by Victor Serge
As one of the hotheaded young travelers of the poem, Serge was much closer in spirit to Rimbaud le voyou in his nihilistic rebelliousness. In his maturity, however, Serge came to sympathize with the very sorts of people he had scorned before.30 The values of friendship, community, and solidarity in adversity, and the feeling for the inviolability of the individual deeply inform his poetry and his resistance to totalitarianism. And if Serge often resorts to religious imagery and language, he does so to use their numinous power to address human suffering, not to invoke a deity—Serge’s spirituality is of this world. In this poem, the Russian church and the Mexican church, while fulfilling their traditional roles as providers of solace, function also as objective correlatives to Serge’s perennial outsider status. And for Serge the churches are emotional vantage points on the still-living, turbulent histories of the Russian and the Mexican revolutions.
At the Russian church situated on “snowy plains … under a splendidly dazzling sun,” all is bright, clear, and peaceful, and Serge and his delighted companions are relieved of their inner turmoil in the vicissitudes of revolution. Under the sign of the crimson flame, these young people mentally and emotionally afflicted by “obsessive suns” of their ideas and ideals are momentarily restored to themselves and the ordinary social world. But theirs is an ephemeral reconciliation, a northern analogue of the dreamed-of peaceful islands of “Tête-à-Tête” and “Song.”
In Mexico many years later, “after the wars revolutions mass graves inexplicable crimes,” Serge comes upon the church “with the black flame.” As if it were the photographic negative of the Russian church, the church at San Juan Parangaricutiro is set in a landscape that seems to contain “the most immense battlefields of our times,” where nature is ripping itself apart as the Paricutín volcano engulfs the town with ash, lava, and “dark destructive snow cosmic dust cold fire dust.” Unlike the Russian church, which was blessed by a clear winter’s day, the Mexican church has “slipped into the irreconcilable night / a night of annihilation”—into utter hell on “the inhuman earth,” where the dark plume of the volcano blots out the stars.
In the 22 February 1943 entry of Carnets, Serge mentions reading the news of the sudden appearance of the volcano: a man “working in his fields saw the earth slowly rise, ‘as if it were breathing,’ and smoke and sparks issuing from little crevices.” 31 Serge then follows a chain of meaningful coincidences that link the volcano with his dream of an earthquake, with real earthquakes, and with cosmic catastrophes and social chaos. As if he were beginning a Surrealist narrative of chance encounters,32 Serge writes, “For me, it all began with a dream” in which he sees a crowded building split in two. An earthquake strikes a couple of days later, and Serge happens upon a destroyed building that resembles the one in his dream.
Discussing all this with his friend Fritz Fränkel, a German psychoanalyst and revolutionary who had participated in Walter Benjamin’s drug experiments, Serge remarks that he has used the word “earthquake” (séisme) several times in his writings to characterize great events and that his latest novel includes a seismologist. Realizing that the psychoanalytic mechanism of repression was in operation, Serge writes that in the conversation he forgot to connect the seismologist to the working title of the novel, La Terre commence à trembler (The Earth Begins to Shake), published as The Case of Comrade Tulayev.33 As if to complete the series of deep images that appear in much of his fiction and poetry, Serge confesses his love of looking at the night sky, even though he always expected to see portents of disaster there—perhaps an exploding star that would fill the sky with fire.
Late that night another earthquake occurs, rousing Serge and his family from sleep. Serge comments on experiencing an “animal panic” mixed with a feeling of powerlessness at the core of his being, as if the earth were floating and mountains were breaking up. The next morning, Serge remarks to Fränkel that they are “like the people of the Middle Ages who, amid the social chaos, fed on the Apocalypse as they awaited the Millennium.” When Serge eventually visited San Juan Parangaricutiro and the Paricutín volcano, his dreams came true.34
As “Mexico: Churches” unfolds at the volcano and in town, Serge and his companions take reassurance from the dignity of some Indios “eating tortillas in the halos of smoky lamps / —what calm ruled there what security in calm and certain destruction.” The oxymoronic linking of “calm” and “certain destruction” in this fiery dark night of the soul already indicates the path to take: the next morning is “as calm with annihilation as the night of annihilation” as the Indios drag themselves on their knees into “the transparently bright nave” of the church.
Amid the darkness and the destruction, Serge finds a corollary to the Russian church: the black flame of the Mexican church sheds its unique light not only on the natural disaster but also on the destruction of so much of what Serge holds dear. In the days when the Bolshevik revolution still held promise of a better, more just life, the young Serge and his friends experienced a moment of personal reconciliation in the Russian church. By the time Serge is in exile in Mexico, his world and his hopes are in ruins. The reconciliation that he needs must be collective and communal, and thus objective. The Indios also arrive at the church from historical disasters, including the genocide of the Spanish Conquest and the ambiguous results of the Mexican Revolution.35
The Indios do not so much fight the catastrophe as fuse with it: they are “men of energy and ash,” people of the earth whose rites in the nominally Catholic church long predate European contact as they perform a strange hopping dance before the altar. As in “Death of Panait,” with its death-knell repetition of “finished,” “Mexico: Churches” uses the repetition of a phrase in part for its sound: réconciliés avec—“reconciled with”—seems to echo the “murmured prayers and the scuffing sound” of the worshippers’ feet on the stones, to insist on the need for absolute reconciliation of the victims with their fate:
reconciled with the disaster
reconciled with the death throes of the land under basaltic fire and ash
reconciled with the end of the world—and why not?
reconciled
Thy will be done oh Lord—oh Planet!
Serge and his companions are not of the place, not “men of energy and ash,” yet they are participants, not spectators, in the rites they witness. Even though the pious worshippers ignore the strangers, Serge insists that “we saw them we understood them deeply through a sort of transparence.” In “Mexico: Churches” this membrane of transparency joins more than it separates, and to be “reconciled with the end of the world” is in effect to be reconciled with the world: the natural world, the social world, and the world at war.36 It is also to be reconciled with oneself, even for a torn man of Eurasia. Concealed and revealed in the images of disaster is the prospect of regeneration, of a world created anew out of the raw materials of “dark destructive snow cosmic dust cold fire dust.”
Serge wrote “Hands” the day before he died.37 Timing alone does not make the poem a kind of accidental epitaph: with its intimations of mortality and its foregrounding of communication, continuity, and connection through art, “Hands” extends the themes of reconciliation and transparency found in “Mexico: Churches” while also hinting at Serge’s ars poetica.
A piece of sculpture, which Serge might have seen reproduced in an art book, is the pretext for the poem. The poet, reaching across “from one end of time to another,” addresses an anonymous man who was the model for the terra-cotta sculpture by a sixteenth-century Italian artist, “nameless like you”:
What astonishing contact, old man, your hands establish with our own!
How vain the centuries of death next to your hands …
Serge looks back in time through the present tense of the writing of the poem. The sculptor is faceless as well as nameless, and Serge himself is almost anonymous behind the pronoun “I.” Interestingly, the contact he seeks is not with the artist but with the old man who is the artis
t’s model, whose hands of another time and place implore a response, not from God but from other men and women:
The veins of your hands, old man, express prayer,
the prayer of your blood, old man, the next-to-last prayer,
not verbal prayer, not clerical prayer,
but the prayer of reasoning fervor,
powerful—powerless.
Their presence confronts the world with itself …
This opening of communication between Serge and the old man invites the readers of “Hands” to join with them as witness-participants. As if echoing the relationship between Serge and the Indios in “Mexico: Churches,” here Serge and the old man do not see us, the readers; we are nonetheless brought into the drama of the poem through “a sort of transparence.” Serge returns the invitation to profane prayer by “throwing onto the inexorable scales of the universe / at least the fragility of a thought, a sign, a line of verse” that is “as real as the imploring veins of your hand, / as real as the veins of mine so little different.”
That the representation of the old man’s hands in the sculpture and then in the poem “confronts the world with itself” brings readers closer to the world as well. For Serge, these imagined points of contact are not merely the result of plays of appearance within the poem: against all odds, something essential is transmitted as Serge and the old man discover what they have in common:
A drop of blood—
a single shaft of light falls from one hand to the other,
dazzling.
In this image of essential, elemental solidarity between one man and another across turbulent centuries, “Hands” also intimates Serge’s model of poetry—and a model for how to read his poetry. Whatever else we find in his poetry, we are meant to find him and his world, which despite everything is also our world, and this for Serge is another kind of transparency: a hard-won transparency of communication through the language of poetry.
Notes
1 Serge was born Victor Kibalchich. For more about the background to the poetry, see Richard Greeman, “Afterword: The Odyssey of a Revolutionary Poet,” in this book. Serge tells his story in Memoirs of a Revolutionary, Peter Sedgwick with George Paizis, trans. (New York: New York Review Books, 2012). For an appreciation of Serge’s novels in their political, philosophical, and literary contexts, see Bill Marshall, Victor Serge: The Uses of Dissent (Berg: New York, 1992). For a fascinating look at the Paris of the young Victor Serge, see Luc Sante, The Other Paris (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015).
2 Victor Serge, “Souvenirs,” 28 février 1943, in Carnets (1936–1947), édition établie par Claudio Albertani et Claude Rioux (Marseille: Agone, 2012), 280. Serge’s working title for his memoirs was Souvenirs des mondes disparus (Memories of Bygone Worlds).
3 Jean Rière gave Messages its first publication in his edition of Victor Serge, Pour un brasier dans un désert (Bassac [Charente], France: Plein Chant, 1998), which also includes Résistance, “Mains,” and other poems.
4 Serge, Memoirs, 21.
5 Mitchell Abidor, “Editor’s Introduction: The Old Mole of Individual Freedom,” in Victor Serge, Anarchists Never Surrender: Essays, Polemics, and Correspondence on Anarchism, 1908–1938, Mitchell Abidor, ed. and trans. (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2015), 1.
6 See especially Walt Whitman, Drum-Taps: The Complete 1865 Edition, Lawrence Kramer, ed. (New York: New York Review Books, 2015). Whitman’s Civil War poems are in some ways precursors of Serge’s elegies for friends and comrades lost in rebellion, revolution, civil war, and counterrevolution.
7 In this essay, I focus on only a handful of Serge’s characteristic themes and images in hopes of bringing readers closer to the poetry. I mean to suggest openings, not to present conclusions.
8 Marshall holds that “the personal courage and authenticity” of André Gide “probably inspired the figure of Félicien Mûrier” (Victor Serge, 95).
9 Victor Serge, The Long Dusk, Ralph Manheim, trans. (New York: The Dial Press, 1946), 153.
10 Victor Serge, The Case of Comrade Tulayev, Willard R. Trask, trans. (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1950), 293–294.
11 Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose (New York: Library of America, 1997), 285–286. I owe my discovery of the Serge–Stevens connection to D. L. Macdonald’s intriguing discussion in “Wallace Stevens and Victor Serge,” Dalhousie Review 66, nos. 1–2 (Spring– Summer 1986): 174–180. Macdonald notes that Stevens would have read translated excerpts from Memoirs of a Revolutionary in Dwight Macdonald’s Politics magazine. The Konstantinov episode is in Victor Serge, “The Revolution at Dead-End (1926–1928),” Ethel Libson, trans., Politics 1, no. 5 (June 1944): 147–151. The current translation of the episode is in Serge, Memoirs, 236–240.
12 Serge, Memoirs, 238–239.
13 Stevens, Collected Poetry, 174. Alan Filreis discusses Stevens, left politics, and poetry in relation to this poem and others in “Stevens in the 1930s,” in John N. Serio, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 41–42.
14 A snapshot taken on board the Capitaine Paul-Lemerle shows Serge standing next to Breton’s wife, Jacqueline Lamba, with Lam and his wife, Helena Holzer, to their right. See the photo archives of the United States Holocaust Museum at http://digitalassets.ushmm.org/photoarchives/detail.aspx?id=1155267. The notes to the photograph provide background information. (Thanks to Anna Pravdová for directing me to this photograph.) Breton kept a signed copy of Résistance, as well as copies of Serge’s Vie des révolutionnaires, Seize fusillés, and Portrait de Staline, till the end of his life in 1966. See the inventory of his collection at http://www.andrebreton.fr.
15 Interview with Octavio Paz in Rita Guibert, Seven Voices: Seven Latin American Writers Talk to Rita Guibert, Frances Partridge, trans. (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), 214; Octavio Paz, Itinerary: An Intellectual Journey, Jason Wilson, trans. (New York: Harcourt, 1999), 52–53.
16 Serge, “Surréalisme,” 2 janvier 1942, Carnets, 156–159. Although Michaux was not a member of the Surrealist group, he was close to Surrealism. The title of Michaux’s poem is “Contre,” translated as “Counter” in Henri Michaux, Selected Writings: The Space Within, Richard Ellmann, trans. (New York: New Directions Books, 1968), 125–127.
17 See Serge, “The Writer’s Conscience” [1947], in David Craig, ed., Marxists on Literature: An Anthology (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1975), 435–444, and Benjamin Péret, Le Déshonneur des poètes, précédé de La Parole est à Péret, préface de Jean Schuster (Paris: Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1965), 82. Péret critiques L’Honneur des poètes (The Honor of the Poets), a collection of Resistance poems.
18 Serge, “Lac de Pátzcuaro – Giraudoux,” 22–27 février 1944, Carnets, 475. The English translation of the complete line is by J. H. Matthews, from “Lobster,” in Benjamin Péret, Péret’s Score (Paris: Lettres Modernes, 1965), 41.
19 Serge, “Surréalisme,” 2 janvier 1942, Carnets, 158–159. Serge was provoked by a comment that Jacqueline Lamba made on the first line of “Sunday” (Messages): “The singer was singing oh life is so beautiful.” Lamba’s criticism: “The correct word isn’t poetry. I would have written: ‘The singer was sleeping …’”
20 Kenneth Rexroth, The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth, Sam Hamill and Bradford Murrow, eds. (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2003), 154–155. Such poems are complemented by the wry, despairing “New Objectives, New Cadres” (158), whose satire of Bolshevik “purer logic” is closer to Stevens—as well as to Yevgeny Zamyatin’s dystopian novel, We.
21 Kenneth Rexroth, “Victor Serge’s Memoirs of a Revolutionary,” San Francisco Examiner, 8 September 1963, on Ken Knabb’s Bureau of Public Secrets site at http://bopsecrets.org/rexroth/sfe/1963/09.htm#Victor-Serge.
22 The allusion is to the title of Philip Levine’s The Names of the Lost, with its moving elegies to anarchists who died in the Spanish Civil War. Thanks to Christopher Winks, a fellow member of the not entirely imaginary
Serge International, for reminding me of Levine’s book, whose poetry has much in common with Serge’s.
23 Compare this movement toward reconciliation with Rexroth’s long poem on the death of Dylan Thomas, “Thou Shalt Not Kill,” which continually rises in fury at Thomas’s presumed murderers to conclude with the sea birds of New York harbor screaming, “You killed him! You killed him. / In your God damned Brooks Brothers suit, / You son of a bitch.” The poem seems less an elegy than a sort of reverse panegyric in which Thomas is praised by condemning all others. Rexroth, Complete Poems, 573.
24 Serge, Memoirs, 323.
25 Panaït Istrati, Vers l’autre flamme, après seize mois dans l’U.R.S.S.: Confession pour vaincus (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), with additional documents.
26 Serge, Memoirs, 321–322.
27 This list includes terms that Anselm Jappe uses to describe Serge under the less dynamic rubric of “his background hesitation”: “son hésitation de fond entre anarchisme et bolchevisme, individualisme et collectivisme, littérature et action” (Anselm Jappe, “Postface,” in Eleni Samios-Kazantzaki, La Véritable tragédie de Panaït Istrati [Fécamp, France: Nouvelles Éditions Lignes, 2013], 302). The book, whose main text is a memoir of the Panait Istrati– Nikos Kazantzakis tour of the Soviet Union in 1927–1928, includes 43 letters from Serge to Istrati. Marshall stresses “the dialectical aspect of [Serge’s] thought” in dealing with “the dynamic confrontations of seemingly irreconcilable positions” (Victor Serge, 7).
28 Marshall, Victor Serge, 111–114, discusses Serge’s frequent use of images of volcanism and earthquake in his literary works, including in “Le Séisme” (The Earthquake), published in Victor Serge, Le Tropique et le nord: L’hôpital de Léningrad et autres nouvelles (Paris: François Maspéro, 1972); “Le Séisme” was written during the same period as “Mexico: Churches.” In a perhaps telling coincidence, Stevens’s “Esthétique du Mal” opens in the shadow of Vesuvius, which “had groaned / For a month” (Complete Poems, 277).