The Party Line: A Play in Two Acts, written by Sheryl Longin and Roger L. Simon. Criterion Books, 2012. 160 pages. Softcover, $15.95.
The story of Walter Duranty is a far too-little-known chapter in the history of journalism and foreign relations. Duranty was a respected international reporter for the New York Times, and won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of life in the Soviet Union during the 1930’s. Duranty presented Stalin’s USSR as a successful and prosperous nation, and compared the communist system favorably to the Great Depression-afflicted United States. At this time, many whistleblowers and activists were trying to alert the world to the fact that the seeming success of the Soviet Union was largely a sham. Not only was Stalin’s government horribly mismanaging the country’s development, but in order to support other areas of the nation, they were deliberately provoking a famine in the Ukraine, resulting in the deaths of millions.
Though the famine, widely known today as the Holodomor, is acknowledged by many leading figures and politicians to be an act of genocide, there are vast numbers of Holodomor deniers in the present day, and there were plenty of deniers during the 1930’s as well. Duranty was one of the most prominent and influential figures who declared that there was no famine or malfeasance on the part on the Soviet government. Prominent media figures and policy makers accepted Duranty’s version of events, and people who attempted to reveal the truth were marginalized and derided.
Why did Duranty cover up the famine? There is no clear-cut answer, though the play does provide some good suggestions. Soviet sympathies may be one reason– publicizing the massive deaths from starvation would have seriously discredited the communist system. Additionally, journalists who reported the truth might have been banned from the Soviet Union, and therefore, might have been blackballed from their profession.
Notably, The Party Line is not a straight history of Duranty’s career, but instead is a mixture of fact and fantasia, jumping between the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Some of the characters, like Duranty, Fortuyn, and Crowley, are real. Others, like Duranty’s son, have been fictionalized to the point where they almost certainly have only a peripheral connection to the actual person. Other characters are purely the creation of Longin and Simon.
The Party Line addresses the effects of Duranty’s reporting, covering multiple storylines, including Duranty’s career, other journalists wrestling with the ethics of whether to report the truth or not, and a parallel storyline between Duranty’s son and the Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn. Fortuyn crusaded against the threats he perceived were threatening Dutch society, and in return was assassinated. Fortuyn and Duranty are contrasted as radically different men, one principled, the other unethical. I have some hesitations about the portrayal of Fortuyn– by depicting Fortuyn as a hero of conscience some of the destructive repercussions of his social and political policies are whitewashed– but the point of this play is to use Fortuyn as a metaphoric figure as to the dangers of political correctness. I do have some concerns about the presentation of Duranty’s son Michael– Longin and Simon claim to not know what happened to him, and the characterization and scenes featuring young Duranty are pure fiction, which makes me worry what might happen if the real Michael Duranty emerges to complain about his depiction in the play.
Chestertonians may be familiar with one supporting character– Aleister Crowley, the infamous Satanist and dabbler in the occult. Crowley was the one man that Chesterton flat-out refused to debate. Longtime American Chesterton Society member John Peterson once wrote that “Chesterton never stated his objection to meeting Crowley, but possibly he didn't want to lend credibility to Crowley's views by discussing them. Or, it might simply be that Crowley gave him the creeps.” The Crowley depicted in The Party Line will certainly give people the creeps, thanks to his engaging in orgiastic rituals and his consumption of bizarre and vile compounds.
This is a fascinating play. To the best of my knowledge, it has not yet been staged, so The Party Line exists only as a literary experience at this time, though that is likely to change in the near future. It’s an intelligent and carefully argumentative presentation of what happens when people sacrifice their principles, either for personal gain or simply out of cowardice. Additionally, it’s a perceptive look on how people are often more apt to accept a comfortable lie rather than a brutal truth.
I have wondered if someone would ever bring the Duranty story to the stage for years, and I cannot criticize Longin and Simon for depicting the event differently from the way I might have. I would have focused solely on Duranty, but The Party Line is interested in timeless truths throughout modern history, stressing recurring themes rather than set events. In any case, the tale is rich enough to provide fodder for multiple tellings.
There have been a couple of campaigns to have Duranty’s Pulitzer Prize revoked, but the Pulitzer Committee has refused to rescind the award, In response, the Walter Duranty Prizes for Mendacity in Journalism have been recently launched in order to target deliberate lies in reporting that threaten people’s lives and safety.
There have been some fierce debates amongst Chestertonians lately on whether it is acceptable to lie for a good cause. The Party Line argues that there is no such thing as a noble lie.
For more information, see http://www.newcriterion.com/posts.cfm/Announcing--strong-Criterion-Books-strong--and--i-The-Party-Line-i--6918.
