And Yet... (5 page)

Some critics, notably Frances Stonor Saunders in her book
Who Paid the Piper?
, have allowed a delicate wrinkling of the nostril at Orwell's inclusion of details about race, and what is now termed “sexual preference.” It is true that Isaac Deutscher is listed as a “Polish Jew,” and it is also true that he was a Polish Jew. But then Louis Adamic is identified—and why not?—as “Born in Slovenia not Croatia.” The protean Konni Zilliacus, then a very influential figure, is queried rather than identified as “Finnish? ‘Jewish'?” (He was both.)

I have to admit that I laughed out loud at seeing Stephen Spender described as having a “Tendency towards homosexuality,” which would not exactly define him, and at seeing Tom Driberg written down as merely “Homosexual,” which was not to say the half of it. Ms. Saunders comments haughtily that accusations of that kind could get a chap
into trouble in those days. Well, not in the British Secret Service or Foreign Office, they couldn't.

Hugh MacDiarmid, the Stalin-worshiping Scots poet, was described by Orwell as “Very anti-English.” My friend Perry Anderson, editor of the
New Left Review
, made something of this, too, until I pointed out that MacDiarmid had listed “Anglophobia” as one of his recreations in
Who's Who.
And it was Perry Anderson who published, in his “Components of the National Culture” in the
New Left Review
in 1968, a chart giving the ethnic and national origins of the Cold War émigré intellectuals in Britain, from Lewis Namier, Isaiah Berlin, E. H. Gombrich, and Bronisław Malinowski to Karl Popper, Melanie Klein, and indeed Isaac Deutscher. He reprinted the diagram in his book
English Questions
in 1992. I defended him both times. These things are worth knowing.

There are some crankish bits in the list, as when Paul Robeson is written off as “Very anti-white.” But even some of the more tentative judgments about Americans are otherwise quite perceptive. Henry Wallace, as editor of the
New Republic
, had already caused Orwell to cease sending contributions to a magazine in which he could sense a general softness on Stalin. In 1948, Wallace's campaign for the American presidency probably ruined and compromised the American left for a generation, because of his reliance on Communist Party endorsement and organization. Veteran leftist critics of the Truman administration, notably I. F. Stone, were mentally and morally tough enough to point this out at the time.

All too much has been made of this relatively trivial episode, the last chance for Orwell's enemies to vilify him for being correct. The points to keep one's eye on are these: the IRD was not interested or involved in domestic surveillance, and wanted only to recruit staunch socialists and Social Democrats; nobody suffered or could have suffered from Orwell's private opinion; he said nothing in “private” that he did not consistently say in public. And, while a few on “the list” were known personally to Orwell, most were not. This has its importance, since a “snitch” or stool pigeon is rightly defined as someone who betrays
friends or colleagues in the hope of plea-bargaining, or otherwise of gaining advantage, for himself. By no imaginable stretch could Orwell's views of Congressman Claude Pepper, or of Vice President Wallace, fall into this category. Nor could it (or did it) damage their careers. And there is no entry on “the list” that comes anywhere near, for sheer sulfuric contempt, Orwell's published challenge to Professor J. D. Bernal, and the other editors of the
Modern Quarterly
, to come clean about whether they were conscious agents of Stalin or not.

This was the period during which Orwell's samizdat editions of
Animal Farm
were being confiscated in Germany by American officers and either burned on the spot or turned over to the Red Army. It was indeed difficult for him to oppose Stalinism and Western imperialism at the same time, while attempting to hold on to his independence. But the stupidity of the state only helped to make certain that, at any rate while he lived, he was always its victim and never its servant. The British Foreign Office, which had been erring on Stalin's side for almost a decade, suddenly needed anti-Stalinist energy in the mid-1940s. It had nowhere to turn, in its search for credible and honest writers, but to the
Tribune
left. This is not, to take the medium or the long view of history, the most disgraceful moment in the record of British socialism. It is also part of the reason why there was no McCarthyite panic or purge in Britain. The
trahison des clercs
was steadily opposed, in both its Stalinoid and its conservative forms, by groups like the Freedom Defense Committee. Orwell cannot posthumously be denied his credit for keeping that libertarian and honest tradition alive.

(
The New York Review of Books
, September 26, 2002)

I
. Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton, 1998.

II
. Later information tells us that Henryk Erlich hanged himself in prison in May 1942 while Victor Alter was shot in February 1943. In announcing the deaths, which took place in Moscow, Molotov had not troubled to make this distinction. See Gennadi Kostyrchenko,
Out of the Red Shadows
(Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 1995).

III
. Professor Peter Davison, the only scholar with comprehensive access to the archives, points out that the original Rees-Orwell notebook (which included names such as that of Orwell's tax inspector) is not the same as “the list.” For example, the names of Charlie Chaplin and Stephen Spender are not on the list as it was received by the IRD, and Orwell himself crossed out the names of J. B. Priestley and Tom Driberg. Paul Robeson—correctly listed as a Stalinist in the notebook—was also spared the ordeal of being identified to the IRD. Hardly surprising, since this body was asking only for sincere socialists who opposed the Soviet design.

Review of
Snow
by Orhan Pamuk

W
ELL BEFORE THE
fall of 2001 a search was in progress, on the part of Western readers and critics, for a novelist in the Muslim world who could act the part of dragoman, an interpretive guide to the East. In part this was and remains a quest for reassurance. The hope was (and is) that an apparently “answering” voice, attuned to irony and rationality and to the quotidian rather than the supernatural, would pick up the signals sent by self-critical Americans and Europeans and remit them in an intelligible form. Hence the popularity of the Egyptian Naguib Mahfouz, who seemed in his Cairo café-society mode to be potentially “one of us”—even more so when he had the misfortune to be stabbed in the neck by a demented fundamentalist. There was a much lesser vogue for spikier secular writers, such as the late Abdelrahman Munif, author of the Cities of Salt quintet, and the late Israeli Arab Emile Habibi, whose novel
Saeed the Pessoptimist
is the favorite narrative of many Palestinians (and who also had the grace to win Israel's national prize for the best writing in Hebrew). In some ways those two were not quite “Muslim” enough for the purposes of authenticity.

Orhan Pamuk, a thoughtful native of Istanbul who lived for three
years in New York, has for some time been in contention for the post of mutual or reciprocal fictional interpreter. Turkey is, physically and historically, the “bridge” between East and West, and I have yet to read a Western newspaper report from the country that fails to employ that cheering metaphor. (I cannot be certain how many “Eastern” articles and broadcasts are similarly affirmative.) With his previous novel,
My Name Is Red
, Pamuk himself became a kind of register of this position, dwelling on the interpenetration of Islamic and Western styles and doing so in a “postmodern” fashion that laid due emphasis on texts, figures, and representations. After 9/11 he was the natural choice for the
New York Review of Books
, to which he contributed a decent if unoriginal essay that expressed horror at the atrocities while admonishing Westerners not to overlook the wretched of the earth. In Turkey he spoke up for Kurdish rights and once refused a state literary award. Some of his fellow secularists, however, felt that he was too ready to “balance” his views with criticism of the Kemalist and military forces that act as guarantors of Turkey's secularism.

In a Bush speech to the new membership of NATO, delivered in Istanbul last June, one of the president's handlers was astute enough to insert a quotation from Pamuk, to the effect that the finest view of the city was not from its European or its Asian shores but from—yes—the “bridge that unites them.” The important thing, as the president went on to intone from Pamuk, “is not the clash of parties, civilizations, cultures, East and West.” No; what is important is to recognize “that other peoples in other continents and civilizations” are “exactly like you.”
De te fabula narratur
.

Human beings are of course essentially the same, if not exactly identical. But somehow this evolutionary fact does not prevent clashes of varying intensity from being the norm rather than the exception. “Remember your humanity, and forget the rest,” Albert Einstein is supposed to have said. This already questionable call to amnesia translates badly in cultures that regard Einstein himself as a Satanic imp spawned from the hideous loins of Jewish degeneration.

In his new novel Pamuk gives us every reason to suppose that he
is far more ambivalent about this facile “bridge-building” stuff than he has so far let on. The plot is complex yet susceptible of summary. Narrated by Pamuk, with the advantages of both foresight and hindsight, it shows an anomic young Turk named Kerim Alakusoglu, a poet with a bad case of literary sterility and sexual drought, as he negotiates a moment of personal and political crisis in the city of Kars, on the Turkish-Armenian frontier. Disliking his given name, the man prefers to go under the acronym formed by his initials: “Ka.” Having taken part in the violent and futile Marxist-Leninist student movement that was eventually obliterated by the military coup of 1980, and having followed so many of his ex-comrades into exile in Germany, Ka is a burned-out case. Pretending to seek a journalistic assignment in this remote town, which has recently witnessed an epidemic of suicide by young girls thwarted in their desire to take the Muslim veil, he is in fact magnetized by the possibility of seeing Ipek, the lost flame of his youth. As he arrives, a blizzard isolates the city and almost buries it in snow—for which the Turkish word is
kar
. One might therefore deploy a cliché and say that the action is frozen in time.

When frozen in the present, the mise-en-scène discloses a community of miserably underemployed people, caught among a ramshackle state machine, a nascent Islamism, and the claims of competing nationalist minorities. A troupe of quasi-Brechtian traveling players is in town, and it enacts a “play within a play,” in which the bitter violence of the region is translated with shocking effect directly onto the stage. Drawn into the social and religious conflict, Ka seems to alternate between visions of “snow” in its macrocosmic form—the chilly and hostile masses—and its microcosmic: the individual beauty and uniqueness of each flake. Along the scrutinized axes that every flake manifests he rediscovers his vocation and inspiration as a poet and arranges a cycle of verses. This collection is lost when, on his return to Frankfurt, he is shot down in a street of the red-light district.

In terms of characterization the novel is disappointing, precisely because its figures lack the crystalline integrity of individuals. Ipek, for example, appears on almost every page yet is barely allowed any
quality other than her allegedly wondrous beauty. The protagonists speak their lines as Islamists, secularists, conformists, and opportunists. And the author leaves no room for doubt that he finds the Islamists the most persuasive and courageous. This is true in spite of the utter nonsense that he makes them spout. A couple of Muslim boys corner Ka and demand that he answer this question, about a dead girl he never met:

Now we'd like to know if you could do us both a favor. The thing is, we can both accept that Teslime might have been driven to the sin of suicide by the pressures from her parents and the state. It's very painful; Fazil can't stop thinking that the girl he loved committed the sin of suicide. But if Teslime was a secret atheist like the one in the story, if she was one of those unlucky souls who don't even know that they are atheists, or if she committed suicide because she was an atheist, for Fazil this is a catastrophe: It means he was in love with an atheist.

I should caution the potential reader that a great deal of the dialogue is as lengthy and stilted as that, even if in this instance the self-imposed predicaments of the pious, along with their awful self-pitying solipsism, are captured fairly well. So is the superiority/inferiority complex of many provincial Turks—almost masochistic when it comes to detailing their own woes, yet intensely resentful of any “outside” sympathy. Most faithfully rendered, however, is the pervading sense that secularism has been, or is being, rapidly nullified by diminishing returns. The acting troupe is run by a vain old Kemalist mountebank named Sunay Zaim, who once fancied himself an Atatürk look-alike, and his equally decrepit and posturing lady friend. The army and the police use torture as a matter of course to hang on to power. Their few civilian supporters are represented as diseased old ex-Stalinists whose leader—one Z. Demirkol, not further named—could have leapt from the pages of Soviet agitprop. These forces take advantage of the snowstorm to mount a coup in Kars and impose their own arbitrary
will, though it is never explained why they do this or how they can hope to get away with it.