As for the awarding of the Nobel Prize in literature to Mr. Churchill, Nurse Vautour received the news without much fuss — by now, she has become accustomed to a state of perpetual surprise. In fact, she was surprised mainly that, with all his worldly concerns, Mr. Churchill had found the time to write books. The awarding of the prize to Mr. Churchill made little impact in the mass media. It was a less-than-memorable Nobel Prize, compared to Mauriac’s or Hemingway’s, for example, whose names and work have left a greater mark on the literary landscape. No doubt, we ought to reread the writings of Winston Churchill to remind ourselves of his qualities as a man of letters. We might find in him a precursor of the mise en abime so dear to postmodern literature (Mr. Churchill having written “an enormous work on himself” and having entitled it The World Crisis). Perhaps he should be rehabilitated, as the Communists he so detested would say (it was Mr. Churchill who first coined the phrase the iron curtain). As for the members of the Nobel Committee of the Swedish Academy, their 1953 selection may correspond to one of those imperceptible moments of continuity in which Literature, having lost a measure of self-consciousness, momentarily lets slip the barriers that habitually separate the novelist from his characters, and the novel from History.
2
Death of Stalin
Man of steel falls to hardening of the arteries and into coma — Exposition in the grand Hall of the Trade Unions — The Antichrist who despised family life — Illness and death of Queen Mary — The Duke of Windsor’s grief at his mother Queen Mary’s funeral— Talent for evasion and problem of truth — Language and truth — Language and humanity — Return of Corporal Maillet of Lewisville — Baby M.’s mother and Nurse Vautour are — The Boston Braves move to Milwaukee
BABY M.’S MOTHER and Nurse Vautour learned of Stalin’s death in l’Évangéline on Friday, March 6, 1953. The leader of the Communist world had passed away the previous evening, in Moscow. The man of steel’s right side had been paralysed by a cerebral hemorrhage, which had subsequently caused a coma. Kremlin doctors had battled in vain against the hardening of the arteries. Death, supreme, had finally come between their comrade and his work. Nevertheless, even as the Soviet authorities announced that “the heart of the comrade and brilliant perpetuator of Lenin’s will, the chief sage and master of the Communist Party and Soviet people, Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, had ceased to beat,” it was clear that the flame of the Bolshevik revolution was not yet extinguished.
Nurse Vautour and the woman in whose womb Baby M. had begun to take shape followed with some interest the funeral of the Number One Red. His body lay in state in the grand Hall of the Trade Unions, five minutes from the Kremlin, in the heart of Moscow. During the first night, between Friday and Saturday, more than a million people filed past the casket. In the few days that followed, five million people came to pay their last respects to their leader, who was dressed in his marshall’s uniform with its sole decoration, while his medals were displayed on red silk cushions nearby. Soldiers stood guard next to the casket surrounded by flowers, while orchestras played sad songs and works by Tchaïkovsky and Glinka, the deceased’s favourite composers.
That Monday, “following a profound silence,” the remains of the Soviet leader were laid to rest “in a tomb of red and black marble . . . a magnificent art object,” while the cannons of Moscow and twenty-three other great Soviet cities boomed, and the Kremlin’s bells tolled. Earlier, the comrades of the new leadership had lifted “the velvet-trimmed casket onto their shoulders” to carry it down “to the gun carriage” while “hundreds of musicians, their instruments wrapped in black ribbons,” had taken up Chopin’s funeral march. Among the eight pallbearers were Stalin’s successor, Georgi Malenkov, as well as Vyacheslav Molotov, Lavrenti Beria, and Nikita Khrushchev. In spite of a glacial wind, millions of citizens lined the snow-covered streets of the capital to greet the procession. Millions of flowers (red and white roses, tulips, narcissi, and mimosas) had been brought in from the warmer climes of the USSR to decorate Red Square and the walls of the buildings along the funeral route. As had been done with Lenin, Stalin’s body was embalmed according to a secret process perfected by Russian scientists, in order to preserve his features so that they could be viewed by future generations.
Nor were Baby M.’s mother and Nurse Vautour indifferent to the consequences of Stalin’s death. They were well aware of the general concern over the continuation of History, particularly since it seemed that Stalin had been at the helm of the impenetrable Soviet Union forever. Georgi Malenkov, who wanted to prove himself worthy of the task which had fallen to him, made his maiden speech at the funeral service of the man whom he was succeeding. As he spoke, “Malenkov was bare-headed, and obviously under an enormous emotional strain. From time to time, he passed a hand over his eyes, as though he were wiping tears spawned by his grief or perhaps by the wind that whipped the funeral decorations.” Having declared that “the Party, the Soviet people, the entire human race had suffered a terrible and irreparable loss,” he proclaimed Stalin “humanity’s greatest genius.” Malenkov also took upon himself the sacred duty of carrying on Stalin’s peace plan, which included a meeting with President Eisenhower. After detailed study of the funeral orations by Malenkov, Beria (Minister of the Interior), and Molotov (Minister of External Affairs), Western diplomats concluded that the Soviet leadership would continue to advocate peaceful coexistence between the capitalist and socialist camps.
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In spite of their reservations about the fearsome conqueror, Western nations sent messages of sympathy and condolence to the grieving Russian people. The premier of Québec, Maurice Duplessis, did less than anyone to conceal his true feelings. He hailed the death of the Communist leader by declaring that Stalin “had all the characteristics of an Antichrist.” This categorical stance was echoed widely in scarcely couched terms by the Western press. The following comment, for example, was in many ways typical: “Stalin transformed Russia into a major industrial power, stopping at nothing in order to achieve his goal of domination through world Communism. Every human value was violated under his reign. He kept the entire world on alert, only to suffer in the end the common mortal’s fate.”
Baby M.’s mother and Nurse Vautour had difficulty understanding how a carpenter’s son had risen to absolute mastery over eight hundred million people without demonstrating at least a trace of goodness. They therefore read every article in l’Évangéline about this mysterious man. They learned that Stalin had been an erudite and shrewd political scientist who had established “a system of incredible horror” which was, nevertheless, efficient and productive. He was also described as an “impassive and extremely taciturn man . . . who could be affable and take on the mantle of a true father toiling for his family.” But it would be a mistake to fall for such posing, because Stalin “had always despised family life.” In fact, both of his marriages had ended badly, and his son Vassily, a pilot, was known “to regularly spend vast sums of money on parties with lovely young ladies.” This spendthrift son was something of a paradox, since Stalin himself “seemed to have maintained his typically Marxist contempt for personal wealth.” Stalin was also widely denounced for conducting his business at night and for consuming immense quantities of vodka.
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L’Évangéline published a detailed account of Stalin’s funeral the day after the lavish ceremony of Monday, March 9, 1953. On the same day, in the “Around the World” column, there appeared a brief item on the health of Mary, queen consort of the deceased George V. At the age of eighty-five, Elizabeth II’s grandmother had been suffering from a gastric illness that had kept her in bed for close to two weeks. Doctors had declared her condition satisfactory, but the situation was delicate due to the “indomitable dowager’s” advanced age. Less than a fortnight later, she was dead. The queen consort passed away in a peaceful sleep, during the evening of March 24, in her palace at Marlborough. The archbishop of Canterbury and the royal famil
y were at her bedside. Prime Minister Churchill announced the demise of Queen Mary in the Commons, an hour after her death. He immediately adjourned the Chamber’s session “in order to mourn this proud and fine lady who had dedicated her life to her country.”
If the figure of Stalin was the incarnation of the formidable power of the Communist advance, Queen Mary served as the representative of the so-called free peoples of the world. Messages of condolence poured in from everywhere, that is, from every corner of the Empire, as well as from independent nations of democratic tradition, and they were unanimous: Queen Mary was admired for her goodness, her kindness, and her benevolent influence. Even Baby M.’s father weighed in with a brief but respectful editorial, noting that this was not the time to discuss the significance of the British monarchy for French Canada. Under the title “A queen leaves this world,” he summed up the situation as follows: “For more than a century, the Heavens seem to have favoured the throne of England with an outpouring of respect which we would be hard put to contradict. While, in other lands, princes have been the brunt of contempt, Queen Mary has maintained the mantle of a great lady, always poised, generous, and courageous. And when one considers the respect in which the royal family generally continues to be held, Queen Mary can be said to have been an educator who remained faithful to her duty. She lived to see her fourth generation, which is the Church’s pronounced wish for all newlyweds, as a reward for those who remain faithful to their condition in life. In our topsy-turvy world, the dignity of kings offers hope for the final triumph of a social order in which each of us accepts his or her role with equal dignity.”
Over the centuries, the high regard in which the British people held their royal family had been somewhat diminished by a host of unfortunate incidents. George V and his wife, Mary, who ruled together from 1910 until the king’s death in 1936, had shown themselves to be worthy of the respect mentioned by the editor of l’Évangéline. George V was a man “of good sense, dedicated to his duties.” After his death, Queen Mary maintained her husband’s democratic and constitutional attitude. Her reputation also profited from the heroism of her son George VI, who had won the hearts of his subjects by refusing to flee to the safety of the countryside when the bombs rained down on London during the Second World War. At the moment of Queen Mary’s death, the British people, barely recovered from the passing of brave George VI a year earlier, had put their trust in his daughter Elizabeth, who had already begun to symbolize the unity and continuity of the Empire. Indeed, l’Évangéline’s article announcing Queen Mary’s death had made a point of evoking this principle of continuity by pointing out that “Queen Elizabeth II, who ordinarily was due a curtsy from the dowager, had knelt in a gesture of love and respect for her grandmother at whose knee she had learned the rudiments of a sovereign’s duties.”
What most impressed Baby M.’s mother and Nurse Vautour about Queen Mary’s funeral was the display of emotion by the Duke of Windsor, the black sheep of the royal family. According to l’Évangéline, the queen’s “favourite son” cried throughout the entire private ceremony, which was conducted in the presence of four queens, two kings, and several other members of the “declining aristocracy of Europe,” in Windsor Castle’s St. George Chapel. The two Acadians were shocked to see, in black and white, that a mother — and a queen to boot — had admitted to a preference for one of her children. They wondered if this sort of confession was acceptable among Protestants, or whether it was perhaps a way for the royal family to remind the world that they were, after all, only human. Because the truth was that this particular “favourite son’s” tastes were not in keeping with the standards of the monarchy; he had even been obliged to abdicate the throne in order to marry the woman he loved. For the mothers of the time and their derivatives (such as nurses, prioresses, educators, martyrs, and queens), this was l’Évangéline’s real soap opera, rather than the “Cry of the Banshee,” a serialized novel with a pseudo-exotic title, which provided far less excitement than the royal heartbreaks of the House of Windsor.
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In his memoirs, Hitler’s minister of foreign affairs, Joachim von Ribbentrop, affirms that Hitler secretly admired Stalin, his political foe. According to Ribbentrop, who was hanged at Nuremberg for his war crimes, Hitler dreamed of capturing Stalin. The Führer would have granted him a luxurious asylum in a German castle. We can only imagine what security precautions Hitler would have put in place to keep his guest from slipping through his fingers, in light of Stalin’s well-known talent for evasion. As evidence of this ability, consider that Stalin was not even the real name of this serpentine personage. The son of a relatively poor family from Gori, a suburb of Tiflis, the capital of Georgia, he had been baptized Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili. Though they were poor, his parents had promised him to the priesthood of the Greek Orthodox Church. As a matter of fact, it was in the seminary that young Joseph developed a taste for revolutionary socialism. He quickly demonstrated his leadership qualities — much too quickly, in the opinion of the priests, who soon expelled the undesirable politician. It was not long after his expulsion that Stalin opted to become a professional revolutionary. He was a member of one of the first cells of the Bolshevik party, worked under Lenin’s leadership and, like a typical Russian revolutionary, was arrested and shipped off to the salt mines of Siberia. And yet, “in less than a month, he was back in Tiflis with a new name and a new haircut. He was later arrested, imprisoned, and exiled, and escaped half a dozen times under as many different names. The last of these names was Stalin, and he kept it.”
Stalin, the man of steel, quickly rose to the sixth or seventh rank of leadership in the ongoing revolutionary movement. He had, among other things, led the Bolshevik group that seized power in Petrograd in 1917. Supreme power, however, remained in the hands of Lenin, who was able to control the internal jealousies and struggles which might have harmed the party. Among these threats was the conflict between Stalin and Trotsky. In the end, from his deathbed, in 1924, Lenin judged Stalin too impetuous and ordered him demoted from his position as general secretary of the USSR. At that moment, Stalin resolved to eliminate his political enemies, beginning with those on the left, and then attacking those on the right. Once rid of his opponents, he took on “the immense task of transforming, in five years, a backward nation into a modern industrial country.” As far as Baby M.’s mother and Nurse Vautour were concerned, this was cause for joy. After all, “factories sprouted on the bare plains of Russia, schools were opened, specialists were imported.” But the “famous purges” soon convinced them the truth was not so pretty. “One by one, well-known Russian figures appeared before the courts and pleaded guilty to accusations of activities harmful to the state.” One by one they were liquidated. The slaughter completed, Stalin and his cohorts settled in comfortably at the head of the state.
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Nurse Vautour and the woman who, unbeknownst to her, carried Baby M. in her womb, were in the habit of believing everything the newspapers reported. Their confidence was based on a sort of consensus of knowledge which seemed to them to have always existed. They believed, for example, in the fundamental goodness of Queen Mary, in spite of her expressed predilection for the Duke of Windsor. However, in the case of Stalin, a doubt lingered in their minds. They could not bring themselves to condemn him entirely. The West made a great deal of the Communist threat, constantly reminding everyone that the Reds were trying to infiltrate everywhere and that their singular goal was to impose their diabolical system on the entire world. The two women noted that, on this point, Stalin had behaved rather reasonably from the outset. He wanted to implement revolutionary politics in Russia before going elsewhere (contrary to Trotsky, who would have built socialism simultaneously in several countries). Without knowing it, Baby M.’s mother and Nurse Vautour were taking on the problem of truth, which was also Trotsky’s and Stalin’s main concern, the former having founded the newspaper Pravda (Truth) in 1908, and the latter having run it
for several years, beginning in 1912.
As for Baby M.’s mother and Nurse Vautour, they had not the slightest interest in the ethics of journalism. They never thought about the relationship between understanding and language. Nevertheless, they were happy to read an article, in l’Évangéline of course, entitled “Meaning of Words Changes in Communist countries,” an article published not long after Stalin’s death. A Chinese professor exiled in California, who claimed to have experienced the Communist terror in China, drew up a glossary of common expressions which had acquired new meanings under Communist rule. Professor Daniel Hong Lew wrote that, in the Communist mind, freedom had become “the duty to conform to Communist ideas and actions,” that the people comprised “those that supported or were in a position to support Communism,” that democracy implied “consent of the masses, whether in word or deed,” and that peace was nothing more than “the surrender of non-Communist forces.” As for truth, it consisted of “news and information which promotes the Communist cause.” Professor Hong Lew also stated that the Reds made systematic use of “the big lie and brainwashing techniques” to control the people’s ideas. He also offered a description of the “new human beings that the Reds had vowed to perfect.” Essentially, these were to be “soulless bipeds, human robots whose individual value was equivalent to the productive value of horses or cattle.” He also spoke of the collective man that the Communists sought to create. In the Communist view, “the individual’s existence is contingent on his being productive in some manner useful to the Kremlin or if he can fit like a brick in the wall of a Communist cell, for the collective man is devoid of personality or nationality.” The article, which originated in Los Angeles, concluded that the Communist regime tolerated no opposition, and that all opposition had to be annihilated by “criticism, self-criticism, and persuasion,” all language practices.
1953 Page 3