Polemics Debate of Old-New Kemal Ahmet's Case Against the Accusation That He Had Turned Bourgeois Against Leftist Pretenders Against the Accusation that He was a Nationalist Thus the discussion, which had been carried out in clandestine manner in "Tan," was externalised and herewith was declared that it would carry on in the weekly "Hafta" which Peyami Safa was editing. In those days, polemical exchanges were frequently used to attract readers. Generating such writing upon particularly tense ground, and creating sufficient uneasiness greatly helped the sales. Especially when the leading writers of papers were at it, both publications would reach record heights. It was even rumoured that some prominent columnists would write pseudonymously in other papers, articles against their column in the home paper. This was no opportunity to miss for Peyami Safa. He was going to be able to shove aside Orhan Selim and write directly against Nâzım Hikmet. In these articles, then, he would be able to whip up the interest of the enemies of communism, nationalists, national socialists, and both compel leftists to buy his paper and vent the anger so long pent up in him, in his own paper, without having to heed anyone's restrictions. He published a seven-part article called "Some Light, Please" that ran for seven consecutive weeks. In the first part, he described how he had come to meet Nâzım Hikmet, how he defended the poet, arranged for him to read his poetry in the Association for the Fine Arts, how he dedicated one of his novels to him. Concerning informancy, he wrote the following: "Too, there is the fact that Nâzım has only one informer and that is he himself. The worker's cap he wears on his head, the jacket he slings on his shoulder, the rebellious chesthair that shows through his only half-buttoned up shirt, his unironed slacks, and the clear-the-coast comportment with which he walks as it were in the face of the bourgeois and which bespeaks the mine worker that has just come up to fresh air - all of these shout in a chorus: "Look here! This young man is a Bolshevik." "And is not that precisely what the bold man had himself declared in court? [...] "This Bolshevik phantom, who owes most of his fame [...] to the police, knows that he will be forgotten if his name does not keep recurring in the papers, and feels uneasy about it. "Nâzım has not been pursued and prosecuted for his ideas but because he wants to be." ("Hafta," 8 July 1935) "A Little Light, Please 2" was an article that undermined Nâzım Hikmet as a poet, the structure of his thought, and his communism: "Let no one deny it: little Nâzım is a poet. But contrary to all his materialist claims, he is quite romantic, lyrical, ludic, and sensitive poet. It is not necessary to be a hydro-engineer to discover the pools of tears at the bottom of his lines. This improvisational hero who appears in the role of the bold in nearby everyone of his works, is someone who actually whimpers and cries between the acts, a cry-baby and an oversensitive mommy's baby. [...] "He has acquired his philosophy from the facile ideas of Karl Marx easily picked up by every barber's and butcher's apprentice; his aesthetics and poetry, his style, which now so out of fashion everywhere, including Russia, wholesale from a Russian poet by the name of Mayakovsky. [...] "The capturing of Nâzım Hikmet owes to the fact that he's been trying to use the police as the advertising agency of his books. Because Nâzım is an unadulturated bourgeois. And his falsest aspect is his communism." ("Hafta," 15 July 1935) Upon this second article, the 17 July 1935 issue of the magazine "Yedigün" ran an interview by Naci Sadullah with Nâzım Hikmet. Naci Sadullah was a young writer. He was a distant relation of Süreyya Pasha. He had been to "Resimli Ay" to give a beating to the poet who had satirised his family, but had come to agree with Nâzım after having met and talked with him. The friendship that had thus began soon transformed into writerly companionship once Naci Sadullah decided he would become an interview-writer. It had been actually Nâzım who had encouraged Naci in this direction. Picking Naci to conduct with him the interview through which he would be responding to Peyami Safa's attack, Nâzım wanted to enable his friend to conduct an interview that was bound to sell well. Without feeling the need to defend himself, Nâzım Hikmet had concentrated in his interview on Peyami Safa's character: "Socially, Peyami is a most notable, supranational type. You will find hordes of people like him not only in Turkey, but in many large European cities. And they - Peyami and his likes - are so profoundly samples of a kind of degenerate petit-bourgeois intellectuality that they vainly strive toward an ideologically dark dead-end. [...] "The noteworthiest characteristic of petit-bourgeois intellectualism is that in theoretical matters they appear sceptical. But despite their theoretical scepticism, in matters of concrete life, they are exceedingly practical and thus their mode of living is fraught with deepest contradictions. [...] "This man, who claims that dogmatic devotion to any kind of thought transforms the human individual into a member of the herd, was, for example, was attached to the idea and ideal of freemasonry with blind devotion and a piety beyond credibility, and he was so far gone in this attachment that in order to obtain acceptance to a lodge he had supplicated, and been rejected, thrice. Such dogged devotion to the rule of the Grand Lodge - whose articles of faith and limits are known, whose rules and regulations are fixed and compact - such desire for becoming its member, what is it if not to feel an intense wish to become a member of the herd? And now I ask you, to what can you attribute this contradiction between the theory and practice, in other words the word and deed of this type except to the fact of his expectation of material gain from freemasonry? [...] "There is no end to the character traits of degenerate petit-bourgeois intellectuals. [...] "They do not hesitate to resort to the lowest means in order to satisfy their appetite for fame and material affluence. "In fact, this type, whom we are examining here, [...] has recently written in high terms about the editor under whom he works. But a few lines down, writing about a journal this editor was formerly bringing out, he informs on the same man in the following words: " 'Under the series called "Putları Yıkıyoruz" (We are Iconoclasts), "Resimli Ay" launched attacks on the nationalists!' " Toward the end of the interview, Nâzım Hikmet asked Naci Sadullah a question: "Where in the world would you find police force persecuting anyone for his cap, jacket, chest, slacks, and legs?" And Naci Sadullah, without even seeking an answer to this odd question, pointed out that "above all lay his single attire," the poet presented a "correction" of the said. ^ Top | Next >