A Blaze in a Desert

by Victor Serge

  In 1936, on the eve of André Gide’s voyage to the Soviet Union, Serge wrote Gide an open letter warning him to look behind the scenes and daring him to publish the truth of what he would find there. 28 Gide did precisely that, and the publication of Return from the U.S.S.R. earned him the enmity of Moscow and of French Stalinists and fellow travelers like Aragon. Gide also journeyed to Brussels to meet with Serge before publishing his Afterthoughts on the U.S.S.R., where his criticism of Stalinism was sharper and more systematic.

  Also in 1936, with the Surrealist poet André Breton and others (such as Marcel Martinet, the poet to whom “Mexico: Idyll” is dedicated), Serge formed the Committee for Inquiry into the Moscow Trials and the Defense of Free Speech in the Revolution. Serge foresaw that Stalin would extend his purges into civil war Spain and the need to defend independent revolutionaries there. The Committee soon had its hands full when the Spanish Communists engineered the suppression of a rival, anti-Stalinist Marxist party, the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM), to which Serge was an adviser, and kidnapped its leader, Serge’s close friend Andrés Nin.

  Between 1936 and 1939, Serge produced a stream of pamphlets, books, and articles revealing the truth about Stalinism, but he was boycotted by the mainstream press, dominated by the Popular Front antifascist alliance with the Communists. Ironically, Serge ended up working as a proofreader for Socialist newspapers that would not print his authentic explanations of the mystery of the Moscow Trials. His other source of income was the weekly column he wrote for the independent, union-backed daily paper, La Wallonie of Liège, Belgium, in which he commented on history, culture, politics, and world events in the run-up to war.29 Beholden to no one and to no party, Serge offered a unique perspective on a crucial period that stretched from the euphoria of the Communist-Socialist alliance of the Popular Front to the eve of France’s defeat in the Second World War.

  Serge placed the two poems he wrote in Paris, “Sunday” (1939) and “After that splendid Notre Dame …” (1938), first and next to last in Messages (1946).30 Both poems are dedicated to his companion, Laurette Séjourné. And both poems render the uncanny atmosphere of Paris on the eve of war, which Serge describes so vividly in Unforgiving Years.31 In “After that splendid Notre Dame,” “the wide-awake sleeper” experiences a vision of transcendence and connection as he follows the eternally recurring “hope-filled cortege of his executed brothers” along the quays of the Seine. In “Sunday” Serge portrays a ragged café beggar who is a reincarnation of Rictus’s monologist, now transmogrified into “a corpse in a fedora” in an Apocalypse “completely devoid of interest” to the patrons of the café.

  After the French military collapsed before the Nazi onslaught, Serge left Paris at the very last moment, as enemy tanks were penetrating the town. He, Laurette, Vlady, and a Spanish friend joined the exodus on foot, eventually arriving in Marseille, where, along with hundreds of antifascist refugees trapped in Vichy France, they haunted the prefecture and the consulates in a relentless search for exit permits and visas. Serge depicts the haunted atmosphere of that time and place in The Long Dusk (1946).32

  In Marseille Serge worked closely with Varian Fry of the Emergency Rescue Committee to vet and aid antifascist refugees. When Fry and his coworkers rented a big, ramshackle villa just outside of town, they invited Serge, Vlady, and Laurette to move in. Serge dubbed the place “Villa Espervisa” and suggested inviting Breton and his family to join them. Before long, the villa was hosting guests like Victor Brauner, Jacques Hérold, Wifredo Lam, André Masson, Benjamin Péret, and Remedios Varo for regular Surrealist activities.33 In the library of the Villa Air-Bel, Serge would work on his novel of the Stalinist purges, The Case of Comrade Tulayev,34 while Breton wrote “poems in the greenhouse.”35

  Although Breton rejected Serge’s realistic political fiction as passé, Serge joined in Surrealist games with Breton and his friends, while remaining critical of Surrealism and certain Surrealists. For example, during their transatlantic journey, Serge privately expressed dismay that Breton, who practiced astrology, proved ignorant of the first elements of astronomy under the night sky.36 (“Out at Sea,” the love poem Serge composed during that voyage on an old wreck of a freighter overcrowded with refugees, is dedicated to Laurette, who remained in France, joining Serge in Mexico a year later.)

  When the Capitaine Paul-Lemerle arrived in Martinique, the Vichy French officials interned Serge and Vlady in a former quarantine barracks with other refugees. There Vlady sketched his father calmly seated at his typewriter and writing; perhaps Serge is working on “The rats are leaving …” with its dystopian vision of the planet as refugee ship to which we must hold on “with a bitter grip / As one clings to floating hulks” and with its final, sanguinary call for justice.

  Serge and Vlady were eventually granted temporary residency in Ciudad Trujillo, Dominican Republic, where in April 1941 Serge quickly wrote a short book on Germany’s invasion of Russia, Hitler contra Stalin.37 Serge also wrote two poems included in Messages, “Altagracia” and “Caribbean Sea.”

  Thanks to a campaign by supporters like Dwight and Nancy Macdonald in New York and exiled Spanish comrades like Julián Gorkin in Mexico City, President Lázaro Cárdenas of Mexico offered Serge asylum. He arrived in Mexico a year after the assassination of Trotsky, only to find himself the object of Communist slander campaigns in the press (“fascist agent”), leading up to an armed Stalinist attack when Serge tried to speak in a public meeting. (Serge escaped, but several of his comrades were hospitalized.)

  As for Mexico itself, Serge instantly fell in love with the country. And it was in Mexico that wrote most of the poems of Messages and finished his greatest prose works: Memoirs of a Revolutionary and the novels The Case of Comrade Tulayev and Unforgiving Years, all unpublished at his death. He immersed himself in Mexican archaeology, geography, geology, and culture, eventually writing a short book on pre-Columbian civilization, a subject that Laurette Séjourné, later known as an archaeologist, was studying at the university.38 Everywhere he saw similarities between the peoples and landscapes of Mexico and those of Russia and Central Asia.

  As Serge records in his Memoirs, he was enchanted by Mexico from his first glimpse of the country through the window of the DC-3 that brought him and Vlady from Ciudad Trujillo:

  The airplane instructs us in a new vision of the world whose lyrical richness could provide material for a renewed art form to flourish, whether in poetry or painting. But this semi-bankrupt civilization has made it into a killing machine; it is used for travel only by the rich, who are dead to any kind of enthusiasm. We see them dozing in the comfortable seats of the Douglas aircraft, and all the while we are winging over the Caribbean Sea, the storm-ridden lands of Yucatan, and then the tablelands of Mexico, covered in heavy clouds which are transfixed by shafts of light. Huge, rose-pink, and solid, Tenayuca’s Pyramid of the Sun stands out suddenly on its flinty plain.39

  The theoretician of that new art form based on the aerial vision was the painter Gerardo Murillo, who called himself Dr. Atl. Dr. Atl was a notorious political renegade whom Serge encountered during his trips to the Paricutín volcano, which had sprung up in a farmer’s field in 1943.

  Serge’s experiences of the volcano’s vast destructive powers, as well as of Mexico’s earthquakes, had a powerful effect on his imagination, which is evident in the Mexican poems as well as in Unforgiving Years, whose final section is set in Mexico. For Serge, geological revolutions were a natural metaphor for the human revolutions and catastrophes of totalitarianism and the apocalypse of total industrial war on a planetary scale. Serge used the word “pandestruction” to describe the massive, mechanized hyperviolence of the Second World War.

  Serge’s wartime poems abound in images of radical destruction, as in “Altagracia,” in which nature’s violence is indistinguishable from the violence of war in the dream vision of a cemetery in a tropical storm: “Its battalion of crosses seemed to start moving. / A host of eyeless faces we
re revealed in the slanting mirrors of lightning bolts, / All the world’s mirrors were breaking at once, sweeping away the disfigured faces of armies.” More than half a century later, Serge’s cataclysmic evocations have a contemporary ring, prophetic of our era of acid rain, overheated atmosphere, melting ice floes, rising oceans, floods, droughts, and cyclones: pandestruction magnified to a truly planetary scale.

  “Hands”

  The magnificent elegy “Hands,” with its intimations of mortality, was the last poem, the last words, that Serge was to write. Vlady tells the story:40

  One day in November of 1947 my father brought a poem to my house in Mexico City. Not finding me at home, he left to take a walk downtown. From the central post office, he mailed me the poem. A short while later, he died in a taxi. That night a friend came to bring me the news. I found him on an operating table in the police station. A yellowish lamp illuminated the sinister room. The first thing I noticed were his shoes: they had holes in them. This shocked me, for he was careful about his dress, although his clothes were always of the cheapest. The following day, I was unable to draw his face, for they had put a plaster death-mask over it. I limited myself to drawing his hands, which were beautiful. A few days later, I received his poem: “Hands.”

  Notes

  1 Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, Peter Sedgwick with George Paizis, trans. (New York: New York Review Books, 2012), 5.

  2 Ibid., 21.

  3 Le Rétif, “Jehan Rictus: Les soliloques du pauvre” (décembre 1908), published posthumously by Émile Armand in L’Unique, no. 36 (janvier–février 1949).

  4 Serge, Memoirs, 63.

  5 Victor Serge, Men in Prison, Richard Greeman, trans. (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2014).

  6 Serge, Memoirs, 44.

  7 Victor Serge, Birth of Our Power, Richard Greeman, trans. (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2014).

  8 Victor Serge, Conquered City, Richard Greeman, trans. (New York: New York Review Books, 2011).

  9 Serge, Memoirs, 69.

  10 See Victor Serge, Collected Writings on Literature and Revolution, Al Richardson, trans. and ed. (London: Francis Boutle, 2004).

  11 Serge, Literature and Revolution, 153–155.

  12 Serge, Memoirs, 179.

  13 Ibid., 179.

  14 Ibid., 236.

  15 Ibid., 229

  16 Ibid., 230.

  17 Ibid., 230.

  18 Victor Serge, “The Writer’s Conscience,” in David Craig, ed., Marxists on Literature: An Anthology (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1975), 435–444.

  19 Ibid., 437.

  20 Ibid., 440.

  21 Ibid., 442.

  22 Ibid., 368.

  23 Ibid., 53.

  24 Ibid., 361.

  25 Victor Serge, Midnight in the Century, Richard Greeman, trans. (New York: New York Review Books, 2015).

  26 Trotsky used the phrase as the title of a chapter in his autobiography, the phrase occurs in the first line of “Marseille,” and Jean Malaquais borrowed the phrase for the title of his Marseille novel.

  27 Serge’s From Lenin to Stalin and Russia Twenty Years After are available in English translation.

  28 Serge, Memoirs, 390–391. For Mitchell Abidor’s translation of “Open Letter to André Gide,” see https://www.marxists.org/archive/serge/1936/xx/letter-gide.htm.

  29 For a selection of these articles, see Victor Serge, Retour à l’Ouest: Chroniques (juin 1936–mai 1940), textes choisis et annotés par Anthony Glinoer, préface de Richard Greeman (Marseille: Agone, 2010).

  30 Nineteen forty-six is the date of completion of the Messages manuscript, not the date of publication. Its first publication is in Victor Serge, Pour un brasier dans un désert (Bassac [Charente], France: Plein Chant, 1998), thanks to the efforts of the editor of that collection, Jean Rière.

  31 Victor Serge, Unforgiving Years, Richard Greeman, trans. (New York: New York Review Books, 2008).

  32 Victor Serge, The Long Dusk, Ralph Manheim, trans. (New York: Dial Press, 1946). The original French title Les Derniers temps (End Times) is more apocalyptic.

  33 See Rosemary Sullivan, Villa Air-Bel: World War II, Escape, and a House in Marseille (New York: HarperCollins, 2006).

  34 Victor Serge, The Case of Comrade Tulayev, Willard R. Trask, trans. (New York: New York Review Books, 2004).

  35 Serge, Memoirs, 426.

  36 Victor Serge, Carnets (1936–1947), édition établie par Claudio Albertani et Claude Rioux (Marseille: Agone, 2012), 158.

  37 Victor Serge, Hitler contra Stalin, la fase decisiva de la guerra mundial, traducción de Enrique Adroher (México, D.F.: Ediciones Quetzal, 1941).

  38 See Richard Greeman, “Serge en México y México en Serge,” in Victor Serge, Los años sin perdón, Alberto González Troyano, trans. (Xalapa, Mexico: Universidad Veracruzana, 2014).

  39 Serge, Memoirs, 433.

  40 Translated by Richard Greeman from “N.B. por Vlady,” in Mains/Manos: Un Poema de Victor Serge (Mexico: Carta al Lector y El Taller Martín Pescador, 1978), a bilingual edition with a Spanish translation by Verónica Volkow.

  _____________

  Richard Greeman is the translator of five of Victor Serge’s seven novels: Men in Prison, Birth of Our Power, Conquered City, Midnight in the Century, and Unforgiving Years. He has published literary, political, and biographical studies of Serge in English, French, Russian, and Spanish, as well as prefaces to French editions of Serge’s books.

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  Men in Prison

  Victor Serge

  Introduction and Translation by Richard Greeman

  ISBN: 978-1-60486-737-7

  232 pages

  “Everything in this book is fictional and everything is true,” wrote Victor Serge in the epigraph to Men in Prison. “I have attempted, through literary creation, to bring out the general meaning and human content of a personal experience.”

  The author of Men in Prison served five years in French penitentiaries (1912–1917) for the crime of “criminal association”—in fact for his courageous refusal to testify against his old comrades, the infamous “Tragic Bandits” of French anarchism. “While I was still in prison,” Serge later recalled, “fighting off tuberculosis, insanity, depression, the spiritual poverty of the men, the brutality of the regulations, I already saw one kind of justification of that infernal voyage in the possibility of describing it. Among the thousands who suffer and are crushed in prison—and how few men really know that prison!—I was perhaps the only one who could try one day to tell all … There is no novelist’s hero in this novel, unless that terrible machine, prison, is its real hero. It is not about ‘me,’ about a few men, but about men, all men crushed in that dark corner of society.”