ABSTRACT
Dennis Potter, in his play, put the boot in-or that was one way of taking it. For it's an undoubted irony that the same subculture should have produced a few traitors who appear to have relied on some of the same qualities: the confident transparency, but with a different thing to hide. I know that I could never imagine myself into the skin of such a man, and I share enough, in real kinship, with Dennis Potter to wonder how he thought he could. I waited for Line-Up to hear him talking about it, and the same question remained. He said that he wanted to put a question mark after "traitor", and I see that point. From within that system it was possible to revolt. The newsreels of poverty were one kind of reminder: newsreels of fascism and Appeasement might have been even more apposite. But where I hesitated was when Dennis Potter confirmed, as some of the writing had suggested, that he had given his Foreign Office traitor some of his own things to say. The matter is very complex but I can perhaps put it briefly. To defect from that class and that role seems to me not dishonourable. To defect in that way, to another state system, seems to me characteristic of that group. But as a matter of feeling I can never get over the consequent and very damaging confusion between a revolt against fascism and poverty and that cold, alienated method and destination. Just because, like Dennis Potter, I feel those causes in my bones, I cannot stand that cold flesh that attempted to grow on them. And the effect of the play was then even more complex, for the private wounds were seen as the source, and what the visiting journalists met in Moscow (until the very end made it clear that this was the private truth, not the public show, but by then it had been given all the weight) was not the cool self-justifying public transparency but a whining drunk who devalued everything he said, leaving only the pathos which exists on the far side of error. Certainly the play was powerful. An edge of the glass wall was smashed. But whose truth then came through?
