The Children of Delusion

What did you do in the Cold War, Daddy? This is the theme and title of an absorbing new symposium which aims to show how the Cold War felt to children growing up in partisan, usually communist, families. Edited by Ann Curthoys and Joy Damousi, it anthologises the memoirs of people mainly born in the 1940s whose parents remained communists despite everything. This may also be a reason for the book’s limitation. It does not require enormous empathy to psych one’s way into the souls of those who became communists in the 1920s and even the 1930s during the crises of the Great War, the Great Depression, or the rise of Fascism and Nazism. But to remain communist in the 1940s and 1950s—after the well-documented revelations of the Soviet grand guignol—the Gulag, the Ukrainian famine, the Moscow trials, the Hitler–Stalin pact, the Stalinising of Eastern and Central Europe, and the servility to Moscow of the communist parties of the world—calls for a special degree of wilful blindness which should surely be noted in a memoir. But there is little acknowledgment of any of this in these family stories. It is not much help to be reminded by Saul Bellow that “a great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep”. Why was there this need? In any case it is not a good habitat for the rearing of children.

In their introduction the editors regret the narrow range of almost all their highly ideological contributors. They say they simply could not find a writer from a Liberal Party or conservative background who grew up in a Cold War anti-communist ambiance and now wanted to write about it in a symposium with communists and their sympathisers. They asked several children of Cold War conservative families to contribute but were always politely turned away. Perhaps they should have tried harder, but they came to the doubtful conclusion that the Cold War did not affect conservatives as “viscerally” as it did communists, leftists and other ideologues. Cleaving to the Australian, or as some saw it, the British way of life, the conservatives despised and dismissed communists as fanatics, war-time strikers and saboteurs—not the sort with whom you wanted to get together and talk about the old days. Let time heal the wounds.

As it is, most of the contributors thank god their parents remained loyal communists. They seem to think they were on the right side of history. They look on defections from communism not as liberation from a god that failed but as regrettable mistakes. One of the contributors, the historian Lyndall Ryan, appears to feel that the bitterness of her father, Jack Ryan, over his expulsion in 1930 from the Communist Party, as masterminded by a blow-in Stalinist and Comintern double or triple agent, led him to lose his socialist vision: “Jack never recovered.” He even became an anti-communist or rather anti-Stalinist, a sort of Trotskyist. John Docker, whose father had co-operated in Ryan’s expulsion, cannot look back on this family episode without “misery and nausea”. It is hard to see how most conservatives could readily join these exchanges. But their absence is still a pity.

One exceptional chapter stands out. It is the moving (and anti-communist) memoir by Martin Krygier. He gives it the title, “An intimate and foreign affair”. Intimate because it is about his family, especially his father Richard whom he loved and admired, and whose political trajectory, from student pro-communist in Warsaw to uncom­promising anti-communist, deeply influenced him in his youth and still does to this day. His parents were non-observant, non-Zionist Jews for whom their Jewishness was “a secondary part of their self-conception”—as Poles and leftists. Foreign because his parents’ formation was not in Australia but in Poland where they endured nationalist anti-Semitism (in one brawl his father’s jaw was broken); observed the Moscow show trials of 1937; and began to understand the “constant crazy lies” of the communists including their denials of Stalin’s “murders on a mega-­industrial scale”. They fully grasped the reality of totalitarianism in daily life. Fleeing a Poland divided between Hitler and Stalin, they arrived in Sydney in December 1941 a few days before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.

After the war many if not most Australians could not comprehend the Krygiers’ experience. But Richard Krygier now found his cause—combatting illusions about Stalin and the USSR which were entrenched among Australian leftists who should have been, he thought, his friends and allies. To characterise him with the anodyne term “activist” is to underestimate him. Martin writes: “He was a preternaturally energetic man. He was never still.” He sought out people to help or influence. He distributed books and information. He promoted writers from Hannah Arendt to Milovan Djilas, from Robert Conquest to Alexander Solzhenitsyn. He established the Australian Committee for Cultural Freedom, published its bulletin Free Spirit, and in 1956 founded Quadrant. He endured bitter defamation, especially after he gradually if not entirely turned against his old allies on the Left. But he remained irrepressible. In this ambiance Martin Krygier learnt about life and politics.

Martin also takes the story further—in keeping with the theme of What Did You Do in the Cold War, Daddy? In 1985 he made his first trip to what he regarded as Occupied Poland. “It was a profound experience. It changed my life.” He met the partisans of the trade union Solidarity, whose contempt for communism chimed in with his own. When European communism collapsed, he greeted it with apprehensive delight. “I only regretted that my father had not lived to see it.” (His mother did.)

But he also moved on from his inherited views. He re-read Leszek Kolakowki (“How to Be a Conservative Liberal Socialist: A Credo”). He delivered the Boyer Lectures—Between Fear and Hope: Hybrid Thoughts on Public Values. He wrote a major intellectual biography of Philip Selznick (whose Organizational Weapon had been a manual for Cold Warriors). But however much his position today may differ from his father’s, he concludes his memoir with this tribute: “What was fundamental for him remains fundamental for me. He remains for me exemplary as a human being, and a person of courage, energy, selflessness, moral clarity, honesty and warmth.”

It’s what one good man did in the Cold War.

Julia Horne, she tells us, grew up with a brother, a tortoise, a canary—and a book. The book was her father Donald Horne’s best-seller The Lucky Country. She was speaking to a luncheon to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the book’s first publication in 1964. She did not read it until she was an undergraduate. It had changed her father’s life. He was a well-known journalist (and “advertising man”) when he sat down to write it in his spare time. He would probably have written it anyhow, but the originating suggestion and deadline, she said, came from Max Harris and Geoffrey Dutton of Penguin Books, who urged Horne to do a book expanding the ideas in his challenging article “Living with Asia”, written for the fortnightly magazine the Observer. Horne said it took him three months to finish the first draft, which his wife Myfanwy then edited. The first print of 18,000 sold out in nine days. Sales soon reached 160,000. It turned Horne from “journalist” to “writer” who produced a new book every year or two for the rest of his life.

What was the secret of The Lucky Country’s popularity? Part of it was, Julia Horne said, due to its “cheeky” style. But there was more to it than that. Its timing was perfect. It came out at the fag-end of that great exuberant post-war period, the Age of Menzies. Australians were hungry for new directions. Many thought they found them for a moment in Whitlamism, of which The Lucky Country was a precursor. Like Barack Obama decades later, it said, “Yes We Can!” The other secret of its success was its wonderful if ambiguous title summing up Horne’s big theme that the country was being run by second-raters and owed its success to luck. This is the weak part of the book: Australia’s success was far more due to hard work, enterprise and, yes, imagination. But the title caught on—even if often for the wrong reason. Julia Horne tells how irritated her father was when it was used to advertise a popular brand of moselle. But it was a sort of homage.

This year is the fiftieth anniversary of another important book, Henry Mayer’s The Press in Australia. It was the subject of Murray Goot’s Henry Mayer Memorial Lecture on October 7. The book was never popular. In a Marxising mode it mocked the pretensions of journalists and the illusions of reformers. So it was soon forgotten. But Goot believes it is the foundation book of media studies in Australia. Time to look at it again?