The Invisible Writing

by Les Weil

  No. 3 CENTRE

  LONDON RECRUITING DIVISION

  DUKE'S ROAD, W.C.I.

  EUSTON 5741.

  Jonathan Cape Esq.,

  Jonathan Cape Ltd.,

  30, Bedford Square,

  W. C. I.

  re Arthur Koestler

  I am in receipt of your letter of the 11th instant contents of which have been noted.

  As requested, I am therefore postponing Mr. Koestler's calling up, and would suggest that he calls at this Centre when he is at liberty to join His Majesty's Forces.

  Illegible signature

  Major

  ARO

  Having read this remarkable document, I was more than ever convinced that England must lose the war. It took me a month instead of a fortnight to finish Scum of the Earth; I had already learnt not to hurry, and that it was bad form to appear too eager. The process of growing roots had begun.

  Up to this turning point, my life had been a phantom-chase after the arrow in the blue, the perfect cause, the blueprint of a streamlined Utopia. Now, with unintentional irony, I adopted as my home a country where arrows are only used on dart-boards, suspicious of all causes, contemptuous of systems, bored by ideologies, sceptical about Utopias, rejecting all blueprints, enamoured of its leisurely muddle, incurious about the future, devoted to its past. A country neither of Yogis nor of Commissars, but of potterers-in-the-garden and stickers-in-the-mud, where strikers played soccer with the police and Socialists wore peers' crowns. I was intrigued by a civilisation whose social norms were a reversal of mine: which admired `character' instead of `brains', stoicism instead of temperament, nonchalance instead of diligence, the tongue-tied stammer instead of the art of eloquence. I was even more intrigued by the English attitude to the outside world, which I summed up in a maxim: `Be kind to the foreigner, the poor chap can't help it.' Most of the friendly natives on whom I tried this nodded in modest agreement; so few saw the joke that I began to wonder whether it was a joke after all.

  In short, I was attracted by those obvious features of English life which have always fascinated the stranger. But this was a superficial attraction. It gradually wore off, and yielded to exasperation with the land of virtue and gloom which England became under the Labour Government of the postwar era. So, at the end of 1947, after seven years in England, I went tramping again. During the next four and a half years I lived in France and the United States, and travelled in a number of other countries. It was during this long absence from England that I became conscious of living abroad. In England, I felt a stranger-abroad, an Englishman. In 1952, at the age of forty-seven years, I returned to England, and bought a house in one of London's old squares, in which I shall live happily ever after, until the Great Mushroom appears in the skies.

  The reasons why all the places where I have lived long before England have now become `abroad--which is the ultimate test of belonging to a country--are difficult for me to analyse. There is, for instance, language. Since 1940 I have been writing in English, thinking in English, and reading mostly English literature. Language serves not only to express thought, but to mould it; the adoption of a new language, particularly by a writer, means a gradual and unconscious transformation of his patterns of thinking, his style and his tastes, his attitudes and reactions. In short, he acquires not only a new mode of communication but a new cultural background. For several years, while I thought in English, I continued to talk French, German and Hungarian in my sleep. Now even this occurs only rarely; the layers are becoming integrated.

  The process of changing languages is a fascinating one, and as I have gone through it twice (first from Hungarian to German, then from German to English) I hope to give one day a detailed account of the psychological problems that it involves. One curious aspect of it, from the writer's point of view, is what one may call `the rediscovery of the chiche'. Every cliche, even the broken heart and the eternal ocean, was once an original find; and when you begin writing and thinking in a new language, you are apt to invent all by yourself images and metaphors which you think are highly original without realising that they are hoary cliches. It is rather like the sad story of the man in a remote village in Russia, who just after the first World War invented a machine with two wheels and a saddle on which a person could ride quicker than he could walk; and who, when he rode to town on his machine and saw that the streets were full of bicycles, fell down and died of shock. Something similar happened to me when I finished the first novel that I wrote in English (Arrival and Departure), with a sentence whose poetic ring made me rather proud:

  `. .. at night, under the incurious stars.'

  It is still there, on the last page of the book, a verbal bicycle.

  Another symptom of growing roots is the homesickness that accompanies prolonged absence. I am talking of the kind of homesickness which is not focused on persons and places, but a rather diffuse nostalgia for a specific human climate. The buffetings of the past by prison guards, policemen and totalitarian bureaucrats have left their scar: an oversensitivity which reacts to slight traces of aggression or mere uncouthness in the casual contacts of the day, as a Geiger counter registers radio-activity in the air. If one is afflicted in this manner, the mood of an hour or a morning is decided by the rudeness of a taxi-driver, the temper of the charwoman, the smile of the traffic-cop, by waiters, telephone operators, the man at the petrol pump, the girl in the department store. One lives immersed in this anonymous mass, it is like a liquid medium through which one moves without being aware of it; yet its temperature and the amount of friction that it offers, constantly influence one's condition and outlook. In this respect, I have found the human climate of England particularly congenial and soothing--a kind of Davos for internally bruised veterans of the totalitarian age. Its atmosphere contains fewer germs of aggression and brutality per cubic foot in a crowded bus, pub, queue or street than in any other country in which I have lived. I felt a growing conviction that, to quote Orwell, these crowds `with their mild knobby faces, their bad teeth and gentle manners, this nation of flower­lovers and stamp-collectors, pigeon-fanciers, amateur carpenters, coupon­snippers, darts-players and crossword-puzzle fans' lived, in its muddled ways, closer to the text of the invisible writing than any other.

  In his preface to the first English translation of Das Kapital, Engels wrote in 1886 that Marx, `after a life-long study of the economic history and conditions of England,' had been led to the conclusion that, at least in Europe, England is the only country where the inevitable social revolution might be effected entirely by peaceful and legal means'.

  It is one of the few Marxian predictions that has come true. The continuity of tradition which it reflects is indeed an impressive feature, and particularly so in a declining empire. The fall of each of the great Empires of the past was an ugly and catastrophic event. For the first time in history we see an Empire gradually dissolving with dignity and grace. The rise of this Empire was not an edifying story; its decline is.

  Ultimately, this may be the reason which attracted me to England. I only seem to flourish in a climate of decline, and have always felt best in the season when the trees shed their leaves.

  I also like to believe that the disappearance of the Pukkah Sahib and his female equivalent at home, the Virago Harrodsiensis, will make the English more European. It even seems to me, at times, that they are the last Europeans, without being aware of it.

  `If I find Mr. Koestler's writing unlikeable, it is because he accepts as normal what I believe and hope is abnormal,' wrote Mr. Raymond Mortimer in an essay from which I quote again, because the former literary editor of The New Statesman and Nation seems to me fairly representative of the general attitude of men of letters in his country and generation. I can see their point on the question of likableness only too well, but on the question of what is normal I disagree with them. For the life that I have described was indeed, up to 1940, the typical case-history of a Central-European member of the intelligentsia in the totalitarian age. It
was entirely normal for a writer, an artist, politician or teacher with a minimum of integrity to have several narrow escapes from Hitler and/or Stalin, to be chased and exiled, and to get acquainted with prisons and concentration camps. It was by no means abnormal for them, in the early 'thirties, to regard Fascism as the main threat, and to be attracted, in varying degrees, by the great social experiment in Russia. Even today, about one quarter of the electorate in France and Spain, and a much higher percentage among the intellectuals, regard it as `normal' to vote for the Communist Party. Even today the displaced persons, the scum of the earth of the post-war era, number several millions. Finally, it was quite normal for six million European Jews to end their lives in a gas chamber.

  The awareness that the first thirty-five years of my life were a typical sample of our time, and the chronicler's urge to preserve the sample, were my main reasons for writing these memoirs. Yet the majority of well-meaning citizens of the country in which I live, believe and hope that prisons and firing squads and gas-chambers and Siberian slave camps just `do not happen' to ordinary people unless they are deliberately looking for trouble. This protective filter of the mind which, when reality becomes too shocking, only allows a thin trickle of it to pass, has its useful function in keeping us all sane; yet at times it can become rather exasperating. In 1943, when the facts about the gas-chambers had already become general knowledge, the literary monthly Horizon published a chapter from Arrival and Departure which described an episode in the mass-killings. I received a number of letters, some of them accusing me of atrocity-mongering to satisfy my morbid imagination; others naively asking whether or not the episode had some factual basis. I had just received the news that members of my family were among the victims, and this may explain the following outburst:

  A collective Answer to some Inquiries.

  Dear Sir,

  In your letter you asked me the idiotic question whether the events described in The Mixed Transport were `based on fact' or `artistic fiction'.

  Had I published a chapter on Proust and mentioned his homosexuality, you would never have dared to ask a similar question, because you consider it your duty `to know' although the evidence of this particular knowledge is less easily accessible than that of the massacre of three million humans. You would blush if you were found out not to

  have heard the name of any second-rate contemporary writer, painter or composer; you would blush if found out having ascribed a play by Sophocles to Euripides; but you don't blush and you have the brazenness to ask whether it is true that you are the contemporary of the greatest massacre in recorded history.

  If you tell me that you don't read newspapers, White Books, documentary pamphlets obtainable at W. H. Smith bookstalls--why on earth do you read Horizon and call yourself a member of the intelligentsia? I can't even say that I am sorry to be rude. There is no excuse for you--for it is your duty to know and to be haunted by your knowledge. As long as you don't feel, against reason and independently of reason, ashamed to be alive while others are put to death; not guilty, sick, humiliated because you were spared, you will remain what you are, an accomplice by ommission.

  Yours truly

  AK

  I am quoting this grossly unfair letter, written under emotional strain, because, it shows that the process of acclimatisation was not quite as smooth and idyllic as it might appear from the preceding pages; and that has remained true to this day. The smug contentment that I feel each time I arrive at the Passport Control at Dover, joining the queue which says `For British Subjects' and casting a cold eye at the queue `For Foreigners' (the poor chaps can't help it), alternates with moods of impatience and fits of exasperation. But a relationship without ambivalence would be lacking in spice.

  The irony of this relationship is reflected in the sales figures of my books, which are proportionately lower for England than for any other country including Iceland. However, I have gradually become reconciled to the fact that in England I am only read by highbrows, and even by them only as a penance. For I realise that the reasons why the English find my books unlikable are to be found in precisely that lotus-eating disposition which attracts me to them. Their supreme gift of looking at reality through a soothing filter, their contempt for systems and ideologies, is reflected in their dislike of the roman a these, the political and ideological novel, of anything didactic and discursive in art, of any form of literary sermonising. In addition to this native trend, English literary criticism has, since the collapse of the `socially conscious' literature of the 'thirties, developed what seems to me an ultra­Flaubertian tendency--'Flaubertian' in a sense in which the author of Bouvard and Pecuchet never was one. It was largely because of this trend that Orwell, too, remained a lifelong outsider in his country, though he came from solid British stock, and not from Budapest; and that even Wells died in the literary doghouse.

  On the whole, I find life in the doghouse quite cosy, and at any rate a good cure for one's vanity--which, when one thinks one has purged and cauterised it finally out of one's system, pops up again like intermittent fever. Or, to change the metaphor: better a few sour grapes over one's head than the indigestion of surfeit--amen.

  There is a certain arbitrariness in every statement referring to the age of individuals and nations. A cross-section through a nation at any given date will reveal that some parts of the population live twenty, others two hundred years, behind their time, while some small minorities seem to live ahead of it.

  Individuals are even less homogeneous. There are wilted heads on young bodies, and girlish faces framed by grey hair. As for the mind, it has no fixed age at all; it contains layers or circuits that got stuck in infancy, and others that have gone prematurely senile, and still others that function on the paleolithic level. The brain is a clockmaker's workshop where all the clock­faces mark different times. These are supposed to be somehow synchronised in those mythical beings that psychiatrists call `integrated personalities'. Unfortunately, the wider the range of contrasts within a person the more difficult it becomes to bring them into harmony, and Goethe's `perpetual adolescence of the artist' may well be prolonged into the age of dotage. The completely integrated person is the complete bore.

  The above is intended as an apology for that web of contradictions that blurs the features of my youth not only in the reader's, but also in my own eyes. It seems difficult to make sense of a brazen Comintern agent who gains access to the enemy's headquarters in a civil war, but turns into a stammering schoolboy in the presence of Herr Docktor Mann and Herr Professor Freud. It seems difficult to `integrate' the contemplative figure of the hours by the window with the bustling, gregarious extrovert; or to reconcile guilt, anxiety and an obsession with prison and torture, with Orwell's damning (yet correct) verdict: `The chink in K.'s armour is his hedonism.' The contradictions between sensitivity and callousness, integrity and shadiness, ego­mania and self-sacrifice which appear in every chapter would never add up to a credible character in a novel; but as this is not a novel, he must stand as he was. The seemingly paradoxical can only be resolved by holding the figure against the background of his time, by taking into account both the historian's and the psychologist's approach. It was my aim throughout this auto­biography not to withhold from the reader any clue, however embarrassing, that is relevant to the solution. This basic rule of the mystery-story should, I believe, apply equally to the writing of memoirs, if the latter are to satisfy not only the chronicler's urge, but also that second impulse that I have called the 'ecce homo motive'.

  Here this case history, which has now grown to four volumes, comes to an end, leaving its subject at the age of thirty-five. The story of the later settled years I feel no urge nor need to record. For both parts, a fitting epitaph was sent to me a few months ago. It is a poster, three feet by two, put out by the Social Democratic Party of Germany, and reproduced opposite.

  The translation of the text reads:

  1933•••

  In those days the pyres were blazing in Germa
ny's towns. By the order of Goebbels millions of books were burned in the flames.

  The design below this text shows Goebbels hurling a book into the fire while Hitler looks on; the book shows the name Kostler on its cover.

  1952 ...

  In these days new pyres were blazing in the German towns of the Soviet zone. Again 9 million books perished in the flames.

  The design shows Pieck throwing another book, again marked `Kostler', into the fire, while Stalin looks on.

  Though one may object that in 1933 I had only written one book of which no large quantities were available for burning, I found the fact that these posters were being displayed in the streets of Germany nevertheless gratifying. A copy of it now hangs outside my study, framed like a professional diploma, certifying that its owner has passed his examinations and is entitled to exercise his craft. For, to be burned twice in one's lifetime, is, after all, a rare distinction.

  June 1952--October 1953.