Double bloodiness

It is rare for a book to be sent out twice for review in the TLS - and almost always an error.

But in 1928, as I have just discovered, we both asked for and published two reviews of Julien Benda's 'La Trahison des Clercs', a work whose title  (if not its content or the name of its author) still reverberates around discussions of intellectual engagement with the Iraq War and other conflicts of our time.

Our second review was by T.S.Eliot - which already makes the matter slightly different from the usual examples of editorial inefficiency.

But the distinction of our second-choice writer is not the only reason that this subject is being reconsidered today.

Stefan Collini uncovers our Benda 'double' in the course of a chapter in his Absent Minds (see Bloody Intellectuals below) in which he despairs of the continuing influence of a second-rate book that has been variously translated into English as 'The Great Betrayal' and 'the Treason of the Intellectuals'.

Benda was wealthy Jewish man of letters whose lengthy writing life stretched from 1857 to 1956 - from Dreyfus to De Gaulle. In 1927 he famously argued that his intellectual contemporaries had let down their fellow men by rejecting the pure philosophical idealism of their predecessors and allying themselves with practical political movements in support of nationalism or class. This was the 'treason'.

The first TLS review of the French edition treated this idea rather lightly - in the best tradition of British amusement at exaggerated French claims.

Collini has some sympathy for this British approach, pointing out that Benda's claim to be above politics was almost wholly bogus. An alleged political purity allowed the Frenchman to  espouse universal values of reason and human rights which were part of the rhetorical weaponry of the Left while denouncing narrower cultural values which were deployed by the Right. The TLS was 'slight, almost whimsical' in its verdict - and well justified even if the piece was not one of our finest.

A few weeks later the TLS returned to the fray with a second anonymous review which we now know was written by T.S. Eliot, a frequent contributor at that time. Collini argues that Eliot's more sympathetic account was a great deal superior to the book he was reviewing - a tradition at the TLS which we still like to maintain whenever we can.

Eliot claimed to agree with Benda in principle but was not willing to see the men of letters shut out from the world so completely. In its purest form Benda's doctrine 'was a counsel of despair for it advises leaving the regiment of the world to those persons who have no interest in ideas whatsoever'. Eliot distinguished instead 'between those clercs who appeal merely to the emotion of their readers and those who appeal, or try to appeal, to their intelligence'.

Collini cannot avoid Benda, despite his impatience with his claims, because 'La trahison' and its afterlife express the 'double fantasy' which is at the heart of his own bracing work on Intellectuals in Britain.

The first fantasy is that there exists intellectual activity which is entirely divorced from the world, the flesh and the devil. The second fantasy is that even the purest thought can be operative in the world without being at all corrupted or compromised. Collini works his way through both of these powerful dreams.

The phrase itself has become the thing. Attacks on 'treasonable clerks' continue to be made - most noisily now over Iraq - because the phrase can apply so handily to all sides.

It can be used against neo-conservative idealists who aim to spread reason and justice ('what Namier regarded as the most fatuous and self-deceived form of behaviour on the part of that characteristically fatuous and self-deceived species, the intellectual').

And intellectual opponents of the Iraqi intervention can also feel its sting - dubbed as 'treasonable' for their failure to recognise the lofty philosophical motives, in the best Benda tradition, which spurred many of the war's most prominent supporters.

Collini dissects this rare 'TLS double' with patience and elegance.

If his own book were somehow itself to receive multiple reviews, it would be attention well deserved.

The Editor is currently quite tempted.