Malcolm and the Masses

Letters

Vol. 3 No. 5 · 19 March 1981

From Iring Fetscher

SIR: I like the witty and trenchant ways of British criticism and enjoyed above all Clive James’s snobby review of Ian Hunter’s very provincial biography of Malcolm Muggeridge and Hans Keller’s piece on ‘Hitler and History’ (LRB, Vol. 3, No 2). In the latter, however, I found one unfortunate error, which should be corrected. Hans Keller makes fun of the Barneses’ ignorance about the German presidency in 1932. ‘Hitler got his German citizenship just in time to run for the Presidency of the Weimar Republic,’ said the Barneses, but they were simply right! On 25 February, Hitler was made a Regierungsrat (and thus became a citizen of the German Reich) in the Land Braunschweig, where his party was governing in a coalition. He was now eligible for the presidential election which took place on 13 March (first turn) and 10 April (second turn). At the second turn Hitler was beaten by Hindenburg, who got 19.35 million votes against 13.41 million. Already at the first turn the Catholic Zentrum Party and the Social Democrats had appealed to their voters to vote for Hindenburg, who felt quite uncomfortable at this new support from what for him was the ‘far left’. But only in that way could Hitler’s victory at the presidential elections be avoided.

Iring Fetscher
Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main

Vol. 3 No. 10 · 4 June 1981

From Clive Towse

SIR: May I be allowed a late reply to Clive James’s review of Ian Hunter’s life of Malcolm Muggeridge (LRB, Vol. 3, No 2)? After briefly skating through Malcolm Muggeridge’s early life, which James perhaps rightly sees as ordinary enough, and in which the themes of socialism and religion first make their appearance, he pauses to attack the biographer for daring to cast doubt on Keynesian economics – a dismissal which James affects to find a bit daunting. Well, it is certainly not more daunting than witnessing the supercilious nonsense talked by James and Gore Vidal in their television chat about the credit and debit side of Christian civilisation.

Whatever opinion, if any, James holds about Christianity, we learn here that he admires Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle, and it soon becomes apparent that he is himself something of a social Darwinist. It is the impersonal forces of nature that have shaped our world. ‘We probably do best to follow Darwin’s example and look for harmony outside ourselves … but the universe cares little for us as a species and nothing for us as individuals. That much is entirely up to us. Some people will always find this an inspiring thought. Others it will reduce to despair. Muggeridge is plainly among the latter.’

The political legacy of this heroic individualism has been worked out in the 20th century. Characteristically, St Paul’s admonition that the flesh lusteth against the spirit means nothing to James: ‘There is no point in being shocked that God gave healthy male human beings ten times more lust than they can use. He did the same to healthy male fiddler crabs. He’s a deity, not a dietitian.’ A determinism which is, however, subject to swift modification when the subject of abortion arises: ‘Nor has he ever been able to grasp that the alternative to legal abortion is not Christian chastity or even the edifying responsibility of bringing up an illegitimate child. The alternative to legal abortion is illegal abortion.’ So James decisively concludes. Yet, with eminent medical men fully prepared to accept the blame for arranging the death of Mongol children, need he continue to feel qualms about a return to ‘back-street abortionists’?

An intellectual line of descent from this 19th-century social philosophy would most likely have placed James alongside the Webbs, Shaw and Wells had he lived in the decades before the Second World War. Unlike them, however, he finds the concept of the masses unacceptable and settles instead for ‘free institutions’. Consequently, if we wish to account for Hitler’s rise to power via the free institutions of Weimar, we need only have recourse to James’s equation ‘that some things go wrong of their own accord, and often as a direct consequence of other things going right.’ Elsewhere James’s comments on the political climate of the Thirties scarcely suggest that he has made a deeper study of these events than (as he alleges) Professor Hunter. His comment that ‘the Left intelligentsia was unable to take the centre with it’ appears at variance with the seemingly endless unmaskings of past and present members of the Establishment as Russian spies. Equally perplexing is the attempt to discredit Muggeridge’s insight in reporting the atrocities of the Soviet regime when James goes on to imply some sort of equivalence between the setting up of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the founding of the Welfare State. ‘But in the long run he undid his share of the good work by expanding his contempt for the Soviet Union into an indiscriminate attack on any form of social betterment whatever.’ The politics of Europe in the present century has been mass politics, the politics of the collective will. James becomes preoccupied with seeking to avoid the consequences of his own philosophy. ‘Stalin’s example was not enough to teach him [Muggeridge] that there is no such thing as the masses.’ Or, somewhat later on: ‘But there is no such thing as the herd. There are only people …’ Alas, repeated assertion does not make it so. I doubt if there are many Europeans who would derive much benefit from these platitudes. Probably most would think Lenin’s postulate ‘Who whom?’ a much more valid comment on their recent history.

A French strand is also apparent in James’s thought: he imagines like Voltaire that if the Deity didn’t exist it would be necessary to invent Him, which it seems Muggeridge did. James continues: ‘self-indulgence and severity towards others are the same vice. The epigram is La Bruyère’s. It could conceivably have been Kingsmill’s. It could never have been Muggeridge’s.’ But, then, The Thirties could never have been James’s – a book which he has clearly never read. Had he done so, he would never have fallen into the error of thinking that Muggeridge lacks an historical sense, as James so clearly does. Instead, he finds his explanations in the notion of progress – a lazy man’s substitute if ever there was one. The article on the monarchy, mentioned by James but probably not read by him, made its impact by a careful historical analysis of the British monarchy since the 18th century, underlining the erosion of its power-base, its raison d’être. In the event, this makes his talk of slit noses an irrelevance.

Probably the most extraordinary part of James’s review concerns his comparison of Mother Teresa and Jonas Salk: ‘Mother Teresa cares for those who suffer, which fits Muggeridge’s idea of God’s plan for the world. He would find it hard to express the same admiration for, say, Jonas Salk.’ It must be pretty obvious to James that a person’s moral and spiritual standing bears some relation to the actual physical circumstances of their daily life – when, for instance, one contrasts the squalor of Calcutta’s teeming slums with the remote calm of some Californian Institute of Virology.

Clive Towse
Swansea

From Nicholas Brown

SIR: According to Clive James, Malcolm Muggeridge has contemplated his navel endlessly without drawing much enlightenment from it. One day, in contemplating his own navel, Clive James may discover the real reason for his hostility towards Muggeridge, and the enlightenment he will acquire will at last set him free from the sophisticated secularism he clings to. And he will then understand that Muggeridge is infuriating simply because he is a master at penetrating the defences of that sophisticated secularism.

Nicholas Brown
London W1