Michelle, (& Melinda )
One last view on Kazan, from England. Thank you for keeping an open mind .
A choice of two evils
London Times
William Rees-Mogg
Early in 1956, Tennessee Williams wrote a letter to the young Ken Tynan, who was already a leading international theatre critic. He commented on the work of Elia Kazan, who had produced most of his plays on Broadway. "We just don't have another director over here with his way of bringing a script to violent, brilliant life."
Ken himself had been a great admirer of Kazan: in 1950 he thought that his production of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman was "the best he had seen since the War", but he later came to feel, as is quoted in Kathleen Tynan's Life, that Kazan had "come to worship energy for its own sake".
We cannot recapture Elia Kazan's work as a stage director, but he also made important films, including East of Eden and A Streetcar Named Desire. He was given an honorary lifetime Oscar last night - subject to any protests that may have been made after this article went to press. One of his films is among the greatest ever made, up there with Citizen Kane. That is On the Waterfront and in it Kazan directed the best performance Marlon Brando ever gave.
On the Waterfront was made in 1954; it is a tough, social-realistic film about life on the docks. Kazan has been a lifelong liberal; he is a man of the Left. The film is also a moral polemic. The argument is that there is a duty to oppose evil, in this case gangsters with union links, even if it means betraying friends, relations or personal obligations.
The date of the film is significant. In 1952 Elia Kazan appeared before the House of Representatives Committee on Un-American Activities. There he not only stated that he had once been a member of the American Communist Party but also named eight other people who to his knowledge had also been members. That damaged and may have ruined their careers. On the Waterfront is Elia Kazan's answer to E.M. Forster's observation that, if faced with the choice between betraying his friend and betraying his country, he hoped he would have the courage to betray his country.
I went to the United States on several visits in the 1950s. I even corresponded with Senator Joe McCarthy's office, though for the innocent journalistic purpose of obtaining copies of his speeches. He was, in my view, a cheap demagogue and, in some of his dealings with the US Government, a blackmailer. The leading figures in the Un-American Activities Committee were also demagogues, though less formidable. Richard Nixon, who focused on the Hiss case, was a more serious figure. Every liberal in the United States maintained that Alger Hiss was innocent. We now know beyond doubt what the evidence showed then, that Hiss was a Soviet agent from the 1930s, comparable to Kim Philby.
In the early 1950s the Cold War had reached an early but critical stage, the communists had taken over China, Berlin had been blockaded, the atom spies had been arrested, the Korean War was being fought. The Cold War seemed quite likely to lead to a Third World War, in which nuclear weapons would be used. No one in 1950 could be sure that the Soviet Union would be contained, that communist power would not gradually erode the free world.
Not surprisingly, American opinion was extremely anxious. One of the achievements of the Eisenhower presidency was that the line against Soviet expansion was held, and American opinion was stabilised. The situation in 1961, when Eisenhower left office, was in every way better than in 1952, when he was elected.
The Kazan dilemma was complicated by this contrast between the reality of the Soviet threat and the hysteria it had produced. If Kazan is to be criticised, it is not for rejecting communism, nor even for fighting communism by naming its supporters, but for naming them to a headline-seeking committee. Did not his evidence add to the hysteria?
I think that argument against Kazan is too delicate. It supposes that the battle for minds was one between gentle-minded left-wing scriptwriters and sinister demagogues who were misleading the American people. That was not the case. A few of the Hollywood victims of McCarthyism may have been wholly innocent; more were recklessly gullible; at least a few were fully aware of their Soviet commitment and its implications. The real battle of the 1950s was between American democracy and Soviet communism. The American Communist Party was on the Soviet side.
Infantile leftism is the best excuse one can make for American communists of the 1930s and 1940s and their contemporary and later sympathisers. One should not suppose that these fellow-travelling Hollywood scriptwriters knowingly sympathised with the KGB, Beria, the starvation of the Ukraine, the purges, the Nazi-Soviet pact, the Katyn massacre, the gulags, the anti-Semitism, the cult of personality, the corruption of culture and art, or the other horrors and crimes of Stalin's genocidal regime. Yet they were objectively furthering all these causes. Perhaps they did so with their eyes shut, though I can remember Oxford leftists at that time who would glibly talk of the need to break eggs if one was to make omelettes. By breaking eggs, they meant killing people, or putting them in camps.
The German sociologist Max Weber in The Sociology of Religion offers an explanation of this betrayal of human values by relatively large numbers of people in the intellectual professions; it occurred both in America and in Europe. "The intellectual seeks in various ways . . . to endow his life with a pervasive meaning, and thus to find unity with himself, with his fellow men, and with the cosmos . . . as a consequence, there is a growing demand that the world and the total pattern of life be subject to an order that is significant and meaningful." Whatever else may be said against Stalin, no one could deny that he provided an order that was significant and meaningful. So, for that matter, did Hitler.
To Kazan, one may assume, the evil of Stalinism completely outweighed the evil of McCarthyism. He made his choice a few years after the war, but it is a characteristic wartime choice of preferring the lesser to the greater evil. In war, victory can be achieved only by attacking the enemy wherever he can be found.
The members of the American Communist Party, whether gullible, mere "useful idiots" in Lenin's phrase, or aware of what they were doing, were objectively on the side of Stalin. If Kazan saw them as a legitimate target of disclosure, was he wrong? An American constitutional writer, Walter Berns, commented on a Supreme Court judgment: "Free speech turns out to mean that it is worse to suppress the advocacy of Stalinism or Hitlerism than to be ruled by Stalin or Hitler."
In continental Europe there are still some people on the Right who do not wish to speak ill of Nazism or Hitler. They have considerable political weight in Austria and some in East Germany and France. Such people scarcely exist in the democratic life of Britain or the United States, though there was that half-cracked candidate for Governor of Louisiana who used to give a party on Hitler's birthday.
Far larger numbers on the Left, in all these countries, do not like to speak ill of Soviet communism. They will not accept the comparison between Hitler and Stalin; they think one can distinguish between good genocide and bad genocide. Among the parties of the Left, far too few have ever apologised for their traditional sympathy for the Soviet Union, which was extended to Stalin himself. In 1945 even the British Labour Party campaigned under the slogan: "Left can speak to Left."
I feel uneasy about the people who wanted to remain as closet communists. Surely, by 1952, they should have realised what an evil regime they had supported, or still did support. I feel even more uneasy about people of the modern Hollywood Left, who still think it was wrong for Kazan to name names. They would not feel the same about former Nazis. Elia Kazan named people who were the American foot-soldiers of Stalinism. For him it was a moral issue; it still is
|
