The Invisible Writing

by Les Weil

  Freud looked so exactly like his photograph, so exactly as I had imagined him, that it gave me a start and a feeling of unreality--as if, walking through Hyde Park, I had met the fabulous unicorn and it had said politely: `I am the fabulous unicorn'. Freud was indeed very polite and, noticing my embarrassment, a gentleness came into his face--it was the unsmiling, grave, manly kind of gentleness. Though small and fragile, the chin and lower jaws stubbled with the white, short-trimmed beard--a beard with a crew-cut as it were--the dominating impression was not that of a sick octogenarian, but of the indestructible virility of the Hebrew patriarchs. Not even the peculiar, laboured manner of his speech could destroy it. The cancer of the mouth,` which was to kill him within less than a year, forced Freud to speak with lips stretched tight and the corners of the mouth extended--rather in the manner of children imitating the speech of their toothless elders in cruel mockery. He was in intermittent pain, and easily fatigued by visitors. Anna Freud, who had led me to the study door, had asked me to take my leave in twenty minutes, but Freud made me stay another ten. He must have done it out of kindness for, unable to loosen the cramp of my timidity, I trotted out one conversational platitude after another, mostly about politics and Die Zukunft, subjects that could not but bore him. But perhaps the great mind-reader's curiosity about human beings, however inarticulate and gauche they were, also played a part.

  My notes on the talk were confiscated with my files by the French police, and after fifteen years only three fragments of it have remained in my memory.

  The first is the beginning of the conversation, which I opened with a monumental blunder. I explained that for our special issue of the paper we were trying to get contributions from all German and English Nobel Prize winners--yourself, Herr Professor, Thomas Mann, and so on. ..'

  At that Freud said, unsmiling, his mouth stretched tight:

  `Well, you know, I am an old Jew now, but they never gave me the Nobel Prize.'

  The second episode stands out equally sharply. I had uttered some platitude about the Nazis. Freud looked with an absent, wondering look at the trees across the window, and in a hesitating manner, said:

  `Well, you know, they are abreacting the aggression pent up in our civilisation. Something like this was inevitable, sooner or later. I am not sure that from my standpoint I can blame them.'

  He probably put it into quite different words, but there could be no misunderstanding of the meaning. He had merely given a consistent expression to the ethical neutrality inherent in the Freudian system--and in all strictly deterministic science. Not even `tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner'­-for even forgiveness implies an ethical judgment, but simply `Tout comprendre c'est tout comprendre'. I did not have the temerity to contradict, to talk of the `invisible writing', or the `oceanic feeling' which Freud, on his own admission, had never experienced. But I wondered with admiration and compassion, how a man can face his death without it.

  The third incident was an indirect answer to that question. I asked Freud whether he saw many friends and colleagues in London. He said that `the doctors' did not allow him to see many people because `of this thing on my lip'. He went on to say that they were treating it with X-rays and radium. Then again that wondering, absent and wistful gaze carne into his eyes.

  He went on: `The doctors say they can cure it. But who knows whether one can believe them?'

  Freud knew that the thing on his lip was cancer. But the word was never mentioned by him either in speech or in his letters to friends, and it was never mentioned by others in his presence. The destroyer of taboos had erected a taboo of his own. He knew that there was no hope, and that `the doctors' knew it. The man who knew more than any mortal had known about the ruses of self-deception, had chosen to enter the darkness with a transparent veil over his eyes.

  Freud promised to send a short contribution, and he kept his promise. It was his first publication since he had left Austria, and a very strange one. It referred to a quotation, which Freud had once read somewhere, and of which he had forgotten the author and context. Could any reader help him to identify the book in which the quotation appeared? We received no readers' answers. Curiously enough, I have forgotten the quotation whose source Freud had forgotten, and even the nature of its content. I believe it had something to do with anthropology or mythology. All efforts to find a copy of Die Zukunft in which the contribution appeared, undertaken both by the Freud Archives and myself, have so far been in vain. Perhaps a reader may help this time? Freud's article appeared nowhere else and its recovery would be of documentary interest.

  I wonder whether my forgetting what Freud had forgotten had a Freudian reason, or whether it can perhaps be explained in a different way. When, during a conversation, a person is unable to remember a word or a name which he has `on the tip of his tongue' it sometimes happens that the other person suddenly experiences the same blockage. This seems to indicate that not only emotion is infectious, but forgetting, too--a kind of negative telepathy as it were. I have often come across this phenomenon, but as far as I can remember, I have seen no mention of it in the writings of Freud or in any other analytical literature. (Since this chapter was written, a copy of Die Zukunft, containing Freud's article (November 25, 1938) was found in a Paris library by Dr. K. R. Eissler, Secretary of the Siegmund Freud Archives. The subject of the article of which I could only remember that it had `something to do with anthropology or mythology' was-anti-Semitism. I leave it (for once) to the reader to draw his own conclusions. In other respects my memory was correct: the article consists mainly of one long quotation whose source Freud had forgotten.)

  I must now tie up some loose ends which extend into the post-war era. One is the end of Alex's story, the other Nemeth's. The first is pleasant to tell, the second very unpleasant.

  At the time when Eva was expelled from Russia and arrived in London (Spring, 1938), she only knew that Alex was in Kharkov prison, charged with spying for the Germans and fomenting an armed rising in the Ukraine. Later we learned that he had also been accused of having recruited a band of Nazi terrorists to assassinate Stalin and Marshal Voroshilov (Not Kaganovich, as I have mistakenly said in The God that Failed.) on their next hunting trip to the Caucasus, and to blow up the main industrial plants in the Ukrainian capital in the event of war. There seemed to be little that could be done to save him, but I promised Eva to leave nothing untried.

  As Alex was a physicist, I thought that a joint appeal, addressed directly to Stalin, by the three French winners of the Nobel Prize for Physics might make some impression. They were Frederic and Irene Joliot-Curie, and Jean Perrin. All three sympathised with the Left, and the Joliot-Curies soon afterward joined the French C.P. I approached Frederic Joliot, whom I knew slightly from the past days of INFA. He had never heard of Alex Weissberg, but he took my word for it that Alex was innocent, signed the letter to Stalin that I had drafted beforehand, and also obtained for me the signatures of his wife and Perrin--who too had never heard of Alex. I shall have something to say later about the significance of Joliot-Curie's generous gesture, and its political aftermath.

  The joint protest of the French Nobel-laureates, supported by a simultaneous letter from Einstein to Stalin, was never acknowledged or answered, but seems nevertheless to have influenced Alex's fate. A short while after the protest had been dispatched, he was suddenly taken out of his cell, was deloused, given a shave, a haircut, a decent suit and a tie, and photographed in this jollied-up condition. After that the suit and tie were taken away again, and he was put back into the cell. The obvious explanation is that, in view of the foreign protests, the authorities wanted to be able to prove that he was alive and in good shape. And once higher quarters recognised the significance of the case, his bare life at least was safe.

  Altogether, Alex was held for three years in various Ukrainian and Russian prisons. In 1940, together with about a hundred other German and Austrian Communists, Socialists and anti-Nazi refugees, he was handed over by the G.P.U. to the Gestapo. T
his act of unfathomable baseness was one of the consequences, and at the same time the ignominious symbol, of the Stalin-Hitler pact. He survived the further ordeals of the Gestapo, played a part in the Polish underground movement, and after the war escaped to the West. In 1952 he published his remarkable book, Conspiracy of Silence, for which I wrote the preface.

  The part played by Professor Joliot-Curie in this story was that of a courageous and warm-hearted man, prompted by a humane impulse. A year and a half later, when the war started and I was put in a concentration camp, he repeated his generous gesture by protesting against my arrest to the French government. Another five years later, when he had become the most celebrated Communist intellectual in Europe next to Pablo Picasso, he attacked Darkness at Noon from the public platform of a mass-meeting.

  Here we have in a nutshell the tragedy of the Communist intellectual. Joliot's political conscience compelled him to attack a book which was an exposure of Soviet terror. His human conscience compelled him to defend a man who was a victim of that terror. But what faith could he have had in Soviet justice if he was satisfied with my hearsay evidence in favour of Alex, a person unknown to him, officially accused by the Soviet State of spying, sabotage, and plotting to assassinate Stalin? By taking it upon themselves to interfere with the course of Soviet justice, by taking the innocence of its victim for granted and calling the official charges against him `absurd', the three eminent French savants revealed their true opinion of the Soviet regime--which they nevertheless felt in duty bound to defend. They knew that Weissberg's case was not an exception, but the rule, because reports of hundreds of similar arrests on similarly grotesque charges, among their academic colleagues in the Soviet Union, were available to them. Yet hope that in spite of all this the Socialist Sixth of the Earth would in the end justify their expectations, unwillingness to part with a cherished illusion, and intellectual pride which would not admit that they had been fooled, made them remain silent about the horrors of which they knew, and by their silence endorse them. The same is true of thousands of Communist or vaguely sympathising writers, painters, actors, journalists, academic teachers, including myself.

  Some years later, history gave an ironic twist to this affair, and the Joliot­Perrin letter gave rise to a political scandal. It happened in 1950, during a famous French trial. Technically, it was a libel suit brought by the writer David Rousset against the Communist weekly, Les Lettres Francaises, which had accused him of falsifying a text in the Soviet Penal Code. Rousset's real purpose at the trial was to establish in public the facts about Soviet prisons and labour camps. He had cited as witnesses all available men and women who had been imprisoned in Russia, among them Alex Weissberg. When Alex began to testify, counsel for the Communist weekly tried to discredit him by character-smears. At this, counsel for Rousset got up and read a long testimony in Alex's favour, praising his loyalty to the Soviet regime and describing his imprisonment as arbitrary and unjust. It was the letter that I had drafted twelve years before, signed by the idol of the French Communists, Professor Frederic Joliot-Curie, a copy of which had been prescrved through all these years by Eva. The effect was that of a bombshell. Weissberg's testimony was now authenticated, as it were, by the highest intellectual authority in the Communist camp. It carried decisive weight in the trial, which ended with one of the most significant moral defeats of French Communism since the war.

  In the summer of 1939, Nemeth and Juci turned up in Paris. Nemeth could no longer stand the provincial atmosphere of Budapest. They had scraped together a little money to last them for two or three months, and settled down to life in exile in a small hotel room near the Rue Moufetard, where Juci cooked their meals on the gas-ring, and washed Nemeth's shirts and socks in the bidet.

  Nemeth was now approaching fifty, but still the same willowy, untidy, long-haired eternal student. He had successfully resisted all temptations to become a success. He had never finished a novel. He had produced a few beautifully-written pot-boilers, among them a book on the Paris Commune of 187I. Now he was working on the Life of one Pere Lieberman, the son of an Alsatian rabbi who became a Catholic convert and a celebrated missionary.

  We again spent much time together. Unfortunately Sperber, who had become an equally close friend, had little in common with Nemeth. Sperber, the Adlerian Marxist, was brilliant, logical, didactic with a touch of the rhetorical; Nemeth was lazy, dreamy, and enamoured of the absurd. Between the two of them I felt like Hans Castorp in The Magic Mountain with his sympathies split between the discursive Settembrini and the pathos of Naphta.

  When France collapsed, Nemeth and Juci took refuge in a small village in the South where they lived under a regime of semi-confinement under police supervision, restricted in their movements to a radius of two miles, and in the constant fear of arrest and deportation. They just managed not to starve thanks to the ingenuity of Juci, who made women's handbags and sold them to the villagers. It was typical of Nemeth that he had gone to France for the first time in the summer of 1914, and the second time in the summcr of 1939, and had spent both wars in physical or virtual confmement.

  Our last meeting, of which I did not know that it was to be the last, took place in a Paris hotel room in 1946.

  It was during my first visit to Paris after the war. For six years I had not known who among my friends was still alive, who dead. For six years England had been cut off from the rest of Europe, until the occupied Continent, only twenty-odd miles away, had almost become a mythological Atlantis. During six years of sorrow and longing I had dreamt of this return; and the first few days of it I lived in a haze.

  It was not only a return to the town in which the decisive years of my youth had been lived, and which I had thought I would never see again. There were other circumstances which made it so unreal. I had fled from France penniless, with false papers, spat out by a concentration camp, with a kick for a farewell. I came back at the height of the noise around Le Zero et l'Infini, a best-seller and a lion. It was like a wish-fulfilment fantasy in gaudy technicolour. It was both intoxicating and bitterly disappointing like all day­dreams come true--drunkenness and hangover telescoped into one. This may partly explain what happened at that last meeting with Nemeth, which destroyed a quarter-century of friendship.

  The immediate reason for my coming to Paris was the rehearsals of a play produced by Jean Villar in the Theatre de Clichy. It was a new version of Bar du Soleil which Nemeth had translated into the Hungarian, and which had almost been produced in Budapest under the joint names of `the firm'. That manuscript, too, I had lost during the flight from France, but in 1943 I had written another play, with different characters, around the same idea, and had called it Twilight Bar. It was a diversion rather than a play, and without literary pretensions; I had mainly written it for my own amusement during the V-1 bombardment of London. Now it was going to be produced in Paris because my name happened to be en vogue. The earlier play, under our joint names, had never been produced. `The firm' had never been en vogue. The past that Nemeth and I shared, the tie that united us, the memories that we had nursed during our separation, were of struggle, starvation and failure.

  Nemeth and Juci arrived in Paris from the village where they had spent the war, in the middle of the rehearsals. They went back to the little hotel room with the gas-ring near the Rue Moufetard; I now occupied an apartment in one of the larger Left-bank hotels. I did not know that they were in Paris. When, after being told by the hotel porter that Monsieur K. was in conference and could not be disturbed, they finally managed to get through on the telephone, I was on my way to a rehearsal. There was a crisis on: one of the chief characters had to be re-cast a fortnight before the opening and we could not find a suitable actor. I met Nemeth hurriedly in a cafe in the company of the producer, Villar, who would not let go of me. Villar had a car waiting outside the cafe--taxis were still unobtainable in Paris; after a hurried embrace with Nemeth, and a disjointed staccato conversation, I was whisked off to the theatre. The next two days wer
e a mess of meeting agents and actors with Villar; I had to put Nemeth off twice. When, on the third day, we talked over the telephone, Nemeth said softly and quietly:

  `Look, don't apologise. Juci and I both understand. Our circumstances have not changed. Yours have. It is quite natural that you should be too busy to see us. I only rang because I was hoping you could spare me a few minutes on a rather urgent technical matter.'

  I apologised even more profusely, knowing that the irremediable had happened. Nemeth's voice was, as always, free from any trace of a reproach. It was the old, matter-of-fact, taking-everything-for-granted voice which said, `it is quite natural that you should be too busy to see us'. ('You like your boiled eggs with brilliantine? But we all do, of course'.) We arranged that they should come at once to my hotel. He arrived half an hour later, without Juci.

  My sitting-room in the hotel was dark and depressing, as only a French salon with gilt and spindle-legged imitation period furniture can be. Nemeth sat on a narrow, squeaking sofa, I on a straight-backed tapestry chair. In the six years of our separation Nemeth had become an old man. He had always carried himself with a stoop; now he looked almost hunchbacked. The bulginess of the eyes over the bony nose had become more pronounced, beetle-like. The white dandruff on the collar of his worn, shiny black jacket was no longer an amusing eccentricity.

  We sat, facing each other in the semi-obscurity; I forgot to put the electric light on until the room was almost completely dark. It was like talking across the bier of our dead friendship. I talked about England, the Blitz, the political future; it meant nothing to him. He told me about their life in the village, and the handbags that Juci had made. He had not written a line during these six years. What for? He could only write in Hungarian. Who would translate it into French? And who would publish it?