A Blaze in a Desert

by Victor Serge

  So the literary game called Surrealism can produce “excellent” images—the writing of which may be harmful to the poet. By implication, such images are empty, decorative—whether spontaneous or invented. (In fact, Péret’s poetry, which Paz, for one, admired, was known for its effortless spontaneity and for its superabundance of startling images.) And the alternative? Serge seems to propose that the poet should aim for straightforward description via transparent language—that is, a more or less classical style. His criticism of Surrealist poetry can turn even harsher: “From Gongorism to the most insipid ornamental literature, the [Surrealist] line of research has consisted in this: embellish reality, scorn the direct expression of reality.”19

  All the same, Serge is deeply attracted to Péret’s line; he may even have memorized it, given that he makes small errors in transcription when he writes “Les aigrettes de voix jaillissant du buisson ardent des lèvres,” instead of “Les aigrettes de ta voix jaillissant du buisson ardent de tes lèvres” (The egrets of your voice springing from the burning bush of your lips), as the line appears in Péret’s Je Sublime (I Sublimate), a book of ecstatic love poetry. Given the intensity of Serge’s passion for Séjourné and the difficulties of their relationship, perhaps the forgetting of the possessive adjectives (“ta voix” and “tes lèvres”) tells of unconscious conflicts. Moreover, the choice of text to illustrate his argument seems no more accidental than the errors of memory or transcription. As for Serge’s own approach, it is far from Surrealist, but it is surely more complex, ambivalent, and ambiguous than “the direct expression of reality.”

  If there is a roughly contemporary poet in English who is close to Serge in spirit and in poetics, it is Kenneth Rexroth (1905– 1982), who was politically radical, independent of mind, a deeply cultured autodidact, a literary translator (particularly of classical Chinese and Japanese poetry), and a prime instigator of the San Francisco Renaissance following the Second World War. Rexroth and Serge never met, but Rexroth was aware of Serge—and in one poem Serge evokes a presence like Rexroth’s during San Francisco’s radical heyday in the 1930s. In an uncanny moment in “Frontier” (the first poem in Resistance), Serge, “a torn man of Eurasia,” looks westward past Europe to “Greater Europe” and to “Frisco where the IWWs live,” which is “on the frontier of the next, Greater War,” and asks:

  What eyes straining toward Asia peer at the Ocean over there,

  eyes sad like mine from sounding this tangible void where continents begin and end,

  through the silence of the other human face?

  Serge wrote “Frontier” in his city of exile, Orenburg; the poem was published in Paris in September 1934, a few months after the San Francisco General Strike, which Serge possibly had news of. “What eyes straining toward Asia”? Clairvoyance, correspondence, or coincidence provides a purely imaginary, poetic but fitting response: Rexroth, a former Wobbly, was deeply involved with the left and organizing in the city at the time—while butting heads with local Stalinists. Also in this period, Rexroth, turning away from avant-garde poetry, was beginning to write the more direct poems of In What Hour (1940), some of which are strikingly similar to Serge’s Orenburg poems in language, tone, theme, and imagery. Like Serge, Rexroth can quickly shift from musical and poetic to prosaic and sententious. Take, for example, “Another Early Morning Exercise,” with its references to the constellations and its sense of place, persons, and politics in a time of war:20

  The moon falls westward in a parabola from Castor and Pollux.

  I walk along the street at three in the morning.

  …

  I have been sitting in Sam Wo’s drinking cold aromatic liquor.

  “What did Borodin do in Canton in 1927”—

  The argument lasted five hours.

  My friend Soo sympathizes with the Left Opposition;

  …

  Whatever Borodin did was probably wrong;

  History would be so much simpler if you could just write it

  Without ever having to let it happen.

  …

  A chill comes over me; I walk along shivering;

  Thinking of a world full of miserable lives,

  And all the men who have been tortured

  Because they believed it was possible to be happy.

  In his 1963 review of the first English translation of Memoirs of a Revolutionary (“What a tale!”), Rexroth mentions writing to Serge in Marseille, and he notes that “Serge was the author of several moving novels, and a man of great humanity and sensitivity.”21 Though Rexroth may have been ignorant of Serge’s poetry, he does notice qualities in the memoirs that are also present in the novels and the poetry. Referring to Stalin’s murderous purges, for example, Rexroth writes: “We all know the story, but Serge knew the people. They come alive, seen not with Trotsky’s epigrammatic malice, but with pity and understanding, and then they die, and Serge feels each death himself. Something in him dies each time.” And in their poetry, both Rexroth and Serge mourn the deaths of revolutionaries and revolutions. For Serge especially, many of those closest to him were entered into the register of the names of the lost.22

  The elegiac mode holds sway in Serge’s poetry, especially in Resistance: everywhere are elegies to the dead, to “the hope-filled cortege of his executed brothers” (“Sensation”); even poems about the living are often elegiac. In “Constellation of Dead Brothers,” for example, Serge names a long series of friends and comrades—including one Nguyen, later known as Ho Chi Minh, whose death had been reported in error—before acknowledging his debt to them and his resolve to continue their fight:

  Oh rain of stars in the darkness,

  constellation of dead brothers!

  To you I owe my blackest silence,

  my resolve, my indulgence

  for all these seemingly empty days,

  and whatever is left to me of pride

  for a blaze in a desert.

  Against the darkness of the skies, the times, and the mood, the dead are falling stars—fleeting sparks of activity, feeling, and consciousness. But by dint of Serge’s commemoration as he writes from his place of exile, they are also the fixed stars that will guide him through life, despite looming fatality, in all senses of the word.

  In mourning the living—that is, the not yet dead—“Boat on the Ural” is a counterpoem to “Constellation of Dead Brothers”: A group of deported Oppositionists has taken a boat out on the river for the day, and they are very much alive as they row against the current, singing to keep their spirits up. But midway through the poem, an image recalls the deaths of others who “fell / from heaven to a brilliant death”—which echoes the “rain of stars” in “Constellation of Dead Brothers.” When the journey to nowhere comes to its end, along with the momentary illusion of freedom on the river (“smiles in the depths of the water, / prison bars on the pale sky”), the penultimate stanza is almost Chinese in its muted anguish:

  Night falls, the boat pulls in,

  stop singing.

  Exile relights its captive lamps

  on the shore of time.

  “Death of Panait,” one of Serge’s major poems, is a testament to his friendship with the Romanian writer Panait Istrati. In many ways a traditional elegy, “Death of Panait” mourns the friend and celebrates his qualities, his pleasures, and his troubles as it indicts his enemies. A meditation on the uncertainties of life and the finality of death, it is also a search for reconciliation amid the grief of an irreparable loss.23

  Istrati was the author of tales of adventure set in the Balkans that, to Serge, were proof of “an inner lyrical life that is hard to define.” Indeed, Serge describes him as “a born poet madly in love with simple things like adventure, friendship, rebellion, flesh and blood.”24 For many years, Istrati had led a rough-and-tumble, vagabond existence before he turned to writing, with Romain Rolland’s encouragement; his novels met with immediate success.

  In 1927 Istrati was invited to Moscow for the celebration of the t
enth anniversary of the October Revolution, where he met the Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis. Together with their companions, they roamed the country in order to see Soviet life with their own eyes. As an unexpected result, Istrati lost his initial enthusiasm for all things Bolshevik and came away feeling bitterly disappointed by the abuses of power, the corruption, the univocal party line, the suppression of free speech, the atmosphere of fear and intimidation, and the arbitrary detentions that he witnessed. Back in France, Istrati wrote of his disillusionment in Vers l’autre flamme, après seize mois dans l’U.R.S.S. (Toward the Other Flame: After Sixteen Months in the USSR).25 The book earned him intense calumny and vilification at the hands of party hacks and others both in the USSR and in Europe who accused him of betraying the revolution and even of working for the Romanian security services. One of Istrati’s unpardonable sins was exposing the intense persecution of Serge’s wife, Liuba Russakova, and her family: Serge’s father-in-law, Alexander Russakov, a Jewish anarchist worker, had been denounced as “a counterrevolutionary, ex-capitalist, anti-Semite, and terrorist,” and the whole family was put in jeopardy.26 Sick in body and sick at heart, Istrati eventually returned to Romania, where he died of tuberculosis at the age of 50 in 1935.

  In the first two-thirds of “Death of Panait,” the repetition of the word “finished” rings like a muffled bell as incidents of travail and delight in Istrati’s past life are recited. Early stanzas recall Istrati’s taking leave of women and of the seductions of wandering—that is, of two of his most enduring passions outside of writing:

  Finished—the romances, dark lips and golden eyes

  in the back of some dive, in the ports,

  in the depths of the night.

  Finished—the bitter,

  intoxicating

  temptations of the sea.

  As Istrati is progressively despoiled by death, the poem comments on his choice of friends in life, which prompts him to take a swipe at the unreliability of writers:

  But maybe they were good men,

  and maybe they were saints,

  your pals

  in the little café in Brăila

  where tough customers

  smuggled contraband

  at the Paradise.

  “Not one, you see, not one of them

  would’ve left the other in the lurch.

  They weren’t writers.”

  Serge, himself the target of even worse mistreatment, knew how Istrati suffered from the abuse received at the hands—or pens and typewriters—of “all those phrasemongers” who called him “a sellout”:

  You lay upon your press clippings, like Job upon his filth,

  gently spitting up the last remnant of your lungs

  into the faces of the hacks,

  the glorifiers of profitable massacres,

  the profiteers of disfigured revolutions …

  Finished—even the wish to die

  when only bastards are left in this vale of promotional tears.

  His torments almost at an end, Istrati is helped along “the road’s burning stones” toward death in all its finality—“the sky is blinding, ah, what heartbreak!”—by “two goddesses” who are called “solitude, friendship.” Life may have finished with Istrati, but Serge has not finished mourning his friend:

  No more will I see you going from room to room

  stirring your black mood

  into your cup of black coffee.

  No more will I calm your vehement rages.

  No more will I see your veiny Balkan hands,

  your big, gold-filled mouth,

  your hunter’s nose, your eyes of a sly old child,

  a cynic among the cunning …

  In the French original of “Death of Panait,” the exclamation “what heartbreak!” is “quel déchirement!” Among the key words in Serge’s poetry are the noun déchirement, the adjectives déchiré and déchirant, and the verbs déchirer and se déchirer. The semantic field includes tearing, ripping, rending, splitting, with literal and figurative senses that depend on the context. When in the last line of “Frontier” Serge describes himself as “a torn man of Eurasia,” the French is “un homme déchiré d’Eurasie.” In “People of the Ural,” a young woman is singing when “her voice turns gently heartrending”—“la voix devient doucement déchirante.” And in “Mexico: Churches,” the sense of déchirer combines the concrete and the figurative in “a heavy cloud … tearing open … the Milky Way.”

  The déchirement series, however rendered in English, opens a way into the poetry of a torn man, for Serge’s life can be viewed as a set of conflicting, seemingly irreconcilable pairs, such as anarchism and Bolshevism, individualism and collectivism, literature and action, vulnerability and toughness, sanity and madness, power and powerlessness, and Europe and Asia (with eventually a third term, Mexico).27 But as important as the déchirement series may be, it is only one of Serge’s resources in conveying his sense of inner and outer conflicts: Imagery is another, including images of torture and crucifixion. And so are the broken forms of whole poems that mimic the broken world they present; for in these poems, when things fall apart, so do their representations.

  “Outbreaks,” for example, is flooded by a whirl of images related to high-altitude bombing (an innovation of the Second World War), in which an “angel-faced aviator” destroys the planet as he just follows orders, “for his head was equipped with brand-new ideas made of a metal that was superflexible, durable, unbreakable, and cheap.” The immediate result: “the planet split into … six hundred and sixty-six parts, / six hundred and sixty-six decapitated little girls under the rubble” of a school. Enter Alfred Jarry’s Père Ubu, who, thrown into a rage because his collections of chamber pots and postage stamps were destroyed, threatens “a nice little revolution with mass-produced guillotines, standardized, electrified, et cetera / and statues of jerks in uniform on every street corner, you’ll see!” The physical world, as well as the social world, is shattered, and poetry cannot put it back together again.

  A longing for refuge and relief from unending struggle, suffering, and tension appears in many poems, evidence of a deep-seated wish for an “anywhere out of this world.” Yet a particular image of calm does eventually emerge from the agony of two poems, “Tête-à-Tête” and “Song,” an image that conjures up a Baudelairean idyll or Watteau’s The Embarkation for Cythera—transposed of course to very different circumstances. In “Tête-à-Tête,” a poem that discloses the hard trials of Liuba’s mental illness, Serge sketches a definition of “that great word peace”:

  slack waves at dawn under new leaves,

  innocent leaves,

  a welcome, a presence, a fulfillment,

  there is what is not, what will never be.

  “Song” is more cryptic and condensed in its troubledness as it envisions a similar island of repose: “Imagine if you found peace again / that slack water beneath the palms.” But in an irony of personal history, as Serge sailed to exile in Mexico he discovered the Caribbean to be a “voracious sea, [a] dangerous sea” that sings a “menacing song.” Serge experienced the islands as hellish sites of conquest, slavery, and genocide, and the sea as sinister: “The surge of your low waves toward these lush lands is like a surge of hatred, / The palm trees … are shredded by it” (“Caribbean Sea”). Even earlier, in part III of “Dialectic,” he had compared “the wild and sinister / sound of waves” to “the sound of a crowd” and to the “muffled sound” of “throat-slitting.”

  In “Mexico: Churches,” Serge attempts a deeper resolution—a reconciliation—of the conflicts that tear him and the world apart. To this end, he uses a kind of hallucinatory juxtaposition to unite places distant in time and in space: Russia and Mexico, places that are important to his grappling with life in the wake of a failed revolution and a new world war. Perhaps surprisingly for an atheist revolutionary, the emblematic sites are churches: “the flamboyant crimson church of Pushkino” in Russia and a church in San Juan Parangaricutir
o near the newly formed Paricutín volcano in Mexico:28

  The two most Christian churches I have seen combine in my memory

  thus two rising flames join one crimson and the other black

  thus continental expanses merge the tropics and suddenly the pole

  the jungle and suddenly the steel of glaciers inseparable in their inexplicable unity

  The images of the churches combine in the poet’s memory, granted, but here Serge risks playing down the element of poetic imagination, which energizes and dramatizes this connection, a connection that the poem itself enables. Is Rimbaud le voyant so far away when writing in A Season in Hell, “I grew accustomed to simple hallucination: I quite simply saw a mosque in place of a factory … a salon at the bottom of the lake”? The irrational joining of disparate but juxtaposed realities, with each carrying its own specific affective charge, is not so much a technique as a product of the imagination at work. Rimbaud also haunts the description of the youthful Serge at the church in Pushkino:

  and we were reconciled with the cold with the northern lights

  with the polar nights

  with the convulsive nights and the obsessive suns that each carried in his head

  (We were young travelers joyfully bitter and strong on intimate terms with torments and death

  we had real need of reconciliation with ourselves and the work of human hands)

  Even so, the main thrust of “Mexico: Churches” implicitly contradicts Rimbaud, whose watchword was refusal, not reconciliation, and who vociferously denounced the work of human hands: “I detest all occupations … What a century for hands!—I’ll never lift a finger.”29