An Intellectual Bell-Wether
| Published date | 01 March 1974 |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1467-9248.1974.tb01475.x |
| Date | 01 March 1974 |
| Author | Bernard Crick |
| Subject Matter | Review Article |
REVIEW ARTICLE
AN INTELLECTUAL
BELL-WETHER*
BERNARD
CRICK
Birkbeck College,
London
ANYTHING
written by
Hugh
Thomas is to
be
read, and who could be better equipped to write
a life of John Strachey, through all its twists and turns, than someone
so
deeply read in Spanish
and Cuban politics? For John Strachey was nothing
if
not an intellectual,
son
of
the editor of
7’he
Spectator,
then a responsible and sensible
journal,
cousin of the horrible Lytton.
A
Tory
and
a dandy at Oxford, breakfasting at noon
on
crPme-de-menfhe
and chocolate cake, batting for
Magdalen
in
a French peasant straw hat Rith additional dangling pink ribbons, affecting
or
possibly even achieving homosexuality; but then joining the I.L.P., entering the House
of
Commons for Aston, editing
The Miner,
and after following Mosley into the New Party, tuning
to Communism, both open and covert.
As
if
that wasn’t enough for one life-time, from the
A.R.P.
to Bomber Command’s most famous propagandist; to Minister of Food via the Air
Ministry (‘ground-nuts and a friend of Fuchs’-as a cartoon in a certain newspaper portrayed
him), Secretary of State for
War
and lastly a great revisionist and more-or-less anti-Marxist
social democrat, supporter of Gaitskell through all of the thin and some
of
the thick.
Such a quick reminder of who he was perhaps promises more than Hugh Thomas has been
able to perfomi, for: ‘This biography was written on the invitation
of,
and with the support
of,
Mrs. John Strachey, who kindly made available to me all the papers kept by her late husband.
Mrs. Strachey has also, as the text makes clear,
gone
to great lengths to help me in writing the
book.’ May we read between the lines? Perhaps Strachey’s resolute fashionableness gained its
final accolade by his being put on a retainer for the
Obserrer,
but Professor Thomas either avoids
moral judgements
or
sees
nothing particularly deplorable
or
comic in such
a
career,
or
in
the
public which takes such perpetual immaturity seriously. This is not an encouragingly academic
beginning, but the obvious does sometimes need saying. Professor Thomas has written an
interesting, careful and useful book, but he has
no
settled view on Strachey’s character.
His
‘long
experimental life’, he says, but also hints at his great dependence on intellectual father
figures. Far from a Popperian, he was a man who followed one Popper
or
Prophet after another-
from Mosely to Marx and finally to Herman Kahn. At one time he was running Marx and
Freud together,
so
that in the afternoon after his second marriage ‘both Celia and Strachey
went to their analysts’. He leaves that very night for a Marxist lecture tour of the U.S.A., she
remains behind; and while
in
the States he buys
$3,600
worth of Soviet
7
72
bonds of the Second
Five Years Plan. You couldn’t be more faithful to the cause than that. But well might Walter
Lippmann say in
1935:
‘Strachey was evidently really what is known in Russia as
a
radish, red
on the outside and white
on
the inside, a gentleman who would like
to
have the theoretical
advantages he finds in Communism without its practical disadvantages..
.’.
Helped by the love of a good Left-wing woman he escaped from the male spell
of
Mosley fairly
quickly and by the end of
1931
was keen to join the Communist Party. But Palme Dutt, while
obviously eager for big names, showed in letters to Strachey a frank and understandable doubt
about the speed and depth of his small change of allegiance.
So
it
was agreed that Celia, his new
wife, would join the Party, but he would remain outside, becoming the most famous of the
English fellow-travellers. He admirably
fits
David Cante’s definition that they were men who
wanted Communism in some other country. He certainly did not give all his money
to
the poor
(party); he gave, practically and sensibly, some. Yet while one would never for a moment
suggest that he was either un-patriotic
or
even trustworthy enough to be
a
Russian under-cover
agent, he was something more than the ordinary intellectual fellow-traveller
:
whatever the
*
John
Strachey.
By Hugh Thomas (Eyre Methuen, London 1973, pp. vii+316.
fA.50).
Political
Studies.
Vol.
XXTI,
No.
1
(94-973
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