Rotting Hill (31 page)

    My host’s attitude is, I gather, that a communist provides comic relief. This lightheartedness may be misplaced. It depends how easy you find it to forget how big the Russian Army is, and how near, since President Roosevelt arranged for it to occupy Brandenburg. There are, I believe, no communist peers. Several are as-good-as, and a bishop or two of the same colour as the “Red Dean” of Canterbury. The two peers airing themselves were right-wing, last-ditching lords, who had thrown out the Steel Bill for pecuniary, not for ideological, or for caste, reasons. They were not even Catholics. A seedy pair—right-wingism does not pay. Not content with being symbolic of Rightism by birth these two shortsighted men made things worse by acting Right. As businessmen, had they had better judgement they would have been growing fat on Labour rather than getting skinny defending Capital, in Rome doing as the Romans do.

    It was peaceful to sit on this almost deserted terrace, the pink-yellow water swelling nearly on a level with one’s feet, the white gulls floating past on it. If the County Council Building across the water conceded nothing to beauty it might, all things considered, be far worse. Meanwhile excursion steamers on their way to Windsor Castle and I dare say Hampton Court, or river buses, barge their way along with full loads of people this sunny afternoon, the fingers of the passengers pointing at us—the three communists, the two peers, three or four other lawgivers and myself.

    My M.P. went off to see the Sergeant-at-Arms about a seat for me, for I thought I might as well hear the opening of the Steel Bill business—you could call it a debate if you liked. The peers had sent the Steel Bill back to the Commons with about sixty amendments. All of these, except a few insignificant ones, would be chopped off and thrown away, one by one, then the Bill would be returned to the Lords, who would hug it until December the eleventh, when, as I explained just now, it automatically becomes law. The Rights, or their leader Mr. Churchill, promise to stop it, or wipe it out, if they win the Election. Since the Lefts, were they desirous of doing so, could pass a Bill through to destroy the whole of London, or, for that matter, atomically to blast the whole island (England, Scotland and Wales), there being no one with the power to stop them, there was very little point for me or for anybody else to go up and watch the proceedings, but I thought I would have a look at them all.

    I was now sitting at the far end of the Terrace, far from Stalin’s boys and the two old lords. I was sitting with a dreamy Celtic Member, to whom I had been made known. He sat perched upon his chair like a bag of discontented bones precariously balanced, with a quizzical, anxious, countenance. He was revolving something dreamily in his mind. He was thinking of Steel.

    I knew he was thinking of Steel, because various people came up, sat down, and talked to him about Steel. Question time had started in the House, and very shortly the Steel and Iron question would be outlined by the Minister. The principal Ministers, Leftist and Rightist, had very sensibly gone on holiday. They felt as I did about these proceedings—in fact the Rightist chief, the Leader of the Opposition, seldom comes near the place even when in England. He devotes himself almost exclusively to painting pictures and writing books, which, as I indicated just now, gives the measure of his sentiments about the House of Commons in our time. All the rest of these honourable gentlemen could with advantage follow suit.

    The M.P. with whom I sat was, I gathered, against the nationalization of the Steel and Iron Industry, and all that that entailed. This last giant transfer from private ownership to state ownership troubled him, one could see. He was a gentle and moderate man, who belonged, I learned, to that gentle and moderate party which had prepared the way over many years for the very immoderate statist-principles which were now approaching realization. It is always doctrinaire libertarianism that ushers in despotism, in classical political theory. For Aristotle this was an automatic matter of cause-and-effect. Even the present government is composed, with few exceptions, of liberals—liberals taking liberalism to its logical conclusion. It would be foolish to think we could escape the periodic despotism to which human society is subject. Despotism is a human norm. So, with the best intentions these good men are preparing an instrument of oppression. This, of course,
may
never be used oppressively (just as the atom bomb may never again be used in war). But there is so slender a chance that some evil man will not be forthcoming to use such an instrument as the total power involved in state-socialism oppressively that we really may dismiss the idea.

    It was a melancholy experience to be sitting there with this uneasy, puzzled, liberal-minded man who felt himself drifting out of the liberal Victorian daydream (still potent in the province which always sent him back to parliament, and in which his thinking remained embalmed)—drifting into a hard-boiled world that had none of the familiar features of the libertarian past to which he belonged. He was too gentle to say anything about
that
side of it. He just knit his brows, slightly wrung his rheumatic hands and spun a little theory which disguised the reality. It had something to do with its being impossible to check, once nationalization had been pushed through the voting-machine upstairs, the success or unsuccess of the stewardship of the Steel Board. The fundamental question he would never face of course: namely, would it be a good thing or a bad thing to consummate the absolutism of a state-system. Perhaps it would be too boringly obvious.

    However, when I said unexpectedly, “Would not the concentration of
all
power in the hands of the State be a bad thing?” he turned round towards me immediately with a charming twisted smile and brilliant eyes and answered, “Oh, that is of course the basic issue”.

    I was amazed at this readiness. But next moment a man sat down at the table with a sheaf of papers and my liberal friend began to expound his cherished theory. His gentle face was anguished, his eyes glittering and remote, as he argued his case with much dexterity (and this may, for all I know, have been at this great turning point the strategy to be used by his party). As the man with the sheaf of papers went away I should have liked to have asked him: “Why put up an argument that is certain to draw you deeper and deeper into a dialectical bog. Why not say all the time that what is proposed—what is decreed—will result in state-absolutism, which is at least as obnoxious, as the liberal sees it, as royal prerogative or caesarian power? It would involve the extinction of what is left to us of our democratic liberties. Why not say that? What is the use of saying anything else? Bear witness, brother, and, as a party, die!” But if I had expressed myself in this way he would only have smiled charmingly and half-deprecatingly, as if I had made a rather feeble attempt at a joke. For you do not remain a Member of Parliament if you allow anything too real to establish itself in your consciousness, and all Members of Parliament only wish for one thing—to remain Members of Parliament.

    After a time my kind host returned, having arranged for a seat. He accompanied me upstairs, and then he left me, for he himself was speaking a little later: and I may add, without flattery, that he spoke with remarkable skill and vigour. I looked down upon him, a stockily foreshortened figure, holding his paper, and in the voice-transmitting agency above my head his voice rattled in my ear pugnaciously and is now embalmed in Hansard. He at least had some fun. He was a
speaking
M.P. A young Leftist of great ability, in better times he would have made an outstanding parliamentarian. He may yet be a Minister.

    It was Question Time when I took my seat, and the official answers were being rattled off, followed by the lame protests or reiterated enquiries: usually almost before the last word is out of the mouth of the questioner the next answer comes rattling out, and one’s mind takes a hairpin bend and spins off in the opposite direction. Mine bounced from Seaside Boarding Houses to the
Daily Worker.
Then the Steel Bill business started. The Minister, moderate and reasonable—even detached and most accommodating—proposed turning everything over to his Party (for steel, as everyone knows, means, directly or indirectly, everything). When the Steel and Iron Bill becomes law, it will transform England forever into one vast Concern in the hands of a political oligarchy. There will be no appeal against these overlords, for no new
checks
are contemplated, and such checks as exist will be swept away. The very Trades Unions as an effective instrument will go. Such are the fruits of permanent Crisis.

    At this opening stage the Opposition took the line that Steel experts should be appointed to the Steel Board, when nationalization came—accepting nationalization as a
fait accompli.
The mind of the Opposition appeared to be full of the question of how many posts it could secure. That was all. From time to time Mr. Churchill bursts out in his old-fashioned way about freedom and so on, words which for him have long since lost their meaning. But his party does not indulge in rhetoric: it confines itself to securing a share of the control. And only his party was present on this occasion.

    There will be no word breathed by His Majesty’s Opposition about the undesirability of
too much power.
Rightists as much as Leftists would acquire as much power as Stalin tomorrow if that were feasible—all were absolutists under their skins—and the Opposition apparently assumes that everybody knows this, so it never mentions
power.

    In the last analysis, Opposition as much as Government seem to argue that a new absolutist world is imposed on them anyway, which is of course quite correct. My host, for instance, had asked me if I had considered the philosophy of the Atomic Bomb—and from the dramatic way he peered at me over the luncheon table I could see he regarded it as a pretty difficult philosophy to refute. (I was, as a matter of fact, in complete agreement with him, and had no desire to confute him.) From the “pike and gun” and “infallible artillery” of the seventeenth century we had moved onwards, in the twentieth century, to what might be called
Atomic Absolutism.
What this young politician described as “the philosophy of the Atomic Bomb” is the philosophy, in one degree or another, of every person in that House, whatever his party. It is the fatalism ensuing upon consciousness of a Power so overwhelming that it makes nonsense of the old humanist values.

    The main impression I took away from that curious place was the oppression of almost a doctrinaire fatalism—or if you like, the determination
not
to be oppressed, but to construct a new scale of values within this framework. With the release of such powers as
those
among men, where was the use in talking of
les nuances?
All must be Black, or White—power or no power: all-power or slavery. The philosophy of Atomic Fission is not, I am afraid, worked out to its logical conclusion by these people, nor made explicit as I have done here. None are frank, it would be far better if they were. The trouble about the English methods of make-believe and the employment of the fossil-structure is that when suddenly they emerge into the glare of reality they are quite unprepared and deeply astonished; though in the artificial twilight in which they prefer to live they have been moving steadily (and one would think deliberately, if one did not know them) towards some frightful climax.

    Letters that I receive from unknown correspondents requesting an interview (mostly to do with other peoples lives, not mine) I drop automatically in the waste-paper basket. Such letters are often those of a person who rates flattery very high among the stock baits—a person who fancies himself as a trapper. (An “eminent” man must be a vain man, otherwise—so obviously the unknown argues—he would never have sweated his way up to eminence.)

    I have experience of what happens if one does
not
treat these letters as waste-paper. It does the correspondent no good to see him—it is just as humane therefore not to do so. Besides, I do not happen to be vain.

    Mr. Walter Gartsides’ communication lay before me, I looked down at it as I lighted a cigarette: and it was not a half-dozen lines before I reached “I have haunted the cocktail parties in the hope of meeting you”. Of course at this point I prepared to get rid of it. As I gripped it to tear it in half I saw the word
Rochdale.
Mr. Gartsides (the sweet euphonious name—I could see it was hideous though the signature was only partly legible) was “taking up an appointment”, I read, “as art-director”. It was in connection with this that Rochdale came to be mentioned; that was where he was going.

    Rochdale I had seen ten days before. In a railway train after puffing your way through the Pennines, gazing with indolent sadness at those hill-villages of chilly charm—for they force you to think of England before it began to dig in its black entrails and cover its pretty little face with soot—after the Pennine interlude you re-enter the bleak huddle of this mass-day, the factories of Rochdale. Would Mr. Gartsides’ job take him up where it is still beautiful in the hills, or on towards the metropolis of soot, mighty Manchester? “A few miles from Rochdale,” could mean either: but there can be no “colleges” in the Pennines…

    To discuss with me the policy he proposed to pursue at this college, such was Mr. Gartsides’ wish. At present he taught in Bermondsey: he picked ugly neighbourhoods, did this man with the ugly name. I pictured him as a big seedy earnest man. The letter was not badly written, was not embarrassing as some are, was unsmiling, was just cordial enough to be agreeable.

    An aversion to humanity is not what makes me difficult of access, only an aversion to painters or poets. There are so many thousands of individuals wasting their time at the game of “self-expression”; brooding over some midget talent in some dirty little room, with some dirty little woman. After a great war they are found to have alarmingly multiplied. Were it the tinker or the tailor who wanted a conference, or the local builder, tobacconist, or publican, that would be different. I am uncommonly sociable. It was undoubtedly the fact that Mr. Gartsides lived in so underprivileged a neighbourhood as Bermondsey that decided me to write and ask him to come to tea the following week. Owing to great pressure of work I regretted that about an hour was all I should be able to spare. There is no pretentiousness, I may add here, in being particular about time, I am short of time. It is the government makes me short of time, or the penury of the country.