The Invisible Writing

by Les Weil

  I was in doubt whether to use a pseudonym, and the half-heartedness of the disguise (with only two letters in the name altered) reflects my hesitations on the subject. But I had no guarantee that the published text would be identical with my manuscript. The publishers had reserved the right to edit the manuscript, and I had reason to suspect that they would cut, alter and embellish it as they saw fit. I had in fact no more control over the book than a film-script writer over the finished product. As matters turned out, the French edition of the Encylopaedin followed the manuscript without major distortions, except for its style. I wrote it (as I wrote all my books until 1940) in German, in a sober, matter-of-fact style which the translator changed into the oily and whimsical language of the kind of popular science book which treats the reader as a gentle moron. In the English translation, which was based on the French text, this tendency is even more accentuated and very embarrassing indeed; there are also numerous additions and alterations by editor and translator. In short, I do not recommend the book. People in need of guidance will find more up-to-date works on the subject at a lower price; while those in search of titillation will find the book about as stimulating as a gourmet would find a Salvation Army kitchen. Much the same is true of the second book.(1 The English edition of the third volume of the trilogy belongs to an entirely different category. It has only 46 pages (pp. 336-38z) out of 805 in common with the manuscript that Sperber and I wrote. The remaining 7S9 pages are a reprint of the first book with a number of additional chapters by various hands. The original title Encyclopedic de la Famille has been characteristically changed to Encyclopaedia of Se.rnal Practice. `Dr. Costler' has been omitted from the list of authors, to which several fictitious names have been added. It is a confused, repetitive and irresponsible compilation, edited, as the preceding volumes, by Norman Haire.)

  Another reason for preferring a pseudonym was the natural fear of a politically-active person of the odium that still attaches to matters sexual. It is this hypocrisy which turns the publishing of books on sex into a shady business, and which breeds and feeds the Freddies of this world. After all, it can hardly be a writer's ambition to see his name displayed between douches and rubber appliances in the windows of chemist shops in Charing Cross Road. Yet even that seemed preferable, and more honourable, than to earn my living by the political prostitution which the Party demands from its scribes. It is one thing to believe in the ultimate truth of the teachings of Marx and Lenin, but quite another to write to the dictate of the drill-sergeants of the Party bureaucracy, to perpetrate `hymns to Stalin' (as my friend Johannes Becher was forced to do), to pretend that Trotsky was a Nazi agent, to eat your words and confess your sins in public every six months, vowing repentance and whining like a schoolboy `I shall never do it again'.

  While I was still hesitating whether to accept Theodore's offer, an article appeared in one of the magazines published by Muenzenberg. Its author was a Party hack called Rudy Feistman, and its title Lenin'sche Dialektik oder Trotzkistisdtes Nasebohrert ('Leninist Dialectics or Trotskyist Nose-picking'). I was already inured to abuse as a political weapon, yet somehow the nauseating impudence of the title, however unimportant the article was in itself, decided the issue for me. When I mentioned it to Willy, he simply shrugged without comment. He was as independent as a Comintern leader could possibly be, yet the limits of that independence were all too evident.

  Rudy Feistman was one of the young intellectuals, or rather eternal adolescents of the Party, who had never done any serious work in their lives, were incapable of standing on their own feet, and therefore regarded themselves as `professional revolutionaries'. They had become so completely soaked in the atmosphere of the Party and in the dialectics of the smear, that they regarded slander as a natural and legitimate weapon. Rudy had been a friend of my first wife's and I knew him well; in 1940, after my break with the Party, we were locked up in the same concentration camp, where he insinuated as a matter of course that I must be a Nazi agent. He was tall, gawky and unkempt, with a perpetual, supercilious smirk on his ruddy, thick-lipped face which the Lord seemed to have left unfinished half-way through out ofboredom. I loathed him not so much as an individual than as a type. The fact that the Party encouraged hordes of these little intellectual spivs to talk of the creator of the Red Army in terms of 'nose-picking' filled me with a more profound disgust than other events of greater consequrnce. Confronted with that intellectual sewer, I preferred the fresh air of Cross Road. (Feistman, after getting mixed up in the Soviet intelligence apparatus, was liquidated in Eastern Zone of Germany.)

  XX. Schoolmaster in Maisons Lafitte

  I HAD just finished writing the Encyclopaedia, when Willy Muenzenberg asked me to see him on an urgent matter. Among his numerous enterprises was a Home for refugee children. Officially it was open to the children of needy German refugees of all classes and political parties; in fact its inmates were, with a few exceptions, the children of Communist Party officials who had either been killed by the Nazis, or sent on secret missions into Germany, or were engaged in other confidential Party work which made it impossible for them to look after their families. The Home had run out of money. It housed some thirty children between the ages of two and sixteen in a villa in Maisons Lafitte, near Paris, appropriately called `La Pouponniere', which a charitable Frenchman had put at the Committee's disposal. Willy asked me to spend a few days in the Home and write a fund­raising pamphlet about it:

  `Tell them they can't let the children starve while their parents are fighting for Freedom and so on, five thousand words, and get some photos of the brats, make them look jolly but thin.' The matter, he added, with one of those impressive flashes of his eye, was urgent.

  How urgent it was, I realised the next day when I arrived at the desolate villa, a few hundred yards from the forest and from the famous racing track at Maisons Lafitte. Diphtheria had broken out among the children, there was no trained personnel to look after them, and the stocks in the larder consisted of rice, macaroni, cocoa, sugar, cooking fat and nothing else.

  The Communist Party has a sound maxim for its writers and intellectuals: it is called the `operative principle'. It means that you cannot write about the strategy of Communism without having worked in a factory, or Party cell, or underground organisation. The tenet `No revolutionary theory without revolutionary practice' dates back to Marx, who spent more time in organising small workers' associations than in writing Das Kapital. Similarly, if a Soviet writer embarked on a novel about collective farming or a motor car factory, he had to spend several months of active work in a kholkhoz or a factory to get the `operative angle', the inside feel of his subject. Thus it was only natural that, though I knew less about children than about Bushmen, I was turned from the moment of my arrival into a schoolmaster, nurse and medical assistant.

  Instead of a few days, I stayed in the Home for more than two months. This unexpected experience led to the birth of my first novel. I started writing it on the spot, after I finished the pamphlet. The novel won the second or third prize (I don't remember which) in an international competition of the Buchergiide Guttenberg, a Socialist book-club in Switzerland, but was never published. It was called Die Erlebnisse des Genossen Piepvogel nod seiraer Freurade in der Emigration-`The Adventures in Exile of Comrade Cheepy-bird and his Friends'. The title was a homage to an enchanting little boy of four who had learnt the expression 'Genosse' among the first words in his vocabulary, and addressed with it all grown-ups, children and animals. One day, tottering about the garden, he exclaimed, pointing at a sparrow on a tree, `Look, comrade, there is a comrade cheepy-bird'; hence his nickname which also served as his alias.

  All other children and all members of the staff had aliases, for reasons which were only half playful. Their surnames had to be kept secret from the outside world and even, as far as possible, from each other. As some of the children's parents lived under false identities in Germany or elsewhere, the list of names of the children in Maisons Lafitte would have given the G
estapo valuable clues for finding out which functionaries of the Communist Party were engaged in active underground work, and possibly even for tracking them down. The Home had actually been burgled under suspicious circumstances, though whether this had been done by the Gestapo was impossible to know. At any rate, no documents showing any of the children's surnames were kept in the Home, and the children themselves had been taught never to disclose them. They kept to the rule with surprising discipline--helped, of course, by the sensation of participating in an exciting cops-and-robbers game.

  The members of the staff were only known by their nicknames. The most striking of these was 'Clysteria' for a psycho-analytically inclined female comrade whose duties included the application of enemas to the smaller children. Collectively the grown-ups were known as the `Chaldraus', an expression borrowed from a novel about a Soviet orphanage which was the rage at the Home. Of the 'Chaldeans' there were altogether five, who, between them, had to do the supervising, nursing, cooking and housecleaning for the entire Home. They were, in order of their importance:

  Marianne, the cook, a member of the French C.P.; Ferdinand, the `Chief Responsable', an Austrian comrade of unknown past, with an endearing habit of cursing all day under his breath in soft Viennese; Clysteria, who dispensed the most hair-raising Freudo-Marxian theories about the sexual life of suckling infants with an impish Mona Lisa smile; Thusnelda das Burgfraulein--a name with a Walter Scott flavour, meaning something like `the damsel of the Castle'-who was an energetic young gymnastics teacher, always racing up and down staircases with a chamber-pot in each hand; and Hermann, the man of all jobs, a former member of the Party's paramilitary organisation in Saxony, who shared my passion for Russian billiards and struck me as the only sane person among the 'Chaldeans'. Before my time the staff had also included a certain 'Pickelchen', which means `Little Car­buncle' or `Spot on the Nose'. He was Clysteria's consort, a timid soul, who wrote Marxian essays on the history of art, and had resigned from the staff when the larger children took to beating him up too often. None of the members of the staff had any educational qualifications or experience. Such discipline as existed in the Home was mainly ensured by a kind of Council of the older children, called `The Collective'. The Collective held daily sessions, sat in court over offenders, and functioned generally as a kind of administrative body. Members of the Collective were all children over twelve except for Ullrich, the only boy of upper middle-class origin, who was expelled from it for 'anti-social behaviour'. In short, the Home was a kind of organised bedlam, and its atmosphere similar to that which had prevailed in the early years of the Revolution in the schools of Russia.

  The diphtheria outbreak, which coincided with my arrival in `La Pouponniere', proved of a relatively harmless kind, but it led to the unfortunate result that the Home was put in quarantine by the French school authorities. The bigger children had been attending the local school; now, for several weeks, they were confined to the Home, which made the staff's task even more impossible than it had been before. Accordingly, I was warmly welcomed as a temporary addition to the ranks of the `Chaldeans', under my old Party name of Comrade Ivan.

  Among the various duties which fell to me were: to hold a kind of Class for the smaller children, and to put them to bed; to edit the weekly wallpaper of the Collective, scrub the floors when it was my turn, and give private lessons in the Russian language to the two unquestioned leaders of the Collective: Piet the Great, and Florian the Bonze. Piet was nearly sixteen, a tall, strong and thoughtful youth, the son of a Hamburg stoker who had been killed by the Nazis; Florian the son of a member of the Party's Central Committee (now a member of the East German Government), already at fifteen a budding Comintern-bureaucrat. `Bonze', it will be remembered, was the slang word for Party brass-hats.

  Apart from these functions I also acted on two occasions, while Marianne was absent, as a cook. Assisted by the counsels of the Collective, I filled a huge cauldron (it was a dinner for thirty) with macaroni, cocoa and sugar, and let it all hopefully boil for half an hour. As I did not know that one is supposed to drain the starchy water off the macaroni, the contents of the cauldron solidified into a deliciously compact sort of sweet black pudding which, served with molasses, was remembered by all for a long time. My second attempt was a variation of the same recipe, with rice instead of macaroni as the basic ingredient; but this time, guided by a dialectical intuition, I added large quantities of bicarbonate of soda. This dish became known as `pudding a la Ivan' and secured my admission as an honorary member to the children's Collective.

  Children were a new and amazing discovery for me; I was thrown into their alien universe, with its private laws of logic and subterranean sensitivities, like a traveller in Mbo-Mba-Land, without dictionary or guide, reduced to making contacts by gesture and grin. But contact was made easier by the fact that I had actually lived in Russia where none of the other 'Chaldeans' had been, and could give a first-hand account of the domes like golden onions which face the Kremlin walls; and also by my own infantile streak and passion for inventing games, which a frustrated childhood had left behind.

  After two months in La Pouponniere, I returned to Paris and finished the novel in the late spring of 1934. The manuscript, which I had thought lost when I had to flee from the Germans, is one of several that escaped the searches of the Gestapo, stowed away in an old knapsack in a Paris cellar. On re-reading it after twenty years, I found it too amateurish and uneven to be published even as a period-piece. Instead, I propose to include here thesynopsis, written for the benefit of a prospective publisher. It ran as follows:

  The action takes place in a home for German refugee children near Paris; time, the present. The characters are children from 2 1/2 to 16 years, mostly of proletariau origin; parents and staff ... The thirty ernigre children, cut off from their French environment, lead a kind of desert-island existence which undergoes strange transformations, follows its own logic, and reflects in a much more pointed form than is normally the case, the problems of social integration and the crises of puberty. The initial difficulties and disorders in the inadequately staffed and financed Home are overcome by the growing sense of responsibility of the Collective; the stages of this evolution, the shared experiences of the children, occupy the major part of the novel.

  In the last part of the book, individuals, characters and destinies begin to take shape. `Ullrich the Opposition', already at the age of fifteen a typical middle-class intellectual, is incapable of subordinating himself to the proletarian community of the children. His inner conflicts, and clashes with the Collective, lead to an abortive attempt at suicide. The story of his main opponent Piet, son of a Hamburg stoker killed by the Nazis, provides the closing chapters of the book.

  The main characters in the novel were, apart from those already mentioned, `Saucy Gustav', `Igelchen', and 'Bobo, the Badger'. `Igelchen' means Little Hedgehog, which sounds rather endearing in German. Igelchen was seven: a very pretty, haughty, husky-voiced and unapproachable proletarian princess, the step-daughter of my Party-guru, Peter. Bobo the Badger, aged eight, was an egg-headed, misshapen humpty-dumpty and an inveterate bed­wetter, whose father worked in the Party underground in Germany. As for Saucy Gustav, aged 13, I shall let the curriculum vitae (authentic) that he wrote for the Committee speak for him:

  I was born August 1921 and sent to foster parents where I stayed 6 years and was then sent to the Jewish Orphanage which I disliked. For it was like a barracks, and prayers all the time. We were also beaten. One day my mother turned up and took me away. I,was then 9. But she couldn't keep me because I am illegitimate. My mother worked in the Jewish Office as an assistant. My mother was a member of the Independent Socialist Party and gave me political enlightenment. But at that time I did not understand much about politics. Later I was sent to a home for Workers' children in Berlin and my mother lost her job. Then my mother joined the German C.P. I liked school, we had a teacher who was also a Communist. We also had a group of Communist Pioneers. Then Hitle
r came and the Pioneers were dissolved. On May 1st somebody made a speech as follows: `The Marxists want only manual workers in the May-Parade, but we want everybody.' That was Demagogy, because May Day belongs to the Working Class. Because of this argument they locked me into a dark bunker. In the bunker I was afraid and sang the `Internationale'. Later they arrested my mother, and my uncle brought me to Paris. Later they let my mother go, but she can't get out of Germany because they won't give her a passport. I apply to be admitted to the Home because my mother is a Fighter against Fascism and my uncle without money. Signed Gustav R.

  The excerpt which follows is typical of the atmosphere of that singular children's crowd. It is based on a factual incident, and the dialogue is photographically faithful, in the tradition of `Socialist realism'. A food-parcel, belonging to Igelchen, had been stolen by an unknown thief. Amidst general excitement a meeting of the children's Collective is called, to discuss what measures should be taken in the interest of social justice:

  ... The door had hardly closed behind Ullrich, when Saucy Gustav's shrill voice pierced the silence:

  `I propose that we hold a Collective Court with respect to the burglar and pass sentence on him.'

  ` Rot, Courts are a bourgeois hypocrisy,' said Thehla the Goose.

  `It isn't rot, in Russia they have Courts, too.9 'But only for counter-revolutionary saboteurs. Not for burglars.'

  'You don't say. And what do they do with the burglars?'

  `In Soviet Russia they laaven'tgot burglars at all.'

  The Goose always had an answer to everything. That was one of her unpleasant qualities. For the moment, however, nobody contradicted her, because nobody wished to say anything naninst Russia. In the end Piet said in a measured voice: