Writing put to evil ends

Oneworld, £16.99

THE 20th century produced despots of varying degrees of madness but there wasn’t a decent writer among them. Stalin and Mao hardly needed atomic bombs – torching their collected works would have produced the same effect. Daniel Kalder, a former Fifer and current Texan, performed a task of self-flagellating diligence by delving into the dictators’ canon. He even read the follow-up to Mein Kampf, the one about fashion and dating. Through a series of essays, Dictator Literature provides entertaining hints of the “Krakatoalike eruption of despotic verbiage” that characterised the lives of people under the grey clouds of dictatorship.

This is a book about writing put to evil ends. First there was Lenin, who devised “a new identity from the bad ideas he found in a variety of not terribly good books”. He then created a new identity for a whole country on the basis of his own bad books, his leadership of the revolution secured by inflicting angry reviews on his rivals. Stalin knew more about real violence. He was a thug-poet who was taught Russian at the local church school in “an error of world-historical proportions”. But still, Stalin was a romantic. He believed in the soul-shaping power of literature only a little less than he believed in the soul-destroying power of the gulag. It was sad, but only for him, that few souls even noticed socialist-realist literature about hydroelectric dams. Unsurprisingly, the mass murderer “was also the line editor from hell”.

Most despots would benefit from Stalin’s corrections but Mussolini wrote “prose that was at times highly readable”. Kalder quotes him on Nietzsche and there’s a whiff of Norman Mailer at his most unhinged. Before getting his job as dictator, Mussolini was a teacher like his admirer Jean Brodie. He wrote a pulpy novel about cardinals with mistresses that “wriggles and writhes with exuberant fleshiness”. There was a bigger problem, however: it wasn’t that Mussolini the dictator was different from Mussolini the writer, he was the opposite. The young Duce was a socialist and, like the young Brando, opposed to any authority he could lay his hands on. Later, when he looked like the old Brando, he was an authoritarian fascist. Undaunted, Mussolini invaded new literary forms by co-authoring a play about Napoleon. Hanging from a lamppost was far in the future.

In China, Mao worked in a library and owned some bookshops. He was a promising young revolutionary who opposed Marxist waffling in favour of analysis based on Chinese conditions. Eventually, however, he succumbed to the charms of incoherence and churned out books that allowed western intellectuals to prove “their immense sophistication via their enthusiasm for the ideas of a totalitarian despot”. Like his fellow poet Stalin, Mao inflicted terrible suffering on literature. Only about 100 novels were published during the Cultural Revolution as China’s trees worked overtime to produce 200 million copies of the Little Red Book. Its popularity in countries where people were free to read whatever they pleased says more about human nature than the transcendental wisdom it contained.

Though not in the top league of murderous maniacs, Franco managed to write about the worldwide conspiracy of freemasonry with all the grunting madness of books by his more illustrious colleagues. In communist eastern Europe, dictators churned out piles of words, the main objective of which was to avoid transgressing against Stalin’s thinking.

Kalder gives the impression of being well-versed in political theory but that hasn’t stopped him from writing a highly readable book. He uses droll mockery to undermine titanic figures who sought to create new societies despite being unable to write a half-decent sentence. Only occasionally does he slip into a bald sarcasm that feels too easy. Does dictator literature matter? Here is the reality: “Lenin and Trotsky, for all their fluency in theoretical matters, perhaps owed more of their success to their willingness to inflict extreme violence on their foes”. Kalder is footering in the footnotes of history but he knows a person can do far worse with their time.