The New Lifetime Reading Plan

Up to 1849 Karl Marx, a German-Jewish middle-class intel- lectual, had spent most of his mature years in subversive jour- nalism in Cologne, Paris, and Brussels. Forced to leave Prussian territory, he emigrated to England. The last thirty- four years of his life were spent there, mainly in the British Museum, which may claim to be the physical incubator of the Communist Revolution. Marx's life was uneventful; it has become eventful posthumously.

His major work is of course Capital. There is no sense in recommending that you read it, unless you are a very earnest student indeed. In addition to its impenetrable German style, its difficulties are formidable; and much of it has been ren- dered utter nonsense by the passage of time and the move- ment of Marx's revered history.

The Communist Manifesto, however, is quite readable. Indeed one might wish it had been less so. It is not a work of literature or even an example of ordered thought. It is propa­ganda, but epochal propaganda. Its original function was to supply a platform in 1847 for the Communist League, as it was then called. Its continuing function has been to supply propa­ganda for the entire communist movement, particularly as it developed after 1917. In clear, if deliberately rhetorical terms,

it presents the main theses of classical communism: that any epoch as a whole is explainable only in terms of its modes of production and exchange; that the history of civilization is a history of class struggle; that now the stage has been reached in which the proletariat must emancipate itself from the bour- geoisie by means of a total overturn of society, and not merely a political revolution.

The Manifesto begins with one of the most famous sen- tences ever written: "A spectre is haunting Europe—the spec- tre of Communism.^,> It concludes with three sentences no less famous: "The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workingmen of ali countries, unite."

The dissolution in our time of the USSR may seem to have demonstrated that Marx's concluding sentences are untrue. But there are millions of Chinese who are taught Communism as the only truth, and it is a disturbing fact that our free enter­prise system is still opposed by many in what was once the Soviet Union. Unfortunately The Communist Manifesto must still be read as something more than an historical document. Its influence remains one of the iron realities of our era.

C.F.

83

HERMAN MELVILLE

1819-1891

Moby Dick, Bartleby the Scrivener

At twenty-five Melville had already had most of the experi- ences that were to supply him with the raw materiais for his books. As a seaman he had served aboard the trader St. Laurence, the whaler Acushnet, the Australian bark Lucy Ann, and the frigate United States. He had sailed both the Atlantic and the South Seas. He had undergone "an indulgent captiv- ity" of some four weeks with a cannibal tribe in the Marquesas.

His adventures had been preceded by an aimless, sketchy edu- cation and were to be followed by a little formal travei in Europe and the Holy Land. These externai events—plus a brooding, powerful, and original genius—were enough to pro- duce not only Moby Dick but almost a score of other works in prose and verse. One of these, Billy Budd, Foretopman, was published many years after his death, and is well worth read­ing. He wrote Typee, an account of his stay with the cannibals, when he was twenty-five. It had considerable success. Nothing he wrote thereafter received much popular welcome, and the latter half of his life was spent in obscurity and loneliness. Moby Dick (1851) was not precisely unnoticed, it is true, but it was not understood. Not until the Twenties of our century, about thirty years after Melville^ death, was it resurrected by a few devoted scholars. Then Melville's reputation skyrocketed, and it has never since greatly diminished. Moby Dick is recog- nized everywhere as one of the world's great novйis.

"I have written a wicked book and feel as spotless as the lamb," wrote Melville to his good friend Hawthorne [70]. An interesting sentence. Partly it is light irony. Partly it is a recog- nition of the fact that Moby Dicfcs metaphysical and religious defiances would hardly please Melville^ straitlaced family. And partly it is a fair description of the book. For, though the inten- tion is of course not wicked, the novel is about evil, and it is hardly Christian in tone.

There are other narrative prose works of the imagination that can be read on two or more planes—for instance, Gullivers Traveis [52], Alice s Adventures in Wonderland [91], Huckleberry Finn [92], and Don Quixote [38]. Moby Dick belongs with them.