Games with Shadows

by Neal Ascherson

  At first, the enraged Kisch shouted Wagner down; he would hear no excuses. Then he began to listen. He knew the house. It belonged to a Colonel Alfred Redi, chief of staff to the army headquarters and head of intelligence. And that very Monday, an official bulletin from Vienna had announced the ‘tragic death’ of Redi, praising to the skies the virtues of this rising officer who was expected to become Minister of War, perhaps even Commander-in-Chief one day.

  The incredible truth burst on Kisch. Redl must have been a spy, and the bulletin about his death was a cover-up for something horrific. The problem was how to publish it without getting the paper instantly confiscated. Kisch fell back on the trick which still keeps Private Eye alive. Bohemia ran on its front page a grand démenti, in which ‘high sources’ denied outrageous reports that Redl had been a Russian spy and stated that the military commission which had ransacked his house on Sunday and broken open all the drawers and safes had not been looking for stolen plans at all, but for ‘material of another nature….’

  Nobody, of course, was fooled. The story blazed across the world Press. Within a day and a half of Redl’s forced suicide, the political world in Vienna was in convulsions, and the Archduke Franz Ferdinand – contrary to Szabo’s version – was firing generals right and left for having tried to keep him in the dark.

  Kisch could embroider. He was almost engagingly candid about it, like the reporter who burst into the old Europa Hotel in Belfast when I was eating breakfast, shouting: ‘I’ve got a terrific story, and it’s trueish!’ But his account of the Redl scoop does stand up. It is a pity that almost nobody in this country knows his books, and it would be another pity if those who do read Kisch thought that he had been swindled over Colonel Redi.

  It is not very comfortable to compare Egon Erwin Kisch to the image of the investigative journalist which comes at us now off the small and large screen. Kisch was a happy warrior. He was a left-wing Socialist, who later gave his heart to the Russian Revolution; he sympathised with Czech nationalism, and he regarded the Habsburg Empire as a ludicrous old heap of repressive superstition, falling into the hands of militarist maniacs who had to be brought down before they deluged Europe in blood. He knew what he wanted, professionally and politically, and the Austrian police and censorship apparatus was far too mild and cumbrous to stop him doing it.

  Contrast him with the gloomy protagonists of these current reporter-versus-MI5 dramas. They are defensive, always expecting the worst. They go about their digging with a curious fixed stare, professional news-getting automata with no ideals and no politics. If they show any optimism at all, it is in the belief – childish, in practice – that if they can evade the spooks and get their story rolling off the presses, their enemies will scatter and dissolve like snow before the fiery sun of public knowledge.

  It is too easy just to say that journalists are not really like that. One can see the reasons why script-writers have turned to pressmen: the old thriller tradition of setting good policemen against bad crooks grew unconvincing, and Punch-and-Judy contests between tough British security men and evil Commie spies wore thin in their turn. The public is always basically decent in thrillers, but who is now protecting the public against whom? It has come to this: that the State is the villain and the only knightly Order defying the State’s intention to crush society with the big stick and the big lie is … the mass media.

  Kisch at least believed that politics could change things. Have we lost all our weapons except the printed or broadcast word? We have not, and we should reject these invitations to frighten ourselves to death.

  [1986

  Tempers

  The Spanish referendum on NATO is over, and Europe – as I see the result – is the poorer by one potentially neutral state. Felipe Gonzalez, the Prime Minister, is covered with glory. His main opponent, the conservative leader Manuel Fraga Iribarne, is covered with egg, if nothing worse.

  I do not like Fraga’s politics. In a surreal contest, rather like a football match in which each team tries to score as many own-goals as possible, he persuaded his Alianza Popular to campaign against NATO membership because he was in favour of it. He is an authoritarian and a bully, and he has deserved the mess he is now in.

  And yet, I have to confess, there is something endearing about the man. Small, balding and Napoleonic in appearance, he is an original. The first time I met him, he was Franco’s Minister for Information and Tourism. At the end of a brilliant interview, which included a minor scoop, he declared that he would like to give me a souvenir. Rummaging in a cupboard, he staggered back to me bearing an object the size of a small tombstone. It proved to be a book entitled ‘Death in Spanish Painting.’

  Its weight produced a dangerous list in the taxi back to my hotel. Unwilling to pay a fortune in excess baggage, I left it in the flat of a protesting British friend in Madrid. I accepted this gift in the spirit in which it was offered, but I have wondered ever since what that spirit was.

  But the most appealing thing about Fraga is his combination of high intelligence with a fatal, explosive, uncontrollably bad temper. He has the lowest boiling point, the shortest fuse, of any politician I have met. This makes for delicious comedy. In 1977, at an election meeting in his home territory of Galicia, Fraga broke off a grandiose speech to fly through the air, like a tubby little rocket, and land on the throat of a heckler. One never knows when he is going to go off bang. Neither does he.

  My favourite Fraga memory is of his eve-of-poll party political broadcast in 1977 – Spain’s first, chaotic exercise in free elections for 40 years. He started imposingly, scowling at the nation and rushing through his speech at a great pace. Then, quite suddenly and for no apparent reason, Fraga lost his temper with himself. His own oratory no doubt overheated him; spontaneous combustion took place. He began to scream and bellow. He waved his arms imprudently, and all his notes escaped and flew about the studio. Scrabbling for them, his rage only grew worse. Next day, he got even fewer votes than the Communists.

  Genuine bad temper and politics seem unlikely consorts. In fact, though, they combine quite often – and even in democracies. I say ‘genuine’ deliberately. For this definition, rage has to be uncontrollable, something which can undo a politician’s own purposes. This excludes what one might call the ‘furia fascista,’ the calculated outburst of screeching and raving which Hitler and Mussolini taught themselves to switch on and off at will.

  It also excludes those who govern by tongue-lashing. Old Konrad Adenauer did that; I still remember how Bundestag members used to squirm on their heavy hunkers as his sarcasms cracked over their heads. Fraga once gave a lunch at which he proclaimed: ‘There are only three real men in Europe. Me, Franz-Josef Strauss and Maggie Thatcher!’ Here we have two genuinely filthy tempers and one mere tongue-lasher, in that order.

  Strauss, however, certainly qualifies. In that Manichean figure, intellect and base nature are perpetually at war. Nobody in West Germany has a more lucid and penetrating understanding of how democracy should work. Nobody in that country has such a fatal capacity to grasp the cup of democracy when it is handed to him and then – in a convulsive tantrum -to smash it against the wall.

  Let it not be thought that bad temper is an affliction only of the Right. I think of the late Władysław Gomułka, of Poland. Aware of his weakness, he was given to clutching the table-edge at politburo meetings, in order to stop himself shooting to his feet and bellowing. In this and some other ways, he resembled another Polish leader: Marshal Piłsudski, in many ways an extremely intelligent and cultured man, also suffered from volcanic impatience with those who questioned his judgment – with the result that they questioned it even more.

  The most frightening bad temper was that of Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev – frightening, because the man wielded absolute power not only over his subjects but over nuclear weapons. Men were known to suffer heart attacks when he exploded. The Russians, rightly, did not consider this funny, and in the end it was largely fear of his unpredictable tempe
r and moods which led to his deposition in 1964.

  Even our own Labour Party has had its Roman candles -now mostly extinguished. The late George Brown undid himself as much by his bullying rages as by the drink which helped to provoke them. Dick Crossman, another short fuse, once knocked him down in a Committee Room corridor. George Brown, in turn, once punched Eric Heffer. (But Heffer, though trained in unarmed combat in his youth, is said merely to have complained to the Chief Whip.)

  The paranoiac fears the secret persecutor. The authoritarian (and all choleric politicians are authoritarians) is never free from a morbid suspicion that somebody is contradicting him – or even suppressing a contradicting thought. As the mercury rises, a mere snigger, even an inanimate object which shows signs of mutiny, may be enough to touch off the blast. Once when Fraga (to mention him for the last time) was briefing journalists, the telephone kept interrupting him until he snatched a pair of scissors from his desk and severed the cable.

  In this absurd scene, there is a hidden significance. A politician who cuts his own telephone cord is performing an act of self-mutilation, wrecking his own central purpose of communicating. Those who lose their tempers in public alienate that public, which will never take them quite seriously again. We are looking at a sort of primitive fail-safe system, a fuse but this time an electrical safety-fuse which time and again operates to bring a truly arrogant figure to a halt and limit his influence.

  Modern political training, the choice and maintenance of an image, eliminates people like that. The politician who can be ignited by a television interviewer’s impertinent question is scarcely to be seen now. The performance is cool, bland, patronising, polished until the joints in the armour can no longer be found.

  I fear politicians of that kind. They never put a foot wrong because their foot is already firmly planted on our chest. We can love them or hate them, but they never drop their guard or their fixed smile.

  Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, was often seized by rages against his own subjects. At night, temper inflamed by drink, he would sometimes write orders for artillery to demolish some recalcitrant village. But all orders had to be shown to him again in the morning – and he usually tore them up. I do not ask for unpredictability on that scale. But I do ask the image-makers to leave us a few politicians – just a few–who are their own worst enemies.

  [1986

  Sex

  As the past week’s news has been largely – and rightly – devoted to terrorism and the flight of families from nuclear fall-out, I thought I would change the subject and write about love. Perhaps I really mean sex; perhaps the conclusions will be equally depressing. Anyway, last week produced one of the saddest and weirdest love stories ever told.

  This was the story of the French diplomat Bernard Boursicot and the Chinese dancer Shi Peipu, sentenced in Paris last week to six years in prison for betraying secret diplomatic intelligence. They met in Peking in 1964, when Bernard was 20. Shi Peipu was a male opera dancer and, as the French police have established to their satisfaction, is biologically a man. However, he told his new French friend that he was really a woman in disguise. Not only did Bernard believe him, but he continued to believe him throughout a passionate and loving sexual relationship which lasted, with interruptions, for 20 years.

  So much, one might say, for French sophistication in these matters. It was not until 1983 that Bernard, ‘shattered,’ yielded to the evidence of the police doctors. He explained that Shi Peipu had always been ‘modest’ about undressing. The French papers talk knowingly about ‘une certaine gymnastique’ and ‘apparences trompeuses.’ Anyway, Bernard objected, they had a baby son, the little Shi Du Du, who even looked like him. Here again, poor Bernard has bowed to the verdict of tests which prove that, whoever the father of Shi Du Du may have been, it was not Bernard Boursicot and Shi Peipu was certainly not his mother.

  The spying was the least interesting part of the tale. A shadowy Mr Kang soon appeared, demanding from Bernard the inevitable quid for the quo of letting the affair continue. From the French embassy in Peking and later from Ulan Bator, Bernard provided various banal scraps of paper; for example, the notes of his ambassador on a Mongolian journey (‘we passed gigantic herds of yaks’ and ‘the horse is to the Mongols what the automobile is to the Americans’). But it was not until 1983, when Shi Peipu and Shi Du Du appeared in Paris and moved into Bernard’s flat in the Boulevard Raspail, that French counter-intelligence pounced.

  Pleas by Bernard’s lawyer that this was a ‘crime of passion,’ or alternatively that Mr Kang could not be proved to represent a foreign State, were ignored by the court. The sentence could have been worse; the maximum penalty is 20 years. But in the circumstances, the imposition of six years’ ‘criminal detention’ is no less than an unfeeling atrocity.

  The damage done was trivial. And whatever went on between Bernard Boursicot and Shi Peipu was love – a faithful, exemplary love maintained for many years through frightening circumstances and in spite of huge separations. As Stendhal wrote in the first sentence of his De l’Amour, ‘I seek to comprehend this passion whose every sincere development has a character of beauty.’

  Grotesque in detail, this is an old-fashioned story told in a time when relationships between the sexes, and inside the sexes, are provoking a lot of morose reflections. Some of this gloom arises from the AIDS plague. A lot of people – women in particular – are thinking about the ‘bath house’ phenomenon which AIDS illuminated, the interest of male gays in wild, indiscriminate orgy as an essential component of a way of life. And they do not like what they think.

  One approach, which isn’t anything like an explanation, is to assert that hectic promiscuity is somehow a built-in element of male homosexuality, a tendency which may not always show itself but which is simply a part of the gay syndrome. I doubt this, not least because it is one more way of treating homosexuality as if it were a sickness, with symptoms like rashes or warts.

  But some gay men provide a very different answer. They say: ‘If you think that a taste for promiscuous, orgiastic sex is to do with homosexuality, you are on the wrong track entirely. We are male. The lust for orgy is a basic male characteristic, whether a man is gay or straight. The difference is that we, without the restraint imposed by relationships with women, are able to face this need in ourselves and to indulge it.’

  Shocking! There rises in reply a chorus of male voices insisting – sincerely – that they do not recognise this element in themselves, that sex means for them a ‘caring one-to-one partnership,’ and so on. But I wonder.

  Moderate feminists of the 1968 generation hoped that enlightenment and the liberation of women would coax out of the chauvinist pig a sensitive, sexually considerate and loyal partner. The ‘separatist’ and lesbian wing of feminism does not share that optimism. The bath-house theory of male sex suggests that men who adapt their sexuality to that of women, let alone to conventional morality, do so by repression.

  Orgy is an antique fantasy, usually a heterosexual one. Professor Norman Cohn has demonstrated that almost all societies have accused their dissidents – religious, especially – of indiscriminate group sex, starting with Roman slanders against Christians. But even where sexual orgies really went on, they were evidently male games played by male rules. A few acquaintances who have tried out this sort of thing report the female team as unenthusiastic, getting through on alcohol or the thought of a cheque afterwards. This was decidedly not their scene.

  But the fact that men-women orgies are one-sided, indeed close to gang rape, doesn’t reduce the ominous persistence of this male hankering. A want which has survived so long against such violent disapproval from churches, women and nice people in general has a right to be taken seriously, if only as a threat.

  We may think of the male-female relationship in the West as still one of male domination, but there’s a hint here that without our particular social pressures it might be far worse. I have come across a small African tribe in whic
h men and women regarded each other with open fear and hatred, and reproduction was inflicted by violent rape. In his book ‘Mafia Business,’ Pino Arlacchi writes: ‘Virility and sexual shame (in Sicily) were linked to a clear opposition between the sexes … the uomo di rispetto (man worthy of respect) had the task of demonstrating his virility at every opportunity, even if this meant committing violence against women or seizing them by force.’

  These dark thoughts from the bath-house also leave a lot of psychological theory in disarray. Repression was supposed to be a bad thing, wasn’t it? It seemed fine when Herbert Marcuse wrote that ‘the unsublimated, unrationalised release of sexual relations means the most emphatic release of pleasure as such and the total devaluation of work for work’s sake … the hopelessness and injustice of working conditions would penetrate the consciousness of individuals and render impossible their peaceful regimentation….’

  In those days, the German revolutionaries threw copies of Reich’s ‘The Function of the Orgasm’ at the police. Now they throw grenades. The release of sexuality no longer sounds like an escape into peace and love. Those who worry about the male nature have learned something from experience. Those who smashed the eccentric little refuge built by Bernard Boursicot and Shi Peipu and sent them to prison have learned nothing.

  [1986

  Precision

  In his book ‘The Russian Album,’ a study of his father’s family, Michael Ignatieff provides a reflection on the family photograph. ‘In a secular culture, they are the only household icons, the only objects that perform the religious function of connecting the living to the dead and of locating the identity of the living in time.’