A POLITICS OF THE NURSERY

...To these momentous "revelations," Mitford remarks: "I did not share this anguish to any marked degree, perhaps because I had never been as thoroughly convinced as most comrades of Soviet infallibility...

...The dissociation of daily work from its rationale and justification is complete...

...Because they anticipate the scene of the murders, the pictures of trains ultimately function this way too, as do many other atmospheric details...

...Fo~ the true activist, activity is its own reward and own end: being an activist is sufficient unto itself...

...Activism, narrowly defined, as it is here, is a special universe with its own atmosphere, which cannot support life, and its own law of gravity...

...lowed me into the abode of the damned, or should we have had to get a divorce...

...The further we are drawn into this expressionistic world, the more it takes hold of our imagination and compels our assent to it...

...instead, Mitford will undertake "merely to reconstruct my own experiences as a part of the [Red] Menace during those years and as an 28 October 1977:688 ex-Menace thereafter, to describe the fascination, difficulties and frequent joys of being an 'activist' in an embattled, proscribed (and, to me, occasionally comical) organization...

...The "fascination...

...Mitford and her husband visited Hungary not long before the events of 1956 and for all they truly saw they might as well have stayed home...

...To those inside the hermetically-sealed chamber, the thunder of the Gulag being built block by block was inaudible until one day the chamber walls collapsed...

...and, one thinks on hearing this, how refreshing such a tone could prove, after all the sackcloth and ashes, muttered curses and terriblecries of the ravaged heart...

...For Jessica (as for her sisters) it was no fling (unless there is such a thing as a lifelong fling): still in her teens she fled the manor-house, to Spain during the Civil War, where the teenager who would become her first husband (he was also her second Cousin and Churchill's nephew) was a volunteer, and ultimately to the United States...

...she was the daughter of Lord and Lady Redesdale, themselves devoted admirers of Hitler, sister of the brilliant Nancy and of Diana, wife of Oswald Mosley, Britain's principal fascist, of course, and of---especially of--the incomparable Unity, Hitler's "perfect Nordic goddess": a rather impressive array when one considers it's merely one family we're talking about--a "nuclear" family, "'Farve" and "Muv" and the kids--and not a fair-s~ed Central European principality...

...To look hard and steadily, without illusion but also without self-pity, without tears or whimpering, recriminations or craven pleas for forgiveness of sins, that depressing prelude to squalid capitulation made familiar by the like of Howard Fast, Bella Dodd, Whittaker Chambers, Louis Budenz and so many others of the " 'I-was-duped' school of American ex-party members...

...In fact no opportunity is missed and, inevitably, this results in some sprightly comedy and snappy oneliners, the best of them provided, naturally enough, mostly by the famously witty Nancy...

...She presented conditions: no fascist fulminations, no Jew-baiting...

...certainly better not to express one's doubts and reservations...

...The greater part of her political energies was devoted to the Civil Rights Congress and there is no question in my mind (there wasn't then and isn't now) that the work was socially important and valuable...

...Certain delicate questions of family decorum and feeling are raised incidentally but never posed as such...

...Her husband, a labor and civil rights lawyer, would scarcely have withered beneath a slur, one imagines...

...Questions might lead to other questions and enough of them of the right kind might lead to disaffection . . . or to punishment...

...it doesn't raise questions, certainly not fundamental ones...

...There's also a question of truth...

...No genre is harder to do original work in than film noir...

...and in any case one kept so busy being "active" there was no time for questions, no space for doubts...

...Dismayingly, the world beyond Party politics in an area of Oakland is quite rigorously excluded, as if history itself were someone else's business, perhaps the Party's Central Committee and that of its theoreticians, not that of a mere member and petty functionary whose principal business was raising money for the Party and the CTC...

...Nor does it seem to have occurred to her that the Party need not have been consulted in the first place--indeed that it was of utmost importance that it not be consulted, and for the most powerful imaginable reason: it was simply none of its business...

...Of course, film noir has always maintained, with Heraclitus, that fate is character...

...In the breathless, headlong, heedless, sometimes giggly and silly, babbling, chatty, often smug, prevailingly mindless and morally shallow scheme of the book, the great questions are either begged or offhandedly ignored, as if history had never posed them or no one ever thought of asking them...

...She thought they'd never ask...

...We discover this, as he does, when he is elated after his first murder...

...Anguish is painful and sensible people avoid pain...

...but a prevailing, virtually shadowless flippancy of tone is a desecration: a politics of the nursery carried far past the most tolerantly defined age of innocence...

...The closed, autistic, self-confirming world of the Party shut out the light...

...These baroque touches make it seem as if Jonathan lived in a deterministic world--as if he were doomed from the start...

...Jessica never again saw her father...

...dashing beard, smoldering oriental eyes...

...The fact that what happens to Jonathan is so arbitrary somehow makes his fate seem all the more irresistible...

...That this question can't be answered in any rational way makes the fact that Jonathan does believe him seem an inescapable turn of events...

...The yellow light of day and blue light of evening deepen into tangerine and purple...

...The best work of the last few yearsm Gumshoe, The Long Goodbye, The Late Showmsuggested that the only thing left for film noir to do was parody itself...

...No, we are to be spared such tiresome analysis...

...Muv and Farve must have dreaded her letters home: it wasn't enough that she had married an English Communist...

...A still ampler bounty is promised: since she left the Party in anything but a vertigo of rage and disillusionment, but on the whole cheerfully and fondly, saying "au revoir but not goodbye, for I went on seeing lots of the comrades, giving what support I could to their endeavors," she is not interested in "sort[ing] out the tangle of events in the Communist world of the postwar era," in assessing the "changes in Communist strategy and tactics (or the Party Line, as it is called for short), the rise and fall of Party leaders...

...The first of two parts) COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...

...The imagery, which has only had subliminal designs on us until now, begins to become outrageous...

...What would the Party have said...

...Few writers could resist making the most of such a family...

...The richest comedy alas, is invisible: reported but unwitnessed meetings between Muv and Jessica's Jewish mother-in-law in New York, and the latter and Nancy in Paris...

...By not reading or "associating" with the "enemy" one was sealed off from the enemy's truth...

...the abode of the damned was filled with defectors, doubters of the received truth, heretics and schismatics...

...Not noticeably to feel anguish seems somehow pallid, a bit bloodless, in circumstances which should have summoned up anguish to a very marked degree--after all, her whole life had been called into question...

...Not for it to reason why...

...The result of such calculated effects is to impart to Jonathan's story an oppressive feeling of inevitability...

...she remained to bear their child, make a new life for herself, first in wartime Washington, then in San Francisco and Oakland...

...The influence of the films in this genre has been so pervasive that aH its possibilities seemed exhausted long ago...

...Getting us to accept a crazy premise, such as the corruptibility of a man like Jonathan, is what film noir is all about...

...Preoccupied with immediate and unremitting press u r e s - t h e domestic slavery of politics, so to speak--it cannot look beyond it, and has no wish to...

...Later on, when even the blind could see that the groundswell, once the dust had settled, would leave everything pretty much in place, and only the FBI remained faithful to the Party, she left...

...A POLITICS OF THE NURSERY SAUL MALOFF A book such as Jessica Mitford's A Fine Old Conflict (Knopf, $10) might have been is lamentably overdue: at this remove to look hard through relatively clarified air at a Communist "past," extending in her instance from the days of the Spanish Civil War to 1958, two years after Khrushchev's confessions to the 20th Congress of the CPSU...

...could maintain intact, as it were, an impenetrable chastity...

...would she, her mother asked, come to bid him farewell...

...This is quite a feat on Wenders's part...

...a dark, airless, cramped space...

...As to the Moscow trials and inner-Party events in Eastern Europe, not a word, not so much as a glancing word...

...If Jonathan trusts the gangsters, it is at least partly because he wants to and, deep down, craves the violence to which trusting them will expose him...

...Motives and other subtleties Commonweal: 689 don't much interest Mitford...

...That hyperbolic flourish does nothing to conceal the seriousness of the question and the very real underlying anxiety...

...No more but no less, either: Khrushchev said what the enemies of the Party from Trotsky to the social democrats had been saying all along-that the Revolution had been betrayed and corrupted, that the Soviet Union was a charnel-honse, that the true believer's life was grounded in lies...

...We come to feel, insanely, that Jonathan couldn't have not become a criminal...

...There you have it, the world's saddest story: if you have children, you have no further need of enemies...

...Now, to be the hellraising daughter of such a family, even if it's not altogether the done thing, is, taking the wide view and making allowances for aristocratic eccentricity, at least understandable...

...In short, to dismantle the pernicious American myth of the "Communist conspiracy"--the "Red Menace'--by revealing in some demystifying detail the dailiness of her life as a minor Communist functionary...

...Her mother replied that conditions in themselves, conditions as such in the grim eircumstances, were unacceptable...

...it deals in means...

...That this is not the case, though, Wenders's film makes clear...

...but to be a teenage Communist (even if her untutored ear heard "fine old conflict" for "final conflict," that ringing call to Armageddon from the Internationale first heard while strolling in Hyde Park with Nanny or governess ) --well, that's something else again...

...Her father lay dying--"one of Nature's Fascists," one of his fascist daughters proudly called him...

...and not to feel it because in some sense she'd known all that from the beginning is intellectually delinquent and morally execrable...

...To look back upon the fascinations, difficulties and joys of activism with a certain measure of pride and cheerful good humor is, within strict limits, refreshing...

...but when finally the Party asked her in, she jumped...

...After all, many members were not Communists, simply people who espoused this or that inherently just cause...

...But she was not the usual run of American (or British) functionary...

...Acting out his suspicion that he has been "framed," for instance, Jonathan pokes his head through a gilt picture frame he himself has made, and then smashes his handiwork to pieces as if trying to break free of his own fate...

...When is a front not a front...

...better not to inquire too closely, or at all...

...In those bleakest days of the Cold War, in that dismal atmosphere associated with the names Truman, Nixon, Smith, McCarran, Mundt, McCarthy, HUAC and its Senate counterparts, and other patriots, what other multitudes actively opposed police brutality, segregated neighborhoods, racial murder in Mississippi, the assassination of the Rosenbergs, the systematic harassment and persecution of the Left...

...28 October 1977:690...

...While it's understandable that she never again saw Diana or Unity--after the war, oceans of blood separated them her refusal to see her dying father poses a subtle question at the junction where rigid ideology and ordinary human feeling clash...

...Why should Jonathan believe what some Mafioso tells him about his health instead of his doctor...

...To Khrushchev's appalling disclosures to the remnants of the faithful--surely the most devastating event in the psychic as well as ideological life of the Party--her response is bewilderingly bland, fiat, breezy, almost dismissive...

...Upstairs in the great house the girls transformed the nursery into barricades, decorating the walls, in the mode of normal, healthy girls everywhere, with romantic images of Hitler on one side, Lenin on the other (darling mustache, cute cowlick...

...The minute Jonathan commits his first murder, Wenders plunges us headlong into this world...

...unexpressed doubts---consciousness repressed and girded round by powerful defenses--needn't get in the way of job-efficiency, while expressed doubts can call down chastisement, and if they are pressed, expulsion: the damnation of "non-association...

...The shooting has a retroactive effect on our memory of the man who falls, and of Jonathan's own flight down an escalator earlier on his way to his doctor in Hamburg...

...And what of her husband: "Would he have folSAUL MALOFF'5 most recent book is Heartland (Scribner's...

...Mitford freely, not to say complacently or indiscreetly, calls the organization a Communist "front," a creation of the Party: a grave question of propriety which needn't detain us here...

...The heart's reason...

...she had to go and marry an American one--and a Jew to boot...

...Expulsion meant, Mitford reports without irony, being "put on nonassociation"--"severed forever," in her words, "not only from the organization and all its activities, but from a whole circle of long-time friends and acquaintances...

...Unburdened by remorse, or even a small ache of regret, Mitford in effect announces, moreover, that she will treat her subject with affection and humor as well as pride...

...Coincidences even begin to occur that flaunt the improbability of the plot, as when Ripley happens to walk by a window behind which, at just that moment, a gangster is receiving a call about the shooting Ripley helped arrange in Paris...

...and it doesn't seem to occur to Mifford that what the Party (that is, some other functionary) might have said, if anything at all, is beside the point, which is, to repeat through clenched teeth, that the old chap was dying...

...It makes us believe in a world gone mad, a world of lurid exaggeration and extreme artificiality...

...Mitford is not one of them, however marginal the bizarre family romance may seem to her declared subject...

...Whatever the motives, the facts are clear...

...Punishment in the Party, at its most extreme (gothic horror-tales and bloody melodrama to the contrary notwithstanding), meant expulsion, banishment to darkest night, the world beyond the circle of radiant light wherein dwelt the Party...

...At its best film noir always gives us these irrational feelings that the characters are trapped in invisible ways...

...When only means matter, and ends won't stand close scrutiny, it attracts and breeds bureaucrats, clerks, bookkeepers, stationmasters who are so intent on timetables they don't ask where the trains are going...

...Better to close the mind to the Soviet Union's "fallibility" (a weak word, on the whole) and get on with the job...

...For all its gay chatter and accounts of good deeds well done, the memoir reveals a moral and intellectual void...

...Nor is she matlo ut~easy by the Party's highly selective concern for civil rights and liberties--its indifference, if not actual glee, for example, in the fact of the FBI's brushfire war against Trotskyites and other elements of Left opposition, the "other" Left and thereforeno concern of the Party's...

...difficulties, and frequent joys of being an 'activist' ": "activism" is a curious condition, a queer state of mind...

...When, in 1941, in defiance of the Party line (which, before the attack on the Soviet Union, proclaimed the war a "phony war") he left for Canada and the Royal Air Force, they exchanged a lovers' vow in the manner of enamored young people the world over: he would join the Party as soon as he got to England and she the American Party...

...Almost immediately he was killed in action...