Frank Hardy– But the Dead are Many

Reviewed by Dave Riley

The image of communism promoted during the Cold War years was that of the great purges. Leading communist cadre were executed as the Russian Revolution turned on its favourite sons and daughters. The worldwide movement for socialism was told by its leaders in Moscow that there would be fewer but better communists. Imperialist agents were discovered in the most unlikely of places and weeded out in a series of paranoiac show trials. The dead were many.

These purges were the greatest gift the revolution ever gave its enemies. As millions moved leftward in the postwar years, they were reminded by a well-oiled offensive that the red flag shrouded not a caring and sharing socialism but the handiwork of the mates of Joseph Stalin.

The Communist Party of Australia was gutted by this legacy, so effectively manipulated by the Western powers. After attaining a membership of 23,000 in 1947, it haemorrhaged its ranks through the '50s and '60s as the reality of the crimes of Stalinism were reinforced by Khrushchev's secret speech in 1953, and later by the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.

By the 1980s, adherents were so thin on the ground that the CPA gave up the communist project altogether and suicided. Veterans of a generation that went through the Great Depression and the second world war saw the party to which they had committed themselves so passionately adapt further to capitalism by pursuing a series of ad hoc designer doctrines before collapsing completely.

In terms of a generation's hopes and ideals, the history of the CPA is a tragedy played out in the individual lives of thousands of its true believers.

Most of these ex-communists instead of seeking a heretical reworking of the history of which they were part, threw the baby out with the bath water or, shattered by their experience, turned vigorously renegade as militant salvationists for the other side of politics.

Those few who remained loyal to their line of march did so by fusing with the soul of the communist movement so that their character congealed the best rather than the worst of its history. Now in their 70s or 80s, such stalwarts are all that remain of a proud tradition. The late Frank Hardy was one of them.

Like it or not, we are all sentenced to history. The generation which has embraced this newspaper must answer one day for its time spent on earth. In But the dead are many, Frank Hardy does just that: "I will take my epoch upon my shoulders and I will answer for it this day and forever".

Unfortunately, John Morel — the leading CPA member portrayed in this novel — answers with suicide. Deeply puzzled, his friend Jack decides to examine the reasons for the death.

Set in the early '70s, But the dead are many locates itself inside the CPA during the bitter dispute over the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. The party later split over this issue.

The character of Morel is pieced together from contemporary and historical sources as Jack chronicles his life. The 1938 Moscow show trials cast a shadow over his friend's work for the party and his relationships in Australia.

Dishonest and weak but talented and passionate, John Morel is no working-class hero. Warped by guilt, his feelings of personal inadequacy dovetail with his interpretation of the times in which he lives. The events in Czechoslovakia serve to hasten death by his own hand.

Indeed, death is a visitor to almost every page of this novel. The work is preoccupied with it. Its form blends narrator with the subject of his investigations so that the first and the third person fuse as each pursues the same questions of mortality. After a time, Jack and John — one living, one dead — seem separated merely by an ambivalence within the same self.

Greeted on its publication in 1975 as Hardy's masterwork, But the dead are many has worn well these last 19 years. Never a slouch when it came to self-congratulation, Hardy called it the quintessential literary work of the communist movement. Given its loyalties and its intelligent pursuit of the experience of his generation, Hardy may be right.

But regardless of its political explorations, the novel is a suspenseful and moral tale brilliantly realised. The crude structure and phrasing of his early works are displaced here by a mature and confident handling of complex themes seldom pursued in literature — particularly in the realist tradition that Hardy subscribed to.

This reprinting of the novel preceded Frank Hardy's death by six months. Such coincidence delivers us an opportunity to read it (again, for some) at a time when death has caught up with both Soviet-style communism and Frank Hardy.

Our easy willingness to dismiss the recent past can feed a false confidence that we can individually transcend it as we pursue our own lifetimes, making it up as we go. Hardy reminds us that the living are few but the dead are many. 

History catches up with all of us, and the bargain we make with existence is negotiated over the lives of those who have gone before us. It is better that we stand on their shoulders than unconsciously relive some of the tragedy that dogged their lives.