34
PARTISAN REVIEW
opinion in every area from the theater and art to sports. Whenever propa–
ganda required, the rabbits of protest would leap from the clandestine cap.
There were clubs to celebrate Soviet cinema, Soviet art, Soviet anything
- joined to the usual untiring search for intellectual legitimacy. This
craving for the prestige of cultural big names amounted to an institutional
neurosis for the
apparat.
Nor was the church forgotten: Gibarti was par–
ticularly proud of how effectively he dominated the political attitudes of
the Right Reverend Hewlett Johnson, Dean of Canterbury Cathedral.
Qohnson was never the Archbishop of Canterbury, incidentally, though
credulous Continentals often jumped to that conclusion, and Gibarti was
delighted to have it so.) Johnson was a genuinely contemptible creature,
mindless and cheerful in his Stalinism, a cleric who could be relied upon
to rain blessings on any act of cruelty or tyranny that Louis Gibarti told
him to bless, while denouncing as un-Christian any challenge or question
put to the dictator's power, wherever it might appear.
One bit of Ariadne's thread linking propaganda and espionage can be
picked up in the youth of Rosamund Lehmann's brother, the publisher
and poet John Lehmann. In 1933 John Lehmann was a promising and
glamourously well-connected young man of letters who had just stubbed
his toe against the ego of Virginia Wool( The result was a painful but
brief hiatus in what would become one of the most distinguished careers
in modern British publishing. John Lehmann came straight down from
Cambridge at the turn of the decade, and was introduced to his trade by
taking on the slightly dangerous job of assisting Leonard and Virginia
Woolf at the Hogarth Press, to which he had been sent for the interview
by his great friend , the Woolfs' nephew and Anthony Blunt's lover, Julian
Bell.
Leonard and Virginia were delighted with Lehmann, and he got the
job. He served his apprenticeship with such success that by 1932 or so a
certain inevitable friction began to emerge. John Lehmann was much
more than merely a bright young man. He soon showed a very genuine
and specific aptitude for publishing. Leonard and Virginia were able to
leave everything in his hands; for the first time in years, a holiday was
possible - days, whole weeks of freedom. Lehmann was no mere go-fer.
Not only did he have taste and intellect of his own; he was beginning to
put the stamp of a new generation on something that had always been
absolutely and uniquely theirs.
Despite her quite unfeigned fondness for this golden boy, and she was
very taken with him, Virginia especially disliked the new note. A fresh
generation of anti-poetic realists was emerging, a generation for whom
Virginia Woolf was an institution but not a model. The writers of the
