The Ugly Leah

THE GOD THAT FAILED (273 pp.)--Edited by Richard Grossman -- Harper ($3.50).

Once during the '20s an English Communist went to Moscow to ask advice on what seemed to him a difficult tactical matter. Upon being advised to say one thing in public but do another in private, he blurted: "But that would be a lie." The assembled comrades guffawed. Somebody got on the phone and told Stalin, who roared with the rest; in no time at all the laugh was all over Moscow.

Yet somehow the joke was not quite so funny west of the Russian border. While Western comrades laughed at the scrupulous Briton and his decent human impulse, some of them also felt a little like crying. Many of them had joined the party in the '20s and '30s with the notion that they were making a better, more decent world only to find that the party was committed to indecent, inhuman calculation.

At that point, the more courageous broke with the party. In The God that Failed, six of them tell the stories of their Communist pilgrimage, and the return trip. It is as goodly a company of such pilgrims as has yet been collected in one volume: there are Novelists Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, Richard Wright, Andre Gide, Journalist Louis Fischer, Poet Stephen Spender, and there is an introduction by British Laborite M.P. Richard Grossman, who thinks that but for his own "nonconformist cussedness" he might have been tempted by Communism himself. The stories the six contributors tell may be read as strange and dreadful Canterbury Tales of the 20th Century.

The pieces by Spender (who was a member for only a few weeks) and Fischer (who never actually joined at all) are clear, but like their authors' experience of the party, not deep; Wright's is appealing for its passionate declaration of one Negro's reasons for trying Communism, though a little boyish; Gide's is a paraphrase of his Return from the U.S.S.R. (1936) and Retouchings of My Return from the U.S.S.R. (1937), perhaps the most famous anti-Communist accounts ever written and among the best, but chiefly of biographical interest now. It is Koestler and Silone, who went deepest into the vortex of revolutionary activity, who emerge with the profoundest insights.

The Honor of Revolt. Koestler joined the party in 1931, while he was a science and foreign editor for the publishing house of Ullstein in Berlin. It was the era when "wheat was burned, fruit artificially spoiled and pigs . . . drowned ... to keep prices up and enable fat capitalists to chant to the sound of harps, while Europe trembled under the torn boots of hunger-marchers . . ." Just like all the other authors of this volume, Koestler decided "that in the face of revolting injustice the only honorable attitude is to revolt, and to leave introspection for better times ... I was one of those half-virgins of the Revolution who could be had . . . body and soul, for the asking." For seven years he did party duty in Germany, France, Spain and England. At first he bowed down before the party slogans: "The front-line is no place for discussions." "Wherever a Communist happens to be ... is ... the front-line."

After a trip through Russia, he began to. dream of the day when "the leaders would be called to account for ... the avoidable defeats, the wanton sacrifices, the mud-stream of slander and denunciation, in which the pick of our comrades had perished. Until that day you had to play the game--confirm and deny, denounce and recant, eat your words and lick your vomit . . ."

At last, after spending four months in Franco's jails, Koestler began to get a few "perennial commonplaces" clear in his mind: "That man is a reality, mankind an abstraction; that men cannot be treated as units in operations of political arithmetic because they behave like the symbols for zero and the infinite, which dislocate all mathematical operations . . . that . . . charity [is] not a petty-bourgeois sentiment but the gravitational force which keeps civilization in its orbit."

In 1938 he left the party, but it had left its mark on him. "I served the Communist Party for seven years," he concludes ironically, "the same length of time as Jacob tended Laban's sheep to win Rachel, his daughter. When the time was up, the bride was led into his dark tent; only the next morning did he discover that his ardors had been spent not on the lovely Rachel but on the ugly Leah. I wonder whether he ever recovered from the shock of having slept with an illusion."

The Road of Disquiet. Silone helped found the Italian C.P. in 1921, when he was 21, He tells of his experiences less brilliantly, though in a larger and more moving spirit than Koestler. He speaks at length of his childhood in the Abruzzi Apennines, in central Italy; and in a passage of kindly humor describes a local "revolution" he pulled off while in his teens.

Through the '20s Silone moved and observed in the highest party circles.

"What struck me most about the Russian Communists, even in such really exceptional personalities as Lenin and Trotsky, was their utter incapacity to be fair in discussing opinions that conflicted with their own . . . An adversary in good faith is inconceivable to the Russian Communists ... To find a comparable infatuation one has to go back to the Inquisition."

It was at an executive meeting of the Comintern, as he watched Stalin personally cracking the whip trying to get a unanimous condemnation of Trotsky (for a Trotsky article the non-Russian members were not allowed to read), that Silone saw the light at the end of the tunnel. But the last steps were hard. "I felt at that time like someone who has had a tremendous blow on the head and keeps on his feet, walking, talking and gesticulating, but without fully realizing what has happened."

After the Moscow incident, Silone's health broke and he went into a Swiss sanatorium to recuperate. In 1930 he formally broke with the party and brought out his first novel, Fontamara. He became a Christian again, bringing out of the depths of his experience "an intuition of man's dignity and a feeling of reverence for that which in man is always trying to outdistance itself, and lies at the root of his eternal disquiet."

If history has left any doubt that such documents are required reading for democrats, Editor Grossman skewers the doubt with a pointed message: "No one who has not wrestled with Communism as a philosophy, and Communists as political opponents, can really understand the values of Western democracy. The Devil once lived in Heaven, and those who have not met him are unlikely to recognize an angel when they see one."

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