by Les Weil
Among my last memories of life in the Party are two meetings of the Writers' Caucus.
On the first occasion we had to discuss a new slogan of the Soviet Writers' Federation which had just been transmitted to us. The slogan was: `Write the Truth'. It was an eerie discussion; I wish it had been taken down on a taperecorder as a document of our times. We knew the truth, that day after day the leaders of the Revolution and our own comrades in Russia were being shot as spies, or vanished without trace. And there we all sat, Kisch and Anna Seghers and Regler and Kantorowicz and Uhse, in a private room of the Cafe Mephisto (as our meeting-place was appropriately called), earnestly discussing how to write the truth without writing the truth. With our training in dialectical acrobatics it was not even difficult to prove that all truth was historically class-conditioned, that so-called objective truth was a bourgeois myth, and that `to write the truth' meant to select and emphasise those items and aspects of a given situation which served the proletarian revolution, and were therefore `historically correct'.
On the other occasion we were visited by a woman comrade from Moscow who exhorted us to exercise more revolutionary vigilance, and took for her text another slogan: `Every Bolshevist must be a Chekist'. We took it as quietly as if she had said: `Grow your own vegetables, the Nation needs them'.
The end came as another anti-climax.
Some time during that spring of 1938, I had to give a talk on Spain to the Association of Exiled German Writers' in Paris. Before the talk, a representative of the Party asked me to insert a passage denouncing the POUM as agents of Franco. I refused. He shrugged, and asked politely whether I would care to show him the text of my speech and to discuss it `informally'; I refused.
The meeting took place in the hall of the Socielte des Industries Franpises, on the Place St. Germain des Pres, before an audience of two or three hundred refugee intellectuals, the majority of them Communists. It was my first public appearance in Paris since I had returned from Spain, and I felt that it would be my last as a member of the Party. I had no intention of attacking the Party while the Spanish War was still being fought, and the idea of attacking Russia in public still carried the horror of blasphemy. On the other hand, I felt the need to define where I stood, and not to remain a passive accomplice of my friends' executioners. Although I usually speak extempore, I wrote and rewrote the end of that speech several times. It was a decisive occasion, and I wanted to choose my ground carefully. I finally decided on three simple phrases with which to conclude the speech, each in itself a pious platitude, and yet a capital heresy for a Stalinist. The first was: `No movement, party or person can claim the privilege of infallibility'. The second was: `It is as foolish to appease the enemy, as it is to persecute the friend who pursues the same end as you by a different road'. The third was a quotation from Thomas Mann: `In the long run, a harmful truth is better than a useful lie'.
The effect was about the same as if one had told a Nazi audience the startling news that all men are born equal. When I had finished, the nonCommunist part of the audience applauded, the Communist part sat in stony silence, most of them with demonstratively folded arms.
I went home alone. While I was waiting for the train in the metro station at St. Germain des Pres, a group of my comrades who had attended the meeting came down the staircase. They walked past to the other end of the platform without a glance, as if I were the invisible man.
That journey home in the metro was a foretaste of months and years of loneliness to come. It was not a physical loneliness, for after the break with the Party I found more friends than I have had before. But individual friendships could never replace the knowledge that one belonged to an international brotherhood embracing the whole globe; nor the warming, reassuring feeling of a collective solidarity which gave to that huge, amorphous mass the coherence and intimacy of a small family.
A few days later, on an evening that I was spending alone at home, it suddenly occurred to me that I might just as well end the agony of waiting, take the initiative and resign from the Party. Although I had been on my way out for a long time, this solution did not appear to me as a logical consequence of the situation, but as an entirely novel and reckless idea. A Communist expelled from the Party is regarded by his comrades as a fallen member of the family; one who leaves in voluntary defiance puts himself outside the human pale. Yet at the same time the idea filled me with the wild elation that I had experienced every time that I had burned my bridges: on that night in Vienna when I had decided to abandon my studies; and on that other night, seven years ago, when I had decided to throw up my career and oin the Communist Party.
I worked on my letter of resignation all night. It was, I believe, a good letter, and I am sorry I have no copy of it. And yet that letter, too, was an anti-climax; I still did not have the courage to go more than half the way. It was a farewell to the German C.P., the Comintern, and the Stalin regime. But it ended with a declaration of loyalty to the Soviet Union. I stated my opposition to the system, to the cancerous growth of the bureaucracy, the terror and suppression of civil liberties. But I professed my belief that the foundations of the Workers' and Peasants' State had remained solid and unshaken, that the nationalisation of the means of production was a guarantee of her eventual return to the road of Socialism; and that, in spite of everything, the Soviet Union still represented `our last and only hope on a planet in rapid decay'.
I clung tenaciously to this belief for another year and a half, until the Hitler-Stalin pact destroyed this last shred of the torn illusion. A faith comes into life through an apparently spontaneous act, like the bursting out of a butterfly from its cocoon. But the death of a faith is gradual and slow; even after the seemingly last flutter of the tired wings, there is yet another twitch, and another faint convulsion. Every true faith displays this stubborn refusal to die, whether its object is a Church, a Cause, a friend or a woman. Nature's horror of the void applies also to the spiritual sphere. To avoid the threatening emptiness, the true believer is ready to deny the evidence of his senses, to excuse every betrayal like a cuckold out of Boccaccio; and if the illusion can no longer be maintained in its original integrity, he will adapt and modify its shape, or try to save at least part of it. That is what I did, in the company of millions of others in the same predicament.
The theory that the Purges, the Slave-camps, the disfranchisement of the people, were merely surface phenomena and temporary expedients on Russia's road to Socialism, is a typical last-ditch rationalisation of this kind. It is connected with the notion that a planned State economy must by itself, regardless of the country's political regime, lead in the end to a free and happy Socialist society. In The Yogi and the Commissar I have dealt at length with this fallacy, ('The doctrine of the unshaken Foundations') but arguments are of little avail against the power of illusion.
The belief that the Soviet regime, in spite of its admittedly repulsive traits, is nevertheless the only basically progressive country and the great social experiment of our time, is a particularly elastic and comforting one. It permits one to shrug off reality with an all-embracing reference to `temporary expedients' and `emergency measures'. It is particularly suited to wellmeaning and confused Progressives of all shades, who dislike Communist practices in their own country. For all these reasons, last-ditch illusions of this kind are still as prevalent today as they were in my time among an immense number of people all over the world.
Every period has its dominant religion and hope, and `Socialism' in a vague and undefined sense was the hope of the early twentieth century. So much so that German `National-Socialists', French `Radical-Socialists', Italian `Christian-Socialists' all felt the need to include the fetish-word into their names. In the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics this hope seemed to have found its incarnation; and the magic worked, and still works, with varying degrees of intensity, on a considerable portion of mankind. The realisation of the full truth about the regime which now rules one-third of the world: that it is the most
inhuman regime in human history and the gravest challenge that mankind has as yet encountered, is psychologically as difficult to face for most of us as an empty heaven was for Gothic man. The difficulty is almost the same for the illiterate Italian peasant as for a highly literate French novelist like Sartre, or for a highly realistic politician like the late President Roosevelt--who sincerely believed that Stalin's regime was a kind of uncouth, Asiatic New Deal; that after the war America would `get on very well with Stalin and the Russian people', and that the only threat to post-war peace would come from Britain's imperialistic designs. That the great American President could believe this, in spite of all the available evidence about Communist theory and Soviet practice, that experienced democratic politicians all over the world could believe this, not to mention scientists, scholars and intellectuals of every variety, is an indication of the deep, myth-producing forces that were and still are at work.
If my hesitations before and immediately after the break with the Party show the tenacity of the hope-sustaining illusion, my experiences in later years reflect another aspect of the irrational forces at work. While I was a Communist, I felt surrounded by the sympathy of progressive-minded people who did not like Communism, but respected my convictions. After I had broken with Communism, the same class of people treated me with contempt. The abuse that came from the Party conformed to pattern; but behind the resentment of those who had never been Communists I felt a different kind of unvoiced reproach. Ex-Communists are not only tiresome Cassandras, as the anti-Nazi refugees had been; they are also fallen angels who have the bad taste to reveal that heaven is not the place it is supposed to be. The world respects the Catholic or Communist convert, but abhors the unfrocked priests of all faiths. This attitude is rationalised as a dislike of renegades. Yet the convert, too, is a renegade from his former beliefs or disbeliefs, and quite prepared to persecute those who still persist in them. He is neverthe-less forgiven, for he has `embraced' a faith, whereas the ex-Communist or the unfrocked priest has `lost' a faith--and has thereby become a menace to illusion and a reminder of the abhorrent, threatening void.
A sad example of this was the way in which my relations with Sir Peter Chalmers-Mitchell came to an end, in spite of the respect and affection that I felt for him. We continued to see each other until 1941. A short time after Darkness at Noon had been published, we lunched in Soho, with a mutual friend, Daphne Hardy, the translator of the book. After lunch the three of us travelled together in a tube towards Kensington. We had drunk some wine and were in high spirits. Suddenly Sir Peter, leaning across Daphne who sat between us, said to me: `Frankly, I did not like that novel of yours. What a pity that you sold yourself for thirty pieces of silver.' I thought at first that he was joking, but he was not; the wine had made him reveal his true opinion of me. We had to talk rather loudly in the rattling train, across Daphne who was quite petrified. I said: `Please, take that back, or we won't be able to see each other any more'; but he wouldn't. In the end Daphne and I got out of the train--and that was the last I saw of Sir Peter. He was run over by a bus in 1945 and killed. He had never been a Communist. He had been a warmhearted and generous friend to me. He did not like Stalin's pact with Hitler. But he liked people who changed their Clubs even less.
Whenever I met with this attitude among the naive, kind and progressiveminded, I felt that the unconscious source of their resentment was not that I had been a Communist but that I had ceased to be one; not that I had fallen into error, but that I had fallen out of it. This may explain why the democratic public in the West reacts with indifference toward Communists convicted of endangering the security of their country and homes, and detests former Communists who denounce the traitors. Incidentally, among the vast number of ex-Communists only a few found themselves in the painful situation of having to denounce their former comrades; not more than a handful of former apparat people in the West had relevant information to disclose. The voluminous literature written by former Communists, from the days of Ciliga, Gide, Silone, Serge, to those of Kravchenko, Wcissberg, Sperber and Neumann Buber, is a denunciation of conditions, not of individuals, and the main source of the West's knowledge of its opponent. Yet in the public eye the ex-Communist remains an informer and warmonger. It is an understandable attitude, and as human as the ancient custom of hanging the messenger who brings news of a disaster, and endangers our necessary and cherished illusions.
I was twenty-six when I joined the Communist Party, and thirty-three when I left it. The years between had been decisive years, both by the season of life which they filled, and the way they filled it with a single-minded purpose. Never before nor after had life been so brimful of meaning as during these seven years. They had the superiority of a beautiful error over a shabby truth.
Seven years is the span of time for which Jacob tended Laban's sheep to win Rachel his daughter; `and they seemed unto him but a few days for the love he had for her'. But the morning after the nuptials in the dark tent, he found that he had spent his ardours not on the beautiful Rachel but on the ugly Leah. And he said to Laban: `What is this thou hast done unto me? Wherefore hast thou beguiled me?'
One would imagine that he never recovered from the shock of having slept with an illusion. We are told, however, that he did obtain the real bride at the price of another seven years of labour. And again they seemed to him but a few days; for, glory be, man is a stubborn creature.
XXXVII. Darkness at Noon
IT is during the critical period after the break, when he becomes an outcast from the party of outcasts, and lives in a state comparable to the mystic's dark night of the soul, that the ex-revolutionary is tempted to go over to the opposite political extreme, or to become a religious convert. Those of my friends who have resisted the temptation and succeeded in retaining their intellectual and emotional balance, are nearly all men with a continuous interest--writers or artists or scientists--which provided them with an independent purpose, a centre of gravity.
When I had returned to Paris at the beginning of 1938, I had brought with me a precious document. It was an agreement with Jonathan Cape in London for the publication of The Gladiators, my first novel to appear in print. Cape had paid me an advance of, I believe, a hundred and twenty-five pounds; though I had to pay the cost of translation, it left me with just enough for six months of Spartan living. Thus I was at last able to finish this book which I had been forced to abandon time and again, either because I had run out of money or under pressure of political events. I finished it in July 1938, four years after I began it.
After each of these more or less dramatic interruptions, the return to the first century B.C. had filled me with peace and relief. During the months before and after the break with the Party, it became an occupational therapy. It gave me a sense of continuity which tided me over that period of outer loneliness and inner emptiness. Before the break, I had thought of myself as a servant of the Cause, and of writing as a means of serving it. Now I began to regard myself as a professional writer, and writing as a purpose in itself. As soon as I had finished The Gladiators, I began to write Darkness at Noon.
The novel, as outlined in a short synopsis that I wrote for Cape, was to be about people in prison in a totalitarian country. There were to be four or five characters who, under sentence of death, find themselves transferred from the trivial to the tragic plane of existence. They re-value their lives and each one discovers that he is guilty, though not of the crimes for which he is going to die. The common denominator of their guilt is having placed the interests of mankind above the interests of man, having sacrificed morality to . expediency, the Means to the Ends. Now they must die, because their death is expedient to the Cause, by the hands of men who subscribe to the same principles. The title of the novel was to be The Vicious Circle.
When I began writing the book, I had no notion of the plot, and only one character was established in my mind. He was to be a member of the Old Bolshevik guard, his manner of thinking modelled on Nikolai Bukharin
's, his personality and physical appearance a synthesis of Leon Trotsky and Karl Radek. I saw him as clearly as a hallucination--short, stocky, with a pointed goatee, rubbing his pince-nez against his sleeve as he paced up and down his cell. The next problem was to find a name for him. Rummaging in the lumber-room of memory, I stumbled upon the name 'Rubashov' without remembering where it came from. I liked it because it sounded like roubashka, the high-necked, embroidered Russian shirt in which I sometimes dressed him up for a Sunday. Actually, Nikolai Salmanovich Rubashov was the name of the editor of Davar, the Palestine Labour Party's daily paper, but I had forgotten this. I had never met the real Mr. Rubashov, but his name was well-known to me during my years in Palestine. Incidentally, the second name, Salmanovich (Solomonson) made my hero a Jew, but neither did I notice this, nor has any reader ever pointed it out to me.
The opening sequence seemed quite obvious. When his own people come to arrest him, Rubashov is asleep and dreaming about the last time when he was arrested in the enemy's country; sleep-dazed, he is unable to decide which of the two hostile dictators is reaching out for him this time, and which of the two omnipresent oil-prints is hanging over his bed. Curiously, this symbolic assertion of the basic sameness of the two totalitarian regimes (which returns as a leit-motif in the last lines of the book) was written at a time when in my conscious thinking I was still a Soviet sympathiser, a year before the Hitler-Stalin pact, and when I would still have indignantly rejected the suggestion that there was nothing to choose between Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany.
Once the opening scene was written, I did not have to search for plot and incident; they were waiting among the stored memories of seven years, which, while the lid was down on them, had undergone a kind of fermentation. Now that the pressure was lifted, they came bubbling up, revealing their true essence and colour. Nadeshda, little Werner, the two nachalniks in Baku, and a multitude of episodes, single phrases or gestures which, during all these years had been prevented by the inner censor from falling into their proper pattern, did so now of their own accord. I did not worry about what would happen next in the book; I waited for it to happen with fear and curiosity. I knew, for instance, that in the end Rubashov would break down and confess to his imaginary crimes; but I had only a vague and general notion of the reasons which would induce him to do so. These reasons emerged step by step during the interrogations of Rubashov by the two investigating magistrates, Ivanov and Gletkin. The questions and answers in this dialogue were determined by the mental climate of the closed system; they were not invented but deduced by the quasi-mathematical proceedings of the unconscious from that rigid logical framework which held both the accused and the accuser, the victim and the executioner in its grip. According to the rules of the game they could only argue and act as they did.