Record of a Friendship

[ 1950 ]

Summerhill School
Leiston, Suffolk

My dear Reich,

288

August I, 1950

I have heard nothing from the consul. I have done nothing
because there was nothing to do. A visa has just been refused to
Stephen Spender the poet who was one of the disillusioned writers of
The God That Failed, * so that it seems that however much a man is
now against communism, he is suspect because of his earlier beliefs. It
is alarming, for if universal war comes every C-ist in Britain will be
imprisoned as dangerous, quite rightly, but people like me will prob­
ably have to share their fate because once we thought C-ism was going
the right way. I can think of nothing more dreadful than to be a martyr
for a cause you don't believe in. If the policy is to exclude everyone who
has ever had any suspicion of being left wing, I guess that nothing I've
done or said will alter things.
We have got the children off for the vacation today, and this last
week has been very hard, for we had to deal with many parents and
visitors while all the time we were worrying about Qur cancelled trip.
All this trouble has helped to make me more pessimistic than usual,
but the risk of a general war looks so great that it would require a lot to
make anyone an optimist. I want Zoe to live and keep thinking of what
to do if and when war comes. And I want my work to live and grow,
which it can't if hate and hell breaks out again.
One horrid feature of not going to U.S.A. is that the feeling of stand­
ing alone becomes greater. In Orgonon the fact of being one of a crowd
of people who are life-positive is enough to inspire, but here I never
meet anyone with anything to give; they all want me to give to them.
The result is that I dry up, exhausted.
It seems certain that everything is left to the decision of McIntosh
here. Sure, they did not refuse me a visa (I said to McIntosh): "Sure,
you said apply again and it might take up to six weeks, but you refused
me in effect, because I have to cancel my seminars and am likely to
miss the Conference and in any case won't likely get a passage."
A Danish student here put it neatly... "Neill, this comes of patting

* Essays by Arthur Koestler et al., edited by Richard Crossman (New York:

Harper, 1949).