From Pollitt to 'Punch'

...Yet this crushing experience may have played more part than later events in creating his phenomenal sense of mischief, his restless urge to upset the apple cart, his compulsive need to divert himself by searching out the grotesqueries of life...

...Shortly Pollitt invites him to help edit the Daily Worker...

...This is true in more than one respect...

...With mischievous glee he gives all the technical detail—in a section omitted from the English edition—about the difficulties of preparing a news dispatch from a town in Spanish Morocco where he has never been, describing an uprising against Franco which never happened...

...Because Pollitt has read some copies of The Week and thinks Cockburn might be able to add some "reader appeal...

...In characteristic delight he announces that Blum —despite the stupid doubts of the capitalist press—falls for the story and lets the guns go through...

...But if this minister did exist, he would be sure to represent a Western democracy...

...The minister is not named...

...Why...

...If this account had been published in, say, The New Leader, it would be instantly recognized as fantastic...

...But it must be written with a rigorous, self-searching honesty which is absent in the present volume if it is to be the truly great and valuable testament which Claud Cockburn is uniquely capable of creating...

...Yet the relationship was not remembered in this light before Cockburn's years on the Daily Worker taught him how to use anything, even his father, as grist for one mill...

...Here we meet a new Claud Cockburn, bearing no relation to the man whose political acumen had all the editors of the London Times begging him to be Washington correspondent at 28 and dangling before him the possibility of the foreign editorship...

...One Russian, Koltsov, representative of Pravda, he mourns as having lost favor and disappeared, presumed to have been executed...

...He was once heard to illustrate his early conservatism by the story of a trip to the station at the age of 8 to meet a favorite aunt...

...He spends no pity on his own small self of these troubled days, though his amah was sent back to China on the next boat, leaving him with no human he had ever known before...

...his American chief, rings movingly true...

...He mentions, with the special tenderness reserved throughout this book for anything Chinese, her plight in the village where "the boys shouted and threw stones at her in the street because she wore blue trousers...

...In this very part of the book, among others, Cockburn expresses great concern for his literary style as subject to corruption by writing for publications with which he cannot agree...

...The book, which came out first in a somewhat expurgated form in England, has been called uneven...

...Since his father died before young Cockburn was grown up, no one now alive can disprove the story...

...From this viewpoint it is immaterial to speculate as to how many people in Sparta reallv had the virtues which are called Spartan...

...This book is rich in comedy, even though the absurdities Cockburn reports relate to the tragic aftermath of World War I in Central Europe, the sterile ugliness of French village life between the wars, the boom-bust depression cycle in the United Slates, the gathering Nazi storm in Germany, and the heartbreaks of the war in Spain and the British sellout in Czechoslovakia...

...Certainly no bodies of Communist victims are described in these pages...

...Yet in summing up his memories of the school's leaching methods he says: "In other words, history becomes a sort of myth, devised today, revised tomorrow, to suit today's and tomorrow's purposes...

...It is on remembered boyhood conversations with his father, a former member of the diplomatic service in the Far East, that Cockburn draws for his most damaging proof of the unscrupulous hypocrisy of British imperialism...

...Engaging her in discussion, he was shocked to hear her express mild sympathy for the Irish Republicans...

...The total break in his relationships at so young an age he passes over completely...

...In this book, however...

...But the direct evidence consists of such anecdotes as the one attributing to his father a monstrous plot to maintain British supremacy in the Far East...

...The first Minister of Government I met told me a most horrible lie almost immediately...

...Communism has no false fronts and only the most solemn respect is accorded to Soviet diplomacy...

...This mild literary project had to be postponed in the course of Cock-burn's climb to the editorship of the British Daily Worker and an important position in the Communist party...

...He still took the conservative position in the school arguments with his liberal headmaster amusingly related in this book...

...Putting aside any temptation to let the end justify the means in that case, the question must be asked if this sort of fabrication was faithful to his own sense of the "Moment of Truth" to which he pays homage as motivating the martyred intellectuals in Spain...

...But here is how he introduces his friend, Otto Katz: "He presented himself quite openly and frankly as a Communist, employing none of the schoolboy ideological disguises which ignorant sensationalists like to suppose are used by organizers of 'broad fronts.' " It is with this character, Katz, that he collaborated in the successful deceit of Premier Blum in order to get needed guns across the French border to the Spanish Loyalists...

...There are many indirect suggestions of this in the book, such as when he likens the help of an older man to that of a father in its "cherishing" and "developing" qualities...

...But since it is told "straight" to the general public—and there may still be some people who can believe that official Communist publications engage their editors this way—it is plain dishonesty...

...His father undoubtedly implanted in him the need constantly to exceed his own powers in order to make his life count in the world's progress...

...He never mentions any Russian who betrayed the cause of freedom in the Spanish Civil War, and in both editions he mocks Hemingway, who did discover and report such betrayals...

...Cockburn was born in Peking "on the day the Japanese blew up the Russian flagship Petropavlovsk at Port Arthur...

...It gave startling point to his mimeographed publication, The Week, in its mid-Thirties period of most trenchant news value, and has found a natural outlet in his pieces for Punch which followed rather quickly the Daily Worker phase...

...Purely to "get his newssheet talked about," he becomes involved in various vaguely described liberal committees...

...Uneven as the book is, the only truly weak parts come toward the end...

...When I talked with Al Capone, there was a sub-machine gun poking through the transom of the door behind him...

...Perhaps it is carping to delect a disingenuous note: "Nothing sets a person up more than having something turn out just the way it's supposed to be...

...Whether that was the first sight Cockburn saw in Budapest, or whether for literary or political purposes he has selected it to report as the first sight he saw, is a question which the reader must try to answer...

...In an Irish castle, a sow ran right across the baronial ball...

...Ernest Hemingway spoke out of the corner of his mouth...

...Cockburn's interest in politics began very young...

...When he was hardly four years old, his parents sent him with his amah to England...

...Interspersed with hundreds of hilarious scenes are such marvelously serious paragraphs as the one describing the writing of his first official news dispatch from New York to the London Times...

...like falling into a Swiss snowdrift and seeing a big dog come up with a little cask of brandy round its neck...

...asks the astonished Cockburn...

...If Cockburn had no advance news of the revision of history in regard to Stalin, this is a startling case of his famous educated guesswork...

...As a youth, Cockburn spent his school vacations with his family in Budapest, where his father was trying to sort out Hungary's war debts...

...It was capitalism's cockeyed aspects, the book states in effect, the false fronts and absurdities of Western diplomacy, that led Cockburn to abandon a spectacular career on the London Times to become (in reverse Worker-ese) a Hireling Hack of Communism...

...But, like the Third Man theme in Victor Borge's attempts to play classical music, the idea of the wildly unlikely being the actual and the real has kept cropping up in most of what he has written...

...He thereupon turned his face away and could not bring himself to speak during the rest of the ride...

...The first time I traveled on the Orient Express, I was accosted by a woman who was later arrested and turned out to be a quite well-known international spy...

...He, the only victim of Soviet slaughter mentioned in the book, is described as a "close confidant and mouthpiece and direct agent of Stalin...

...The way lies open also, of course, for his genuine description of what caused his awareness—if indeed he has become aware—of the incompatibility of human integrity with Communism...

...Reviewed by Hope Hale In his youth, Claud Cockburn took pleasure in planning a book about a typical, average, "normal" English village...

...this is merely a preamble to his first sight?and never was his eye for the fantastic more alert—of the Times office in London...

...Many reminiscences pour forth as irrepres-sibly as they did from the author's lips in countless drawing rooms...

...Now the theme serves again, both to unify his autobiography and to provide a serious political argument...

...Throughout the book, his father's role is to teach the young Cockburn callous and cynical attitudes...

...What Sparta is for is to teach people to keep a stiff upper lip when that fox cub starts gnawing their stomachs...

...Suddenly out of the blue he is telephoned by Harry Pollitt, head of the CP in Britain, whom he has "never met...

...The way lies open for his sequel to present a plea, well camouflaged by comedy, for the popular front which his former comrades—if former is the word—now want...

...He emerges in London at 29 as a bewildered innocent among the complexities of British politics...

...Cockburn recalls that on his first trip from the railway station to the hotel his guide took him to a pier of the bridge between Buda and Pest and pointed down to where he said he had seen the water of the blue Danube clogged with the bodies of 300 men who tried to defend the commune...

...It stands as a superlative exposition of the problems of a writer, and the story of his relationship with Louis Hinrichs...

...the job of Ancient Rome was to inspire the organizers of the British Empire...

...Others have the slightly strained lone of a gambler using banter to bemuse his fellow players as he draws an ace from his sleeve...

...He preferred to write "honestly and creatively" for the Communists...

...His whole report of this period barely skirts the edges of the truth...

...No need to wonder what the Romans were really like...

...A typical memory, not startling enough perhaps to be included, was of long hours spent in companionable reading of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, punctuated by remarks such as "There are some jolly good bits in this one" as they exchanged volumes...

...The straightforward description would quietly reveal each inhabitant as a fantastic eccentric...

...When a brilliant author writes about the cockeyed aspects of anything, it is almost certain to be funny...