SIR.—While Mr. Anthony Hartley analyses the Plight of English 'Intellectuals'
(the Marxist cant word has, one takes it, come to stay) with striking Perception one may perhaps question his general fairness and his final- conclusion. If we are slow to realise we arc no longer a great Empire (no more is anybody else) it can hardly be for want of being told so. If we have had our Suez so too has France. America has had (in every sense) her Cuba and. Russia has her Poinan and her purges. I would suggest the English intellectual has been unhappily placed in lacking a cause worth writing for and any chance to play the Andre Malraux or the Garcia Lorca.
Like everybody else we went through our trahison des clercs which at our finest hour sent sundry English intellectuals West. But there was neither a Resistance nor an anti-colonialist revolution, not even a McCarthy purge where others of the class could find fulfilment. That there were English in- tellectuals—one thinks of Richard Hillary and Rex Whistler, but there were others—who performed their part is obvious. But in the,. circumstances this
was not and it could not be a distinctive part. For this reason the English intellectuals as a group have become divorced from the general current of popular feeling and English social history. So it is hardly surprising if none can live by writing books. the English intellectual feeling himself cheated has really quite a lot to get angry about and vents his spleen by looking back (not forward) in the mood and playing his part in the annual Aldermaston charade where the finer aspects are vitiated by streaks of Red infiltration and blue funk.
There is however a healthy feeling abroad against both the bloodymindedness of the Left and the smug 'Never had it so good' of the Right (quite a lot of it dwells in Orpington). Nor, oddly, is this conviction of England's finished role perceptible in any continental, African or Asian country. It was Britain, after all, that invented not only penicillin and the Comet but also the Peace Corps, the ultimate answer to the whole question of race relationships in the post-imperial world, and when our intellectuals discover the extent of the respect and liking for individual British in the uncommitted world I dare to suggest that there will be a more profitable field open to them than any Spanish Civil War, along with the chance to redeem themselves as a group and a theme for their creative and imaginative endeavour.
14 Great Ormond Street, WC1
GEORGE EDINGER
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