Cyril
Connolly
was
born in Coventry, Warwickshire in 1903. Educated at Eton
and Balliol College, Oxford
he was a regular contributor to the New
Statesman in
the 1930s.
Connolly
also co-edited Horizon
(1939-41) with Stephen
Spender
and later was literary editor of the The
Observer. Books by Connolly include
the novel, The Rock Pool (1938),
the autobiographical, Enemies of Promise
(1938) and The Unquiet Grave
(1944), a collection of aphorisms, reflections and essays.
After
the Second World War Connolly was the principal
book reviewer of the Sunday
Times. He also published several
other books including The Condemned Playground
(1945), Previous
Convictions (1964) and the Modern
Movement (1965).
Cyril Connolly
died in 1974.
(1)
Cyril
Connolly, New
Statesman (21st November 1936)
It is in Barcelona that
the full force of the anarchist revolution becomes apparent. Their
initials, CNT and FAI, are everywhere. They have taken over all the
hotels, restaurants, cafes, trains, taxis, and means of communication,
as well as all theatres, cinemas, and places of amusement. Their first
act was to abolish the tip as being incompatible with the dignity
of those who receive it, and to attempt to give one is the only act,
short of making the Fascist salute, that a foreigner can be disliked
for.
Spanish anarchism is a
doctrine which has gone through three stages. The first was the conception
of pure anarchy which grew out of the writings of Rousseau, Proudhon,
Godwin, and to a lesser extent, Diderot and Tolstoy. The essence of
this anarchist faith is that there exists in mankind a natural trend
towards nobility and dignity; human relations based on a love of liberty
combined with a desire to help each other (as shown for instance in
the mutual generosity of the poor in slum districts in cases of sickness
and distress) should in themselves be enough, given education and
the right economic conditions, to provide a working basis for people
to live on; State interference, armies, property, would be as superfluous
as they were to the early Christians. The anarchist paradise would
be one in which the instincts towards freedom, justice, intelligence
and "bondad" in the human race develop gradually to the
exclusion of all thoughts of personal gain, envy, and malice. But
there exist two stumbling blocks to this ideal - the desire to make
money and the desire to acquire power. Everybody who makes money or
acquires power, according to the anarchists, does so to the detriment
of himself and at the expense of other people, and as long as these
instincts are allowed free run there will always be war, tyranny,
and exploitation. Power and money must therefore be abolished altogether.
At this point the second stage of anarchism begins, that which arises
from the thought of Bakunin, the contemporary of Marx. He added the
rider that the only way to abolish power and money was by direct action
on the bourgeoisie in whom these instincts were incurably ingrained,
and who took advantage of all liberal legislation, all concessions
from the workers, to get more power and more money for themselves.
"The rich will do everything for the poor but get off their backs,"
Tolstoy has said. "Then they must be blown off," might have
been Bakunin's corollary. From this time (the Eighties) dates militant
anarchism with its crimes of violence and assassination. In most of
its strongholds, Italy, Germany, Russia, it was either destroyed by
Fascism or absorbed by Communism, which has usually seemed more practical,
realisable, and adaptable to industrial countries; but in Spain the
innate love of individual freedom, a personal dignity of the people,
made them prefer it to Russian Communism, and the persecution
which it underwent was never sufficient to blot it out.
Finally, in the last few
years it has gone through a third transformation; in spite of its
mystical appeal to the heart anarchism has always been an elastic
and adaptable faith, and looking round for a suitable machinery to
replace State centralisation it found syndicalism, to which it is
now united. Syndicalism is a system of vertical rather than horizontal
Trade Unions, by which, for instance, all the workers on this paper,
editors, reviewers, printers and distributors, would delegate members
to a syndicate which would negotiate with other syndicates for the
housing, feeding, amusements, etc., of all the body. This anarcho-syndicalism
through its organ, the CNT, has been able to get control of all the
industries and agriculture of Catalonia and much of that in Andalusia,
Valencia and Murcia, forming a more or less solid block from Malaga
to the French frontier with considerable power also in the Asturias
and Madrid. The executive militant spearhead of the body is the Federacion
Anarquistica Iberica, usually pronounced as one word, FAI, which partly
owing to acts of terrorism, partly to its former illegality, is clothed
in mystery today. It is almost impossible to find out who and how
many belong to it.
The ideal of the CNT and
the FAI is libertarian Communism, a Spain in which the work and wealth
is shared by all, about three hours' work a day being enough to entitle
anyone to sufficient food, clothing, education, amusement, transport,
and medical attention. It differs from Communism because there must
be no centralisation, no bureaucracy, and no leaders; if somebody
does not want to do something, the anarchists argue, no good will
come of making them do it. They point to Stalin's dictatorship as
an example of the evils inherent in Communism. The danger of anarchism,
one might argue, is that it has become such a revolutionary weapon
that it may never know what to do with the golden age when it has
it, and may exhaust itself in a perpetual series of counter-revolutions.
Yet it should be an ideal not unsympathetic to the English, who have
always honoured freedom and individual eccentricity and whose liberalism
and whiggery might well have turned to something very similar had
they been harassed for centuries, like the Spanish proletariat, by
absolute monarchs, militant clergy, army dictatorships and absentee
landlords.
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