INTELLECTUAL DINOSAURS
congress for the intelligentsia 50 years on from the war
IT HAD to happen. Spain's galloping modernisation, her determination to be ruled by sober-suited social democrats, to enter the EEC even if it means maintaining a few American bases, and to reduce the three-hour lunch break to two and a half hours, have for some time heralded the demise of the peculiar Spanish cult on the intellectual. But who would have guessed that the exposure of this traditional object of veneration to questioning and even ridicule would take place at a would-be I thought the Tories were all for free enterprise.' intellectual apotheosis? The occasion was last week's Interna- tional Congress of Artists and Intellectuals in Valencia. Fifty years ago in the same city, where the Republican government was shortly to take refuge from be' leaguered Madrid, there took place a meeting of minds which has since become legendary: the Second Congress of Writers for the Defence of Culture. Last week : event was in part a commemoration °` what Garcia Marquez (almost incrediblY' not invited) has called one of the very fe11_, intellectual gatherings to have had any real historical meaning in this century, but also, according to the prospectus, a critical reflection upon it and an attempt to define the role of the intellectual in today s differently ordered world. It was probably inevitable that memories of the heroic past would prevail civet the less glamorous problems of the present (let alone the future). Not only did the ghosts of the great names of 1937 — HemingwaY' Dos Passos, Malraux and Neruda — seem to cast giant shadows over the living, but three of the four surviving P°et- participants of the 1937 Congress, Stephen Spender, the Mexican Octavio Paz and the, Valencian Juan Gil-Albert,. were on hand to give the opening addresses. The fourth member of the generation of '37, the Communist poet Rafael Alberti, had turned down the invitation at the last minute (and he was by no means the only distinguished non-participant) on grounds that were not entirely clear. Clues were to be found in the discourses of Spender and Paz: both, while paying tribute to the importance of the intellec- tuals' stand against Fascist tyranny, ack- nowledged that many on their own side had ended up countenancing other forms of tyranny. Paz recalled the 'immense wave of generosity and authentic brotherhood' which had constituted the moral greatness of the 1937 Congress, but also the 'perver- sion of the revolutionary spirit' in which had lain its weakness. On Friday evening, after three days of rather low-key discussion on subjects such as "the Intellectual and History' and 'The Intellectual and Memory', Paz and Spen- der's implied criticism of left-wing totali- tarianism suddenly became a smelly bone of contention between Cuban supporters and opponents of Fidel Castro. A discus- sion between the writer and ex-Communist leader Jorge Semprun and a Castroist Cuban very nearly ended in blows. The theme under debate was 'The Intellectual and Violence'. This irony proved irresistible to the heavy brigade of special correspondents whom the leading papers had brought in to cover the Congress. Doubts about its value which had hitherto been delicately hinted were now expressed with no holds barred. Have intellectuals got anything to talk about? Are the so-called intellectuals today the people who influence thought? Do the real leaders of thought go to conferences? Does the word intellectual in fact have any meaning? Most of these questions received a firmly negative answer. For one commentator, the novelist Julio Llamazares, intellectuals had become like dinosaurs, obsolete and out of touch with the truly contemporary issues. In his view, the only significant result of the Congress was that all the debates ended with the questioning of the role of the intellectual. The 1987 Congress certainly had its absurd aspects: the gossip of wounded vanity (had Garcia Marquez failed to turn up because he hated Vargas Llosa? was Alberti's non-attendance explained by a feud with Paz?), the preening before the cameras, the failure to communicate in a civilised manner on the part of people pledged to dialogue, were all grist to the Mill of ellec tual h those who would argue that today's intas no valid role. The real question, though, which the clever commentators did not ask, was whether there was anything new about this situation. They did not remind us that the 1937 Congress, for all its moral fervour, failed to achieve its aims: Britain and France were not persuaded the break their neutrality and support the Spanish Repub- lic; Hitler's Condor Legion and Mussolini's Blackshirts continued to limber up on Spanish soil for their bloodier campaigns to come. Sometimes heroic failure is the best that can be managed: dinosaurs, in com- parison with some of the more recent arrivals, have, as children at least know, their charm.
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