Witnesses: a greatest generation of anti-Communists.(In Appreciation)

THE year now coming to its end has marked the centenary of three fine British anti-Communist writers: Evelyn Waugh, George Orwell, and Malcolm Muggeridge. Each tried his hand at different kinds of writing, but I do not think it seriously unfair to tag them by the work they are best known for--as, respectively, a novelist, an essayist, and a journalist. All three writers lived among contemporaries held in thrall by the illusion of progress and social justice in the Soviet Union. All saw through that illusion very early. They were, you might say, premature anti-Communists.

It is not altogether coincidence that three of the West's clearest voices for reason and liberty were born in precisely the same year. The observers best placed to witness, and reflect on, the tremendous events of the 20th century's first half were the generation that came of age in the aftermath of WWI, Western civilization's greatest crisis. To have been born in the early years of that century; to have had one's childhood memories formed before the cataclysm; to have entered adolescence as the war was being fought; to have seen the shattered, disoriented post-war world with the receptive eyes of early adulthood--to have been part of that demographic cohort was to have had a grandstand seat at one of history's most gripping spectacles.

One of the commonest trajectories for this "witness generation" passed into, and then out of, an infatuation with Communism. Muggeridge lost his illusions earlier than most, as a result of spending the winter of 1932-33 in Moscow. If Orwell ever was enamored of Communism, his eyes were opened by the opportunism and cruelty of Stalin's agents in the Spanish Civil War. Arthur Koestler, born in 1905, tells us he resigned from the Party in 1938 because of Spain, though he did not completely lose faith in the USSR until the Nazi-Soviet pact a year later. That pact was the breaking-point for many--notably James Burnham, another member of the 1905 cohort. Also from that cohort was the French writer Raymond Aron, whose book The Opium of the Intellectuals (1955) was described by Roger Kimball as "an indispensable contribution to that most patient and underrated of literatures, the literature of intellectual disabusement." Those whose faith was deeper hung on for longer: Frank Meyer, born in 1909, described himself as a "dedicated communist" until 1945, and a "doctrinaire socialist" for some years afterward. Not until 1952 did he vote Republican for the first time.

Not all of this witness generation fell into the category of the disabused. Evelyn Waugh seems never to have felt the slightest attraction to any variety of leftist thought. His published writings take on Marxism mainly from a Catholic point of view, but as Donat Gallagher remarks in his notes to The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh, "[H]e had been a conservative before he became a Roman Catholic, and his conservatism developed independently of his religion." (Waugh converted to Catholicism in 1930.) By 1944, when he was supposed to be assisting in British liaison efforts with the Communist partisans of Croatia, Waugh had, according to his brother officer the Earl of Birkenhead, advanced to such a "detestation of communism" that he could not bear to be in the same room as a partisan. Says Birkenhead dryly: "One could not fail to recognise that holding these views so strongly, he could be of little, if any use as a liaison officer with communist allies."

Waugh's case illustrates the point that it was not only the year of ...