THE MYTH OF REVOLUTION

...What lends their writing a particularly somber cast is an awareness, be it spoken or not, that in circumstances where evil appears to be so complete, a triumph of good might end in a new kind of evil— and that, nevertheless, it remains a moral imperative to accept that triumph...

...v. FCC, Justice Byron White spoke of the right of viewers and listeners to receive "suitable access to social, political, esthetic, moral, and other ideas and experiences," and said that it is that "right of the viewers and listeners, not the right of the broadcasters, which is paramount...

...This kind of assurance likely requires some sort of government intervention...

...Well...

...Its concern with the scarcity of frequencies in the electromagnetic spectrum is said to have been rendered obsolete by the rise of cable television and other new technologies...

...But the fate of Lionel Burger can still move us because in South Africa, for whatever reasons and with whatever ultimate consequences, the Communists have suffered in behalf of black liberation...

...Scattered through the book, they make compelling reading...

...But the enterprise has had one major flaw: it has never come to grips with the reality of economic inequality and its central place in American capitalism...

...I remember well the acorns and chestnuts we ate...

...it is the sense of politics as a terrible force beyond the reach of the rationality we like to suppose in control...

...With a remarkable set of records and diaries at hand, Nancy can account for every penny...

...The trip to Paris wasn't easy, because police were stationed along the way and the truck was stopped frequently...

...A series of secondary characters registers a variety of feelings about him—some influence of Henry James's techniques may be visible here...

...A young white intellectual, prematurely world-weary, keeps probing Burger's story for skeptical depreciations...

...Finally, in 1952, Nancy and her husband Dwight sent a leaflet, Proposals for a Committee to Aid Spanish Refugees in France, to friends who had already contributed in one way or another...

...When we arrived in Paris, we were placed in various homes of comrades, or sympathizers of the Spanish Republic...

...for the purposes of fictional credibility, it is enough that we suppose it is a plausible or likely judgment by Burger's daughter...

...The FCC called on Congress—which had made the fairness doctrine part of the Communications Act in 1959 (albeit in a somewhat ambiguous way)—to repeal the doctrine...

...But the comrades in Paris had taken precautions and we were successful in passing all the police barriers...

...Nadine Gordimer—Revolution Yes, But...

...If it is still possible anywhere in the world to think of politics in absolute moral terms, as a blunt counterposition of good and evil, that place is South Africa...

...And here again we found a place which must have been a factory, and here the prison was installed again...

...378 THOUGH NOT VERY POLITICAL and certainly not a Communist, Rosa returns to join the black liberation struggle, becoming a prisoner like her father...

...Sending this card was a shot in the dark and I was really lucky...

...382...

...At first it was I alone who received the solidarity of those who took me in...

...Preface by Mary McCarthy...

...On the whole, this has been a worthy enterprise...

...Yet this subject can also prove to be a tyranny: narrow, sterile, confining...

...Not surprisingly, the Reagan-era FCC, as part of its mad rush to deregulate the entire telecommunications field, has sided with the broadcast industry...

...It is hard to imagine a novelist managing so positive a response to a Communist leader anywhere else in the world...

...We can hardly be sure, since it is neither the politics of revolution or its mere rejection which dominates this novel...

...Unfortunately, we haven't the space to offer more than one sample, a brief selection from an interview with Juan Andrade and his companion, Maria Teresa, taped in 1967...

...Aid for 74 tuberculars...

...A formidable task...

...That at any rate is the theory of our Constitution...

...When the Supreme Court upheld 379 the fairness doctrine's constitutionality in the 1969 case Red Lion Broadcasting Co...

...that, sooner or later, we may detect a slight motion of change...

...Perhaps, then, the more practical goal for this society is not free trade in ideas but fair trade—some assurance, in other words, that one particular viewpoint will not completely drown out others because of its adherents' power (financial or otherwise) in the ideological marketplace...

...An intransigent black nationalist, indifferent as a matter of principle to Burger the individual, is quite ready to scoff at him as a mere "useful" white...

...Although Congress is unlikely to accede to this request, the fairness doctrine is almost certainly heading for another Supreme Court test...

...They were arresting all the Spaniards and taking them to concentration camps...

...In 32 years it raised over $5,000,000...

...We were half starved, so the first thing we did when they arrived was to sit down and eat...

...They attracted sponsors, and Spanish Refugee Aid (SRA) finally came into being in 1953...

...He is rarely seen directly...

...Nancy Macdonald was that "one," and over the years she recruited friends and built a small organization that served the needs of the Spanish exiles after the Spanish Civil War...

...With some friends, Nancy sent food and money before communication with France was ended by the Nazi takeover...

...But not without a good many qualifications and hesitations...

...The fairness doctrine is not the same as the so-called equal-time rule for political candidates, although the two are often confused...

...Again, fearing that the Communists would recognize us, we decided to go to the mountains to try and cross the frontier in a spot where there wouldn't be such an abundance of people fleeing from the Spanish war...

...Because all we wanted to do was to cross the frontier and go to France...

...It's as if, in these uneasy years, two myths were confronting one another in a standoff: the myth of sobering and exhaustion after the debauch of Communism and the myth of revolutionary desperation in the emerging countries as they try to get out from under Western imperialism...

...The stark circumstances of that country lend force and passion to the work of such writers as Gordimer, J.M...

...Both of these myths have their energizing powers for novelists and both have enabled the making of fine works of fiction...

...For writers they may in fact be beginnings, not ends...

...Critics ought not to be in a hurry to tell them they can't do it...

...How much will he then be able to do with his irony and anger, his force and fury...

...But in the first town we came to, there was a police barrier...

...yet it's precisely this "digression," while not always absorbing in its own right, that helps to sustain that larger portion of the novel which rests, however uncomfortably, on the myth of revolutionary heroism...

...They arrested us, put us in a truck and took us to Le Perthus, and made us cross the frontier into Spain...

...In reality the story is rather picturesque and special...

...What possibilities remain in my familiar subject matter...

...Soon after the novel's opening, Burger is arrested by the government and sentenced in court to life imprisonment...

...Having scourged the falsities of "socialist" countries without socialism and exposed the falsities of "liberated" countries without liberation, writers like Kundera and George Konrad, Naipaul and Mario Vargas Llosa must ask themselves: What next...

...And so we decided to leave immediately because we feared the worst...

...If you have no doubt of your premises or your power and want a certain result with all your heart you naturally express your wishes in law and sweep away all opposition...

...If the Court does strike down the fairness doctrine, pundits will tally "winners" and "losers"—the broadcast industry on one hand, various public-interest and advocacy groups (both liberal and conservative) on the other...

...But naturally there was what one might call a sort of camaraderie between the jailers and us...

...Paul...

...Rosa now comes to believe that her father and his friends had "made a Communism for 'local conditions' . . . a connection with blacks that was completely personal...

...Our group consisted of those who had been in the Barcelona prison, the executive committee of the POUM and a few comrades who had been arrested for their activities connected with the party...

...And in the decades after the Second World War, such excitements have been abundant only in Eastern Europe and parts of the Third World...

...She finds ways to bring in the Moscow trials, the Prague spring, and Burger's part in expelling a deviant comrade from the party, so that the Burger shown as a selfless and heroic man is also shown to be a faithful agent of Stalinism...

...Many realities sooner or later loom before us as impasse, and all writers look for ways to scale walls or slip past barbed wires...

...In fact, the government took a small step in this direction roughly forty years ago, when the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) promulgated the fairness doctrine, a regulation whose future as of this writing (December 1986) is very much in doubt...

...Ad hoc and formal committees, efforts of one sort or another, followed this first step of helping Andrade...

...Novelists committed to political themes do not have to arrive at political solutions: it is usually better that they not try to...

...In recent years, the Red Lion decision has come under vigorous attack...

...The immediate task, apparently, must overwhelm all doubts and complicating perceptions, and thereby the revolutionary myth does achieve an equivocal sort of vindication...

...But finally, thanks to the solidarity of a comrade, she found a place to be free from the persecution of the Fascists...

...SRA set $25,000 as its goal the first year...

...Andrade: Escape to France "When Barcelona fell (January 26, 1939), we were in [a Communist] prison and we came to an agreement with our jailers to leave and go to France together...

...Serge wrote that, with thirteen other POUMists, Andrade "had been condemned by a military tribunal of the Vichy Government, sitting behind closed doors [in Montauban, November 1718, 1941], for having maintained an illegal organization with connections in Spain...

...After two nights of rain in the mountains my weakness became extreme . . . I had started writing two books in prison and they were the principal thing I had taken when we left the prison in Barcelona...

...To allow opposition by speech seems to indicate that you think the speech impotent, as when a man says that he has squared the circle, or that you doubt either your power or your premises...

...There were difficulties...

...She was imprisoned like me and she left prison only when the Fascists were marching through the streets...

...Here, with a few introductory remarks, is the note on Gordimer.—I.H...

...That night, at 4 or 5 in the morning, all the comrades left, but this time without our guards...

...She knew Maria Teresa's address and immediately took it to her...

...As Thomas Edsall points out in The New Politics of Inequality, the disproportionate impact of such spending stems in large part from the "increasing intersection" since the mid 1970s "of the interests of the right-wing ideological community, the business community, and the Republican party...

...There were then 160,000 Spanish exiles living a precarious existence in France, fifteen years after the end of the Civil War...

...Persecution for the expression of opinions seems to me perfectly logical...

...but both also bring writers up against the pain of blockage...

...The writer can only struggle, through the sobrieties of realism or the artifice of antirealism, hoping to cope with or get round, or best of all, engage once again with the urgencies of his moment...

...In the name of free speech, the Supreme Court has permitted unlimited "independent" expenditures in political campaigns, which have largely benefited conservative candidates...

...In Burger's Daughter, her most distinguished work, Nadine Gordimer focuses upon a small group of South African whites, in condition middle class and in opinion Communist, who at risk to their lives and liberty have thrown themselves into the movement for black liberation...

...With what result...

...Despite the presence of one or two tantalizing hints in late Burger Court opinions, it is not clear how the Rehnquist Court will act...

...In this way, their Communism was the antithesis of antiindividualism...

...THESE ARE NOT QUESTIONS we need answer, or pretend to be able to answer...

...the range of legally permissible speech in America is broader than in most other democracies...

...But there is, I think, a strong psychological and even moral need among both writers and readers of novels—which is one reason novels are not, in any strict sense, tragedies— to feel that the rendered situation may not be utterly intractable...

...THE FACT IS THAT IN A SOCIETY built on substantial material inequalities, a genuine free trade in ideas of the sort envisioned by Holmes is probably unattainable...

...We were all very weak and I was in the worst condition because I was already weak when I left the prison...

...The position has its discomforts...

...Will there be a point at which he will find himself acknowledging the impotence of words...

...And broadcasters complain bitterly that the Supreme Court, in upholding the fairness doctrine, deprived them of First Amendment rights enjoyed by print journalists...

...But the real losers will be the millions of Americans who rely on television and radio for news and public affairs information, and whose already insufficient influence in the marketplace of ideas will have been further reduced...

...She was in a really difficult position...

...She is also lavish in her praise of those who gave generously in time, funds, or, as in the special case of Alexander Calder, made frequent contributions of their art (so that the sale of art, Calder's and the works of others, became an important source of income...

...Burger's comrades adore him...

...My companion, Maria Teresa, had stayed in Barcelona...

...Andrade "was the Don Quixote type, tall, gaunt, and idealistic...

...I ended up doing an Afterword as a series of notes on a number of writers—Gordimer, Naipaul, Garcia Marquez, Kundera, Solzhenitsyn—for essays that may or may not be written...

...In these high-tech days when causes good and bad seem unable to operate without sophisticated computerized appeals and organizations, it is good to be reminded that a few individuals, working with dedication and minimum resources, can accomplish worthy goals...

...If her tone is generally dispassionate, Nancy can be quite acerbic, perhaps unfairly, about those who might have helped more than they did...

...The publisher asked me to "bring it up to date" by discussing, however briefly, political fiction written since the Second World War...

...Help for 90 people in hospitals...

...Political fiction requires wrenching conflicts, a drama of words and often blood, roused states of being, or at least a memory of these...

...Well, as Franco's forces continued to advance, we decided to move the prison once again from Gerona to Agullana, which was a town very near the frontier...

...First I spent several weeks in the home of a woman who belonged to the classic French bourgeoisie...

...The troops of Franco were nearing Barcelona and most of the inhabitants were leaving...

...Vichy was *Homage to the Spanish Exiles: Voices from the Spanish Civil War...

...Precisely insofar as she registers these complications does Gordimer enable credence for her version of Burger...

...Nancy went to Spain in 1977, having visited refugee shelters in France before that...

...Gordimer neither indicates her own acceptance of this judgment nor presses her readers to accept it...

...It's as if Gordimer refuses fully to yield herself to the pathos of his fate even as she is using all of her literary resources to make us respond to that fate...

...The second day we went out, we were very surprised to discover that the Army Staff of the Communist Party and the big military powers had established their headquarters in Agullana...

...I had the idea of writing a card in a special sort of way, sending it to her address where we used to live...

...At this point the book turns, for several chapters, into something close to a novel of sensibility...

...Rosa rebels a little by fleeing to the civilized assurances of Western Europe, as if the act of "finding herself' must mean for a time ceasing to be her father's daughter...

...And the jailers and the director of the prison wanted to flee from Spain too and see if they could cross the frontier...

...The leaflet listed specific needs: for example, used clothing, "monthly subsidies for Republican Dispensaries in Montauban and Toulouse...

...There are realities the imagination cannot transcend and should not try to...

...It is, I think, an extraordinary feat this late in the century to make a Communist leader into a sympathetic, even noble figure without succumbing to either cant or sentimentality...

...Art can be crushed by the sheer moral weight of certain subjects, and these gifted South African writers find themselves gasping for a bit of imaginative space, some portion of freedom from the subject that seems inescapable...

...I was very well received...

...Most of them have received considerable media attention, even where concrete support (food, decent living conditions) was meager and inadequate...

...we slept for two days in the mountains, we had no food, and there was no place to find any...

...In its first year, April 1953-March 1954, SRA provided "10 artificial limbs, 2 wheel chairs, 14 dentures, 75 CARE blankets," hearing aids, and money to bring families together...

...Andrade was one of the leaders of the POUM...

...In Gerona, the prison of Barcelona was installed in an old factory...

...In the early decades of this century, however, Holmes, Brandeis, and others gave the principle of "free trade in ideas" an exceptionally powerful rhetorical expression, thereby laying the foundation for the elaborate edifice of modern First Amendment doctrine...

...Justice Holmes, dissenting in Abrams v. United States (1919) The "marketplace of ideas" is an old notion, older than Holmes's famous articulation of the "theory of our Constitution," older indeed than the Constitution itself...

...19.95 380 not sympathetic to Spanish refugees, nor were subsequent French governments much better...

...The fairness doctrine requires broadcasters to cover "controversial issues of public importance" and to afford "reasonable opportunities" for the airing of differing views on those issues...

...In a recently published book, Nancy (a firstname privilege I take, having known her for almost the entire period covered) presents the story of these exiles and what was done to help them— principally, the non- or anti-Communist left: anarchists, socialists, POUMists (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista• United Marxist Workers Party).* It all began, for Nancy, in 1941, when she received a letter from Victor Serge (see Dissent, Winter 1984) asking "if we could help a Spanish refugee, Juan Andrade, suffering with tuberculosis in the prison of Montauban in Vichy-ruled France...

...Such and such a person contributed thousands of dollars (down to the decimal point) over the years...

...Gordimer, however, is too intelligent to stop there...

...There have been millions upon millions of refugees...

...In Spain, while fighting Franco's forces, he and his comrades had been persecuted by the Stalinists...

...But we were able to go out freely...

...Then we decided to send two comrades as delegates who, hiding and 381 avoiding the French police, went to a bar in the French town nearby to telephone to Paris...

...And then in agreement with us, they pretended to transfer the prison to Gerona and all of us left together in a truck...

...And there I was received like a real son of the caretaker and like a comrade by her nephew, who . had asked for a Spanish refugee...

...This enables Gordimer to negotiate a tentative, nervous entry into the outer precincts of black rebellion and a much more confident entry into the circle of Lionel Burger, a physician who is also a leader of the South African Communist party...

...Neither conservative stasis nor social democratic moderation, both of which may be seen as virtues compared to the bloody excesses of recent times and other places, seem able to inspire first-rate novels dealing with political themes...

...New York: Human Sciences Press, 1986...

...The intellectual leader of the POUM, Andrés Nin, had been assassinated by the Stalinists...

...During her visits she taped interviews with refugees...

...Gordimer manages this not through a full-faced portrayal—she is novelistically shrewd enough to keep a certain distance from Burger—but through a series of narrative skirmishes that complicate and perhaps even call into question her narrative of revolutionary heroism...

...By inclination and training a novelist of sensibility, Nadine Gordimer writes as a liberal who has apparently begun to wonder whether liberalism is adequate to the anguish of South Africa and whether revolutionary measures must be anticipated and perhaps acquiesced in...

...Later] I was sent to the janitor's apartment in a house in the well-known workers' district of St...

...What if, locked into the unfreedom of his Eastern European country or the wretchedness of Third World nation, he can find no way out...

...Although they couldn't have weighed much, being paper, I abandoned them in the mountains because they hindered my walking...

...Andrade was sentenced to five years (from which he was freed by Spanish maquis...

...One group of refugees, perhaps because they "merely" numbered in the tens of thousands, received almost no attention and, but for the dedicated help of a few people—one in particular—little would have been done to alleviate their wretched condition...

...And Burger's daughter Rosa, through whose intelligence much of the story is strained, opens up old and painful memories: what it was like to have lived as a child in a home totally dedicated to politics, what it was like to have it assumed that the daughter would necessarily follow in the footsteps of the father...

...A historical impasse should not be airily dismissed with light literary chatter about "the imagination transcending," etc...

...Although the fairness doctrine generally has not been enforced in a vigorous or punitive way, over the years it has given radio listeners and television viewers access to a somewhat greater range of opinions on current affairs than they would otherwise have had...

...Working with volunteers and a small and meagerly paid staff, SRA felt and served a great need...

...Coetzee, and Andre Brink, all of whom are haunted—but thereby also enabled—by a great commanding subject...

...Political fiction has not flourished in the relative stability of the Western countries during the decades after the Second World War...

...The card arrived and the caretaker, whose husband belonged to the CNT [Confederacibn Nacional del Trabajo: National Confederation of Labor], took the card from the postman...

...Pablo Casals—SRA's honorary chairman—never gave a concert for SRA...

...some voices are bound to be heard much more loudly than others, for reasons having nothing to do with the intrinsic merit of the ideas being advocated...

...But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas—that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out...

...Perhaps we should be grateful for that...

...But what if, in all honesty, the writer sees no such possibility...

...There were still 40,000 of them in France after the death of Franco...

...They had an official document made which said that we were ill and they were taking us to be hospitalized in Paris...

...They are fairly long, for the most part, and interspersed with questions...

...Presenting herself as a cultivated middle-class white, she identifies with the outcry of the blacks even as she realizes she cannot speak for and, in any close way, about them...

...Our comrades in Paris sent a truck to pick us up and they brought with them bread and cold cuts, enough for a big meal...

...And I was running all sorts of risks to try and get in touch with her, as we were cut off...

...There remain in the world a few situations in which the myth of revolution as pure and heroic liberation can retain its hold on the novelist's imagi377 nation...

...Maria Teresa was his Sancho Panza, short, lively, and down to earth...

...We went silently and crossed the border and started walking towards the interior of France...

...In August 1985 the Commission issued a lengthy report which concluded, via a highly selective and distorted reading of the evidence, that the fairness doctrine's operation "inhibits the presentation of issues of public importance . . . impedes the public's access to the marketplace of ideas and poses an unwarranted intrusion upon the journalistic freedom of broadcasters...