The voices of the victims
Francis King
AN EMBARRASSMENT OF TYRANNIES edited by W.L. Webb and Rose Bell Gollancz, £20, pp. 347 One of the many distinguished contrib- utors, John Mortimer, to this anthology in celebration of 25 years of Index on Censor- ship, once remarked, 'The price of freedom is perpetual fussing.' By perpetually fussing over breaches of freedom, whether as monstrous as those in the former Soviet Union, China and many countries of Latin America and Africa, or as comparatively trivial as those in the near-approximations to democracies in which a privileged minority of us live, Index has amply justi- fied both its founding, at the instigation of Stephen Spender in 1972, and its often financially precarious survival.
Spender — one of those admirable peo- ple for whom 'the miseries of the world are misery and will not let them rest' — was prompted to his initiative by an extraordi- narily courageous letter which Pavel Litvinov wrote to the Times in protest against the show trials then being held in the Soviet Union. Spender at once recog- nised that the vital thing for an imprisoned writer was the assurance from the outside world that he and, no less importantly, his creations had not been engulfed by the night.
The validity of this conclusion is confirmed by the work of the Books to Prisoners Committee of the English Centre of PEN, under the chairmanship of the novelist Pauline Neville. Many of the books sent may not be handed over to their intended recipients, many may not be the sort of books the recipients wish to read, but their despatch at least provides these victims of oppression with an assurance that, in the words of Stuart Hampshire in one of the most cogent essays in the anthology, 'their names, and the names of their works, remain among the names of the living'.
In general, and not unexpectedly, the best contributions are those not by such world-class figures as Arthur Miller, Nadine Gordimer and Arthur C. Clarke, who have never themselves had to endure censorship or imprisonment, but by actual victims, some of them little known to the world at large. It is the victims who repeatedly come out with what is unexpect- ed, often in a highly arresting or discon- certing manner.
For example, that fine Czech Jewish writer, Ivan Klima, ends a brilliant essay with the provocative statement: 'I believe that it is less important for a writer to worry about his freedom of expression than about what he wants to express.' Joseph Brodsky, sentenced to hard labour on a charge of 'parasitism' in the Soviet Union and later to win the Nobel Prize, is tremen- dous in an interview with Michael Scam- mell. Scammell — a nimble-witted Anglo-American academic, once editor of Index, whose authorised biography of Arthur Koestler has been awaited even longer than the restoration of the Albert Memorial — puts all the expected ques- tions. Brodsky then proceeds to rap out a series of totally unexpected answers. 'Why do you think that they sent you to prison?' Scammell asks. Brodsky replies that he does not really want to know. To him the question is 'typically western' — in the West, every event has to have a cause. All he can say is 'A man who sets out to create his own independent world is bound sooner or later to become a foreign body in soci- ety.' So it goes on. Didn't Brodsky say on BBC television that nothing could be done in the West to help Soviet writers? Scam- mell asks. Brodsky confirms this: 'You can't help a writer to write, can you? You can't help him to live, nor can you help him to die.'
If Brodsky's contribution is the outstand- ing one, Yehudi Menuhin's, a single page in length, is the oddest. 'There is a case to be made,' writes Menuhin with dangerous blandness, 'for restricting certain types of musical activity.' The chief musical activity which he has in mind is, it transpires, `muzak' — 'injurious to the ear, soul and sensibility'. Stalin of course found 'injuri- ous to the ear, soul and sensibility' some of the works of Shostakovich and Prokofiev.
Ronald Dworkin asks the old question: is free speech so important that we must tolerate, in its name, the most despicable and harmful utterances? As one would expect, he then discusses this issue intelli- gently and lucidly. Matthew D'Ancona con- tributes a good essay on the theme `Euphemism is the subtlest form of censor- ship, drawing his examples from the 'wars- peak' which prefers, for example, words like 'suppress', 'eliminate' and `de-air', to the stark 'kill' or 'destroy'. Tom Stoppard, having had 'a little trouble' getting a visa to visit the CSSR, writes a venomously ironic open letter to Dubcek's supplanter and Havel's predecessor, President Husak.
When I used to visit the Soviet Union on behalf of PEN, my hosts would often ask me, with an insidious politeness, if I really believed that there was no censorship in the western democracies. To that, I could only answer, in all truthfulness, no. In his excellent introduction to this collection, W L. Webb refers to the various ways in which this censorship is exerted — through the concentration of press-ownership, through the swallowing of individual English publishers by American conglom- erates, through 'the pollution of language and thought' by deceitful euphemisms. He might have added political correctness, which threatens to make the expression of certain thoughts and the use of certain phrases taboo.
There is also the ominous capriciousness with which, for example, our society decides that, on the one hand, a film sym- pathetic to the IRA can gain finance and be widely shown, whereas a film similarly sympathetic to the Nazis would certainly not achieve either of those objectives. No less ominous is the sort of commercial cen- sorship which resulted in an issue of Private Eye derisive about the hysteria surrounding the death of Princess Diana to be rejected for sale (i.e. banned) by W. H. Smith and other leading suppliers. Amazingly, other publications made, as far as I am aware, no protest.
All in all, despite some dud contribu- tions, this is a worthy memorial to Index's 25 years of relentless struggle against the destruction of freedom of expression. One can only hope that, under Ursula Owen 's forceful and efficient editorship, it Will have the resources to continue this still essential task far into the future.
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