[Here were pasted in some scribbled sheets dated 11th November, 1952.]

Writers’ group meeting last night. Five of us — to discuss Stalin on Linguistics. Rex, literary critic, proposes to take this pamphlet sentence by sentence. George, ‘proletarian writer’ from the ‘thirties, pipe-smoking and bluff, says: ‘Good God, have we got to? Never was a chap for theory.’ Clive, communist pamphleteer and journalist says: ‘Yes, we must discuss it seriously.’ Dick, the socialist-realist novelist, says: ‘We ought to get hold of the main points, at least.’ So Rex begins. He speaks of Stalin in the simple respectful tone that has been familiar for years. I am thinking: Yet every one of us in this room, meeting in a pub, or on the street, would use a very different tone, dry and painful. We are silent while Rex makes a short prefatory speech. Then Dick who has just come back from Russia (he is always on some trip to a communist country somewhere) mentions a conversation he had in Moscow with a Soviet writer about one of Stalin’s more savage attacks on a philosopher: ‘We must remember that their tradition of polemics is much more rough and knockabout than ours.’ His tone the simple, bluff, I-am-a-good-fellow tone which I use myself sometimes: ‘Well, of course you have to remember their legal traditions are very different from ours,’ etc. I am beginning to be uncomfortable whenever I hear this tone; a few days ago, I heard myself use it, and I started to stammer. I usually don’t stammer. We all have copies of the pamphlet. I am discouraged because it seems to me nonsense, but I am not philosophically trained (Rex is) and am afraid of making stupid remarks. But it is more than that. I am in a mood that gets more and more familiar: words lose their meaning suddenly. I find myself listening to a sentence, a phrase, a group of words, as if they are in a foreign language — the gap between what they are supposed to mean, and what in fact they say seems unbridgeable. I have been thinking of the novels about the breakdown of language, like Finnegans Wake. And the preoccupation with semantics. The fact that Stalin bothers to write a pamphlet on this subject at all is just a sign of a general uneasiness about language. But what right have I to criticize anything when sentences from the most beautiful novel can seem idiotic to me? Nevertheless, this pamphlet seems to me clumsy, and I say: ‘Perhaps the translation is bad.’ I am astounded that my tone is apologetic. (I know if I were alone with Rex it would not be apologetic.) Instantly I see that I have expressed everyone’s feeling that the pamphlet is in fact bad. For years, over pamphlets, articles, novels, pronouncements from Russia we’ve said: ‘Well the translation is probably bad.’ And now I am having to fight with myself to say: ‘This pamphlet is bad.’ I am amazed at the strength of my reluctance to say it. (I wonder how many of us come to such meetings determined to express our uneasiness, our disgust, and find ourselves silenced by this extraordinary prohibition once the meeting starts?)