The Invisible Writing

by Les Weil

  This period of gestation lasted from the spring of 1935 to the summer of 1936. It reminds one strangely of the period of suspense in Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year between the first appearance of the plague, and its full outbreak several months later. Typical of the secrecy surrounding this period is the fact that Zinoviev, Kamenev, Smyrnov and accomplices, the defendants in what is known to the world as the `First' Moscow trial, were in fact tried three times within eighteen months for the same crime. The first time they were tried in January 1935, found guilty of `being politically and morally responsible' for Kirov's assassination without having any actual part in it, ind were sentenced to prison terms. The second time the same defendants, plus a host of new co-defendants, numbering in total thirty, were tried secretly on the same charges in the spring of 1935; all that is known of the trial is that another five years were added to Kamenev's prison sentence. The third time, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Smyrnov and accomplices, were tried in August 1936, under the full blast of publicity. It was this trial that became known to the world as the `First' Moscow trial. This time all the accused were found guilty as the direct instigators of and accomplices in Kirov's murder, were sentenced to death and shot.

  During this year and a half of veiled preparations, Soviet propaganda mill managed to keep the world in ignorance about the real state of affairs in Russia. The liberal and progressive-minded section of the European public was completely taken in by the propaganda barrage boosting the new Soviet Constitution and the new `People's Front' policy in Europe. It was during this period that Stalin proved his genius for propaganda by gradually tightening his grip round the people's neck, and at the same time creating the illusion of a more liberal policy.

  This period ended with a bang in August 1936. The death sentences in the `First' Moscow Trial marked the transition from camouflaged terror to stark and open mass terror. But by that time the Spanish Civil War had broken out. Franco's revolt made internal events in Russia recede far into the background for the European Left, myself included. On the day when the first reports of the Zinoviev Trial appeared in the European Press, I was already on my way as a Comintern agent to Spain.

  This period of transition and suspense, the year 1935-36, was also the last of my adolescence. I was now thirty, but adolescence is not a matter of age; it is a state of character and mind. The story that I have told betrays only too clearly how unbalanced and unstable I still was. I experienced joy and despair, love and hatred with keen intensity, but my emotions were self­centred, and those who inspired them served merely as projection-screens.

  The turning point came at the end of this period, with my imprisonment in Spain. The last year before it was both restless and empty. It was divided between Paris, Zurich, Budapest and other places. I was not travelling for pleasure, but like a hobo from one job to another, in search of a living.

  The first station in these wanderings was Zurich. Dorothy's brother Ernie had been offered a post as a hospital surgeon in the Volga-German Soviet Republic, and was eimigrating with his Swiss-born wife and their little daughter to that country. The lease of their flat in Westbuehl, one of Zurich's modern residential suburbs, ran for another six months. It would be a pity to waste it; Dorothy and I could live there rent-free while I was writing my book, and even have a real bathroom of our own. I think it was the bathroom that decided us, and in January r93S we installed ourselves for the next six months in Zurich.

  Just before we left Paris, I had an unexpected stroke of luck. In a moment of generosity, Theodore, the Sex Publisher, agreed to pay me five pounds a month for a year against the copyright of The Gladiators. He was now prosperous, and intended to branch out into `respectable' publisling--an intention that he never realised, as will be seen. I was, of course, overjoyed by the prospect of being able to concentrate entirely on the novel, and of finishing it within a year.

  Ernie's was a pleasant, modern flat; it had three rooms with large windows opening on tidy, suburban lawns; after the cheap Paris hotel rooms it appeared to us as a place of glamour and luxury. We relished the cleanliness of the Swiss, their homely dialect and their honest, gruffmanners. The Town Library was well-stocked with works on antiquity, and had the great advantage that up to fifteen volumes could be taken home.

  As against these blessings, we found it more difficult to be poor in Zurich than in Paris. Although the largest town in Switzerland, Zurich has an intensely provincial atmosphere, saturated with prosperity and virtue. To be poor on Montparnasse could be regarded as a joke, a bohemian eccentricity; but Zurich had neither a Montparnasse nor cheap bistros, nor that kind of humour. In this clean, smug, orderly town, poverty was simply degrading; and, though no longer starving, we were very poor indeed. We had Dorothy's five pounds per month, and I had the same amount; one day we discovered that our joint monthly income was lower than that of a Swiss worker living on unemployment relief.

  Nevertheless, these five or six months were contented and uneventful. I worked my regular eight hours, and sometimes we went for long walks around the lake or in the lulls. To our great relief the Party forbade us all contact with thee Swiss C.P. The Swiss police were must stricter than the French in supervising the activities of foreigners, and contact with the Swiss Party would have meant immediate expulsion from the country.

  Our friends nearly all belonged to the so-called 'Humm Circle'. Jacob Humm is a distinguished Swiss-German novelist, in whose flat a group of writers met once a week for literary readings and discussions. These evenings were very enjoyable, and the friendly, polite tone of the discussions stood in agreeable contrast to the acerbity of our arguments in the Writers' Caucus in Paris. Humm was a tall, gaunt, eccentric man, with the appearance and manners of a Swiss mountain guide, yet with a great tenderness of feeling and a seismographic intuition for other people's troubles. In several respects he resembled George Orwell. He lived in an old-fashioned, rambling flat on Hecht Platz with his quiet and efficient wife Lilly and a host of children of all ages. One of the peculiarities of the flat was that the frosted-glass lavatory door opened straight into the sitting-room. Our high-flown discussions Were punctuated by the comings and goings of the Humm children through that door.

  More or less regular participants in our discussions were Ignazio Silone, who at that time lived in Switzerland; Bernard von Brentano, the Gcrnian novelist; Julius Hay, the Hungarian Communist playwright, and several local journalists and young writers. After a few weeks, Peter, now my brother-in-law, also turned up in Zurich on some mysterious new Party assignment, and became a regular member of the Humm Circle. The assignment had something to do with `broadening the cultural front and establishing new contacts', but he was very cagey about it; so, knowing Peter's harmless foible of giving himself conspiratorial airs, I did not press him and never found out the exact nature of his mission. He seemed entirely undaunted by our INFA experiences, and when I indulged in some bitter and cynical remark, he just looked deeply into my eyes with his saintly stare, half psychiatrist, half priest, and made me feel ashamed of myself.

  Faithful to Party tradition, Peter, Hay and I immediately formed a caucus within the Humm Circle. It was a sophisticated group that could not be approached by direct Communist propaganda; it could only be manoeuvred by much patience and by imperceptible steps, into a`sympathising' attitude. The three of us, thoroughly versed in the Marxist theory of literature, had the advantage of all propounders of a logically self-consistent system over opponents with no system at all. Our arguments were cogent and seemed to make sense, even if the axioms on which they were based were one-sided and partly nonsense. The Humm Circle did not embody any political power; it was merely one of the thousands of intellectual coteries all over the world who, in their ensemble, create the climate of public opinion; and in each of these there were, during the nineteen-thirties, small caucuses of Peters and Arthurs patiently at work to make this climate favourable, or at least benevolently neutral, to the Great Social Experiment in Russia and its Western extension, the People's F
ront against war and Fascism.

  The third of us, Julius Hay, was a dark, good-looking and easy-going young man. He was a Communist by philosophy, but took no interest in politics, paid his Party dues as one pays income tax, and lived entirely for his plays. One had been performed at the Hungarian National Theatre during the Commune of 1929; since then he had been an exile, wandering through Europe with a suitcase full of unperformed plays which represented his capital and future. After the war he returned to Budapest, where one of the plays became a great success.

  Silone attended the circle less regularly, perhaps only two or three times. He was convalescing in the mountains after an attack of tuberculosis, and only came to Zurich at rare intervals. Fontamara, his first novel, which made his European reputation, had been published a few months earlier in a German translation. The publishing history of the book is typical of the almost insurmountable difficulties which emigre writers have to face. Silone had offered the manuscript to the then largest Swiss publishing firm, Oprecht und Helbing, whose owner, the late Dr. Emil Oprecht, was a Left-wing Socialist with Communist sympathies. In spite of this, and in spite of the enthusiastic readers' reports, Oprecht refused to publish the work as the cost of translation from the Italian manuscript `would make the risk too high'. This is the classic argument which condemns the exiled writer to silence and starvation. After a year or two had passed, Silone's friends discovered a Maecenas in the person of a kindly Zurich fur merchant whose wife had literary leanings. The fur merchant gave Oprecht a guarantee against possible losses, and now at last Fontamara appeared in print. It became a best-seller at once, and for the rest of his life the publisher basked in the glory of having discovered Silone. The merit, of course, was the fur merchant's, whose name ought to be remembered by posterity; he was called Herr Mayer.

  In the course of the last few years before we met in Zurich, Silone had been gradually detaching himself from the Party,' but he did not attack it openly, and the Party was still hoping to win him back. I had much admired Fontamara, and was looking forward to meeting Silone. I found him a kind but very reserved person, wrapped up in himself, surrounded by a soft but impenetrable cloud of melancholy and depression. To my great disappointment I was unable to find any real personal contact with lum.(After the Zurich period we did not meet again for thirteen years; but our names were constantly bracketed together by the critics, with Andre Malraux as the third, in a kind of trium­virate representing the ex-Communist brand of the Continental novel.

  In 1948, on our first post-war visit to Rome, Mamaine (my second wife) and I rang up Silone, and arranged to meet for lunch in a restaurant the next day. Silone arrived late, and after addressing a few melancholy words of greeting to us, buried himself into a newspaper for the rest of the meal, without noticing our bewilderment. Later on Darina, Silone's charming and devoted Irish wife, told us in comic despair that after the luncheon she had rebuked Ignazio for his apparent rudeness to us; and that he had answered in surprise: `But why should I not read my newspaper? The Koestlers are not strangers but my friends.' We did indeed become quite good friends later on--but it has always remained a somewhat frustrating kind of friendship.)

  In March, Dorothy and I got married. The immediate reason was a problem of passports, the refugee's eternal nightmare. Dorothy's German passport had expired and could not be renewed; by marrying me she could obtain a Hungarian passport. Although in Russia the `new proletarian morality' had resurrected sexual conventions with a vengeance, European Communists still clung to their old-fashioned libertinism, and regarded bourgeois marriage with contempt. But there was no other way of getting Dorothy a passport, so, with a joint sigh of resignation, we decided to go through with that archaic ceremony.

  A few days before it was scheduled to take place, Dorothy came to my room with an expression of deep gloom:

  `I had a letter from the Consulate,' she said hesitantly, `telling me that my passport can be renewed after all.' `Wonderful,' I said. `Now we can call the whole thing off, and live happily ever after.' Dorothy looked at me pensively from under her tousled hair. `But now I have written to everybody that we are getting married,' she said. `If we call it off, what will people say?' So we went to the Humms to borrow their wedding rings for the ceremony. Neither of us breathed a word about this new turn of events. To save our self-respect, the marriage had to remain a reluctant passport affair.

  Next to his passport, the refugee's main preoccupation is his identity card or perntis de sejour. The passport proves his right to exist; the permit his right to reside where lie does. The third essential document is the working permit which would grant him the right to earn a living. But this he is in most cases unable to obtain.

  In Switzerland, every alien who does not belong to the privileged category of tourists is subject to periodical police check-ups. His means of subsistence, his morals and politics are legitimate objects of scrutiny, and the smallness of the country enables the police to supervise the alien's life fairly thoroughly. A week after we had taken possession of Ernie's flat, a plain­clothed policeman called on us. He saw at a glance that we were impecunious, and when it turned out that we were not even married, his manner became gruff to the point of offensiveness. The sharing of a flat by an unmarried couple is not a cause for deportation even in virtuous Switzerland, but prostitution is, and the detective's questions seemed to imply that Dorothy was a`kept woman'. However, as we were living in her brother's flat, who was a doctor and had married into a respectable Swiss family, the detective had to beat a grumbling retreat.

  After our marriage, the same detective came to see Dorothy again while I was out. He started with the same insinuations. Dorothy showed him our marriage certificate as proof that she was after all not `a kept woman'. The man thought for a while, then said: `I suppose this marriage was arranged to cover up the fact that you are working as his housekeeper without a labour permit.'

  In the late summer, young Ellen, the `Queen Nefertete' of INFA days, turned up in Zurich, as gay and irrepressible as ever. She was engaged to marry a young scientist who had been offered a job in Soviet Russia. He had gone ahead to Leningrad to prepare the ground, and she was to follow him in a few weeks' time.

  I never understood what exactly Ellen was doing in Zurich. She said she needed a holiday, and as her actions had always been rather unpredictable, we did not question her further. Long after I left Zurich I learnt that she had been arrested by the Swiss and kept in prison for several weeks on a charge of espionage; and that in the end she had been deported to Russia. Another friend of ours, a strikingly beautiful young woman called Helen, was arrested on a similar charge about the same time, and released after a while. To my knowledge both Ellen and Helen were `sympathisers', and neither of them a member of the Party. I have never found out why they got into trouble, but I beheve that both were innocents abroad who had agreed to pass on messages, or the like, in the belief that they were helping the underground in Germany, while in fact they were being exploited by Soviet Military intelligence or some other branch of the apparat. I mention this episode as one example of the ambiguities of the twilight world in which we lived.

  The end of Ellen's story conforms to the monotonous pattern running through these pages. A year after her arrival in Leningrad she had a baby, and until 1937 she wrote more or less regularly from Russia. Then the usual silence. Later on we heard that pretty Nefertete and her husband had been arrested; they have vanished since with the rest.

  The same fate befell Dorothy's brother, Ernie. He was arrested in Saratov in 1936 on the usual absurd charges, and has never been heard of since. His wife was also arrested, spent seven years in various Soviet Labour Camps, survived and, thanks to her Swiss nationality, was allowed to return to her native country after the war. Their daughter was taken to a Soviet orphanage; in spite of her mother's desperate efforts, backed by Swiss diplomatic representations, she was not permitted to leave Russia. For a while, the child was allowed to write once or twice a year; then no more le
tters arrived.

  I only met Ernie two or three times. He had joined the Party as a matter of conviction, but took no interest in politics. He was a gentle and entirely unremarkable person, a little spoilt and self-indulgent, ideally suited for the part of the trusted family doctor--which in another time he would no doubt have remained till a happy old age of four-score years.

  One day in the summer of 1935, Theodore arrived in Zurich on an unexpected visit. He explained, with an embarrassed air, that he was on his way to Budapest to discuss further publishing plans with Freddie. His embarrassment gave us a premonition of disaster. Sure enough, after some beating about the bush, he came out with a proposition that, instead of continuing with The Gladiators I should write another sex book. He had thought the matter over and had come to the conclusion that few readers took an interest in the first century B.C., whereas everybody took an interest in sex.

  I tried to argue, but his mind was made up. He had lost interest in Spartacus; my monthly five pounds, half our minimum basic budget, would no longer be forthcoming. Despairingly I suggested that I read to him a few chapters of the manuscript, but Theodore said it would only make him sad to hear my undoubtedly beautiful prose when the hard necessities of business life made it impossible for him to help me. `My dear boy,' he declared in genuine distress, `you are an idealist. I too was one when I was young, but I have learnt my lesson.' The dreadful thing was that he spoke the truth. Theodore had tried to study law, to go into politics, and to become a journalist, and had always failed. In the end, he had been forced to surrender to Freddie, the rake. He was still Freddie's employee, and entirely dependent on him. I suspected that it was Freddie who had decided against The Gladiators, and that poor Theodore now played the part of the heartless businessman merely to uphold his own prestige.