Richard Crossman - The God That Failed

Richard Crossman, M.P.

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE: Richard Crossman was born on December 15,1907. The son of a barrister, later Mr. Justice Crossman, he was educated at Winchester College and New College, Oxford, where he took first-class honors in classics and philosophy. He remained at Oxford as a Fellow of New College for eight years, teaching Plato and political theory, and simultaneously began his political career as a Socialist on the Oxford City Council.

In 1937 he became the Labour candidate for Coventry, which he won in the 1945 election.

In 1938 he became Assistant Editor of the New Statesman and Nation, a position he still holds.

During the war he served first in the Foreign Office and then on General Eisenhowers Staff, as an expert on Germany in charge of enemy propaganda.

In 1946 he served on the Anglo-American Commission on Palestine, and as a result became the leading English opponent of Mr. Bevins Palestine policy. He was a member of the Malta Roundtable Conference in 1955 and since 1952 has been a member of the Labour Party Executive.

Bibliography: Plato Today, Government and the Governed, Palestine Mission, The Charm of Politics, Nation Reborn.

T his book was conceived in the heat of argument. I was staying with Arthur Koestler in North Wales, and one evening we had reached an unusually barren deadlock in the political discussion of which our friendship seems to consist. Either you can't or you won't understand, said Koestler. It's the same with all you comfortable, insular, Anglo-Saxon anti-Communists. You hate our Cassandra cries and resent us as alliesbut, when all is said, we ex-Communists are the only people on your side who know what it's all about. And with that the talk veered to why so-and-so had ever become a Communist, and why he had or had not left the Party. When the argument began to boil up again, I said, Wait. Tell me exactly what happened when you joined the Partynot what you feel about it now, but what you felt then. So Koestler began the strange story of his meeting with Herr Schneller in the Schneidemhl paper-mill; and suddenly I interrupted, This should be a book, and we began to discuss names of ex-Communists capable of telling the truth about themselves.

At first our choice ranged far and wide, but before the night was out we decided to limit the list to half a dozen writers and journalists. We were not in the least interested either in swelling the flood of anti-Communist propaganda or in providing an opportunity for personal apologetics. Our concern was to study the state of mind of the Communist convert, and the atmosphere of the periodfrom 1917 to 1939when conversion was so common. For this purpose it was essential that each contributor should be able not to relive the pastthat is impossiblebut, by an act of imaginative self-analysis, to recreate it, despite the foreknowledge of the present. As I well know, autobiography of this sort is almost impossible for the practical politician: his self-respect distorts the past in terms of the present. So-called scientific analysis is equally misleading; dissecting the personality into a set of psychological and sociological causes, it explains away the emotions, which we wanted described. The objectivity we sought was the power to recollectif not in tranquillity, at least in "dispassion and this power is rarely granted except to the imaginative writer.

It so happens that, in the years between the October Revolution and the Stalin-Hitler Pact, numberless men of letters, both in Europe and America, were attracted to Communism. They were not "typical" converts. Indeed, being people of quite unusual sensitivity, they made most abnormal Communists, just as the literary Catholic is a most abnormal Catholic. They had a heightened perception of the spirit of the age, and felt more acutely than others both its frustrations and its hopes. Their conversion therefore expressed, in an acute and sometimes in a hysterical form, feelings which were dimly shared by the inarticulate millions who felt that Russia was on the side of the workers. The intellectual in politics is always unbalanced, in the estimation of his colleagues. He peers round the next comer while they keep their eyes on the road, and he risks his faith on unrealized ideas, instead of confining it prudently to humdrum loyalties. He is in advance, and, in this sense, an extremist. If history justifies his premonitions, well and good. But if, on the contrary, history takes the other turning, he must either march forward into the dead end, or ignominiously tum back, repudiating ideas which have become part of his personality.