New Left Review I/25, May-June 1964
Quintin Hoare
A history of the USA; A History of the USSR
A history of the USA. André Maurois. Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 36s.
A history of the USSR. Louis Aragon. Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 63s.
The difference in the price of these two books reflects the difference in their lengths; the only real difference that there is between what one might have expected to be the products of two opposed traditions of historical interpretation. Maurois is urbane and anglophile—he is photographed for the dust-cover wearing a dinner-jacket—and his book is resolutely amateur, moderate, middle-brow and uncritical. He deplores the ‘out-of-date tradition’ which makes a distinction between capitalist and collectivist economies (p.327); deals with Cuba in four trite sentences; gives as examples of ‘great, essentially American’ music that of Gershwin and Bernstein; sees jazz as merely a ‘Dionysiac stimulation’. The situation of negroes in the United States Maurois dismisses in one ineffable paragraph, which ends as follows: ‘In possibly 30 or 50 years, there will be complete racial equality. It may be said that 30 or 50 years is a long time; but there are very ancient prejudices that have to be overcome. One generation has to pass away and a fresh one must rise up: meanwhile there will be a continuous progress, because that is in the nature of things.’ This is typical of this trivial book.
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