Millions of Americans must be
deeply disturbed by recent events in Charlottesville, though we doubtless
grieve in different ways. I am
discovering a kind of “elder grief”. Among
the more or less contemporary novels that made a big impression on me when I
was young was Alan Paton’s Cry, the
Beloved Country. It was published in
1948, and I must have read it in the early Fifties, at a time of considerable
civil rights “turmoil” in Arkansas. The
novel is about many things, but principally the situation of disintegrating
black communities in South Africa on the eve of the imposition of the formal
apartheid system. There was a lot in it
I didn’t get, starting with the (for me) exotic and unpronounceable African
place and personal names. But there was
a lot I did get, beginning with an
unvarnished but not unsympathetic depiction of the historical burden of racial
fear.
What sticks with me still is the
book’s title. The aging process is
complicated, and full of mellow surprises; but it makes vivid the apprehension
of mortality that for most of one’s life is a mere abstract inevitability. One hopes to cast off the mortal coil with
one’s affairs in reasonable order. And
one’s affairs extend far beyond a few legal documents. They begin with one’s beloved family, but
extend certainly to one’s beloved country, and well beyond that. How can one fail to see that our beloved
country is in a bad way, is spiritually ill?
You might say I’m burdened with
gerontic fright. In a plangent,
lyrical passage from which he took his title Paton wrote: “Cry,
the beloved country, for the unborn child that is the inheritor of our fear”.
There is a temptation
to exaggerate, of course. There is some
comfort to be had, I suppose, in the realization that the country has at times
been sicker, as for example in 1858, say, yet still pulled through. John Brown, at the foot of the scaffold in
1859, spoke not of sickness but of guilt—that is, of moral rather than physical
pathology. “I, John Brown, am now quite
certain that the crimes of this guilty land can never be purged away but with
blood.” It does seem very sad that even
a century and a half after a cataclysmic civil war remarkable for its human
hecatombs and prodigious material destruction we are still mired in its
detritus and haunted by its ghosts. But
a sticky, gooey adhesiveness is far too often a characteristic of history. Our great imaginative writers have often
understood this more clearly than our political leaders. “The past is never dead” wrote Faulkner;
“it’s not even past.”
One of the more
famous remarks of Karl Marx is this: “The philosophers have only interpreted
the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.” The idea of
“changing the world” seems on the one hand grandiose and preposterous
and on the other noble and necessary.
What I most admire in the several generations of students I have had the
good fortune to encounter is the large incidence of a vivid, optimistic
idealism that I believe must necessarily leave the world a better place than
they found it. On the other hand in
surveying the huge social changes that have come across America in the
comparatively brief span between the birth of my grandparents and the majority
of my eldest grandchild I find that most of it is to be explained in terms of
large and impersonal forces like “technology” and “demography” rather than in
those of identifiable, benign human volition.
I want to resist the
more reckless analogies, of which there are plenty going around, involving Nazi
Germany; but it does seem possible that we shall see more unpleasant vignettes
reminiscent of pre-Nazi Germany. In Charlottesville a “disturbed youth”—of
whom we seem to have a nearly endless supply in this country—murdered a woman
he cannot have known and probably could not have seen even as he was murdering
her with a speeding automobile.
Political fanaticism so pure as to justify murder is a frightening thing
indeed. And there is no great distance
between justifying murder and demanding it.
Some years ago I wrote a book about four important anti-Communist
writers of the Forties and Fifties. The
whole project was an accident. It started
with my stumbling upon a forgotten bestseller—Jan Valtin’s Out of the Night, 1940—a book that had a significant influence on
popular American views of Soviet Communism.
It purports to be the autobiography of a German Communist agitator and
secret agent active in the northern seaports from Danzig to Antwerp in the
Twenties and Thirties. The book is in
fact an historical novel; but some of its most vivid parts are undoubtedly
direct reflections of the author’s experience.
Prominent among these are the accounts of Hamburg street brawls between
demonstrating and counter-demonstrating Communists and Nazis—two groups whose
ostensibly bitter ideological opposition masked for too many their deadly
affinities of political fanaticism.
These bloody battles took place in many German cities, often with
appalling carnage. Though as we know the
Brown Shirts eventually emerged as the undisputed masters of barbarism, things
were for a time touch-and-go, and the honors for the atrocities were pretty
evenly divided. Valtin reports that
Heinz Neumann, a leading Communist propagandist, gave the following pep talk to
his marchers: “I want to see bodies!”
That’s not a very appealing political vision. Our situation in America is I hope and
believe very different. Political violence
is still a shocking aberration condemned by all sensible people rather than an
accepted cultural norm to be adjudicated according to some ideological balance
sheet. (“Trump Again Says Two Sides at
Fault in Rally Violence” is this morning’s blaring headline.) But I still fear we may not have not seen the
last body in the streets. Cry, the beloved country, indeed.
