The Invisible Writing

by Les Weil

  I wrote a series of articles whose factual content was so shocking that the Vossische did not dare to print them. They carried as a motto the inscription over the gate of the `Sexualwischenschaftliches Institut': AMORI ET DOLORI SACRUM --loving and suffering are sacred. I quote a few paragraphs that may serve as a motto to the books that I later wrote on the subject, and as an explanation for my interest in it:

  Out of sixty million Germans approximately one and a half million are homosexuals who live in permanent conflict with the law.

  In the sixty-million population of Germany, every year more unborn children are illegally aborted than children are born.

  Birth control, one of the decisive factors in a nation's destiny, is a clandestine practice. The `public advertisement and offer for sale' of contraceptives is illegal; the annual sale of ninety million of these appliances represents ninety million more or leess veiled offences against the law.

  Even these introductory remarks may suce to let a quite incredible idea dawn on us--the idea that the routine sexual activity of our times has its place outside the law.

  The films, the radio and the printing presses tell us that the great cataclysm of 1914 has revolutionised the erotic habits of our age. It is true that the Chinese iVall has collapsed; but its ruins are covered by a jungle that we call the new ,rrnrality of the post-lirar era. We are exposed to an inflation of bogus enlightenment; pamphlets circulate by the million with prescriptions for the perfect marriage, life and love; the psychoanalysts and the Salvation Army, nudist prophets and public prosecutors, Lesbian clubs and sex blackmailers are fighting for our bodies and souls. The taboos have been smashed--but they have merely been replaced by half-baked slogans and catch-phrases. And the lonely wanderer in the labyrinth of Eros is lonelier than ever.

  In the economic chaos of the pre-war world, millions o f individuals were unable to satisfy their hunger. The sexual chaos of the post-war world has shaken mankind to a similar extent, but it has equally failed to answer the problem of millions how to satisfy their instincts, how to resolve the tragic dilemma between artficially over­stimulated desire and the stern limitations of custom and law.

  Is there a change, is there an improvement since that much advertised breaking of taboos? Has the revolution in our customs really created a better and healthier state of affairs? There is no evidence for this optimistic belief. The evidence of polls and statistics, the evidence of the cafes, bars and taverns in our towns all point to the opposite conclusion.

  I thus became interested in sexology as one of the many facets of the crisis in our civilisation. However, I would hardly have thought of writing a book on the subject (and much less a trilogy of some half a million words), but for the desperate impasse in which I found myself as a Communist exile who did not wish to make a living out of Communism. No French publisher would print Red Days, no French theatre would produce `the firm's' plays, and I could not get a job on a Frcnch newspaper as my French, though fluent, was far from perfect. Hence, when a publisher suggested to me that as a one-time science editor, I should write a popular Encyclopcedia of Sexual Knowledge, embracing everything that the average citizen wanted to know of the subject, I eagerly accepted the offer. He gave me a dozen or so standard text-books and reference works, ranging from Mantegazza's Die Hygiene der Liebe to Van De Velde's Ideal Marriage, and from these I condensed and distilled the `Encyclopaedia' at a rate of about four thousand words a day.

  I wrote the book in six or eight weeks, and was paid for it a flat sum of three thousand francs--at the time approximately forty pounds. This sum included the sale of the copyright; I received no royalties. When the book became a world best-seller, the publisher felt moved to make an additional payment, not foreseen in the contract, of another £20. The latest English edition, dated January 1944, shows the imprint: `New Cheap Edition 25/­Nett. Over 75,000 copies Sold.' The French, American, Spanish and Italian editions had a similar success; I have no idea in what other languages the book appeared.

  The publishing firm in question was owned by two brothers from Budapest. They were actually relatives of mine-this is the one fact in this chapter that I find embarrassing to confess.

  In Arrow in the Blue I have mentioned that my mother's stuffy and conservative middle-middle-class family had been ruined in the 1890's by the marriage of one of its female members to a villain in the best tradition of Victorian melodrama. The two brothers were the offspring of that marriage. As a child I had known them well; then I had lost sight of them--until the older one turned up as a publisher in Paris and approached me with his offer. I shall call him Theodore, and the younger one Freddie.

  The two brothers had contrasting personalities. Freddie had inherited his father's character; he was a typical adventurer from that colourful region between the Danube and the Levant. Dark and handsome, with a faun's face, and eyebrows grown together over a fleshy nose, Freddie was charged with sex like a gypsy fiddler. He was ostentatious in manner and dress, a reckless gambler, a seducer of women, and a generous squanderer of money. He had fascinated me all through my childhood as the embodiment of dazzling villainy, a hero of disreputableness. He was about ten years my senior. When I was five, I admired him because on our country holidays he stole chickens, wrung their necks and roasted them on a spit. When I was ten, he burgled my father's wardrobe to pawn his suits; when I was thirteen, he put my favourite governess in the family way--see Arrow in the Blue. Freddie had all the flashy charm of his type; and beyond that, like many people who he for art's sake and believe in their own lies, he had an almost hypnotic power of persuasion. He was also a hypochondriac with a tendency to hysteria, an aggressive coward, and a man with a desperate need to be liked and admired. In short, a psychopathic character straight out of a textbook, but full of charm and seduction.

  Theodore, the older one, was by disposition Freddie's exact opposite. He had started life as an introvert and a bookworm. As an adolescent he had been awkward and complex-ridden, tortured by jealousy for the younger brother who was the darling of his parents and the spoiled genius of the family. Theodore grew up with a kind of Cinderella complex. He studied law without ever exercising his profession, dabbled in journalism, and never got anywhere until Freddie took him into his publishing firm. Had he been a stronger character, he would have grown in the opposite direction to Freddie. But he was weak and ruined his life by trying to imitate his younger brother. Honest and even scrupulous by disposition, he became gradually corrupted by Freddie, who had an uncanny power over him and whom he then tried to outdo in reckless manners and as a lady-killer-parts for which he was pathetically unfit. He lived in a permanent cramp, and his forced antics were embarrassing to watch.

  Family relationships pertain to a plane where the ordinary rules of judgment and conduct do not apply. They are a labyrinth of tensions, quarrels and reconciliations, whose logic is self-contradictory, whose ethics stem from a cosy jungle, and whose values and criteria are distorted like the curved space of a self-contained universe. It is a universe saturated with memories--but memories from which no lessons are drawn; saturated with a past which provides no guidance to the future. For in this universe, after each crisis and reconciliation, time always starts afresh and history is ahvays in the year zera This may explain why, after I had been done in by Freddie and Theodore over the Encyclopaedia as thoroughly and completely as a choir­boy in a gold-digger town, I proceeded, one year later, to write the second book for them; was done in again, and yet, four years later, procceded to write the third--for which I haven't been paid to this day. It may also explain why, in spite of all this--and in spite of two jovial blackmailing attempts by the late Freddie, threatening to disclose Dr. Costler's identity `to the world public'--Freddie himself has never lost his fascination for me.

  Freddie died, in 1951, completely destitute, in a London hospital. He died of a brain disease. He had played a more important part in my life than our actual relations seemed to warrant. From my early childhood, the dark, cocky, tota
lly irresponsible cousin had served as a bogey in my mother's family. `Beware of Freddie, my child' and `never become like Freddie' were her constant admonitions, a refrain that rang in my ears for ycars. So, of course, Freddie became irnmensely attractive as thc embodiment of forbidden badness, and as a small child I worshipped him--the more so as he took me to football games, taught me chess, dirty words, and how to cheat on my pocket-money accounts. But I soon realised how ruthlessly he betrayed my confidence and used me as a tool, so my adulation of Freddie changed into a mixture of fascination and horror.

  Through Freddie, I had my first experience of moral evil. To most sheltered middle-class children `evil' is an abstraction; through Freddie I came early into direct contact with it and realised that evil is really evil. But since I continued to love Freddie, while morally condemning him, I learned not only to recognise evil, but to understand it with an intuitive, almost tender, comprehension. (Perhaps that is the reason why, later on, I could not help liking Otto Katz.) I recognised that there was a good deal of Freddiness in myself, and a tendency to emulate him as poor Theodore did; but at the same time I also understood that this part of myself was the enemy within whom I had to fight for all I was worth. It was like an infection which forces the organism to develop anti-toxins; the reaction against the Freddiness in myself must have played an important part in my early obsession with Utopia, the Perfect Cause, the arrow in the blue.

  Through Freddie I also learnt the complexities and contradictions of human character. As a born gambler, he was generous in his private life; during the years of exile when I was unable to support my parents, he often helped them by small loans and gifts. At the same time he seemed to be incapable of meeting his business obligations or repaying debts--an incapacity based on a genuiue neurotic inhibition. He had a great affection for me and entertained me lavishly when we met; but this did not prevent him from ruthlessly exploiting and cheating me in our business relations. He was willing at any time to lend me small sums of money, but refused to pay me royalties on the books from which his and his brother's fortunes were mainly derived. When, in the end, I went to my solicitors, he wrote to me with genuine indignation that he had never expected such ingratitude from me.

  His last years were like the end of a morality tale. I had broken off relations with him in 1939, and during the following twelve years, until his death, I saw him on only one, unforgettable occasion. He had been interned as an enemy alien in 1941. Unlike other Hungarians in England who were released within a few months when their loyalty had been established, he was kept in internment during the whole period of the war. In November 1942, I received a hysterical letter from him asking me to `use my influence' to get liim released at once, and ending with the usual veiled `or else'. I tore the letter up in disgust, and a week later got another even more hysterical one, asking my forgiveness and begging for help. The charges against him, according to his letter, were `leading an immoral life, publishing pornographic books, dope peddling, racketeering in wines and spirits, being a Hungarian secret ageut, and passing on information to the Nazis'. I believe that he invented most of these charges himself in order to make the real charges appear equally absurd; at any rate, he was never tried on any of them. I did not know what he had been up to in the years since I had last seen him, and was careful not to get mixed up in all this, but I sent him occasional food parcels, cigarettes and comforting letters to the internment camp on the Isle of Man. Then, some time in 1943, he made the foolish mistake of trying to bribe one of the officers in the camp, was brought up to London for a special investigation, and asked me to visit him. That was our last meeting.

  It took place in the Brompton Oratory School which, during the war had been requisitioned by the Ministry of Home Securiry and used as a kind of transit camp for political detainees. I was kept for a while in a desolate waiting-room. Then the door opened, and an unshaven, collarless figure in a once too-showy, now stained and crumpled suit was escorted in by a sergeant. For a fraction of a second I did not recognise him. He walked up to me with a would-be debonair grin, but at that moment another door opened, an officer walked through the room, and the sergeant ordered Freddie to stand to attention. Freddie jumped to the command and pulled himself up in the indescribable way old convicts have when standing to attention in the prison yard: with shoulders slumped forward, arms dangling to knock-kneed legs. His stubbled, grey, creased face expressed an abject servility, and a fear which was quite unwarranted by the circumstances. He was then allowed to sit down, and we talked across a table in the sergeant's presence. For a minute or so Freddie seemed embarrassed by his preceding humiliation, but soon he became again his cocky, scheming, persuasive self, trying to involve me in the affairs of his firm with the promise of ample rewards after his liberation and `for the sake of our past friendship'. Our past friendship had ended when my solicitor unsuccessfully tried to serve a writ on Freddie, but he seemed to have genuinely forgotten it. I told him, as gently as I could, that I wished to have nothing to do with his affairs.

  `My poor boy,' Freddie said feelingly, `you have been hopeless all your life. First you were a Zionist, then a Communist, always broke, always shabbily dressed and hungry, except when I bought you a decent meal. Now you write political novels which nobody wants to read. You will never make real money in your life. I was the only one to give you a break and make You a world success with the Encyclopaedia. And now, when I am down, you snootily refuse to help me with my business, which I cannot conduct from the camp, although you know that I am innocent and detained on entirely arbitrary grounds. But to tell you the truth, I have never expected anything else from you.'

  His hypnotic persuasiveness had not lost its effect, and for a moment I felt the embodiment of darkest ingratitude. I asked Freddie timidly whether the last food parcel had been all right. He looked at me with scathing irony from under his dark, joined satyr's eyebrows and remarked that I seemed to believe that he had become a vegetarian. I told him apologetically that rationing made the sending of meat impossible. His irony deepened to amused contempt: 'Rationing-that's typical of you. I will tell you the name of a shop in Soho where you get as much Hungarian gooseliver-pate and Italian salami as you like.' He added as an afterthought: `You can send the sergeant a salami, too.' The sergeant, a young chap from the Midlands, changed colour but kept silent.

  When the time was up, after Freddie and I had shaken hands for the last time, the sergeant made Freddie stand to attention, and after an `about turn!', made him leave the room at the `quick march'. During this humiliating manoeuvre, Freddie's face again seemed to fall to pieces. Stumping out of the room, with the obscene nakedness round the neck of men in town-suits deprived of collar and tie, his eyes dulled with cringing and panic, the hero of my childhood vanished from my life.

  How Freddie came to be a publisher I only know by hearsay. It was not he, but Theodore, who commissioned me in the spring of 1934 to write the ' Encyclopaedia'. At that time he was not yet Freddie's partner, but his employee at a modest salary. He told me how Freddie, after one of his hankruptcies, had married a girl with a dowry whose parents kept a stationary shop with a lending library in a Hungarian provincial town. After getting rid of his creditors, Freddie had worked in the lending library for a few months. At that time, Professor Van de Velde's Ideal Marriage had just been published in German, and had created a great stir by its outspoken treatment of the physiological aspects of conjugal life. On the spur of one of his sudden inspirations, Freddie got into a train, went to see the German publishers in Stuttgart, and bought the foreign-language copyrights of the book. He published it in Hungarian and, I believe, in Italian, and at the same time sent Theodore to Paris to found a French publishing firm.

  The firm's name was 'Editions. ..', featuring the surname of the brothers.(Their firm in England ran under the same name until it was dissolved and the copyrights ~,f the Dr. Costler books were ceded to another publisher, under whose imprint they are now sold.) Its method of operation was different f
rom that of other publishers. Freddie had invented a system by which he sold his books before they were written, and when it was still doubtful whether they would ever be written. (That, Theodore explained to me, was the reason why he could pay me no royalties.) The Paris office--consisting of two dingy rooms, and staffed by one accountant and one typist--sent out large numbers of circulars to professional people, mostly in provincial towns. Their addresses were culled by a statistical sampling system from that series of excellent French address books called the Bottin Professionel. The circulars contained an elaborate description, with list of contents, illustrations, etc., of the projected book, pretending that it was in the process of printing, and asking for cash payment in advance at a`preferential price'. If the first batch of 2,000 circulars brought orders from less than one and a half per cent. of the addressees, the idea of the book was dropped, and the cash payments were refunded. (This happened to another contemplated Dr. Costler book, an Encyclopaedia of Psychic Research.) If the orders exceeded one and a half per cent., a second batch of 10,000 circulars were sent out. If the orders from these confirmed the percentage of the first batch, the book was commissioned, and the number of circulars was simultaneously increased to 100,000 or 200,000, in the now certain expectation of at least 2,000 buyers, which for a high-priced book and practically no overhead expenses meant an excellent profit. In fact, the Encyclopcedin sold some 30,000 copies in its first year in France, and if, during the following twenty years, it sold only a further half as many copies, Freddie and Theodore must have made some fifteen thousand pounds out of it in that country alone, compared to my sixty.

  The English editions of the three books featured Norman Haire as editor. He was a Harley Street specialist on birth control. I have never met Mr. Haire, but I have looked him up in Who's Who for 1946, where he occupies more space than either Winston Churchill or George Bernard Shaw. I am told that he died in 1952.