Official rebel
Sir: As your readers will have observed it is not I but Mr Szamuely who is in a rage (Letters, 6 December). I have always believed that those who dish it out should be able to take it, and I am delighted to discover that he can't. The important point is that Mr Szamuely has not succeeded in controverting any single statement I made. As a mere City Editor and not a Reading University kremlinologist I have had to acquire the habit of choosing my words with extreme care. May 1 remind your readers what they were?
1. I said it was distasteful to see these attacks on Yevtushenko coming from the secure, the comfortable and the well-fed. Not being familiar with the conditions of tenure at Read- ing I don't know whether Mr Szamuely is secure or not, but Kingsley Amis, Bernard Levin and Peregrine Worsthorne are surely as secure, as comfortable and as well-fed a trio as one would expect to meet in the course of a normal life.
• 2. I said that Yevtushenko's poems contained things which it seemed to me must have re- quired courage to write. Mr Milner-Gulland's letter (6 December) appears to give examples of similar courage in prose.
3. I said that he was a distinguished poet. This statement is incontrovertible. Note what I did not say. I did not say he was great, or the greatest. It is no good Mr Szamuely coming along and expressing a preference for Voznesensky, Brodsky and Akhmadulina. They were not standing for elec- tion. Moreover, very early in the first of the four years I devoted to the study of literature (as my friends will know it is in this and not in finance that I am academically qualified) I learnt that to attempt to produce league tables of poets was foolish, futile and philistine.
4. I said that a clique of cold-warriors were dragging poetry in the dust. The use of terms such as 'hack' or 'whore' seems to me to do precisely that. I did not say, but I will now, that to a lover of liberty if there is one thing worse than a communist it is an ex-communist, because there one is liable to find all the intolerance and none of the idealism. One of the distressing features of this campaign is that much of it has been conducted in a Stalinist frame of reference, characterised by intem- perateness of language and the readiness to use any material to hand, including quotations from 'revolutionary' students and even (how terrible!) accusations of good living.
5. I asked 'Have they ever read a poem in their lives?' Since Mr Szamuely has failed to understand what I was getting at, let me explain. I found it difficult to believe that anyone in whose life poetry was a living force would possess the smallness of soul and meanness of mind required to take an active part in such a campaign as has been mounted against Yevtushenko. That is still my considered opinion.
Finally, since I have mentioned Peregrine Worsthorne, my friend and colleague in all but this, may I add that he regards Kingsley Amis's famous letter as 'inept,' and much of the tone of the attacks as 'unfortunate.' But then, he is not an ex-communist.
Patrick Hut bet The Old Rectory, Drayton Parslow, Bucks Mr Hutber's carefully chosen words were, in fact, 'His [Yevtushenko's] crime in their [Yevtushenko's critics'] eyes appears to' be that he is not serving seven years in a labour camp . . . I find this zeal for vicarious martyrdom emanating from the secure, the comfortable and the well-fed, as distasteful as anything which has occurred in this country since the war: (Letters, 29 November.) Mr Szamuely
replied (Letters, 6 December) 'I have spent too much time inside Soviet prisons and labour camps (where, I assure Mr Hutber, I was neither "secure" nor "comfortable" nor "well- fed") to desire a similar fate for anyone.' It should also be pointed out, on another point of fact, that Mr Szamuely is not an ex- communist—except in the sense that, having been born and brought up in a communist state, it was not until he had reached the age of twelve-and-a-half that he consciously re- jected communism in theory and practice.— Editor, SPECTATOR.
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