How Harry became a Communist
Although he died in 1954, and although I never met him, I find it easy to understand Harry. Mum once told me that when Russia allied itself with Britain in 1941, Harry changed from being an Elder of the church to being a Communist.
But it seems that Russia's move to the Allied side did not bring him round to Socialism. He was on the Left from the 1930s, and would say that "Socialism was living Christianity", according to mum. Unfortunately, he gave his library to the Party when he knew he was really ill, so all that is left to us of the thousands of books he owned is Spoon River Anthology, now in my library.
My mother adored him. "If he said something was right, it was right," she says now. His brother Arthur didn't think so and, says Arthur's daughter, Harry's involvement with the Communist Party caused a rift in the family. "Anything approaching Communism was viewed with great suspicion in the 30s and 40s and 50s," she says, "and Dad had spent four years in the trenches in France fighting 'for King and country'."
Constant clipping pays off
Feelings are very sensible on opening the album. Inside the front cover is a clipping Bea, his wife, took from The Herald, a Melbourne broadsheet, on Monday 25 November 1963. "Assassin Shot Dead on His Way to Gaol," blares the headline, which is flung across the top of the page, and displaces the masthead. The news on this page is, of course, about Lee Harvey Oswald. The story continues on pages 3, 4, 5, and 6.
Bea didn't clip the story of Jack Kennedy's killing, but Oswald's. And this makes me wonder. Mum wonders too.
Who did he clip? There are a couple of blank pages to start with. Then on page two of the album's main contents are three items by David Martin, who worked "as a freelance journalist and editor of The Australian Jewish News. He quickly became part of Australian literary and political life. He joined the Communist Party in 1951, was active until 1956 and remained a member until 1959", according to the National Library of Australia's Web site.
Most of the clippings are undated. But they are carefully clipped, neatly edged, and glued deliberately in place. On page four the date 12 October 1953 is written in green ink on a clipping that features a poem, 'Mao's Gift'. "This poem of the Peking Peace Conference is by West Australian poet Victor Williams, who has been invited to the USSR by the Soviet Writers' Union." According to the Web site of The Guardian, the "weekly newspaper of the Communist Party of Australia", Williams turned 90 in 2004.
Without elencating every clipping and identifying its author, I can say with some assurance that this album is the labour of a passionate man. Many of the poems are mere doggerel, but there's no doubting the enthusiasm of the man who selected, clipped, and pasted each one. My mother, who adored her father, told me the clippings are from The Tribune, a Communist Party newspaper.
Art vs dogma
More important to Harry than the quality of the verse is the message it purveys. As a long-time Nabokovian, I personally would not, in the past, have selected a poem on this basis for inclusion in an album.
In 1964, in an interview conducted by Alvin Toffler for the January issue of American Playboy, Nabokov made one of many similar assertions about the meaning of art when he said: "A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual, and only the individual reader is important to me." (Strong Opinions, Vintage, New York, 1990, p. 33.)
In The New York Times Book Review of 9 January 1972 Nabokov replied to questions written by Israel Shenker (Nabokov only ever gave answers to written questions, submitted in advance: "I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child." op cit, p. xv).
Shenker: What kinds of power do you favour, and which do you oppose?
Nabokov: To play safe, I prefer to accept only one type of power: the power of art over trash, the triumph of magic over the brute.
Shenker: What are the large issues that you can't get interested in, and what are you most concerned with?
Nabokov: The larger the issue the less it interests me. Some of my best concerns and microscopic patches of color. (Op cit, p. 182.)
Harry would not have agreed. The man who bought Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology in 1926 would, in 1953, vote with his time for the faction that says art must serve a higher cause.
'The men who made Australia' by Henry Lawson, is the first clipping in the album, and it is captioned by the editor: "It is fitting the in Australia Day week we should publish this poem by Henry Lawson which has been omitted from modern collections of his works. It was written on the occasion of the Royal Visit to Australia in 1901."
This page (22) of the album holds clippings that deal with the Rosenbergs, tried for espionage in 1951. There are more on subsequent pages.
