Pedigree of Bolshevism

But I could not help wondering, as I turned these purring pages, whether Mr. Wilson would have allowed his hero to admire the equivalent sights of Berlin quite so innocently and unreservedly, if Fate had taken him there during the Nazi years. Surely there were individual German physicists then, as decent and likable as Dmitri Goncharoff; yet no responsible American writer or publisher, in those days, would have dared to pretend that a novel concerning them was authentic, or even plausible, if it ignored their acquiescence in the regime their work sustained. To Mr. Wilson’s characters, on the other hand, Budapest is merely the name of a city, and—with an irony that makes one wonder what his unconscious was up to—he puts one of his longest paeans to coexistence in the mouth of a Hungarian.

So Nicholas Rennet, who began by committing adultery with a woman, ends by committing it with a country, and instead of betraying only a luckless spouse betrays, by his moral blindness, the civilization that educated and rewarded him. It is a theme worthy of a great writer, and if Mr. Wilson had intended this result his novel might have had a significance far deeper than it does. Instead, he shares his hero’s blindness, and thus participates in his betrayal. No wonder Piatnitskaya snapped him up.

SP

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Stefan T. Possony

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But I could not help wondering, as I turned these purring pages, whether Mr. Wilson would have allowed his hero to admire the equivalent sights of Berlin quite so innocently and unreservedly, if Fate had taken him there during the Nazi years. Surely there were individual German physicists then, as decent and likable as Dmitri Goncharoff; yet no responsible American writer or publisher, in those days, would have dared to pretend that a novel concerning them was authentic, or even plausible, if it ignored their acquiescence in the regime their work sustained. To Mr. Wilson’s characters, on the other hand, Budapest is merely the name of a city, and—with an irony that makes one wonder what his unconscious was up to—he puts one of his longest paeans to coexistence in the mouth of a Hungarian.

So Nicholas Rennet, who began by committing adultery with a woman, ends by committing it with a country, and instead of betraying only a luckless spouse betrays, by his moral blindness, the civilization that educated and rewarded him. It is a theme worthy of a great writer, and if Mr. Wilson had intended this result his novel might have had a significance far deeper than it does. Instead, he shares his hero’s blindness, and thus participates in his betrayal. No wonder Piatnitskaya snapped him up.