They Chose Damnation

THE NEW MEANING OF TREASON by Rebecca Wesf. 374 pages. Viking. $6.95.

From her lofty eminence as one of the world's most celebrated woman authors, Dame Rebecca West has been passing chilly judgment on traitors for some years now. Her earlier book, The Meaning of Treason, which dealt mostly with Nazi traitors, has now been expanded to include more recent defectors to Communism: Klaus Fuchs, Burgess and McLean, the Rosenbergs; and she winds up with a few words on the madcap, if not strictly treasonous, doings of Christine Keeler and friends.

Seedy & Scientific. Good reporter that she is, Dame Rebecca has poked into every nook and cranny of her traitors' lives, dug up all the dirt on them and buried them in it. This disposes of them, but does it explain them? Aloof, detached, reproving, very much the grande dame at 72, Dame Rebecca is convinced that the traitors were all perfectly rational people, always knowing right from wrong and exactly where they were going. She writes of Lord Haw-Haw: "He should have recognized that the words he had been saying since 1927 were. 'Evil, be thou my good.' But he would not open his eyes or unstop his ears, and he stood fast and chose damnation." This makes HawHaw sound like Faust, when he was actually a miserable, shabby, bewildered, compulsive, witless and pathetic little fellow.

Dame Rebecca is on firmer ground when she writes about the Communist traitors, who were more knowing and rational than the Nazis. She makes a sharp distinction between the seedy, out-of-sorts types who were attracted to Nazism as an answer to their personal bitterness and the more self-controlled, often scientifically skilled persons who joined the Communists for ideological reasons. The Communist "network of perceptions and association and interpretations," she writes, "made the Nazi-Fascists seem like hogs rooting among the simple, unimproved beech mast of the world." She also makes the cogent point that the well-publicized flights from England of Spies Bruno Pontecorvo, Burgess and McLean were deliberately contrived by Moscow to destroy U.S. confidence in England and sow disunity among the allies.

Signs of Decadence. No one can quarrel with the facts that Dame Rebecca presents, and there is no one who tells a better tale of espionage. The quarrel is with the "meaning" she assigns this espionage. Because Klaus Fuchs is a scientist and intellectually arrogant, she suggests that all scientists are peculiarly prone to treason. Because most of the traitors did not be lieve in God, she suggests that Communism or Nazism is the only alternative to faith in God. She is perfectly correct in charging the West, and Great Britain in particular, with egregious laxity in letting Communist spies steal so many atomic secrets. But she is on treacherous ground indeed when she says that this handful of traitors is a symptom of Western decadence and decline. Every society has its misfits, and always will.

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