The Invisible Writing

by Les Weil

  It may seem strange to the outsider that this whole storm in a teacup was aroused, not by a clash of policies, but by a difference in timing--by the fact that Peter and I were a few months ahead of the line. But exact timing is one of the secrets of `Fraktionspolitik'. Inside a closed universe, whose heroes are periodically unmasked as traitors, and which progresses in a jagged zig-zag of policy-reversals, everything depends on making the proper shift of personal allegiance and political orientation at the exactly proper time. The Comintern politician's fate is not unlike the trapeze acrobat's, whose life depends on letting go of the swinging bar with split-second precision. The prophets and visionaries of the past became martyrs because they were born a century or two before their times. In the Communist movement, a time-lag of a few months was quite sufficient to be crucified.

  To change the metaphor: every political system may be compared to a series of sieves or filters through which the politician, manager or bureaucrat who aspires to power must pass. But the pattern of the mesh is different for each political system. In England, for instance, the main quality a politician must possess if he is to pass through the filter is a certain upright and dependable mediocrity; in America, it is some popular quality that appeals to the imagination of the masses; in Latin countries, a gift for oratory and histrionics; in the Communist world, the qualities which I have tried to describe. The filter represents, as it were, the principle of natural selection in a given regime. No politician, however gifted, can pass through it if his personality is not cut to fit the specific shape of the mesh. When, once in a while, a genius succeeds in getting through by busting the filter, the whole structure of the system is apt to change.

  My failure as a Communist was not due to any unfortunate hazards, but to a personality-pattern which was unsuited to pass even the lowest filter in the series. It was a first inkling of this which had caused me to prefer the writing of sex books to working in the Muenzenberg Trust. After my experience with INFA, I finally accepted it as a fact. From that time--the end of 1934--my conscious retreat from the Party began. It was to last another three years, for the war in Spain forged new ties with the Party, as the victory of Hitler had done. Without that, I would probably have left when the Great Purge in Russia got under way.

  XXIV. Excursion into the First Century B.C.

  THE day after my career at INFA came to an end, I was moved by a momentary curiosity to look up the name 'Spartacus' in the Encyclopaedia. The German Communist Party is the offspring of a revolutionary group that called itself `Spartaktas-Bund', and was founded in 1917 by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. The name 'Spartacus' was accordingly a household word among Communists; but, like most Communists, I had only the vaguest notion who Spartacus was. I knew that he had led some sort of a revolution in antiquity, and that was about all. It was one of those blind spots in one's education which one always means to cure by looking the subject up, but somehow one never gets round to doing it.

  So I opened Volume II, Seefeld to Traun, of Meyers' Lexikon, and read the foilowing:

  Spartacus, leader of the Slaves' or Gladiators' War 73-7I B.c., a free­born Thracian, was sent, as a Roman prisoner of war, to the Gladiators' Training School in Capua, fled from there in 73 with seventy of his comrades, occupied Mt. Vesuvius, defeated the Praetor Varinius, and saw his following grow to 70,000 men. He now took possession of Southern Italy And four times defeated the Romans, until in 71 the Praetor M. Licinius Crassus drove him to the south-western tip of Italy; he fell at Petelia, together with 60,000 slaves. The prisoners were crucified, the survivors who had succeeded in breaking through were annihilated by Pompeius (q.v.) in the foothills of the Alps. Bibl.: Hartwig, Der Sklavenkrieg.

  This laconic text took such a hold on my imagination that I resolved on the spot to add to my four unpublished manuscripts a fifth one, by writing a historical novel. It took four years to write, involved me in a mammoth research task, gave me a new outlook on history, and was my first novel to appear in print.' Before I was able to finish it, I was obliged to write four other books: two more sex books in order to live, a propaganda book for the Spanish Loyalists, and an account of my imprisonment in Spain. Thus the writing of The Gladiators became something of an obstacle race. By the time the book was finished, in the summer of 1938, I had broken with the Party, and the political dialogues in the novel now read to me like a logbook, reflecting a pilgrim's progress to inner freedom.

  The following weeks I spent mostly at the Bibliotheque Nationale. My material condition had by now slightly improved. Since August I no longer lived in the hayloft in Val Fleuri; I lived in a little hotel on the Ile St. Louis with Dorothy, to whom this book is dedicated and who, a few months later, became my first wife.

  I had met Dorothy the previous year, when we had both been working for Willy Muenzenberg. She was then a girl of twenty-five, with dark, tousled hair, large brown eyes, and a pleasant oval face with a shy and earnest expression. She did not fit into either of the two main categories of women found in the German Communist Party: the tough, cocky, working­class girls, and the neurotic Cinderellas of the bourgeoisie.

  Dorothy's father had been a Berlin banker; her brother, Ernie, was a young doctor; her sister, Liesl, was married to Peter. While still at school, Ernie and his two sisters had drifted into the Socialist youth movement, and from there, lured by Russian films, avant-garde plays, and Brecht-Eisler songs, into the Communist Party. Their father had died several years before, leaving his money to his widow, my future mother-in-law. She was a domineering and eccentric woman, haunted by the fear of poverty, who hated her daughters because they were Communists, and who lived, of all places, in a service flat in Shepherds Bush. She paid Dorothy an allowance of five pounds a month, which even in 1934 was a ridiculously small sum; when we were married, she sent her, as a combined trousseau and wedding gift, a pair of woollen knickers.

  So Dorothy was nearly as poor as I. However, after leaving INFA I wrote occasional articles for Leopold Schwarzschild's liberal weekly, Das Neue Tagebuch, and Dorothy had a part-time job; so we managed to scrape along, cooking our meals on a gasfire in the cabinet de toilette, and visiting the cinema du quartier once a week.

  Our little hotel was a narrow, rickety building on the Quai d'Anjou, with a misleadingly grand name, Hotel de la Paix. Each time someone pulled the chain of the lavatory behind the milk-glass window on the landing, the whole hotel shook with the gurgling and rushing of water through the lead-pipes, so that we seemed to live surrounded by a waterfall. But the traditional shortcomings of the plumbing were compensated by the lovely view over the Seine from our window, and by a plane tree whose branches grew almost into our room. It was a good room to work in, but I felt equally happy at the Bibliotheque Nationale, where I spent most of the day, in front of one of the green-shaded desk-lamps, digging into Roman history, the condition of slaves in antiquity, the regulations concerning gladiators' fights, the folklore of Thrace and Gaul, the economy of the Roman state, the topography of Mount Vesuvius, and similar subjects. Thanks to Jan's cunning manoeuvre, I had entered upon the new life just when I was ready for it. During the next seven or eight months I read more history than I had done since my schooldays, and wrote the first eight chapters of The Gladiators; about one-third of the book.

  From the moment when I had joined the Communist Party three and a half years earlier, I had been submerged in the stream of Revolution. Now I was coming up for air, looking at the stream, wondering where it was leading, and trying to find out about the nature of the forces that made it move. At first, my imagination had been caught by the picturesque and romantic aspects of the Slave War: the circus gladiators who were its leaders, their camp in the crater of Vesuvius, and by the fact that the Slave Army came within an ace of conquering Rome and thus altering the whole course of history. But soon my interest shifted from the picturesque facade to the historical and moral lessons of the first great proletarian revolution. There existed some obvious parallels between the first pre-Christian c
entury and ours. It had been a century of social unrest, of abortive revolutions and violent mass movements, starting with the Sicilian Slave Rising which led to the crucifixion of twenty thousand rebels, down to the revolution of Marius and Cinna, the rebellion of Sertorius and the Catiline Conspiracy; and in between, Spartacus, the most important and enigmatic figure of all.

  The causes which led to these upheavals had an equally familiar ring: the breakdown of traditional values, a rapid transformation of the economic system, mass unemployment caused by the importation of slave labour and of cheap corn from the colonies, the ruin of the farmers and the growth of large latifundia, a corrupt administration and a decadent ruling class, a falling birth-rate and a spectacular rise in divorces and abortions. Only against this background could it be understood that a band of seventy fugitive circus fighters could grow within a few months into an army of 70,000 men, and for two years hold half Italy under its sway. In fact, it was one of those rare moments in history when all the elements of what Marxists call an 'objective revolutionary situation' were assembled.

  Why then did the Revolution fail? And how was it possible that Rome, with its corrupt, parasitic ruling class and anachronistic economy, whose end was declared imminent by its own poets, satirists and philosophers--how could it happen that this doomed Empire survived for nearly another five hundred years? And what about the Marxian dictum in the Communist Manifesto that throughout History `free men and slaves, oppressors and oppressed, carry on an uninterrupted fight that must end either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common destruction of both contending classes'? In the first century A.D. there were already twice as many slaves as free men in Italy. The initial success of the Spartacus rising had shown them their own strength, had shown them that Rome was helpless against them once they dared to lift their heads. They never did again; it was not the Roman proletariat who brought the Empire down, but the barbarian invader. Why did the Roman slaves fail `to take their fate into their own hands' as the Communist Manifesto said? And why, two thousand years later, did the German and Italian proletariat still fail to recognise their own interests, and support the Neros and Caligulas of their own age? Did the concept of 'class-consciousness' have any practical value in explaining history? Was not the psychology of the masses an infinitely more complex phenomenon? Why was this all-important subject a blank on the Marxist map of the world? Why did the `Party of the masses' ignore the discoveries of Le Bon, Fraser, Durkheim, Levy-Bruhl, Freud and Jung, who all stressed the irrational and affective nature of group-behaviour, so strikingly demonstrated by Fascism and its allied movements? Did the Party's monotonous ravings against the `traitors to the working class' and `lackeys of the bourgeoisie' explain why the people refused to follow us? Did the closed universe in which I lived have any rclation to the reality around me?

  It was not I who asked these questions, it was the material in which I was working. The answers which emerged were tentative and hesitant, and very remote from the doctrinaire certitude of historical materialism. Up to now, I had been critical of the Soviet leadership and the Comintern bureaucracy, but not of the basic teaching of Communism, which I regarded as historically correct, and as self-evident as the axioms of Euclid. Now, the more engrossed I became in my subject, the more questionable became the very foundations of the doctrine, the more cracks appeared in the wall around the `closed system', and the more fresh air blew in. I wrote the novel in the excited mood of a voyage of discoveries, where every turn opens a new vista. If some critics have called it my best novel, it is perhaps because the passions and angers which contemporary events aroused in me were here projected on a screen remote in space and time, and purified from the topical dross which tends to clutter up my other books.

  The original sources on Spartacus turned out to be disappointingly meagre and biased. Even the Encyclopmdia Britannica remarks that `his character has been misrepresented by Roman writers, whom his name has inspired with terror down to the time of the Empire'. All the references in Livy, Plutarch, Appian and Florus added together amounted to less than ten pages. They had obviously felt the whole episode to be so humiliating that the less said about it the better--a striking justification of Marx's scorn for `bourgeois historians' and for his assertion that all history was written with an unconscious social bias. The one exception seemed to have been Sallust, of whose Historim only fragments survive. An eighteenth-century French historian, Charles de Brosses, had filled in the missing details with much imagination and revolutionary rhetoric, thus providing an opposite, quasi­Jacobin slant.

  But although direct references to the Slave Revolt itself were scant, background material on social conditions and political intrigues was abundant. In a similar way, next to nothing was known about the character of the slave leaders and the ideas that guided them, whereas a great amount was known about their opponents: Pompeius, Crassus, Varinius, Gellius Publicola, the Consuls and Senators of 73-71, their friends and contemporaries. This allowed, on the one hand, a wider scope for imagination than a historically well-defined hero would permit; in fact, not only the characters of Spartacus and his lieutenants, but also the details of their campaign and the organisation of the slave community had to be invented. But, on the other hand, the detailed knowledge available about the period provided a pattern or frame from which much could be deduced; so that the filling in of missing details became a problem of intuitive geometry, the piecing together of a jigsaw puzzle.

  The sources gave no indication of the programme or common idea that held the Slave Army together; yet a number of hints indicated that it must have been a kind of `socialist' programme which asserted that all men were born equal, and denied that the distinction between free men and slaves was part of the natural order; there were further hints to the effect that at one time Spartacus tried to found a Utopian colony, based on common property, somewhere in Lucania. Now such ideas were entirely alien to the Roman proletariat before the advent of primitive Christianity. This led to the wild, but fairly plausible guess that the Spartacists had been inspired by the same source as the Nazarenes a century later: the Messianism of the Hebrew prophets. There must have been, in the motley crowd of runaway slaves, quite a number of Syrian origin, and some of these may have acquainted Spartacus with the prophecies relating to the Son of Man, sent `to comfort the captives, to open the eyes of the blind, to free the oppressed'. Every spontaneous movement eventually picks up, by a kind of natural selection, the ideology or myth best fitted to its purpose. I thus assumed, for the purposes of my jig­saw puzzle, that among the numerous cranks, reformers and sectarians whom his horde must have attracted, Spartacus chose as his mentor and guide a member of the Judaic sect of Essenes, the only sizeable civilised community that practised primitive Communism at that time, and taught that `what is mine is thine, and what is thine is mine'. In short, what Spartacus needed most after his initial victories was a programme and credo that would hold his mob together; and the philosophy most likely to appeal to the largest number of the dispossessed seemed to be the one which a century later found a more sublime expression in the Sermon on the Mount--and which Spartacus, the slave Messiah, had failed to implement.

  In contrast to these speculations regarding the unknown heroes of the tale, I felt the need to draw the known historical background with a strict, indeed pedantic accuracy. This led me into a study of such far-fetched subjects as the nature and shape of Roman underwear, and their complicated ways of fastening clothes by buckles, belts and sashes. In the end, not a word of all this found its way into the novel, and clothes are hardly even mentioned in the text; but I found it impossible to write a scene if I could not visualise how the characters were dressed, and how their garments were held together. Similarly, the months spent in studying Roman exports, imports, taxation and related matters yielded exactly three pages (in which Crassus, the fat banker-politician, explains to the younger Cato the economic policies of Rome in cynically Marxist terms).

  Although
it was a fascinating adventure, and provided me with a great amount of fun, I decided half-way through the book never again to write a historical novel. There is a basic inertia to imagination which sets limits to one's capacity for projecting oneself into worlds distant in space and time. Every culture is an island. It communicates with other islands; but ultimately it can only experience tragedy and laughter in its own climate. The habits and mentality of, say, a Knight in the Second Crusade have a frame of reference so strange to us that we find it difficult to believe in the reality of the person. The thoughts of a galley-slave or a Thracian captive trained to die in the arena are so unimaginable that the figures are reduced to meek or menacing shadows on a dim screen. There are, it seems, only two possible techniques for the novelist to bring these shadows of history into focus. One is to turn them into silhouettes with sharp profiles, into character-types as entertaining as the shadow-plays of childhood, but without the depth and warmth and luminosity needed to make emotional identification possible. The alternative technique is to cheat; to bring the shadows alive by projecting into them the feelings and ideas of the writer's own period. All historical novels and plays seem to use one of these two techniques, or a mixture of both. In The Gladiators, the treatment of characters belonging to the upper strata of Roman society, whose habits are familiar to us, follows the `modernising' technique of making them speak as if they were slightly eccentric contemporaries of our own; whereas Campanian labourers and Lucanian shepherds, Thracian gladiators and walrus-moustached gloomy Celts had to remain, by the force of circumstances, silhouettes in profile, or coloured bas-reliefs, as it were.