BOOKS

Still staggering on

Ferdinand Mount

LINES OF DISSENT: WRITING FROM THE NEW STATESMAN 1913 -1988 edited by Stephen Howe

Verso, £14.95, pp.376

Nothing is more significant in the world of today than the collapse of socialis- tic doctrine. Only a decade ago the outlines of the socialist policy seemed well-defined, and socialism itself a body of doctrines and a programme as clear as the sun at noon- day. When a man said he was a socialist, you could tell within narrow limits what he stood for and what he believed . . . But now, when a man calls himself a socialist, he conveys by the name little information about his ideas and beliefs. . . socialism is still no doubt a faith; but it is like the faith of some modern Churchmen, a faith that has discarded all its doctrines — a dis- embodied faith in the soul of a dead idea.'

Even Mr Norman Tebbit seldom goes quite as far as that. It is hard to imagine that these words were in fact penned by the greatest of all British socialist teachers, G. D. H. Cole, in the New Statesman in 1924. As in the Christian Church, it seems, doubts have always been with us. Mr Stephen Howe, the editor of this fruity selection from The Spectator's old rival, admits to 'a shiver of recognition'.

There is, I think, more to it than that, and this anthology shows it, perhaps unwit- tingly. The New Statesman has been carica- tured by Conservatives through the ages as the epitome of dreary Left-wing dogma. Yet in reality the magazine has always been ambiguous, quarrelsome and even playful in its relation to socialism. In fact, its charm lay in the furtive dissents, the furious denunciations, the frivolous hesita- tions and diversions, not in the serious discussions of ideology or the responsible ruminations on policy. In the present collection, there are precious few of the latter and not, I fancy, solely because they would make dull reading.

Typically, we have Keynes not on econo- mics but on why appeasement is a least bad option: 'I have said in another context that it is a disadvantage of "the long run" that in the long run we are all dead. But I could equally well have said that it is a great advantage of "the short run" that we are still alive. Life and history are made up of short runs . . . By postponement we gain peace today.' Well I never.

The nearest we get here to a discussion of socialist economic policy — nationalisa- tion, for example, never raises its head except to be told how ugly it is — is John Kenneth Galbraith's gloomy assessment in 1970 that 'the age of Keynesian economics is now over . . . There can be no economic policy tolerable to the Left that does not involve wage and price controls.' And, it should be added, high taxation. 'There are, I've long thought, few problems in New

York City which would not be solved by doubling the city budget.'

Naturally this collection is somewhat doctored, since it comes from the New Left stable. The gloriously dotty Leftism for which the Statesman was renowned in its heyday is under-represented. The best mustered here from the Thirties is Edmund Wilson's claim that the Marxist has 'work- ed out a veritable engineer's technique for analysing society and manipulating its va- rious forces'. I also liked Kingsley Martin demonstrating what Mr Howe charitably calls 'his never wholly misted vision of the monstrosity' of Stalin's purges: 'the mys- tery is why Stalin should have permitted a trial so damaging to the interests of his country . . it still remains curious that Stalin should not realise the damaging effect of such a spectacular method of removing his opponents from positions of influence.' Not very curious. It was, after all, the opponents who were on the receiv- ing end of the real damage. The trouble about engineers of human souls is that they love their work so much they just cannot stop engineering.

In modern times, the NS's indulgence towards socialist dictators abroad has been transferred to socialist yobs at home what Paul Johnson, who ties for second place with James Fenton at three pieces each behind Kingsley Martin with four, calls 'aggrosocialism'. Peter Sedgwick in 1974 smacked his lips at the thought of a society shaken up and eventually trans- formed by ceaseless demonstrations and counter-demonstrations in 'the total war that is the politics of socialism'. The way forward lay through 'a sharpening polarisa- tion of society . . . the extremisms are now on the agenda . . . the working class is

buoyant and potentially highly assertive.'

But as the 1980s wore on, our poles seemed to have been sharpened enough, and a certain scepticism began to creep in again. For the first time in 70 years, one even begins to notice nice things being said about Americans — their addiction to the rule of law, their open-mindedness and enterprise, for example, facets which seemed to have escaped the attention of previous contributors.

And in a damning finale, Zygmunt Bauman points out that 'industrial workers are now the most rapidly shrinking part of the population'; and 'far from being a "dangerous class", organised labour has become the staunchest defender of law and order.' Nor was there any profit in imput- ing a revolutionary will to some imaginary working class which was quite unlike the workers as they actually were. In any case, revolution was a short cut and hence an act of violence against history: 'This is what makes the short cut morally odious and ineffective as the means to bring history where it was intended to be brought. In history, most short cuts appear to be culs-de-sac. Living without a hope for a short cut is another thing today's Left has to learn.'

This is an almost eerie echo of E. M. Forster's criticism, in his 1938 review of Christopher Caudwell's Studies in a Dying Culture (one of the few readable and imaginative products of English Marxism), of Communism's 'desperate jump to glory' and its criminal vagueness about what happens after the revolution: 'I don't believe the Communists know what leads to what. They say they know because they are becoming conscious of "the causality of history". I say they don't know.' No jumping, no short cuts. They might as well close the playground.

Behind the big brutish socialism of the Statesman, there always hovered the acid, refined liberalism of the Nation. The two periodicals merged in 1931, two months after Kingsley Martin took over. In other circumstances, one may find Forsterism a little old-maidish and supercilious. In this company, it is the saving grace. The back half of the magazine, in the days before Mr Bruce Page ruined it, was not simply a pleasant relaxation after the rigours of the front half; it was as much the source of the real energy as the back legs of a horse. There if anywhere was to be found the critical alertness, the sense of life so often missing from the portentous rumblings at the front.

There too was also to be found some of the most frightful snobbery. How patroni-

singly Graham Greene describes his child- hood haunts of Berkhamsted; the 'dainty and doyly effect' of the green litter boxes, the commuters returning to sleep in their `Siberian dormitories', the radios blazing in the pubs; 'the soil exacted no service and no love'; give me Haiti and Antibes where they know how to order these things. Or pre-Pauline Johnson anatomising the Con- servative Party conference: 'the anony- mous regiment of the minor public schools, young girls training to be air hostesses and gym mistresses, matrons in hand-knitted cardigans'. Or Angela Carter on Mrs Thatcher's voice: 'a form of "toff-speak" now reminiscent not of real toffs, but of Wodehouse aunts'. Would it be any better if the voice was reminiscent of real toffs (or if the Tories had been to major public schools)? In any case, surely Bertie's Aunt Dahlia, of Brinkley Court, was adequately bien.

Sometimes one feels that the only pas- sionately felt class hatred is that felt by bourgeois intellectuals for the petty bourgeoisie. The proles are conspicuous by their absence from these pages, except as racist yobs (Clancy Sigal, Notting Hill, 1958) or as stoic heroes on the picket line (Cortonwood colliery, 1984). Any sense of manual workers having their own lives, their own ambitions and antipathies is only very thinly conveyed, if at all. Indeed there is an embarrassed stiffness about most Statesman efforts to deal with English life, other than in terms of hearty contempt for the monarchy, say. By contrast, there are brilliant descriptions of war, famine, Northern Ireland, Vietnam — in fact, almost anywhere else you care to name, James Fenton being the star in this depart- ment.

But again and again it is towards the back end of the magazine that the best things are to be found: V. S. Pritchett on George Orwell: 'He prided himself on seeing through the rackets, and on con- veying the impression of living without the solace or even the need of a single illusion.' Or Conor Cruise O'Brien on Yeats's slip- pery politics: 'His references to fascism, though sometimes mildly critical, are never hostile, almost always respectful, often admiring, and this especially in years of fascist victories: 1922, 1933 and 1938 . . . for Yeats a bandwagon had the same high degree of attraction that it has for other mortals.'

Statesman writers seem to flourish, not when they are wrestling with that most dubious of virtues, political commitment, but when they are being unashamedly sceptical, or simply describing things as they look. Unlike Mr Howe, I do not think that the magazine's proudest claim is to have started CND (which would have started anyway) or even to have been required reading for the post-war ruling class, although I liked Bruce Renton's report of the Hungarian Revolution: `Armed patrols kept passing incon- gruously across the rich carpets. One of Nagy's assistants spoke fluent English. "Oh, what a fine paper," he said when 1 told him I represented the New Statesman. In the next room Nagy was arguing with Soviet Ambassador Andropov.' The prime virtue of the Statesman is that for most of its life it has been the only sassy agin-the- government journal, usually ready to cast doubts on the wisdom, and often on the sanity of our rulers, even when they were Labour. Flatulent, shrill, inconsistent and usually wrong about anything that mat- tered, its role has none the less been an indispensable one.

In recent years, the Statesman has been pluckily asserting the existence of a viable counter-culture, mostly composed of Greenham Common women, teenage vic- tims of the 'sus' laws and people who are frightened of having their telephones tap- ped — a coalition of the marginalised, to use the marcusey jargon. But margins are unlikely to come together and form a coherent body. The convenient concept of `the masses' is no longer available, and one is hardly likely to be able to make much of a revolution out of 'the sporades'.

The magazine's decision to merge with New Society is not simply, I think, born of commercial desperation. The sociology in- dustry, though itself much reduced in circumstances, still offers a kind of refuge and still disposes of jobs, grants and jargon. It would be nice if this melancholy merger were taken as the opportunity to revive and enlarge the literary and artistic side, and so to repeat the beneficial influ- ence that the Nation once had upon the Statesman.

It is a sad day, all the same, for all old Staggers fanciers. And one can only mourn it in the words of S. Beckett's contribution to Lines of Dissent:

`Blacked out fallen open true refuge issueless towards which so many false time out of mind.'