Waiting for Lefty

PERSONAL COLUMN COLIN WELCH

So Lucky Jim has turned right and Mr Kingsley Amis (surely they are not one and the same person, incidentally?) has choien freedom. Long at odds with the ruling party group, often urged to recantation and self- criticism, he now bids farewell to his Fabian native-land, to its desolate Shaws, its tangled Webbs and polluted Wells.

Those who once loved him so, followed him, honoured him, now turn in fury on the rene- gade. They now declare him, as Mr Kosygin declared Miss Stalin, `a morally unstable per- son, a sick person.' A well-aimed turd from Alan Brien speeds the exile on his way. The only discordant note is an oddly envious salute from Mr John Osborne, who would plainly like to come too, but dare not leave the com- fort of his angry dacha for the perils of the complacent unknown.

And what do we think, we stodgy native- born citizens of the conservative land which grants him political asylum? Behind all the warm welcoming things we feel and say there is concealed, I suppose, a certain resentment, wholly discreditable yet also human, and even predictable by those who have studied the re- ception and assimilation of refugees.

Here they come, Mr Amis in the van and heaven knows how many hundreds of thousands more following, repentant econo- mists from the Department of Economic Affairs, chastened dons from progressive circles, regenerate planners and rethinking thinkers, a vast army of the disillusioned, retournant de ruRss, fleeing from failed gods and naked emperors.

We peer apprehensively through our lace cur- tains at the advancing mob. Who's going to find jobs and homes for this lot, we grumble; and what are they going to bring with them, what strange habits, what bizarre ideological diseases? We shall all have to move over and double up to make room. We ought to like it: but we won't.

Joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth more than over ninety and nine just persons, which need no repentance. In heaven, perhaps; but what about on earth? One can imagine the remarks of the just persons when the prodigal son, after years on the spree, comes back and gets the fatted calf to boot: `What about us? . . . if that's all the thanks we get . . . who fatted the calf, that's what I'd like to know . . . bloody nerve, call it . . . cheek . . .' Just persons are not always pleasant or forgiving—a fact which Christ Himself may here have slyly implied.

Another reason for our resentment is an envious suspicion that all these prodigal sons are much more interesting than the just per- sons. After all, most of us have been around for years, always saying much the same old thing. No one waits on our words; everyone knows what they are going to be. The prodigal sons, by contrast, have sojourned in exotic climes and are saying something new—new from them, anyway: and everyone clusters round to listen. And if a prodigal son happens to have written six or seven highly entertaining novels—well, how unfair can life get? '

Some of the Jews who came to England in the 'thirties and after Made little secret of the

fact that they found us impossibly philistine, woolly-minded, complacent and unintellectual, apolitical, provincial and inarticulate. What could they make of people who ate fish and chips, who had never read Goethe and seemed to rate Vaughan Williams above Bruckner and Mahler? If Mr Amis and his friends are to avoid misunderstandings and explosions, they will have to be more tactful. They may feel at first that they have joined the stupid party —and in a sense they will be right. They will certainly be moving into a world far less vivacious and argumentative than the one they were accustomed to.

To become a socialist of any kind, after all, is to formulate a want, to criticise the existing world and to envisage a better one. For these exercises intelligence is certainly required, if not necessarily of a very high order. Indeed, it is never lack of intelligence with which socialists are in general justly charged—on the contrary. What is blameworthy in them is the dispropor- tion between the intelligence, often great, which they actually have and the intelligence, in- finitely greater, which would be required for the gigantic and absurd tasks they have set them- selves. To alter society radically, to take it to bits and reconstruct it according to abstract principles : for this neither the most formidable natural talents and energies, nor Winchester nor Oxford nor even the LSE, nor the closest acquaintances with the teachings of either Wesley or Marx, can fit any man.

To be a conservative, by contrast, requires no brains whatsoever. Cabbages, cows and conifers are conservatives, and are so stupid they don't even know it. All that is basically required is acceptance of what exists. If a Con- servative minister can think of nothing sensible to do or say, no one thinks it reprehensible in him to do or say nothing. Prodigies of activity, mental or physical, are no more expected of him than of an oak or cathedral. His role, in Mr Amis's own words, is 'keeping things going plus as much improvement as they will stand.' Such a role puts a premium not on speculative

audaCity, but rather on experience and on an accurate knowledge of one's own and other people's limitations. To call this simply stupidity is obviously unjust; it is certainly a `dignified sort of stupidity, possibly deserving the name wisdom. But it has perhaps con- ferred on conservative circles a certain intel- lectual torpidity and complacency which the refugees may at first find boring or irri- tating.

They may also wonder, as I do, whether it is still appropriate to the times we live in. Acceptance of what exists—fine: but does this include acceptance of a socialist or semi- socialist society if that is what happens to exist? This is the great debate which, ill- repressed, has increasingly convulsed the Con- servative party since 1945 and which may now actually endanger Mr Heath's pragmatic pre- eminence. Its logic is that conservatives, faced by an ideological alternative government, must either themselves become more ideological in turn or else abandon the great principles of freedom which were always the most im- portant and defensible part—the keep, so to speak—of whatever status quo they strove to preserve.

In such an ideological party brains, where possessed, would no longer have to be carefully concealed as pudenda. They could be flaunted and used, might lead to success, even glory. In such a party, too, reformed left-wing in- tellectuals should find a warm welcome. It is partly up to them. Some of them may be ex- hausted by the mental exertions which took them first into the left and then out again. They may feel they have thought enough. The odd article or book may emerge, of a type recently familiar—How I Escaped the Wilson Terror, Grinz Secrets of the DEA, I Was Douglas Jay's Aunt, and so forth—and then silence.

Who cannot feel sympathy for them? They come to their new home for the most part reluctantly, not for positive reasons but for negative, not because they `like it here' but because their last abode collapsed about their ears.

For many of them old loyalties will still re- main strong, the string will continue to twitch. Even now, in Hampstead and Golders Green, there are eyes which still smart uncontrollably when they hear Siegfried's horn-call or the beloved-Nuremberg theme; and there are men who, in fact, moved rightwards twenty or thirty years ago and still preface remarks which even I find reactionary with the ritual prelude, `As progressives, we ...' or 'As a man of the left, I . .' Convinced indeed that socialism is silly or worse, they still view conservatism as an evil, if perhaps a necessary one fame de mieux and the lesser perhaps of the two. The idea that conservatism is in any positive sense materially, socially or morally defensible often remains alien and unpalatable to them. They are accordingly reluctant to learn its language, to study and accept its premises and its conclusions.

To find at the age, say, of forty or more that most of one's intellectual possessions, so painfully acquired, are in fact just trash to be thrown away must be in itself a discouraging experience. Who can blame those daunted by the prospect of grimly acquiring, mastering and tit oughly developing a whole new philosophy

o 7 Yet this is what we ask of our immi- grants : for their good as well as our own. They will never be happy, fruitful or at home, till h :0 ginnp