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GREAT NOVELIST WAS ALSO GREAT EDITOR

‘Be lively-be read’ was Dickens’
guide in publishing his weekly

IF ALFRED HARMSWORTH, .

Lord Northcliffe, is to be believ-
-ed — and he, surely, should know
—the greatest editor of a popular
magazine that ever lived was
Charles Dickens. —

This is proved by the magazine
he founded in 1850 and conduct-
ed thenceforward to the end of
his life. It suffered one change
of name (for legal reasons) from
Household Words to All the Year
Round. It was a 24-page weekly,
sold at twopence and maintained
with few fluctuations the circula-
tion of 250,000 it achieved with
its first number.

Naturally the name and popu-
larity of Charles Dickens had a
good deal to do with this suc-
cess. But this is only another
way of saying that the magazine
showed the qualities evidenced in

» Dickens’ novels—qualities which
have made him the most endur-
ingly popular of all English nov-
elists, and the English writer
whose work has been most often
-translated, and which continues

~ to be the most widely popular
with the common people wher-
ever printed matter is circulated.

Dickens loved life intensely.
And because he thought that
everybody had a right to get the
best possible out of existence,
and not the worst, in every issue
that he could see clearly he took
the side of the common people
against every sort of oppression,

BOOKS

deprivation, cruelty or exploita-
tion. The common people felt in
him a friend; and they continue
to do so long after his hand has
been still in death, and in lands
that his eyes never saw.

x x x :

DICKENS WAS not in the for-
mal sense a Socialist. Nor, for
the matter of that, was he a Radi-
cal in the orthodox doctrinaire
sense. He had in fact| an out-
spoken contempt for the official
political parties.of his day. But
as'a humanitarian he was always
fiercely eager to get to the root
of every evil he saw and, if pos-
sible, get rid of it without waste
of time.

Bernard Shaw swore that it
was Dickens’ Little Dorrit which
made him a Socialist. There is,
of course, a measure of Shavian
paradox in this.

But the picture Dickens draws
of the poor imprisoned in poverty
and the rich enslaved by their
riches — so that a shift over from
poverty to riches only produces
a change of prison — gives such
an indictment of bourgeois so-
ciety as would evoke a socialist
conviction in anyone who had al-
ready begun to think along those
lines.

And the concept at the back of
Little Dorrit is the one behind
every issue of Household Words.

But Dickens was a born journal-
ist — in the sense that Daniel

British soldier relates

horrors of Koreanwar

STANDING IN his slit trench
or slogging through a shattered
village, the private soldier catches
‘the.full impact of horror wrought
by a brutal and unnecessary war.

Now one of them, Julian Tun-
_stall of the British Army’s Middle-

~ sex Regiment, has put into words -
' for all to understand the. bitter

bewilderment of a man caught up
in the Korean war.

His book, ! Fought in Korea
(obtainable here at the People’s
Cooperative Bookstore, 337 West
Pender, price $1.50) is a cry to

* the peoples of the Western coun-

tries to ensure that the U.S. and

its puppet, Syngman Rhee do not |
' sabotage the armistice and bring

new horrors on that ravaged coun-
try.

Tunstall first saw action on the
perimeter of the “Pusan box” to-
ward the end of 1950.

He fought his way north in

‘MacArthur’s crazy attempt to
reach the Yalu River, and was
among the British troops who had
the thankless task of protecting
the rear of the panic-stricken
Americans when they fled south.

The destruction of Seoul during
its recapture by the Americans
is seen as an unnecessary act of

- vandalism.

“Seoul could have been by-
passed and the whole area sur-
rounded from the north and
east. But this was not to be.

“The Americans, ever keen to
score some colorful victory and
needing some concrete triumph
to sustain their troops and their
reputation, decided to fight -in
the city, completely disregard-
ing the consequences. . . . This
idea alone caused Seoul’s de-
struction.”

At first hand Tunstall saw the
methods employed by Rhee police
to question civilians or prisoners
of war.

“If a Korean failed to answer
quickly enough, or even gave an
unexpected reply, he was beat-
en with thick wooden clubs or
batons. Whether he was beaten
on the head seemed unimport-
ant to the police, who continued
to strike him until either he
‘confessed’ or could not rise to
his feet.” ~

Then the picture of the drive
toward the Manchurian border,
with its ruthless slaughter of men,
women and children.

“Twice in one day I saw by
the side of the road a mother
with her baby still tied to her
back, both lying dead... . Air-
craft and ground troops alike
simply shot at anything that
moved to their front, completely
regardless of what or who it
happened to be.”

These three extracts taken from
the first few pages of the book
give some idea of the fantastic
brutality of the Korean war and
how far removed it was from the
“liberating mission” its U.S. spon-
sors claimed to be fulfilling.

Making friends with some of
the Korean civilians who escaped
death, Tunstall learned how deep-
ly they resented the treatment
accorded to them as “gooks” by
the Americans—and some other
troops — the wanton destruction
of their homes, and the molesta-
tion of the women. ‘:

Tunstall left Korea with the
war still at its height. His quiet
vow that one day he will return
to Korea to help rebuild it from

‘the ruins he helped unwillingly

to create, rings with sincerity.
It is a book that can do much
to show people what has been
done in their name and how they
can prevent Korea again being
made.a battlefield —FRED PATE-

_ MAN.

Defoe was a journalist, and some
of us think, the greatest of jour-
nalists, as he was the first of any
importance.

Life Defoe, Dickens saw that
the first and foremost object of a
journalist must be to get read.
Dickens insisted, rightly, upon
factual accuracy. But he insisted
even more that. accuracy loses
most of its merit if it is not pres-
ented in a lively and a convincing
way.

Be lively! Be lively! Be lively!
—is his repeated instruction to
his chief sub-editor.

With that end in view, he
studied every device to make his
journal entertaining as well as
instructive and politically inspir-
ing.

Every copy tackled some issue
upon which reform was needed,
and suggested remedies. Educa-
tion, housing, sanitation, cooper-
atives, trade unions — upon all
these and upon kindred questions
there was always something in
every, issue, and Dickens never
pullled his punches. He: always
hit the enemy the hardest blow he
could.

But — and this is to be spec-
ially noted — he never allowed
direct political matter to fill more
than five or at most six of his 24
pages. The rest of his space he
filled with popular science; his-
torical, biographical or literary-
critical articles; poems; and
prose-fiction.

This theory — a sound one —
was that you can overdo any good
thing. A journal exclusively de-
voted to Radical politics will be
read only by Radicals, who, being
already convinced, will have only
a minimal need of its stimulation.
' But a journal that is read for
its stories, its entertaining de-
scriptions, and its culturally in-
formative articles, can, at the
same time, draw attention ef-
fectively to practical matters that
would repel the same readers if
given in too large, and too badly-
cooked, lumps. :

~ There is plenty of » evidence
that Dickens did more for radical-
ism, then developing into social-
ism, by this oblique method of
making the politics an ingredient
in what was essentially an enter-
tainment, than any rival did by a
less imaginative approach.

ok * *

DICKENS, TOO, had a pro-
found: conviction not only that
men needed entertainment; but
that they derived, consciously or
unconsciously, an educational
gain from the things which enter-
tained them.

In one of the first numbers of
Household Words he describes a
visit to the Victoria Theatre in
London — it was the “New” Vic,
then: it is the “Old” Vic now —
along with a “whelk-seller from
the New Cut.”

Dickens gets a lot of fun out
of the absurdities of the melo-
drama enacted. But he grasps the
point of the mass-sympathy ex-
cited when a large audience of
working folk is gathered together
thus:

The food given to their sym-

pathies and their imaginations
might be better in quality; but
some food of the kind they must
have. Better melodrama than no
mental-emotional food at all. For,
it is Dickens’ conviction, the para-
mount need of us all is imagin-
ative-sympathy and sympathetic-
imagination. Without those quali-
ties nobody could ever be roused

to reform anything. ~
Dickens worked that view out
at full length in the two novels
he wrote as serials for his maga-
zine, Hard Times and the Tale of
Two Cities. And the whole world

has read those books.
—T. A. JACKSON.

Attainment of the 29,002-foot peak of Mount Everest (above) by

Sir Edmund Percival Hilary and Tensing Norkay is recorded in a

remarkable British documentary, The

Onquest of Everest.

Everest conquest recorded

by British documentary

A REMARKABLE British color
documentary, The Conquest of
Everest, records the successful
climbing for the first time in his-
tory of the world’s highest and
most formidable mountain (29,-
002 feet). .

~Located in the Himalayas be-
tween Nepal. and Tibet, Mount
Everest is half as high: again as
Mount Logan, the 19,850-foot
peak at the extreme southeastern
tip of the Yukon Territory.

The significance of the con-

quest of Mount Everest is two- -

fold.

First, it showed how far sci-
ence has advanced since the last
unsuccessful attempt a quarter of
a century ago. This time the Eng-
lish-led expedition assailed the
mountain equipped with a bet-
ter knowledge of breathing con-
ditions at high altitudes, the re-
sult of a whole series of intensive,
pre-climbing oxygen tests in a
laboratory.

In short, the arts and sciences
usually associated with war were
used to conquer this outpost of
nature which had defied man’s
ingenuity for nearly a century,
and that was the cement that pav-
ed the way to the success of this

venture. Science in the service
of peaceful pursuits — that was
the lesson of Mount Everest.

Second, for the first time E
: uro-
peans started climbing Mount
verest, an Asian was a full-fledg-
ed member of a climbing party.

Tensing Norkay, veteran Nepal-
ese guide, was one of the two
men to reach the summit of Ey-
erest. The story in the New York
Times said Norkay was the first
to reach the top, then went back
43 help the exhausted New Zea-
rae Hilary, make the final

The climbers carried three fi
to the top—British, United Ne.
tions and Nepalese.

_Thus was acknowledged the
tise of Asia as a power in world
affairs,

At last there was some recog-
nition for the labor of the hun-
dreds of Asian workers who had
the tremendous job of carrying
the several hundred tons of equip-
peu from the foothills to the

p.

The expedition, as The Con-
quest of Everest shows, could not
have gotten off the ground with-
out their help and advice. 3

—DAVID. PLATT.

Politics of Hollywood

IT’S ALWAYS said by hostile
critics of Soviet films that they
are “all propaganda.”

And so they are. Propaganda
for peace, for human dignity,

for the pride and happiness of |
humanity struggling to build a_

better life.

But what about Hollywood
films? Are they all propaganda
too—of a different kind—or are
some of them just  entertain-
ment?

John Howard Lawson, the
author of Films in the Battle of
Ideas (price $1.10 at the People’s
Cooperative Bookstore, 337 West
Pender Street, Vancouver), is well

» qualified to answer these ques-

tions. As a screenwriter of dis-
tinction, a former president of
the Screen Writers’ Guild, he has
known Hollywood intimately -as
a creative worker.

And as one of the Hollywood -

Ten—the film artists jailed for
refusing to cooperate with the
witch-hunting Un-American Ac-
tivities Committee—he has had
first-hand experience of the ter-
ror that rules Hollywood today.
He shows clearly that Holly-
wood has a definite job to do in
selling U.S. capitalist society at
home and abroad, and that an
increasingly close control is ex-
ercised by the ruling class: over
the content of its films and the
people employed in making them.

In a patient analysis of some
recent Hollywood films, Lawson
shows how the familiar gangster
central figure has merged over
the years into the unthinking
ruthless soldier-hero.
Every filmgoer can confirm
from his own experience Lawson’s
indictment of the social pattern
of Hollywood films as one in
which history is consistently fal-
Sified, women are degraded and
the informer glorified.

The way to combat the evil of
Hollywood, he thinks, is for trade
union and other progressive org-
anizations to make their own films
and for audiences to insist on see-
ing these films and Progressive
films from abroad instead of
meekly accepting what Hollywood
hands out.

In establishing his main point
Lawson has tended to over-sim-

plify here and there, and in prais-

ing Soviet films for being ¢hiefly
concerned with problems‘of work
and reconstruction he under-rates
the importance of personal life
as the subject, for art in a social-
ist society—as Soviet film-makers
themselves underrated it until
their audiences put them right.
But his clear-eyed analysis of
the Hollywood machine and his
practical statement of how it can
be fought are badly needed by
film-makers, audiences and critics
alike THOMAS SPENCER.

PACIFIC TRIBUNE — FEBRUARY 5, 1954 — PAGE 8