When the watchdog turns lapdog

Two books I read lately were by Anglo-Marxists, set mostly in the 1930s: the autobiographical Editor by Kingsley Martin, editor of New Statesman from 1930 to 1960; the other, a 1959 collection of novellas and short stories, Memoirs of Hecate County by Edmund Wilson, former managing editor of Vanity Fair and one of America’s celebrated literary critics who wrote in The New Yorker. My father-in-law handed me Martin’s memoirs sometime back, but the motivation to jump it in my book-queue came after Vinod Mehta, in his memoir Lucknow Boy, described the formative influence the New Statesman had on him during his struggling days in 1960s England. (Indeed, everything Vinod did in journalism makes sense after you consider that the New Statesman often hosted literary fisticuffs between the likes of HG Wells and George Bernard Shaw, both close friends of Martin but temperamentally far apart.) Both were extraordinarily rewarding reads — even though they were by Marxists.

The provocation for mentioning these writers was a telephone call from my father, who lives abroad, a few days ago. He wanted to know if it was true that the Army had planned to attack Delhi back in January, as reported in The Indian Express. Don’t worry, I said, no such thing. If the Army Chief had planned a coup to ensure he spent another year in office, then he wouldn’t have filed a petition on his date of birth in the Supreme Court. When we rang off, it seemed that there must be many ordinary Indians far and near who were scared by this story. What a shame. And the author tried to camouflage the cynical timing of the story (immediately after the government’s ugly spat with the Army Chief) by saying the story took 11 weeks to materialise. That would be credible if the story was loaded with data or fieldwork, like a story on child malnutrition in Maharashtra, for instance; it wasn’t. Even an RTI application gets answered in less time (though no RTI request would have generated such a cock-and-bull story). At the end of the day, a well-regarded journalist (he reported on the Nellie massacre in Assam nearly 30 years ago) was used by a cynical government. Guess who emerged from this looking diminished.

Even though we are now post-ideology and know that communism was discredited by the Soviet model’s failure, we have a lot to learn from the Marxist writers. After all, Kingsley Martin may have been an apologist for Stalin’s regime — to the extent that George Orwell couldn’t stand the sight of him — but he was principally a journalist who would write with equal disdain about Neville Chamberlain, Winston Churchill and Clement Atlee. Martin recalls an anonymous profile he published in 1933: “It is not true to say that every statesman has to maintain his popularity by pretending to be rude, ignorant, sentimental, superstitious and stupid. Cabinet Ministers are of all sorts and conditions, from the superlatively clever to the superlatively dull, and they are kept together… by a dough of mediocrity.” Too many editors in India (mostly the post-superannuation lot) who would never dare publish such irreverence because they believe themselves to be part of the ruling class, and that it is their job to steer the country. Kingsley Martin got away with publishing such barbs because, one, over his consistent 30-year-career he always plunged headfirst into the moral conflicts of his time without a care as to whether it would hurt his friendships in the House of Commons; and two, because of his fidelity to his craft. “An editor’s paper should be his mistress,” he writes. “I ate, drank and slept with the paper.” Contrast that with the editor who not only values his friendship with the powerful over his devotion to his profession, but never hesitates to make himself the centre of the story.

Edmund Wilson was as historically wrong as Martin, but that did not stop him from being acidly self-referential: “Marxism is the opium of the intellectuals,” a drunken writer says in The Milhollands and Their Damned Soul, a story about a publisher’s deal with the devil. Wilson had exacting standards: he trashed the mystery genre in “Who cares who murdered Roger Ackroyd?”; he trashed JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings; he wasn’t too excited with Lolita (which ruined his friendship with Vladimir Nabokov); and his approval helped wider public acceptance of Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner and F Scott Fitzgerald.

By 1959 Wilson would have realised the abomination of the Soviet system, yet he persisted with his hostility to the Cold War. The novella at the centre of Memoirs…, the beautifully sad The Princess with the Golden Hair, is the story of an art historian barely surviving through the Depression, who has simultaneous affairs with an affluent neighbor and a working-class Ukrainian immigrant in Manhattan. The politics of the story may be predictable, but the writing is enduring (and racy, too). To me, the lesson is that fidelity to your principles will ensure your craft reaches a zenith.

Compare these men of letters with those in India who today have no ideology other than the service of power. Instead of the watchdog of democracy they would rather be the lapdog of crony capitalism. It’s enough to make you admire the old Left; such is the crisis in our nation today.

The writer is the Editor-in-Chief, DNA, based in Mumbai