SOME "KEY" BOOKS

Evening Post, Volume CXXX, Issue 24, 27 July 1940, Page 19

SOME "KEY" BOOKS

?v (By "Quivis.")

PRESENT AND PAST

FACT AND FICTION

Following an article of mine a month Jtgtrin this column under the heading "Reading Now," I received a number of (fetters from readers, some complimentary, others not, a reaction to my own experience of the effect of the [war on my reading as expressed in lhe article, the gist of which was that the grim and tragic events of the actual .war had outstripped the relevant litera(fcure preceding it, and created as it were a vacuum, filled, by me at least, by a retreat into the remoter past among the .Victorian and even the Elizabethan classics. I mentioned only b few worfcs, some Elizabethan plays other than Shakespeare's, and some [Victorian novels, mainly those of the women -novelists, the Brontes, Mrs. Gaskell, and George Eliot. One correspondent has asked me to amplify this list by way of help to people in the same plight as mine. Another correspondent, on the contrary, reproaches me with a neglect of duty for turning away ; from literature rjwnich might throw light on the war, its causes, and its heroes and villains. Is it possible in reply to deaLwith both points of .view? To a certain extent I believe it is, again giving my own experience and opinion as a guide to my choice of books either about the situation in Europe today or about things in general, including the imaginative creations of writers of the past.

Take the war. To us—or some of -us, if or instance, those barred by age or sex from active participation—the war will seem like a stupendous drama, unfolding itself scene by scene and act by act, now slowly, now swiftly, before our eyes. We would like to know fell we can about the leading characters in order to understand the part they are playing and why, and to Anticipate, if possible, what they will do in the next act. To do that properly we must study the prologue to this great drama of real life, the careers pf the heroes or villains, as they may be, carved in the recent history of their own countries and the Europe of the post-war world. But it would be too jnuch to include in the prologue all that has been written about Hitler (and Germany, Stalin and Russia, Mussolini and Italy, let alone about the jninor characters in the lands of the dictators and the democracies. Nor is it necessary, except, perhaps, for the historian. The mere outline of events, the framework of the prologue, is within our memory, or not difficult to get in the various contemporary histories in the "Oxford Pamphlets,''? say.,., o_*Vthe "Penguin" or "Pelican" series. What one really wants —what at any rate I ■wanted —is something authentic about the dictators themselves and their countries, something that penetrates the smoke-screen and poison-gas of propaganda to the real truth behind it all and beneath all the superficial comment of virtual outsiders or interested persons with an axe to grind for or against the dictators and their mysterious domiciles. In other words, one wants what I have called in the heading "key" books.

Now, curiously enough, so far as my own experience goes, these are by no means numerous. I would not include among them any of the regular library of best-sellers, such as "Inside Europe," "Insanity Fair," "Fallen Bastion," etc., etc, interesting and entertaining as they are, coming as they do from skilled observers and vigorous writers. Their defect is that they are not really inside stuff, for few newspapermen are ever really on the inside. What, then, is a'"key" book? My idea of a "key" book is one that explains facts about a man and events •in his country otherwise inexplicable. Take Stalin and Russia. How was it {possible to reconcile the glowing pictures of the early 1930s—we all remember them and most of us would Shave liked to believe them—with stories that leaked through of peasants dying in myriads of starvation, and of trials and purges of old Bolsheviks authenticated in the cable news of the day? Personally I gave it up as insoluble until about five years ago I came across a strange book, "I Was a {Soviet Worker," by one 'Andrew Smith, a disillusioned American Communist, ■who had given up all to migrate to Russia and settle in the "workers' paradise." It was a horrifying book, but to me, if not to some of my friends, it "explained the otherwise inexplicable" and was accepted as a "key" book at least on the actual working of the Soviet economic .system—at the time. Then there was the equal mystery of Stalin's foreign policy culminating in the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact of August last, perfectly inexplicable on the normal evidence available. The *'key" to that came in a series of articles about April, 1939, in the "Saturday Evening Post," by one W. G. Krivitsky, allegedly chief of the Soviet secret service in Western Europe during part of the last decade. These articles have more recently been republished in book form, under the title "i;Was Stalin's Agent." The internal evidence, as in the case of "I ;Was a Soviet Worker," is all in favour of their truth. These, then, were my two "key" books on Stalin and Russia, overriding a whole library of other literature I had read.

There' is no need to deal with Hitler and Mussolini, Nazism and Fascism, in the same detail. My "key" books to Hitler were his own "Mem Kampf" and Rauschning's "Hitler Speaks," together with Aurel Kolnai's massive,' truly German, work, "The War Against the West," a complete, though confused, exposition of the Nazi doctrine, i might add that Nora Walm's "Reaching for the Stars" helped to round . out the picture of Germany under Nazism. Some of my friends consistently and persistently hold to the view, advanced by John Strachey and others, that Fascism and Nazism are forms of organised capitalism diametrically' opposed to Communism. Personally I saw too many discrepancies in the. argument to hold that view. Fascism was quite inexplicable on such.line., alone and even Stiachey has now recanted. The "key" book for me to Fascism and Mussolini was Professor Borghese's most brilliant work, "Goliath: The

March of Fascism." It became immediately clear then that Fascism was what I had tentatively deduced it to be, simply the organisation of a nation for aggression and war. Nazism is fundamentally just the same. Both dictators have used capitalism to their own ends.

Little space is left for the treatment of the other correspondent's plea, but again I would apply the principle of the "key" book. I have just read one again after over forty years, Thackeray's "Vanity Fair." The test of "key" i books in literature proper is the same as for the specialised literature that seeks to explain current events, namely,' truth, intrinsic truth. But the field is far wider and the problem, deeper and more difficult—to explain the mysteries and intricacies of human nature working in human society. Here again the .supreme "key" books are not very numerous. There are few of them among the average best-sellers, but it does not follow that a oest-seller cannot be a "key" book nor a "key" book a best-seller. "Vanity Fair" was and is both. So is Thackeray's "Esmond," but I would not say t£at another best-seller of its day, the same author's "The Neweomes," splendid though it is in parts and praised to the skies by critics like George Saintsbury, need be taken as a "key" book. "Vanity Fair" had already done the job and done it better.

I cannot go further into this fascinating subject .of "key" books in creative literature, beyond saying that a safe rule for choice would be to take a great writer's best, most dynamic, most lifelike, most real work, real in the sense that the object; of all artistic work is to creiate the illusion of reality. Some of my own choices, by this criterion, . are of Dickens "Pickwick Papers," of Meredith "The Adventures of Harry Richmond," of Hardy "Tess of the D'Urbervilles," of Conrad. "Nostromo"—just to mention a few.- - But it would be foolish and futile to try to lay down laws for/ other people in matters of taste. Every man to his own. The bill of fare is big enough for all,, and there is plenty of room for difference of opinion.