Books: Circles of Perdition

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THE MEANING OF TREASON (307 pp.)—Rebecca West—Viking ($3.50).

When, in 1936, General Emilio Mola announced that he would capture Madrid because he had four columns outside the city and a fifth column of sympathizers within, the world pounced on the phrase with the eagerness of a man who has been groping for an important word. The world might better have been stunned as by a tocsin of calamity. For what Mola had done was to indicate the dimension of treason in our time.

Other ages have had their individual traitors—men who from faintheartedness or hope of gain sold out their causes. But in the 20th Century, for the first time, men banded together by millions, in movements like fascism and communism, dedicated to the purpose of betraying the institutions they lived under. In the 20th Century, treason became a vocation whose modern form was specifically the treason of ideas.

Modern man was challenged to choose between the traditions of a 2,000-year-old Christian civilization and the new totalitarian systems which, in the name of social progress, contended for the allegiance of man’s secular mind. The promise of the new ideas was as old as that serpentine whisper heard in the dawn of the Creation: “You shall become as gods”—for the first traitor was the first man.

And yet, though the new ideas had been violently avowed, and the hallmark of their advocates was a fanaticism unknown since the first flush of Islam, wherever the fanatics were brought to trial, almost without exception they failed to defend their beliefs. Why?

A book published in the U.S. this week, The Meaning of Treason, is a clue to this clouded question.

The Book. The Meaning of Treason is a collection of Rebecca West’s reports of the trials of a number of British World War II traitors. She covered the trials on assignment for the New Yorker, where her articles (now expanded and revised) were first published. But the idea was her own, and she could scarcely have chosen a better person for the job.

Rebecca West is a novelist of note ( The Thinking Reed), a distinguished literary critic (The Strange Necessity). But, above all, as she proved in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (TIME, Nov. 17, 1941), she is one of the greatest of living journalists.

Most reporters report in one dimension, achieving at best the dramatic surface of a mural or a movie. Rebecca West reports in depth—a depth whose winding recesses of character, situation and context she divines by the play of unusually acute instincts and intuitions guided by an eye for significant detail. And she floods the planes of her perception with the generous human warmth of a womanly nature and a culture-crowded brain that gives to the meanest fact a new perspective.

The treason trials, as she records them, were not just the raw pulp of daily news, tatters of irrelevant wretchedness or cold inquests of justice upon a succession of dingy destinies. They become three-dimensional—as events in a process of history, which Miss West views as organic and continuously alive; as ordeals of a common humanity, which the men on trial shared with the men who tried them; as glimpses of a common hell, which all men know (since all men betray themselves continually), but know less terribly than those traitors who in addition had betrayed their fellows.

Dark Descent. Miss West’s book is a descent into the circles of a drab inferno. It was reached through several pit heads—the bomb-battered building of London’s Central Criminal Court, the House of Lords, a court martial near the blitzed waterfront at Portsmouth. Above all, it was reached through the collapsing corridors of many ruined minds.

There were about 20 traitors. In the first circle were those whom Miss West calls the children of treason—”The ones who thought like children, and felt like children, and were treacherous as children are, without malice, only because someone was giving away sweetmeats or because the whole gang was chasing the dog.”

There was Kenneth Edward. When World War II began, Kenneth Edward was 13. In 1940 he went to sea in an ammunition ship. At 15, he transferred to the Cymbeline, which was sunk by a German raider. The raider landed him in France and he was sent to an internment camp, then to another and another and another. He did not know where these camps were or how long he stayed in them. At last Kenneth came to the attention of John Amery, another British traitor, who was organizing a British Free Corps to fight the Russians. In time the boy enjoyed the distinction of being the only private in the British Free Corps (all the others were officers). Then he was forgotten.

He spoke little German and so was often arrested—perhaps 23 times. The collapse of Germany came. Kenneth surrendered to the Russians, who turned him over to the Americans, who turned him over to the British. He was almost 18, and a traitor.

The Repentant. There were other children of treason. Says Author West: “The children “who go from their homes with strangers because they have been given cakes and sweets are unsustained by pride when the unkindness falls on them. They know well that they have done wrong. A person should be loyal to his father and mother, to his brothers and sisters, to his friends, to his town or village, to his province, to his country; and a person should do nothing for a bribe, even if it takes the form of a promise that he should live instead of die.”

All the children repented: “This attitude was clearly distinguishable from regret at having been on the losing side, and it was not feigned; the rush of blood from the cheek after the shameful admission, the greenish swaying sickness of repentance are inimitable. It is not an attitude which has been taught them by an exploiting class. They were born into a tongue-tied age, and neither their school teachers or the culture within their reach had given them such positive instruction. The judgment they passed on their own disloyalty and the loyalty of others was a spontaneous reaction to experience.”

Circle No. 2. The second circle of Miss West’s inferno is that of the grotesques—those who were more developed but scarcely older than the children. Some were, like Kenneth Edward, merchant seamen. Some were British prisoners of war who went over to the Germans. Some had been members of Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. Almost all became members of the British Free Corps.

“There was poor Herbert George, who, though of medium height, had the look of a Disney dwarf. His deeply lined skin was puckered into thin folds in the apprehensive expression of a chimpanzee, and his features so far departed from the normal that those who met him found themselves looking back again and again to see if they could be as they were remembered, though the total impression was by no means monstrous, merely animal and odd.”

During the Spanish Civil War Herbert George had joined the International Brigade. Later he deserted. During World War II his ship was torpedoed off Narvik, and he went from one German camp to another. Then he got a letter saying that his wife in England had a baby. He thought it over for a long time and decided the baby could not be his. So one day when recruiters for the British Free Corps came around, he joined up, “just as a sad little dog, finding himself far from home in streets where they throw things, with rain falling and the dusk thickening, will follow any passerby.”

Thomas Haller Cooper was a different kind of grotesque. His father was an English photographer; his mother was German. Somehow his mother had instilled in him a love for Germany. “It cannot be put down in black and white how she wove the spell about him. . . . The secret does not lie in the promise of conquest. That secret is a lyricism that extends the kingdom of the nightingale, diffuses everywhere the secret perfume of the rose. The home where this man’s mother lived was distinguished from all the other red-brick and stucco houses in a shabby suburban street by the wealth of flowering bulbs, jonquil packed beside narcissus, crocus beside grape hyacinth, which crammed the bow-windows of the ground floor flat. . . . When the spring came, they made a truly German window. Loving this lovely Germany, her son joined the SS, which bled and died that there should be camps where starved prisoners fell on the bodies of their dead comrades and, if not too disgusted by the lice, ate their kidneys and livers and the soft parts of their thighs.”

These traitors and their mates were sent to jail for varying terms. They will come out, says Author West, as they went in: “Unchanged in their essential and dangerous quality. . . . They will be timber for the next international revolutionary movement.”

Circle No. 3. John Amery deserved a circle of perdition to himself. He was the worthless son of a distinguished father, Leopold Amery, Secretary of State for India in the Churchill government. He had been convicted 74 times on traffic charges. He had caused a scandal by falling in love with the prostitute who nightly occupied the most conspicuous spot in Piccadilly. He was a bankrupt. He had been an aide to Francisco Franco. During the war he joined the Germans and organized the British Free Corps.

His trial lasted eight minutes, for he said, in answer to the court’s question: “I plead guilty to all counts.”

“A murmur ran through the court which was horrified. … In effect, the young man was saying, ‘I insist on being hanged by the neck in three weeks’ time,’ and the strength of his desire to die was forcing his weak voice through his shuddering lips and ignoring his pain, which was great, for he was blasted by what he did. He was like an insect that falls on a hot stove and is withered, and what he did felt like an act of cruelty to the whole court. It rejected the life that was in all of us.”

The Pit. Circle No. 4 is the pit. Here, in that ambiguous clarity which Milton called “no light but rather darkness visible,” are two architects of betrayal. These men committed not the treason of the unlighted mind, like Kenneth Edward or Herbert George, nor the treason of depravity like John Amery, but the fully conscious treason of ideas. One was a Communist. One was a Fascist.

“Not guilty,” pled Dr. Alan Nunn May.

He could scarcely force the plea between his chattering teeth. He was glazed with sweat. “. . . His body assumed without shame the very shape of fear. In his cringing motions, however, there were indications of an extreme fineness of intellect, unfoldings of a lacework of perceptions, of associations, of interpretations, which made the Nazi-Fascists seem like hogs rooting among the simple unimproved beech-mast of the world. No matter how he stooped and wavered, out of his head proceeded mental patterns intricate and brilliant as the etchings of frost on a winter pane. Surely the others, the Nazi-Fascists, were not fully human. But neither was he.”

For Dr. Alan Nunn May had been for years a member of the Communist Party. He had been a lecturer on physics at the University of London. During World War II, he volunteered for service as the senior member of the nuclear physics division of the atomic bomb project. Then he had turned over to Russia samples of uranium 235 enriched and uranium 233. Says Miss West: “If Russia ever drops an atomic bomb on Great Britain or America, the blame for the death and the blindness and .the sores it scatters will rest largely on this fatuous and gifted man.”

And yet: “The spectators were plainly appalled when the judge passed sentence [ten years’ penal servitude] on Dr. Alan Nunn May, though none of them was his follower. … It was the light about the man’s head which made the thought of his imprisonment intolerable: the changing and complicated intellectual patterns proceeding from his brow and spelling out a meaning which men required.”

The Voice. There was no such light about the head of Dr. May’s pit-mate. “Not guilty,” pled the scar-faced prisoner on trial for his life in London’s Central Criminal Court. The little man who, in his self-conscious spruceness looked like a somewhat comic gangster, was Lord Haw Haw — William Joyce — the British Fascist who, during World War II, had nightly tried to sap his countrymen’s will to survive by broadcasting defeatist propaganda from Germany.

At those two words, “not guilty” — the first words he had spoken — the spectators in the courtroom started. Few of them had ever seen the man before, but in all of them the sound of his voice touched a nerve of terrible memory.

“Never before,” wrote Author West, “have people known the voice of one they have never seen as well as if he had been a husband or a brother or a close friend; and if they had foreseen such a miracle, they would not have imagined the familiar unknown would speak to them only to prophesy their death and ruin. All of us in

England had experienced that hideous novelty. It was difficult not to chance on Joyce’s wavelength when one was tuning in to the English stations, and there was an arresting quality about his voice which made it a sacrifice not to go on listening. … It seemed as if one had better hearken and take warning, when he suggested that the destiny of the people he had left in England was death, and the destiny of his new masters in Germany life and conquest, and that, therefore, his listeners had better change sides and submit. This was often terrible to hear, for the news in the papers confirmed it. He was not only alarming, he was ugly; he opened a vista into a mean life. . . . He went further than that smug mockery of our plight. He sinned that sin which is the dark travesty of legitimate hatred . . . just as incest is the dark travesty of legitimate love.”

Biography of Betrayal. The facts in the life of William Joyce were neither clear nor simple, but their meaning was. He had been born in Brooklyn, N.Y. (an important part of his defense was that he was not a British subject). His parents were Irish. They were loyal to England. When Ireland became Eire, they were forced to emigrate to Britain. Joyce’s father was suspected of being a British informer. William Joyce claimed that he had done intelligence work for the Black & Tans.

The Joyces did not prosper in the land to which they had remained loyal and which did not reward their loyalty. But young Joyce graduated from the University of London, where he was an excellent student. He became a highly successful tutor. His love for England was intense—”such a love as led him in afterlife habitually to make a demand—which struck many of his English acquaintances as a sign of insanity—that any quiet social evening he spent with his friends should end with the singing of the national anthem.”

“It was this love,” says Miss West, “slanting across time, which made him a Fascist. He had been brought up to believe in an England who held Ireland by force, and felt betrayed when Home Rule was given.”

So Joyce joined Sir Oswald Mosley, the founder of the British Union of Fascists. (In time he broke away to form his own British National Socialist League.) And so just before the war he fled to Germany, to lend to the treason of ideas his vibrant voice. For this he was hanged.

Miss West lights up the darkness of this trial with fierce flashes of observation. But none is so shocking as the reaction of Joyce when he heard the word “hanging” casually mentioned in court. By an unconscious reflex, he raised his hand and with his finger touched his throat.

The Vacuum. Why did the traitors commit double treason by failing to defend the beliefs in whose name they had committed treason first? One of the most intelligent of totalitarians has tried to give the answer in a cry from the brink of the grave. In March 1938 Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin, once one of the most powerful figures in Russia, made his last plea to the Soviet Supreme Court. He admitted that he was a traitor, and explained why he had confessed.

He said: “For three months I refused to say anything. Then I began to testify. Why? Because while in prison I made a revaluation of my entire past. For when you ask yourself: ‘If you must die, what are you dying for?’—an absolutely black vacuity suddenly rises before you. . . . There was nothing to die for, if one wanted to die unrepentant. . . . And when you ask yourself: ‘Very well, suppose you do not die; suppose by some miracle you remain alive, again for what? . . .’ And at once the same reply arises. And at such moments, Citizen Judges, everything personal, all the personal incrustation, all rancor, pride and a number of other things, fall away, disappear. … I am about to finish. I am perhaps speaking for the last time in my life. I am explaining how I came to realize the necessity of capitulating to the investigating authorities and to you, Citizen Judges.”

In her own way, Miss West is saying the same thing when she writes of Dr. May: “A man with so dynamic a mind will be specially conscious of the vacuum left by the disappearance of God.” For the horror of treason is its sin against the spirit. And for him who violates this truth there rises inevitably Bukharin’s “absolutely black vacuity,” which is in reality a circle of absolute loneliness into which neither father, wife, child nor friend, however compassionate, can bring the grace of absolution. For this loneliness is a penalty inflicted by a justice that transcends the merely summary justice of men. It is the retributive meaning of treason because it is also one of the meanings of hell.

The Ibsen Girl. Rebecca West is a Socialist by habit of mind, and a conservative by cell structure. She has the true genealogical instinct. “I am descended,” she has written, “from one of the first governors of Madras. . . . One of my close relatives is counted as a maker of British Africa, and … the more I live in intellectual circles the less does this heredity displease me.”

She was born Cicily Fairfield, in London, in 1892. Her father had been a Confederate stretcher-bearer at the siege of Richmond in the U.S. Civil War. After returning to England he became a newspaperman. Cicily took the pen name, Rebecca West, in her teens, when concealment became necessary after she sold her first article to the Freewoman, a feminist magazine which her mother had forbidden her to read. Rebecca West is the name of a character in Ibsen’s play, Rosmersholm.

Brushing Off the Webbs. In less time than it takes to say Emmeline Pankhurst, Rebecca West was in London writing literary criticism on the Freewoman’s staff. A year later she was a full-fledged political writer on the old Socialist Clarion, and a member of that Socialist intellectual advance guard, the Fabian Society. Its pundits, Sidney & Beatrice Webb, had her in for dinner, but “I argued with the Webbs, so I was never invited back.”

Plenty of other doors flew open. Rebecca, despite a somewhat unconstructed chin, had a beauty of face which was heightened by a beauty of the mind when her dark brown eyes grew intense with the animation of ideas. Talk poured from her in a brilliant jet, and had upon her listeners the effect of an electric impulse. She has been talking ever since, for her writing is, in fact, a burst of brilliant conversation.

Rebecca also possessed two other provocative talents—an ability to put her mental finger on the key detail of a complicated situation or character, and a sharp tongue. She is still in brisk command of both assets. In Manhattan last summer, she was introduced to arch John Erskine, author of The Private Life of Helen of Troy, The Human Life of Jesus and some 40 other books. Said Erskine: “I’ve been reading your clever articles and I wonder if they’re sincere.” Snapped Miss West: “I’ve been reading yours, and I never wonder about either of those things.”

Feet First. Rebecca had not been in London long before she sat at the feet (a vantage point of signal value) of practically everybody worth observing. Her great friend, Novelist G. B. Stern, with whom Rebecca shared meager quarters in those pioneer days, would be struck speechless by the arrival of successive literary lions with whom Miss West would chat, easily and informally, about the private lives and feuds of the legendary characters then dominating the British literary scene.

On high reigned the Big Four—”The Uncles,” Miss West called them in The Strange Necessity. There was Uncle John Galsworthy, Uncle H. G. Wells, Uncle Arnold Bennett and Uncle Bernard Shaw, of whom she now observes: “The trouble with Shaw is that he was a wonderful writer with nothing important to say. It’s too bad he couldn’t have been a Christian.”

“Uncle Wells arrived always a little out of breath, with his arms full of parcels, sometimes rather carelessly tied, but always bursting with all manner of attractive gifts that ranged from the little pot of sweet jelly that is Mr. Polly to the complete Meccano set for the mind that is in The First Men on the Moon. . . . One had, in actual fact, the luck to be young just as the most bubbling creative mind . . . since the days of Leonardo da Vinci was showing its form.”

No. 1 Woman Writer. When, at the end of World War I, Rebecca West became the book critic of the New Statesman and Nation, she was already a minor celebrity. She wrote with an authority beyond her years or experience in a prose in which, at its best, a logic of music was magnificently mated to a logic of ideas. At its worst, it was excessive and overblown. Sometimes she took time out from her breadwinning chores to write a novel (Harriet Hume). Sometimes she collaborated on satirical sketches (Lions and Lambs, The Rake’s Progress) with Cartoonist David Low. She managed to get abroad a good deal, and a shimmering list of continental hosts and hostesses were always eager to entertain her. The posh social life of Paris, the spas and resorts, which Miss West described in loving detail in The Thinking Reed, was first-hand reporting. When in 1937 the British Council sent Miss West to Yugoslavia and she recorded her experience in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, she became indisputably the world’s No. 1 woman writer.

Flowers & Cows. At 55, Rebecca West is greying and has put on weight which makes her look stocky rather than stout. Vestiges of her girlhood beauty now light a face that is impressive with mature intelligence. But, since she has little interest in dress, she often looks as if somebody had thrown her clothes on her as she rushed for the train.

With her devoted husband, Henry Maxwell Andrews, an investment banker with a cool, scholarly, finely whetted mind, she lives at Ibstone House, in the county of Buckinghamshire, 36 miles from London. There she prefers to be known as Mrs. Andrews. Ibstone is an 18th Century manor house whose back windows command one of the noblest vistas in southern England—broad fields falling away to a deep valley in the Chiltern Hills. Around the house lies the 85-acre farm, where the Andrewses raise fruit, vegetables, flowers, hogs, and pasture their purebred Jersey herd. Near the house is an immaculate modern dairy equipped with electric milkers. Miss West has been known to take visitors to the dairy and, in one of those transports common to cattle lovers, throw her arms around a cow’s neck and murmur: “You beautiful, beautiful creature!”

Unlike most writers’ farms, the Andrews project makes a profit. But not enough to support Ibstone House. Since her husband has lost most of his fortune, Rebecca West must still write for a living. The U.S. market pays her top rates for practically anything she cares to write, and she writes at top speed. Her report on Lord Haw Haw’s trial, some 6,500 words, was in the New Yorker’s office 24 hours after the trial ended, and almost no editing had to be done on it. Says grateful New Yorker Editor Harold Ross: “It was the quickest piece of journalism I’ve seen.” Says grateful Miss West of Ross: “The best editor I’ve ever known.”

Last fortnight, her 2,500-word report on the Princess Elizabeth wedding was dashed off in time to make the London Evening Standard’s early afternoon edition and the New York Herald Tribune’s morning edition (TIME, Dec. 1). It was a mood piece with one notable dig at the Labor government. Her jab was about a huge national savings advertisement sign opposite Westminster Abbey: “An imaginative administration would surely have blanketed it for this one day.”

Twipe, Twipe, Twipe. Miss West’s present political temper worries her Laborite friends. “The individualist,” she wrote recently, “is being looted by his own country as if it were an enemy.” She has lately been raising the dust with her articles (in the Evening Standard) on the Fascist open-air meetings in London and the political use that the Communists are making out of them. She heard herself denounced by one little soapboxer who, unfortunately, could not pronounce the letter R. He rose to a climax with the cry: “I want to say that Miss Webecca West’s articles are twipe, twipe, twipe from the gweatest twipe shop in the universe, Fleet Stweet.”

Rebecca West rather enjoys it. For with all her warmth of heart and incandescence of mind, she is seldom averse to a good brawl. She listens, calmly poised for pouncing, when she is called a Fascist, a Communist, an anti-Semite, though she is none of those things. The root of the misunderstanding is that in a world racked by partisan passion, which more & more insists on viewing men in black & white, as caricatures of good or evil, she finds them blends of both. Her view asserts the faith that what distinguishes men, not so much from the brutes as from their more habitual selves, is the fact that however tirelessly they pursue evil, their inveterate aspiration, invariable even in depravity, is never for anything else but for the good.

This faith Rebecca West tries to express with a tonality equal to its meaning. Thus, in a prosy age, her style strives continually toward a condition of poetry, and comes to rest in a rhetoric that, at its best, is one of the most personal and eloquent idioms of our time.