The left's power of facing.(Politics)(Critical Essay)

IN "WHY I WRITE", published in 1946, George Orwell wrote of his early youth: I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts." In Orwell's Victory, Iris recent book on Orwell, Christopher Hitchens pauses to reflect on this rather unusual use of words:

 
   Not the ability to face them, you notice, but "a 
   power of facing". It's oddly well put. A commissar 
   who realises that his five-year plan is 
   off-target and that the people detest 
   him or laugh at him maybe said, in a 
   base manner, to be confronting an 
   unpleasant fact. So, for that matter, may a priest 
   with "doubts". The reaction of such people to 
   unpleasant facts is rarely self-critical; they do not 
   have the "power of facing". Their confrontation 
   with the fact takes the form of an evasion; 
   the reaction to the unpleasant discovery is a 
   redoubling of efforts to overcome the obvious. 
   The "unpleasant facts" that Orwell faced were 
   usually the ones that put his own position or 
   preference to the test. 

Hitchens is aware, of course, that the "unpleasant fact" that Orwell faced with greater intensity than any other was that Soviet Russia was not the paradise many on the Left believed it to be. His greatest battle, in other words, was with his own constituency. Hitchens, too, has recently acquired a sort of internal dissident status, stemming from his often-boisterous assaults on the Left's reflexive anti-Americanism in the wake of the September 11 attacks--the tendency, when faced with the conflict between the "West" and "theocratic fascism", to retreat to a position of moral equivalence. For Hitchens, the political man of letters and Washington-based contrarian, the Left's "power of facing" is as much a matter for concern as it was for the author of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.

But even as Hitchens calls into question the Left's "power of facing", his own is being called into question from a most unlikely quarter. His friend, the novelist Martin Amis, has written a book about Stalin--Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million--in which he accuses Hitchens of quietism regarding Soviet crimes. Or rather he accuses the Left of quietism, but does so in the form of a letter to Hitchens, who has responded in the London Guardian and in a long review of Amis's book written for the Atlantic Monthly. Here, then, we have the unusual spectacle of Hitchens--author of a book on Orwell, and in one sense following Orwell's example in attempting to take the Left to task essentially from within its ranks--being accused of the very thing of which Orwell himself accused the Left. An odd little set of controversies, perhaps, but one that I hope will allow us to focus on an aspect of the left-wing psyche that I think has important consequences for its "power of facing" generally.

BEFORE WE CAN do so, however, we need to look in rather more detail at the controversies themselves. Koba the Dread, as it happens, would have been pretty controversial even if Amis hadn't addressed so much of it to Hitchens. Amis's argument is essentially this: the person and crimes of Stalin sit far too comfortably in the genera consciousness", commanding nothing like the attention that is paid to the Nazi Holocaust. That it is possible to joke about Stalinism and not about the Holocaust (from which subject, Amis's argument runs, "laughter automatically absents itself') is symptomatic of the general "asymmetry of indulgence" (thus, "Laughter and the Twenty Million").

Koba the Dread is a challenge to this situation, and one of the ways in which it proceeds is by trying to show us Stalin fresh. Even with his title, Amis is attempting to "make strange" Stalin: "Koba"--he name of the hero of a popular Russian novel--was the nickname Stalin acquired as a boy. ("The Dread"--that is, "the Terrible"--is Amis's designation.) The often-impressionistic depiction of Stalin's perverted character is combined with a mote straightforward history and--the source of most of the controversy sections of autobiography. These last deal in particular with the premature death of Amis's sister and seem to function as an emotional challenge to Stalin's chilling dictum that while the death of one is a tragedy, a million deaths is a mere statistic. "[A] million deaths," counters Amis, "are, at the very least, a million tragedies."

The response of the great majority of critics has been intensely negative. One kind of charge was made (was led) by Orlando Figes in the London Telegraph: "The blurb claims that 'Amis gives us perhaps the best one hundred pages ever written about Stalin'. In fact, as a piece of history-writing, they are unoriginal and even second-rate." Figes invokes the damning motif of the undergraduate essay, "magpie-like with other people's work, sharp and clever (especially with words), over-quick to judgment, and full of muddled facts". Of the various facts that Amis muddles, Figes lists a few, some of them trivial, others less so, and it is of course entirely reasonable that readers should be made aware that the book contains mistakes. But running beneath the allegations of slack historiography there seems to be a certain annoyance that Amis has tackled the subject at all. "Who is this Martin Amis," asked Zinovy Zinik in the TLS, "who is so preoccupied with this belated task?"