The Lisbon Route

by Ronald Weber

  Even for exiles bent solely on getting away, delays in doing so could stretch so long that they seemed to be living in Lisbon. The American novelist and poet Frederic Prokosch reported that after going through a furious phase of trying to leave—“straggling in and out of the Consulates, gathering for gossip, begging for introductions, ferreting for loans, gambling, bribing, bickering, pawning; waiting and waiting”—many refugees gave up and made homes of a sort in the city and took up familiar national routines. “Their complaints,” he went on “grew stylized; people stopped listening. A strange kind of peacefulness swept over them. The drab, gentle lethargy of Lisbon gathered them in.”

  Lisbon became Munich, Manchester, Marseilles. Small replicas of a dead Europe were erected all over the city, tenderly, rather shabbily. French and Belgians flocked to the boulevard cafés; Germans to the shady beauty spots; English to the tennis-courts; Jews and South Americans to the fashionable tea-shops; Dutch and Norwegians and Jugoslavs to the cliff-lined beaches. Everyone managed, after a while, to be contented; or almost everyone. There was plenty of coffee, butter, beef. Warsaw, Rotterdam, Belgrade were never mentioned.

  Prokosch himself settled in. At the time he reached Lisbon on the early wave of fleeing refugees he was an ascendant literary star, having published collections of poetry and novels—his first novel, The Asiatics, was a major success—and in 1937 been awarded a prestigious Guggenheim fellowship. With the award he put aside plans for an academic career, following a master’s degree from King’s College, Cambridge, and a doctorate from Yale, in favor of imaginative writing and a wandering life spent mostly in Europe. He was in France and subsisting on a publisher’s advance when the war began. Immediately he drove a Ford convertible to Bordeaux and booked passage on a steamship, then discovered he was not yet ready to abandon Europe, and so drove south to Spain.

  After a week in Madrid and Seville he went on to Lisbon. In the Pálacio in Estoril he found a dollar-a-day maid’s room in which he felt, as he later wrote, “safe and inaccessible. The war was thrillingly near yet intriguingly remote. The refugees swept down from Brussels and Oslo and Amsterdam and the beach rang with the accents of Dutch, Norwegian, Flemish.” His intent to stay two weeks in Portugal stretched to two years.

  Prokosch spent his mornings working on a new novel about Europe in the time just before the war, his afternoons at the beach with a polyglot group of new friends. They lunched together on cheese from Algarve, sausages from Minho, and joked about the Nazi leaders while also making fifty-escudo bets among themselves about when the Wehrmacht would take Moscow. One night at a large beach at Guincho (located some four miles beyond Cascais, near the westernmost edge of Europe), with breakers crashing in beneath steep cliffs, he and his new friends went swimming nude—and he rescued one of them from the surging water by grabbing her hair and dragging her to the beach. Praised for his brave act, he passed it off as simply reaction to fear, though possibly it also had something to do with his level of physical conditioning. Prokosch was a skilled tennis and squash player who had played in many tournaments and in 1939 had won the French national championship in squash.

  While he worked on his novel the war suddenly came close in Prokosch’s awareness of “ambiguous and slippery personalities” staying with him at the Pálacio. Some of his evenings he spent in the hotel’s lounge going over notes for his book, causing an Italian guest to caution him, “Shouldn’t you be a bit more circumspect? People are beginning to be suspicious!” Another figure, suddenly appearing before Prokosch during a nighttime walk on the beach, warned him about a drink he had recently had with a Prussian aristocrat named Baron von Rheinbaben.

  One of the big shots in the Gestapo but please don’t tell him that I told you so! But be careful with the Baron. He sends his cables straight to Hitler and nothing would please him more than to establish a rapport with America—a friendly little dialogue with a famous poet or novelist. And besides, you are being watched, my boy. Not only by me, who am innocuous, but by an odalisque draped in pearls and by a lady who is wearing sunglasses. So do be careful from now on! What a delicious place, Portugal!

  With the novel finished after many months of work (reports in the press in June 1941 said that Harper and Brothers had received from the Pálacio Hotel in Estoril the manuscript of a new Prokosch novel called The Skies of Europe), Prokosch took a lesiurely driving tour north to the fishing village of Nazaré, the cities of Coimbra and Porto, and into the mountains of Minho, which struck him as the loveliest he had ever seen. Back in Estoril, his friends now departing for places in South America, he decided the time had come for him to leave as well. He booked passage to New York on the Portuguese vessel Serpa Pinto and, as he wrote,

  I waved goodbye to my lovely Portugal on a gray October morning and the ship slid from the Tagus into the gray, sullen, seas. Every night the deck was illuminated by brilliant lights spelling portugal and at dawn a flock of gulls swooped over the ship with screams of warning.

  A chance of returning to Lisbon came when the playwright Robert Sherwood, head of the Overseas Branch of the U.S. Office of War Information, suggested Prokosch might be a good fit for propaganda work in a neutral country. “You know the Portuguese mentality,” Sherwood told him. “You might be useful to us in Lisbon.” Prokosch preferred a new neutral location and mentioned Stockholm, and there he went in 1943 on what Sherwood called “a cultural exploration.” Prokosch characterized it as “my erratic little career in espionage.”

  Prokosch’s only return to Portugal was imaginatively in the brief 1943 novel The Conspirators, a story of betrayal and retribution set in wartime Lisbon. In an opening scene, Vincent Van der Lyn, a Dutch refugee caught up in undisclosed anti-Nazi activity, escapes from prison and sets about finding who has named him to Portuguese authorities. From Quintanilla, a mysterious veteran of the Spanish Civil War, he learns that the villain, wearing a white dinner jacket with a red carnation, will appear that very night at the second roulette table of the Estoril casino. If he misses him there, the man will spend the night at a small inn at Guincho before departing the following day for Madrid. When he leaves Quintanilla’s quarters, Vincent takes with him a silver letter opener, which of course he is destined to employ as a weapon.

  Intertwined with Vincent’s story is that of Irina Petrova, his Russian mistress but also the lover of the man he seeks, Hugo von Mohr, supposedly an anti-fascist Anglophile but in reality a Nazi agent. Over the course of the compressed story’s single evening, Irina comes to realize that von Mohr is as coldly betraying her as he has Vincent.

  Both Irina and Vincent in their movements through Lisbon become Prokosch’s vehicles for evoking the overflowing city of the refugees, including those for whom it becomes the sad end of their journeys. For instance, Irina, passing cafés on the Rua Augusta, glimpses many familiar exiles but knows “each day there would be new ones.”

  Each day some of the old ones vanished. Most of them took the Clipper or the Excalibur for New York; a few sailed to Rio on the Siqueira Campos; others left, one by one, for Capetown or Brazzaville or Batavia; a few settled in small hotels or cottages along the shore “for the duration.” And a few of them quietly disappeared. The distinguished Dutch explorer, for example, had been found in his bedroom with a bullet in his right temple; the Austrian baroness had been jailed for stealing a sapphire bracelet in the Casino; the stammering Norwegian school teacher had fallen a victim to typhoid; the Latvian journalist had thrown himself into the Tagus; the Hungarian ballet dancer had suddenly gone blind with syphilis. They were gone, all gone. And others were going day by day.

  In the novel’s final scene Vincent pries open the window of the room in the inn at Guincho and kills von Mohr with the letter knife. (On the terrace outside the Estoril casino, as von Mohr left after winning at roulette, they had passed each other, Vincent pausing and staring, the other ignoring him.) He then calmly awaits the police, knowing he will return to prison but feeling strengthened by his deed. Mild and self-questionin
g to this point, Prokosch has Vincent now think: “I am at last a participant in the world. A part of history.” And add: “By a single brutal act I have cut myself from the life of men; yet in this very act, I have united myself to humanity.”

  More substantial than the characters or the plot of the novel is Lisbon itself, sketched by Prokosch in moody detail. Seemingly he intends to illustrate how the “most old-fashioned capital in Europe” was transformed into a “frenzied bazaar” by the great rush of refugees, its once sleepy atmosphere now thick with conspiratorial feeling and moral uncertainty yet, in some ambiguous fashion, also charged with fresh energy. He has Irina, whom the police bring to Guincho to see both killer and victim, believe in the story’s closing lines that “from the very core of disaster and loss she was drawing a new vitality, and a boundless strength; she was in the act of creating, at this very moment, a new way of living.”

  In 1944 Hollywood turned The Conspirators into a film of that name, with Vincent recast as a gallant Dutch freedom fighter and the murky foreboding of the novel blown into a full-scale spy melodrama. Prokosch had no role in the adaptation, which was the sole pleasure he took from a screening he saw. The film seemed to him to go out of its way to avoid such construction staples as suspense, characterization, or verisimilitude in portraying the Lisbon setting. “After all,” Prokosch wrote, “I had lived in Lisbon; I hadn’t imagined that the quality of that city could be so widely misrepresented, could be turned into such excruciating silliness. I kept smiling when I thought of the bewilderment the Portuguese will feel when that film finally reaches them. (If it ever does.)” The only things he was willing to accept as a bit right were a couple of costumes of Hedy Lamarr, who shared lead roles with Paul Henreid, and shots of a fine Rolls-Royce.

  *

  Hugh Muir’s writing in Lisbon was newspaper writing. He had worked in Paris on an American paper, the Paris Herald, in the World War I period, then moved back to his native England as a correspondent and eventually editor of London’s Sunday Express. When World War II began Muir was again in Paris as editor the Continental Daily Mail, the local edition of the London Daily Mail. With German forces advancing on the city, he fled in his car and in July 1940 came to Lisbon, where for the next eighteen months he was resident correspondent of the Daily Mail’s London edition. (A planned Continental Daily Mail edition in Lisbon, with Muir presumably in charge, never materialized.)

  Muir assumed that because Lisbon was the escape point for refugees leaving Europe and a crossroads for diplomats and high-profile wartime officials shuffling in and out, the city would be a journalist’s paradise. The day-to-day actuality, he soon learned, fell far short: the place was rife with rumor and propaganda clothed as news. “With dull regularity,” he observed, “we heard that German troops were about to march into the Peninsula, that revolt had broken out in Spain, that France had surrendered her fleet, and that the Americans were going to occupy the Azores.” If any such things really happened, Lisbon-based correspondents were often the last to know, with the result that most Allied newspapers and wire services relied on Portuguese stringers rather than staff writers for coverage of what firm news there was. An American correspondent for Collier’s magazine, Alice-Leone Moats, considered herself fortunate to be passing through Lisbon rather than working there since the unceasing rumor mill made it impossible to separate fact and fiction. “Five times a day,” she wrote, echoing Muir, “I would hear a different version of some wild report that was going the rounds. Each one was believed implicitly and repeated with embroidery.”

  Beyond rumor and propaganda newsmen faced structural difficulties: refugees were reluctant to tell their stories because of fear for friends and relatives still in occupied territory; visiting diplomats and officials were tight-lipped; and Portuguese censors were courteous but rigorous. Local correspondents frequently read better versions of their best stories when informants got to America and gave interviews free of Portuguese blue pencils.

  Work aside, and the swelling population of refugees also aside, Muir found Lisbon a delightful place to live. Its neighborhoods had a small-town intimacy about them, and the animated life of streets and cafés was a day-and-night magnet drawing nearly everyone outside or hanging from windows or leaning in doorways. Despite shabby districts and obvious poverty, the city was clean, its inhabitants relaxed and friendly, and there was a general air of modest commercial prosperity. Although the government was authoritarian, the law-abiding felt free to do as they pleased.

  For Muir’s countrymen the city had added charms. Sun and warmth were high on the list, but also in many ways Lisbon felt like home. There were British schools and churches, a British hospital and cemetery; there was English marmalade, Worcestershire sauce, English newspapers and tearooms and bars. Names of many familiar English businesses were on storefronts. There was the Royal British Club for gin and bridge. And there was nearby Estoril or Cascais to replace homesickness, if one were not overly stricken, for the wonders of Brighton or Blackpool.

  Lisbon and its seaside communities were so compelling, and wartime conditions back home so cheerless, that some British citizens resisted repatriation. If they were refugees and had gone through their funds in reaching Lisbon—and due to British regulations were unable to export funds from home accounts or friends—they could draw ten pounds a month from the British consulate after signing an agreement to repay the debt. The amount, supplemented for medical fees, was adequate for life in a cheap hotel or boardinghouse. But with British refugees constantly arriving and the local community thus expanding, the financial drain on the consulate brought forth an order that anyone refusing to accept transport home when available would forfeit the monthly allowance. A loophole, though, made an exception for those producing a medical certificate indicating they were too ill to travel. When some laggards found agreeable medical men to so certify them, the order was altered: only a medical certificate issued by the consulate’s doctor would do.

  A number of British seamen stayed on in Lisbon for another reason. They were survivors of merchant ships sunk by U-boats or German planes and had been rescued by Portuguese vessels or managed to paddle lifeboats or rafts to the Azores or Cape Verde islands. Now under the care of the embassy, the Mercantile Marine Office in Lisbon, and the British Seamen’s Institute, they were happily taking in Lisbon’s sun and food while regaining their health before again shipping off to sea. They lingered in the English bars in Cais de Sodré Square, easily recognizable in their new clothes but sternly forbidden to speak of their ships or convoys.

  When Hugh Muir gained permission to talk with the chief officer of one torpedoed freighter, he was told a story of being hit about 150 miles off the Azores and climbing in a lifeboat, one of the few to get free of the burning ship. From the lifeboat the officer got into a dinghy with six others, then transferred to another lifeboat with 40 men and spent nine days at sea before a fishing boat spotted them and they were towed to a village on one of the islands. Injured and splotched with fuel oil, the officer was carried ashore on a stretcher. When he was able to get to his feet, two Portuguese soldiers helped him stagger up the village street and pass before, to his considerable embarrassment, a lineup of weeping local women.

  After eighteen months of working in Lisbon, Muir returned to England for good. Through a friend in the British embassy he got priority booking on a flying boat. It was winter in Portugal, but the morning his plane left from Cabo Ruivo—with fourteen passengers aboard in bucket seats in an otherwise bare interior—the weather was fine and the flight was made without incident. London when he arrived was in blackout and it was raining, but, as Muir wrote of the moment, “it was London, and thoughts of Lisbon’s sunshine and a land of no war could not spoil my satisfaction at being home.”

  *

  Among Hugh Muir’s countrymen drawing on consular funds was the author Norman Douglas. Now in his seventies and long a resident of Europe, he was believed missing when the war began but turned up in Lisbon, as the New Yo
rk Times disclosed with a story in March 15, 1941, headlined “Norman Douglas Safe in Lisbon.” He had left Antibes in the south of France and reached Lisbon by rail in February, and after a few days in the city moved to the far north of Portugal to stay in the large and elegant home of a British acquaintance. “I shall stay till I am kicked out,” he wrote in a letter, “or failing that, till the war ends, or failing that, and supposing the war to last longer than I do—then, presumably, for ever… . I do nothing but eat and sleep which fills up the 24 hours nicely.” Unable to carry money with him out of France, he was living on his host’s hospitality and the British handout.

  Douglas may have been trying to fix his legal status in Portugal for the duration, or possibly he had been turned out by his host (who eventually left for the United States), when he went down to Lisbon in May. After a couple weeks there, Neil Hogg, the second secretary of the British embassy, put him up in a spare room in his Lisbon flat. With his Portuguese visa renewed, and the British raising his monthly payment to twenty pounds due to age and certification by the British Hospital that he was not up to further travel, he was prepared for another long wait in Portugal. Before leaving France he had booked an air flight from Lisbon to England as a requirement for getting Spanish and Portuguese transit visas, but he now wrote his close friend Nancy Cunard in London (who had published some of his work at her Hours Press in Paris) that his prospects of getting out were poor: “… there are 80 people ahead of me, and some 700 others, waiting their chance to go to England, and many of them much more important than myself. A pretty tangle!”

  Douglas seems not to have tried overly hard to improve his chances of leaving. He was of two minds about returning to a country he had not seen in a quarter century, and he dreaded having to deal with English food, weather, and social attitudes. He wrote Nancy Cunard, “If the police renew my passport, and if Neil Hogg does not get recalled, I shan’t move from here. The idea of England makes me rather creepy.” Later, with Douglas back in England, Cunard prodded him in written notes to recall his experience in France and Portugal.