Left-Wing Villain

GOING TO THE RIVER by Constantine Fitz Gibbon. 277 pages. Norton. $4.95.

As World War I approaches its demi-centenary, more and more British writers are exploring it as a true watershed in European history. Presented by Anglo-American Constantine Fitz Gibbon, the war not only killed millions in the trenches, it destroyed the survivors. The demanding civic faith and exacting private moral code of the Victorians were the unlisted casualties. The survivors who carried on were Eliot's "hollow men, headpiece filled with straw."

Figures in this novel of invisible corruption include Dr. Talbot, rector of "Gloucester" College, Oxford, who lends his prestige to the concoction of war propaganda, and Lord Pontypool, a vulgarian press lord, whose horrible career is clearly based on that of megalomaniac Lord Northcliffe, creator of Britain's all-too-popular press. But the chief villain is one who usually appears as a fictional hero--the sensitive leftwing intellectual. Tony Caldecott had been the editor of a Quaker-financed liberal weekly and survives the war with a combat-won Military Cross and consciousness of a desperate cowardice known only to himself and his dead comrades. Between 1918 and 1939, he profitably combines sensational political journalism with the business of being an undercover agent of the Communist Party. He has a charm of a kind, and Lord Pontypool, for one, cannot live without him. But the penumbra of lies and bad faith under which he lives infects all his acquaintances. His wife, Daisy, becomes a dipsomaniac.

Caldecott is a truly dreadful character, designed to win Fitz Gibbon no friends in British left-wing intellectual circles, who have detested him ever since When the Kissing Had to Stop (TIME, July 18, 1960) made the left the villain of contemporary British history. Fitz Gibbon does not seem to mind, has announced his next book as Random Thoughts of a Fascist Hyena.

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