Part of the Truth, by Granville Hicks (Harcourt, $5.95). “I was a good boy” asserts Mr. Hicks at the outset of an autobiography whose seeming purpose is to persuade the reader that its author remained a good boy all the days of his life. He was a good boy as a Communist sympathizer in the early 1930s; he was a good boy as the Party’s leading literatus in the later 1930s, and —as all good boys should do—he quit the Party at the time of the Hitler-Stalin pact. He became a socialist, and then a “critical liberal,” which is presumably what good boys grow up to be. One thinks of Whittaker Chambers, who was not a good boy. But to compare Chambers and Hicks is to compare Oedipus and Peer Gynt. The one knew that motives do not count, but that the act does; that the evil of the act was his evil, and, knowing this, knew guilt. The other trivializes the act, insists that his motives were pure, and reassures himself that he is really a fine fellow at heart who, as Hicks puts it, was “betrayed by good intentions into taking an evil position.” For such a one, evil is alien and guilt is unknown. He dwells on the secular surface of life where nothing more profound can be discerned than mistakes in judgment and resulting embarrassments. Such a life is sheer surface, is flat,
and so is the chronicle of it that Hicks has recorded. Nothing seems too minor for mention; other people’s names drop like hailstones; and everything is recited in an invincible, dull monotone that makes even the major events seem trivial. E. H. WALL
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