The Invisible Writing

by Les Weil

  I began writing Darkness at Noon at the time of Munich, and finished it in April 1940, a month before the German invasion and the subsequent fall of France. There were again, as with The Gladiators, several long, enforced interruptions which turned the writing of the book into an obstacle-race against time and fate, for since Munich I had been convinced that France would collapse within a few weeks under a German attack.

  The first obstacle was that, halfway through the book, I again ran out of money. I needed another six months to finish it, and to secure the necessary capital I had to sacrifice two months--April and May 1939--to the writing of yet another sex book, the third and last. Then, after three months of quiet work in the South of France, came the next hurdle: on September 3 the War broke out, and on October 2 I was arrested by the French police.

  At this point began the series of Kafkaesque events that I have told in Scum of the Earth. I spent the next four months in a concentration camp in the Pyrenees. I was released in January 1940, but continued to be harassed by the police. During the next three months I finished the novel in the hours snatched between interrogations and searches of my flat, in the constant fear that I would be arrested again and the manuscript of Darkness at Noon confiscated.

  Yet a friendly voodoo seemed to be protecting that book. On one occasion, in March 1940, when the police searched my flat, they took away nearly all my files and manuscripts, but the typescript of Darkness at Noon escaped their attention. The top copy was lying on my desk, where I kept it on the theory of Edgar Allen Poe that conspicuous objects were least likely to attract suspicion; while, on an opposite theory, the carbon copy was hidden on the top of the bookshelf. In the end, I was again arrested and the original German version of the book was lost. But by that time the English translation had been completed. It was dispatched to London ten days before the German invasion of France started, and the book thus had another narrow escape.

  During the next six months that it took to make my own escape to England, the book had quietly progressed to the stage of page-proofs. The page-proofs reached me in Pentonville prison in London, where I had landed on my arrival. There was some difficulty about this, as prisoners are not supposed to receive books from outside; but as it could be proved that the book was written by the prisoner, permission was granted by the Governor. It was also in Pentonville that I heard for the first time the English title of the book. It had been suggested by Milton's `Oh dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon', and was the translator's idea. The translator, Daphne Hardy, was in fact not a translator but a young English sculptress, the `G' in Scum of the Earth. She had escaped from France earlier, by a different route; our reunion took place in the visitors' room in Pentonville, where we had to talk across a wire-mesh in the presence of a uniformed guard. When the guard escorted me back to my cell, he asked me what sort of book it was we had discussed for so long. I said that it was a book I had written about a prisoner in a solitary cell. `Then you must be a prophet,' he said, slamming the door of my solitary cell.

  When Darkness at Noon was published, I was still in that cell.

  In England, the book was discussed in Left-wing circles, but otherwise made so little stir that after the first edition of a thousand was sold out, it remained out of print for several months, and at the end of the first year had sold less than four thousand copies.

  In France it was published after the end of the war, and sold over four hundred thousand copies. It is not usual for an author to mention circulation figures, but I feel that in this case an exception is justified on two grounds: firstly, because it illustrates the contrast in reading preferences between the two countries, and secondly because of certain developments which I shall presently explain.

  The reason why Le Zero et 1'Infinil (The French title is an allusion to a passage in the book which says that the individual's value in the social equation is both nought and infinite.) broke all pre-war records in French publishing history was not literary but political. After the terror of the German occupation France went through a second period of terror the history of which has not yet been written. During the chaotic weeks between the crumbling of the occupational forces' authority and the establishment of orderly government, nearly every region of France became the scene of summary executions, arbirtary reprisals and lawlessness. The Communists, who emerged from the Resistance movement as the best-organised force, used these chaotic weeks, just as they had done in Spain, for a systematic settling of accounts with their opponents under the pretext that they had been collaborators. This rule of the maquis--in the original, lawless sense of the word--abated only gradually, and in more covert forms continued for several years; even today certain aspects of it are hushed up by tacit agreement. At the time in question, 1946, the Communists were still the strongest party in France; they sat in the Government, had direct control over the trade unions, and indirectly, through blackmail and intimidation, imposed their will to a considerable degree on the Courts, on publishing and editorial offices, the film industry and literary cliques.

  In this oppressive atmosphere, the novel on the Russian Purges; though dealing with events that lay ten years back, assumed a symbolic actuality, an allusive relevance which had a deeper psychological impact than a topical book could have achieved. It happened to be the first ethical indictment on Stalinism published in post-war France, and as it talked the authentic language of the Party, and had a Bolshevik of the Old Guard for its hero, it could not be easily dismissed as `reactionary' and `bourgeois'. Instead, the Communists at first tried to intimidate the publishers of the book. When they did not succeed, they bought up entire stocks of it from suburban and provincial bookshops, and destroyed them. As a result, the book was sold in between reprints at black-market prices three to five times higher than the official price. When the circulation had passed the quarter-of-a-million mark, Communist speakers were instructed to attack book and author at their mass meetings. The pressure of intimidation may be gathered from the fact that the French translator found it advisable to hide behind a pseudonym, and subsequently to withdraw even that from the cover, so that no mention of a translator appears on later editions.

  The controversy reached its peak during the fateful weeks preceding the referendum on the future form of the French constitution. If the Communists' formula had won, this would have given them, as the numerically strongest party, nearly absolute control of the State. When the battle was over, one of the leading newspapers, summing up the campaign in its editorial, said that `the most important single factor which led to the defeat of the Communists in the referendum on the Constitution, was a novel, Le Zero et L'Infini.'

  I have mentioned in an earlier chapter that there are two incidents in my life to which, in the frequent hours of depression and self-negation, I turn for comfort. The first is related to Thieves in the Night, the second is the episode that I have just told.

  Communist attacks continued during the post-war years. They ranged from academic polemics to physical threats. On the academic level, Professor Merleau-Ponty, the successor to Henry Bergson's chair at the College de France, published a remarkable book to prove that Gletkin was right. (Humanisme et Terreur (Paris, 1947), first published as a series of essays in Sartre's monthly, Les Temps Modernes, under the title Le Yogi et le Proletaire (a polemical paraphrase of my The Yogi and the Commissar). The book defends every measure of the Soviet regime, including the Stalin­Hitler pact, as Historical Necessity, condemns Anglo-American policy as Imperialist Aggression, and regards criticism of the Soviet Union as an implicit act of war. It is an almost classic example of the controlled schizophrenia of the closed sysrem, provided by the foremost academic exponent of the French Marxist-Existentialist school.) On a lower level of the echelon, the official writers of the French C.P. took a simpler, traditional hne. An example of this category was M. Jean Kanapa's book Le Traitre et le Proletaire--ou 1'Entreprise Koestler and Co. Ltd. (another paraphrase of The Yogi and the Commissar), which revealed the well-guarded secret
that I had been recruited by the British Intelligence Service in Franco's prison in Seville. The next lower level may be exemplified by a front-page article in the Party's weekly paper, L'Action, which revealed that the little villa in Fontaine le Port which I owned for a while, was `the headquarters of the cold war', and that I trained there `Fascist thugs to form a terrorist militia. This was followed up by the Party's Sunday paper Humanite Dimanche, which published a map of the area, marking the exact location of the villa by an obliging arrow. After that, our cook's relatives no longer visited her on Sunday afternoons, as they had been given to understand that the villa might blow up at any moment.

  In November 1952, the last of my intimate Party comrades, Otto Katz, alias Andre Simon, met his fate.

  Otto had spent the war years in Mexico. Then he had gone back to his native country, Czechoslovakia. After the Communist coup of 1918 he had been appointed editor of the official Party organ, Pravo Lidu, and later on chief of the Press Department at the Foreign Ministry. In 1952 the great purge that swept through the satellite countries, swept him away too. He was one of the nine accused in the Slansky-Clementis trial, charged with being a British spy, a saboteur and--of all things--a Zionist agent. He confessed to everything and was executed by hanging.

  As I read the terrible report of Otto's confession at the trial, I received a more painful shock than on any similar previous occasion. In his last statement before the Tribunal, Otto had quoted Rubashov's last speech as textually as he could probably remember it. Otto's concluding words were:

  I... belong to the gallows. The only service I can still render is to serve as a warning example to all who, by origin or character, are in danger of following the same path to hell. The sterner the punishment ...' (Voice falls too low to be intelligible).

  Rubashov's last speech, with its emphasis on `rendering a last service' and `serving as a warning example' was a paraphrase of Bukharin's confession at the Moscow trial of 1938--and Otto knew that. The phrasing by Otto of his last statement was clearly intended as a camouflaged message, to indicate that he, too, had been brought to confess to crimes as imaginary as Bukharin's and Rubashov's. Perhaps he believed that I could do for him what he had done for me when I had been in a similar, yet less hopeless predicament; perhaps he hoped that his influential former friends in London, Paris and Hollywood, who had once admired and feted the author of the Brown Books, the propagandist for republican Spain, would raise their voices in protest. When a man is going to be hanged, he tends to over-estimate the interest which the world takes in his windpipe. Not one voice was raised among the editors, journalists, social hostesses and film-stars who had swarmed round Otto in the romantic, pink days of the `People's Front'. His last message was like a scribbled S.O.S. in a bottle washed ashore by the sea, and left to bob among the driftwood, unnoticed by the crowd.

  XXXVIII. The End of a Friendship

  IN the autumn of 1938, I became the editor of a German weekly paper in Paris, called Die Zukunft (The Future), and published by Willy Muenzenberg.

  Willy, too, had finally broken with the Comintern by refusing to go to Moscow. The world-wide enterprise that he had built up was taken over by the Party bureaucracy, and soon fell to pieces. Willy needed an outlet for his inexhaustible store of energy; hence Die Zukunft.

  The idea was to publish an independent, German-language weekly paper which, apart from anti-Nazi propaganda, would work for the rapprochement of the various groups in exile, and develop a programme for the day when the Nazi regime was no more. We had a rather good start, with original contributions from Siegmund Freud, Thomas Mann, Harold Nicolson, Duff Cooper, Norman Angell, E. M. Forster, Aldous Huxley, and others. For the planning of a long-term, post-Hitlerian policy we had assembled an editorial Brains Trust consisting of Manes Sperber (who by now had also left the Party), Paul Sering (the penname of Richard Loewenthal, at present on the London Observer), Julius Steinberg the sociologist, Willy and myself. We also had a literary supplement, edited by Ludwig Marcuse.

  In spite of all this, after a few months the paper began to go stale, as sooner or later most emigre papers do, cut off as they are from their native country, and without real contact with the country of their exile. While I was editing it, I could only work at Darkness at Noon during the night--but the novel was growing on me like an advancing pregnancy, and, as I felt that the war was approaching, I wanted to concentrate on it while the going was good. About Christmas I resigned from the paper, but remained a member of its Brains Trust, and an occasional collaborator.

  Die Zukunft continued to appear, edited by Thorman, a member of the Catholic Centre Party, until the end of 1939 or the beginning of 1940, when most of the staff were sent to internment camps, and the paper closed down. It had been a still-born idea from the beginning, but I do not regret the time spent on it, for during the first few months after the break with the Party I needed activity, and the comradeship of a like-minded team. Work on the paper brought me into even closer contact with Willy before his dcath, and was also the beginning of my intimate friendship with Manes Sperber, in whom, since he had left the Party, I discovered a rare mixture of lucidity, warmth, humour and penetrating analytical power behind the somewhat authoritarian facade.

  We were all going through the critical period after the break, like convalescents learning to walk again after an operation. For Sperber and myself it was easier to find our feet again than for Willy, whose life had been the Party, and nothing but the Party, since his days as a young man in the shoe factory at Erfurt. Yet I never heard from him a word of complaint about the way the Party had treated him. The real test of a politician's human greatness comes after his fall from power. Deprived of their imposing desks, secretaries, acolytes, and the trappings of rank and position, most of the former Cabinet Ministers and ex-Excellencies whom I have known in the lands of exile were like old men shivering in a Turkish bath. Willy was one of the rare exceptions. His personal magic, his authority and driving power remained the same to the end.

  The end came for Willy in the summer of 1940. French politicians had protected him from being interned as an enemy alien (as all German refugees were at the outbreak of the war) until a few days before the fall of Paris. He was then sent to an internment camp in Central France. When the German armies were approaching that region, the French officer in command of the camp, knowing that the inmates were political refugees, and the fate that awaited them if they were to fall into the Nazis' hands, opened the gates and wished them good luck. The internees decided that their best chance was to disperse and to make their way, singly or in small groups, towards Switzerland and the unoccupied South. Willy was last seen marching down a road towards the East in the company of two young men who had attached themselves to him in the camp. The young men were unknown in refugee circles, and supposedly members of the German Socialist Party. A few days later Willy's body was found in a forest near Grenoble, hanging from a tree by a rope round his neck. His face was battered and bruised. The position of the branch to which the rope was attached excluded the possibility of suicide. Neither German nor French troops had passed through the region. The two young men have never been heard of again. (I learned these details after my escape to England from the late Ellen Wilkinson who had been an intimate friend of Willy and Otto. In 1940, Ellen was Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Home Security in the Coalition Government and had detailed intelligence reports regarding Willy's death in her files.)

  It seems surprising that a man of Willy's experience should have walked into the trap. But Trotsky, Krivitsky, Ignatz Reiss, and other victims of the G.P.U. were equally experienced men, who knew equally well that the G.P.U. was determined to get them, and sooner or later they, too, walked into a trap. The reason is simply that no man can live without a minimum of trust in his friends. Old-fashioned assassins used women as decoys. The G.P.U.'s modern dialectic of assassination is based on the psychological insight that a lonely man can resist all temptations, except one: his craving for frien
dship and loyalty. It is thanks to Die Zukunft that I had the opportunity of making the acquaintance of Siegmund Freud, in the last year of his life. Some time during the autumn of 1938, I went to see him in London, to ask him for a contribution for a special Anglo-German issue of the paper that we were preparing.

  Freud was then eighty-two. A few months before, the Nazis had annexed Austria, and Freud and his family had emigrated from his native Vienna to London. His younger son Ernst, the architect, had prepared a house for them in Hampstead. It was a pleasant Georgian house with a small, walled-in garden, surrounded by old trees. A swing couch stood on the lawn, where Freud occasionally took a nap after a sleepless night. There was a miniature lift that Ernst Freud had ingeniously contrived to squeeze into the narrow old staircase.

  Freud's study was on the second floor. Of the furniture I remember nothing--I was so overwhelmed by the occasion that I crossed the anteroom to the study in a daze. I remember, though, that there were a great number of small oriental objets d'art about--Freud's famous collection, to which I gave only a sidewise glance of awe and wonder. My accursed shyness had returned, and kept me during the whole visit in a grip of perspiring paralysis, even worse than at the meeting with Thomas Mann.