The Invisible Writing

by Les Weil

  My own development was different from that of the enthusiastic 'fellow­travellers' of the 'thirties. I began to write my first novel when I was already disillusioned, and on my way out of the Party. The reason is that emotionally and in artistic taste I remained an adolescent to my late twenties. But this retarded development is again partly due to my seven years in the Communist Party. So long as I remained a true believer, my faith had a paralysing effect on my creative faculties, such as they are. The Marxist doctrine is a drug, like arsenic or strychnine, which in small doses have a stimulating, in larger ones a paralysing effect on the creative system. The large majority of 'socially conscious' writers of the 'thirties were stimulated by it because they did not enter the Party, and remained sympathisers from a safe distance. The few of us who actually took the plunge--such as Victor Serge, Richard Wright, Ignazio Silone--felt frustrated during their active Party career, and only found their true voice after the break. One wonders what would have happened to Catholic novelists like Mauriac, Evelyn Waugh, or the late Bernanos, had they accepted the discipline of monastic life, or at least taken holy orders.

  The Russian writers belong to a different category. They could not remain distant sympathisers; from the early 'thirties onward literature in Soviet Russia was regimented, and literary criticism wielded by the Party as a disciplinary weapon, with punishments ranging from the silencing of the discordant voice to the liquidation of its owner. A number of our Russian colleagues--among them the greatest, Alexander Blok--saw long before us where the regime was drifting and committed suicide. The majority, who made Soviet literature great during the first decade of the Revolution, were officially or secretly liquidated during the Purges. Those who survived have either lost their voices, or become Stalin-prize court jesters. The same is true of those non-Russian Communist writers who have remained in the Party­-c.g., Johannes R. Becher and Louis Aragon.

  My fanatical allegiance to the Party did not cause complete mental blindness to the more absurd phenomena in my new environment. I noticed that the political instructors sent by District Headquarters to the meetings of our cell knew nothing of the world outside the narrow field of working-class politics--that is, strikes, demonstrations and trade union developments. They did not know or believe that the Christian-Democratic Chancellor Breunning was genuinely opposed to Hitler, or that there was a difference between a British Tory and a German Nazi. For them, democracy was `a camouflaged form of the dictatorship of the capitalist ruling class' and fascism `its overt form', while `the class-content' of both regimes was the same. The political struggles between the various `bourgeois' parties were merely a symptom of the `internal contradictions of the capitalist system'; the real alignment of social forces was along the class frontier. All this to my mind was both true and untrue. It was untrue because it was a crude over­simplification of a complex reality; but in the long view of History nuances did not matter, and my sophistication did not matter, and the dialectical telescope revealed the essential truth.

  There were things even more difficult to swallow, particularly in the field of language and literature. After a speech in the cell, in which I had repeatedly used the word `spontaneous', a well-wishing comrade tipped me off that I had better avoid it in the future, because `spontaneous manifestations of the revolutionary spirit' were part of Trotsky's theory of the Permanent Revolution. I was at the very beginning of my party career, and though I agreed that such semantic purism was part of the necessary `revolutionary vigilance', I did so, for the first time, with my tongue in my cheek. This reaction was soon to become more frequent.

  A comrade, on his return from the Soviet Union, quoted to me the contents of a lecture he had heard, given by a Party instructor to a literary circle of workmen in a Russian factory. `To regard poetry as a special talent which some men possess and others don't,' the instructor had explained, `is bourgeois metaphysics. Poetry, like every other skill, is acquired by learning and practice. We need more class-conscious proletarian poetry; we must increase our poetry output on the literary front. Beginners should start with five or ten lines a day, then set themselves a target of twenty or thirty lines, and gradually increase the quantity and quality of their production.'

  Later on I myself heard a Russian lecturer explain that the vogue of excessively long poems in Germany during the 'twenties was the ideological reflection of the currency inflation with its floods of printed paper. I constantly came across nonsense of this kind in Russia, but told myself that it didn't matter; it was merely a touching symptom of the exuberance and enthusiasm of a backward people awakening from centuries of apathy and oppression. The `backward masses' could not be expected to develop overnight the sophistication of an ex-editor of Ullstein's.

  After a few months in the Party my faith began to assume a more supple and lasting form. Everything that I disliked I explained to myself as `the heritage of the Capitalist past', or as `the inevitable measles of the Revolu­tion', or finally as `temporary expedients'. The higher interests of revo­lutionary strategy often necessitated tactical measures which seemed cruel, absurd or downright despotic. But Marxists must not judge `mechanistically' by appearances, as the bourgeois Press did; their duty was to discern the hidden dialectical meaning; and their public utterances must be kept on the level of the backward masses.

  Thus my originally naive faith gradually changed into a private, esoteric creed which was more malleable, and shock-proof aganiast reality. If the outsider asks how intelligent people could stand the wild zigzags of the Party line, the answer is that every single educated Communist, from the members of the Russian Pohtbureau down to the French literary coteries, has his own private and secret philosophy whose purpose is not to explain the facts, but to explain them away. It does not matter by what name one calls this mental process--double-think, controlled schizophrenia, myth addiction, or semantic perversion; what matters is the psychological pattern. Without it the portrait of the author as a comrade would not be comprehensible.

  There existed, however, a barrier beyond which I was unable to carry self-deception. My language and reasoning became reconditioned to the Party's jargon; but this mimicry remained confined to the spoken word. When it came to writing, I encountered an unconscious resistance. Though a seasoned journalist, I was unable, during my whole Communist career, to write a single article for the Party Press--even when I found myself on the verge of starvation. At the beginning I composed broadsheets and leaflets for our cell, but though correct regarding the line, they were too unorthodox in style, and the District Committee stopped them. Much later, during the Saar Campaign of 1934, I edited a comic Party paper, but this too was stopped after the first issue. I was capable of making speeches in the orthodox Party manner and of keeping them strictly on the level of the `backward masses', while my esoteric truth and private opinion remained locked away in an air-tight compartment of the mind. But when I tried to apply the same process to writing, I became paralysed: I got involved with the syntax, made inkblots on the paper, was unable to concentrate, and caught myself drawing arabesques or a naked goddess holding up a hammer and sickle to the sun.' (I have tried to describe this mental torment in the chapter `Fatigue of the Synapses' in The Age Longing.)

  Thus there were limits to my capacity for double-think. I had been unable to argue with Von E. though my job was at stake; I was unable to write in the Party's style; later on, as will be seen, I failed at other tasks. Perhaps, despite my ardour, I was only a mediocre Marxist. The fact that in spite of my growing misgivings I stuck to the Party through seven years, seems to indicate that my limitations as a Communist were of an unconscious rather than of a rational order. I was still chasing after the arrow in the blue, the absolute Muse, the magic formula which would produce the Golden Age. Arrows may drift with the wind, and apparently change their direction relative to the rotating earth; but, unlike guided missiles, they cannot be forced into a zigzag course.

  A special feature of Party life that had a profound and lasting influence
me was worship of the proletariat and contempt for the intelligentsia. Intellectuals of middle-class origin were in the Party on sufferance, not by right; this was constantly rubbed into us. We had to be tolerated, because during the transition period the Party needed the engineers, doctors, scientists and litterati of the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia. But we were no more trusted or respected than the so-called `useful Jews' in Hitler's Germany, who were given a distinctive armlet and allowed a short respite before their usefulness expired and they went the way of their kin. The social origin of parents and grandparents is as decisive under a Communist regime as racial origin was under the Nazi regime. Accordingly, Communist intellectuals of middle-class origin were trying by various means to give themselves proletarian airs. They wore coarse polo-sweaters, displayed black finger-nails, talked working-class slang. It was one of our undisputed articles of faith that members of the working-class, regardless of their level of intelligence and education, would always have a more 'correct' approach to any political problem than the learned intellectual. This was supposed to be due to a kind of instinct rooted in class-consciousness. There is again a distinct parallel here with the Nazis' contempt for 'destructive Jewish cleverness' as opposed to the `healthy and natural instinct of the race'.

  This atmosphere provided wonderful nourishment for my chronic inferiority complex. In the chapters dealing with my childhood I have explained the depths and tenacity of this affliction, and its ties with anxiety and guilt. In later years I gradually managed to build up a brash facade, but this still further deepened the conviction that I was a sham who deserved his failures and humiliations, and obtained his successes by fraud. I felt a constant longing to be `myself and nothing else beside'; yet for a person suffering from this type of affliction it is easier to climb Mount Everest than to be his own self. We know that Demosthenes, the stammerer, practised speech with his mouth full of pebbles until he became the foremost public orator of Greece; but we are not told whether he ever learnt to speak with a natural voice to his friends.

  Now the working-men with whom Party-life threw me into contact did speak in their slow natural voice, and did more or less behave as their natural selves. That a truck-driver or a dynamo-fitter can be just as neurotic as a literary critic, and that he merely lacks the articulateness to express it, was a much later discovery. At the time it seemed to me that the proletarian members of our cell were all strong, silent, hard and kindly men, not only appointed by History to inherit the earth from the decadent bourgeoisie, but also mentally more hale and sane than the clever phoneys of my type. In short, the class-conscious proletarian was the Marxist equivalent of Rousseau's Noble Savage, of Nietzsche's Superman, of Hitler's Blut und Bodenmensch, and became a kind of collective super-ego for the Communist intelligentsia. For reasons that I have just explained, my own responses in this respect were particularly deep and lasting.

  It is relatively easy to explain how a person with my story and back­ground came to become a Communist, but more difficult to convey a state of mind that led a young man of twenty-six to be ashamed of having been to a university, to curse the agility of his brain, the articulateness of his language, to regard such civilised tastes and habits as he had acquired as a constant source of self-reproach, and intellectual self-mutilation as a desirable aim. If it had been possible to lance those tastes and habits like a boil, I would gladly have submitted to the operation.

  A recent American study, embracing people from all social classes and races including Negroes, has shown that the majority of young Americans who joined the Communist Party were prompted not by economic distress, but by some conflict within the family. I have said before that such psychological facts neither prove nor disprove the validity of Marxist theory. But vice versa, it is not Marxist theory in itself which turns people into rebels, but a psychological disposition which makes them susceptible to revolutionary theories. The latter then serve as rationalisations of their personal conflict-­which does not exclude the possibility that the rationalisation may be a correct one.

  To sum up this aspect of the story. As a child I had been taught that whatever I did was wrong, a pain to others and a disgrace to myself. At the age of five, the permanent awareness of guilt and impending punishment resulted in a mild attack of persecution mania, described in an earlier chapter. A few years later, the feeling of inferiority manifested itself in paralysing shyness, then focused on my slow growth and juvenile appearance. Now, at twenty­six, this floating mass of anxiety and guilt, always ready to fasten on the first peg in sight, turned against my bourgeois background, my powers of reasoning and capacity for enjoyment. To bask in the sun, to read a novel, to dine in a good restaurant, to go to a picture gallery, became guilty exercises of a privilege that others could not share, frivolous diversions from the class struggle. True Communists, like Catholics, live in a constant awareness of original sin.

  I deplore the logical error that led me into the Communist Party; but I do not regret the spiritual discipline that it imposed. Purgatory is a painful experience; but no one who went through it is likely to wish that it should be erased from his past.

  The one `diversion from the class struggle' that did not make me feel guilty was love. In an earlier chapter I have described the phantom-chase after Helen's image that obsessed me during some twenty years. With most men, at least in the Anglo-Saxon countries, sex is the main source of guilt and anxiety. In my case it was the only pursuit exempt from guilt--perhaps because my attitude to women remained basically naive and romantic, imparting to each liaison a flavour of uniqueness; and the feeling of uniqueness seems to me the only criterion of purity in matters of sex. The squalor of promiscuity prompted by mere pleasure-seeking lies in the drawing of comparisons. To be compared in one's most intimate behaviour to others is a degrading and wounding thought, and probably the main reason why we set so much store on exclusive possession. The phantom-chaser, however, who discovers Helen's image in each beloved face, feels each time that `this is the real thing', set apart from all other experiences, past and future, and hence not comparable with them. It is a feeling that automatically conveys itself to the other person, and creates an oasis of innocence round both, leaving regret but no resentment when the illusion dissolves.

  Some of the women with whom my life interlinked during my two years in Berlin have remained permanent friends; two were killed in air bombardments; two died in concentration camps; one of tuberculosis, and one achieved the rare distinction of marrying a dentist in Persia.

  I wish one could write about one's sentimental curriculum in the same manner as one writes about one's political or literary evolution. The trouble is not that it would shock the reader, but that it would bore him. The experience of uniqueness is always confined to the protagonists. The oasis, however strange and fascinating, has only room for two. And yet--as some French writer is sure to have said somewhere--one learns to think through books; one learns to live through women.

  Two episodes concerning women with whom I was not personally involved deserve to be related here because they are characteristic of the atmosphere of Berlin during the feverish months of Gotterdammerung that preceded the Nazis' seizure of power. The first is pretty ghastly, and hard to believe for anyone who has not experienced the mass-hysteria that conquered the German people during the last days of Weimar. It happened to a colleague of mine at Ullstein's, whose name has slipped my memory--it sounded something like von Ehrendorf, so I shall call him that.

  During the carnival season of 1932, Ehrendorf went to a dance and picked up a tall, pretty blonde. She wore a large swastika brooch on her breast, was about nineteen or twenty, gay, uninhibited and brimful of healthy animal spirits--in short, the ideal Hitler-Ma'dchen of the Brave New World. After the dance, Ehrendorf persuaded her to go back with him to his flat, where she met his advances more than half-way. Then, at the climactic moment, the girl raised herself on one elbow, stretched out the other arm in the Roman salute, and breathed in a dying voice a fervent 'Heil H
itler'. Poor Ehrendorf nearly had a stroke. When he had recovered, the blonde sweetie explained to him that she and a bunch of her girl friends had taken a solemn vow, pledging themselves `to remember the Fuehrer every time at the most sacred moment in a woman's life'.

  The tricoteuses of the French Terror had found their successors in the Valkyries of the Hitler era. I use this opportunity to confess that I have always held a reactionary view of the part played by women in politics. Taking history as a whole, female interference in matters of State seems to add up to a rather nefarious balance. The male tyrants of history are on the whole cancelled out by an equal number of reformers; but where are the female humanists to compensate for the long series of monsters, from Messalina to Catherine the Great, to Irma Griese of Buchenwald? There are countless books for boys about great men, and no books for girls about great women; yet an anthology about the harpies who left their imprint on history would be an international best-seller. I am talking of women who took a direct hand in politics; their indirect influence via husbands and lovers is a different problem altogether--though even here it seems that they have acted on the whole more as catalysts of ambition than as neutralisers of aggression.

  The second story is the counterpart of the first. Alfred Kantorowicz, our cell leader, had asked a girl comrade to tea in his flat. There were only the three of us present. The girl, whom I had not met before, was dark and slim and would have been moderately attractive but for her slovenly manner of dressing, and a curiously distraught look. She took no part in the conversation, and did not even pretend to listen. Suddenly she said to Kantorowicz: 'Do look out of the window now, and see whether he is there; but be careful.'