Giovanni Tiso
John Mulgan and the Greek Left: A regrettably intimate acquaintance by C.-Dimitris Gounelas and Ruth Parkin-Gounelas (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2023), 368pp, $40
At the beginning of a series of lectures entitled Beyond the Frontier given at Stanford University in 1981, the British historian E.P. Thompson noted, almost apologetically, how the subject of his talks concerned ‘an event which, in terms of public history, is trivial; marginal; meriting a footnote’. He went on to add that he could not expect his audience to share his ‘own personal concern to establish the truth of the matter’.
The truth in question concerned the execution of his older brother Frank at the hands of collaborationist troops in Nazi-occupied Bulgaria in the Spring of 1944. More specifically, whether or not the administration of the Secret Operations Executive (SOE), established by the British Government to aid resistance movements in wartime Europe and to which Frank belonged, had given implicit assent to his murder. In further justifying the choice of such a personal topic, Thompson goes on to explain that his talks would ultimately concern:
the activities of anti-historians, how sensitive evidence is destroyed or screened, how myths originate, how historical anecdote may simply be a code for ideology, how the reasons of state are eternally at war with historical knowledge.
This description could equally apply to John Mulgan and the Greek Left: A regrettably intimate acquaintance by the scholars of literature and language C.-Dimitris Gounelas and Ruth Parkin-Gounelas. Here, too, the central subject is the writing of history as it is being made (what can be said about it by its protagonists when a regime of censorship exists) as well as its continual erasure, correction and falsification over time (as documents are concealed or destroyed, and changing reasons of state lead to the production of revisionary accounts). Equally, the John Mulgan who emerges from its pages is not primarily the author of the classic New Zealand novel Man Alone, but rather, like the Frank Thompson of the Beyond the Frontier lectures, the protagonist of a set of deadly fictions whose interpretation and ultimate ‘truth’ remain contested to this day.
Therefore, its central text is Mulgan’s much less well-known war memoir Report on Experience, first published in the United Kingdom in 1947. Reading this, the authors of John Mulgan and the Greek Left observe: ‘what strikes us is the way the text seems to say then un-say what its author is thinking, the way it covers its tracks, veers off in a safer direction just as it seems to be close to revealing something.’ This ‘rhetoric of evasion’ is the authors’ principal object of enquiry.
One of the book’s organising questions concerns the reading of the titular phrase— ‘regrettably intimate acquaintance’—which Mulgan used to describe his relationship with EAM-ELAS, that is to say, the Greek left-wing National Liberation Front and its irregular army during his years as a wartime SOE operative. Should we read it as an expression of regret, a wish for that acquaintance never to have taken place? Or rather, ironically, as a way of reinforcing how closely intertwined his fate had become with theirs against the backdrop of the brutality and tragedy of the occupation and its almost equally bloody aftermath? The ambiguous phrase, penned in a report to the New Zealand government in the days leading up to Mulgan’s death, becomes an index of his reticence and of the constraints of his official role, requiring us to hold it up to the light in order to reach an ultimate evaluation of his true beliefs. But, the authors contend, the balance of evidence still points to the fact that Mulgan remained, to the last, a political radical.
Mulgan’s tendency towards radicalism had developed first at Auckland University College in the early years of national protest during the Depression and then at Oxford University, where he graduated with a first in English in 1935. It’s here at Merton College, Oxford, that he met the German emigree Theodore Adorno, who described Mulgan in a letter to his friend Walter Benjamin as a Marxist (a label to which the authors assign a healthy degree of nuance, inflected as it would have been with the Hegelian perspective of the Frankfurt School as opposed to that of Soviet Leninism).
After completing his degree, Mulgan worked at the Clarendon Press, where he first collaborated with the then-avowedly radical W.H. Auden. The pair would later edit a poetry anthology for Gollancz titled Poems of Revolt, which was changed before publication to the less threatening title Poems of Freedom. It is in this period that he penned with Geoffrey Cox a series of columns—under the heading ‘Behind the Cables’—for the Auckland Star and the Dominion back home in which they documented the acquiescence of the conservative British establishment first toward Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia, and later to the Francoist repression in Spain. At the same time, Mulgan drafted Man Alone.
He also began to take an interest in the situation in Greece, where King George II had given Prime Minister Ioannes Metaxas dictatorial powers in response to widespread popular unrest. A few years later, during World War II, keen to abandon the discipline of military life, he was to be parachuted into the midst of the Greek guerrilla movement in the mountains as British Liaison Officer for the SOE following the occupation of Greece by Italian and German military forces.
What followed was what Mulgan called in a letter home ‘the most interesting time of the war, perhaps of my life’. Unlike the protagonist of Man Alone, Johnson, or the likes of George Orwell, Mulgan had not gone to Spain to fight alongside the Republican Army and was later to wonder in Report on Experience how history might judge this conduct (‘they will ask why we didn’t get killed in Spain’). Yet in the remote mountains of Thessaly he found his Aragon, and the sense of comradeship and common purpose that the ‘practical socialism’ he advocated might be nurtured from. A key element of this ‘intimate’ relationship was Mulgan’s willingness to regard and treat the Greek partisans as equals. However, as European fascism hurtled towards defeat and Britain started to reorient its policies towards the post-war order, this quality ultimately made Mulgan incompatible with his role.
During what came to be known as Ta Dekemvriana—the series of violent clashes, ignited in Athens by police repression, which led to the defeat of ELAS/EAM at the hand of government forces backed by the British and formed the prelude to the restoration of the monarchy and the civil war that was to take place after his death—Mulgan began ‘letting his guard down’ and expressing in private correspondence political views that ran directly against the strategy dictated by Churchill and implemented by the Secret Operations Executive. Unusual as it might have been in his line of work, this perspective was broadly shared even by the centrist press in Britain and the United States, let alone on the left, including by the Fraser government back in New Zealand—which asked Mulgan for his unofficial report on the crisis.
At this juncture, I expected the book to chronicle the final weeks of Mulgan’s life as being dominated by a sense of bitterness and actual regret for the role he might have unwittingly played in the betrayal of his comrades and the Greek people as a whole. The authors go in a different direction, however, with two speculative chapters that cast doubt on the official explanation for Mulgan’s death-by-suicide. The questions raised about the identity of the woman who was among the last to see him alive are openly left to be answered by others, as new testimony and the release of de-secreted documents in the twenty-first century continue to throw light on shadowy events of nearly eighty years ago.
As for the evidence that his commanding officer, Julian Dolbey, might have had a hand in both his murder and its cover-up, it seems most likely that—if it ever existed—it would have been destroyed in the immediate post-war, along with nearly 90 percent of the documentation pertaining to the Special Operations Executive. This was the work of the anti-historians that E.P. Thompson decried.
However, this conclusion invites us perhaps to read the book against its own grain: for even as they cast doubt on Mulgan’s suicide—pointing, among other things, to the contradictions and apparent lies in his suicide note, including the claim that he had been diagnosed months earlier with an incurable throat cancer—the authors open to the door to questioning its principal line of argument. If Mulgan did, in fact, commit suicide, surely still a more than likely possibility, then his final act of self-erasure would also be implicated in the falsification of the archive and the negation of history. It is a fitting final note of ambiguity for a book concerned with finding truth in a machinery designed to obscure it.
GIOVANNI TISO is an Italian writer and translator based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. He’s the online editor of the literary journal Overland.
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