The Invisible Writing

by Les Weil

  That the innocent victim happened to be a disguised Communist was, of course, not known to the public. But this ironical twist to the affair was equally characteristic of the days of the People's Front, when Communists were the driving force behind all similar campaigns. Liberals all over the world signed appeals demanding the liberation of Thaelmann, the Communist leader imprisoned by Hitler; not one in a hundred felt the same urge regarding the Communist leaders imprisoned and shot by Stalin. Yet this was the time when the Great Purge was ravaging Russia, a modern version of the Black Death--beginning with the execution of the leaders of the Revolution, ending with the execution of the executioners, and carrying off on its way more than ten per cent. of the nation to slow death in the forced labour camps.

  I hope not to appear either cynical or ungrateful in pointing out this paradox in the mentality of the liberal public to which I owe my life. The men of goodwill of that era fought clearsightedly and devotedly against one type of totalitarian threat to civilisation, and were blind or indifferent to the other. Such one-sidedness is perhaps unavoidable; it seems to be almost impossible to mobilise public emotions for an ideological two-front war. Yet when I learned about the fuss that had been made about me, and compared it with the unsung end of my friends in Russia (nearly all of whom were at that time already under arrest), I became increasingly aware of a crushing debt that must somehow be repaid. Darkness at Noon, which I started writing the next year, was the first instalment towards it.

  I also found that, unknowingly, I had incurred another debt, of a personal nature, that could not be repaid. The organiser and driving force of the campaign had been Dorothy, from whom I had been separated for the last two years, but who was legally still my wife. The day when the news of my arrest had appeared in the French papers, Dorothy had peremptorily asked the Party to be sent to London for the purpose of initiating a public protest. The Party was sceptical, and thought that in view of the unsavoury facts that might come out, the less said about me the better. The only person who backed her up was Otto Katz.

  Willy's position was already badly shaken. Moscow had recalled him `for consultations'. Willy, knowing what that meant, was postponing the journey under various pretexts, and Otto, who during all these years had informed on Willy for the apparat, was gradually taking over his functions. He was betraying his chief and benefactor, as we all, including Willy, had known that he would when the moment came. Yet once one accepts the basic tenet of Communist ethics that loyalty to the Party overrules personal IoNlalty, Otto had no other choice; and the attitude he took towards Dorothy proves that in the midst of that struggle for survival, conducted according to inhuman rules, he tried to preserve a vestige of humanity. By-passing the Party bureaucracy, he authorised Dorothy to go to London on behalf of the Muenzenberg outfit, and paid her expenses out of the Spanish propaganda funds he handled. Moreover, Otto periodically launched ficticious news about me in the Press: `Koestler kept in chains in dark underground dungeon,' and the like. It was all in the tradition of similar campaigns, in which Otto was an old hand, the purpose being to provoke a denial and thus to obtain some indication of the prisoner's whereabouts.

  Thus Dorothy went to England, a country where she had never been before, to mobilise public opinion for her husband, of whom nobody had ever heard before. Her task was all the more difficult as even my official employers, the News Chronicle, knew next to nothing about me. I had only met two members of its staff personally: Norman Cliff and Willy Forrest. I had never met the editor, and all in all the paper had published perhaps half a dozen dispatches by me. Though the Chronicle did everything in their power to help Dorothy, they were naturally handicapped by these facts. Yet Dorothy, whom I knew as a shy and inhibited young woman, suddenly revealed the qualities of a fighting amazon. She was tireless and ingenious, tactful and dogged. She spent sixteen hours a day collecting signatures from politicians and men of letters, lobbying in the House of Commons, interviewing Dukes and Archbishops, engineering petitions and protest-resolutions. Her tongue-tied manner achieved more in England than eloquence could ever have done; her sincerity was instantaneously convincing; the fact that she spoke as the distressed wife of a husband in prison was more effective than any political argument. There were many who helped, but it was Dorothy who saved my life.

  Dorothy's brother Ernie was arrested in Russia about the same time as I was arrested in Spain. She was, of course, willing to do everything to save him as she had saved me. But public opinion and diplomatic pressure, which still carried some weight with Fascist countries, carried no weight whatsoever with the Soviet regime. Thus I could be saved though I was an enemy of Franco's rule and guilty according to its laws; whereas Ernie, who was innocent and a loyal supporter of the Soviet Union, was shot.

  While she was campaigning for me as my wife, Dorothy had, of course, not mentioned that in fact our marriage had broken up several years before. Thus for the sake of appearances, after my return we had to live together for a while. Nothing can bind two human beings more firmly to each other than the kind of experience that Dorothy and I had shared; and we now had a unique opportunity to make a fresh start. For a while we enjoyed the hospitality of Lord (then Sir Walter) and Lady Layton in their house on Putney Hill (Layton was Chairman of the Board of the News Chronicle) ; then we took for the rest of the summer a little house in Shepperton-on-Thames, where I wrote Dialogue with Death in two months--most of the book was dictated straight into the typewriter to Dorothy. All the circumstances were propitious; yet my neurotic inability to settle down with a partner for life again proved distressingly stronger than affection and gratitude. I have discussed this painful subject before, and shall not return to it. Our friendship remained, but our ways, a few months later, parted again.

  It was also necessary to keep up appearances in another field. After all the public protests against the arbitrary imprisonment of a Liberal journalist, the disclosure that he was, in fact, a member of the Communist Party would have been highly embarrassing, and not only to the News Chronicle; it would have made all who had helped out of human kindness look like fools. It would also have been grist to the mill of Franco's propaganda which took the line that all democratic opponents of his regime were disguised Reds. Thus by the logic of circumstances the fiction of the bona fide Liberal journalist had to be maintained, first in the account of my prison experiences that appeared in serial form in the News Chronicle, and subsequently in Dialogue with Death which appeared a few months later. A deception, once started, has the compelling momentum of a rolling stone.

  However, during this first prolonged stay in England, when for the first time I met people from every walk of life, a form of existence which required continuous deception became almost unbearably odious. On the Continent things were different. There conspiratorial cunning and underhand methods were in keeping with the political atmosphere created by Hitler, Mussolini, Franco and Metaxas. By force of contrast, England appeared an island of innocence, where plotting was confined to memories of Guy Fawkes and to Victorian melodrama, and where fair play was taken for granted even by members of the ridiculously small and provincial C.P. To be a Communist in disguise in Shepperton, Middlesex, with a retired naval officer for a neighbour whose daughters came over for tennis and tea on the lawn, seemed as grotesquely out of place as the proverbial Yankee at the Court of King Arthur.

  Fortunately, I was never asked either in public or in private, except on one occasion, whether I was a Communist--under the circumstances a sign of an almost extravagant discretion. The one exception was Katharine, Duchess of Atholl, whom my publisher, Victor Gollancz, had asked to write an introduction for Spanish Testament. Katharine Atholl was President of the Spanish Relief Committee and dedicated to the cause of the Loyalists; a Conscrvative by conviction and party, she often spoke for Spain on the same platform with Ellen Wilkinson, the Socialist, and Isabel Brown, the Communist. She was then in her middle fifties, with a distinguished career in public welfare to her credit, her tirel
ess energy hidden behind the manner of a mild public librarian. At our first meeting, she asked me whether I was a member of the Commuuist Party in the casual voice of asking whether I liked playing tennis. I had no choice but to answer `No' out of a constricted throat; she said: `Your word is enough for me.' Although denials of this kind are an elementary duty for Party members and become almost a conditioned reflex, I did not feel like an undercover revolutionary but like a schoolboy telling a particularly odious fib. But it was now almost for the last time.

  The aged eighth Duke seemed to be rather unhappy about his wife's latest political activities. I have only met him once, for a few minutes. I was lunching alone with Katharine Atholl in their house in Chelsea when the Duke, a tall figure bent by age, shambled into the room, wagged his finger at me, remarked, `You naughty boy, you are leading Katharine into bad ways,' and shambled out again.

  Spanish Testarnent, incorporating Dialogue with Death and several chapters from L'Esyagne Ensanglantee, was published in the beginning of 1938. It became a Left Book Club choice, was translated into several languages, and had a modest success. Thus, at the age of thirty-three, I was at long last launched on my course as a writer.

  I fnished the book in the first days of September. By then, I had used up the advance that Gollancz had paid me, and was back on earth, returned from the tragic to the trivial plane. I could not resume my job with the News Chronicle and the Spanish News Agency, for, as a condition of my release, I had been obliged to sign an undertaking not to return to Spain for the duration of the war. Lord Layton, who did not know that I was a Party member, tentatively offered me the post of the News Chronicle's correspondent in Moscow; but Gerald Barry, the editor, who did know it, vetoed the project. Instead, it was agreed that I should do a few weeks' tour for the Chronicle through Palestine and the Middle East.

  The tour was to start with Greece, and I travelled by land, across the Continent. My first stop was Paris whcre Otto greeted me at the Gare du Nord, most incongruously and touchingly equipped with a huge bouquet of roses. We must have looked like a couple of gangsters out of an American film carrying a wreath at a funeral.

  The next day I was submitted to a formal interrogation by two delegates of the Party regarding my conduct in prison. One of them was Paul Merker, who after the war became a member of the East German Government and who has since been purged; the identity of the other interrogator is unknown to me.

  It is a tradition in all secret revolutionary movements, and especially in the Communist Party, to regard any member of the organisation who has been imprisoned and subsequently released, as ipso facto suspect. He might have been bullied or bribed into becoming an enemy agent; or he might have given away his comrades. Accordingly, a Communist released from prison must undergo a thorough investigation by the security organs of the Party, and in countries where the Party leads an undergrotmd existence, he will for a considerable time be `put on ice'--isolated from any contact with other members. As it is often impossible to establish with certainty whether the person is still `sound' or not, many tragedies were caused in the German underground Party, and later in the French Resistance, by persistent, lingering suspicions which the victim was unable to dispel.

  In my own case, the proceedings were quite harmless, and more in the nature of a formality. I had no underground contacts in Franco Spain whom I could have given away; I had been exchanged by an international deal which gave my captors no opportunity for forcing a bargain on me; and that I should have voluntarily become a Franco agent was unlikely. The meeting took place in a little cafe near the Bastille. Merker, a broad-shouldered, burly man with a slow and thoughtful manner, cross-examined me for about an hour in a neutral but not unfriendly voice, while the other man watched me without speaking. He was a smallish, colourless person, with small, hard grey eyes, who spoke German with a foreign accent that I could not place. In the end Merker said that he had finished with me--but perhaps the Comrade would like to ask some further questions? His voice, in addressing the other man, was slightly deferential. The other shook his head, looked at his watch and got up. The only words he had spoken during an hour were his opening phrase when Merker introduced us, `I have heard about you'; and his closing words, `Goodbye'.

  The two of them left together. In observance of an old Party rule regarding meetings with members of the apparat, I had to stay behind in the cafe for another five minutes. No verdict had been announced and no comment on my conduct made; yet I had a feeling that all had gone well--though I no longer cared much about the Party's favour or disfavour, anyway.

  However, once the interrogation was over, I had a sudden, intense attack of anxiety, and I noticed how unsteady my hand was as I lifted the cup of cold cafe au lait. This was the autumn of 1937; a few weeks earlier Marshal Tuchachevsky and eight top-ranking Generals of the Red Army had been shot after a secret trial; every day we heard of new arrests, accompanicd by incredible and frightening accusations. The harmless interrogation of a moment ago carried a terrifying echo. It was impossible not to think how helpless one would be facing that taciturn, hard-eyed man, not at a Paris cafe table, but across the Prosecutor's desk in the G.P.U. building in Baku or in the Lubyanka. For instance, I had said nothing about that fatal phrase `I no longer am a rojo'; but I knew that under different circumstances that phrase would eventually have come out, that its motives and implications would have been wrested from me step by step, and that alone would have been enough to finish me off. By these standards, which had once been my own standards, nobody was without guilt. The Terror was roaring across Russia, like a tidal wave drowning everybody on its way, and even a small, distant ripple of it made the cup tremble in one's hand in a Paris cafe. Before my stay in cell No. 40, the words `prison' and `execution' had only brought to my mind some abstract cliche like Fascist Terror, or the Dialectics of Revolution. Now the same words had a different ring, they echoed the muffled cries of madre and socorro which could not be dislodged from the ear, like an insistent tune that drives one crazy. I thought of Nadeshda and Werner, Alex and Eva, Ernie and Paul Dietrich, and there was always the same muffled refrain of socorro, socorro.

  My next stop was Switzerland, where I had arranged by correspondence a meeting with Thomas Mann. It was my first and last personal meeting with the author of Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain, whom I had admired more than any other living writer in my youth. The meeting itself was a rather cruel disappointment, but the event that caused it is worth recounting, as it seems to involve a striking example of telepathy.

  To explain it, I must again hark back to Seville. During the first three weeks of solitary confinement, before I was allowed books from the prison library, my only intellectual nourishment had been the remembrance of books read in the past. In the course of these memory exercises, a certain passage from Buddenbrooks came back to me and gave me great spiritual comfort--so much so, that at times when I felt particularly dejected, I would have recourse to that scene as if it were a pain-soothing pill. The content of the passage, as I remembered it, was this. Consul Thomas Buddenbrook, though only in his late forties, knows that he is about to die. He was never given to religious or metaphysical speculation, but now he falls under the spell of a book which for years has stood unread in his library, and in which he finds explained that death is nothing final, merely a transition to another, impersonal form of existence in the All-One.'. .. He felt that his whole being had been unaccountably expanded and ... there clung to his senses a profound intoxication, a strange, sweet, vague allurement ... He was no longer prevented from grasping eternity . . .' The book to which Consul Buddenbrook owes his revelation is Schopenhauer's essay On Death, and its Relation to the Indestructibility of our Essential Selves.

  The day after I was set free, I wrote Thomas Mann a letter (I knew that he lived in Zuerich-Kuessnacht), in which I explained to him what I have just explained, and thanked him for the spiritual comfort that I had derived from his work. The title of Schopenhauer's essay was expressly mentioned
in my letter, which was dated from the Rock Hotel, Gibraltar, May 16 or 17, 1937.

  Thomas Mann's answer reached me a few days later in London. It was a handwritten letter which I lost, together with all my files, on my flight from France in 1940, I cannot, of course, remember its actual text, only its content which, for the sake of simplicity, I shall paraphrase in direct speech:

  Dear Sir,

  Your letter arrived on May.... On the afternoon of that day I was sitting in my garden in Kuessnacht. I had read Schopenhauer's essay in 1897 or 98, while I was writing Buddenbrooks, and had never read it again as I did not want to weaken its original strong impact on me. On that afternoon, however, I felt a sudden impulse to re-read the essay after nearly forty years. I went indoors to my library to fetch the volume. At that moment the postman rang and brought me your letter....

  After this startling prelude, I looked forward to my meeting with Thomas Mann with even greater trepidation than I would have felt in any case. In the train from Paris I read his address delivered. on the occasion of Freud's eightieth birthday, and derived a curious impression from it. The subject of spiritual reincarnation (in a literal sense, and then again not in a literal sense--in his essays Mann is difficult to pin down) kept recurring as a leit-motif. In his fastidiously ironical and elusive style, which had become more elusive and mannered in his later work, Mann seemed to suggest that he considered himself a kind of spiritual reincarnation of Goethe--Mann's preoccupation with Goethe's personality is much in evidence in his work. With an uncomfortable feeling I asked myself whether the great man really believed that he was Goethe, or whether he only believed it metaphorical ly-­for, since he received the Nobel Prize in 1929, Thomas Mann had been the unchallenged Dichterfuerst of German letters.

  The meeting took place in a Swiss holiday resort (I think in Locarno, but I am not sure), where Dr. Mann and his wife were staying at the time. From the moment I arrived, everything went wrong. There is a charactcr in The Magic Mountain, the semi-educated Frau Stoehr, who is always trying to bc refined, and always gets her expressions wrong. She has, for instinct, a dreadful habit of saying 'wenn es Ihnen konveniert' (roughly, 'if it couveniences you' for `if it is convenient to you'). When I arrived at the hotel where the Maims were staying and where I had booked a room, I rang up Dr. Mann as arranged. He said: `Well, when would you like to come over to my room? I was so excited that I blurted into the telephone, just like Frau Stoehr: