New Kind of Statesmanship

Of England's weekly journals of opinion, the New Statesman is beyond much doubt the best written, best edited, most successful--and most maddening. It is read round the world, has particular standing among Asian intellectuals, including India's Prime Minister Nehru, who is apt to agonize over the mildest New Statesman rebuke. In Britain, it is relished or reviled with equal fervor. Wrote Irish Author Sean O'Faolain: "It is the British bible of every washed-up Liberal, soured Conservative, lapsed Catholic, half-baked grammar-school intellectual, and every other unhappy misfit, pink and pacifist, whose sole prophylactic against despair, if not suicide, is a weekly injection of Kingsley Martin's Bottled Bellyache."

Basil Kingsley Martin has been stirring such steam-heated passion since he became the Statesman's editor in 1931. He made it Britain's leading organ of dissent, with a circulation of 80,038--nearly twice that of its competitor, the Spectator (42,453). Now, after an uncharacteristically mild valedictory ("Thirty years at an office desk seems long enough"), Kingsley Martin, 63, is taking a new title--editorial director--and a new assignment as the Statesman's roving foreign correspondent. His chosen successor as editor: Assistant Editor John Freeman, 45.

Zigzag Intellectual. Following in Martin's wake may take some doing. A brilliant but zigzag intellectual with the tonsure and the look of a nonconformist cleric (his father was just that), Martin came to the Statesman determined to kindle a blaze: "I thought I was the sort of editor who would destroy the paper within six months but would make my message clear." He succeeded in doing neither.

Martin's convictions had the habit of ringing like gongs; he refused to shoulder arms in World War I, for example, not on religious but on personal grounds (he later served with an ambulance unit in France). His pacifism sometimes sounded like appeasement at nearly any price. The Statesman was the first publication in Great Britain to advocate ceding the Sudetenland to Hitler. Early in World War II, the New Statesman hinted at a negotiated peace. It questioned the legality of U.S. intervention in Korea, editorialized: "The Communist offensive in Korea has given American imperialism just the opportunity it deserved." Recently, one of its top editors could write of the "remarkably endearing and encouraging revolution" that delivered Cuba to Fidel Castro.

Suits for an Ear. Such positions, coupled with Martin's professional anti-Americanism (that kind that denies its anti-Americanism), have made the magazine habit-forming to its particular set of readers. "In its fantastic inconsistencies," admits one Statesman contributor, "the New Statesman distills the spiritual agony of the British intellectuals." This only partly explains the magazine's stature. Week in and out, it commands what may be the most illustrious stable of contributors in England although it pays them next to nothing. George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, J. B. Priestley, V. S. Pritchett, and other literary lights past and present, have all appeared in its pages, happy to address the New Statesman's high-IQ audience. Many of them disdain the political views up front. Some others, with a message to spread, are well aware of Martin's reputation for adopting the positions of the last person he talked to, sue for his ear just before he begins to write. "The art of Kingsley is that he hasn't got a political line, but merely a color and tone," says a friend. Says another: "He's not even a loyal fellow traveler."

The chief difference between Outgoing Editor Martin and Incoming Editor Freeman is that Freeman is not a professional rebel. But he is every bit as much an individualist, ignores a ringing telephone when not in the mood to talk, explodes in temper fits, and vanishes from cocktail parties almost as soon as he arrives: "I look around to see if there's anyone I want to spend the evening with. If not, I leave."

Imperialistic Difference. Tall and ginger-haired, John Freeman emerged from the war a major to serve with distinction in Parliament as one of the Labor Party's brightest young men. He resigned in 1951 in disillusion over cuts in social services and increases in defense spending. Since then, Freeman has earned a national reputation as the caustic and incisive interviewer of the known and the renowned (e.g., Carl Jung, Racing Driver Stirling Moss, former Prime Minister Clement Attlee, Adlai Stevenson, Novelist Evelyn Waugh) on BBC's topnotch TV program, Face to Face.

Hired as assistant editor in 1951, Freeman has been groomed to take Martin's place. Under Freeman, the magazine is likely to move more toward the left's center. His view on U.S. relations: "The only real obstacle to understanding is that we are a vanishing imperialism and the U.S. is a rising imperialism." He intends to build up the Statesman's vital rear, a compelling assortment of features, literary articles and whimsical prize contests.*

The Statesman's staff--five regulars, about a dozen regular contributors--will be opened to men "still young enough that their attitudes haven't all hardened." Free man is acutely conscious that the Martin menu of sour rectitude and chronic dissidence has lost flavor among Britain's youth: "A journal of dissent should appeal to the young; I attach high priority to that." But Freeman's Statesman stands in no real danger of domestication. "The thing a radical journal ought to do," said Freeman last week, "is be first to point out that the emperor has no clothes."

*Sample clerihew: "The chimpanzee/Is a most embarrassing animal to see, /For he always indulges in sex/When the visitor least expects."

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