Crucible

by Charles Emmerson

  VIENNA: Still weak from his ordeals, Sigmund Freud receives an early Christmas present, and a token of his growing fame: a copy of an unsolicited biography, the first to be written about him in any language. ‘I need hardly say that I neither expected nor desired the publication of such a book’, Freud writes back. He sends a list of corrections, in case there is a second edition.

  EPILOGUE

  1924

  For the first time in years, a treat: Schlagobers–cream whipped into dreamy Alpine peaks–reappears in Vienna’s coffee houses. Sigmund Freud has started work again, ‘with downright animalistic satisfaction’. His speaking voice, while less strong than it was, is now intelligible. Smoking cigars, however, has become more difficult. To insert one, his mouth must be held open with a wooden clothes peg.

  ‘One has even long since become accustomed to the insecurity about the future and thinks as little of that as of one’s own death’, Albert Einstein writes. ‘It all comes along under its own steam without us doing anything ourselves.’ He promises himself to live life more quietly this year. Less travel. At forty-four, he is no longer a young man. He is aware of younger physicists who may yet outshine him.

  Nadya reads her husband short stories by Jack London about gold prospectors in the Klondike. She lies about the splits at a party conference where Trotsky is accused of ‘petty-bourgeois deviation’ and the party leaders organise a resolution against him.

  On 21 January 1924, Vladimir is given coffee and bouillon and confined to bed. Later that day, Nadya hears a strange gurgling in his chest. That evening, the dictator dies. Trotsky is given the news at a railway station in the Caucasus on his way to the Black Sea. ‘Lenin is no more’, he writes; ‘these words fall upon our mind as heavily as a giant rock falls into the sea.’ He decides not to return to Moscow.

  The GPU is told to brace for trouble. In life the dictator’s health was kept a secret; in death, the published autopsy report turns his final illness into a heroic struggle against fate. A death mask is made. Lenin’s brain is removed for special scientific investigation and found to be heavier than average, supposedly a mark of his great intelligence.

  His funeral takes place on the coldest day of the year. Thousands queue for hours to walk past his coffin. Portraits are held up like icons. Stalin is in the honour guard. In Petrograd, now renamed Leningrad, three quarters of a million participate in commemorations. Medical stations are set up to take care of frostbite victims.

  Russia’s radios fall silent. Then a new message pulses across the Red empire the dictator has bequeathed: ‘Lenin has died–but Leninism lives’. Against Nadya’s wishes, a decision is taken to preserve his body rather than to bury it. It is the revolution’s property now.

  Trotsky spends long days looking at the sea through palm trees.

  Mayakovsky begins to write a poem.

  Winston Churchill greets the news that Britain will have a Labour Prime Minister with horror. Socialism is the kind of awful thing that usually happens after a country has been defeated in war, not if it is the victor. He writes the new PM a letter of congratulation nonetheless.

  An agreement is struck for Fiume to be finally annexed to Italy. Shortly thereafter, on his own suggestion, Gabriele D’Annunzio is made a Prince.

  Woodrow jots down some thoughts for his 1924 presidential nomination acceptance speech. ‘Overwhelming honour’, he begins. Two weeks later, he is dead. As in Moscow when Vladimir passed, radio shows are cancelled across America. The only embassy in Washington that does not fly its flag at half-mast is that of Germany.

  The trial of General Ludendorff and Adolf Hitler begins in Munich. Once the mangy ex-field-runner starts talking, no one can shut him up. He launches into an explanation of his political philosophy. There are times when only fanaticism–‘intense, ruthless, brutal fanaticism’–can save a country from slavery, he declares. There can be no treason against the traitors of 1918.

  André Breton, the sometime Dadaist provocateur, magazine editor, art aficionado, psychiatric doctor and now–tentatively–surrealist, publishes his latest book: Les Pas Perdus, or The Lost Steps. He sends a copy to Tristan Tzara. He makes it out to ‘the swindler-of-all-trades, the old parrot, the police informant’. He returns to automatic writing. He decides he needs a manifesto.

  Mustafa Kemal cements his power. In March, the Caliphate is abolished and the last Caliph sent off into exile on the Orient Express. Religious schools are closed. Religious courts are shut down.

  Kemal’s jilted girlfriend Fikriye makes an unauthorised trip from Istanbul to Ankara to try and see the man she loves. She is refused access to the presidential palace in which she once lived. She shoots herself with a handgun and dies from complications soon after.

  Up early to prepare formula for his son Bumby. Then perhaps some boxing in the gym on the Rue de Pontoise. Relying on Hadley’s dwindling inheritance for funds, Ernest takes an unpaid position as assistant editor on the city’s latest literary magazine, a rag called the transatlantic review (note the lower case). The April issue of the magazine reviews some of his own work.

  Hitler gives his final court address. ‘When is treason really treason?’ he asks. In the end, there is only patriotism and betrayal. Bismarck once broke the rules of the Prussian constitution to advance the cause of German unity. Was that treason? Mustafa Kemal disobeyed the Sultan to fight for his people’s freedom. Was that treason? Was Mussolini’s march on Rome an act of treason before it became an act of national salvation?

  He recalls the bright promises made at the end of the war–of peace, freedom, self-determination–and the awful reality of hunger, humiliation and national disintegration which came instead. ‘My noble lords, if the next five years are like the last five, will there be any Germany left for our children at all?’ The verdict of history is all that really matters, Hitler says: no one will remember what some judge said in 1924.

  The judge duly awards Adolf five years in jail. Ludendorff is let off.

  Benito announces that the works of Machiavelli are now more relevant than ever. The April elections are a triumph. The Fascists–under a list which co-opts figures of influence up and down the country–win two thirds of the national vote. The King salutes the ‘generation of victory which now controls the government’. Italy’s Great War has come to an end at last.

  One day in May, in the Sheraton Hotel, Cincinnati, those old rivals William Du Bois and Marcus Garvey finally meet. Garvey is stepping out of the hotel elevator. Du Bois is going in. He pretends not to notice his enemy, about whom he has just published another article. He claims the twitching of his nose was to do with the smell of breakfast and nothing more.

  The surrealist rush is on. Breton’s rivals criticise him for his proprietorial ambitions. ‘Mr Breton, get used to it: you will never be the Pope of Surrealism’, one writes. ‘Surrealism belongs to everyone and will not be monopolised.’

  In America, the name ‘Teapot Dome’ becomes a byword for corruption. The country’s leading oil baron testifies that one hundred thousand dollars was indeed paid to the former Secretary of the Interior–delivered by his son, in cash, in a black satchel. This was a loan, and not a bribe, he explains. To a man as rich as him, a hundred thousand is a ‘mere bagatelle’–equivalent to twenty-five bucks to a mere mortal. America seems full of gangsters and prospectors and men on the make. The nation is obsessed with the stock market.

  Henry Ford does not run for the presidency.

  In jail, Adolf receives food packages from admirers and the prisoners are allowed a pint of beer with dinner every night. While some chop wood for recreation or engage in various athletic activities, Hitler prefers to play the referee. ‘A leader cannot afford to be beaten at games’, he explains. He takes particular pleasure watching a bloody boxing match.

  On the feast day of St Adolf, a revue is organised in his honour. One inmate dresses up as Charlie Chaplin; another pretends to be a gypsy, reading men’s fortunes from grains of coffee. Occasionally Hitler relives
his war experiences for his followers, jumping around the room gesticulating wildly, making all the sound effects himself, like a Futurist poetry recital or a piece of Dadaist theatre.

  He starts writing his autobiography, banging it out day after day on an American-made Remington typewriter. Adolf wonders if he could write a book as great as Henry Ford’s bestseller My Life. He talks with a new (male) secretary called Rudolf Hess about the possibilities of space travel, discusses his views on astrology and shows him his most recent architectural sketches: a huge domed building in which national festivals will be celebrated in the future, plans for a gigantic new Great War museum, stage designs for operas by Wagner and Puccini.

  One day he reads out a passage of his book, recalling how in France the sounds of battle used to mix with young men’s voices singing ‘Deutschland, Deutschland, über alles’. Adolf starts to cry.

  The Ku Klux Klan claims four million members across the United States, with Senators at its beck and call. Neither Democrats nor Republicans condemn it.

  A court in London determines that Grand Duke Michael, Nicholas Romanov’s younger brother, must be dead by now. (He was shot in 1918.) A fight breaks out amongst the Romanov family over who is now the rightful Tsar.

  In Moscow, Lenin’s funeral commission is repurposed as a commission for the immortalisation of his memory. Scientists work on a secret embalming fluid. His body is to be mummified. Stalin delivers lectures on Leninism at Sverdlov University.

  The most explosive of Lenin’s dictations from two winters ago remain unpublished. Some are read out in a secret party meeting. Stalin admits to being rude. ‘We are not frightened by rudeness’, a stooge in the audience interjects. Trotsky admits that it is impossible to be right against the party. Even Nadya rebukes him.

  At the Venice Biennale, works of Russian artists are displayed for the first time since 1914. Following Lenin’s death, even Fascist Italy has accorded diplomatic recognition to the Soviets. The centrepiece of the Italian contribution to the exhibition is a white marble bust of Mussolini–not by Clare Sheridan–his neck as thick as a bull’s, his brow furrowed in an expression of stern, almost angry, determination. It is Benito’s preferred look to keep the masses on their toes–the ancient Roman style updated to reflect a cruder and more energetic age.

  No one quite knows whether Mussolini himself is to blame for the bungled kidnapping and murder of the leader of Italy’s Socialists that summer. Several Fascist thugs are arrested; there is as yet no bloodied body to shock the nation. ‘Let him who is without sin cast the first stone’, preaches the Vatican newspaper. The stock market flutters but does not crash. Italy’s old elites may not like the rougher side of fascism, but they are prepared to live with it. The Socialists boycott parliament. The King refuses to fire Mussolini.

  The Kaiser receives a letter from one of his few remaining supporters, an old Prussian general. He is only waiting for the signal to fall behind the Kaiser and his restoration, the general writes. Wilhelm is dismissive. ‘Who is going to call?’ he asks. ‘There are no leaders… just non-entities.’

  Armed with three Kodak cameras, two air-beds, four suitcases (one containing evening wear), all strapped to the back of a motorcycle called Santanella, Clare Sheridan sets off on her latest adventure: a trip across Europe with her brother in his sidecar. Holland whizzes past. In Germany, people ask Clare why she didn’t take the train.

  In Czechoslovakia she notes pictures of Woodrow Wilson hanging side by side with portraits of Masaryk, the charming Czech gentleman who was so helpful to Jessie Kenney and Emmeline Pankhurst in Petrograd back in 1917. Clare finds Warsaw a disappointment. In Brest-Litovsk, she poses for a photograph outside the fortress where Trotsky declared ‘neither war, nor peace’. It seems such a long time ago now. In Kiev, there is a Communist procession on the tenth anniversary of the outbreak of war, complete with clowns playing the capitalists. But the city is quite different from Moscow last year. Communism is only skin deep here. Christian pilgrims still walk the ancient pathways to the old monasteries. Clare meets a few local Jewish traders who would like to emigrate to Palestine.

  In Crimea, Clare sees two great naval guns set up by General Wrangel to defend his last redoubt against the Red Army. A guide takes Clare and her brother around the Romanovs’ summer palace. In Odessa, Clare is confronted with the strangest thing of all: an actor dressed in black tails and a top hat who is the spitting image of the new British Labour Prime Minister. Clare is told they are making a film about him.

  ‘Keep Cool with Coolidge’, advises the Republican Party in the hot summer of 1924, ahead of the presidential elections in the autumn. The prospect of a Henry Ford candidacy is now completely forgotten.

  Adolf Hitler continues to work on his book. He pushes the ideas of others to absurd, hateful conclusions. He does not pause to question his own thinking. He discovers he was right all along, without even knowing it. His own fantasy narratives become a sort of holy gospel. He is his own God, the source of his own revelations. His thoughts only tend in one direction: towards the extremes.

  ‘Yes, it is quite true,’ Adolf tells a Nazi from Bohemia, ‘I have changed my mind on the best means of fighting the Jews.’ He was too soft in the past. ‘In the course of writing my book, I have come to the conclusion we must only use the harshest means in the future.’

  With Germany at the negotiating table and the Americans dangling the mighty dollar before their eyes, the French accept a Wall Street compromise. German reparations will be spread out over decades. France will lose the ability to sanction Germany if payments are not made. The country will be rehabilitated economically, with a huge loan secured against the nation’s assets. French troops will be out of the Ruhr within a year. The British Prime Minister calls it the first real peace treaty, ‘because we sign it with a feeling that we have turned our backs on the terrible years of war and war mentality’.

  A new play catches the eye of the New York Times’s theatre critic in September. The plot is ridiculous (it centres on the horse races), the set is colourful, the songs are hummable (courtesy of Sissle and Blake of Shuffle Along fame). It is called The Chocolate Dandies. All the actors are black. One of them steals the show. For most of it she is dressed in a ragged cotton dress. Not much to look at, with a certain slapstick charm. At one point she imitates a saxophone and crosses her eyes while doing so. The audience roars with laughter. Then she dances, and they are mesmerised by her unearthly fluidity.

  The New York Times calls her a ‘freak’. But what does that matter? There it is: Josephine Baker’s name in print. The girl from St. Louis has become a star.

  A commission of twenty-six lawyers starts work on adapting the Swiss civil code for Turkey. Polygamy will be outlawed. Men will lose the right to divorce their wives at will. ‘Countries vary,’ Mustafa Kemal says, ‘but civilisation is one, and for a nation to progress it must take part in this single civilisation.’

  Despite recognition of his good behaviour by the prison warder, Adolf Hitler’s request for parole–after just six months of his five-year sentence for high treason–is turned down.

  A storm blows in from the Gulf of Finland and Leningrad is flooded. The old wooden block pavements of the city float off into the sea like pieces of an enormous jigsaw puzzle. Students work waist-deep to save Russia’s historic treasures from destruction. Tsar Peter the Great’s slippers are amongst the casualties. At the Institute of Experimental Medicine, Pavlov’s dogs are saved from the drowning. As the flood-waters recede, hundreds of blue-and-gold chairs are set out to dry outside the Mariinsky theatre alongside scenic backdrops from past productions from another age.

  Those left homeless will find it easy to secure alternative accommodation somewhere in the city. So many of its people have moved to the countryside, or to Moscow, or abroad. Leningrad is a shadow of what imperial Petrograd once was.

  One Friday afternoon in the autumn, a new research institute opens its doors in Paris. It is called the Bureau of Surrealist Rese
arch. Its director is André Breton. Opening hours to the public are 4.30 p.m. to 6 p.m. every day except Sunday. A new magazine is planned, called La Révolution Surréaliste.

  The battle for the surrealist name is not yet finished. Now André produces a new weapon: a surrealist manifesto. It bears little relation to Tzara’s Zurich text, with its zingy contradictions and jokey tone. Surrealism is serious. Rationalism is dying, Breton writes, ‘trapped in a cage of its own making, unable to escape’. The surrealist manifesto is rationalism’s epitaph and a slingshot into a new world: an instruction manual, a polemic, a kind of poem, a roll-call of current adherents and past forebears. (Dante and Shakespeare were both surrealists avant la lettre, apparently; André claims Picasso for the cause as well.) At its centre, of course, is the rediscovery of the subconscious, and a fascination with the power of dreams.

  Breton recalls the impression made on him by the rapid-fire ‘spoken thought’ of shell-shock victims during the war. He remembers the awe he felt, in 1917, when watching Babinski diagnose patients at La Salpêtrière. Though nameless, they too are the forebears of surrealism. It is in the state of dreaming, the manifesto reads, that the human spirit is at its most unbounded, where humans become superhuman, where ‘one can kill, fly faster, love as much as one wants to’. Humankind has been projected into a new world, where the unbounded and irrational can at last be given their proper due. Putting his embarrassing Vienna interview to one side, André makes clear it is Freud who has cleared the way.