Neither Five Nor Three (Helen Macinnes) (10 page)

“I think we do. Most of us do. Most of us sense the overall strategy against us. We don’t always recognise the tactics. But we are learning.” Bill Weidler’s eyes narrowed. “I think,” he said, “that you are the man to hear the full story about Blackworth. You won’t go calling me a ‘witch-hunter.’ It’s a strange story,” he warned.

In a strange setting, Paul Haydn thought as he waited: he looked across at the busy office buildings on Fifth Avenue, listened to the dim roar of traffic beneath, imagined the busy sidewalks—people working, people hurrying to engagements, people planning a pleasant party with friends, people looking forward to a quiet night in their own homes. What could be more peaceful, more unsuspecting of evil, more comforting?

Weidler began his story, speaking quickly but clearly. “In the last three years Crowell has been pretty sick, off and on. He came more and more to depend on Blackworth as his assistant editor. During the last ten months, Blackworth took over most of his work. I didn’t know how far it went, until recently. I’ve always liked Crowell, and I didn’t want to force him to retire. I was waiting for him to admit he couldn’t carry on. In any case, Blackworth was next in line for the editorship of our Feature Department.” He rubbed his nose, then his head. The story clearly embarrassed him. He cleared his throat and took a deep breath.

“We knew Blackworth as a good writer, a better editor, a young man who was hard-working, clever. His previous jobs had been in a publishing house, and in Washington for two years of the war. I did notice that during the last ten months, the tone of the feature articles was changing. They depressed me. But facts are facts. And here were articles giving facts about America. I began to think that the country was in a hell of a condition, that there were basic wrongs and injustices and corruptions it would be hard to cure. Some letters from our readers would reflect my feelings, but there were others saying ‘Good old
Trend
! Tell us more of the real truth!”

“Then one day, just about six weeks ago, a writer I know personally called me up to ask what was wrong with his stuff—we never printed anything he sent us nowadays. He pretended to make a joke of it, but I could feel he was pretty sore. I calmed him down and got him to give me a list of his rejections.

“Perhaps I’d have done nothing more about that (after all, writers
can
be prima donnas) but Burnett, who is now head of our architecture section, came to see me. Blackworth had been running a series of articles on housing. Naturally, Burnett and his department were surprised and interested. Rona Metford—remember her? She’s done very well, you know—well, Rona had been making a special study of post-war housing for one of her courses at Columbia this winter, and she insisted that the writer of those articles was lying. She tipped Blackworth off about that, as soon as she read the first article; but no action was taken, for a second, and then a third, article was published. So Burnett was worried. He brought me the three last numbers of
Trend
where Rona had underlined all the oversimplifications and misrepresentations. His own verdict was that the articles were definitely misleading.

“I wanted facts. So I sent for Rona. She made a list of them for me. She agreed that there had been mistakes in post-war housing, but things weren’t as bad or vicious as
Trend
made them out to be. The effect of those three articles, as Rona pointed out, was to make our readers think that America was run by cheats and crooks.”

Weidler took a deep breath there, shaking his head, a wry smile on his lips.

“I sent her away, told her to keep quiet about it. But I studied her list of figures, and the marked magazines. I called in a couple of other architects, a couple of experts on housing, and a couple of building contractors. By the time they had verified Rona’s analysis, I was pretty damned mad.

“Then I checked on the new feature writers who had been printed by us recently. Some of them had written for us before, but it was odd that their articles were usually accepted when Crowell was ill and Blackworth was in charge. In the last six months we had had some articles by writers I didn’t know at all—new discoveries, apparently. When I looked at the tone of their work really carefully, I decided to check on their names. I got some expert help on that. And one of them at least was using a phony name. He’s an admitted member of the Communist Party. But he wasn’t presented to our readers as that. You know those little captions we put on the ‘Introduction to Contributors’ page? He was listed simply as ‘William Slade, writer, lecturer, and collector of rare coins.’ Strictly double-headed eagles, I’d imagine... His real name is Nicholas Orpen. Ever heard of him?”

Paul shook his head. “New to me.”

“Few people remember him. But I’ve known about him for some years,” Bill Weidler said. “I know a lot about Orpen.” He shook his head in distaste, and fell silent for a few moments. Then he roused himself. “Orpen’s article was a clever piece. It pretended to discuss the reasons for decadence in American writing. You were left with the feeling that a system such as ours would inevitably result in decadence. It was after this that I decided to take some action. I didn’t know how far the thing had gone. But apart from the fact that I had to get rid of Blackworth, I didn’t know quite how to do it. It wasn’t as easy as it sounds. I wanted no scandal, nothing to ruin
Trend’s
reputation, nothing to stampede our readers away from us. You see?”

Paul nodded.

“In a way,” Weidler said, “I felt I was fighting shadows.”

“But,” Paul reminded him, “if there’s no substance, there’s no shadow. Anyway, what did you do?”

“The obvious thing. I asked a man at the FBI for advice. He told me the FBI could only deal with people’s actions, not with people’s political ideas. And there is no law against anyone refusing to buy from certain firms or stores, or from certain writers. People are allowed to have their own prejudices, their own opinions. If I challenged him, Blackworth could always retort that he wasn’t forcing our readers to believe anything—he was only publishing what he considered good writing.”

“Well, how did you fire him?”

“By asking him about our new contributors. Had he met them? Of course he had—that’s part of his expense account. Then I asked about the man who was modestly called a ‘writer, lecturer, and collector of rare coins.’ Blackworth said he was a nice guy to meet, shy and retiring, that his material was well written, and that he seemed a good man to have as a regular contributor. So then I said, ‘If you’ve met him, you must have recognised his face. For he taught you at Monroe College fifteen years ago. And you know the scandal that broke out there in 1941.’”

Paul said, “Then Blackworth protested it was persecution, not scandal. He probably said that Orpen was no longer a Communist, and he had to live, and you couldn’t take his livelihood away from him. Was that his reply?”

Weidler looked up at Paul then. “More or less,” he said. “How did you know?”

“They keep repeating their patterns. I had the same defence from hidden Nazis and disguised Communists trying to slip into German newspapers. Same old story. Always appealing to human decency and conscience, although they themselves try to kick all anti-totalitarian writers into the gutter. They have no conscience about ruining other people’s careers. So, what did you do?”

“I lost my temper. I showed him Rona Metford’s analysis. I told him he’d better leave. He wanted to know my exact reasons. But I’d got my temper under control again, and I said he was leaving simply because he didn’t suit us. No, he didn’t get any libel suit out of me!”

“Then he said that publishers shouldn’t be dictators, that all kinds of opinions should be given freedom of expression?” Paul asked.

“But I had an answer for that. I said if he felt free to choose the feature writers, surely I had the same freedom to choose the members of my staff? He had followed his own taste and judgment: that was what I was doing, too.”

There was a long silence.

Then Weidler spoke again. “You believe I was right, don’t you?” He was still worrying about his decision.

Paul Haydn nodded. He was thinking of his plane trip home, of Roger Brownlee who had sat next to him and tried to enlist his interest in something that had seemed fantastic. Yet Brownlee’s guarded generalisations now began to fall into an understandable pattern. But where Weidler believed that he alone had been singled out for this bit of treachery (part of his indignation was based on the feeling he was fighting a propaganda battle all by himself, with little understanding expected from either his readers or his friends), Brownlee saw it all as a widely thrown net where people were often caught because they felt they were alone and helpless.

“I know a man—he was my colonel at one time,” Paul said, “who knows a lot about propaganda. He made a particular study of the fall of France in 1940. He came to the belief that France was defeated before the German armies reached her border. I used to think he was a bit hipped on the subject. But—perhaps I was wrong.”

“Do I know him?”

“I don’t think so.” Better not give away Brownlee’s name, even to Weidler, until Brownlee said it was all right. “Before the war came,” Paul went on, “he used to work for Consumers’ Union. He tracked down all the false advertisements, the misleading statements made by dubious manufacturers. He believed that the public ought to know what it was buying. He feels very much the same about propaganda. Take away the tinsel and the gay wrapping paper and let people see what really lies inside. All ingredients to be marked honestly on the outside of the box. Then, if people still insist on buying it, the responsibility is all theirs.”

“That makes solid good sense,” Weidler said, suddenly interested. “That’s an idea worth following through.”

“And that is what he means to do. It seems to him that people have been offered a lot of packaged ideas in these last few years without being told what the packages really contain. Just as the people of France were sold ideas such as ‘Imperialist war,’ ‘Patriotism is for the rich,’ ‘Hitler doesn’t mean the destruction of France,’ ‘Why fight for England?’ But by the end of 1940 Frenchmen were beginning to realise that they had been duped. Patriotism was for every man, if he wanted to stay a Frenchman. They weren’t fighting for anything except their own freedom. By that time, it was too late to fight ideas with ideas. It was a case, then, of fighting with machine guns too, of underground warfare, of risking torture and death and the destruction of their families.”

“I’d like to see you do a series of articles on that,” said Weidler. Then regretfully, “Only, of course, we steer clear of politics.”

“What has Blackworth been doing? Concentrating on the beauty of abstract art or the joys of travel?”

Weidler looked at Paul Haydn almost angrily. “You’ve come back speaking plainly,” he said. But he was thinking over what Haydn had told him.

“Yes. And I’m going to add this too,” Paul said. “There will be other Blackworths trying to edge their way into
Trend.
Don’t think you can relax, now that you’ve found him out. This is going to be a struggle for power for the next ten or twenty years. Perhaps longer. Some struggles for power used up centuries.”

Weidler said, “Will you take this job on
Trend
, Paul?”

Paul hesitated. “I’m closer to taking it than I was,” he said frankly. “I need a few days to think it all over. The situation is all clearer to be. But—Bill, why don’t you publish the story you told me? Just as you’ve told it to me? Let your readers know. Let the public see what is happening.”

Weidler’s frown came back. “You know what
will
happen? There will be a campaign against us. We’ll be called fascists, warmongers, American imperialists, witch-hunters.”

“You’ve forgotten to add ‘hysteria-inciters,’” Paul said, smiling. “Strange how often they’ve been using ‘hysteria’ recently—almost hysterically, in fact.” Then, seriously, “We can, of course, let ourselves be blackmailed into silence. That is one of their tactics. We are supposed not to join together and pool our experiences. We have all to keep on worrying in private, and hush everything up publicly. Just like the victims of gangsters’ rackets, who are afraid to testify.”

Weidler said slowly, “I’d like to talk with that friend of yours. The colonel.”

“He isn’t a colonel any more. He resigned his commission. He sees he has to act as a civilian in this.”

“I’d like to talk with him,” Weidler repeated.

“I’ll arrange it. I think it would probably cheer you up if you did. You aren’t alone in this.”

Weidler looked surprised, and then smiled. “God knows I could do with some cheering up.”

“Solidarity forever,” Paul said with a grin, as he rose to leave. “That’s our motto.”

* * *

He said to himself, as he went down the corridor, “I wanted none of this.” He had listened to Roger Brownlee in Berlin with impatience. On the plane journey home, he had been almost angry with Brownlee. And yet, for the last half hour, he had been echoing all Brownlee’s worries and thoughts. And now, because of Weidler, he would have to get in touch with Brownlee after all. And soon. I wanted no part of this, he thought. But what other choice was there? Turn your eyes away from the war that was going on, the struggle for domination over your country? And then, later—when it was too late—moan about your blindness, your smugness, your vanity, your cowardice?

“There’s no choice,” Brownlee had said, “no choice. They’ve chosen the weapons. Infiltration and control of propaganda sources. We shall have to learn to know them for what they are. Or go down in history as the biggest boobs of all time. For the writing is on the wall, clear to see. It is up to people like you and me, Paul. It’s up to people like us, who make our living in an information medium—the publishers, the writers, the producers and directors, the journalists, the columnists, the teachers and the preachers, the editors, the television and radio men. It’s up to us. We ought to see the lies and guard against them. We’ve got to expose them.”