“They’re not all crypto-fascists and right wing nut jobs. We also have some venture capital dems and centrist ghouls. Dad’s ideological range was wide.”
Kendall Roy, Episode 7 of Succession
My mother was a woke. bleeding-heart liberal who believed apartheid was a moral outrage and an indelible stain on the conscience of humanity. Her impassioned rhetoric against it, after falling for so long on apparently deaf ears both at home and abroad, gave way in her later years to the exhausted sigh of, “Why can’t people just be nice to one another…”
It had ceased to be a question.
Dad’s ideological range was wide. Explaining it is going to sound a little, well, feudal.
On Mondays, when the (black Zulu) labourers were still too drunk from the weekend’s revelries to turn up for work, he swore he would henceforth be voting for the Herenigde Nasionale Party, a group of (exclusively white, mostly Afrikaner) nationalists commonly known as the Herstigtes who believed the ruling National Party, the originators and enforcers of apartheid, wasn’t being racist enough.
On Tuesdays when Spono, his Zulu foreman, accidentally drove the little grey Massey Ferguson tractor through the fence that kept the cows out of the lucerne field (to quote one example of any number from the local library of Typically Incompetent Zulu Farm Labourer Tropes) — but Wilson had miraculously remembered to mow the lawn when he woke up at 2 pm, my father would swear he would henceforth be voting for the Nats who believed black people could be taught to behave like whites in some distant future when everyone would anyway be dead.
And so on through the working days of the week, his political preferences warming on Wednesdays, when the pigs were fed and no major farm implements were broken, to the possibility of voting for the far-right but nominally centrist United Party founded by Oom Jan Smuts, for old times’ sake; on Thursdays to the possibility of voting for the Progressives after Simon had fixed the lucerne fence on his own initiative and maybe my mother was right about them after all — they are people like you and me, dear, they just need love, encouragement and education; until Friday evening arrived to close the week with celebratory dops of cane all round when he would end up as thoroughly pissed as they were, telling rude jokes in his fluent Zulu amid much laughter and actual black-white bonding after which he would stagger back to the farmhouse to declare that he loved them like brothers, just like brothers, and if only the Communists had a sense of humour he would be one of them.
I would be with my mother, physically and politicly.
Wherever you are in the world it’s easy enough to identify woke, bleeding-heart liberals like me. We wear a lot of denim and we try to be nice.
It’s a lot more difficult to pick out right wing nut jobs who aren’t as volubly racist, misogynistic and homophobic as the ones we grew up with in South Africa in the 1960s. If you couldn’t hear them coming you could (gratuitous anti-racist, racist slur) smell them. And it’s especially difficult to distinguish the American variety from the British one.
Oddly and discomfortingly, it has taken Succession to illuminate the difference.
Succession. Martin Amis (RIP), and Ayn Rand.
Totalitarianism produces great literature, but always and only in defiance of it.
Goodreads lists more than eight-hundred books of fiction and non-fiction that fall into the (admittedly loose) category of anti-totalitarianism. A search for pro-totalitarian books produces, well, Mein Kampf.
Only my English reticence, shying quite naturally away from the faintest whiff of a hint of a possible controversy, inhibits me from writing to Goodreads to ask them why The Fountainhead didn’t make the cut.
That, and the memory that Ayn Rand’s chef d'oeuvre was one of my brother Bruce’s three favourite books. The other two, for completion’s sake, were Irving Stone’s epically fictionalised biography of Michelangelo, The Agony and the Ecstasy, and Russell Foreman’s Long Pig (1958), a novel about cannibalism summarised by Kirkus book reviews as, “...full of horrifying savage practices, vigorous action, this is strident excitement which does not always merit assent.”
At the time, circa 1968, I thought The Fountainhead merited less “assent” than Long Pig did. I read the latter as a salaciously gruesome teen fantasy. I read the former as shrill agitprop for capitalism unchained, i.e. totalitarianism in suits.
My dim view of it was consolidated when I discovered in 2016, during the US presidential campaign, that the real estate developer Donald Trump was a “huge fan” of the novel, that he identified personally with Ayn Rand’s protagonist Howard Roark, and that an American private equity firm was named Roark Capital Group in honour of the same character.
1968 happened also to be the year when anyone who thought about anything had to make up their minds about everything. Which is to say, in essence, that anyone over the age of fourteen who could think about anything apart from sex, drugs and rock'n'roll was obliged to decide whose side they were on, politically speaking.
A ripple of protests by students and labour unions against repressive, authoritarian and totalitarian governments had begun in West Berlin, Rome, London, Paris, Italy, Argentina, many American cities and elsewhere around the world in the early 1960s.
Among them, most notably and closest to home, was the Sharpeville massacre of 21st March 1960 when white South African police killed sixty-nine black men, women and children, injuring 180 others, when they opened indiscriminate fire on a crowd of black residents of the eponymous township, not far from Johannesburg, who had gathered to protest against South Africa’s infamous “Pass Laws”, one of the most hated of the many Kafkaesque instruments used by the National Party government to control and enforce the complete separation of the races in labour, love and life.
The ripple became a current. In 1968 it burst its banks in a bloody tidal wave of police and military crackdowns, shootings, executions and massacres in Mexico, Brazil, Spain, Poland, Czechoslovakia and China.
News of them filtered into South Africa, into Natal, and eventually to Estcourt where our history teacher, the remarkable Fiona Cheeseman, did an admirable job of decoding the significance of them without sounding as though she had an opinion one way or the other. So we were left to figure it out the difference between Left and Right for ourselves during break, exchanging Texans, Lucky Strikes and tentative opinions in the ablution block between Eastside and the playground where we had figured out some of the other facts of life.
Whaddya think?
Hmm…
Seems to me on the one side you’ve got some people who want a fairer world where everyone is treated with dignity and respect no matter their race, sex or ability.
Okay…
And on the other side you have the greedy, narcissistic, selfish, vicious dickheads and dooses who don’t give a flying fuck about anything or anyone who isn’t like themselves and who want to imprison, kill or torture the first lot slowly to death because they like the world and what they got from it and want to keep it just the way it is and for it to stay that way forever barring cheaper flights, cheaper caviar and cheaper hookers.
Okay…
Long pause.
Hard to choose, huh?
Sound of toilet flushing.
Which one is left?
The first one, right?
No, left.
Which one is right then?
Can’t remember.
Jeezus, Wessels, what did you eat?
(Muffled) Fok jou.
I think I like the first ones.
I thought you said you were an atheist?
What’s an atheist?
Smells like long dead leguan.
Long pause.
Got a light?
We were fifteen going on sixteen. In two years time we would be called up to the SADF to defend the democracy of apartheid from the ruthlessly undemocratic Communists.
It was confusing.
It was almost as confusing as trying to figure out why, when the Beatles’ famous White Album arrived in the record shop a few months later, the fourth track on the first side of the glossy black vinyl, sandwiched between Glass Onion and Wild Honey Pie, had been rendered unlistenable by the scratch of the censor’s knife. It took a while to find out, via a friend’s older sister who lived in London, that the offensive lyric in Obladi-Oblada that threatened to subvert the cherished morals and ethics of the apartheid state was, “Desmond stays at home and does his pretty face…”
Which helped us to make up our minds. We would be on the side of the cool people, whichever that side was.
By 1972, my first year at the all-white University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg (as it was called then) I had become a predictably long-haired lefty liberal, my political convictions cemented in stone by my annus horribilis in the SADF, by reading Orwell, Huxley and Bradbury, and by the blindingly obvious fact that I owed every single one of the many liberties I enjoyed to the colour of my skin. Apartheid, I said often, loudly and pretentiously, was simultaneously both the incubus and the succubus of every fascist’s favourite wet dream.
I was bothered by one thing, and one thing only. Why did my brother Bruce admire The Fountainhead?
He wasn’t greedy for money, fame or for more than moderate success. He was an artist, a maverick and he was notoriously quick to anger. But he was thoughtful and caring, he loved his family, and he played golf.
He didn’t support apartheid. He thought the legislation and implementation of it was cruel, inhumane and unnecessary. He believed it would have happened anyway, quite naturally, and it would have dissolved quite naturally, in its own way and in its own time, without the need for the bitter rancour of white-black politics or a bloody revolution.
Nor did he blame apartheid exclusively on the Afrikaner nationalists. He thought white, English-speaking South Africans were hypocrites for reaping the benefits of it while attributing the moral disgrace of it to anyone but themselves. And my blithely uninformed socialist solutions for putting South Africa and the world to rights infuriated him to the point of apoplexy.
He wasn’t a racist, a homophobe or a misogynist. Yes, he was a little sexist, but only because he liked it so much.
It niggled at me for years. Eventually, and for the sake of his memory, I filed the question of his admiration for The Fountainhead under AFE, (Awaiting Further Evidence) alongside The Truth About UFOs, The Problem of Evil, The Beatles or The Stones?, and the offensively sexist What Do Women Think About All the Time?
Then I ended up in London, England, where everyone was so nice, so kind and so polite that the difference between Left and Right melted away like frost on a daffodil in the morning’s spring sunshine.
Labour was in power. Tony Blair, only seven or eight months older than me, was the Prime Minister. I was back in my ancestral home, in that eternal, unchanging and apparently unchangeable Cockaigne where the lead stories on the BBC were, typically, about the train from Euston to Birmingham being held up for nearly an hour by ducklings crossing the tracks, thereby inconveniencing several passengers. They were duly interviewed, the passengers. All of them said bless where we would have said shame, man.
The BBC would follow it up in due and inevitable course with several in-depth documentaries about the history of ducks, the psychology of ducks, and the mysterious bond between humans and ducks. There were tips for breeding ducks and roasting ducks. And, Breaking News, that a special BBC investigation could now reveal that Hans Christian Andersen had been inspired to write The Ugly Duckling after a meeting with Princess Charlotte of Belgium, a cousin of, yes, our very own Queen Victoria.
My mother would be delighted when I told her on the phone.
The Washington Post, in its obituary for Martin Amis (RIP), nailed it perfectly:
Amis — the son of famed British writer Kingsley Amis — became one of the characteristic literary celebrities of his generation. He first broke onto the scene with darkly comedic novels about drugs, sex, finance and media, cutting against what he viewed as the British tendency toward airless, sanitized nostalgia.
Washington Post, 22nd May, 2023
(My italics)
I didn’t think England was airless or sanitised in 2001. I thought it was delightfully airy, and beautifully cleansed of the fraught and bitter rancour that had poisoned the political and social discourse I had grown up with. So any kind of nostalgia was fine with me, and the more of it the better.
Then we got WMDs, followed by the WMDs that were Cameron, Johnson, Brexit, more Johnson, Truss and Sunak, all of them enabled by a tyranny of politeness that wouldn’t and couldn’t call them out because, well, we didn’t want to make a fuss.
How are you?
Not too bad.
Left and Right, the terms we use to distinguish broadly progressive political views from broadly conservative ones, have long outlived their usefulness.
The Green Party in the UK, which is positioned in the collective mind of the British public (i.e. the Murdoch press) as further to the left of the political spectrum than even “Red-Alert” Labour, is trying desperately to conserve what is left of the natural world. Just Stop Oil, the radical fringe of the green movement, is desperately trying to conserve our natural resources so that future generations can, for instance, breathe.
The Conservatives, who ditched their burning-torch logo in favour of a blue tree, appear meanwhile to be hellbent on upgrading it to a burning bush.
The example may be trivial. The point isn’t.
The opponents of the left, i.e. Rupert “Logan Roy” Murdoch and the people who over the years have provided him and his ilk with oxygen, have successfully and effectively persuaded the Great British Public and, consequently, vast swathes of the English-speaking world, that the merest breath of a hint of the idea of social justice is the whispered edge of totalitarianism, gulags and the end of the free world as we know it. To have so convincingly conflated the Left with totalitarianism and the Right with freedom must be one of the most extraordinary and deeply chilling achievements of 20th century doublespeak.
Orwell, we know, was an ardent and committed socialist.
The aforementioned Tony Blair once suggested, rightly but somewhat optimistically, that the Right-v-Left divide should rather be characterised as Closed-v-Open.
According to Blair, attitudes towards social issues and globalism are more important than the conventional economic left–right issues. In this model, "open" voters tend to be culturally liberal, multicultural and in favour of globalisation while "closed" voters are culturally conservative, opposed to immigration and in favour of protectionism.
Wikipedia
His mistake, as Brexit proved, was to call them “closed” instead of, say, “blind to the well-being of anybody but themselves”.
I was chewing on this nasty bone when Kendall Roy’s impromptu eulogy at his father’s funeral suddenly, and very unexpectedly, shone a revealing light on the problem of The Fountainhead and, hence, on the false divide between Left and Right.
"Yes, he had a terrible force to him, and a fierce ambition, that could push you to the side," Kendall said. "But it was only that human thing, the will to be, and to be seen, and to do. And now people might want to tend and prune the memory of him, to denigrate that force, that magnificent awful force of him, but, my god, I hope it's in me. Because if we can't match his vim, then god knows the future will be sluggish and grey."
It struck me then: The will to be, and to be seen, and to do — was a resounding echo of Bruce’s impatient and restless will to carve out a life free of the expectations of others, free of cant, free of the comfortable conformities that said the right things and did the wrong ones. Kendall Roy had described how Bruce thought, felt and chose to live.
I knew and I forgot. The Fountainhead is a paean not to capitalism but to Individualism, to that heart-quickening, pulse-racing idea that each of us, as individuals, has the agency and power to change and shape the world according to our own lights.
It’s a feeling, not a philosophy; an idea, not an ideology. It’s a rage against complacency. It’s an urge to make our mark, to make new things, to build new things — to impose our individual wills on the grey and sluggish landscape of the dull conventions that surround us.
For someone like Bruce, with the burning flame of his creative and artistic ambitions suffocated by the polite and petty concerns of the English bourgeoisie of the Natal Midlands, and starved of ait by the closed-minded Afrikaner Calvinists around us who dictated what we could see, experience and imagine, the promise of The Fountainhead would have swept through his dogmatically agnostic soul like the Biblical thunderstorms of ice, fire and howling gales that swept down from the Drakensberg in our late Octobers to quench the aching thirst of the brown veld, to smash the incipient buds in my mother’s sweet English rose garden to smithereens, and to shock us into summer, a sentence that should have had a Beware: Heavy-Handed Pathetic-Fallacy Warning in front of it.
Brian: Please, please, please listen! I've got one or two things to say.
The Crowd: Tell us! Tell us both of them!
Brian: Look, you've got it all wrong! You don't NEED to follow ME, You don't NEED to follow ANYBODY! You've got to think for your selves! You're ALL individuals!
The Crowd: Yes! We're all individuals!
Brian: You're all different!
The Crowd: Yes, we ARE all different!
Man in crowd: I'm not...
The Crowd: Sch!
Individualism is the liberation and celebration of the agency of the self; the urge to embrace who we are, to dig deep into the stuff of ourselves to find the substance we’re made of; in Quaker speech to mine our inner gold — to envision it, extract it, mould it, shape it and share it with the world.
To leave a mark, as Howard Roark and Logan Roy undoubtedly did. Or scars, depending on your point of view.
It’s the polar opposite of blind faith.
So, yes, Bruce was an individualist. I mistakenly believed it placed him on the right of the political spectrum. But Individualism takes no political side. It is only a lack of compassion that places it on the Right.
Bruce was naturally, instinctively, unaffectedly and profoundly cool. And he would have punched you in the face for classifying him with tribally judgemental word.
Which will bring me back to Orwell, to the English novel, and to the central paradox of this peculiar age.
Onwards to Middlemarch.
Interesantes puntos de vista, particularmente lo relativo a The Fountainhead. El hombre mirando al espejo de manera honesta (fría y ardiente) sin maquillaje, sin tomar partido... y con todo el peso tanto de su historia como de sus posibles futuros. Saludos Gordon.