The Invisible Writing

by Les Weil

  With the exception of Rene and Ellen, we were all `old Party horses'; all of us, I suppose, had at one time or another been caught up between the wheels of the Party machine and carried a hidden scar. Hence we were all glad to live and work in this friendly oasis, under the benevolently goggling eyes of Peter. There was never any explicit criticism of the Party, but there were little silences and quiet shrugs, and the shared knowledge of disappointments and frustrations, which brought us even closer together. When work was finished, some of us always stayed behind, huddled in the kitchen, and talked endless shop. The Institute was our collective hobby and obsession.

  There must have existed millions of Communists of every age and nationality like us, an untapped human reservoir of idealism and devotion, vast enough to transform the political desert of this globe. History was repeating the tragedy of the early Church--the spiritual spring-tide that had carried the pure and humble towards the milliennium, and had left them stranded in the grip of a debased Papacy; the messianic faith at the beginning of the Crusades and their terrible end.

  Why did these frustrated, dedicated millions fail to shake off the grip of the Kremlin Borgias? Those who lived inside Russia were obviously reduced to helplessness; but what about the honest Peters and Lyses and Egons and Arthurs, over whom the G.P.U. could exercise no direct control? There are various answers to this--atomisation, dispersion, the sorry end of all independent Communist splinter-groups who had no Russian money and power behind them. But the basic cause for our paralysis lay deeper: it was the true believer's insurmountable horror of excommunication. Though we trusted each other, we shrank from actually giving voice to our heretical thoughts. A shrug, a silence, were the limits to which we could go without outlawing ourselves before our own conscience:

  There was a conviction shared by the best among my friends who have now either left the Party or been killed. Though we wore blinkers, we were not blind, and even the most fanatical among us could not help noticing that all was not well in our movement. But we never tired of telling each other--and ourselves--that the Party could only be changed from inside, not from outside. You could resign from a club and from the ordinary sort of party if its policy no longer suited you; but the Communist Party was something difterent: it was the incarnation of the will of History itself. Once you stepped out of it you were extra muros, and nothing which you said or did had the slightest chance of influencing its course. The only dialectically correct attitude was to remain inside, shut your mouth tight, swallow your bile and wait for the day when, after the defeat c f the enemy and the victory of World Revolution, Russia and the Comintern were ready to become democratic institutions. Then and only then would the leaders be called to account for their actions: the avoidable defeats, the wanton sacrifices, the mud-stream of slander and denunciation in which the pick of our comrades had perished. Until that day you had to play the game-confirm and deny, denounce and recant, eat your words and lick your vomit; it was the price you had to pay for being allowed to continue feeling useful, and thus keep your perverted self-respect. (The God That Failed.)

  The only member of the Institute who did not seem to fit into the picture was Max, the business manager. He looked like a fat, middle-aged travelling salesman in ladies' underwear. The Party had sent him to us as an `efficient organiser', but we all felt ill at case with him--until one day he vanished in unexplained circumstances from the Rue Buffon and from France. I believe that he also took some of our meagre funds with him, though Peter, and Lys who kept the books, were flatly non-committal on the ubject.

  In the ensuing emergency I was given the additional job of business manager. It consisted mostly in visiting our various French patrons and asking them for donations. It was in this capacity that I first met, among other French intellectuals, Andre Malraux. I went to see him at his office at Gallimard's, his publishers, and we talked while walking up and down in the pretty garden at the back of the Gallimard building. As a fervent admirer o Malraux's, I was overwhelmed by the occasion, but went on bravely about the great prospects of INFA, and its even greater need for donations. Malraux listened in silence, occasionally uttering one of his characteristic, awe inspiring nervous sniffs, which sound like the cry of a wounded jungle beat and are followed by a slap of his palm against his nose. At first this was rather startling, but one soon got accustomed to it. When I had had my say Malraux stopped, advanced towards me threateningly, until I had my back against the garden wall, and said:

  'Oui, oui, mon cher, mais que pensez-vous de l'apocalypse?'

  With that he gave me five hundred francs, and wished me good luck.

  I usually went on my begging tours once a month, for which occasion I put on my one remaining good shirt. (The others were of the short-sleeved French chemise de sport variety, made of a kind of net-fabric which betrayed the hairiness of your chest as a darkling shadow). Among the patrons of INFA whom I visited on these tours were Professor Langevin, bearded and gentle, Frederick Joliot-Curie, young, intense and eager, Louis Aragon, tense with ambition and vainglory, the only one who always gave good advice and iiever a penny; finally Professor Lucien Levy-Bruhl, whose work on the prelogical character of primitive mentality had a great influence on my intellectual development and whom I accordingly idolised. Levy-Bruhl was then over seventy, and near his death. A small, fragile figure, sitting erect behind a large desk, his delicate face framed by a white goatee and white mane, he has remained in my memory as the prototype of the great French homrares de lettres of the last century.

  All these men, and many other French intellectuals were kind and helpful to the anonymous 'anti-Fascist refugee' that I was. Though most of them were not Communists, they gave money to INFA, lent their names to our committee of Patrons, and gave me letters of introduction to others. Yet there was something withdrawn, impersonal and chilling in their helpfulness; I was grateful for their help, but it depressed me that neither I nor any of my fellow refugees was ever invited to a French house. I knew of course that it was reserve was an inherent part of French tradition, and during my previous stay in Paris as a foreign correspondent I had taken it for granted. But poverty and exile make one oversensitive; what a refugee craves most is relief from the permanent feeling of uprootedness. Soldiers abroad have the same craving to escape from their bleak army billets into the comforting warmth of a family around a meal. The British have an instinctive understanding of this need and, for all their apparent shyness and restraint, they have a way of picking up the stranger as if he were a kind of stray dug, carrying him to their houses and making him feel at home; while the French, with their easy affability, embrace him warmly and let him stand shivering in the street, condemned to remain forever a permanent tourist or permanent exile, as the case may be.

  Thus the great mass of refugees in France lived cut off from French contacts and led a kind of ghetto existence. They read their emigre papers, frequented their emigre-clubs and cafes, lived immersed in their emigre universe, and its inevitable feuds and intrigues. During my seven years as a refugee in France, I lived entirely in the company of fellow-refugees and continued to write and think in German; yet from the moment when, in 1940, I settled in England, I began to write in English, moved among English friends and ceased to be a refugee. Incidentally, quite a number of writers whose native language was not English have risen to prominence in English and American letters; but I cannot think of a single analogous example of a writer whose native language was not French.

  For the story of my remaining years in France, these circumstances have to be borne in mind. It is a story of physical and spiritual exile and, individual crotchets apart, typical of the condition of the political refugee--at that time numbering thousands, and now hundreds of thousands.

  To live up completely to the destiny of the refugee, I now become homeless in the literal sense of the word: unable to pay my rent even in the cheap Belleville hotel, I moved to a hayloft which was rent-free. The hayloft was located in an open-air colony of gentle cranks in
Meudon-Val Fleuri, halfway between Paris and Versailles. The colony lived in a lovely park which had once been a deer park of the fourteenth or fifteenth Louis, with various abandoned stables, pavilions and summer-houses for the amorous dalliances of the Court. These buildings, and a number of tents, were now occupied by a motley crowd of vegetarians, nudists, poets, and painters, mostly followers of the Raymond Duncan sect, and by a number of refugees without proper identity papers hiding from the police. It was run by a bearded young man named Paul, who wore sandals and hand-woven garments, and was a secret member of the Party.

  I was told about the colony by a comrade, the German writer George Glaser, who was as down and out as I was. George was a very gifted and lovable boy of genuine, blue-blooded, proletarian origin; not a middle-class bohemian, but a real tramp with the gift for fending for himself under the most unlikely circumstances. He lived in a tent, which he had wangled out of some charitable organisation, in a wild corner of the colony's park, and earned the few francs he needed for food by odd jobs in the colony. When he heard in what straits I was, he arranged with Paul that I should be allowed to sleep in the hay-loft of one of the summer-houses; for a bed or a tent the colony charged a rent which, though ridiculously small, I could not pay. So, one day in June or July 1934, just before the next rent in the hotel was due, I packed my few belongings into a suitcase, and tramped out with George to Meudon-Val Fleuri.

  During the next few weeks I led a life that was almost perfectly happy. At seven-thirty in the morning I started, on an empty stomach, on the three mile walk from Val Fleuri to the Metro terminal at the Maine d'Issy, thus saving the train fare which INFA paid me; and on sunny days I saved the Metro fare too. At midday I filled up on thick soup and bread; around six or seven o'clock in the evening I again took the Metro to Issy, or walked all the way home to my loft. In a little shop in Issy I bought my dinner, which invariably consisted of a pound of bread and a few ounces of lard, at a total cost of 50 centimes. Bread and lard were not only the cheapest variety of food if you had no cooking facilities, but also relatively the most nourishing; it used to be the staple diet of the poor in my native Hungary. Often I could not resist eating my dinner while I trudged along the last stretch of the road; this meant swallowing the lard without salt, under which circumstances it is tasteless and indigestible. Yet somehow I could never get myself to carry salt in my pocket.

  After dinner I wandered through the park with George and some other people in the colony. I remember one particularly pleasant young man and his equally nice girl--later his wife. This young man had spent several years in the notorious prison of Brest Litovsk, where he had contracted tuberculosis; now he was recuperating. He was nearly as poor as I was, yet one evening he bought me a real hot dinner in a bistro, the pleasure of which I still remember. I also remember him telling a particularly gruesome story about a fight with rats in a punishment cell in Brest Litovsk, and of prisoners who died of infected rat bites. He was a gentle and sensitive young man, without a trace of fanaticism or bitterness, and he was obviously happily in love with his pretty and gay fiancee. I heard a few years later that they had emigrated to America where, to the best of my knowledge, they still live.

  Though I was always slightly hungry, and ravenous on Sunday when there was no INFA soup, I was in excellent health and profoundly contented. Work, and a glowing feeling of comradeship and belonging had burnt every trace of self-pity out of my system. At last, I felt, I was leading the life a Communist should lead, a life of poverty, dedication and obedience.

  I was now approaching the landmark of thirty. Though emotionally still unstable and far from being grown up, a change in personality began slowly to crystallise behind all the contradictions and confusions. My earlier years had been a succession of breathless pursuits of the arrow in the blue: the perfect cause, the ideal Helen, the knowing shaman, the infallible leader. Vow, after a series of disillusionments, the perfection of the cause which I served became gradually less important than the act of serving in itself. l'hrough a long process of trial and error, I began to learn that complete dedication to a cause was for me a physical necessity, my only haven from the nagging sense of guilt which early childhood had implanted, and my only salvation from becoming that typical and boring phenomenon of our age, the neurotic intellectual stewing in his private limbo.

  In other words, I began to accept the fact that I was a person of the obsessive type. Blessed or cursed with a surplus of nervous energy which demanded excessive outlets, I had to be obsessed with some task if I was not to be obsessed with myself. During the last few months in that hotel room in Belleville, I had evidently been going to pieces. Had that hotel room been in Chelsea or Greenwich Village, the probable sequel would have been spending three hours a week during the next three years on a psychiatrist's couch, to emerge in the end with a more or less successfully patched-up personality. But as I was penniless and could count on no help from outside, I had to fall back once again on 'Babo'-Muenchausen's boastful Baron in the Bog, who pulled himself out by his own hair when on the point of drowning. Hence, instead of that magic couch, I was lying on a hayloft and dreaming of our plans for an International Anti-Fascist Exhibition--a grandiose affair, which would prove once and for all by historical parallels, statistical figures, graphs on rearmament, and so forth, that APPEASEMENT MEANS WAR, and which at the same time would appeal to the emotions by wax-work representations of daily life in a concentration camp, accompanied by the warning that IT WILL HAPPEN HERE.

  It can, of course, be said that living in a hayloft and working hard without pay was a sign of a need for self-punishment. Perhaps it was; but if so, it was a constructive form of self-punishment. This leads us back once more to the ambiguity of value judgements, for the psychiatrist regards every obsession as a disease that ought to be cured, whereas from the historian's point of view the mad obsessions of artists, rcformers, explorers, and inventors are the dynamic sources of progress. Even the question whether an obsession is creative or sterile, is sometimes impossible to decide, and only posterity will tell whether a man shall be classified as a pioneer or a neurotic crank.

  However that may be, it gradually dawned on me that my only happy periods were the periods when I was chasing after the arrow in one shape or another. It was the only form of life which gave me peace of mind--not the prim feeling of virtue of do-gooders and hospital sisters, but the creative joy, the happy furore of building and shaping, of adding a brick to the edifice of that more humane future in which I still believed. It was at the same time an outlet for the chronic indignation which was gnawing at one's guts during the seven years of darkness.

  I also discovered that in between the `dedicated periods' I became depressed, with recurrent suicidal fantasies. In later years, obsession with a cause changed into obsession with the book I was working on; and then the periods between-two-books became hollows of depression. It all sounds obvious in retrospect, but it took many years until I began to understand the pattern, and discern the reasons for these wild ups and downs. It is easy to say `I happen to be a manic-depressive type', but laborious to discover the individual switch that releases the manic or depressive phase.

  Gradually these manic bursts of activity, followed by morbid depressions, levelled out into a relatively stable working discipline which keeps me , hained to my desk all the year round for eight or nine hours a day. For an independent writer this is an unusual routine, and the chains are self-imposed; but each time I have tried to break them I had to pay the penalty of being relegated into a limbo of maudlin drunkennesses, tormenting hangovers, and phantom-Helenas. Thus work became my therapy and drug, my compromise with a guilt-ridden ego, and a sacrificial offering to the ghosts of the past. I expect that this condition will last to the end of my days; when my writing has run dry, I shall still sit for eight hours at my desk, growing piles over some boring and meritorious piece of research, as an atonement for an unknown original sin. And over my desk, in a gay frame, shall hang Attila's lines:
r />   ... but thank you, I feel fine;

  it worries me though, why that sin

  eludes me when it's mine.

  XXIII. Purge in a Teacup

  IT was, of course, too good to be true.

  Our INFA was an insignificant sideshow of the Communist movement, but the story of how it was destroyed deserves to be briefly told because it contains the whole tragedy of Communism in a nutshell.

  Some time in the summer of 1934, the Institute received a valuable addition to its staff in the person of `Comrade Paul', alias Manes Sperber. A few weeks later the Party delegated a commissar to control our activities. He called himself Jan, but I should rather call him the Invisible Man, for he seemed to possess no personal features or individual characteristics. He was of middling age and middling height; he was baldish, his suit was brownish, his shoulders squarish, his speech slowish, his manners mulish. He was the perfect incarnation of the German Party bureaucrat--wooden-faced and plaster­brained, the interior spaces of his body apparently stuffed with horsehair. And yet he had sonic formidable qualitics. He had been trained in Moscow. I was never to know his name, but I learnt that he had been, among other things, General Secretary of the League of the Godless--an international atheist organisation sponsored by the Comintern and disbanded, I think, in 1934, when the change to the 'People's Front' line was being prepared.