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Socialist Review Index (1993–1996) | Socialist Review 182 Contents
From Socialist Review, No. 182, January 1995.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Gerry Gable is a television producer and editor of Searchlight
My father was a skilled cabinet maker who believed in the dignity of labour. He also served in Bomber Command for six years. He left school at 12 after his father and eldest brother, then 17, had been killed in the First World War. It was he who introduced me to good literature and my first three adult books, which left a lifelong impression on me: Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano.
Mailer painted a genuine portrait of men and women in war. Later I read Alexander Baron’s From the City From the Plough, a British view of the First World War from a working class perspective. In the 1950s and early 1960s, when I was an industrial organiser in the construction industry, I could still see the relevance of Tressell’s marvellous study of the building industry at the turn of the century.
I have enjoyed, from a literary point of view, almost everything Vonnegut has produced, but I believe Player Piano, one of his earliest works, is his best. His futuristic nightmare scenario of a state taken over and run by technology, scientists and the military, with a huge non-working underclass being kept in check, has in many places today become a reality.
My work as an anti-fascist journalist and researcher over the last 35 years has caused me to read countless books on the Nazi regime and the resistance to it. Red Orchestra by Giles Perrault, the story of the anti-Nazi master spy Leopold Trepper, is an inspiration to all who work undercover investigating and exposing the Nazis today. Trepper was a Soviet agent, who suffered under the Nazis and was then imprisoned by Stalin. As a postwar Zionist activist in Poland he was refused the right to live in Israel for many years.
The work of the British writer John Le Carré make him deserving of a Nobel prize for literature. His writing, his style, his characterisations are the very best from a British writer over the past 20 years. I doubt, however, whether he will be nominated while the snobbery in our literary circles prefers to award prizes to obscure works rather than finely written books about real people, subjects and problems. His latest spy thriller, The Night Manager, is a superb real insider’s view about the crisis in Western intelligence since the end of the Cold War.
A few years ago visiting the US I had the privilege to meet Stetson Kennedy, author of a number of books about racism in the US and about his time as an infiltrator inside the Ku Klux Klan, including I Rode with the Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow Guide to the USA. The true story of his time posing as a Klansman and fascist has been one of the great motivations and inspirations for Searchlight’s moles operating inside the far right internationally. Today this man, who was a friend of that great balladeer of the American working class, Woody Guthrie, has been recognised internationally for his anti-fascist work as well as preserving the multiracial culture of his native Florida.
Finally I come to Andrew Bell’s work in conjunction with Searchlight’s longtime mole Ray Hill about his work inside Britain’s Nazi movements, The Other Face of Terror. This book is both exciting and amusing, because of the author’s keen and often wicked sense of humour. More than anything it is the inspiring story of a working man tempted into Nazism, who after many years redeemed himself by a brave and selfless struggle to expose the enemies of all decent people everywhere.
When I am feeling down and want to cut myself off from the day to day struggle I read poetry, mainly 20th century British and American poets, including many of the up and coming young British black writers. If I am faced with a desire to remember my own roots and culture and have a bloody good laugh, I flick through a few pages of Leon Rosten’s Joys of Yiddish.
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