Rejected by the New Statesman, by Douglas Goldring

[p029] Rejected by the New Statesman The following letter was offered to the New Statesman, which refused to publish it. It was then offered to Labour Review, which is glad to publish it. NOT the least of the virtues of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament is the fact that it offers a moral challenge to the Establishment—a term which includes the established church. Its sponsors are too respectable to incur the smear hitherto dealt out to patriotic realists of having ‘Russian syrapathies’, and it speaks for all those Britons who do not intend to be forced to commit suicide by decadent politicians. unscrupulous newspapers or bishops who think like the Arch- bishop of Canterbury. There have, of course, been predecessors to CND which suffered the usual fate of pioneers. In the dark days of the China Lobby’s Korean adventure a courageous writer, the late A. E. Coppard, launched the Authors’ World Peace Appeal with a simple non-political statement to which some 800 authors signed their names. Unfortunately the Authors’ World Peace Appeal was quickly captured by Right-wing Labour. the founder indignantly resigned and the organiza- tion died a lingering and ignominious death. Before this happened I record, as a joke against myself, that I wasted my time writing two short books, one called ‘Is Britain Doomed?’, (in answer to Bertrand Russell who at that time thought it did not matter if it was), the other “The Future of Liberalism’. Although qualified for my task by years of intensive study and, if I may say so, professional competence, I was unable to persuade my publisher to read either. Some of the larger firms, then as now, preferred to make profits out of American pornography rather than risk capital on radical dissent. The Korean War, the origins of which were convincingly set forth by Sir John Pratt, was the signal for the outbreak in literary London of the British equivalent of McCarthyism. It was very unpleasant while it lasted, the victims being independent writers, like myself, with no party political back- ing. (Patriotic radicals were labelled ‘fellow-travellers’ even 154 in socialist weeklies like Tribune, and Shaw and H. G. Wells found no successors.) There is no recorded instance of a famous author standing up in defence of an unpopular colleague. Among a number of disagreeable incidents I was libelled by a veteran novelist, who charged me. in an Authors’ World Peace Appeal Bulletin, with writing under Moscow influences. In those days no more damaging accusation could have been made. Rather than print my reply, the anonymous editor brought out the next number with the last page blank. A year or two later a publisher under contract to issue the final volume of my political autobiography, entitled “Towards Living in Peace’, returned the MS. with an angry letter and preferred to sacrifice his meagre advance rather than produce it. Finally. when Martin Secker (Richards Press) published a collection of my short stories and character sketches. in which some of the characters expressed radical opinions. the Press boycott was almost complete. The sales were under S500 copies and a literary career of half a century thus came to an abrupt full stop. The trifling inconveniences referred to above were. of course, nothing to the persecution endured by progressive writers in the USA and elsewhere. Tt is a relief to me, in the closing years of a long life. to see some of our leaders of thought. who were recently among the most belligerent of the ‘bomb Russia’ addicts. now con- verted to sanity. I only wish the Archbishop of Canterbury was among them. If it has not come too late, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, which boldly proclaims what a few of us tried to say ten years ago, may succeed in laying the foundations of a British Resistance Movement. It cheers me to think that after I die a younger generation of Englishmen may decide to hold up their heads, rid our country of foreign troops and remove the collaborators. When this happens. if it ever does. books by English writers will soon trickle back into the pub- lishers’ lists and we may even, once again. compose our own songs and sing them ourselves. Stonar House. Deal Douglas Goldring