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Pr o Te fes s de chn ional Spray di olog ca i ted es for the Graff iti Artist
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Series Editor: Stuart Christie
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ChristieBooks Christie Books ChristieBooks
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ARENA 2: ANARCHISTS IN FICTION Publisher: ChristieBooks Editor: Stuart Christie Art Director: Leslie Prince Copyright Š the individual authors First published in the UK in 2010 by ChristieBooks PO Box 35 Hastings, East Sussex, TN34 1ZS ISBN: 1-873976-42-9 ISBN-13: 978-1-873976-42-5 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data: A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data: A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. Distributed in the UK by: Central Books 99 Wallis Road London E9 5LN Email: orders@centralbooks.com Distributed worldwide by: PM Press PO Box 23912 Oakland, CA 94623 www.pmpress.org Email: info@pmpress.org
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Edited by Stuart Christie
“The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.” — Oscar Wilde This tragedy [The Trojan Women of Euripedes] is perhaps, in European literature, the first great expression of the spirit of pity for mankind exalted into a moving principle; a principle which has made the most precious, and possibly the most destructive, elements of innumerable rebellions, revolutions, and martyrdoms, and of at least two great religions. Pity is a rebel passion. Its hand is against the strong, against the organised force of society, against conventional sanctions and accepted Gods, It is the Kingdom of Heaven within us fighting against the brute powers of the world; and it is apt to have those qualities of unreason, of contempt for the counting of costs and the balancing of sacrifices, of recklessness, and even, in the last resort, of ruthlessness, which so often mark the paths of heavenly things and the doings of the children of light. It brings not peace, but a sword. So it was with Euripides. The Troddes itself has indeed almost no fierceness and singularly little thought of revenge. It is only the crying of one of the great wrongs of the world wrought into music, as it were, and made beautiful by ‘the most tragic of the poets’. — Gilbert Murray translator of The Trojan Women of Euripedes (1905)
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INTRODUCTION In this second issue of Arena we aim to provide general insights into the role of the anarchist in fiction, both as protagonist (as angels and demons, but mostly demons) and author. Obviously, there will be writers whom some readers will think I have unjustifiably missed. All I can reply to such complainants is that you can’t please everyone and that there will be other opportunities in future issues. Meanwhile, it is best to allow the articles here included to speak for themselves, without comment. Stuart Christie David Weir’s essay ‘Anarchist Fiction, Anarchist Sensibilities’ focuses on the progenitor of anarchist fiction, William Godwin’s Caleb Williams, a highly political novel, published in 1794, that demonstrated, in fictional form, the pressing need for the utopian system he described in the first systematic elaboration of anarchist philosophy, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. ‘Epic Pooh’ is a newly updated revision of a 1978 article by Michael Moorcock (later published in his 1989 book Wizardry and Wild Romance) reviewing epic fantasy literature for children, particularly J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. While researching early twentieth-century French anarchist plays translated into Italian, Santo Catanuto discovered interesting information on the literary side of the indomitable Communard Louise Michel, indicating that she was the author of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea. Strapped for cash, she reputedly sold the manuscript to Jules Verne for 100 francs. Stephen Schwartz, a longtime critic of the detective novel, evaluates the arc of French writer Leo Malet from anarchist to arabophobe and, in ‘Between Libel And Hoax’, counters Miguel Mir’s libellous depiction of the Spanish anarchist movement Entre el roig i el negre. In Stephen’s extended essay, ‘Reading the Runes’, he also takes a fresh look at the archival and related research on the historiography of the Spanish Civil War since the death of Franco. In his discourse on B. Traven’s first full-length novel, The Death Ship, Ernest Larsen looks at the intractable modern problem of identity. Larsen’s short story ‘Bakunin At The Beach’ is about Mr and Mrs Bakunin holidaying at Lake Maggiore under the watchful eyes of Inspector Dupin of the Swiss Department of Justice and Police. Joseph Conrad’s short story ‘An Anarchist. A Desperate Tale’ is republished here from A Set of Six (1908), originally published in Harper’s Magazine in August 1906. ‘Anarchists in Fiction’ is a collection of idiosyncratic reviews of books in which anarchists are portrayed as an eclectic group of villains and criminal degenerates. Finally, we conclude this second issue of Arena with an article by our cinema editor Richard Porton on Dušan Makavejev’s playful, allusive 1971 film WR: Mysteries of the Organism. Stuart Christie
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CONTENTS 100David Weir
41
Anarchist Fiction, Anarchist Sensibilities
1
An Enquiry into the strange case of Caleb Williams 20 Michael Moorcock
45
Epic Pooh
9
30 Santo Catanuto
95
Louise Michele and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.
Notes, rumours and confirmation regarding the real author of the renowned novel 40 Stephen Schwartz
23 107
Leo Malet. From anarchism to Arabophobia 50 Ernest Larsen Traven Hypothesis (The Death Ship) 60 Stephen Schwartz
33 125 41 143
Between Libel and Hoax. Review of Miguel Mir’s Entre el Roig i el Negre 70 Various Anarchists in Fiction 80 Joseph Conrad An Anarchist. A Desperate Tale 90 Ernest Larsen Bakunin at the Beach 10 Stephen Schwartz
49 189 67 201 81 229 103 265
Reading the Runes. New Perspectives on the Spanish Civil War 11 Richard Porton
113 229
W.R. Mysteries of the Organism. Anarchist Realism and Critical Quandaries
133
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ANARCHIST FICTION, ANARCHIST SENSIBILITY An Enquiry into the strange case of Caleb Williams
David Weir
‘Anarchist fiction’, rhetorically considered, is either a redundancy or an oxymoron. The phrase is redundant if the ideology of anarchism is considered from the uncharitable perspective of political history. Despite a number of sensational, even explosive, moments in its history, anarchism has fared less well over the centuries than other ideologies, such as liberalism or socialism. The continuing relevance of these two ideologies in particular is especially obvious in the age of Obama, since the talking heads on satellite radio and cable television make a habit of calling the President ‘liberal’ or ‘socialist’ (not to mention ‘fascist’). But so far, the right-wing machine has refrained from calling President Obama an ‘anarchist’. If anything, his right-wing detractors, with their jeremiads against ‘government takeovers’ of everything from Detroit automobile companies to the healthcare system, might be called ‘anarchists’ because of their hatred of the State, even though they would be reluctant to describe themselves as such. The reason for such reticence may be that anarchism today, for all practical purposes, is little more than a fiction, a make-believe ideology that might be fun to entertain or dream about, but stands little chance of emerging as a real alternative to other ideologies, as it assuredly did in the nineteenth century and at critical periods in the twentieth (during the Spanish Civil War, for example). A stateless society — a system of mutual, contractual arrangements between autonomous individuals rather than a system that subjects individuals to governance and law — does seem little more these days than the stuff of fantasy, an anarchist fiction. At the same time, ‘anarchist fiction’, considered from the perspective not of political history but of literary history,
William Godwin (1756-1836)
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sounds contradictory, especially if by fiction we mean the novel, a literary genre widely understood to have originated as an artistic expression of capitalist ideology. The argument for the novel as a capitalist genre is most often made with reference to the English variant, given the political and economic reforms that followed from the Glorious Revolution of 1688: ‘The features of a modern capitalist economy, so familiar to us now, were just being consolidated in England in the first half of the eighteenth century. . . The Bank of England and the sustaining of a substantial national debt, initiated at the end of the seventeenth century, developed so rapidly and so consequentially in the early eighteenth century as to represent what some have called a financial revolution’, the period ‘in which a true “consumer society” was born in England’. [1] Add to these social and economic circumstances certain older narrative traditions, such as the romance and the picaresque, and you get a form of fiction that highlights the adventures of some rather randy economic individualists, lusty characters who aim to enter the existing social order, not to overturn it: Tom Jones, Moll Flanders, Benjamin Franklin (a historical personage, yes, but an economic picaro in his Autobiography if there ever was one). The anarchist who would write a novel, then, has the game stacked against him from the outset, since the fictional form itself is stamped with capitalist coin. But the socio-economic world of the eighteenth century reflected in the novels of Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, and the like has another side. The active, mostly masculine narrative of the picaresque adventurer who acquires prestige and wealth over the course of the typical eighteenth-century novel is countered by the passive, largely feminine story of those excluded from the new economic adventure but who nonetheless experience its effects. Novels about how economic and social power feels to those who are not themselves in control of that power are usually called sentimental: such novels form a mostly domestic record, frequently epistolary, of emotional sensibility. This type of novel, one critic writes, ‘supplied what was undoubtedly a potentially radical politics of subjectivity, promulgating a notion of exquisite individual sensibility which, although called into play by the outside world, was essentially selfauthorizing rather than produced through subjection to any social structure (most especially the State) whatsoever’. [2] In 2
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other words, even though sentiment is called forth, initially, as a response to socio-economic reality, the feeling that reality evokes takes on its own autonomous, ungovernable character. Given this scenario of sensibility, the type of novel that explores it would seem to be the perfect medium for specifically anarchist sentiment. Thus far I have refrained from noting the familiar fact that novels of sensibility, despite the considerable precedent of Jean-Jacque Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761), were written mainly by women. The novels of Jane Austen, for example, offer sentiment aplenty. Austen’s narratives of female protagonists in patriarchal circumstances, however, hardly seem suited to anarchist sensibility, mainly because the plots of Austen’s novels so often find their resolution in marriage, a contractual arrangement that requires sanctification by the Church and certification by the State, two institutions all anarchists abhor. Still, there is a remarkable confluence of political and literary history toward the end of the eighteenth century: the political philosophy of anarchism and the literary aesthetic of sensibility emerge around the same time, and both the philosophy and the aesthetic encourage an individualistic response to the social and economic order of eighteenth-century capitalism. The first systematic elaboration of anarchist philosophy is the one provided by William Godwin, the British rationalist philosopher who published his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice in 1793. Although he did not actually use the term ‘anarchist’ (that honor belongs to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who called himself an anarchiste around 1840), [3] Godwin believed in the supremacy of reason and sentiment as the basis for human society — not law. He understood ‘political government’, based on law, as a ‘brute engine which has been the only perennial cause of the vices of mankind’. [4] Against the vices of political government Godwin sets the virtues of rationalistic morality, and imagines a highly altruistic society in which each person is so respectful of his fellow man that the rule of law becomes redundant and unnecessary: ‘No man so truly promotes his own interest as he that forgets it. No man reaps so copious a harvest of pleasure as he who thinks only of the pleasures of other men’ (Enquiry, 395). Godwin’s world is indeed a utopian one
Title page of 1796 French language edition of Caleb Williams
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where virtue and reason have slain the Leviathan of the State, but it is also one that preserves sentiment as a source of human happiness. The ‘man of taste and liberal accomplishments’, for example, may still experience ‘the pleasures of solitude’ and hold ‘commerce alone with the tranquil solemnity of nature’ (Enquiry, 394). The year after Godwin published the political treatise that proposed a society based on virtuous reason and tasteful sentiment rather than oppressive laws and vengeful government, he published a novel that demonstrated in fictional form the need for the utopian system the treatise described. Things as They Are; or, the Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794) is anarchist fiction of a high order, and here the descriptive phrase is neither redundant nor oxymoronic. The redundancy is avoided because the novel does not actually present an anarchist vision of society but, instead, reveals the oppressive nature of existing society. And the oxymoron is avoided because the novel does not simply follow the capitalistic form of either the novel of economic adventure or the novel of emotional sensibility but, instead, combines the two forms into one. Caleb Williams does not pursue socioeconomic power but is instead pursued by that power; but like the protagonist of the novel of sensibility, Godwin’s hero feels the effects of the capitalist world just outside his experience, only in a more extreme way than the typical sentimental protagonist: that is his adventure. The plot of Caleb Williams is clearly calculated to evoke in sentimental form many of the same issues of state control and political injustice that Godwin explored through his carefully reasoned treatise. The author makes this point clear in the preface to the second edition of the novel, originally intended to accompany the first edition but withdrawn, Godwin says, ‘in compliance with the alarms of booksellers’. [5] The booksellers were evidently alarmed because Godwin dated the original preface the very day that Prime Minister Pitt suspended habeas corpus, 12 May 1794, and defiantly asserted in it ‘that the government intrudes itself into every rank of society’. The intrusive nature of government is ‘known to philosophers’, but needs ‘to be communicated to persons whom books of philosophy and science are never likely to reach’. Hence the novel is intended to show the oppressive operations of government and law in a manner more comprehensible to the general public by proposing ‘a 4
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general review of domestic and unrecorded despotism by which man becomes the destroyer of man’ (p3). Caleb Williams allows the reader to experience, vicariously, the ‘terror’ (Godwin’s word) that accompanies the government’s abridgment of liberty and to see how smaller domestic injustices reflect those of the broader political world. The initial injustice that drives the plot of the novel concerns the treatment of a poor tenant farmer named Hawkins by the wealthy country squire Barnabas Tyrrel. As his name implies, Tyrrel exercises tyrannical control over his hapless tenant, who initially refuses to place his son in service to the squire. The act of disobedience on the part of the father prompts Tyrrel to persecute his tenant by flooding his land and poisoning his livestock. Hawkins naively hopes to gain relief through legal means, thinking that there might be ‘some law for poor folk, as well as for rich’. Caleb Williams, who is in service to another country squire named Falkland, comments on the futility of Hawkins’s hopes: ‘Nothing could have been more easy to predict, than that it was of no avail for him to have right on his side when his adversary had influence and wealth’, for ‘[w]ealth and despotism easily know how to engage those laws as the coadjutors of their oppression’ (p75). Predictably, Hawkins and his son are ruined. Thereafter, Tyrrel turns his embittered attention to Falkland. Tyrrel targets Falkland because his cousin Emily Melville begins to dote on the rival squire after he saves her from a burning building. The man can’t abide his cousin’s affections for Falkland and is on the point of forcing her to marry against her will when Falkland intervenes and stops the marriage, not because he wants the homely Emily for himself, but, rather, out of a sense of chivalry. Tyrrel is outraged and takes unreasonable, but legal, action against the poor girl, whom he regards as his property. In a section of the novel that shows its clear connection to the novel of sentiment, Emily Melville is so distraught that she dies, but when Tyrrel is confronted with the fact he is sanguine about his role in the matter: ‘I did nothing but what the law allows. If she be dead, nobody can say that I am to blame!’ (p95). When Falkland shames the man over his behavior, calling him an ‘inhuman, relentless tyrant’ (p98), Tyrrel first appears to accept the censure and retires from the scene. But he
Caleb Williams
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Caleb Williams
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returns, ‘having intoxicated himself with large draughts of brandy’, and gives Falkland a public beating (p99). Falkland means to take his revenge, but ‘was baffled of the vengeance that yet remained to him’ because Tyrell turns up dead, ‘having been murdered at the distance of a few yards from the assembly house’ (p100). All of these events are reported from the first-person perspective of Caleb Williams, who assumes, like everyone else, that Tyrrel has been murdered by the much-wronged Hawkins and his son, who have ample motivation to do so. But Falkland’s vengeance has not been baffled after all, for it is he who is the real murderer. The squire, however, allows ‘justice’ to take its course, and watches in silence as the Hawkinses are arrested, tried, and executed for a crime they did not commit. Later, Falkland confesses his secret to his servant Williams, which paradoxically increases the master’s power over him: given the subservience of the law to wealth and class, Williams knows that the secret he shares with Falkland is something he must live with for the rest of his life. Ultimately, the pressure becomes too great and he leaves his master’s estate, whereupon Falkland, fearing that his escaped servant will reveal the truth about the Tyrrel murder, accuses Williams of theft and unleashes the forces of the law against him. This is the point in the novel where the adventures of Caleb Williams truly begin, as he is relentlessly pursued both by the regular police and by Falkland’s agent Gines. The story of Williams’s fugitive existence, his pursuit by bounty-hunters, his capture, trial, imprisonment, escape, re-capture, and so on, have given the novel its justifiable reputation as one of the first suspense thrillers. The Adventures of Caleb Williams is a true adventure novel, but it is also a novel of sensibility, as the surprising dénouement of the story confirms. A series of revelations and reversals turn the tables on Falkland and put his servant Williams in the position of credible accuser of his former master, who is finally found guilty of the murder of Tyrell. Williams, however, finds no satisfaction in the workings of justice. Quite the contrary: when he realises that the weight of the law has fallen on Falkland (perhaps because he knows what the experience of dealing with the law is like), he undergoes a radical change of attitude: ‘I came hither to curse, but I remain to bless. I came to accuse, but am compelled to applaud. I proclaim to all the world that Mr. Falkland is a man worthy of affection and kindness, and that
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I am myself the basest and most odious of mankind!’ (p334). The surprising ending makes the point that justice is nothing without human sentiment, and that the law has made victims of both accuser and accused (regardless of who takes what role). Elsewhere, I have shown how the sentimental elements of Caleb Williams also fed into Godwin’s revisions of the second and third editions of the Enquiry Concerning Political Justice.[6] If sentiment ultimately transformed the treatise, that may be because the only way Godwin could write anarchist fiction was by transforming the form of the novel of capitalist adventure by combining it with the novel of sensibility. Perhaps unwittingly, the first anarchist to write the first anarchist novel happened upon a solution to a problem that continues to dog radical authors to this day: how to reconcile conventional artistic forms with unconventional political sentiments. Possibly, drama is a better medium for radical politics than the novel, as the success of the self-described anarchist Henrik Ibsen shows, whose plays won the hearty endorsement of Emma Goldman and other activist anarchists. Indeed, the suspect nature of the novel as an artistic medium for the conveyance of anarchistic sentiment is suggested by a considerable number of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novels that feature anarchist characters but are frankly anti-anarchist: Dostoevsky’s The Possessed (1872), Henry James’s The Princess Casamassima (1886), E. Douglas Fawcett’s Hartmann the Anarchist (1893), Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907), and C.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday (1908). In most of these novels, and especially in Dostoevsky’s and James’s, anarchism fares badly precisely because it is so bound up with sentiment or sensibility, and, as such, is treated with ridicule. Godwin, by contrast, used the novel of sensibility to show that anarchism was something worthy of sentiment, and, as such, was a political philosophy much more worthwhile than anything the capitalist adventure could offer.
William Godwin
David Weir is an independent scholar whose teaching at the Cooper Union in New York City is barely acknowledged by the administration but is much appreciated by the students. He is the author of five books, including Anarchy and Culture: The Aesthetic Politics of Modernism, Amherst: University of Massaschusetts Press, 1997 7
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Notes 1. Jill Campbell, ‘Fielding and the Novel at Mid-Century’, The Columbia History of the British Novel, ed. John Richetti (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p108. 2. Nicola J. Watson, Revolution and the Form of the British Novel 1790-1825: Intercepted Letters, Interrupted Seductions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p24. 3. K. Steven Vincent, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and the Rise of French Republican Socialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), p69, p254n210. 4. William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and its Influence on Modern Morals and Happiness (London: Penguin, 1985), 554. Further references are cited parenthetically in the text as Enquiry. 5. William Godwin, preface to Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (London: Penguin, 1988), 3. Further references to both the preface and the main text of the novel are cited parenthetically in the text. 6. See Anarchy and Culture: The Aesthetic Politics of Modernism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), 98-100.
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EPIC POOH
Michael Moorcock Why is the Rings being widely read today? At a time when perhaps the world was never more in need of authentic experience, this story seems to provide a pattern of it. A businessman in Oxford told me that when tired or out or sorts he went to the Rings for restoration. Lewis and various other critics believe that no book is more relevant to the human situation. W. H. Auden says that it ‘holds up the mirror to the only nature we know, our own’. As for myself, I was re-reading the Rings at the time of Winston Churchill’s funeral and I felt a distinct parallel between the two. For a few short hours the trivia which normally absorbs us was suspended and people experienced in common the meaning of leadership, greatness, valour, time redolent of timelessness, and common traits. Men became temporarily human and felt the life within them and about. Their corporate life lived for a little and made possible the sign of renewal after a realisation such as occurs only once or twice in a lifetime. For a century at least the world has been increasingly demythologised. But such a condition is apparently alien to the real nature of men. Now comes a writer such as John Ronald Reuel Tolkien and, as remythologiser, strangely warms our souls. Clyde S. Kilby: ‘Meaning in the Lord of the Rings’ Shadows of Imagination, 1969
I HAVE SOMETIMES wondered how much the advent of steam influenced Victorian ballad poetry and romantic prose. Reading Dunsany, for instance, it often occurs to me that his early stories were all written during train journeys: Up from the platform and onto the train Got Welleran, Rollory and young Iraine. Forgetful of sex and income tax Were Sooranard, Mammolek, Akanax: And in their dreams Dunsany’s Lord Mislaid the communication cord.
The sort of prose most often identified with ‘high’ fantasy is the prose of the nursery-room. It is a lullaby; it is meant to 9
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soothe and console. It is mouth-music. It is frequently enjoyed not for its tensions but for its lack or tensions. It coddIes; it makes friends with you; it tells you comforting lies. It is soft: One day when the sun had come back over the forest, bringing with it the scent of may, and all the streams of the Forest were tinkling happily to find themselves their own pretty shape again, and the little pools lay dreaming of the life they had seen and the big things they had done, and in the warmth and quiet of the Forest the cuckoo was trying over his voice carefully and listening to see if he liked it, and wood-pigeons were complaining gently to themselves in their lazy comfortable way that it was the other fellow’s fault but it didn’t matter very much; on such as day as this Christopher Robin whistled in a special way he had, and Owl came flying out of the Hundred Acre Wood to see what was wanted. ‘In Which Christopher Robin Gives A Pooh Party And We Say Good-bye’. Winnie-The-Pooh, 1926.
It is the predominant tone of The Lord of the Rings and Watership Down and it is the main reason why these books, like many similar ones in the past, are successful. It is the tone of Warwick Deeping’s Sorrell and Son, of John Steinbeck at his worst, or, in a more sophisticated form, James Barrie (Dear Brutus, etc.) and Charles Morgan; it is sentimental, slightly distanced, often wistful, a trifle retrospective; it contains little wit and much whimsy. The humour is often unconscious because, as with Tolkien* the authors take words seriously but without pleasure: One summer’s evening an astonishing piece of news reached the Ivy Bush and Green Dragon. Giants and other portents on the borders of the Shire were forgotten for more important matters: Mr Frodo was selling Bag End, indeed he had already sold it — to the Sackville-Bagginses! ‘For a nice bit, too’, said some. ‘At a bargain price’, said others, ‘and that’s more likely when Mistress Lobelia’s the buyer.’ (Otho had died some years before, at the ripe but disappointed age of 102). Just why Mr Frodo was selling his beautiful hole was even more debatable than the price... The Fellowship of the Ring, 1954
I have been told it is not fair to quote from the earlier parts of * The Silmarillion, 1977, is, of course, the finest proof of this argument.
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The Lord of the Rings, that I should look elsewhere to find much better stuff so, opening it entirely at random, I find some improvement in substance and writing, but the tone is still there: Pippin became drowsy again and paid little attention to Gandalf telling him of the customs of Gondor, and how the Lord of the City had built beacons on the tops of the outlying hills along both borders of the great range, and maintained posts at these points where fresh horses were always in readiness to bear his errand-riders to Rohan in the North, or to Belfalas in the South. ‘It is long since the beacons of the North were lit’, he said; ‘and in the ancient days of Gondor they were not needed, for they had the Seven Stones’. Pippin stirred uneasily. The Return of the King, 1953
Tolkien does, admittedly, rise above this sort of thing on occasions, in some key scenes, but often such a scene will be ruined by ghastly verse and it is remarkable how frequently he will draw back from the implications of the subject matter. Like Chesterton, and other markedly Christian writers, who substituted faith for artistic rigor, he sees the petit bourgeoisie, the honest artisans and peasants, as the bulwark against Chaos. These people are always sentimentalised in such fiction because, traditionally, they are always the last to complain about any deficiencies in the social status quo. They are a type familiar to anyone who ever watched an English film of the thirties and forties, particularly a war-film, where they represented solid good sense opposed to a perverted intellectualism. In many ways The Lord of the Rings is, if not exactly anti-romantic, an anti-romance. Tolkien, and his fellow ‘Inklings’ (the dons who met in Lewis’s Oxford rooms to read their work in progress to one another), had extraordinarily ambiguous attitudes towards Romance (and just about everything else) which is doubtless why his trilogy has so many confused moments when the tension flags completely. But he could, at his best, produce prose much better than that of his Oxford contemporaries who perhaps lacked his profound respect for middle-English poetry. He claimed that his work was primarily linguistic in its original conception, that there were no symbols or allegories to be found in it, but his Christian beliefs permeate the book at thoroughly as do the books of Charles Williams and C.S. Lewis, who felt morally bound to introduce 11
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‘...that Surrey of the mind...’
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their religious ideas into everything they wrote. I suppose I respond so antipathetically to Lewis and Tolkien because I find this sort of consolatory Christianity as distasteful as any other fundamentally misanthropic doctrine. One should perhaps feel some sympathy for the nervousness occasionally revealed beneath their thick layers of stuffy self-satisfaction, typical of the second-rate schoolmaster, but sympathy is hard to sustain in the teeth of their hidden aggression which is so often accompanied by a deep-rooted hypocrisy. Their theories dignify the mood of a disenchanted and thoroughly discredited section of the repressed English middle-class too afraid, even as it falls, to make any sort of direct complaint (‘They kicked us out of India. you know’), least of all to the Higher Authority, their Anglican God who has evidently failed them. It was best-selling novelists, like Warwick Deeping, who, after the First World War, adapted the sentimental myths (particularly the myth of Sacrifice) which had made war bearable (and helped ensure that we should be able to bear further wars), providing us with the wretched ethic of passive ‘decency’ and self-sacrifice, by means of which we were able to console ourselves in our moral apathy. Moderation was the rule and it is moderation which ruins’ Tolkien’s fantasy and causes it to fail as a genuine romance. The little hills and woods of that Surrey of the mind, the Shire, are ‘safe’, but the wild landscapes everywhere beyond the Shire are ‘dangerous’. Experience or Life itself is dangerous. The Lord of the Rings is a pernicious confirmation of the values of a morally bankrupt middle-class. Their cowardly, Home Counties habits are primarily responsible for the problem England now faces. The Lord of the Rings is much more deep-rooted in its infantilism than a good many of the more obviously juvenile books it influenced. It is Winniethe-Pooh posing as an epic. If the Shire is a suburban garden, Sauron and his henchmen are that old bourgeois bugaboo, the Mob — mindless football supporters throwing their beer-bottles over the fence — the worst aspects of modern urban society represented as the whole by a fearful, backward-yearning class for whom ‘good taste’ is synonymous with ‘restraint’ (pastel colours, murmured protest) and ‘civilised’
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behaviour means ‘conventional behaviour in all circumstances’. This is not to deny that we do not find courageous characters in The Lord of the Rings, or a willingness to fight Evil — but somehow those courageous characters take on the aspect of retired colonels at last driven to write a letter to The Times and we are not sure — because Tolkien cannot really bring himself to get close to his proles and their satanic leaders — if Sauron and Co. are quite as evil as we’re told. After all, anyone who hates hobbits can’t be all bad. The appeal or the Shire has certain similarities with the appeal of the ‘Greenwood’ which is, unquestionably, rooted in most of us:
J.R.R. Tolkien (1916) (1892-1974)
In summer when the sheves be shene And leaves be large and long, It is full merry in fair forest To hear the fowlè’s song; To see the deer draw to the dale, And leave the hilles hee, And shadow them in levès green, Under the greenwood tree. A Tale of Robin Hood (quoted in Ancient Metrical Tales, 1829)
There it no happy ending to the Romance of Robin Hood, however, whereas Tolkien, going against the grain of his subject matter, forces one on us — as a matter of policy: And lastly there is the oldest and deepest desire, the Great Escape: the Escape from Death. Fairy stories provide many examples and modes of this — which might be called the genuine escapist, or (I would say) fugitive spirit. But so do other stories (notably those of scientific inspiration), and so do other studies... But the ‘consolation’ of fairy-tales has another aspect than the imaginative satisfaction of ancient desires. Far more important is the Consolation of the Happy Ending. J.H.R.Tolkien, On Fairy Stories
The great epics dignified death, but they did not ignore it, and it is one of the reasons why they are superior to the artificial romances, of which The Lord of the Rings is merely one of the most recent. Since the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, at least, 13
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people have been yearning for an ideal rural world they believe to have vanished — yearning for a mythical state of innocence (as Morris did) as heartily as the Israelites yearned for the Garden of Eden. This refusal to face or derive any pleasure from the realities of urban industrial life, this longing to possess, again, the infant’s eye view of the countryside, is a fundamental theme in popular English literature. Novels set in the countryside probably outsell novels set in the city. D.H. Lawrence’s appeal cannot be on the quality of the writing; it must lie in his subject matter — lust and landscape. If I find this nostalgia for a ‘vanished’ landscape a bit strange it is probably because as write I can look from my window over twenty miles of superb countryside to the sea and a largely unpopulated coast. This county, like many others, has seemingly limitless landscapes of great beauty and variety, unspoiled by excessive tourism or the uglier forms of industrialism. Elsewhere big cities have certainly destroyed the countryside surrounding them, but rapid transport now makes it possible for a Londoner to spend the time he would have needed to get to Box Hill forty years ago in getting to Northumberland. It is neophobia which makes him hate the modern world and its changing society; it is xenophobia which makes him unable to imagine what rural beauty might lay beyond the boundaries of his particular Shire. He would rather read Trollope or A Year in Provence and share a miserable complaint or two on the commuter train while planning to take his holidays in Bournemouth, as usual, because he can’t afford to go to Spain this year. He doesn’t want rural beauty anyway; he wants a sunny day, a pretty view. Writers like Tolkien take you to the edge of the Abyss and point out the excellent tea-garden at the bottom, showing you the steps carved into the cliff and reminding you to be a bit careful because the hand-rails are a trifle shaky as you go down; they haven’t got the approval yet to put a new one in. I never liked A.A. Milne, even when very young. There is an element of con in his tone that a suspicious child can detect early in life. Let’s all be cosy, it seems to say (children’s books are, after all, primarily written by conservative adults anxious to maintain an unreal attitude to childhood); let’s forget about our troubles and go to sleep. At which I find myself stirring to a sitting position in my little bed and replying with uncivilised bad taste: ‘Fuck that. And fuck you. too’. According to C.S. Lewis his fantasies for children — his Narnia 14
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series of seven books beginning with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and ending with The Last Battle were deliberate works of Christian propaganda. The books are a kind of Religious Tract Society version of the Oz books as written by E. Nesbit; but E. Nesbit would rarely have allowed herself Lewis’s awful syntax, full of tacked on clauses, lame qualifications, vague adjectives and unconscious repetitions; neither would she have written down to children as thoroughly as this childless don who remained a devoutly committed bachelor most of his life. Both Baum and Nesbit wrote more vigorously and more carefully: Old Nimbi had thought herself very wise to choose the form of a Griffin, for its legs were exceedingly fleet and its strength more enduring than that of other animals. But she had not reckoned on the untiring energy of the Saw-Horse, whose wooden limbs could run for days without slacking their speed. Therefore, after an hour’s hard running, the Griffin’s breath began to fail, and it panted and gasped painfully, and moved more slowly than before. Then it reached the edge or the desert and began racing across the deep sands. But its tired feet sank far into the sand, and in a few minutes the Griffin fell forward, completely exhausted, and lay still upon the desert waste. Glinda came up a moment later, riding the still vigorous Saw-Horse; and having unwound a slender golden thread from her girdle the Sorceress threw it over the head of the panting and helpless Griffin; and so destroyed the magical power of Mombi’s transformation. For the animal, with one fierce shudder, disappeared from view, while in its place was discovered the form of the old Witch, glaring savagely at the serene and beautiful face of the Sorceress. L. Frank Baum, The Land of Oz, 1904 Elfrida fired away, and the next moment it was plain that Elfrida’s poetry was more potent than Eldred’s; also that a little bad grammar is a trifle to a mighty Mouldiwarp. For the walls of Eldred’s room receded further and further till the children found themselves in a great white hall with avenues of tall pillars stretching in every direction as far as you could see. The hall was crowded with people dressed in costumes of all countries and all ages — Chinamen, Indians, Crusaders in armour, powdered ladies, doubleted gentlemen. Cavaliers in curls, Turks in turbans, Arabs, monks, abbesses, jesters, grandees with ruffs around 15
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Edith Nesbit (1858-1924)
their necks, and savages with kilts of thatch. Every kind of dress you can think of was there. Only all the dresses were white. It was like a redoute, which is a fancy-dress ball where the guests may wear any dress they choose, only the dresses must be of one colour. The people around the children pushed them gently forward. And then they saw that in the middle of the hall was a throne of silver, spread with a fringed cloth of chequered silver and green, and on it, with the Mouldiwarp standing on one side, and the Mouldierwarp on the other, the Mouldiestwarp was seated in state and splendour. He was much larger than either of the other moles, and his fur was as silvery as the feathers of a swan. E. Nesbit, Harding’s Luck, 1909.
Here is a typical extract from Lewis’s first Narnia book, which was better than some which followed it and is a better than average example of Lewis’s prose in all his fiction, whether for children or adults: It was nearly midday when they found themselves looking down a steep hillside at a castle —a little toy castle it looked from where they stood — which seemed to be all pointed towers. But the Lion was rushing down at such a speed that it grew larger every moment and before they had time even to ask themselves what it was they were already on a level with it. And now it no longer looked like a toy castle but rose frowning in front of them. No face looked over the battlements and the gates were fast shut. And Aslen, not at all slacking his pace, rushed straight as a bullet towards it. ‘The Witch’s home!’ he cried. ‘Now, children, hold tight.’ Next moment the whole world seemed to turn up-side down and the children felt as if they had left their insides behind them; for the Lion had gathered himself together for a greater leap then any he had yet made and jumped — or you may call it flying rather than jumping — right over the castle wall. The two girls, breathIess but unhurt, found themselves tumbling off his back in the middle of a wide stone courtyard full of statues. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, 1950
As a child, I found that these books did not show me the respect I was used to from Nesbit or Richmal Crompton, who also gave me denser, better writing and a wider vocabulary. The Cowardly Lion was a far more attractive character than Aslan and Crompton’s William books were notably free from moral lessons. I think I would have enjoyed the work of Alan Garner, 16
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Susan Cooper and Ursula Le Guin much more. They display a greater respect for children and considerably more talent as writers. Here is Garner: But as his head cleared, Colin heard another sound, so beautiful that he never found rest again; the sound of a horn, like the moon on snow, and another answered it from the limits of the sky; and through the Brollachan ran silver lightnings, and he heard hoofs and voices calling, ‘we ride! We ride!’ and the whole cloud was silver, so that he could not look. The hoof-beats drew near, and the earth throbbed. Colin opened his eyes. Now the cloud raced over the ground, breaking into separate glories that whisped and sharpened the skeins of starlight, and were horsemen, and at their head was majesty, crowned with antlers like the sun. But as they crossed the valley, one of the riders dropped behind, and Colin saw that it was Susan. She lost ground though her speed was no less, and the light that formed her died, and in its place was a smaller, solid figure that halted, forlorn, in the white wake of the riding. The horsemen climbed from the hillside to the air, growing vast in the sky, and to meet them came nine women, their hair like wind. And away they rode together across the night, over the waves, and beyond the isles, and the Old Magic was free, for ever, and the moon was new. Alan Garner, The Moon of Gomrath, 1963
Garner, as we see, is an infinitely better writer than Lewis or Tolkien. In the three fantasy novels, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, The Moon of Gomrath and Elidor his weakness, in common with similar writers, is his plot structure. In a later, better-structured book, The Owl Service, he improved considerably. This deficiency of structure is not evident in Susan Cooper or Ursula Le Guin. For my taste Susan Cooper has so far produced the best novels of their type (modern children involved in ancient mystical conflicts). Her story sequence The Dark is Rising has recently been completed. The strongest of them are the title volume and the final volume Silver on the Tree (1977) while some of the best writing can be found in The Grey King (1975): They were no longer where they had been. They stood somewhere in another time, on the roof of the world. All around them was the open night sky, like a huge black inverted bowl, and in it blazed the stars, thousand upon thousand of brilliant prickles of fire. Will heard Bran draw in 17
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a quick breath. They stood, looking up. The stars blazed round them. There was no sound anywhere, in all the immensity of space. Will felt a wave of giddiness; it was as if they stood on the last edge of the universe, and if they fell, they would fall out of Time... As he gazed about him, gradually he recognised the strange inversion of reality in which they were held. He and Bran were not standing in a timeless dark night observing the stars in the heavens. It was the other way round. They themselves were observed. Every blazing point in the great depthless hemisphere of stars and suns was focused upon them, contemplating, considering, judging. For by following the quest for the golden harp, he and Bran were challenging the boundless might of the High Magic of the universe. They must stand unprotected before it, on their way, and they would be allowed to pass only if they had the right by birth. Under that merciless starlight of infinity, any unrightful challenger would be brushed into nothingness as effortlessly as a man might brush an ant from his sleeve.
Ursula K. Le Guin in her trilogy A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), The Tombs of Atuan (1972) and The Farthest Shore (1972) is the only one of these three to set her stories entirely in a wholly invented world. She writes her books for children as conscientiously as she writes for adults (she is a leading and much admired sf author whose work has won many awards). Here is a passage from near the beginning, with its echoes of Frazer’s The Golden Bough — a monumental influence on all fantasy of this type: On the day the boy was thirteen years old, a day in the early splendour of autumn while still the bright leaves are on the trees, Ogion returned to the village from his rovings over Gont Mountain, and the ceremony of Passage was held. The witch took from the boy his name Duny, the name his mother had given him as a baby. Nameless and naked he walked into the cold springs of the Ar where it rises among the rocks under the high cliffs. As he entered the water clouds crossed the sun’s face and great shadows slid and mingled over the water of the pool about him. He crossed to the far bank, shuddering with cold but walking slow and erect as he should through that icy, living water. As he came to the bank Ogion, waiting, reached out his hand and clasping the boy’s arm whispered to him his true name: Ged. Thus was he given his name by one very wise in the use of power.
The Wizard of Earthsea 18
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Lloyd Alexander is another American writer who has had considerable success with his books set in an invented and decidedly Celtic fantasy world, but for my taste he never quite succeeds in matching the three I have mentioned. He is the weakest, using many more clichés and writing a trifle flaccidly The Horned King stood motionless, his arm upraised. Lightning played about his sword. The giant flamed like a burning tree. The stag horns turned to crimson streaks, the skull mask ran like molten iron. A roar of pain and rage rose from the Antlered King’s throat. With a cry, Taran flung an arm across his face. The ground rumbled and seemed to open beneath him. Then there was nothing. The Book of Three, 1964
One does become a little tired, too, of Hern the Hunter turning up everywhere. Another legacy from Fraser. Sometimes he appears in books of this kind almost as an embarrassment, as if convention demands his presence: an ageing and rather vague bishop doing his bit at official services. There are a good many more such fantasies now being written for children and on the whole they are considerably better than the imitations written ostensibly for adults. Perhaps the authors feel more at ease when writing about and for children — as if they are forced to tell fewer lies (or at least answer fewer fundamental questions) to themselves or their audience. Another variety of book has recently begun to appear, a sort of Pooh-fights-back fiction of the kind produced by Richard Adams, which substitutes animals for human protagonists, contains a familiar set of middle-class Christian undertones (all these books seem to be written with a slight lisp) and is certainly already more corrupt than Tolkien. He is a worse writer but he must appeal enormously to all those many readers who have never quite lost their yearning for the frisson first felt when Peter Rabbit was expelled from Mr MacGregor’s garden: As Dandelion ended, Acorn, who was on the windward side of the little group, suddenly started and sat back, with ears up and nostrils twitching. The strange, rank smell was stronger than ever and after a few moments they all heard a heavy movement close by. Suddenly, on the other side of the path, the fern parted and there looked out a long, dog-like head, striped black and white. It was pointed downward, the jaws grinning, the muzzle close to the ground. Behind, they 19
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could just discern great, powerful paws and a shaggy black body. The eyes were peering at them, full of savage cunning. The head moved slowly, taking in the dusky lengths of the wood ride in both directions, and then fixed them once more with its fierce, terrible stare. The jaws opened wider and they could see the teeth, glimmering white as the stripes along the head. For long moments it gazed and the rabbits remained motionless, staring back without a sound. Then Bigwig, who was nearest to the path, turned and slipped back among the others. ‘A lendri’, he muttered as he passed through them. ‘It may be dangerous and it may not, but I’m taking no chances with it. Let’s get away.’ Watership Down, 1972
Adams’s follow-up to this was Shardik (1974), better written, apparently for adults, and quite as silly. It was about a big bear who died for our sins: ‘Martyred Pooh’. Currently The Plague Dogs (1977) displays an almost paranoid conservative misanthropism. I sometimes think that as Britain declines, dreaming of a sweeter past, entertaining few hopes for a finer future, her middle-classes turn increasingly to the fantasy of rural life and talking animals, the safety of the woods that are the pattern of the paper on the nursery room wall. Hippies, housewives, civil servants, share in this wistful trance; eating nothing as dangerous or as exotic as the lotus, but chewing instead on a form of mildly anaesthetic British cabbage. If the bulk of American sf could be said to be written by robots about robots for robots, than the bulk of English fantasy seem to be written by rabbits, about rabbits and for rabbits. How much further can it go? Of the children’s writers only Lewis and Adams are guilty, in my opinion, of producing corrupted romanticism — sentimentalised pleas for moderation of inspiration which are at the root of this kind of Christianity. In Lewis’s case this consolatory, anxiety-stilling ‘Why try to play Mozart when it’s easier to play Roger and Hammerstein?’* attitude extended to his non-fiction, particularly the dreadful but influential Experiment in Criticism. But these are, anyway, minor figures. It is Tolkien who is most widely-read and worshipped. And it was Tolkien who most betrayed the romantic discipline, more so * That school of English studies exemplified by another ‘Inkling’, David Cecil. Between them these academics probably did more to reduce the aspirations of generations of students and produce that generally low standard of fiction and criticism we experience today.
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than ever Tennyson could in Idylls of the King, which enjoyed a similar vogue in Victorian England. Corrupted romanticism is as distasteful as the corrupted realism of, say, Katie Flynn. Cabell’s somewhat obvious irony is easier to take than Tolkien’s less obvious sentimentality, largely because Cabell’s writing is wittier, more inventive and better disciplined. I find William Morris naive and silly but essentially good-hearted (and a better utopianist than a fantast); Dunsany I find slight but inoffensive. Lewis speaks for the middle-class status quo, as, more subtly and in a more profound context, does Charles Williams. Lewis uses the stuff of fantasy to preach sermons quite as nasty as any to be found in Victorian sentimental fiction, and he writes badly. There is nothing like a bunch of self-congratulatory friends to ensure that writing remains hasty and unpolished. Ideally fiction should offer us escape and force us, at least, to ask questions; it should provide a release from anxiety but give us some insight into the causes of anxiety. Lin Carter, in his Imaginary Worlds — the only book at time of writing the original of this essay I was able to find on the general subject of epic fantasy — offered an argument familiar to those who have read apologies from that kind of sf or thriller buff who feels compelled to justify his philistinism: ‘The charge of “escapist reading”’, says Carter, ‘is most often levelled against fantasy and science fiction by those who have forgotten or overlooked the simple fact that virtually all reading — all music and poetry and art and drama and philosophy for that matter is a temporary escape from what is around us’. Like so many of his colleagues in the professional sf world Carter expresses a distaste for fiction which is not predominantly escapist by charging it with being ‘depressing’ or ‘negative’ if it does not provide him with the moral and psychological comforts he seems to need. Carter dismisses Spenser as ‘dull’ and Joyce as ‘a titanic bore’ and writes in clichés, euphemisms and wretchedly distorted syntax, telling us that the pre-Raphaelites were ‘lisping exquisites’ and that Ford Madox Brown (1821-93) was a young man attracted to the movement by Morris’s (1834-96) fiery Welsh (born Walthamstow, near London) dynamism and that because Tolkien got a CBE (not a knighthood) we must now call him ‘Sir John’ — but Carter, at least, is not the snob some American adherents are (and there is nothing funnier than the provincial American literary snob — Gore Vidal being the most 21
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developed example). In a recent anthology compiled by Robert H. Boyer and Kenneth J. Zahorski, The Fantastic Imagination, we find the following: ‘In addition to their all being high fantasy, the stories selected here are good literature’. Among the writers to be found in the volume are C.S. Lewis, John Buchan, Frank R. Stockton and Lloyd Alexander, not one of whom can match the literary talents of, say, Fritz Leiber, whose work has primarily been published in commercial magazines and genre paperback series. For years American thriller buffs with pretentions ignored Hammett and Chandler in favour of vastly inferior English writers like D.L. Sayers and here we see the same thing occurring with American fantasy writers. The crux of the thing remains: the writers admired are not ‘literary’ or ‘literate’. As often as not they flatter ‘middle-brow sensibilities and reinforce middle-class sentimentality and therefore do not threaten a carefully maintained set of social and intellectual assumptions. Yet Tennyson inspired better poets who followed him, who sought the origin of his inspiration and made nobler use of it. Both Swinburne and Morris could, for instance, employ the old ballad metres far more effectively than Tennyson himself, refusing, unlike him, to modify their toughness. Doubtless Tolkien will also inspire writers who will take his raw materials and put them to nobler uses. On the other hand perhaps the day of the rural romance is done at last and we can look forward to seeing more of the grittier urban fantasies of the kind written by China Mieville, Holly Black or members of the so-called ‘New Weird’ movement. Not that urban nostalgia need be any more vital. We have seen too many television series set in the depression, appealing to people who sentimentally mourn the disappearance of the old, squalid, ‘vital’ cities of their youth; for days when pubs had carbonised beer instead of Real Ale; pining for the lost and banned chemical additives to childhood peas and pies. Where is the slush of yesteryear? Michael Moorcock, 1978
Revised 2009 from Wizardry and Wild Romance
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LOUISE MICHEL and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea Notes, rumours and confirmation regarding the real author of the renowned novel
by Santo Catanuto A Rivista Anarchica While exploring the background to a number of anarchist plays translated from the French and printed and circulated in Italy during the earliest years of the first decade of the 20th century, I ran across a rather extraordinary text1 which, among other things, contained very interesting information regarding the literary side to the indomitable Communard [Louise Michel] and author of at least four plays: Nadine, a comedy ‘staged [in 1882] by her friend and fellow deportee Lisbonne, the then director of the Bouffes do Nord theatre, for, it would appear only a few performances’; The Red Rooster which was ‘staged at the Batignolles theatre in 1888’, The Son of the People ‘a five-act play from 1883 [which] allegedly would have had a greater impact had Louise not been sentenced to six years in prison and jailed at the very moment when the play was being staged’; and Prometheus which ‘in all likelihood was published by the International bookshop in Alfortville which had advertised it in the press in 19052 and which was staged in London as The Killer Whale and Prometheus’.3 Having taken note of this I read on and stumbled across the following: ‘Again on a social scientific note, Louise Michel wrote Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea. One day when in dire need of cash, she sold the still-unfinished manuscript on to Jules Verne for a hundred francs.’4 This was an odd claim and there is no evidence to support it that might be explored, for — I have been told — two possible reasons: either Planche glibly accepted certain legends5 as truth or he was stating the truth, having gotten wind of it
Louise Michel (29 May 1830 – 24 March 1905)
(Translated by Paul Sharkey)
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(through letters, testimony or the like) without. however. bothering to set out the facts and circumstances, a practice of longstanding among hagiographers of the past, and not merely the distant past. Knowing whether Planche’s claim was with or without foundation does not affect me, but out of sheer curiosity I have opted to ferret out and compare some of the biographical details of Michel and Verne who were born in 1830 and 1828 respectively. We know that at the age of twenty — following the death of her putative mother — Louise Michel was shunned by the heirs to the chateau in Vroncourt where she had been Jules Gabriel Verne (8 February 1828 – brought up and moved away to Chaumont where she was to 24 March 1905) finish her education and obtain a teacher’s qualification. After her time in Chaumont (1851-1852) she moved initially to Layny and then, in January 1953, to Audeloncourt in the Haute Marne department. There she taught at a private school and carried on writing stories and poems and corresponded with Victor Hugo who had been a regular visitor to the home of her Encyclopaedist, Voltairean father. In 1856 she moved to Paris where, for nine years, she taught at the Chateau d’Eau run by Madame Voillier. In 1865, aged 35, she committed herself to the schooling of the socially-disadvantaged and joined with others in the foundation of a free school in working-class Montparnasse, providing a free meals scheme for the most impoverished pupils. The early years in Paris were fruitful for Louise in literary terms. Having laid out the bare bones of many of the novels she had in mind she worked on a number of them, almost to the point of completion. However, the five years between the founding of the Montparnasse school and the time of the Commune, years in which the ever more socially- and politically-committed Louise came into contact with the Women’s Rights movement, acted as secretary of the Democratic Moral Improvement Society, treasurer of the Russian Refugee Aid Committee, and joined the Blanquist International, were rather more frantic for the as-yet not-quiteanarchist Louise. It was over these five years that her pugnaciousness, determination and oratorical talents became 24
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Louise Michel And 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea
by-words, as did her mode of dress, so modest as to appear shabby. But given the turn taken by events around her during and after the Paris Commune, lots of her manuscripts from this time were lost and only a few were to be recovered, partially or in fragments, over the ensuing years.6 The picture outlined thus far clearly shows that Louise Michel wrote much, wrote well and did not live in luxury. Indeed the choice to teach in a free school in a working-class district involved an economic precariousness bordering on poverty which she countered with a simple lifestyle and by giving private lessons.7 Against such a backdrop, Planche’s claim that ‘one day when in dire need of cash 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea [Louise] sent the still-unfinished manuscript [of Twenty (1954 film starring Kirk Douglas as Ned Thousand Leagues Under The Sea] on to Jules Verne for a Land, James Mason hundred francs’. has the ring of plausibility to it. as Captain Nemo, Paul Lukas as Now we need to look at Verne or whoever it may have been Professor Pierre Aronnax and Peter who, on his behalf, actually bought the manuscript, or find Lorre as Conseil.) out it the book is entirely of his own making despite the ‘rumours’ recorded by Planche. If the lives of Louise Michel and Jules Verne intersected the place can only have been Paris during those early years when Louise was involved with popular schooling, because, prior to that, Louise would not have been ‘in dire need of cash’. Leafing through the life of Jules Verne, we find that the novelist was working on Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea in 1867, revamping and reshaping it lots of times over before it was published in serial form in 1869 in Le magazine d’éducation.8 That two-year interval coincided with the period when Louise, on her uppers, was teaching at the popular school, enough in itself to prompt the Verne expert Marc Soriano9 to ask: ‘How could there not have been rumours in the air? To the effect, say, that Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea had been written by Louise Michel in New Caledonia. But no: we have checked and this can be ruled out, for the first instalment of the novel concerned appeared on 20 March 1869 in Hetzel’s Le magazine before Louise was ever deported.’10 Well-versed in the life of Verne, as a result of research and enthusiasm, the French academic is not so familiar with the life of Louise Michel and he too makes the 25
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Louise Michel’s school in Montmartre
Louise Michel ‘The Red Virgin of Montmartre’
mistake of not checking his facts, taking as accurate another ‘rumour’ — that it was in New Caledonia that Michel wrote an outline of the novel — and is dismissive of the attribution of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea (or the original outline at any rate) to Michel. However, as we have seen, Michel, who had produced several drafts for novels during her early years in Paris, could only have passed the unfinished manuscript to Verne during the time she was working with the school in Montparnasse, a period during which — coinciding exactly with what Soriano claimed was the time when Verne was engaged in redrafting [1867] — Louise was ‘in dire need of cash’ and not after her return from New Caledonia. At that point Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea was already in print. But for this misleading reference Soriano might have been less emphatic in refuting what he saw as ‘rumours in the air’, knowing well that rumours are often not without some foundation: vox populi, vox dei. The suspicion that Verne, in his frenetic literary efforts, and on his long travels, might have acquired other people’s manuscripts for revamping, is bolstered by an extract from the text concerned to the effect that the idea and outline for The Begum’s Five Hundred Millions, on which Verne was working after October 1878, preparing it for publication a year later, belonged to Paschal Grosset. ‘Through the agency of the abbé of Manas, Hetzel11 received a manuscript from his friend Paschal Grosset, a Communard who had fled to London, entitled The Heir of Langevol: he passed it to Verne who revamped it. Grosset was paid 1,500 francs for the draft.’12 Remember too that in 1883, while working on the final version of Archipelago in Flames, Verne was busily redrafting The North Star, another Paschal Grosset story, a novel that the pen of the French writer of fantasies would turn into The Southern Star.13 Intrinsic femininity
Such facts tell us that Verne, a prolific and frenetic author, needed to keep the pot boiling, just like every other prolific and frenetic achiever who earned himself a readership, fame and money, if he wanted to carry on grappling with his publishing ventures at a rate imposed by those very same commitments. In fact, in 1862 he had signed a contract committing him to write three books a year in return for 1,925 francs per book, a commitment that he was to maintain for almost his entire life. And quite a few marvelled at his 26
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Louise Michel And 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea Jules Verne wallpaper
1871: arrest of Louise Michel in Saint Denise
literary productivity. In 1895 Edmondo De Amicis ‘his suspicions aroused by the flurry of novels appearing regularly from an author who [...] lives in the provinces and is never seen’, doubted that Verne had actually ever existed and made the trip with his children to Amiens to meet him in the flesh. ‘The old master received him warmly. The verdict was delivered: Jules Verne does exist.”14 Between 1865 and 1866 Verne ‘knocked out” a number of projects: an Uncle Robinson, vetoed by his publisher, and two trips; one under water, the other by sea and land. This latter 1871: facing a which was to be the first to be finished, was published as The Council of War for her role in the Paris Children of Captain Grant. But Verne was forever having Commune second thoughts about the other one. ‘When Jules Verne came to write Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea, sprawling belly-up all the blessed day on his boat, the Saint-Michel I [Honorine, his wife] was to declare in wonder: ‘How does Jules do it, writing all these things when all he does is turn his backside on them!’.15 The suspicion that the draft was not his gains substance when we note that even Verne himself, much later on, was to reveal to his publisher that ‘the lengthy article “An American Reporter’s Exploits in 2889” above his by-line in the American magazine The Forum was not by him, but by his son, Michel’.16 And that as early as 1875 a certain 1871:Satory Prison ‘Delmas’, said to be from Pont Est, accused Verne of having awaiting deportation plagiarised Journey to the Centre of the Earth from his own to New Caledonia. Louise Michel is story The Head of Minerva.17 second from right in above engraving. Such notes tend to bear out Planche’s claims which are also 27
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indirectly bolstered by a number of oddities thrown up by Soriano’s analysis of Verne’s immense literary output (articles, episodes, puns, stories, plays and novels) leading him to hypothesise that Verne displayed a latent homosexuality countered from adolescence by a compulsion to write, read and travel in fact or in the imagination.18 A number of extracts and passages were quoted again and again in support of this, from the novels From Earth to Moon, The Sons of General Grant, The Mysterious Island, Journey to the Centre of the Earth, Around The World in Eighty Days ... whereas Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea, being regarded as the most ‘feminine’ of all Verne’s novels, is cited very little and then only to stress the intrinsic femininity by which it is riddled: ‘Here, woman is a constant presence [...] If, as Marcel Moré has hypothesised, the motor car is, for Verne, a metaphor for woman, let us not forget that this woman is “phallic”.’19 ‘In Verne, female characters are reduced to their simplest expression (photography, appearance) but at the same time woman, as an element, is always a mainstay of action: the sea roamed by the Nautilus, the swift, aggressive, lively island represented by the Nautilus, somehow hint at femininity and become symbols of it [...] Verne’s novel develops in the direction of enclosure within a narrow confine (the Nautilus). Only within those confines is there an outlet for the refined pleasures of melancholy hearts (devotion, self-sacrifice, tenderness), and the overweening affection unable to discover any other outlets.’20 Therefore, while arguing that it was merely a rumour that the writer of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea, if not of the finished text, then at any rate of the bare bones of it, was Louise Michel and giving credence to another rumour, that it was written by Michel in New Caledonia, nevertheless detects in the novel an unsettling ‘inner meaning’, a peculiar psychology that sits ill with Verne’s personality: the inherent femininity by which this novel is shot through, more than any of the others. But for the a priori faux pas that prompted him to see Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea as an original one hundred per cent Verne creation, an originating female hand might have been brought to light and it may be no accident, therefore, that Soriano, essentially treats the novel almost as if it were essentially unconnected with Verne’s pen; quoting it very little indeed but underlining this inherent femininity factor. Furthermore — in a reference to Verne’s style — he cites as a ‘specific instance’ Cyrus Smith’s 28
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declaration of faith to Captain Nemo: ‘Where you have gone wrong is in thinking that you could revive the past and resist a progress which is inevitable’. This statement is held to be ‘odd’ and out of tune with the character with which Verne has invested Captain Nemo (a man open to progress and the future). But the inconsistency evaporates if the character’s original features spoke of a critique of progress (and in the original draft, the entire ‘future location’ of Twenty Leagues Under The Sea was turned on its head completely) so that it is legitimate to suppose that the views originally articulated by Nemo and Smith were completely inverted. When Verne’s publisher and friend, Hetzel, asked him in 1869 to rework the part where the Nautilus sinks a British ship,21 Verne’s reaction was: ‘Had I to revamp the character [Captain Nemo} — something that I simply would not be capable of doing, given that I lived with it for two years and could not reinvent him — I would have to remain in Paris for a full month’.22 Which confirms that Verne had the draft outline in his possession (whether it was his own or Michel’s) since 1867 and spent two years cheek-by-jowl with the leading character of the novel ‘under construction’ and Verne — so inventive and prolific — would have been ‘utterly incapable’ of reshaping him in that he could not have ‘reinvented him’. Later on, Verne was commissioned to write a sequel to the History of Great Travels and Great Travellers. He was to claim that there was a documentalist whose task it was to track down texts for the book ‘which Jules Verne must revise and tinker with until he has made them his own’. In short, Verne and his publisher were an enterprise covering a wide swathe of the publishing market of the day and had to churn out novel after novel. No matter what the price. To conclude: during her time in Paris, Louise Michel was on good terms with the photographer Nadar23 — who was supported by Jules Verne from time to time, just as he was by Elisée Reclus24 — and there is every likelihood that it was an enthusiasm for geography, which was booming at the time, that provided a stimulus to inventiveness in the real characters in this brief account and in their more than merely literary speculations. More so than — to borrow Nietzsche’s expression — some ‘stellar’ intersection of their lives, albeit
Louise Michel ‘
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only for the time it took for lightning to flash and cash to jingle. Notes
1. Fernand Planche La vita ardente e intrepida di Luisa Michel, ‘la vergine rossa’ (Italian translation by Umberto Consiglio), Syracuse, Edizioni Terra e Libertá, 1948. 2. The very year in which Louise Michel died. 3. F Planche, op. cit. pp. 246-247 4. Ibid p. 235 5. Once recorded in hagiographic profiles, these become ‘written in stone’ and are mechanically repeated: Take the impressive, not to say logistically highly unlikely number of talks supposedly given by Pietro Gori in the United States; in a single year, no less than 400 in a huge number of towns, adding up to an overall figure of 11,000. 6. Planche reconstructed Louise Michel’s literary oeuvre: around about 1859, Glimmers in the Dark, poetry, published under the nom de plume Enjolras (the same one she used for her articles in Jules Vallès’s Le Cri du people newspaper); The Dream of Jewish Sabbaths (unpublished: The Wisdom of a Madman (unpublished); Entertainments for Children published in 1866 under the nom de plume Louise Quitrine); Through Life (poetry); The New Year Book (published in 1872); Tales for Children (published while Louise was in New Caledonia); Wretchedness (published in 1881 and co-written with G. Guetre, using the nom de plume of Madame Tynaire); Son of the People (published in 1883 and also co-written with Jean Winter using the nom de plume Grippa), with Bakunin as its main character: The Imperial Bastard, published the same year: The Peasants, co-written with Emile Gautier (published in 1883 or 1886): Stories and Legends (1884); Kanak Legends and Songs (1885) and Women of Oceania (these last three were published at least twice); The Human Microbes (a Jules Verne-style ‘science fiction’ novel), was a resounding success; The Starveling, published in 1890; The Red Rooster and Crimes of the Age appeared over 100 instalments in 1888, as did Encyclopedic Readings the following year; Memoirs and Recollections and Adventures of My Life may well have remained unpublished; The New Age (published around 1919); The Commune (published in 1898); Red Century (unpublished); The New World (perhaps unpublished); Prometheus, 30
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published in 1905; Legend of the Bard (unpublished). To these titles must be added rediscovered fragments from the following manuscripts: The Book of Herman; Serial Literature; Devil’s Work in Chaumont; Memoirs of Hanna; The Nihilist; The Book of the Penal Settlement; Conscience; The Book of the Dead (these last three have been lost) and the unfinished The Robbers; Prisons; Conquest of the World. 7. We know that she was hired by George Sand as tutor for her daughter Solange. 8. The first volume, in 18˚, appeared in October that year. Several manuscripts of Verne’s novel exist, one of them given by Verne himself to the Duc de Paris and a further two preserved at the Société de Géographie in Paris along with a fragment from Five Weeks in A Balloon. This was to be issued in a single octavo volume on 9 December 1871. 9. For an interpretive approach to Verne’s life I have used Marc Soriano Il caso Verne (Italian translation by Maria Luisa Mazzini), Milan, Emme 1982, one of the most interesting studies to date of the French writer. 10. M. Soriano. Op. cit. p. 14 11. Verne’s publisher 12. M. Soriano, op. cit. p. 210 13. Ibid, p. 210 and 363 14. Ibid p. 13 15. Charles-Noel Martin Jules Verne, sa vie et son oeuvre (Lausanne, Rencontre 1971) p. 60 16. M Soriano. Op. cit. p. 14 17. Ibid., p. 361 18. A theory already posited by Verne expert Marcel Moré 19. Ibid p. 130 20. Ibid pp. 149-152 21. In the final draft the reference to England was dropped. 22. M. Soriano. Op. cit. p. 143 23. Pseudonym of the caricaturist and aeronaut Félix Tournachon. 24. F. Ferretti Il mondo senza la mappa (Milan, ZIC, 2008) p. 207
Louise Michel ‘
Source: A Rivista Anarchica (Milan) Year 39, No. 346, Summer 2009
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‘If, in order to win, it was necessary to erect gallows in the public square, then I think I would rather lose.’ Errico Malatesta, 1883-1932
‘Greetings! What the hell kind of arsehole art thou? Thou averest all revolutions have failed? Perhaps. But rebellion for good cause is self-justifying — a good in itself — transforming slaves into human beings, if only for an hour. Our beliefs are founded on the eternal truth that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others. Anarchism is not a romantic fable, but the hardheaded realisation, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county councillors. Thy army is nothing but a wellorganised lynch-mob. Never wilt thou be fit to have the sons of Anarch under thee: thy army we fear not, and by land and on sea we will do battle against thee. Thy power rests on hierarchy, thou scullion of Babylon, thou wheelwright of Macedonia, thou beer-brewer of Jerusalem, thou goat-flayer of Alexandria, thou swineherd of Egypt, both the Greater and the Lesser, thou sow of Armenia, thou goat of Tartary, thou hangman of Kamenetz, thou evildoer of Podoliansk, thou grandson of the Devil himself, thou great silly oaf of all the world and of the netherworld and, before Bakunin, a blockhead, a swine's snout, a mare's cunt, a butcher's cur, an unbaptized brow, May the Devil take thee! That is what We, the anarchists say to thee, thou basest-born of runts! Unfit art thou to lord it over true, free-born men! The date we write not for no calendar have we got; the moon is in the sky, the year is in a book, and the day is the same with us here.’
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LÉO MALET From Anarchism to Arabophobia
by Stephen Schwartz
The crime novelist Léo Malet represents a fascinating phenomenon in French literature. Coming from a proletarian family — his parents and younger brother died of tuberculosis — he had little formal education. As a youth, he sold anarchist newspapers such as Le Libertaire, and at 16 migrated from his native Montpellier to Paris, where he performed as a cabaret singer. He was employed in more typical marginal jobs. He became a friend of the poet Jacques Prévert and began participating in the Surrealist movement in the 1930s. He was also active as a Trotskyist, like most of the Surrealists of the time. He claimed he wrote many of his later books — the topic of this article — on a typewriter ‘left to him’ by Rudolf Klement, a German political exile and the first secretary of the Fourth International, murdered by the Soviet secret police in Paris in 1938. During the second world war, Malet was imprisoned first by the French for revolutionary activities, and then by the Germans, but was freed and returned to Paris. The most prominent of the many paradoxes in Malet’s life came when he began publishing detective novels, a genre the Surrealists despised. The detective story, however, has sustained a diverse range of attitudes and talents. It includes the banal and reactionary — a Conan Doyle novel about Sherlock Holmes, The Valley of Fear, is a lurid attack on the Mollie Maguires, an Irish labour group in the U.S., and promotes the anti-worker campaigns 33
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of the Pinkerton detective agency. But the boundaries of crime fiction extend to the works of Raymond Chandler, the unchallengeable poet of a corrupt Los Angeles, as witnessed by Chandler’s invention, private investigator Philip Marlowe. Let it be noted that Chandler has had many more imitators, over the past century, than Conan Doyle. The Spanish author Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, creator of a private detective named Pepe Carvalho, also produced a novel, El pianista, in 1985, that discussed the Spanish anarchists and the anti-Stalinist Partit Obrer d’Unificació Marxista (P.O.U.M.), for which George Orwell fought during the Spanish Léo Malet 1909-1996 Malet never completed his planned great cycle of detective stories, Les Nouveaux Mysteres de Paris (‘The New Mysteries of Paris’), which were to include a novel set in each of the 20 arrondissements of Paris. He managed 15 but then gave up.
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Revolution. Malet has been credited with introducing the strippeddown, pessimistic, ‘hard-boiled’ style of Chandler and Chandler’s inferior contemporary Dashiell Hammett — a Stalinist who had worked as a Pinkerton strike-breaker — to French readers. The medium for this novelty was a sequence of short novels in which the protagonist was an ex-anarchist and private detective, Nestor ‘Dynamite’ Burma. In the 1940s, Malet produced a first group of Burma tales, and in the mid-1950s began a second, Les nouveaux mystères de Paris (The New Mysteries of Paris), each of which was set in a different arrondissement or municipal district. All the Burma novels shared with the 19th century magazine series, Les mystères de Paris by Eugène Sue, a sympathy for and profound knowledge of the impoverished classes in the French capital, as well as an inundation of the text by the distinctive Parisian slang, or argot. In other ways, however, the mysteries of Malet differed dramatically from those of Sue. Firstly, the argot itself had changed over time. Second, Nestor Burma first appeared in 1943, under the Nazi occupation, with publication of 120, rue de la Gare (issued by Pan Books in 1991, in an English translation by Peter Hudson, now out of print.) In the Burma novels, the oppressive ‘darkness’ of life begins in the night of fascism. The adventures of ‘Dynamite’ Burma feature a group of recurrent secondary characters. The detective operates the ‘Fiat Lux’ Detective Agency, the Latin name of which means ‘let there be light,’ which may refer to the characteristic gloom of the roman
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noir. The cast includes a female secretary, Hélène, who serves as a faithful coinvestigator, and Marc Covet, reporter for a daily newspaper, Le Crépuscule (The Dusk) — another satirical title when compared with those of the former dailies Le Matin (The Morning) and Paris-Soir (Paris Evening), but also, perhaps, a clever comment on the noir style. Burma usually contends with Florimond Faroux, a top police functionary, but also a sympathetic friend. Appreciating Malet in English is challenging, because of the reduction of the ‘hard-boiled’ idiom to laconic observation without much description of the environment, which is either taken for granted or sinks into anonymity. To really appreciate Chandler, I believe one must know something about the Los Angeles of his time, and to comprehend Malet, the reader should preferably Pan, 1993 be Parisian. The anarchist sympathies both of Malet and of ‘Dynamite’ Burma are well-represented in the 1956 volume Brouillard au pont du Tolbiac, a ‘new mystery of Paris’ set in the city’s southern 13th arrondissement. As Fog on the Tolbiac Bridge, it was published in English, in a translation by Barbara Bray in 1993, also by Pan Books and also out of print. Fog on the Tolbiac Bridge begins with Burma receiving a note that addresses him as ‘Dear Comrade,’ and which is signed ‘Yours fraternally, Abel Benoit’. The communication summons him to a bed in the hospital of Salpêtrière, located in ‘the 13th’. While riding the metro to the clinic, Burma encounters an attractive Gypsy woman, who recognizes him. Strangely, she is aware of his mission to visit Benoit, but tells Burma there is no reason to go any further, because Benoit is dead, and she had mailed the letter to the detective. She then reveals that she had followed Burma out of his office onto the metro, and gives her name as ‘Belita [Isabelita] Morales.’ When he enters the hospital, Burma is informed that Benoit has died the same morning. A 35
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police inspector named Fabre, who reports to Florimond Faroux (and who at this point in the sequence of stories has become a police superintendent), introduces himself by addressing Burma as ‘comrade’. Burma asks if Fabre is a Communist, and Fabre replies that he is aware of Burma’s anarchist past. Fabre states that between communism and anarchism he sees little choice, and Burma responds by declaring, ‘It’s a long time since I threw any bombs’. Burma then cites the notorious remark of the French politician Georges Clemenceau, that ‘Anyone who isn’t an anarchist when he’s sixteen is a fool’. Fabre completes the aphorism, ‘But didn’t he also say that anyone who’s still an anarchist when he’s forty is just as bad?’ Fabre then discloses that he had been waiting at the hospital for Burma to appear, and while Burma seems not to recognise the name of Abel Benoit, Fabre states that the latter had collected newspaper clippings on the detective’s cases, in addition to sending him the note that began the story, and that Benoit had also been an anarchist. Benoit had been fatally stabbed by a band of assailants and, refusing to go to the regular police, wanted Burma to track them down for revenge. Fabre reveals that the victim’s real name is ‘Albert Lenantais,’ and Burma immediately recalls him as an anarchist associate, a quarter century in the past, ‘a shoemaker by trade, so everyone called him the Cobbler’. Lenantais would have been easily identifiable, according to Burma, by a tattoo on his chest reading ‘Neither God nor Master,’ the most famous slogan of the anarchists. Burma recalls him as a counterfeiter, who served a prison sentence for that offence, symbolized by a second tattoo, of a French coin, on the dead man’s arm. Faroux arrives and the text then diverts to a memoir of anarchist life in Paris in 1927. But Burma’s recollections are vague and inconsequential; they merely remind him that he has aged. Faroux tells Burma that Lenantais, a rag-picker, had been stabbed by ‘North Africans’ and taken to the hospital by the Gypsy woman, Belita Morales. Faroux hints at his own disgust that the neighbourhood in which Lenantais was assaulted had become ‘full of Arabs,’ and describes the living quarters of the deceased as sheltering a large collection of anarchist propaganda from 1937 or 1938. The Spanish Revolution, it seems, had ended the activism of Lenantais. Faroux informs Burma that the police are interested in any case in which the detective is mentioned, but Burma insists 36
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that his acquaintance with Lenantais was superficial. To learn more about the dead militant, Burma turns to the journalist Covet. Michelle Emanuel, author of a rather dry, post-modern academic study, From Surrealism to Less-Exquisite Cadavers: Léo Malet and the Evolution of the French Roman Noir1 has pointed out that prejudices against North African Arabs and Gypsies — both treated harshly in Fog on the Tolbiac Bridge — as well as African and Antillean Blacks, and even Japanese, are repeatedly expressed by Nestor Burma. He is, according to Emanuel, a ‘likeable xenophobe.’ Beyond his evocation of the ‘noir’ attitude of disillusion with established life, she writes, Burma ‘represents the darker side of French culture’, i.e. its chauvinism. He is not, however, anti-Jewish, and Emanuel rather crudely contrasts him with the notorious Jewbaiting author Louis-Ferdinand Céline, noting primly that ‘Malet, although a racist, was neither a collaborator [with the Germans] or an overt anti-Semite.’ But in the analysis of Emanuel, Arabs, and especially Maghrebis from Morocco and Algeria, ‘because of their revolutionary involvements… are cast on the opposite team from Burma, often as gun-runners and cigarette smugglers. Hardly sympathetic to their cause, Burma sees them as a threat to Parisian stability.’ Emanuel notes that in interviews, Malet had claimed that ‘racism exists in every citizen,’ including in his own fictional character.’ When interviewed by the leftist daily Libération, in 1985, Malet burst out, ‘Now listen while I tell you something: Arabs bore the shit out of me and I don’t like them at all! And I consider them to be cunts!’ Further on in Fog on the Tolbiac Bridge, Burma sleeps with the Gypsy woman Belita, but then has a confrontation with a male Gypsy, Salvador. The latter is armed with a flick-knife but Burma threatens him with a pistol and then strikes him on the head and hand with it. Some Arab spectators appear but do not get involved. Burma comments, ‘I was getting rather fed up with all this racism.’ That is, the French ex-anarchist turned detective perceives racism on the part of the Arabs and Gypsies rather than in himself. In the resolution of the story, North Africans are innocent of the murder 37
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of Lenantais, so that the splenetic comments of Malet/Burma are gratuitous. It is here that one should take note of the original French publication of Brouillard au pont du Tolbiac in 1956, when the Algerian Revolution was two years old, and the subject of relations between the French and their then-subjects in North Africa was hardly a neutral one. If Malet had wandered far from his anarchist roots in becoming a detective novelist, he journeyed much further away from the Surrealists and the Trotskyists, as well as the anarchists, on the question of North African liberation. All three groups had a long history of supporting North African resistance to French imperialism. The Surrealists in France and the Spanish anarchists were both well-known for their solidarity in the 1920s with Muhammad Ibn ‘Abd El-Krim El-Khattabi, leader of the Rif Berbers in their armed struggle against the French and Spanish in Morocco. From the 1930s to the 1950s the Surrealists, anarchists, and one faction of the French Trotskyists (the Lambertistes) also supported the Algerian pan-Arabist Messali Hadj. In the 1950s the ‘Messalistes’ were known as the Mouvement National Algérien (MNA). The British historian Ian Birchall, who has written on the ex-anarchist, anti-Stalinist writer Victor Serge, has reviewed an important French volume on this topic, Les camarades des frères, trotskistes et libertaires dans la guerre d’Algérie by Sylvain Pattieu.2 According to the Pattieu account, French anarchists, who were more numerous than the Trotskyists, took the lead in supporting the Algerian revolutionaries at the beginning of the 1954-1962 conflict with France. Pierre Morain, a French anarchist, was imprisoned for publishing articles against the war. Later, the Trotskyist rivals of the Lambertistes, known as Frankistes — the competing leaders were Pierre Boussel, alias Lambert, and Pierre Frank — supported the Front de la Libération Nationale (FLN), the more powerful competitors of the MNA. The FLN, supported by the Egyptian nationalist dictator Gamal Abd Al-Nasr, murdered many MNA adherents in Algeria and France alike — an injustice for which the FLN, after years of political power in Algeria, has apologised. But the Frankist Trotskyists were active in transferring money collected by FLN cadres in France to the organization on the southern shore of the Mediterranean. Perhaps most importantly, the Surrealist André Breton, whom Malet had once idolised, was a major protagonist in the 38
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1960 publication of the Declaration of the 121, a statement defending the right of desertion from the French army as an alternative to combat in the Algerian war. The majority of the 121 were members of the surviving Surrealist movement, with some anarchists and syndicalists, associates of Jean-Paul Sartre, and other prominent cultural figures. The Declaration of the 121 was banned by the French authorities.3 It may be that the evolution of Léo Malet and his detective, Nestor Burma, from anarchism to Arabophobia merely reflected age, or changes in French society from the 1930s to the 1960s. One may also discern in the attitudes of Malet and Burma a variant of the proletarian racism that infected the socialist and anarchist movements in France and elsewhere through the last quarter of the 19th century and the period leading to the first world war. In addition, hostility to Arabs in France by an exanarchist anticipates the Islamophobia that has become widespread in Western liberal circles. It seems, nevertheless, more appropriate to perceive in this trajectory a vindication of the Surrealist dislike of detective fiction in general. Once Malet, the former revolutionary, created a sympathetic literary character that, whatever his background, stood on the side of the law, there was no going back. Had he survived, Rudolf Klement, with or without his typewriter, would probably have found himself on the other side of Malet’s last barricades. 1) Published by Rodopi, Amsterdam-New York, 2006. ‘Le cadavre exquis’ (‘The Exquisite Corpse’) was a game of conjoined words or images invented by the Surrealists. 2) On leftist support for ‘Abd El-Krim and Messali Hadj, see my monograph, Islam and Communism in the 20th Century: An Historical Survey, originally published in German as ‘Kommunismus und Islam im 20. Jahrhundert: Ein Historischer Überblick,’ in Jahrbuch für Historische Kommunismus-Forschung 2009, Aufbau, Berlin, and available as a free, downloadable .pdf in English at http://www.islamicpluralism.eu/PDFs/Islam_and_Communism.pdf and at http://www.islamicpluralism.org/documents/islam-communism.pdf. Also see the review in Revolutionary History (UK), v. 8, no. 4, 2004, by Ian Birchall, of Sylvain Pattieu, Les camarades des frères, trotskistes et libertaires dans la guerre d’Algérie, Ed. Syllepse, Paris, 2002. 3) The Declaration of the 121 is accessible in English at http://www.marxists.org/history/france/algerian-war/1960/manifesto-121.htm. Léo Malet’s typewriter (left to him by Rudolf Klement)
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Nestor Burma — a bibliography * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
120, rue de la Gare (1943) Nestor Burma contre (1945) L’homme au sang bleu (1945) Solution au cimetière (1946) Nestor Burma et le monstre (1946) Le cinquième procédé (1948) Coliques de plomb (1948) Gros plan du macchabée (1949) Les paletots sans manches (1949) Direction cimetièere (1951) Pas de veine avec le pendu (1952) Le soleil naît derrière le Louvre (1954) Des kilomètres de linceuls (1955) Fièvre au Marais (1955) La nuit de Saint-Germain-des-Prés (1955) Also published as: Le sapin pousse dans les caves * Les rats de Montsouris (1955) * M'as-tu vu en cadavre? (1956) * Corrida aux Champs-Élysées (1956) * Pas de bavards à la Muette (1956) * Brouillard au pont de Tolbiac (1956) * Les eaux troubles de Javel (1957) * Boulevard... ossements (1957) * Casse-pipe à la Nation (1957) * Micmac moche au Boul' Mich' (1957) * Du rébecca rue des Rosiers (1958) * L’envahissant cadavre de la plaine Monceau (1959) * Nestor Burma en direct (1962) * Nestor Burma revient au bercail (1967) * Drôle d'épreuve pour Nestor Burma (1968) * Un croque-mort nommé Nestor (1969) * Nestor Burma dans l’Île (1970) * Nestor Burma court la poupée (1971) * Les neiges de Montmartre (1974) * La femme sans enfant (1981) * Le Deuil en rouge (1981) * Une aventure inédite de Nestor Burma (1982) * Poste restante (1983) 40
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TRAVEN HYPOTHESES from THE DEATH SHIP Essay
Ernest Larsen “We have jails, and we have camps for people without papers.”1 The writer known as B. Traven deliberately created such a mystery, such a well-maintained series of apparently conflicting fictions about his identity, that, to this day, forty years after his death, this elaborate construction still overshadows his own extraordinary body of work. So successful was his aim to make it next to impossible ever to nail down who in fact he was, given his multiple aliases and back-stories, that his efforts in effect argue for the superior flexibility of fictive identities as opposed to the crudely autobiographical sketch of who we are that we perforce draw out of childhood, with all its awkwardness, rigidities, erasures and errors, or certainly over the cruder if superficially more Traven (Ret Marut) legible marks on the cards of identity most of us carry in our BScotland Yard mugshot wallets or handbags. Should it then surprise us, his readers, that the premise of Traven’s first novel The Death Ship is his take on the intractable modern problem of identity? The Death Ship’s protagonist/narrator is an American sailor who, not long after the end of the First World War, loses his passport and sailor’s card when his ship unexpectedly leaves port in Antwerp without him. Stripped of his papers, he is thereby stripped of legal access to a job or to residency. Repeatedly jailed and forcibly deported, even threatened with execution, he is shuttled from country to country. He is told: “In any civilized country he who has no passport is nobody. He does not exist for us or for anybody else…. If we want to, we can even hang you or shoot you or kill you like a louse.”2 Traven, it becomes clear, has no essential interest in the psychological dimension of the crisis of identity, which has long been the lifeblood of the bourgeois/modernist novel. Rigorously developing and updating historically and materially, the archetypal figure of the sailor, the ur-cosmopolite, the being among all others who exists ceaselessly to navigate the globe, Traven is committed to exploring how the closing and regulation of national borders in Europe in the aftermath of World War I constructed the non-identity of the sans-papiers — 41
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or, more accurately, the consequences of that construction. He is committed, that is, to examining the political dimensions of how identity is constructed and enforced. It is only a little short of astounding, in re-reading The Death Ship, that such questions of borders and papers, of nationalism and citizenship, that Traven seizes upon have become the central questions. As an undoubtedly prophetic master ironist Traven fights his way through these issues and inverts them, to strike at the core question: how does Capital identify itself? Identity is never, in Traven’s view, how one names oneself or who that mug is one sees staring back in the mirror: he takes all that at face value, so to speak. The official who says, to repeat, “In any civilized country, he who has no passport is nobody” must, he indicates, be taken as a true speaker, an enunciator of the Law, of Logos, in its extreme and yet ordinary capitalist/authoritarian/statist manifestation. The conclusion which Traven then draws out of this ordinary bureaucratic official’s assertion, and which he then develops for the rest of his novel, with all its manifold consequences, is that those who call themselves the “civilized,” the keepers and enforcers of the system of the Law, work at all times to keep at bay a deeply buried truth: yes, we say unto you, capital’s selfidentification as civilization should of course be taken with absolute seriousness, and much nodding of the head, just so long as one keeps in mind at all times that civilisation is no more than barbarism — with a makeover. No sentimentalist, Traven does not exempt culture — and certainly not the novel — from this charge. The opening pages of the book self-consciously carve out a distinction between what The Death Ship will attempt to produce as opposed to what the popular genre of the sea adventure or romance (whether emanating from high culture or its less exalted brethren) has long trafficked in: “The fact is that the song of the real and genuine hero of the sea has never yet been sung. Why? Because the true song would be too cruel and too strange… the true story of the sea is anything but pleasant in the accepted sense. The life of the real heroes has always been cruel, made up of hard work, of treatment worse than the animals of the cargo get, and often of the most noble sacrifices… Even the hairy apes are opera-singers looking for a piece of lingerie.”3
The scorn heaped on O’Neill’s 1922 play may seem like a throwaway but the narrator, contesting the claims of even the closest (in time and in subject) approximation of what Traven 42
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is after, is in fact sharply rejecting the playwright’s expressionist technique — still regarded as advanced, if not avant-garde when Traven made his pointed dismissal. In scene after scene, O’Neill’s protagonist Yank, a brutally exploited stoker like Traven’s hero, is given to escalating emotional outbursts that first displace and then discount the potentially transformative role tentatively accorded to the I.W.W in the schematic storyline. Traven refuses the privilege Das Totenschiff that O’Neill’s expressionism accords to the individual psyche. (1959) Horst Bucholz O’Neill’s screechily colloquial opera-singing (art-iness trumps politics, yet again) fatally weakens his dramaturgy — Yank ends up in the arms of a gorilla — symbolism that Traven obviously regards as laughable. But if the then cutting-edge expressionism is found to be wanting, how then does Traven put together the verses of his “true song?” The Death Ship, published in 1926 by a leftist German book club, quickly became an international bestseller, with editions soon appearing in eight languages. The first English edition, translated from the German, published by Chatto & Windus, did not appear until 1934 and later the same year in the U.S. the somewhat longer Knopf edition was published, from a manuscript written in English, according to Traven’s editor, Bernard Smith. At first glance, the book seems to be a model (or perhaps the model) proletarian novel, written in the first-person, from the point of view of an American sailor, it sardonically targets the state, nationalism, the inhuman ascendancy of bureaucracy, the brutality and rapacity of international capitalism, in other words, the whole rancid she-bang. The able-bodied seaman, Traven says, has disappeared with the industrialisation of commercial seafaring: “A modern freighter meant to make money for the company is only a floating machine…real sailors wouldn’t know what to do with a modern ship…The A.B., the able-bodied sailor…today he is just a plain worker tending a certain machine.”4
Therefore the whole, somewhat sodden category of the sea romance has become functionally obsolete. The Death Ship is thus offered, says its narrator, as a corrective — a corrective unsuited for the straightforward realism common to proletarian literature of the era: it’s a “song” promised to be both too cruel and too strange. In other words, the true story resists being truly told but the narrator (in some yet to be defined sense a projection of the writer) is going to tell it anyway. It’s no accident on this count that Traven all but 43
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avoids the word ‘story’ in favor of the word ‘song’: Traven constructs a narrative that in Book I (approximately the first third of the book) more closely resembles the verses and refrain of a song than a story. The real in Traven’s description — too cruel and too strange to permit its representation to be typified with a beginning, some sort of middle, and some semblance of closure — is instead patterned as a series of variations on a theme (verse by verse, in that sense), as our sailor is bounced from country to country, with what I’m calling a refrain (in each country, each situation), which is in each case the narrator’s analysis/commentary on what has happened. The self-consciousness of Traven’s language, as well as his nonchalant dismissal of his literary forebears, are vital aspects of the reach of his effort beyond mere realism, beyond mere romance, or mere expressionism. His song, his version of realism, encompasses reflective discourse on this story that needs to be told, since no one has ever bothered to tell it before and because the material conditions of the possible story (of the A.B., in this case) have irremediably and categorically altered, as noted above. With his rigorous employment of analytical refrain, Traven never allows a story to tell itself, to remain self-contained, instead every story, every episode, even every anecdote immediately generates an explanatory discourse, conversation, or rumination of some kind. For instance: “The state cannot make use of human beings. It would cease to exist. Human beings only make trouble. Men cut out of cardboard do not make trouble.”5 “It looks, sir, as if you would even doubt the fact that I was born at all.” “Right, my man. Think it silly or not. I doubt your birth as long as you have no certificate of your birth.”6 “I am not to blame. It is the system of which I am the slave.”7 “Nationality?” “What a question! It has been testified to by my consuls that I no longer have such a thing as a nationality, since there is not the slightest proof that I was born.”8
Traven’s self-conscious use of such rhetoric that steps outside (or rather inside and outside) the movement of the story (as the refrain of a folk song often steps outside the movement of the verses to comment or elaborate) effectively blocks or at least interrupts the ability of the less-conscious reader to identify emotionally (psychologically) with the unfolding fate 44
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of the sailor narrator. Instead the reader finds herself grappling with (and perhaps identifying with) the political resonances and implications of the story. In this, Traven finds his own path to the alienation effect of his contemporary Brecht — who, of course, also used songs and song-patterns to structure his plays and to create levels of commentary. Unlike Brecht, Traven never theorised his development of this resource, which has, I suspect, somewhat retarded the level of critical reception that a book with the obvious complexity of The Death Ship should have received. There’s probably also a political dimension to this as well: Traven, as an anarchist, never had the capacious apparatus of Marxist literary theory and practice as available support. Only once in the course of the novel does the text disclose the narrator’s name: Gerard Gales. This one, relatively minor, detail calls apt attention to the relation of Traven’s style of narration to his material. Let’s call this relation, for the moment, hypothetical realism. It is realistic in this context for the narrator to have a name, a recognisably “American” name, but it is, I would suggest, hypothetically productive for this name to be disappeared in favour of an anonymity that is productively typical — in this way Traven can have his cake and eat it too. Traven attempts, I believe, to re-ground or to foreground the hypothetical aspect of fiction, fiction as a production of knowledge about the latent, underexplored, or insufficiently imagined potentialities of existence. In language of an unmitigated directness, Traven constructs his sailor narrator’s unrelenting struggle (even at the very end of the novel he’s still in deep water) as wholly paradigmatic of the fate of the worker under the capitalist system. He even pushes that a bit further by proposing (another of the narrator’s unproven hypotheses) that the Death Ship has been on the seas for several thousand years (at least since the Phoenicians ruled the Mediterranean, he says, at one point). This playful (serious) assertion thus broadens Traven’s critical reach beyond modern state capitalism — to the gory history of authoritarian statist formations—playfully (seriously). Eventually, after being shoved across one national border after another in Europe, Gales reluctantly becomes a stoker aboard the Yorikke, which is possible for him san-papiers, because the Yorikke is a death ship — a vessel planned by its corporate owners to be scuttled and sunk at sea in order to collect on a fraudulent and exorbitant insurance claim. The 45
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terms? “Any man coming aboard now is regarded as having signed on under the emergency rules — a ship under weigh with crew incomplete. The skipper now has the right to sign on as many men as he wishes without being compelled to take them to the consul…This, by the way, settles once and for all the question of how the skunk survived the flood. He hopped on when the ark was already under sail, leaving Noah no time to sign him on properly with the American consul, and, owing to international regulations, the skunk could not be thrown overboard, but had to be signed on under the emergency rules. That’s why. Because these regulations are so old that long before Adam came to life, sailors who had sold their sailor’s cards signed on that way to get away from a hot spot.”9
From this quote alone (I could have chosen from dozens of others, perhaps, with a similar rhetorical bite and structure) we can get a flavor of Traven’s easygoing conflation of now and then — history and myth — that hypothesizes the mental and physical structures of the apparent permanence of the rule of authority. Perhaps more startling is the pretty direct suggestion, given the metaphoric reality of the death ship as a ship of state, of the operative efficiency of the state of emergency — in which the skipper, the head of state, legalizes his own illegal actions, willy-nilly, at sea. Clearly, Giorgio Agamben has read his Traven — or is Traven Agamben avant le lettre? Written in the long, tumultuous, aftermath of the first world war, The Death Ship’s sharp-edged, sometimes antic, and unashamedly didactic satire on the human consequences of nationalism surely must have made The Death Ship seem like a topical novel. And yet today we are becoming more aware, moment-by-moment, of the terrifying consequences for anyone who is forced to attempt to live, let alone merely to survive, san-papiers. In some ways that distinction between what is survival as opposed to what might be said to be living is the crux not just of The Death Ship but also of all of Traven’s fiction. Certainly, the six Jungle novels explore that issue at the conjoined levels of collective misery, collective struggle, and revolution. The first set piece of the second part of the novel describes what it takes to be a stoker aboard the Yorikke. While it takes until page 164 (“There was the sea. That blue glorious sea which I loved better than I could ever think of loving a jane.”10) in the paperback edition I have for the sailor to experience life on the open seas, the narrative question of this voyage is: how will he survive? 46
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The Yorikke experience, the narrator tells us, is not exceptional: it is common to Capital, it is Capital at work, how it names itself, or as we are forced to say today, how it brands itself. The Yorikke experience (alas, poor Yorick) is Traven’s parable of the immiseration of labor, which in his telling has no necessary limit and has a global reach. Where Marx saw the ever-increasing immiseration of the workers as a revolutionary factor, Traven, while acknowledging other essential Marxist insights (for instance: since they have nothing to trade except their labour power, workers always remain the most vulnerable class) does not follow this hypothesis, if that’s what it is: “Have I any right to despise the company which runs this ship and which degrades her crew to the lowest kind of treatment in order to keep down expenses and make competition possible? I have no right to hatred. If I had jumped over the railing, nobody could have made me work in his hell. I did not jump, and by not doing it I forsook my prime right to be my own master and my own lord. Since I did not take my fate into my own hands, I had no right to refuse to be used as a slave. Why do I permit myself to be tortured? Because I have hope, which is the blessing, the sin, and the curse of mankind. I hope to have a chance to come back to life again.”11
Here, as always, the narrator, without missing a beat in the song, generalises his situation. Hope (which we in the U.S. heard so much about during the last election campaign) becomes a collectively galvanizing and collectively delusionary emotion. Further: “You could never make a man who had sailed the Yorikke believe those dreadful stories about slaves and slave-ships, no sir. Never had slaves been packed as closely as we were. Slaves could never have worked as hard as we had to. Never could slaves be as hungry and as tired and as down and out as we always were. Slaves had their festivals, their singing, their dances, their weddings, their beloved women, their children, their religious merriment, and hope. We had nothing. Senseless drunk and a tenminute girl for half a peseta were all the recreation we ever had… “Slaves were valuable goods, paid for in real money…. “Sailors, on the other hand are slaves that are not bought and that cannot be sold…. “Sailors are certainly not slaves. They are free citizens, and if they have established residences, they are even entitled to vote for the election of a new sheriff; yes sir. Sailors are free laborers, they are free, starved, tired, jobless, all their limbs broken, their ribs smashed, their feet and arms and backs burned… “He is the master of the world, who can make his coins out of 47
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the hope of slaves.12 “In hell devils have to live.13
Traven, it is abundantly clear, cannot help but identify with the immiserated worker. (In the Jungle novels, he writes his way out of the hopelessness of hope.) None of the sailors — from all the countries in the world — aboard the Yorikke (where English, interestingly enough, is the master language) are known by their own ‘real’ names. They make every effort not to reveal their ‘true’ names. Instead, “by one of the great ironies of which there existed so many aboard the Yorikke,”14 they are called and call themselves by their nationality — except that so often do not they want to be identified with their country of origin either. Thus the all-but-nameless Gales becomes the Egyptian. In this way, among the many others than I have, for argument’s sake, been calling Traven’s hypothetical realism the novel moves from hypothesis to paradigm. This movement, which is not truly in place until the every end, the last word of a novel (as one writes, as one reads it, talks about it to others, and perhaps even one day writes about it) is what one hopes for in writing a political novel (keeping firmly in mind the irony attached to the word “hope”). At its best, the solidity of the paradigmatic (as it coincides with the architecture of the novel, sliding into port, or perhaps into dry-dock) confronts you with such force that you cannot offer any more lame excuses, propose any delays or even think about anything except how the whole barbaric shebang has to be scuttled asap. Notes: 1.01B.Traven, The Death Ship (Brooklyn, New York: Lawrence Hill Books, 1991), p. 18. 2.01Ibid. p.23. 3.01Ibid. p.5. 4.01Ibid. p.4. 5.01Ibid. p.33. 6.01Ibid. p.67. 7.01Ibid. p.70. 8.01Ibid. p.78. 9.01Ibid. p.145. 10.0Ibid. p.164. 11.0Ibid. p.183. 12.0Ibid. p.209. 13.0Ibid. p.182. 14.0Ibid. p.238. 48
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BETWEEN LIBEL AND HOAX Review of Miquel Mir Serra: Entre el roig i el negre [Between red and black], Barcelona, Edicions 62, 2006 [in Catalan]; Diario de un pistolero anarquista [Journal of an anarchist gunman], Barcelona, Destino, 2009 [in Spanish].
Stephen Schwartz
In the 20th century, the craft of writing fiction was transformed. Beginning, according to many authors and critics, with the fusion of historical record and imagination in the works of Jorge Luis Borges, fiction absorbed facts and recognisable personalities from collective memory and documentation. But it did so in a manner completely different from that of the traditional ‘historical novel’. The latter form involved composition of a narrative based on the known lives of renowned personalities. The new fiction borrowed the names and reputations of enigmatic, modern figures and presented them as protagonists in fanciful, satirical, and otherwise weird, but effective, textual inventions. With the emergence of this new school of literature, a strict division between the novelist and the historian became attenuated. Today, the Eastern European writer best known in the West may be Danilo Kiš [1935-89], who made his deepest mark with the admirable and affecting A Tomb For Boris Davidovich [first ed. Zagreb 1976, first UK ed. 1985]. The child of a Hungarian Jewish father killed in the Holocaust, and a mother from Montenegro, Kiš wrote in Serbian and was considered a Yugoslav, rather than an ethnic-specific author. A Tomb For Boris Davidovich included two narratives derived from important, but, at the time, neglected historical episodes. One story in the volume, titled ‘The Sow That Eats Her Farrow’, described the fate of Brian Goold-Verschoyle, a member of the Anglo-Irish gentry born in County Donegal in 1912. Drawn into Communist activities by his brother Hamilton Neil Goold-Verschoyle, a fanatical Stalinist and later translator of the playwright Bertolt Brecht, Brian GooldVerschoyle was recruited for Soviet espionage service, then went to Russia and trained in radio operation. He volunteered 49
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to fight in Spain, but apparently grew disillusioned by the Soviet treatment in Spain of the anti-Stalinist but Marxist Partit Obrer d’Unificació Marxista (POUM), in the ranks of which George Orwell fought. In 1937, Brian Goold-Verschoyle was lured aboard a ship in Barcelona harbour on the pretext of repairing a radio, was kidnapped by Soviet agents, and transported to Soviet Russia. There he was consigned to the gulag. The circumstances of Brian Goold-Verschoyle’s fate — aside from the despicably Brechtian fact that his own brother remained an extreme Stalinist and denouncer of ‘Trotskyites’ until his own death in 1987 — remain obscure. The longer story, for which Kiš’s classic is named, recounts a very lightly fictionalised ‘life’ of a Bolshevik revolutionary and victim of Stalin, Boris Davidovich Novsky. In what might seem authentically Borgesian fashion, the tale begins with a reference to a book, the Granat Encyclopedia, said to include ‘246 authorized biographies of great men and participants in the Revolution’. But Novsky’s name, we are told, is missing from this source. Further, Kiš writes, ‘in his commentary on this encyclopedia, Haupt notes that all the important figures of the Revolution are represented, and laments only the “surprising and inexplicable absence of Podvoysky”’. Even Haupt, we are told, ignores Novsky, ‘whose role in the Revolution was more significant than that of Podvoysky.’ Here, in a manner undetectable to the great majority of his readers, in Yugoslavia as well as the rest of the world, Kiš trumped Borges. For unlike the noted ‘Tlön encyclopedia’ invented by Borges, the Granat Encyclopedia is real, the biographies are real, Haupt is real, and Podvoysky was, as Haupt noted, inexplicably omitted from the volume. The Granat Encyclopedia was a reference work famous in the Russia of the 1920s. Its biographical essays of the main Bolsheviks have been translated and published in English under the title Makers of the Russian Revolution: Biographies of Bolshevik Leaders, edited by Georges Haupt, a French historian. (In reality, Nikolai Ilyich Podvoysky [1880-1948] was obscure but not unimportant; he was a member of the original committee that organized the Bolshevik insurrection in St. Petersburg in 1917, and later served as an assistant military commissar under Trotsky.) The Granat biographies are known today only to the most assiduous researchers on the Bolsheviks, but they are 50
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extremely vivid, thorough, and fascinating to read. Kiš, who seems to have stumbled on them, was obviously charmed by their literary qualities, for his invented protagonist, Novsky — and, rest assured, there was no such person — is assembled out of details drawn from the Granat profiles. In this way, Kiš arrived at an extraordinary creation: by ‘lifting’ the most characteristic details from the lives of the Bolsheviks, he created a collective memorial for a whole generation of radicals who were utterly destroyed by the regime they had brought into being. The effects of this long massacre were felt throughout Central and Eastern Europe for decades; put bluntly, being a revolutionary of whatever ideological type in that part of the world was very different from the experience of radical leftists in Western Europe or North America. Virtually every significant aspect of the life of Novsky is based on fact, making a continuous counterposition to Borges. As Kiš seems to be telling us, the inventions of Borges are nothing compared to the conceits of verifiable history. While Borges is occasionally unnerving, Kiš is, finally, terrifying. Thus, Kiš’s Novsky uses pseudonyms employed by the actual Bolsheviks, such as ‘Parabellum’, named after a pistol, and made famous by the Polish Bolshevik Karl Berngardovich Radek [1995-1939], born Sobelsohn. Novsky becomes ‘a functionary of the powerful union of Jewish hatmakers in Paris’, an item borrowed from the life of the Soviet trade unionist Solomon Abramovich Lozovsky [1878-1952], born Dridzo. His lover is a beautiful woman revolutionary, Zinaida Maysner, based on an easily identified personage, Larisa Reisner [1895-1926], who was the companion of a Soviet diplomat, Fyodor Fyodorovich Raskolnikov [1892-1939], born Ilyin. Kiš’s Maysner falls for A. D. Karamazov, as the author’s method becomes increasingly explicit. Reisner, a kind of Bolshevik amazon, died young (her double, Maysner, is said to have expired before thirty, of disease in a faroff place). Radek was a victim of the show trials of the mid-’30s, Lozovsky was killed in Stalin’s final anti-Jewish purge, and Raskolnikov, who defected to France, was probably murdered by Soviet agents. The fate of Boris Davidovich Novsky is appropriately dreadful. Kiš’s Boris Davidovich is a story about history and its effect on Central and East Europeans, but it is also an examination of a life lived in the service of an esoteric philosophy. In this regard Kiš is truest to his mentor, Borges, for Kiš, like Borges, was also obsessed with Kabbalah, or Jewish 51
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mysticism. In the Western cities that Borges evokes, occult wisdom is benevolent; as others have noted, the ‘universal history of infamy’ that the Argentine genius spun out seldom exceeds the criminality of pickpockets and petty swindlers. In Kiš’s half of Europe, which is also that of Lenin and Hitler, Stalin and Tito, the Croat autocrat Franjo Tudjman and the Serb tyrant Slobodan Miloševic, infamy was and is deeper and more lethal. These concerns also inform the author’s Encyclopedia of the Dead.1 Such fiction works comprise, in their way, authentic secret histories. A more recent, and more famous exemplar of this genre is the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño [1953-2003]. Bolaño has become a worldwide phenomenon in book sales. A snarky note in the Financial Times of May 23-23, 2009, however, describing the cover of his longest work, 2666, issued posthumously [Spanish ed. 2004, UK 2009], alleged that many of its purchasers would not “have time to immerse themselves in Bolaño’s 900-page epic.” 2666 brings together a search by a group of foreign literary critics for an elusive writer named Archimboldi, allegedly living in Mexico, with deadpan, horrifying accounts of the recent (and continuing) murders of young women in the northern Mexican border city of Ciudad Juárez (called Santa Teresa in the novel). Unlike Borges, who is widely and incorrectly perceived as a man of the right, Bolaño was a former Trotskyist, and his works present a remarkable combination of clever fictional strategies and the hideous realities he and his revolutionary comrades faced in Latin America. The global success of his work could be described as the literary triumph, or ‘revenge’, of Trotskyism. One of his first selections translated into English, Distant Star [Spanish ed. 1996, UK 2004] is a deeply unsettling description of the interference of authoritarian police spies with cultural life in Chile after the overthrow of Salvador Allende in 1973. Bolaño spun out a clever work, Nazi Literature in the Americas [Sp. ed. 1996, UK 2010], which purported to describe, in encyclopedic form, a totalitarian genre of writing extending into the present century — entirely invented, although like Kiš, Bolaño inserted real personages into his narrative. Curiously, some of his ‘Nazi littérateurs’ write science fiction and could be said to partake of the spirit, before they became known, of the Islamophobic and quasipornographic books of the French writer who calls himself Michel Houellebecq. 52
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Another of Bolaño’s works, The Savage Detectives [Sp. ed. 1998, UK 2009], is a slapstick description of a journey to various countries, as well as around northern Mexico, by some Mexican poets hoping to locate the last surviving member of a leftist and avant-garde movement prominent in their country the 1920s; the ‘literary quest in the borderlands’ as a basic plot device was replicated in 2666. The enthusiasm for Bolaño among foreign readers, leaving aside the sneering comment of the FT, is, one must aver, somewhat difficult to understand. Few individuals without an extensive knowledge of Mexican culture can imagine who the Mexican poets denounced prolifically by Bolaño, or the 1920s leftist avant-garde movement known as the Estridentistas, mentioned in the book, were or are. Even less comprehensible to non-Mexicans would presumably be why anybody would, as in Bolaño’s book, wander around the world and across the Mexican desert — once the scene of the climactic strike at Cananea in 1906, stimulated by the anarchist Flores Magón brothers — searching for traces of the long-vanished female poet Cesárea Tinajero. The latter is associated with a one-issue literary journal called Caborca, named for a Sonoran town. The Savage Detectives also includes a vignette of the Mexican poet Verónica Volkow, who happens to be the great-granddaughter of Leon Trotsky, and closely resembles him, but is well-known for her aversion to being introduced as such. Volkow has dedicated a fine poem to the late Russo-Mexican painter Vlady [1920-2005], born Vladimir Viktorovich Kibalchich-Russakov, and son of the Russo-Belgian anarchist and novelist, Victor Serge [1890-1947], born Kibalchich. In my view, the work of Bolaño, especially that produced in his last decade, is best understood as a colossal parody of the Latin American literary ‘boom’, and particularly of writers like Gabriel García Márquez, who evoked a paradisiacal HispanoAmerican landscape of dream, fantasy, and revolutionary aspirations. While Anglo-American readers soaked up these works like sponges filling with water, and may have bought and paged through Bolaño believing he embraced the same, now-banal ‘magic realism’, the panorama of Latin America offered by the Chilean author is hellish. Instead of romance, heroism, and leftism, his books project the true essence of life from Mexico southward: brutality, pretention, and fascism. Bolaño himself told an interviewer that Nazi Literature in the Americas dealt with ‘the world of the ultra right, but much of 53
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the time, in reality, I’m talking about the left... When I’m talking about Nazi writers in the Americas, in reality I’m talking about the world, sometimes heroic but much more often despicable, of literature in general’. Bolaño cited, as forebears in his fabrication of an encyclopedia, Borges, whose complete works he acknowledged for its decisive influence on him, as well as the Mexican writer Alfonso Reyes and the French author Marcel Schwob. The innovative blending of history with fiction attracted other late 20th century authors of talent aside from Kiš and Bolaño. In Spanish, this process of synthesis was, after Borges, perhaps most brilliantly embodied in the work of Guillermo Cabrera Infante [1929-2005], whose Tres tristes tigres [Sp. ed. 1967, US-UK 1971] was published in English as Three Trapped Tigers. When his work first appeared in English Cabrera was compared, in a patronising fashion, with Joyce, although Cabrera was more pointed, political, and openly satirical in his work. While Joyce, in Finnegans Wake, seems to have been partially inspired by the polyglot culture of Habsburg-ruled Trieste, Cabrera’s voices were those of the streets of La Habana. Joyce’s Ulysses, with its episode in the Dublin Nighttown of brothels, appears restrained when compared with Cabrera’s riffs from the vice-ridden sidewalks of Cuba’s capital. Cabrera, who emigrated from Castro’s Cuba, was an irrepressible punster and manipulator of languages, surpassing Joyce in his irreverence, and included in Tres tristes tigres a remarkable sequence of literary burlesques on Trotsky’s death, as recounted in the styles of Cuba’s most famous 20th century authors. Also a film critic with the pseudonym Guillermo Cain, Cabrera had the distinction of writing the screenplay, under that name, for the 1971 movie Vanishing Point, centred on a bizarre road pursuit across America. Vanishing Point has gained amazing endurance beyond that of its driverprotagonist, as a ‘gear-head’ picture beloved by car fans, and is even mentioned favorably in Quentin Tarantino’s 2007 grotesquerie, Death Proof. Few enthusiasts or commentators on Vanishing Point seem to have perceived in it a lampoon of Michelangelo Antonioni’s grandiose and stilted 1970 film about American youth rebellion, Zabriskie Point, which has almost no audience today – in contrast with Antonioni’s remarkably fresh 1966 release Blow-Up, based on a short 54
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story by another Spanish-language literary experimenter, the Argentine Julio Cortázar [1913-84]. More conventionally than Cabrera, but with equal emotive force, the Barcelona-born author Juan Marsé [b. 1933], in his powerful Si te dicen que caí (The Fallen) [Sp. ed 1973, UK-US 1979], incorporated the revolutionaries of the POUM, including a spectral Orwell, and an invented niece of that party’s leader Andreu Nin into his work. The book offers a portrayal of anarchists and POUMists attempting to survive in the Falangist atmosphere of Barcelona after the defeat of the Spanish Republic. Si te dicen que caí was released as a film in 1989, directed by the outstanding pro-anarchist director Vicente Aranda Ezquerra.2 As translated exactly, the title of the book and film, If They Tell You I Fell, is drawn from the lyrics of the Falangist anthem Cara al sol [Facing the Sun], and is obviously sarcastic, but the content of the work is finally depressing and even shocking. Both the translation of Marsé’s classic into English and a currently-available dubbed English DVD version of the film (retitled Aventis, an abbreviation of aventuras or ‘adventures’ pursued by Barcelona children), miss major elements that only Barcelonese or others who intimately know the city and its revolutionary history would recognize. Aventis is told in flashback from the 1970s and 1980s, but is mainly set in 1940, during the Stalin-Hitler pact. The leading characters, including an anarchist resistance circle, refer repeatedly to ‘the Chinese’ as enemies equal to the Francoists, and even as allied with the latter against the radical resistance. ‘Xinesos’ in Catalan, or ‘chinos’ in Spanish, was a nickname given to Soviet agents in Barcelona by their revolutionary opponents. Newsreels in a movie house show Franco meeting with Hitler, and Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov parleying with German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. The film clearly suggests that during the Stalin-Hitler pact the Communists and Francoists cooperated in Spain to hunt down and kill anti-Stalinists — ‘the Chinese and the fascists have teamed up to kill us, but we’re alive’, an anarchist declares. A main theme of both the book and film is the concealment from Falangist police of a POUM soldier, Marcos, played on the screen by Antonio Banderas. But Marcos is equally afraid of the ‘Chinese’ — he believes he is still ‘remembered in the Kremlin’. References to ‘the Chinese’ would be incomprehensible to a foreign audience, as would remarks about the Barcelona working55
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class district called the ‘Barri xinès’ —‘Chinatown’ — and Francoist suppression of Catalan folk dancing (la sardana). In the street, the hidden Marcos is described in the children’s ‘aventis’ as a Franco soldier who hid during the revolutionary period and has yet to learn that his side has won, or a Soviet aviator. But Marcos himself is obsessed by the memory of a young woman, Aurora Nin, played by the popular Spanish actress and singer Victoria Abril. The fictional Aurora Nin is presented as a relative of Andreu Nin, murdered by Soviet agents in 1937, and whose slaying is also mentioned in the film. Aurora Nin calls herself Ramona, and has been reduced to defilement in sex shows and to open prostitution, although pregnant. The symbolism of Barcelona’s maltreated soul, degraded but fecund with a reborn self-awareness, is obvious and deeply affecting, especially as presented by Abril. Marcos is not alone in hunting Aurora Nin — his brother Java has been induced to search her out, but must perform sexually with her while watched by a Francoist voyeur with whom she has convoluted links. Further, various other individuals claim they want to provide for her charitably but clearly seek her for her revolutionary past, which is too-briefly depicted. In an authentic star turn, Abril plays both the young Aurora Nin/Ramona, and an adult prostitute, Menchu, at one point with both at the same bar. ‘Aventis’ include streetchildren’s games imitative of Francoist tortures, while the anarchists carry out jewellery thefts and plan other attacks on the regime. Aurora Nin’s fate as a prostitute explicitly refers to the wartime revolutionary effort to end the sex trade among women, and the post-war anarchists raid a whorehouse. No film more eloquently portrays the fidelity of Catalan popular memory to the true history of the POUM in the Spanish Revolution, after the party was internationally libelled for halfa-century by the Communists, as traitors to the Spanish left. In Barcelona today, a street is named for Nin, and a plaza for Orwell. Currently, fiction writers of far lesser talent than Cabrera, Kiš, Marsé, and Bolaño also may claim the right to appropriate history for their own purposes. A Bosnian-born resident of Chicago, Aleksandar Hemon, has claimed that he writes in English after having learned it on his own, in the tradition of Conrad and Nabokov, but his work is derivative and grossly imitative of that of Kiš.3 Other abusers of literary privilege include the American fiction writer and occasional unethical 56
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journalist William T. Vollman, who has managed to appropriate the work of Kiš to himself, but whose moment as a virtuoso of the self-referential seems to have passed. In the Times Literary Supplement of January 29, 2010, reviewer Michael Saler commented, ‘The reader’s patience may also be tried by Vollmann’s self-indulgence. He is shamelessly repetitive (“In our introduction . . . the point was already made, and out of laziness I quote myself verbatim that . . .”, and so on). He is also reluctant to leave out any of his research: “I don’t care to exclude any detail; everything is precious to me”… Early on, he provides a “WARNING OF IMPENDING ARIDITY”, where he apologizes in advance for an onslaught of statistics; later he writes, “If you wish, I can make this chapter even more tedious”. And if he wished, he could also make it less’. An equally pedestrian colleague of Hemon and Vollman, as an American, but writing in the crime genre, is James Ellroy, whose books, based on historical incidents, are replete with anachronisms, gruesome nonsense, and mis-readings of the past. The distance between the achievements of Kiš and Bolaño and the nullity of Hemon or Vollman is simple to grasp. The former write out of genuine horror at the atrocities of the 20th century, ranging from the Stalinist purges and the Holocaust to the repeated bloodlettings, both political and ‘merely’ criminal, in Latin America. The latter mimic a style, but cannot reflect such tragic consequences in their work, since Vollman, as an American, can only observe violence in the manner of a voyeur, and Hemon missed the Bosnian war. Ellroy, who seeks to personalise spectacular crimes unto himself, fails to achieve this questionable goal. Kiš and Bolaño were compelled to write as a memorial for those martyred by tyranny; the rest are motivated by sales alone. *** At first glance, the books of Miquel Mir Serra might seem imitative of Kiš and Bolaño, in emerging from the background of atrocities committed by the revolutionary forces in Barcelona during the social conflict of 1936-37. But finally, he has much more in common with the contemporary icons of easy success, except that one must grant, at least, to Hemon, Vollman, and Ellroy that they show no signs of a political agenda. Hemon stupidly idolizes Stalinist spies, Vollman has exalted crude torments inflicted on the innocent, and Ellroy luxuriates in cruelty and corruption. But none of them are 57
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sophisticated enough to imagine a political effect for their books. Mir Serra, by contrast, has a demonstrable and spurious political goal: to insult the memory of the Spanish anarchists. It is never stated in either Entre el roig i el negre [Between red and black] or Diario de un pistolero anarquista [Journal of an anarchist gunman] whether these volumes are novels, fictionalised history, or serious historiography. The Catalan volume, however, is listed in a series of novels issued by its publisher. What are they, then? Nothing but primitive pamphlets dressed up as literature. Mir Serra is described as an employee of the municipal archives in the Catalan city of Girona and local president of the post-Franco remnant of the Esquerra [ERC or Catalan Republican Left]. He has introduced his books with a series of extravagant allegations. In an article published by the Madrid daily El Mundo,4 Mir Serra was quoted and described as follows, ‘“I have possession of 80 percent of the documentation produced by the FAI [Iberian Anarchist Federation]”, which once it is examined and catalogued by Mir, he will provide to a Catalan archival institution, affiliated with the Generalitat [regional government], without stating which. The bulk of the information collected by Miquel Mir comes from the files that at the end of the Spanish war were transferred to Toulouse, from where they were sent to London after the Nazi invasion of France. With the end of the Second World War, while a great part of the documentation of the CNT [National Confederation of Labour] was sent to the anarchist archive in Amsterdam [i.e. the collections of the International 1936: CNT-FAI poster Institute for Social History or IISH], that of the FAI remained in a London apartment, given the highly sensitive character of the information it contained, among other things, the lists of militia members who formed the control patrols [patrullas de control — i.e. the voluntary public order patrols established in Barcelona after the revolution of July 1936]. Miquel Mir found this material in the 19 July, 1936: barricades in Barcelona London apartment. Part of this documentation is now made public in Diario de un pistolero anarquista, where it refers to the conduct of the said control patrols’. There are serious problems with this account. First, archival materials, no matter where they are found, are not sunken treasure to be 58
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claimed as booty by whoever stumbles over them. If Mir Serra really located archives of the FAI in London, he was obligated, if he was a serious historian or archivist, to return them to living members of the organisation or their appointed executors. He admits this in the first few pages of Entre el roig i el negre, where he briefly alludes to the Francisco Ascaso Abadía (1 Apr 1901-20 Jul 1936) return of CNT and other archives seized by Franco’s troops at the end of the war. The restitution of these and other documents was accomplished after the passage of more than 30 years following Franco’s death in 1975. Most of the holdings appropriated by the Franco forces, including those of the Generalitat, the CNT, and the Jewish Community of Barcelona, were not restored to their rightful owners until 2006.5 Second, the remainder of the CNT-FAI archives, i.e. Francisco Ascaso excepting those captured by the Franco forces, were transferred in 1939 first to the Paris branch of the IISH, then to Oxford, and finally to the IISH main facility in Amsterdam.6 In his books Mir Serra dispenses with this apparent imposture and produces another: he declares that in 2003, he was introduced to a Catalan called Maurici, otherwise unidentified, Above: 20 July, 1936, who had been a youth during the Spanish Revolution. ‘Maurici’, according to Mir Serra, had been an assistant to one Below: last known photo of Francisco ‘Josep Serra’, the supposed ‘anarchist gunman’. Mir Serra Ascaso (left). claims that in 1938 ‘Josep Serra’ (identified only as ‘José S.’ or ‘Josep’ in his books but with a family name disclosed in mass media), after committing many murders and robberies, made plans to escape Spain. ‘With the aid of an English brigadista’, i.e. a Communist member of the International Brigades, identified only as Steve, Mir Serra writes in Diario de un pistolero anarquista that ‘Josep Serra’ had ‘succeeded in removing from the country, in a clandestine manner, numerous chests filled with valuable items 19 July, 1936 requisitioned from churches and bourgeois homes’. This fabulous tale continues, ‘Thanks to Maurici I [Mir Serra] could have access to an extremely rich documentation on the activities of the anarchist patrols in Barcelona during the civil war. Among the papers… were to be found long lists with the addresses and names for houses in which searches and arrests had been conducted; there were also inventories of 59
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Aug. 1936: Milicianos entering Villamesías, Cáceres
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requisitioned goods, belonging to churches and to wealthy families in Barcelona… A part of this documentation was still to be found in the London apartment’. José S. and his Communist accomplice purportedly sold the religious art and other looted works, and the ‘FAI gunman’, according to Mir Serra, died in 1974. Curiously, this flamboyant person, whose Communist associate serves a pretext in these books to praise the International Brigades, remained unknown to the London CNT milieu. In Diario de un pistolero anarquista, Mir Serra then springs his most sensational revelation: ‘amid so many documents and notebooks, one element shined with a light of its own, above all the rest: a black covered notebook in which José had written, in pencil and with uncertain spelling, once exiled in London, the atrocious chronicle of those years’, i.e. the revolutionary period. ‘This journal is reproduced in its entirety here… in which its information and that provided by the remaining documents is articulated in narrative form’. Yet of all the lists and other crucial data found in the London trove, none is reproduced in either of Mir Serra’s books. Instead, Diario de un pistolero anarquista comprises 158 pages of historical summation by Mir Serra, covering the biography of José S. from birth in 1893 to his emigration to England, followed by 28 pages of the ‘diary’, which seems hardly enough to justify the title of the Spanish edition. Then, 84 pages of ‘documents’ that are either gratuitous or irrelevant, but none of which refer to the shadowy assassin. In Diario de un pistolero anarquista three muddy pages from the ‘diary’ are reproduced as photographs, with five such appearing in Entre el roig i el negre. But these are paragraphs taken from the commencement and conclusion of the ‘diary’, and their content is innocuous. Both volumes also include inflammatory photos of militia members vandalising churches, as well as familiar images of barricade fighting in July 1936, anarchist propaganda and demonstrations, and well-known CNT personalities. The long and pretentiously labelled ‘documentary appendix’ in Diario de un pistolero anarquista consists of texts Mir Serra describes as ‘coming from a personal archive to which the author has access, although copies of some documents exist in various archives’. In other words, they are part of the common literature of the Spanish Revolution, have long been available, and offer nothing new. They include an undated statement of the CNT, FAI, and FIJL (Libertarian Youth) denouncing
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Communist counter-revolutionary intrigues, and an undated FAI and Libertarian Youth announcement for a public showing of a film warning against alcoholism, with, inexplicably, the lyrics to the popular anarchist songs ‘Hijos del Pueblo’ (‘Sons of the People’) and ‘A Las Barricadas’ (‘To the Barricades’) attached. Perhaps Mir Serra thought these songs were unfamiliar to, or sources of derision for, his 21st century Catalan readers. These ‘finds’ are followed by undated and unsigned CNT-FAI documents on the political crisis of the Generalitat and the future of anarchism in Spain, and an inconsistently dated and edited statement on the confrontation in May 1937 between the workers of Barcelona and Soviet-controlled provocateurs, including a declaration by the CNT National Committee in Valencia, dated June 6, 1937, but with no further explication. The latter represents a major gaffe by an ‘archivist’. Then come minutes of a meeting held on March 26, 1937, including CNT and POUM leaders, in which the Control Patrols and a conflict with presumptive Stalinists were discussed; an undated circular from the Peninsular Committee of the FAI calling for organisational strengthening; a similar circular of the same Committee, dated October 25, 1936; and undated solidarity messages from Bulgarian and Swedish anarchists and anarchosyndicalists. These tit-bits are accompanied by what might have seemed a spicy dish — a list of art works expropriated from counterrevolutionaries, some of obvious value, including works by Goya, Rubens, Frans Hals, Tiepolo, Tintoretto, Botticelli, Murillo, El Greco, Zuloaga, and other artists. These assets were intended for sale to finance the purchase of arms for the Republic. But rather than reproducing a secret catalogue held by a thief and gunman, this register was published as an official document of the Catalan Generalitat on August 11, 1936, as indicated by Mir Serra. The ‘documentary appendix’ then offers one brief and undated text on liaison between the CNT-FAI and the Stalinist PSUC (United Socialist Party of Catalonia) and UGT socialist union federation, followed by 12 documents issued by the Generalitat and specifying measures for regulation of the Control Patrols and the Central Committee of Antifascist Militias (CCMA). In other words, the landscape of criminality and terror presented by Mir Serra as the work of the CNT-FAI rests upon no evidence previously unknown, or probative of anything. In addition, Diario de un pistolero anarquista 61
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includes photo reproductions of four documents, on falsification of credentials, procedures for arrest of suspected counter-revolutionaries, and the observations of customs personnel. Entre el roig i el negre similarly reproduces three pages of documents on the sale abroad of objects of value seized by the CNT-FAI and on alleged extortion of ransom from hostages accused as counter-revolutionaries. The most ‘spectacular’ disclosure by Mir Serra and his murderous marionette, according to Spanish media, has to do with the execution of 47 Marist clergy, who were beatified by the Vatican — the first step toward sainthood — in 2007. The 47 were killed in August 1936, during the most tumultuous, early phase of the Spanish Revolution, after money had been extracted from them on a promise of their liberation. The ‘diary of Josep Serra’ describes this incident as if he were present, and Spanish media coverage of Mir Serra’s writings declare that the ‘anarchist gunman’ was their slayer.7 But the ‘diary’ and Mir Serra neglect to mention a historical detail recorded at the time by the Soviet consul in Barcelona, Vladimir Aleksandrovich Antonov-Ovsyeyenko [1883-1939], who was soon to be withdrawn to Moscow and killed by Stalin. That is, Catalan president Lluís Companys [1882-1940], learning of the execution of the 47, prevented the shooting of about 70 more from the Marist group, and, threatening to resign his post, called a halt to summary executions.8 The name of Companys indicates what I believe is the motivation for the writing of Mir Serra’s books: to shift all responsibility for violence in Barcelona following the defeat of the military insurrection in July 1936 to the anarchist movement. Mir Serra’s logic is simple — according to him and his alter-egos, ‘Josep Serra’ and ‘Maurici’, murders and robberies are to be blamed exclusively on the Control Patrols and the Central Committee of Antifascist Militias, bodies established in the aftermath of July. Both the Control Patrols and the CCMA were controversial in their time, chiefly because they were considered organs of revolutionary mobilisation, and the foundation of proletarian power, in Catalonia, and were the object of consistent efforts by the Stalinists of the PSUC to dissolve them. Indeed, the CCMA was abolished after only two months. Mir Serra and the ‘Diary’ assert, in both Entre el roig i el negre and Diario de un pistolero anarquista that half of the members of the Control Patrols were anarchists. But the 62
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Catalan and Spanish versions differ. In the former, Catalan volume, the text reads ‘La meitat dels homes que componíem les patrulles de control érem de la FAI’, while the Spanish edition declares, ‘La mitad de los hombres que componíen las patrullas de control pertenecía a la CNT-FAI’. To anybody conversant with the history of the Spanish Revolution and its active elements, the difference is significant. The FAI was a militant, dedicated network of idealists within the mass trade-union organisation of the CNT; strictly speaking, the FAI were anarchists and the CNT anarchosyndicalists and syndicalists. But in reality, the Control Patrols did not always embody a half-share for the CNT. The 12 Control Patrols were made up of members of the CNT, Esquerra, UGT, and POUM. The ratio varied in the different Barcelona neighborhoods: in Poble Nou, 30 CNT, 20 Esquerra, 10 UGT, and 5 POUM, i.e. 30 CNT to 35 others, while in Casc Vell, the figures were 30 CNT, 15 Esquerra, 10 UGT, 3 POUM, i.e 30 CNT to 28 others. In the Central district, the Patrols included only 25 CNT, with 15 Esquerra, 15 UGT, and 5 POUM, i.e. 25 CNT to 35 others. The total personnel of the fearsome Control Patrols was less than 700 in Barcelona, a city that then counted more than a million inhabitants.9 In addition, Mir Serra neglects to mention that both the CCMA and the Control Patrols were established by order of the Catalan Generalitat under Companys, not by the CNT or FAI, and that the anarchist and syndicalist leaders were divided on whether to participate in them. Recollections of this debate were published by García Oliver.10 The intent of Mir Serra is therefore clear: to sanitise the reputation of his own party, the remnant of the Esquerra, which in the 1930s dominated the Catalan petit-bourgeoisie and middle-peasants, but in the most recent Catalan parliamentary elections gained only 14 percent of ballots, and, since the death of Franco, has never surpassed the bourgeois-regionalist Convergencia i Unió and the Catalan Socialists in its vote totals. The Esquerra currently serves in a three-party coalition leading the Generalitat, with the Socialists and the former Communists, the latter who, as successors to the PSUC, bear the name ICV (Initiative for Catalunya-Greens). It is unsurprising that a contemporary leftist party, of the kind that the Esquerra now represents, should try to rehabilitate itself for political advantage, through the publications of an incompetent historian and hypocritical 63
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author, which is how we may describe Mir Serra. But it is contemptible that this should be done by libelling the Spanish anarchists — especially since, as noted by many historians, after the defeat of the July 1936 military rising in Barcelona, Companys and the Esquerra retained authority through the Generalitat only at the sufferance of the CNT-FAI, which clearly held the loyalty of the triumphant masses. Many more questions may be posed in this context. Some of these would touch on the internal politics, during the Revolution, of the Catalan national movement, which included its share of Catalan fascists, opposed to the Franco forces because they considered Catalanisme a higher value than counter-revolution, or because they were caught in revolutionary Barcelona by the rush of events, and could not escape to enter Francoist ranks. Further, the time is past when anticlerical violence by the Spanish revolutionary movement could be taken as a permanent principle to be unavoidably defended. I recall vividly being cautioned against anticlericalism in the early 1980s, by members of the Foment Obrer Revolucionari (FOR), the successor movement to the tiny Spanish Trotskyist contingent active in the May events of 1937, and led by Manuel Fernández Grandizo Martínez, known as G. Munis [1912-89]. The Barcelona FOR pointed out that under the Franco dictatorship the Catalan Catholic hierarchy turned against the Madrid regime in protest against the suppression of Catalan culture, and that in many strikes during the later Franco period, churches were the only places labor activists could safely meet. We cannot deny that atrocities were committed by members of the Republican side in the Spanish Revolution, not only against revolutionaries like Andreu Nin, assassinated on Stalinist orders, but also against innocent Catholics and others treated indiscriminately as counter-revolutionaries. Such tragedies occur in all conflicts. For example, the resistance forces in the 1992-95 war in Bosnia-Hercegovina included criminal elements who were considered necessary participants in the struggle because of their knowledge of weapons, as well as so-called ‘mujahidin’ — Arabs and others who had fought in Afghanistan and went to Bosnia to ‘defend the Muslims’. These ‘mujahidin’ constituted no more than 2 percent of the Army of the Republic of Bosnia-Hercegovina, did not affect the outcome of any battles, and committed atrocities against innocent Serbs and Croats. But the exploits of Bosnian 64
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gangsters and the ‘mujahidin’ were recorded thoroughly in Bosnia media and in the proceedings of the International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) at The Hague. By contrast, Miquel Mir Serra has conflated some stray notes with rumours and libellous Stalinist propaganda to produce books that are neither history nor literature, but a hoax. Until he produces the documents he claims to have located in London, his books should be disregarded. Notes 1. 0These comments on Danilo Kiš are taken from an essay on Yugoslav literary classics published in my Sarajevo Rose: A Balkan Jewish Notebook, London, Saqi/The Bosnian Institute, 2005. I have also written on Larisa Reisner in my paper, ‘Islam and Communism in the 20th Century’, originally published in German as ‘Kommunismus und Islam im 20. Jahrhundert: Ein Historischer Überblick’, by Jahrbuch für Historische Kommunismus-Forschung 2009, Aufbau, Berlin. The paper is available in English as a free download at the websites of the Center for Islamic Pluralism: www.islamicpluralism.org/documents/islamcommunism.pdf and www.islamicpluralism.eu/PDFs/Islam_and_Communism.pdf. The German original is accessible as a free download at www.islamicpluralism.de/PDFs/JHK_2009_Kommunismus_u nd_Islam_Deutsch.pdf. 2. 0See my essay on the Spanish revolutionary films of Aranda, ‘The Paradoxes of Film and the Recovery of Historical Memory: Vicente Aranda’s Works on the Spanish Civil War’, in Film History, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, No. 4, 2008. 3.0See my examination of Hemon and his ‘theft of style’ in my review of his pastiche The Question of Bruno, at www.islamicpluralism.org/1042/the-question-of-bruno. Hemon has dismissed my critique of his appropriation of Kiš as a politically motivated right-wing attack, but the review shows that politics were irrelevant to the discussion. Bosnians typically offer as a justification for Hemon that ‘everyone here has published an imitation of Kiš’. This may be true, but not all of them have, like Hemon, received large cash advances and extravagant praise by American critics for mediocre, sophomoric products. And not all of them, unlike Hemon, stayed out of the struggle to defend BosniaHercegovina against aggression. Some Bosnians who 65
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enjoyed security in America returned to their native country to risk their lives for its freedom. 4. 0Josep Maria Sòria, ‘Miquel Mir publica el impactante dietario de un patrullero de la FAI en 1936’, El Mundo [MadridBarcelona]. June 10, 2007. 5. 0Anonymous, ‘Els papers de Salamanca són ja a Barcelona, segons el Ministeri de Cultura’, (‘The Salamanca Papers are now in Barcelona, according to the Culture Ministry’), Europa Press [agency], Madrid, January 31, 2006. Also see my forthcoming article ‘Archivarische Forschung und einschlägige Studien zur Geschichtsschreibung über den Spanischen Bürgerkrieg seit dem Tod Francos’ (‘Archival and Related Research on the Historiography of the Spanish Civil War Since the Death of Franco’), to appear in Jahrbuch für Historische Kommunismus-Forschung 2010, Aufbau, Berlin. 6. 0See www.iisg.nl/collections/spain-civilwar/. 7. 0Ana María Ortíz, ‘El Anarquista Que Fusilo A 45 Beatos’, El Mundo, October 14, 2007. 8. 0See César Alcalá, Las Checas del Terror, Libros Libres, Madrid, 2007. This volume is hardly sympathetic to the revolutionary forces in the Spanish war, but is a factual presentation that contrasts strongly with the exaggerated writing of Mir Serra. 9. 0Alcalá, Las Checas del Terror , ibid. 10. See Juan García Oliver, Wrong Steps, Kate Sharpley Library, London, 2000, and My Revolutionary Life, Kate Sharpley Library, London, 2008.
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ANARCHISTS IN FICTION
From Cienfuegos Press Anarchist Review No. 5 (1980) (Contributions to this series will be greatly welcomed, so if you know of any novels dealing with anarchism or portraying anarchists, tell us about them or write a short appreciation yourself.
AB There is an old Spanish proverb which says that history is a common meadow where everyone can make hay, and as a result we always watch out for the distortions made by historians. Noam Chomsky’s essay on ‘Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship’ is without doubt the finest study of this subject. But it is not just historians, whether liberal, communist or fascist, who intentionally misrepresent anarchism. Fiction is a medium which has a far wider audience and so we will be including a series in Arena showing how anarchism and anarchists have been portrayed. To start off with I have selected excerpts from three writers: P.C. Wren who represents the most violent reactionary attitude towards it, Hemingway who personifies the privileged liberal with an intensely patronising view, and finally Hermann Hesse, who, although not an Anarchist himself, wrote what I think is the greatest anarchist novel of all time, ‘Steppenwolf Beau Sabreur by P.C. Wren (1925
Beau Sabreur is a sequel to Beau Geste and its hero is Major Henri de Beaujolais, an old Etonian, Frenchman, Hussar, Spahi officer, and Secret Service Agent dedicated to maintaining French ‘civilisation’ in North Africa. The villain of the novel is Becque, an anarchist, mutineer, and secret agent of the German and Turkish governments! The author in his foreword to the novel has the following to say in all seriousness: “The reader may rest assured that the deeds narrated and the scenes and personalities pictured in this book are not the vain outpourings of a film-fed imagination, but the rearrangement of actual happenings and the assembling of real people.” 67
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P.C. Wren (1875-1941)
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The story starts with de Beaujolais fresh out of Eton being told by his uncle, a general, to go and enlist as a trooper in a Hussar regiment. There he meets his adversary for the first time. “Becque seemed to have plenty of money and plenty of ideas — of an interesting and curious kind. He was an ‘agent’, a Man with a Message, a propagandist and an agitator. Apparently his object was to ‘agitate’ the regiment, and his Message was that Law and Order were invented by knaves for the enslavement of fools.” De Beaujolais goes to a recruiting meeting organised by Becque. He is of course accompanied by his faithful servant Dufour. “Becque was clearly a monomaniac whose mental content was hate — hate of France; hate of all who had what he had not; hate of control and discipline and government; hate of whatsoever and whomsoever did not meet with his approval. I put him down as one of those sane lunatics afflicted with a destruction-complex; a diseased egoist, and a treacherous, dangerous mad dog ... It appeared that Dufour had not taken the Oath of Initiation, and it was forthwith administered to him and to me. We were given the choice of immediate departure or swearing upon the Bible OM with terrific oaths and solemnities that we would never divulge the secret of the Society or give any account whatsoever of its proceedings. The penalty for the infringement of this oath was certain death. We took the oath, and settled ourselves to endure an address from Becque on the subject of the Rights of Man — always meaning unwashen, uneducated, unpatriotic and wholly worthless Man, bien entendu. Coming from the general to the particular, Becque inveighed eloquently against all forms and manifestations of Militarism, and our folly in aiding and abetting it by conducting ourselves as disciplined soldiers.” De Beaujolais then sets out to provoke Becque to a duel. “‘Good’, said I. ‘Have you ever been wrongfully imprisoned, or in any way injured or punished by the State?’ ‘Me? Prison? No,’ he replies. ‘What do you mean? Except that we’re all injured by the State, aren’t we? There didn’t ought to be any State.’ And you hold your tenets of revolution, anarchy, murder and mutiny, and the overthrow and destruction of France and the Republic, firmly, and with all your heart and soul, do you?’ I asked. ‘What’s your game? Are you fooling, or are you from the Third Central?’ ‘Never mind,’I replied. ‘Are
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Anarchists in fiction — P.C. Wren
you prepared to die for your faith? That’s what I want to know.’ ‘I am,’ answered Becque. ‘You shall,’ said I, and arose thus signify that the conversation was ended. Opening the door, I motioned to the creature to remove itself.” Then the duel which our gallant hero of course wins: “Scrutinising Becque carefully, I came to the conclusion that he would show the fierce and desperate courage of a cornered rat, and that if he had paid as much attention to fencing as to anarchistic sedition, he would put up a pretty useful fight.” After his victory, de Beaujolais is told to see his officer whom the Sergeant describes thus: “I know that Lieutenant d’Auray de Redon is one of the finest gentlemen God ever made ... He has often saved me from suicide — simply by a kind word and his splendid smile.” De Beaujolais is then congratulated by Redon, another member of the secret service. He refers to the wounded Becque as “a mad dog as you say, but I fancy that the mad dog has some pretty sane owners and employers.” At last the Great Anarchist Conspiracy Theory is about to be proved. The man is not merely a vile anarchist who believes in no government at all, but he is also an agent of the German government! The scene shifts to North Africa where our hero charges around covering himself with glory and being rapidly promoted. Meanwhile nasty incidents start to happen and Becque is suspected of being at work again stirring up hatred against the French. De Beaujolais then escapes from the slaughtering of a French garrison with the American heroine whom he has saved from a fate worse than death, and makes his way south on a secret mission to a potentially friendly Emir whom he wants to win over. Unfortunately the Emir takes a fancy to the heroine and de Beaujolais’ mentality is suitably summed up when he says: “As an honest and honourable man I must put the orders of my General, the honour and tradition of my Service and, above all, the welfare of my Country, before everything — and everybody. Logic showed me the truth and suddenly I stopped in my stride, turned and shook my fist in the Emir’s very face and shouted: ‘Damn your black face and blacker soul, you filthy hound! Get out of my tent before I throw you out, you bestial swine! WHITE WOMEN! You black dogs and sons of dogs!’ And shaking with rage I pointed to the doorway of my tent.”
Gary Cooper as Henri de Beaujolais
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Becque, the ‘Anarchist’, then arrives as a secret agent for the Turks and plots to deliver the heroine to the mercy of the rapacious Sudanese soldiery. So de Beaujolais fights him for France, and to protect Miss Mary Vanbrugh’s honour. He wins of course. “I would not rejoice over a fallen foe, and I would not express regret to a villainous renegade and a treacherous cur — who, moreover, had plotted the death, mutilation, and dishonour of Mary Vanbrugh.” Even if this grotesque rubbish was presented as satire today it would be derided for going over the top, but the author claimed if was based on fact and we can estimate that it was probably accepted as roughly accurate by hundreds of thousands of readers. But the ludicrous contradiction of a man being an anarchist and an agent of an enemy government at the same time is typical of the warped paranoia that we face from the patriot. The Fifth Column [1938] For WhomThe Bell Tolls [1940] A Farewell to Arms [1929] Across the River and Into the Trees [1950]
Hemingway was the archetypal liberal who supported the ‘underdog’ overseas from the comfort of the best restaurants in town. His most unpleasant work is the play Fifth Column, supposedly written in Madrid while under fire. This piece of bad theatre glorifies the Communist secret police, the SIM. Needless to say in the play, all their victims were Fascist and there was no reference to their torture and murder of anarchists or members of the POUM. His most famous novel (For whom the Bell Tolls) was also set in the Spanish Civil War when a young American explosives hero (one of the many surrogate Hemingway clones), takes command of a guerrilla detachment in the Guadarrama. His mission is to destroy a bridge just before a major Republican offensive, and needless to say the fate of free Spain rests in his hands. He sends off one of his men to get an urgent message through to the Russian General Goltz, but Andrés the messenger has trouble when he gets to the Republican lines where he is delayed by anarchists. “He knew now he was up against the crazies; the ones with the red and black scarves.” Andrés is finally allowed to explain his mission and the ‘Anarchist Officer’ says to him: ‘There is too much of this silly guerrilla nonsense going on. All of you should come in and submit to our Libertarian discipline. Then when we wished to 70
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Anarchists in fiction — Ernest Hemingway, Herman Hessse
send out guerrillas we would send them out when needed.’ “Andrés did not like these people who were like dangerous children; dirty, foul, undisciplined, kind, loving, silly, and ignorant, but always dangerous because they were armed... It is not liberty not to bury the mess one makes, he thought. No animal has more liberty than a cat, but it buries the mess it makes. The cat is the best anarchist. Until they learn that from the cat, I cannot respect them.” And Andrés passes on offended by the smell. Hemingway also wrote two novels set in Italy. In the first, A Farewell to Arms’, he is not rude about Anarchists, just tolerant in a benign and superior way. And then in a much later one, Across the River and into the Trees where he takes the role of a beat-up American Colonel, there is an almost maudling affection for an anarchist bartender in one of his fashionable drinking haunts in Venice. “The bartender shook hands with him. This bartender was an Anarchist but he did not mind the Colonel being a Colonel at all. He was delighted by it and proud and loving about it as though the Anarchists had a Colonel too, and in some ways, in the several months that they had known each other, he seemed to feel that he had invented, or at least erected, the Colonel as you might be happy about participating in the erection of a campanile, or even the old church at Torcello.” And so on until the Colonel says goodbye. “The bartender looked at him with his wise Italian eyes, not merry now, although the lines of merriment were clearly cut where they radiated from the corners of each eye. I hope there is nothing wrong with him, the bartender thought. I hope to God, or anything else, there’s really nothing bad.”
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)
Steppenwolf [1929]
Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf is the great surrealist novel, and it explores the duality of the human character through the medium of Harry Haller. Harry is a pacifist (like Hesse), and his anarchist soul is trying to break out of its bourgeois mould. One evening he sees a mystery man advertising an ‘Anarchist Magic Theatre’ who gives him a pamphlet which accurately describes the struggle within Haller. He searches and searches again for the man later as the bourgeois side of his character starts to suffocate the anarchist Steppenwolf within him. His liberation comes through a girl who though completely uneducated teaches him about life, as opposed to 71
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Hermann Hesse (1877-1962)
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his view of it which is entirely seen through books. Eventually she leads him to the Anarchist Magic Theatre where he is shown many visions to help the Steppenwolf finally overcome the bourgeois. The most striking of these is self-evident:“I was swept at once into a world of noise and excitement. Cars, some of them armoured, were running through the streets chasing the pedestrians. They ran them down and either left them mangled on the ground or crushed them to death against the walls of the houses. I saw at once that it was the long- prepared, longawaited and long-feared war between men and machines, now at last broken out. On all sides lay dead and decomposing bodies, and on all sides too, smashed and distorted and halfburned cars. Aeroplanes circled above the frightful confusion and were being fired upon from many roofs and windows with rifles and machine guns. On every wall were wild and magnificently stirring placards, whose giant letters flamed like torches, summoning the people to side with the men against the machines, to make an end at last of the fat and welldressed and perfumed plutocrats who used machines to squeeze the fat from other men’s bodies, of them and their huge fiendishly-purring automobiles. Set factories afire at last! Make a little room on the crippled earth! Other placards, on the other hand, in wonderful colours and magnificently phrased, warned all those who had a stake in the country and some share of prudence (in more moderate and less childish terms which testified to the remarkable cleverness and intellect of those who had composed them) against the rising tide of anarchy. They depicted in a truly impressive way the blessings of order and work and property and education and justice, and praised machinery as the last and most sublime invention of the human mind. With its aid, men would be equal to gods.” (Haller stands wondering between the two appeals but the Steppenwolf side wins). “Well, the principal thing was clear. There was a war on, a violent genuine war where there was no concern for Kaiser or republic, for frontiers, flags or colours and other equally decorative and theatrical matters, all nonsense at bottom. But a war in which every one who lacked air to breathe and no longer found life exactly pleasing gave emphatic ex- pression to his displeasure and strove to prepare the way for a general destruction of this iron-cast civilisation of ours .. . I joined the battle joyfully.”
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Review: Hartmann the Anarchist Hartmann the Anarchist: or The Doom of a Great City by Edward Douglas Fawcett (1892) (Tangent Books, 2009, £5)
This is not a book to take seriously, so having shaved off a few precious fractions from my ever-shortening life in reading it, why waste more time in reviewing it? That’s what I thought at first about this very silly story. Not silly-funny, as in a hilarious spoof — it’s always worth while to take a breather from the serious business of living to laugh — but silly-toxic. But on reflection I decided that for that very reason it ought to be taken seriously. The world of Homo sapiens (as we men and women all-sorts are ludicrously denominated) has evolved technologically into, and in some respects even beyond, the science fiction world of fantasy writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yet men and women who might conceivably, or even actually, board a vehicle to fly into space have commonly stuck fast in a fantasy mental world, or even stepped into a time-machine flying backwards from the high-tech world they live in. Thus, followers of one ancient Middle Eastern prophet master the controls of stratospheric airliners to fly them into skyscrapers in America, while followers of another prophet/deity from the same part of the world step onto the moon. More bizarrely still, millions of the compatriots of both lots of gravity-defying mortals agree that the facts about the creation of the world and of their own species were faithfully recorded long ago by saintly stenographers listening to the voice of the one and only god they share. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that reason is in retreat everywhere. In the mindsets of these men and women of the new millennium pure fantasising about the past incongruously conflates with science fiction metamorphosing into fact, somehow without sparking off intolerable internal conflict. The differing elements in the fantasies, however, produce differing ideologies which do clash and have led to terrorist action and the counter-offensive of ‘the war on terror’. The hundred-years-old story we are looking at shares some of these characteristics. It is science fiction which was destined, in terms, quite soon to become fact; it is propelled by ideological conflict (though not of a religious nature); and it is about terrorism. The form the terrorism takes is provided by the science fiction element, such as it is. In truth, this does not rank high as a feat of the imagination. The main terror tool is an airship 73
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constructed from a nearly weightless metal known only to Hartmann and his closest confederates. The story was written in 1883, fifteen years before the Brazilian Santos Dumont and the retired German army officer Count von Zeppelin began to build the first practicable dirigibles powered by internal combustion engines, but the French engineer Henri Giffard had already piloted his steam-powered semi-rigid airship in 1852, while the embryo airship dates back to the balloons of the Montgolfier brothers a whole century before young Fawcett dreamt up his nightmare fantasy. More tellingly than the unimpressiveness of the external, technological trappings common to science fiction, which as served up here are mere devices without even a perfunctory effort to provide plausibility (as in the sole possession of that ‘magic’ metal), is the absence of that deep philosophical essence which, from writers like H.G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon to Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Brian Aldiss, and J.G. Ballard, distinguishes significant science fiction from pure fantasy with tacked-on gadgetry. Such philosophy as Fawcett’s story has is entirely socio-political in nature and unaided by its scientific elements. The first edition of Hartmann was published by Edward Arnold in 1892 and the story has long been out of print. Ian Bone has brought out this attractive paperback edition with a fanfare, but it is hardly a “long forgotten masterpiece of Victorian science fiction” and still less is it (as he calls it in his rhapsodic introduction) “a lost anarchist classic”, a claim which calls for rebuttal at some length. First though, its merits. These are not literary. It is quite racily written, but characterisation is no more than functional, style at times risibly melodramatic, and the simple tale is told without humour. Such defects may be accounted for by the fact that the author was only 17 when he wrote it. Though less well known than his younger brother Percy, the famous explorer who vanished in the Mato Grosso in 1925, he went on to make a name for himself as a theosophist and led an extraordinarily adventurous life spanning the hugely transformative near-century running from 1866 to 1960. Hartmann has a certain curiosity value as one of the earliest doom-from-theskies-at-the-hands-of-a-fiendish-villain tales, but its main interest is sociological/historical. The story belongs to the sensationalist let’s-scarethe-pants-off-the-bourgeoisie genre which was so 74
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Review: Hartmann the Anarchist
popular in late Victorian and Edwardian times, before the Great War demonstrated what total terror was really like. Those contributions to this degenerate literature primarily based on fear of the toiling masses were frequently penned in deadly earnest, but my guess is that a knowledgeable and sophisticated young man like Fawcett was simply exploiting a genre which paralleled the anti-Jacobin literature of a hundred years earlier. At all events, it was part of the anti-democratic, anti-socialist propaganda of the possessing classes whose interests were more or less well served by the established form of society. Hartmann and the unnamed man who gets caught up in his evil machinations and tells the story belong to these ‘better sort of people’, only differing in their views from the generality of the comfortably-off in that they both consider themselves socialists, and ultimately at least as believers in equality. They both actively seek to transform society; but they part company radically over how this is to be accomplished. The narrator is firmly of the Fabian tendency, abhorring violence, or rather unsanctioned violence (he shows no awareness at all of its omnipresence in the State, which blessed obliviousness could be considered a notable touch of realism on the author’s part if he himself revealed the slightest irony in his writing), and since he tends to see revolution in terms of “streets slippery with blood”, he rejects it as a way forward. Substantial progress can only come through educating the ignorant masses; and the educating, the leading out and the actual leading needs to be done by people like himself. In conversation with the “journalist and agitator” John Burnett, who has thrown in his lot with the fiendish anarchist, he contends that “we must not…see the graces of high life, art and culture, fouled by the mob.” As becomes apparent, he is more genuine and infinitely more humane but in essence as elitist as the man who fascinates him at the same time as he repels him. Hartmann, on the other hand, belongs to the-endjustifies-the-means school of thought, outdoing in this respect the behaviour the most ruthless of the real-life Bolsheviks were to display. What neither of Fawcett’s two principal protagonists appear to have is much idea of what their fellow citizens who were members of the working class were like, or any awareness that they had produced their own dynamic and redoubtable 75
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leaders. Nor indeed does the young gentleman who conjured them up to tell his tale. In a story in which the two principal characters are ostensibly driven by their concern for the downtrodden masses, this is a crippling defect. Inasmuch as ‘the workers’ are depicted at all, it is either as bovine victims of events or as mindless brutes revelling in any opportunity for mayhem. This gross ignorance of the lower classes displayed by gentry (and radical-minded ones at that) brings to mind the second title of Disraeli’s novel, Sybil, or The Two Nations, and the words of the unschooled self-educated Chartist leader Stephen Morley when he talks of a mental segregation of the classes which makes them “inhabitants of different planets”. Well, Sybil was written by a Tory radical in 1845 (the same year, as it happens, in which Engels’s devastating The Condition of the Working Class in England was published in Germany, although unfortunately the Victorian reading public did not have the benefit of this salutary scourge in English for another forty years), and a string of other novels portraying working class characters, by authors including three notable women, Elizabeth Gaskell, Frances Trollope, and George Eliot, had appeared by the time Fawcett wrote Hartmann, while a legion of other concerned men and women had spread knowledge of working class lives. So how does one explain the crude caricatures dished up by Fawcett? But to return to consideration of the contrasting attitudes of the reformist and the revolutionary, while the narrator’s standpoint is reasonably fully explained, Hartmann’s thinking — if one is to call it more than ‘emoting’ — receives summary treatment that matches the anti-hero’s dismissive attitude to the views of others. Lena, the narrator’s intended, who knows much about Hartmann through her friendship with his mother, tells him that “he regarded civilization as rotten from top to foundation, and the present human race as ‘only fit for fuel’.” His objective is the total destruction of the industrial capitalism that has brought misery to so many. “We are Rousseaus who advocate a return to a simpler life,” he tells the narrator, and his professions of caring about the multitude (excoriated at one point as “slavish”) can only be compared with those of Pol Pot. Along with capitalism, he totally rejects government in favour of “free association” and so styles himself an anarchist. The author certainly portrays him as such, and without the slightest indication that he cannot be taken as fairly 76
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representative of what anarchism is all about. Well, Fawcett was a young man out to make a name for himself, and as is commonly the way with young men, he purported to know and to understand a great deal more than he did. But what are we to make of the veteran anarchist promoting this “long lost must-read anarchist classic” about an arch-terrorist he hails as “one hell of a guy”? “There are of course…ahem…a few minor quibbles,” he writes, “about Hartmann’s class analysis…referring to the working class as ‘the swinish multitude’ [echoing the infamous gibe made at the time of the French Revolution by Edmund Burke, the renegade Irish parliamentarian beatified by the Tories for his windy defence of the English establishment — a poisonous source which goes unmentioned] he’s not particular if they also perish as they ‘have long colluded with the system’. But this is to quibble in the face of genius…” He goes on to remark that at any rate, “I take it that Hartmann’s contempt for ‘the swinish multitude’ is in fact nothing more than a modish rejection of late Victorian consumerism!” For class-war-warrior Ian Bone, paladin of street protest, this is an oddly cavalier reaction to mass murder of the proletariat. Or if you prefer, it is just a bit of light-hearted nonsense. So why is this book worth a review? Paradoxically, for the very reason that it is nonsense. A great deal of nonsense about anarchism was talked in Fawcett’s time and a good deal of it has been perpetuated right up to ours. While sharing the same etymological roots as ‘anarchy’, which is indeed (infelicitously, in my opinion) used as a synonym by some of its adherents, anarchism has in its essence nothing to do with disorder, let alone chaos. Not without cause, it came to be associated in many people’s minds with terrorism, particularly in the form of bomb-throwing, in the late nineteenth century, when a succession of outrages in public places, mostly in the Latin countries of the Continent, were perpetrated by anarchists. Bone alludes to two of these, in celebratory mood, in writing, “As with Emile Henri and Ravachol — there are no innocents for Rudolph Hartmann.” It makes no sense to talk of these things (which is to say it makes for nonsense) without putting them into context. For a succinct account of the circumstances in which these deadly deeds were carried out I doubt if one could do better than 77
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read The Anarchists, by Roderick Kedward, who brought to the near-impossible task of telling a long and complex tale in a short illuminating book a sympathy and humanity which shines brightly in such passages as this: “Anarchist violence, with its strong element of random terror, provoked…extreme fear in those who were imminently threatened. Human beings have erected elaborate rituals and rules for killing each other, by wars, slavery, persecution, and execution, but the anarchists appeared to ignore them. Their violence was therefore labelled as ‘insane’ and ‘inhuman’. By comparison, the mass execution of thousands of Communards in 1871 or the organised slaughter of millions of soldiers in the First World War were seen as strictly according to the rules, however much to be regretted.”
Kedward cites as a sort of common denominator shared by the diverse kinds of men and women thinking of themselves as anarchists these words of Malatesta: “Anarchism was born of a moral revolt against social injustice.” The predominant factor forming the social context of the horrifying deeds of the two French anarchists (it’s Henry, by the way, not Henri) honoured in Bone’s paean to this trumpery thriller was ‘the condition of the people’. Summarily put, with regard to the labouring masses of the Western nations (to range no further), this amounted, with varying degrees of hardship, to more or less unremitting exploitation in working and living conditions commonly ranging from harsh to appalling and endured beneath a dark cloud of chronic insecurity. And in those countries in which a measure of popular suffrage had been won it was a common feeling that it made very little difference to their lives. What is astonishing is that in most places for most of the time restraint prevailed, not riot and still less revolution. Some individuals, both men and women and from both the working classes and from more privileged circles, felt themselves driven beyond indignant protest into violent action. Assassination, which after all held a venerable place in history as a means of ridding society of tyrants, was resorted to by activists of many radical persuasions as a kind of retaliatory people’s justice against men of power held responsible for injustice inflicted or tolerated by the State. The thirty-four years running from 1881 to 1914 saw the assassination of royalty at the beginning (the Tsar of the Russian empire, Alexander II) and — in murders which sparked the explosion of world war — at the end (the Crown-Prince of the Hapsburg empire, Franz Ferdinand, and his wife), with another sovereign, King Umberto of Italy, republican heads of 78
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state in France, Italy, and the United States, and the prime minister of Spain suffering the same fate in the years between. An anarchist congress in London held on Bastille Day four and a half months after the Tsar’s death approved what had come to be called ‘propaganda by the deed’. But it was one thing to make a case for such ‘people’s executions’ and another to justify such ‘revolutionary propaganda deeds’ as those of Ravachol, Henry, and others like the Spanish anarchist Santiago Salvador, since they were not targeting individual culprits but engineering mayhem by throwing bombs in such public places as cafes, theatres, and railway stations. They rationalised these actions as hitting the privileged in a grossly unequal and unjust society, but many other anarchists, notably Kropotkin and Malatesta, openly condemned them. It can reasonably be argued that their indiscriminate nature distinguishes them from tyrannicide and warrants branding as terrorism. Yet the motivations of these anarchist bombers and their identification with the cause of ‘the common people’ makes them infinitely far removed from the ruthless megalomaniac Rudolph Hartmann, who shares with them only anarchism’s critique of capitalism and the State, and none of its commitment to a true equality that can only be realised in freedom. As for a ‘propaganda of the deed’ rooted in (not, like Hartmann’s, devoid of) a sense of common humanity, anarchism is not the kind of creed for orisons on bended knees in a pew, but by its nature is a call to action. That can take many forms, and did back in the days when young Fawcett, the budding theosophist, did his bit to reinforce the vulgar perception (which still has some traction today) that anarchism is essentially a form of terrorism wedded to the idea of disorder. For anarchists uncircumscribed by an unshakeable adherence to pacifist conduct, violence cannot but have a place in a world governed by force, latent when not openly deployed; but effectiveness in serving the cause is always the only sensible criterion for action, and in most times in most places non-violent organised campaigns will serve it better, which is why by far the greater part of anarchist action in Fawcett’s times was concerned with solidarity between workers, not with sensational outrages. And so it has been ever since. So buy this little book with its striking black-and-white depictions of ‘anarchist terror’ to slip into the stocking of 79
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someone who has the sense to recognise the nonsense it is. Read out loud to friends by the fireside, it could raise a laugh or two. Don Pedelty Horst Bienek Bakunin: An invention. (1977 —Victor Gollancz)
This is a curious little book. I can't even remember where I picked it up, but it has been in my collection for many years. It is difficult to say whether it is a story, a novel, ruminations on anarchist theory and history, or the product of a fascinating mescaline trip. It definitely has a beginning, a middle and an end; I can clearly see page 1 (11 actually), and a last page, and there is text between them, but beyond that I am pretty much at a loss. The text is fragmentary, peppered with quotations and extracts from various works on, by or about Bakunin, and loosely held together around the principal figure. The author uses the third person masculine pronoun 'he' a great deal, but it is not always clear who the 'he' is at several points. Perhaps it doesn't matter. The scenario is that of a tired and disillusioned anarchist, who is never named, trying to trace the last days of Bakunin, referred to throughout as B. The protagonist traces Bakunin's steps at the end of his life and active revolutionary career, visiting the haunts of the old revolutionary and tracing those who knew people who knew Bakunin. But all he encounters, if I understand 'the plot' is obscurity, lies, exaggeration and fragments that may or may not be 'true'. What he finds is not Bakunin, but an image of Bakunin, and he can get no further. For this reason, it seems, he loses all interest in the whole subject towards the end. One of the themes seems to be his inability to get below the surface of things, an image that is reinforced towards the end when he smashes a glass in his hands and watches his own blood fall upon the table. It seems at the end that the main character is having some kind of psychotic break, or at least a severe depressional episode, brought on by the opacity of the texts he has studied and the final conclusion that his quest amounts to very little, indeed may be meaningless and pointless. Throughout the journey, a sad portrait of the old revolutionary at the end of his life emerges, ignored, shunned even, by his 'comrades', given to exaggeration and sentimentality, a revolutionary whose fire has dwindled, and who is no longer wanted, even by his friends. The really strange thing about the book is that when taken in parts it seldom makes much sense, but taken as a whole a message of sorts emerges. Like life itself? LP
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AN ANARCHIST A Desperate Tale From A Set of Six, (1908). Originally published in Harper’s Magazine, August, (1906)
Joseph Conrad
That year I spent the best two months of the dry season on one of the estates — in fact, on the principal cattle estate — of a famous meatextract manufacturing company. B.O.S. Bos. You have seen the three magic letters on the advertisement pages of magazines and newspapers, in the windows of provision merchants, and on calendars for next year you receive by post in the month of November. They scatter pamphlets also, written in a sickly enthusiastic style and in several languages, giving statistics of slaughter and bloodshed enough to make a Turk turn faint. The “art” illustrating that “literature” represents in vivid and shining colours a large and enraged black bull stamping upon a yellow snake writhing in emerald-green grass, with a cobalt-blue sky for a background. It is atrocious and it is an allegory. The snake symbolizes disease, weakness — perhaps mere hunger, which last is the chronic disease of the majority of mankind. Of course everybody knows the B. O. S. Ltd., with its unrivalled products: Vinobos, Jellybos, and the latest unequalled perfection, Tribos, whose nourishment is offered to you not only highly concentrated, but already half digested. Such apparently is the love that Limited Company bears to its fellowmen — even as the love of the father and mother penguin for their hungry fledglings. Of course the capital of a country must be productively employed. I have nothing to say against the company. But being myself animated by feelings of affection towards my fellow-men, I am saddened by the modern system of advertising. Whatever evidence it offers of enterprise, ingenuity, impudence, and resource in certain individuals, it proves to my mind the wide prevalence of that form of mental degradation which is called gullibility.
Joseph Conrad
(1857-1924)
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In various parts of the civilized and uncivilized world I have had to swallow B. O. S. with more or less benefit to myself, though without great pleasure. Prepared with hot water and abundantly peppered to bring out the taste, this extract is not really unpalatable. But I have never swallowed its advertisements. Perhaps they have not gone far enough. As far as I can remember they make no promise of everlasting youth to the users of B. O. S., nor yet have they claimed the power of raising the dead for their estimable products. Why this austere reserve, I wonder? But I don’t think they would have had me even on these terms. Whatever form of mental degradation I may (being but human) be suffering from, it is not the popular form. I am not gullible. I have been at some pains to bring out distinctly this statement about myself in view of the story which follows. I have checked the facts as far as possible. I have turned up the files of French newspapers, and I have also talked with the officer who commands the military guard on the Ile Royale, when in the course of my travels I reached Cayenne. I believe the story to be in the main true. It is the sort of story that no man, I think, would ever invent about himself, for it is neither grandiose nor flattering, nor yet funny enough to gratify a perverted vanity. It concerns the engineer of the steam-launch belonging to the Maranon cattle estate of the B. O. S. Co., Ltd. This estate is also an island — an island as big as a small province, lying in the estuary of a great South American river. It is wild and not beautiful, but the grass growing on its low plains seems to possess exceptionally nourishing and flavouring qualities. It resounds with the lowing of innumerable herds — a deep and distressing sound under the open sky, rising like 82
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a monstrous protest of prisoners condemned to death. On the mainland, across twenty miles of discoloured muddy water, there stands a city whose name, let us say, is Horta. But the most interesting characteristic of this island (which seems like a sort of penal settlement for condemned cattle) consists in its being the only known habitat of an extremely rare and gorgeous butterfly. The species is even more rare than it is beautiful, which is not saying little. I have already alluded to my travels. I travelled at that time, but strictly for myself and with a moderation unknown in our days of round-the-world tickets. I even travelled with a purpose. As a matter of fact, I am —“Ha, ha, ha! — a desperate butterfly-slayer. Ha, Morpho deidamia, Iracoubo ha, ha!” This was the tone in which Mr. Harry Gee, the manager of the cattle station, alluded to my pursuits. He seemed to consider me the greatest absurdity in the world. On the other hand, the B. O. S. Co., Ltd., represented to him the acme of the nineteenth century’s achievement. I believe that he slept in his leggings and spurs. His days he spent in the saddle flying over the plains, followed by a train of half-wild horsemen, who called him Don Enrique, and who had no definite idea of the B. O. S. Co., Ltd., which paid their wages. He was an excellent manager, but I don’t see why, when we met at meals, he should have thumped me on the back, with loud, derisive inquiries: “How’s the deadly sport to-day? Butterflies going strong? Ha, ha, ha!” — especially as he charged me two dollars per diem for the hospitality of the B. O. S. Co., Ltd., (capital L1,500,000, fully paid up), in whose balance-sheet for that year those monies are no doubt included. “I don’t think I can make it anything less in justice to my company,” he had remarked, with extreme gravity, when I was arranging with him the terms of my stay on the island. His chaff would have been harmless enough if intimacy of intercourse in 83
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the absence of all friendly feeling were not a thing detestable in itself. Moreover, his facetiousness was not very amusing. It consisted in the wearisome repetition of descriptive phrases applied to people with a burst of laughter. “Desperate butterfly-slayer. Ha, ha, ha!” was one sample of his peculiar wit which he himself enjoyed so much. And in the same vein of exquisite humour he called my attention to the engineer of the steam-launch, one day, as we strolled on the path by the side of the creek. The man’s head and shoulders emerged above the deck, over which were scattered various tools of his trade and a few pieces of machinery. He was doing some repairs to the engines. At the sound of our footsteps he raised anxiously a grimy face with a pointed chin and a tiny fair moustache. What could be seen of his delicate features under the black smudges appeared to me wasted and livid in the greenish shade of the enormous tree spreading its foliage over the launch moored close to the bank. To my great surprise, Harry Gee addressed him as “Crocodile,” in that half-jeering, half-bullying tone which is characteristic of self-satisfaction in his delectable kind: “How does the work get on, Crocodile?” I should have said before that the amiable Harry had picked up French of a sort somewhere — in some colony or other — and that he pronounced it with a disagreeable forced precision as though he meant to guy the language. The man in the launch answered him quickly in a pleasant voice. His eyes had a liquid softness and his teeth flashed dazzlingly white between his thin, drooping lips. The manager turned to me, very cheerful and loud, explaining: “I call him Crocodile because he lives half in, half out of the creek. Amphibious — see? There’s nothing else amphibious living on the island except crocodiles; so he must belong to the species — eh? But in reality he’s nothing less than un citoyen anarchiste de Barcelone.” “A citizen anarchist from Barcelona?” I repeated, stupidly, looking down at the man. He had turned to his work in the engine-well of the launch and presented his bowed back to us. In that attitude I heard him protest, very audibly: “I do not even know Spanish.” “Hey? What? You dare to deny you come from over there?” the accomplished manager was down on him truculently. At this the man straightened himself up, dropping a spanner 84
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he had been using, and faced us; but he trembled in all his limbs. “I deny nothing, nothing, nothing!” he said, excitedly. He picked up the spanner and went to work again without paying any further attention to us. After looking at him for a minute or so, we went away. “Is he really an anarchist?” I asked, when out of ear-shot. “I don’t care a hang what he is,” answered the humorous official of the B. O. S. Co. “I gave him the name because it suited me to label him in that way, It’s good for the company.” “For the company!” I exclaimed, stopping short. “Aha!” he triumphed, tilting up his hairless pug face and straddling his thin, long legs. “That surprises you. I am bound to do my best for my company. They have enormous expenses. Why — our agent in Horta tells me they spend fifty thousand pounds every year in advertising all over the world! One can’t be too economical in working the show. Well, just you listen. When I took charge here the estate had no steamlaunch. I asked for one, and kept on asking by every mail till I got it; but the man they sent out with it chucked his job at the end of two months, leaving the launch moored at the pontoon in Horta. Got a better screw at a sawmill up the river — blast him! And ever since it has been the same thing. Any Scotch or Yankee vagabond that likes to call himself a mechanic out here gets eighteen pounds a month, and the next you know he’s cleared out, after smashing something as likely as not. I give you my word that some of the objects I’ve had for engine-drivers couldn’t tell the boiler from the funnel. But this fellow understands his trade, and I don’t mean him to clear out. See?” And he struck me lightly on the chest for emphasis. Disregarding his peculiarities of manner, I wanted to know what all this had to do with the man being an anarchist. “Come!” jeered the manager. “If you saw suddenly a barefooted, unkempt chap slinking among the bushes on the sea face of the island, and at the same time observed less than a mile from the beach, a small schooner full of niggers hauling off in a hurry, you wouldn’t think the man fell there from the sky, would you? And it could be nothing else but either that or Cayenne. I’ve got my wits about me. Directly I sighted this queer game I said to myself —‘Escaped Convict.’ I was as certain of it as I am of seeing you standing here this minute. So I spurred on straight at him. He stood his ground for a bit 85
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on a sand hillock crying out: ‘Monsieur! Monsieur! Arretez!’ then at the last moment broke and ran for life. Says I to myself, ‘I’ll tame you before I’m done with you.’ So without a single word I kept on, heading him off here and there. I rounded him up towards the shore, and at last I had him corralled on a spit, his heels in the water and nothing but sea and sky at his back, with my horse pawing the sand and shaking his head within a yard of him. “He folded his arms on his breast then and stuck his chin up in a sort of desperate way; but I wasn’t to be impressed by the beggar’s posturing. “Says I, ‘You’re a runaway convict.’ “When he heard French, his chin went down and his face changed. “‘I deny nothing,’ says he, panting yet, for I had kept him skipping about in front of my horse pretty smartly. I asked him what he was doing there. He had got his breath by then, and explained that he had meant to make his way to a farm which he understood (from the schooner’s people, I suppose) was to be found in the neighbourhood. At that I laughed aloud and he got uneasy. Had he been deceived? Was there no farm within walking distance? “I laughed more and more. He was on foot, and of course the first bunch of cattle he came across would have stamped him to rags under their hoofs. A dismounted man caught on the feeding-grounds hasn’t got the ghost of a chance. “‘My coming upon you like this has certainly saved your life,’ I said. He remarked that perhaps it was so; but that for his part he had imagined I had wanted to kill him under the hoofs of my horse. I assured him that nothing would have been easier had I meant it. And then we came to a sort of dead stop. For the life of me I didn’t know what to do with this convict, unless I chucked him into the sea. It occurred to me to ask him what he had been transported for. He hung his head. “‘What is it?’ says I. ‘Theft, murder, rape, or what?’ I wanted to hear what he would have to say for himself, though of course I expected it would be some sort of lie. But all he said was — “‘Make it what you like. I deny nothing. It is no good denying anything.’ “I looked him over carefully and a thought struck me. “‘They’ve got anarchists there, too,’ I said. ‘Perhaps you’re 86
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one of them.’ “‘I deny nothing whatever, monsieur,’ he repeats. “This answer made me think that perhaps he was not an anarchist. I believe those damned lunatics are rather proud of themselves. If he had been one, he would have probably confessed straight out. “‘What were you before you became a convict?’ “‘Ouvrier,’ he says. ‘And a good workman, too.’ “At that I began to think he must be an anarchist, after all. That’s the class they come mostly from, isn’t it? I hate the cowardly bomb-throwing brutes. I almost made up my mind to turn my horse short round and leave him to starve or drown where he was, whichever he liked best. As to crossing the island to bother me again, the cattle would see to that. I don’t know what induced me to ask — “‘What sort of workman?’ “I didn’t care a hang whether he answered me or not. But when he said at once, ‘Mecanicien, monsieur,’ I nearly jumped out of the saddle with excitement. The launch had been lying disabled and idle in the creek for three weeks. My duty to the company was clear. He noticed my start, too, and there we were for a minute or so staring at each other as if bewitched. “‘Get up on my horse behind me,’ I told him. ‘You shall put my steam-launch to rights.’“ These are the words in which the worthy manager of the Maranon estate related to me the coming of the supposed anarchist. He meant to keep him — out of a sense of duty to the company — and the name he had given him would prevent the fellow from obtaining employment anywhere in Horta. The vaqueros of the estate, when they went on leave, spread it all over the town. They did not know what an anarchist was, nor yet what Barcelona meant. They called him Anarchisto de Barcelona, as if it were his Christian name and surname. But the people in town had been reading in their papers about the anarchists in Europe and were very much impressed. Over the jocular addition of “de Barcelona” Mr. Harry Gee chuckled with immense satisfaction. “That breed is particularly murderous, isn’t it? It makes the sawmills crowd still more afraid of having anything to do with him — see?” he exulted, candidly. “I hold him by that name better than if I had him chained up by the leg to the deck of the steam-launch. “And mark,” he added, after a pause, “he does not deny it. I am not wronging him in any way. He is a convict of some sort, anyhow.”
Vaqueros‘
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“But I suppose you pay him some wages, don’t you?” I asked. “Wages! What does he want with money here? He gets his food from my kitchen and his clothing from the store. Of course I’ll give him something at the end of the year, but you don’t think I’d employ a convict and give him the same money I would give an honest man? I am looking after the interests of my company first and last.” I admitted that, for a company spending fifty thousand pounds every year in advertising, the strictest economy was obviously necessary. The manager of the Maranon Estancia grunted approvingly. “And I’ll tell you what,” he continued: “if I were certain he’s an anarchist and he had the cheek to ask me for money, I would give him the toe of my boot. However, let him have the benefit of the doubt. I am perfectly willing to take it that he has done nothing worse than to stick a knife into somebody — with extenuating circumstances — French fashion, don’t you know. But that subversive sanguinary rot of doing away with all law and order in the world makes my blood boil. It’s simply cutting the ground from under the feet of every decent, respectable, hard-working person. I tell you that the consciences of people who have them, like you or I, must be protected in some way; or else the first low scoundrel that came along would in every respect be just as good as myself. Wouldn’t he, now? And that’s absurd!” He glared at me. I nodded slightly and murmured that doubtless there was much subtle truth in his view. The principal truth discoverable in the views of Paul the engineer was that a little thing may bring about the undoing of a man. “Il ne faut pas beaucoup pour perdre un homme,” he said to me, thoughtfully, one evening. I report this reflection in French, since the man was of Paris, not of Barcelona at all. At the Maranon he lived apart from the station, in a small shed with a metal roof and straw walls, which he called mon atelier. He had a work-bench there. They had given him several horse-blankets and a saddle — not that he ever had occasion to ride, but because no other bedding was used by the working-hands, who were all vaqueros — cattlemen. And on this horseman’s gear, like a son of the plains, he used to sleep amongst the tools of his trade, in a litter of rusty scrap-iron, with a portable forge at his head, 88
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under the work-bench sustaining his grimy mosquito-net. Now and then I would bring him a few candle ends saved from the scant supply of the manager’s house. He was very thankful for these. He did not like to lie awake in the dark, he confessed. He complained that sleep fled from him. “Le sommeil me fuit,” he declared, with his habitual air of subdued stoicism, which made him sympathetic and touching. I made it clear to him that I did not attach undue importance to the fact of his having been a convict. Thus it came about that one evening he was led to talk about himself. As one of the bits of candle on the edge of the bench burned down to the end, he hastened to light another. He had done his military service in a provincial garrison and returned to Paris to follow his trade. It was a well-paid one. He told me with some pride that in a short time he was earning no less than ten francs a day. He was thinking of setting up for himself by and by and of getting married. Here he sighed deeply and paused. Then with a return to his stoical note: “It seems I did not know enough about myself.” On his twenty-fifth birthday two of his friends in the repairing shop where he worked proposed to stand him a dinner. He was immensely touched by this attention. “I was a steady man,” he remarked, “but I am not less sociable than any other body.” The entertainment came off in a little cafe on the Boulevard de la Chapelle. At dinner they drank some special wine. It was excellent. Everything was excellent; and the world — in his own words — seemed a very good place to live in. He had good prospects, some little money laid by, and the affection of two excellent friends. He offered to pay for all the drinks after dinner, which was only proper on his part. They drank more wine; they drank liqueurs, cognac, beer, then more liqueurs and more cognac. Two strangers sitting at the next table looked at him, he said, with so much friendliness, that he invited them to join the party. He had never drunk so much in his life. His elation was extreme, and so pleasurable that whenever it flagged he hastened to order more drinks. “It seemed to me,” he said, in his quiet tone and looking on the ground in the gloomy shed full of shadows, “that I was on the point of just attaining a great and wonderful felicity. Another drink, I felt, would do it. The others were holding out 89
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well with me, glass for glass.” But an extraordinary thing happened. At something the strangers said his elation fell. Gloomy ideas — des idees noires — rushed into his head. All the world outside the cafe; appeared to him as a dismal evil place where a multitude of poor wretches had to work and slave to the sole end that a few individuals should ride in carriages and live riotously in palaces. He became ashamed of his happiness. The pity of mankind’s cruel lot wrung his heart. In a voice choked with sorrow he tried to express these sentiments. He thinks he wept and swore in turns. The two new acquaintances hastened to applaud his humane indignation. Yes. The amount of injustice in the world was indeed scandalous. There was only one way of dealing with the rotten state of society. Demolish the whole sacree boutique. Blow up the whole iniquitous show. Their heads hovered over the table. They whispered to him eloquently; I don’t think they quite expected the result. He was extremely drunk — mad drunk. With a howl of rage he leaped suddenly upon the table. Kicking over the bottles and glasses, he yelled: “Vive l’anarchie! Death to the capitalists!” He yelled this again and again. All round him broken glass was falling, chairs were being swung in the air, people were taking each other by the throat. The police dashed in. He hit, bit, scratched and struggled, till something crashed down upon his head. . . . He came to himself in a police cell, locked up on a charge of assault, seditious cries, and anarchist propaganda. He looked at me fixedly with his liquid, shining eyes, that seemed very big in the dim light. “That was bad. But even then I might have got off somehow, perhaps,” he said, slowly. I doubt it. But whatever chance he had was done away with by a young socialist lawyer who volunteered to undertake his defence. In vain he assured him that he was no anarchist; that he was a quiet, respectable mechanic, only too anxious to work ten hours per day at his trade. He was represented at the trial as the victim of society and his drunken shoutings as the expression of infinite suffering. The young lawyer had his way to make, and this case was just what he wanted for a start. The speech for the defence was pronounced magnificent. The poor fellow paused, swallowed, and brought out the statement: 90
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“I got the maximum penalty applicable to a first offence.” I made an appropriate murmur. He hung his head and folded his arms. “When they let me out of prison,” he began, gently, “I made tracks, of course, for my old workshop. My patron had a particular liking for me before; but when he saw me he turned green with fright and showed me the door with a shaking hand.” While he stood in the street, uneasy and disconcerted, he was accosted by a middle-aged man who introduced himself as an engineer’s fitter, too. “I know who you are,” he said. “I have attended your trial. You are a good comrade and your ideas are sound. But the devil of it is that you won’t be able to get work anywhere now. These bourgeois’ll conspire to starve you. That’s their way. Expect no mercy from the rich.” To be spoken to so kindly in the street had comforted him very much. His seemed to be the sort of nature needing support and sympathy. The idea of not being able to find work had knocked him over completely. If his patron, who knew him so well for a quiet, orderly, competent workman, would have nothing to do with him now — then surely nobody else would. That was clear. The police, keeping their eye on him, would hasten to warn every employer inclined to give him a chance. He felt suddenly very helpless, alarmed and idle; and he followed the middle-aged man to the estaminet round the corner where he met some other good companions. They assured him that he would not be allowed to starve, work or no work. They had drinks all round to the discomfiture of all employers of labour and to the destruction of society. He sat biting his lower lip. “That is, monsieur, how I became a compagnon,” he said. The hand he passed over his forehead was trembling. “All the same, there’s something wrong in a world where a man can get lost for a glass more or less.” He never looked up, though I could see he was getting excited under his dejection. He slapped the bench with his open palm. “No!” he cried. “It was an impossible existence! Watched by the police, watched by the comrades, I did not belong to myself any more! Why, I could not even go to draw a few francs from my savings-bank without a comrade hanging about the door to see that I didn’t bolt! And most of them 91
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were neither more nor less than housebreakers. The intelligent, I mean. They robbed the rich; they were only getting back their own, they said. When I had had some drink I believed them. There were also the fools and the mad. Des exaltes — quoi! When I was drunk I loved them. When I got more drink I was angry with the world. That was the best time. I found refuge from misery in rage. But one can’t be always drunk — n’est-ce pas, monsieur? And when I was sober I was afraid to break away. They would have stuck me like a pig.” He folded his arms again and raised his sharp chin with a bitter smile. “By and by they told me it was time to go to work. The work was to rob a bank. Afterwards a bomb would be thrown to wreck the place. My beginner’s part would be to keep watch in a street at the back and to take care of a black bag with the bomb inside till it was wanted. After the meeting at which the affair was arranged a trusty comrade did not leave me an inch. I had not dared to protest; I was afraid of being done away with quietly in that room; only, as we were walking together I wondered whether it would not be better for me to throw myself suddenly into the Seine. But while I was turning it over in my mind we had crossed the bridge, and afterwards I had not the opportunity.” In the light of the candle end, with his sharp features, fluffy little moustache, and oval face, he looked at times delicately and gaily young, and then appeared quite old, decrepit, full of sorrow, pressing his folded arms to his breast. As he remained silent I felt bound to ask: “Well! And how did it end?” “Deportation to Cayenne,” he answered. He seemed to think that somebody had given the plot away. As he was keeping watch in the back street, bag in hand, he was set upon by the police. “These imbeciles,” had knocked him down without noticing what he had in his hand. He wondered how the bomb failed to explode as he fell. But it didn’t explode. “I tried to tell my story in court,” he continued. “The president was amused. There were in the audience some idiots who laughed.” I expressed the hope that some of his companions had been caught, too. He shuddered slightly before he told me that there were two — Simon, called also Biscuit, the middle-aged 92
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fitter who spoke to him in the street, and a fellow of the name of Mafile, one of the sympathetic strangers who had applauded his sentiments and consoled his humanitarian sorrows when he got drunk in the cafe. “Yes,” he went on, with an effort, “I had the advantage of their company over there on St. Joseph’s Island, amongst some eighty or ninety other convicts. We were all classed as dangerous.” St. Joseph’s Island is the prettiest of the Iles de Salut. It is rocky and green, with shallow ravines, bushes, thickets, groves of mangotrees, and many feathery palms. Six warders armed with revolvers and carbines are in charge of the convicts kept there. An eight-oared galley keeps up the communication in the daytime, across a channel a quarter of a mile wide, with the Ile Royale, where there is a military post. She makes the first trip at six in the morning. At four in the afternoon her service is over, and she is then hauled up into a little dock on the Ile Royale and a sentry put over her and a few smaller boats. From that time till next morning the island of St. Joseph remains cut off from the rest of the world, with the warders patrolling in turn the path from the warders’ house to the convict huts, and a multitude of sharks patrolling the waters all round. Under these circumstances the convicts planned a mutiny. Such a thing had never been known in the penitentiary’s history before. But their plan was not without some possibility of success. The warders were to be taken by surprise and murdered during the night. Their arms would enable the convicts to shoot down the people in the galley as she came alongside in the morning. The galley once in their possession, other boats were to be captured, and the whole company was to row away up the coast. At dusk the two warders on duty mustered the convicts as usual. Then they proceeded
Anarchist revolt, Guyane, 1894‘
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to inspect the huts to ascertain that everything was in order. In the second they entered they were set upon and absolutely smothered under the numbers of their assailants. The twilight faded rapidly. It was a new moon; and a heavy black squall gathering over the coast increased the profound darkness of the night. The convicts assembled in the open space, deliberating upon the next step to be taken, argued amongst themselves in low voices. Top: roll call. Below: isolation cells “You took part in all this?” I asked. “No. I knew what was going to be done, of course. But why should I kill these warders? I had nothing against them. But I was afraid of the others. Whatever happened, I could not escape from them. I sat alone on the stump of a tree with my head in my hands, sick at heart at the thought of a freedom that could be nothing but a mockery to me. Suddenly I was startled to perceive the shape of a man on the path near by. He stood perfectly still, then his form became effaced in the night. It must have been the chief warder coming to see what had become of his two men. No one noticed him. The convicts kept on quarrelling over their plans. The leaders could not get themselves obeyed. The fierce whispering of that dark mass of men was very horrible. “At last they divided into two parties and moved off. When they had passed me I rose, weary and hopeless. The path to the warders’ house was dark and silent, but on each side the bushes rustled slightly. Presently I saw a faint thread of light before me. The chief warder, followed by his three men, was approaching cautiously. But he had failed to close his dark lantern properly. The convicts had seen that faint gleam, too. There was an awful savage yell, a turmoil on the dark path, shots fired, blows, groans: and with the sound of smashed bushes, the shouts of the pursuers and the screams of the pursued, the man-hunt, the warder-hunt, passed by me into the interior of the island. I 94
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was alone. And I assure you, monsieur, I was indifferent to everything. After standing still for a while, I walked on along the path till I kicked something hard. I stooped and picked up a warder’s revolver. I felt with my fingers that it was loaded in five chambers. In the gusts of wind I heard the convicts calling to each other far away, and then a roll of thunder would cover the soughing and rustling of the trees. Suddenly, a big light ran across my path very low along the ground. And it showed a woman’s skirt with the edge of an apron. “I knew that the person who carried it must be the wife of the head warder. They had forgotten all about her, it seems. A shot rang out in the interior of the island, and she cried out to herself as she ran. She passed on. I followed, and presently I saw her again. She was pulling at the cord of the big bell which hangs at the end of the landing-pier, with one hand, and with the other she was swinging the heavy lantern to and fro. This is the agreed signal for the Ile Royale should assistance be required at night. The wind carried the sound away from our island and the light she swung was hidden on the shore side by the few trees that grow near the warders’ house. “I came up quite close to her from behind. She went on without stopping, without looking aside, as though she had been all alone on the island. A brave woman, monsieur. I put the revolver inside the breast of my blue blouse and waited. A flash of lightning and a clap of thunder destroyed both the sound and the light of the signal for an instant, but she never faltered, pulling at the cord and swinging the lantern as regularly as a machine. She was a comely woman of thirty — no more. I thought to myself, ‘All that’s no good on a night like this.’ And I made up my mind that if a body of my fellowconvicts came down to the pier — which was sure to happen soon — I would shoot her through the head before I shot myself. I knew the ‘comrades’ well. This idea of mine gave me quite an interest in life, monsieur; and at once, instead of remaining stupidly exposed on the pier, I retreated a little way and crouched behind a bush. I did not intend to let myself be pounced upon unawares and be prevented perhaps from rendering a supreme service to at least one human creature before I died myself. “But we must believe the signal was seen, for the galley from Ile Royale came over in an astonishingly short time. The woman kept right on till the light of her lantern flashed upon 95
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the officer in command and the bayonets of the soldiers in the boat. Then she sat down and began to cry. “She didn’t need me any more. I did not budge. Some soldiers were only in their shirt-sleeves, others without boots, just as the call to arms had found them. They passed by my bush at the double. The galley had been sent away for more; and the woman sat all alone crying at the end of the pier, with the lantern standing on the ground near her. “Then suddenly I saw in the light at the end of the pier the red pantaloons of two more men. I was overcome with astonishment. They, too, started off at a run. Their tunics flapped unbuttoned and they were bare-headed. One of them panted out to the other, ‘Straight on, straight on!’ “Where on earth did they spring from, I wondered. Slowly I walked down the short pier. I saw the woman’s form shaken by sobs and heard her moaning more and more distinctly, ‘Oh, my man! my poor man! my poor man!’ I stole on quietly. She could neither hear nor see anything. She had thrown her apron over her head and was rocking herself to and fro in her grief. But I remarked a small boat fastened to the end of the pier. “Those two men — they looked like sous-officiers — must have come in it, after being too late, I suppose, for the galley. It is incredible that they should have thus broken the regulations from a sense of duty. And it was a stupid thing to do. I could not believe my eyes in the very moment I was stepping into that boat. “I pulled along the shore slowly. A black cloud hung over the Iles de Salut. I heard firing, shouts. Another hunt had begun — the convict-hunt. The oars were too long to pull comfortably. I managed them with difficulty, though the boat herself was light. But when I got round to the other side of the island the squall broke in rain and wind. I was unable to make head against it. I let the boat drift ashore and secured her. “I knew the spot. There was a tumbledown old hovel standing near the water. Cowering in there I heard through the noises of the wind and the falling downpour some people tearing through the bushes. They came out on the strand. Soldiers perhaps. A flash of lightning threw everything near me into violent relief. Two convicts! “And directly an amazed voice exclaimed. ‘It’s a miracle!’ It was the voice of Simon, otherwise Biscuit. 96
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“And another voice growled, ‘What’s a miracle?’ “‘Why, there’s a boat lying here!’ “‘You must be mad, Simon! But there is, after all. . . . A boat.’ “They seemed awed into complete silence. The other man was Mafile. He spoke again, cautiously. “‘It is fastened up. There must be somebody here.’ “I spoke to them from within the hovel: ‘I am here.’ “They came in then, and soon gave me to understand that the boat was theirs, not mine. ‘There are two of us,’ said Mafile, ‘against you alone.’ “I got out into the open to keep clear of them for fear of getting a treacherous blow on the head. I could have shot them both where they stood. But I said nothing. I kept down the laughter rising in my throat. I made myself very humble and begged to be allowed to go. They consulted in low tones about my fate, while with my hand on the revolver in the bosom of my blouse I had their lives in my power. I let them live. I meant them to pull that boat. I represented to them with abject humility that I understood the management of a boat, and that, being three to pull, we could get a rest in turns. That decided them at last. It was time. A little more and I would have gone into screaming fits at the drollness of it.” At this point his excitement broke out. He jumped off the bench and gesticulated. The great shadows of his arms darting over roof and walls made the shed appear too small to contain his agitation. “I deny nothing,” he burst out. “I was elated, monsieur. I tasted a sort of felicity. But I kept very quiet. I took my turns at pulling all through the night. We made for the open sea, putting our trust in a passing ship. It was a foolhardy action. I persuaded them to it. When the sun rose the immensity of water was calm, and the Iles de Salut appeared only like dark specks from the top of each swell. I was steering then. Mafile, who was pulling bow, let out an oath and said, ‘We must rest.’ “The time to laugh had come at last. And I took my fill of it, I can tell you. I held my sides and rolled in my seat, they had such startled faces. ‘What’s got into him, the animal?’ cries Mafile. “And Simon, who was nearest to me, says over his shoulder to him, ‘Devil take me if I don’t think he’s gone mad!’ “Then I produced the revolver. Aha! In a 97
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moment they both got the stoniest eyes you can imagine. Ha, ha! They were frightened. But they pulled. Oh, yes, they pulled all day, sometimes looking wild and sometimes looking faint. I lost nothing of it because I had to keep my eyes on them all the time, or else — crack! — they would have been on top of me in a second. I rested my revolver hand on my knee all ready and steered with the other. Their faces began to blister. Sky and sea seemed on fire round us and the sea steamed in the sun. The boat made a sizzling sound as she went through the water. Sometimes Mafile foamed at the mouth and sometimes he groaned. But he pulled. He dared not stop. His eyes became blood-shot all over, and he had bitten his lower lip to pieces. Simon was as hoarse as a crow. “‘Comrade —‘ he begins. “‘There are no comrades here. I am your patron.’ “‘Patron, then,’ he says, ‘in the name of humanity let us rest.’ “I let them. There was a little rainwater washing about the bottom of the boat. I permitted them to snatch some of it in the hollow of their palms. But as I gave the command, ‘En route!’ I caught them exchanging significant glances. They thought I would have to go to sleep sometime! Aha! But I did not want to go to sleep. I was more awake than ever. It is they who went to sleep as they pulled, tumbling off the thwarts head over heels suddenly, one after another. I let them lie. All the stars were out. It was a quiet world. The sun rose. Another day. Allez! En route! “They pulled badly. Their eyes rolled about and their tongues hung out. In the middle of the forenoon Mafile croaks out: ‘Let us make a rush at him, Simon. I would just as soon be shot at once as to die of thirst, hunger, and fatigue at the oar.’ “But while he spoke he pulled; and Simon kept on pulling too. It made me smile. Ah! They loved their life these two, in this evil world of theirs, just as I used to love my life, too, before they spoiled it for me with their phrases. I let them go on to the point of exhaustion, and only then I pointed at the sails of a ship on the horizon. “Aha! You should have seen them revive and buckle to their work! For I kept them at it to pull right across that ship’s path. They were changed. The sort of pity I had felt for them left me. They looked more like themselves every minute. They looked at me with the glances I remembered so well. They were happy. They smiled. 98
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“‘Well,’ says Simon, ‘the energy of that youngster has saved our lives. If he hadn’t made us, we could never have pulled so far out into the track of ships. Comrade, I forgive you. I admire you.’ “And Mafile growls from forward: ‘We owe you a famous debt of gratitude, comrade. You are cut out for a chief.’ “Comrade! Monsieur! Ah, what a good word! And they, such men as these two, had made it accursed. I looked at them. I remembered their lies, their promises, their menaces, and all my days of misery. Why could they not have left me alone after I came out of prison? I looked at them and thought that while they lived I could never be free. Never. Neither I nor others like me with warm hearts and weak heads. For I know I have not a strong head, monsieur. A black rage came upon me — the rage of extreme intoxication — but not against the injustice of society. Oh, no! “‘I must be free!’ I cried, furiously. “‘Vive la liberte!” yells that ruffian Mafile. ‘Mort aux bourgeois who send us to Cayenne! They shall soon know that we are free.’ “The sky, the sea, the whole horizon, seemed to turn red, blood red all round the boat. My temples were beating so loud that I wondered they did not hear. How is it that they did not? How is it they did not understand? “I heard Simon ask, ‘Have we not pulled far enough out now?’ “‘Yes. Far enough,’ I said. I was sorry for him; it was the other I hated. He hauled in his oar with a loud sigh, and as he was raising his hand to wipe his forehead with the air of a man who has done his work, I pulled the trigger of my revolver and shot him like this off the knee, right through the heart. “He tumbled down, with his head hanging over the side of the boat. I did not give him a second glance. The other cried out piercingly. Only one shriek of horror. Then all was still. “He slipped off the thwart on to his knees and raised his clasped hands before his face in an attitude of supplication. ‘Mercy,’ he whispered, faintly. ‘Mercy for me! — comrade.’ “‘Ah, comrade,’ I said, in a low tone. ‘Yes, comrade, of course. Well, then, shout Vive l’anarchie.’ “He flung up his arms, his face up to the sky and his mouth wide open in a great yell of despair. ‘Vive l’anarchie! Vive —‘ “He collapsed all in a heap, with a bullet through his head. 99
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“I flung them both overboard. I threw away the revolver, too. Then I sat down quietly. I was free at last! At last. I did not even look towards the ship; I did not care; indeed, I think I must have gone to sleep, because all of a sudden there were shouts and I found the ship almost on top of me. They hauled me on board and secured the boat astern. They were all blacks, except the captain, who was a mulatto. He alone knew a few words of French. I could not find out where they were going nor who they were. They gave me something to eat every day; but I did not like the way they used to discuss me in their language. Perhaps they were deliberating about throwing me overboard in order to keep possession of the boat. How do I know? As we were passing this island I asked whether it was inhabited. I understood from the mulatto that there was a house on it. A farm, I fancied, they meant. So I asked them to put me ashore on the beach and keep the boat for their trouble. This, I imagine, was just what they wanted. The rest you know.” After pronouncing these words he lost suddenly all control over himself. He paced to and fro rapidly, till at last he broke into a run; his arms went like a windmill and his ejaculations became very much like raving. The burden of them was that he “denied nothing, nothing!” I could only let him go on, and sat out of his way, repeating, “Calmez vous, calmez vous,” at intervals, till his agitation exhausted itself. I must confess, too, that I remained there long after he had crawled under his mosquito-net. He had entreated me not to leave him; so, as one sits up with a nervous child, I sat up with him — in the name of humanity — till he fell asleep. On the whole, my idea is that he was much more of an anarchist than he confessed to me or to himself; and that, the special features of his case apart, he was very much like many other anarchists. Warm heart and weak head — that is the word of the riddle; and it is a fact that the bitterest contradictions and the deadliest conflicts of the world are carried on in every individual breast capable of feeling and passion. From personal inquiry I can vouch that the story of the convict mutiny was in every particular as stated by him. When I got back to Horta from Cayenne and saw the “Anarchist” again, he did not look well. He was more worn, still more frail, and very livid indeed under the grimy smudges of his calling. Evidently the meat of the company’s main herd 100
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(in its unconcentrated form) did not agree with him at all. It was on the pontoon in Horta that we met; and I tried to induce him to leave the launch moored where she was and follow me to Europe there and then. It would have been delightful to think of the excellent manager’s surprise and disgust at the poor fellow‘s escape. But he refused with unconquerable obstinacy. “Surely you don’t mean to live always here!” I cried. He shook his head. “I shall die here,” he said. Then added moodily, “Away from them.” Sometimes I think of him lying open-eyed on his horseman’s gear in the low shed full of tools and scraps of iron — the anarchist slave of the Maranon estate, waiting with resignation for that sleep which “fled” from him, as he used to say, in such an unaccountable manner.
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Dino: Sorry, squire. Anarchists only on Thursdays. Gent: Oh, I say. Quite. I’m terribly sorry. Anarchist: Why don’t you just tell them to Fuck Off? Dino: Because I must dance in and out of the NonFool World. And to do this I must generate and store a wide plurality of transgressive limitalities. Anarchist: (thinks) Well, how positively splendid! How simply tickety-boo! So good to know that. Easy with the razor, Dino.
LET’S HAVE A CHAT ABOUT SERVITUDE Every occupation impresses on its members certain habits of mind and peculiarities of character in which they resemble each other and also distinguish themselves from the perceived riff-raff. To live under the power of another is to live in dependence on their will and thus, in condition of a vassal. Beware! Servitude breeds servility and servility so easily transforms itself into comfort. Comfort time slips away imperceptibly. Hours stolen from you now are non-returnable.
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The Cunningham Amendment, Bradford
Mrs Smilely’s Submission The State does not maintain power by convincing people the system is The Answer. Such a fiction would be too difficult to justify in the face of so much evidence. What the state does, and it does it most effectively is to convince the plankton mass that there is no alternative, Let me up that last bit into capitals. THERE IS NO ALTERNATIVE This is my submission Thank you v. much
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BAKUNIN AT THE BEACH Fiction
Ernest Larsen The twilight trans-Switz express rolled slowly into motion. Glancing up from his mug of coffee where the flat circle of steaming brown liquid swirled incessantly, Bakunin waited for the train to gather sufficient speed. The station began to spin away from his attention as his body focused intensively on the train. He rose from his seat, swung his leather bag under his arm, grazed his chest pocket to assure his fingers of the safety of his Italian passport — F. Culpa, wine merchant — and trotted out, dropping en route a few pieces of soiled linen before the jaded gray eyes of Inspector Dupin. As a gust of his unfaithful wife’s favourite perfume lunged at his wide Russian nose he leaped the car’s steps to her outstretched arms. Their lips met, their long hair merging in the windstream. The station retreated. Locarno was but 100 kilometers distant; the Bakunins were on vacation. Inspector Dupin extended his cane, speared the fallen items and after a few moment’s examination tossed them gingerly into a nearby waste container. His cane rejoined the crook of his elbow and he drew out a small notebook and a pen to scribble some new bits of information, just in case.
The Bakunins
From X’s Diary: 12 August. Before my very eyes Bakunin in white walking shorts, purchasing salt-water taffy at a stall. 18. August. A sound sleep at last: S. confides in me more and more. Asked me into w.c. to view. Through the open garret window B. in brown walking shorts, devouring steamers at a sidewalk stand. 19 August. Our paths cross on Vida Street. I north B. south. His beard trimmed. I took a chance and nodded, in an effort to approximate neighbourly recognition. He did not appear to notice. 22 August. The mosquitoes! Bakunin. 23 August. S. at last! I bear in my waistcoat pocket — the one without the hole — a most precious object, a scented treasure, silky pink underdrawers. On my personal parade, passing the Versailles Café, there he is, at a table with a small woman, 103
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evidently his wife. His hands are flying, sketching, slicing the air, while her posture is a bit less animated than one of those mannequins you see in the fancy department stores in Paris. 26 August. I no longer resist temptation, any temptation. 27 August. He accosts me in the street, greets me familiarly. Then, sans preliminary, he begins to detail the most extraordinary set of secret plans he’s been developing — please please don’t whisper a word, he says — for overturning something or other in the very near future. Launching into this dark conspiracy without a word of context, he manages only to leave me there in the dark. 29 August. S. suddenly cold, colder, almost unreachable. My searching looks produce an indifferent response. B. now seems to think I am one of his confederates. I received a note from him at the second post. How indeed did he know my address, I am wondering. He requests a small loan. 30 August. He saw me, I’m sure. But he must have been distracted. I waved. A liveried manservant opened the door to the mansion. A matched pair of male servants led B. ceremoniously through an arched marble entry past still more servants to a monstrous table laden with rare delicacies and exquisitely prepared dishes. He was politely begged to choose anything that suited his fancy. At that very moment, the recently deposed king Louis-Philippe began banging his sword on the gold-embossed door of the banquet hall. Nobody budged. Everyone made an effort not to notice this intrusion. Unperturbed, B. said, Choose? He shook his head. Pack it all up. I need some fresh air. A nearby footman nodded. More remorselessly loud banging. B. browsed, briskly tasting this and that, as dish after dish was carefully stacked into wicker picnic hampers. Wicker is good — much better than wood. It’s not only lighter and therefore easier to transport but it is naturally ventilated. No question about it. The former ruler of France, long past his youth, became winded soon enough and gave up, dropping his heavy sword to the Carrara marble floor. A final clangor. Later, while the mules were being saddled, Bakunin sat on the veranda, paging through his well-thumbed copy of Proudhon’s What Is Property? There was just enough torchlight to read but Bakunin wished once again only to browse, as if the printed words he happened upon were exquisitely prepared philosophical morsels. 104
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The waters of Lake Maggiore still sparkle in the sun. What then to make of the fact that Bakunin sits facing the glare of the sun’s last bright moments? Sits, almost immovably, on a vertical stack of the previous tenants’ abandoned volumes of the Encyclopedia Brittanica, which taken together contain a fair approximation of the total sum of the world’s knowledge? He doesn’t even shade his eyes. He can hear someone walking slowly through the rented house, opening and shutting doors. It must be Tina, who must intend to remind her husband of her physical, not at all hypothetical, existence. Bakunin Flavio Costantini If Tina does not succeed — then what will she do? A door slams. If Bakunin does not respond then she will seek out Cafiero. He is not far away. He can be found. She need only open a certain door in the attic. She will enter the small narrow room under the A-frame roof, take a few steps inside and then halt. The air up here is a bit stifling. She waits until Cafiero, who is seated at a small desk in front of the only window ceases to write. Cafiero will cease to write soon enough. he need wait only a breath or two. She will ask him a question. Forgetting his pen, Cafiero will look at Tina’s lips. And in this way or something very much like it — it will begin again, will it not? For Bakunin it could be said that the beginning of a day is the same as the beginning of an epoch. Tina’s lips will tremble very slightly as she repeats the question. Cafiero will now stand, hoping thereby to distance or formalize what is beginning to feel like a sticky situation. The sun’s glare is painful. Bakunin stands. The pile of books totters. Silence throughout the house, one of those blanket silences that intimate an embrace between the failing light and the outstretched earth. The books do fall. Bakunin doesn’t notice. He is lost in thought, as inaccessible as the highest peak in the nearby Alps. With a tentative glance, Cafiero showed me a recent notice, a clipping that a London comrade had sent, from an English review. I had not yet finished early breakfast. It appears that some literary luminary has produced a novel in the tissues of which I am somehow embedded —t races of me, that is. Crumbs, like the bread crumbs on the plate here. This egotist, 105
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self-serving braggart, self-deceiving scoundrel con-artist and so on and so on, the usual, in other words. I put it down. I have been working up all this material on practices of selforganization, on cooperatives, on possible new modes of radical decentralization which yet are rooted in certain forms of peasant life still perceptible even here in the cantons of Switzerland, in rural communes in Catalonia — and so to be distracted by mere literature? I don’t think so. Before taking a nap out in the back garden, after lunch, I picked up the clipping again. The book under review paints a Russia with the inevitable tints of blankness, dread, and snow. A strange land strewn with fanatical student bomb-tossers. Fanatical. On the gray walls of their tiny garrets: icons fervently lit in homage to the most infernal of saints: B. The terrible damage I inflict on impressionable youth. So now I am stalked into Locarno by this double whom no one who knows me could recognize — and I will now be recognised at once by all who don’t know me, once the novel makes its appearance on the continent. Fortunately, that will take years. Eventually an alternative me will wash up on shore to soak up my dissonances like an acoustical sponge. I wish I had that particular peculiar talent to be able to glean only the lies from a golden field of ripe-for-the-harvest rumor. I have decided or almost decided on a health regimen, which includes a strict diet, limited intake of alcohol, hydrotherapy, and regular exercise. For the latter I hit upon the notion of a round-trip swim to a small uninhabited atoll a few hundred metres offshore. These excursions must be conducted exclusively after nightfall, when everyone is asleep, partly, to be honest, so as to flatter my over-developed taste for secrecy but equally to avoid excessive ridicule. The truth is that I can scarcely swim and yet I have before my eyes at all times the image of Byron swimming the Hellespont — and drowning, of course. Moving with self-imposed gravity the cat took his moment calmly, at least temporarily interrupting my view of the words. I arrested my hand — raised to shoo the beast — at the sight of my own blackened fingertips. The cat sat. His fur brushed the still-fresh ink. He awaited his own decision to flatten out entirely on the table. I admired him as I often did. His tail 106
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curled this side of my coffee cup, its tip threatening to dip into it, like a nib into an inkpot. When my other arm dropped the paper relaxed a bit and the cat took that as a cue and stretched out. The waiter set out the luncheon prix fixe entrée before the customer at the table nearby. The customer made a grimace as he inspected the platter, which still steamed, undisturbed by even a trace of wind. The studious-looking customer started to part the peas from the carrots with his knife and fork, as if forcibly imposing a truce on warring armies who’d Bakunin been engaged too long on the battlefield. The cat blinked his eyes and fell asleep or so he wanted me Flavio Costantini to believe, at any rate. His body blocked most of the page and most of the news-sheet that passes for a newspaper here. I could make out one story of interest. The Czar has closed the Sunday Schools again, pronouncing them hotbeds of treasonous activity. I wonder: would the secret police dare to torture a priest who might defy the new ban? I have had a long blank imposed on my life. I never speak of it and yet so much if not everything that I do is conditioned by the fact of my imprisonment in the Peter and Paul Fortress. No, that is not accurate. The way that I do what I do is the effect of that long blank. Every sentence I utter in fact has a blank in it somewhere, concealed or not. For example: No other torture was so __________ as the strappado. My gloves. when I remember to wear them. are courteous enough to hide those scars. Once each night if I am able to fall asleep a creeping sweat bathes the hulk of my body. I take the attitude of a suppliant, fingers pointed to the heavens. My head spears itself on my sharpened spinal cord. The Czar never asks for anything more than what his peoplecan give, Michael. The Czar requests only a complete __________, Michael. It’s as simple as can be. It is in your power, Michael, to renew his faith, in the omnipotence of_____________. Cafiero, in a striped bathing costume, came out of the sun holding before him with a decidedly sacramental air a badsmelling fish. I told him to take it away. I complained about my non-existent allergies, my lack of appetite, my aversion to certain types of seafood. He insisted that I feel the stillbreathing, still-wriggling fish in my bare hands. I attempted to 107
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push away his gift. He came still closer with it. Scarcely worth noting — Cafiero was for some reason in a light-hearted mood and I was not. But still: this counted as the first time in my life that it occurred to me that a gift could in any way represent a problem for the receiver of the gift. Cafiero left the greenishgold fish lying on the rocking-chair. In its dying efforts it managed to wriggle off the rocker onto the ground. In the old days, nearly everyone of a real political spirit was in some acknowledged sense a panslavist. Bakunin was, of course, the most ardent panslavist of all time, so ardent that he overflowed its boundaries fairly quickly. True, he did in his younger days make a spontaneous offer of Panslavian leadership to his most benevolent and holy torturer Czar Nicholas. Is this at bottom among the most authentically anarchist gesture possible at that moment — or is it merely confused and truly in league with intellectual chaos — or both at once? Bakunin unable to sleep or to swim is sitting on the wicker rocker. Absentmindedl, he pokes a hole in the chair arm. He is fishing — though he doesn’t fish — for certain memories, trying to decide which among them still breathe or at least will still wriggle on the hook for a minute or two. When at last B. did arrive alive in London after all those versts, miles, leagues, and kilometers and so on — all those arbitrary measures of the immense distance between the steppes of Siberia and the steps up to the offices of The Bell, Herzen’s struggling expat journal, north of Clerkenwell, Herzen, a bit flummoxed, made a point of showing his old friend the huge stack of appeals that had been made year after year to gain his release. He even showed him the final one, he fingered the unsigned appeal, being made ready for the press just as word came that Bakunin had escaped. Or, as he wondered at the time, was that scarcely credible report of his escape no more than a constructed preliminary to an already written announcement that he was found dead somewhere, by who knew what hand? That seemed a good deal more likely. Cold fried eggs on the plate, looking close to obscene, queasy-making. Bakunin averted his gaze. The undersigned respectfully et cetera — only there were no undersigned. Blank space left for the absent signatures. Eggs overcooked, yokes overvividly yellow, adorned with grease. From an aerial 108
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balloon (one form of transportation which Bakunin had not attempted in the many months it took to get from the Russian there to the English here) they could be rice paddies in China. No, not really. Here was the problem, as Bakunin felt it out, as if feeling his way forward in the dark: No, he said to himself, let’s avoid that cliché, shall we? All right: the streets of St. Petersburg and the streets of London, as far as he was concerned, were very difficult to tell apart. It was mixed up with smoke, lots of smoke. The city sent yellow smoke to the sky — the streets were dense with it. The smoke clung to our clothes and our flesh was acrid and gritty. What’s this, Bakunin asked. Herzen closed his eyes. For a half-second he wished that Bakunin was — not dead, not still in prison — but at the very least not at his elbow tearing through every shred of paper, as if it was a living past, instead of what it really was, let us admit it, a dead one. Bakunin was pointing to: We hereby disassociate ourselves from all programs of random terror. The order, the speed, and sometimes the pressure with which things appear from out of the past — that can amount to a program of random terror. Still steaming, Minister Plehve’s sledge, a blackened rubble and the sooty snow melted about it, left a horizon that was perfectly circular. Nothing random about a perfect circle, is there? After stooping for a handful of snow the officer gripped the charred door. The snow sizzled and the door slid off, smacking the ground. The Minister’s body was not inside. This is what is meant by random then? Bakunin would like to strip away the gap, the blank, leap the void, but you can’t rob Peter to pay Paul. He would even agree to agree, to say such actions are sheer self-willed fantasy, the smoke and mirrors of a third-rate prestidigitator. He was ready for anything in the three months it took to get from Siberia, from the mouth of the Amur, to embark, as it turned out for San Francisco. He was as flexible as an earthworm. He was. He melted from the heat aboard the transcontinental train from San Francisco. True, he was halfhoping and certainly in his boots expecting the Indian tribes to attack at every turn, all across the West. A great disappointment that the only Indians he saw were squatting outside the stations. Waiting for something or other. 109
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He tried to construct an infernal vision — He descended the gangplank and the city stretched out and then the darkness gathered and flung torches the size of courtrooms into the air. Firebombed state buildings faced each other’s flames. — but it fell apart. A raw youth, awaiting Herzen’s attention for who knows what, leaning back a little, elbowing stacked copies of The Bell, slouched and nodded out. As a result, all those identical sketches on the cover of the new issue of Herzen’s journal slid and stretched across the polished wood floor of the office. Sketches of firebombs. All across the city church bells clanged at the moment that Herzen and B. embraced. Eventually, having sorted through a rush of preliminaries, B. asked him: And in Italy? All quiet. And in Austria? All quiet. And in Turkey? All quiet everywhere and nothing in prospect. And what of the fires in the street? The bombings in St. Petersburg spell nothing but repression, disaster. I travelled ten thousand miles through the streets to get here. There is perceptible fear in everyone’s face. Ten thousand miles of faces. They wonder what the future will bring. Things will get much worse now. It’s that — I don’t believe that. Bombings can wash away the gray mist of indecision. Push some closer to the verge of living. They long in their hearts to set up barricades. Herzen gestured his impatience. It’s no secret what fear really does, Michael. Bakunin shrugged. Every negative has a negative potential — I’m not following you, I’m afraid. I’m not able to think very clearly as yet, I’m sorry to say. I am thinking that you don’t necessarily see or smell, feel or taste a rupture before it occurs — and turns everything upside down. Herzen was gobsmacked. His old friend had not changed. 110
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There was a sliver moon. He stripped at the edge of the lake and paddled out until the dark swallowed him up. In the throes of something that he knew was black despair. Legs crossed. Catches himself in absent stares. Tina, haggard, is big with child, sleeping fitfully on a daybed in the corner. The Swiss owner of their vacation cottage sits athwart the entrance, a chair propped against the wood door. B. again takes up scribbling lengthy, pleading, exhortatory letters under the gaslight. Any short-term loan, no matter how insignificant to you, in all your generosity of spirit, will help us at this moment. His strength ebbs again as he regards the Swiss owner’s fingers clasped over his belly. He glances at Tina. The swollen sac breathes with a life of its own. It is never in doubt how much, how feverishly, he loves her. He broods: what specific stratagems would get their household across this this… Now he is writing a letter in a code of his own invention. He writes with a broad scrawl that uses up page after page. It may shock you to learn that I have been following the cure faithfully — off to the baths every morning — lost more than two kilos thus far — but my fretfulness increases. Many friends have arrived recently, sliding into town, as it were. We have made contacts among the workers, many of whom are clear-thinking and incipiently militant. I have divined, like one of those fairground palmreaders, through certain frail stirrings that discontent may be more widespread (though let’s be clear — this is not the Jura!) than those closest to the source are likely to perceive. The air is fraught with portents. In less than four months a severe inflation has sliced real wages to a tenth of normal. Half a loaf decimates a day’s pay. My senses inform me that any extra burden will topple the bridges of ‘rationalism’ over the blue lakes of desire. I am becoming convinced that a revolt is in the wind and my confederates are ready for a swim. Write me of my comrades in Geneva. This new code substitutes a color for a noun. Replace friends with greens, town with blue, contacts with reds, workers with browns, etc. Bakunin writes this code out in meticulous detail and encloses it with the letter in the envelope, seals it. Yours.
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The Chronicles of Farquhar McHarg ¡Pistoleros!
Pistoleros! Vol 2: 1919, Farquhar McHarg ISBN 9781873976-41-8, 210 pp, £14.00 (inc p+p)
Pistoleros! 2: 1919 is the second volume of the memoirs and notebooks of Farquhar McHarg, a seventy-six-year-old anarchist from the Govan district of Glasgow, its writing prompted by the murder, in October 1976, of his lifelong friend, Laureano Cerrada Santos. McHarg’s Chronicles record his evolving beliefs and sense of mission, and the remarkable adventures he experienced from the day he sailed into the neutral port of Barcelona in the spring of 1918, a naïve but idealistic eighteenyear-old, and 1976. Farquhar’s Chronicles are folk history, bringing the changes that shook the political and social landscape of Spain (and the world) between 1918 and 1976 into the framework of adult lifetime. They make a vexatious but fascinating story that provides a deep insight into the spirit that moved the selfless, generous, occasionally naïve and recklessly idealistic people who were involved in the bitter social struggles that marked the hectic insurrectionary and utopian aftermath of the great imperialist war of 1914¬1918. Contemptuous of traditional political parties and professional politicians, and inspired by the example — and the myth — of the Russian Revolution, these men and women aimed to rid the world of a cruel, corrupt, arbitrary and oppressive political and economic system that abused authority and exploited, degraded, tortured and murdered in the name of profit and power. The transformation of the unworldly young Farquhar, in the climactic and rebellious years between 1918 and 1924, is fascinating to observe as he acquires consciousness and identity through his experiences in a world for which he is little prepared. The journey he embarks upon in these pages is not simply a personal memoir or an exploration of his own psyche; the many hitherto untold stories that unfold along his way provide profound understanding of the circumstances, thoughts and deeds of people who tried to rescue the Europe of the twentieth century from the cycle of disaster, war and death.
ChristieBooks, PO Box 35, Hastings, East Sussex, T4341ZS
Pistoleros! Vol 2: 1919, Farquhar McHarg ISBN 9781873976-37-1, 268 pp, £15.00 (inc p+p)
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READING THE RUNES New Perspectives on The Spanish Civil War Archival and related research on the historiography of the Spanish Civil War since the death of Franco
Stephen Schwartz In an unexpected coincidence, the fall of the Communist regimes and opening (in some cases temporary) of their archives, beginning in the 1990s, followed a similar process of documentary disclosure in Spain, regarding the civil war of 1936-39, in which Communism played a central role. The Spanish archival disclosures were better organized, more complete, and more thorough than those, for example, in Russia. Generalísimo Francisco Franco died in 1975 and the dictatorship he created dissolved during a six-year transition to democracy overseen by King Juan Carlos. The opening, publication, and study of archival material, however, lagged behind the republication and issuance of new works on the history of the radical Republicans in Spain, including the anarcho-syndicalist movement (National Confederation of Labour and the Iberian Anarchist Federation – CNT-FAI), the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE), the Workers Party of Marxist Unification (POUM), and the Catalan Republican Left (ERC). The most useful Spanish archival releases and new historiographical volumes have mainly dealt with these parties. By contrast, little fresh commentary on the “official” Spanish Communist Party (PCE) has been produced in Spain, and aside from documentation on the relations between the PCE as Communist International (CI) Communists and their main leftist adversary, the POUM, which considered itself Communist but anti-Stalinist, archival material on the PCE has generally been drawn from Russian holdings, releases from which are limited, although exceptionally valuable. A single volume of Soviet records on the Spanish war, Spain Betrayed1, described below and originally issued in English, then in Spanish, has greatly contributed to new perspectives on the war. 113
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on anarchists in fiction The Spanish Civil War in the History of the Left
The Spanish civil war was already estimated to have become one of the 20th century’s most enduring and fecund historical topics, in terms of the quantity of scholarly, literary, and related productions, when Franco died. A vast output of primary source material was then published, and new analytical works in many languages, most of them based on secondary sources, continue to appear in the 21st century. This survey will cover only the outstanding works focused on archival disclosures or introducing previously unknown documentation, and dealing with Communism, the POUM, and the other radical forces in the conflict. *** The most interesting republications, new volumes, and archival materials are associated with the POUM. From 1937 to 1975, only a few valuable works about the left parties had been published in Spain, and almost nothing at all representative of the POUM and its point of view had been issued abroad, with the exception of some titles in France. By contrast, the Communists and anarchists had supported extensive printing activities in numerous foreign countries during the Franco era, including the U.S. and Britain, directed to the local public as well as to their adherents. The PSOE and the Catalan Left, aside from émigré periodicals and volumes of memoirs serving their own constituencies, had never published outside Spain and the countries of their diaspora, residing in France and Latin America. The lack of reliable source material on the POUM was especially problematical. The POUM, its political attitudes, and its place in Spanish and Catalan working-class and civil war history had become a major theme of political, historiographic, and popular discussion of the war, thanks not only to the course of events but also to the works of observation written by three foreigners: George Orwell, Franz Borkenau, and Gerald Brenan.2 Although Orwell, Borkenau, and Brenan cannot be blamed for them, three political myths had become standardized about the POUM. The first, articulated by Soviet sympathisers, was that it was a small Trotskyist sect comparable to such groups in many other countries, when in reality it was a major political force in Catalonia, far superior in influence there to the PCE. The second legend, put forward by Trotskyists, was that the POUM’s cadres had been “massacred”, along with anarchosyndicalists, by Soviet-directed agents in the wake of the 114
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POUM’s governmental suppression in 1937. Tragically, the POUM’s co-founder, Andreu Nin i Pérez (1892-1937), a prominent Catalan writer and labour figure, and conseller (minister) of justice in the revolutionary Catalan Generalitat (regional government) of 1936, was murdered by Stalinists. The appointment of an alleged and unrepentant “Trotskyite” to the justice portfolio in Catalonia at the onset of the worst Moscow purge trials was a powerful repudiation of the claims of the Russian authorities and must have been perceived by the Stalin leadership with exceptional horror. While the POUM was not Trotskyist in official terms, its anti-Stalinism kept it very close to the Trotskyist movement, some Trotskyists fought in its ranks, and it did not denounce Trotsky or his acolytes in the Stalinist manner. But the full roster of POUM, Trotskyist, and anarchist victims in Spain, killed within the country, or kidnapped and liquidated elsewhere by Communists, was probably no more than 30 people. Trotskyist claims about wholesale murder of the POUM and anarchists seem to have reflected spite, in that the POUM had rejected the political advice of Trotsky and his few Spanish, as well as his international, followers. More important, however, both the POUM and, unquestionably, the anarchist movement, were deeply rooted in Catalonia and could not be done away with easily. The third historical error, which continues to be repeated, is the belief that Nin himself, a Soviet functionary from 1921 to 1930, was a “secretary” for, or otherwise attached to the staff of, Leon Trotsky during the latter’s period of state responsibilities.3 Nin occupied a high post in the Red International of Labor Unions (Profintern) as well as serving in the leading structures of the CI and the Spanish Communist Party. During the internal struggle in the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) he became a member of an International Commission of the Oppositional Center, but did not work directly with or under Trotsky. Victor Serge recalled, “In Moscow I took part in the International Commission set up by the Oppositional Centre, together with [Grigori] Zinoviev’s spokesman [Moisei Markovich] Kharitonov, Fritz Wolf (who soon capitulated, which did not stop him being shot in 1937), Andrés Nin, the Bulgarian Lebedev (or Stepanov, a clandestine Oppositionist who betrayed us and later worked as a Comintern agent during the revolution in Spain) and two or three other militants whose names I have forgotten.”4 115
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Downgrading of Nin, considered a major revolutionary personality in his own right, to a bureaucratic position subordinate to Trotsky, reflects the ignorance of foreign authors who do not know of his prominence in the Catalan journalistic and labor milieux, even before his departure for Russia. The late Catalan author Pere Pagès (1916-2003), known as Víctor Alba, who was my mentor in writing about the POUM5, had demonstrated inexhaustible energy in seeking to “rehabilitate” the party’s reputation by publishing books on it, even in Catalonia at the end of the Franco era. It was therefore unsurprising that two of the earliest volumes of republished documentation on the POUM, after Franco’s death, were issued in 1977-78 at his instance. The first was La Nueva Era (The New Era), a collection of articles from a revolutionary antiStalinist journal printed in Spain from 1930 to 1936. More useful, however, was a compendium of all the basic theoretical and political documents of the POUM produced during the civil war, and titled La Revolución española en la practica (The Spanish Revolution in Practice).6 The latter book provided historians with their first primary source, after many years, on the activity of the party during the civil war. Opening of the Spanish archives
The official process of archival release was slower. Unlike the former Communist governments, the post-Franco regime had no “reasons of state” that would block the opening of most of their holdings, especially on the civil war. The organisation and preparation of documents for scholarly use was carried out with admirable thoroughness, professionalism, and transparency – which made for a relatively long period of work by archival staffs. Some archives were, nevertheless, subjects of controversy. For example, the Franco state had established a General Archive of the Civil War in Salamanca, to support a massive judicial investigation charging the civil war left with assorted crimes, and evidence from which was utilized in individual cases against opposition personalities after the war. The Salamanca facility included the archives of the Generalitat of Catalonia, which, like other Republican source materials, had been seized by the victors at the end of the war. The Generalitat demanded the reversion of these resources to its control, and after a process lasting some 20 years, in which both the city government of Salamanca and the conservative 116
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Popular Party opposed the breakup of the collection, transfer of the materials from Salamanca to Barcelona was effected in 2006.7 Other institutions became involved in the debate, which was resolved by a decision of the Spanish legal system. These included the successor to the Catalan section of the PCE, now known as Initiative for Catalonia — The Greens (ICV), which called for restitution of the entire corpus of documents in Salamanca to all their original possessors. The CNT protested that its documentation should not be returned to the Generalitat, but to the anarchist organisation, and the Jewish Community of Barcelona, the archives of which had also been seized in 1939, similarly wanted them returned to its own handling rather than that of the Generalitat. But while different interests disagreed over the disposal of the archives, no attempts were disclosed to prevent scholars from using them freely, as have been seen in Russia. At the same time, nevertheless, official files on Francoist executions during the civil war have not been opened, as secret police files on the Stalin-era purges have been handed over to family members of Russian victims — a practice that began under Soviet rule in the late 1950s. Materials describing recent surveillance of anarchists, Basque extremists, and others still considered enemies of the state have not been released in Spain, a practice different from that in such countries as Germany and the former Yugoslavia, where dossiers on the recruitment of informers and observation of dissidents against Communism have been made accessible to the general public and even, in the ex-Yugoslav case, printed and offered for sale. In addition, some archives held abroad by left groups were transferred to universities and foundations in Spain. For example, the Centre for International Historical Studies (CEHI) at the University of Barcelona received a considerable collection of POUM documents, and even inaugurated a Maurín-Nin Hall dedicated to the party’s main founders.8 In 1988, a major event took place, when the CEHI received, from the National Historical Archive in Madrid, the dossier of the Republican authorities on the 1937-38 trial of the POUM leadership (exclusive of Nin, who had been killed) by the Special Tribunal for Espionage and High Treason. The Special Tribunal had been established hastily by the Spanish Republican authorities in 1937. The POUM leaders were indicted for allegedly provoking the disorders in Barcelona 117
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known as the “May events” of 1937 (described by Orwell on the basis of his eyewitness) with the aim of carrying out a military insurrection. They were further charged with desertion from the Aragón front in support of the Barcelona protests; subversive propaganda; illegal possession of secret military information; unlawful possession and trafficking in arms with the intent of organizing an uprising; smuggling money and objects of value to France; use of secret codes, and maintenance of relations and communications with suspicious foreigners. Some of the prosecutorial information read as if borrowed directly from similar documents in the Moscow purge trials. The dossier turned over to CEHI also included interrogatory transcriptions taken down from Nin during his period of imprisonment; materials from the 1938 trial of the POUM military commander Josep Rovira i Canals (1902-68), charged with disloyal activities in the same matters treated by the earlier trial, and numerous ancillary memoranda on the POUM composed by secret police investigators. There was no evidence of who had killed Nin or where his body was buried.9 The most sensational item in the dossier comprised investigators’ notes on none other than George Orwell himself (born Eric Blair and described in the document as “Enric”, a Catalan form of “Henry”) and his wife Eileen Blair. In Homage to Catalonia, Orwell had somewhat light-heartedly described his pursuit by Spanish secret police agents in Barcelona. But the notes found in the POUM dossier revealed that the investigation of the Blair couple was anything but innocuous. The anonymous investigators described Eric and Eileen Blair as “pronounced Trotskyists],” which they most certainly were not; and liaison agents between the British Independent Labour Party and the POUM, also untrue.10 The document finally included the phrase “Liaison with Moscow”, with no further explanation. The implication is clear: Orwell was a major target, and would probably have been liquidated or kidnapped and sent to Russia if caught. He was in much more serious danger than he ever admitted, or perhaps was unaware of how great a risk he faced. Discovery of the Orwell document caused a minor sensation in British media. The printed volume based on the POUM dossier, titled El Proceso del POUM (The POUM Trial), totaled 578 pages, and was incomplete at that.11 Investigative notes on other foreigners were included in the documentary transfer but were 118
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not published. The volume was, and remains, an indispensable source for historians of the Spanish civil war and biographers of Orwell. The Legacy of Munis
When Franco expired, Nin and Maurín, as well as Rovira and others who had been tried in 1937-38, were dead, along with most of the rest of the POUM leaders. Víctor Alba, although a courageous and tenacious defender of the party’s reputation, had been a minor figure in the party youth movement and its journalistic efforts during the civil war. But two aggressive and disputatious figures involved in the POUM trial survived and continued publishing commentaries on historical events. These were Juan Andrade Rodríguez (1898-1981) and Manuel Fernández Grandizo Martínez (1912-1989), the latter known by the pen-name “G. Munis.” Andrade had been a member of the POUM Executive Committee and was a prominent sympathizer of Trotsky. He compiled several worthwhile books based on primary sources, which were published posthumously.12 Fernández Grandizo, alias Munis, was born in Mexico but raised from childhood in the impoverished region of Extremadura — the only part of Spain where, before the civil war, Trotskyism was the dominant political trend. He had been the leader of the authentic Spanish Trotskyist group in the war, known as the Bolshevik-Leninist Section and comprising fewer than a dozen members. During the “May events” they distributed a leaflet on the protestors’ barricades, as noted by Orwell. Fernández Grandizo appeared in the POUM trial as a witness, declaring that this group was unaffiliated with the POUM. He and several members of his group were tried in Barcelona in 1938 for the murder of a Russian infiltrator into the POUM, Lev Narvich, who assisted in the arrest of Nin and the other POUM leaders. Narvich had, in reality, been killed in an act of revenge by the POUM. But Munis and his comrades, after being held in exceptionally bad conditions, were found guilty, sentenced to death, and kept in prison until the fall of Barcelona to the Franco forces and their escape, along with many thousands of anarchists, POUMists, and other revolutionaries, across the French border. As “Munis,” Fernández Grandizo returned to his native Mexico and in 1940 delivered the main eulogy at the funeral of Trotsky. In 1948, he published a polemical volume on the failure of the Spanish revolutionaries, Jalones de derrota, promesa de victoria: Espana 1930-39 (Signposts of defeat, 119
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promise of victory: Spain 1930-39). This incomplete and undocumented but exceptional work was republished in France during the Franco era and then reset and republished in Spain after the dictator’s death. Munis was strongly critical of the whole array of radical leaders during the war. Although from a Marxist perspective, he expressed respect for the anarchist CNT-FAI as the only significant revolutionary labour movement in Europe. His vigorous militancy and a certain cachet derived from his involvement in the “May events,” as well as his unlimited stream of published commentary about events of the day, made his work attractive to young Spanish and some foreign radicals during the post-Franco transition. Volumes of his articles continue to be published in Spain; his last writings before his death were critical of Gorbachev as a false reformer. His case was unique; he was the last of the civil war revolutionaries to actively address contemporary issues in a traditional, intransigently Marxist idiom. Anarchist documentation
Beside POUM and Trotskyist sources, a much larger corpus of anarchist documentation emerged in the post-Franco era. Of that mass of books and articles, one volume appears as uniquely valuable. It is related, in a specific and unusual manner, with recruitment by Franco’s nationalist forces of Moroccan volunteers, based on the anti-revolutionary leader’s former service in the sector of Morocco then occupied by Spain. While it is an extremely obscure topic in the historiography of the civil war, the more radical defenders of the Spanish Republic — anarchists, anti-Stalinist communists, and Catalan nationalists — gave serious consideration to support for a nationalist uprising in Morocco. The intent was to undermine the capacity of Franco to enlist Moroccan troops. The Catalan left were especially interested because their region had been convulsed for decades by radical opposition to Spanish military involvement in Morocco. The late Abel Paz (pseudonym of Diego Camacho Escámez, 19212009), the leading contemporary historian of Spanish anarchism, mined official Catalan as well as radical-left archives to show the serious character of the Spanish revolutionary attempt to provoke a rebellion in Morocco. In 2000 he published La Cuestión de Marruecos y la República Española (The Moroccan Question and the Spanish Republic).13 He reported that Simone Weil, the French philosopher then 120
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sympathetic to the radical left, had gone to Spain when the civil war broke out, and learned that clashes had occurred in Morocco between Franco’s legions and the local population. She spurred French anarcho-syndicalist Robert Louzon, who had lived in North Africa (and who was also associated with the early member of the French Communist Party, Pierre Monatte, and with Albert Camus) to go to Fez to investigate the situation. Louzon and a French Trotskyist, David Rousset, were in Fez and set up a meeting with the nationalist Moroccan Committee of Action. The Moroccans then journeyed to Barcelona for inconclusive negotiations, mainly with the anarchists, but with the involvement of the POUM and the French Trotskyist Jean Rous, through the Central Committee of Antifascist Militias. The latter was a near-“soviet” that exercised real power in revolutionary Catalonia’s early phase. But Paz also revealed that the Spanish anarchist movement had, beginning in the 1920s, formulated a variant on the Bolshevik vision of world revolution. That is, they reasoned that since Spain was the only country in Europe where anarchism dominated the left, the sole means to secure a local revolutionary victory would be to support an uprising in North Africa. The most interesting element in this project is that while the Spanish anarchists were famous for their irreconcilable opposition to the Catholic church, they did not consider their irreligion a barrier to approaching the Muslims of the Maghreb. In this, the anarchists were certainly more idealistic, and perhaps even more practical, than the Soviet Communists, who spread antireligious propaganda in the Muslim lands they ruled. But Franco won the war, and ultraradical experiments in North Africa came to an end — at least those involving Western social ideologies. Books and Films
Post-Franco archival and related research produced television and film documentaries as well as books. Armed with an official request from the Catalan Communists, a team of investigative journalists from the Catalan public television channel TV3 went to Russia and visited the CI archives, to determine what could be confirmed about the death of Andreu Nin. The result was a prime-time documentary, Operació Nikolai (Operation Nikolai), broadcast in 1992.14 Four years later, a similar and longer documentary, Asaltando los Cielos (Storm the Skies), was presented on Spanish national television, examining the life of Jaume Raimón Mercader del 121
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Río, the assassin of Trotsky, and including interviews with Spanish Communist exiles in Russia.15 The effect of these broadcasts was devastating for the reputation of the Spanish Communists, in showing their responsibility for two of the most notorious political assassinations in 20th century history. In Operació Nikolai, Nin was restored to his proper reputation as a Catalan literary figure, and Soviet agents were clearly identified as the authors of the defeat of the revolutionary movement on the Republican side during the civil war. But Operació Nikolai did not name the agents who killed Nin, while Asaltando los Cielos described the dreadful effects of Soviet secret police service on the Mercader family, and the sufferings of Spanish Republican émigrés in Russia, sent to labor camps for alleged anti-Soviet activity. In addition to the release of the dossier on the POUM trial, and broadcast of Operació Nikolai, a considerable program of academic and publishing activity has been accomplished by the Andreu Nin Foundation (FAN), created in 1987 (the 50th anniversary of Nin’s murder) and which maintains a website including a monthly bulletin.16 The FAN tracks the availability of archival resources as well as the continued publication of documents, memoirs, and scholarly works dealing with the movement. A sustained interest in civil war history has been demonstrated by publication of a tourist guidebook distributed by the FAN, describing the main sites of revolutionary action during the conflict.17 Outside Spain, a publishing enterprise in English, dedicated to preserving the historical memory of Spanish anarchism, has been established by the Scots anarchist Stuart Christie, a former political prisoner in Spain. Christie’s main work has been the publication in translation of the three-volume complete history of the CNT during the civil war by Josep Peirats Valls (1908-89), the outstanding anarchist chronicler, whose work is especially valuable for its transparency as well as its basis in primary sources. (Peirats’ papers are held at the International Institute for Social History in Amsterdam.)18 All such contentious works, however, as well as new analyses of the fate of the Spanish Republic, some of them based on archival research and discussed further on, have had less impact than a single volume of documents released from the Russian State Military Archive (RGVA) and the Russian Institute of General History of the Russian Academy of 122
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Sciences, supplemented by the collection of Russian secret service messages intercepted and decrypted by the British, and known as “Mask.” Mentioned at the beginning of this article, Spain Betrayed: The Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War, was edited by the American historians Ronald Radosh and Mary R. Habeck in collaboration with the Russian expert Grigory Sevostianov. It has been published in the U.S. in the “Annals of Communism” series, and in Spain, and has caused a literal revolution in studies of the civil war. It is the only volume in the “Annals of Communism” series with a visible impact outside the U.S.19 Comprising 538 English-language pages of documents and brief commentary, Spain Betrayed provided unimpeachable sources on nearly every significant issue in Soviet relations with the Spanish Republic during the civil war. The texts include a CI directive from Moscow to the Spanish Communists as soon as the military insurrection against the Republic commenced on July 17, 1936. This first such message sent to the PCE, and the first printed in the volume, settles the most contested question of civil war history: the intentions of the Soviet government toward their anarchist and other rivals in the Spanish revolutionary movement. Therein, Moscow stated that if the anarchist leadership refused to submit to unification demands by the Spanish Communists, the anarchists — then counting two million members, compared with a few thousand Communists — should be denounced as “strike breakers of the struggle against fascism in the working classes.”20 This blunt language dramatically but definitively refutes long-standing claims by the Spanish Communists and their apologists that the Communists worked for a benevolent unity in the Popular Front (FP), with the sole aim of a Republican victory. It should be noted, however, that the anarchist CNT did not affiliate with the prewar FP, and the very large and radical Spanish Socialist party, while a signatory to the FP electoral pact of 1936, refused to participate in the government produced by its victory at the polls. Somewhat paradoxically, the POUM had been drawn into the FP and gained a seat in the Cortes [national parliament] from Barcelona for its cofounder Maurín, who unfortunately was caught behind the Francoist lines at the beginning of the war and was eventually imprisoned.21 Spain Betrayed further revealed that less than a week after 123
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the triumph of the left in the main cities of Barcelona, Madrid, and Bilbao, with revolutionary euphoria having swept the masses, CI leader Georgi Dimitrov called on the Communists to prevent radical measures in Spain, with the intention of supporting FP governments in France and Belgium, which were based on the integrity of the bourgeois order. While improvised leftist militias had already departed Barcelona for the front in Aragón, Dimitrov called for preservation of a Republican army of the ordinary kind. These aspects of Soviet and Spanish Communist policy have been central to historical debate over the fate of the Republic since the publication of works by Orwell and Borkenau, who described Communist policy as counter-revolutionary. The documents in Spain Betrayed also outline the background for the delay in the decision of Stalin to directly support the Spanish left with arms and “advisers” — an action that did not begin until September 1936. The same collection includes reports by the main Soviet and CI personalities who went to Spain, including the writer Ilya Ehrenburg (18911967), the French CI functionary André Marty (1886-1956), the military intelligence (GRU) officer Vladimir Gorev, the leading Bolshevik activist, diplomat, and former Trotskyist, Vladimir Antonov-Ovsyeyenko (1883-1939), Iosif Ratner, a military attaché, and the economic administrator Artur Stashevsky (1890-1937). But for a larger reading public, both in Spain and abroad, the most affecting revelations in the volume had to do with the destiny of the International Brigades (IB), the Sovietrecruited armed detachments sent to strengthen the Republican military. Spain Betrayed showed that Stalin’s purge apparatus had been extended to the ranks of the IB. One sentence leaps out of an anonymous, confidential report sent to Moscow in mid-1937: about the XIIIth International Brigade, it stated, “This brigade is not destroyed; it has been murdered.”22 An exceptionally long, detailed, and candid report submitted to Moscow at the end of 1937 by the Soviet military intelligence agent Moshe Zalmanovich (Manfred) Stern, widely praised in Communist propaganda worldwide as “General Kléber” before his recall to Russia and disappearance in the purges, revealed that the XIIIth IB, with a large Balkan representation, “fled from the front.” The judgment of the Soviet officers in Spain on the XIIIth IB had been a subject of debate in memoirs and historical works prior to Franco’s 124
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death; it was said that many from the ranks of the XIIIth IB had been executed.2 At the beginning of 1938, the Polish Communist and Soviet Army officer Karol Waclaw Świerczewski (1897-1947), known in Spain by the widely-used CI klichka or alias “Walter,” submitted a report to Moscow that was extremely severe in its criticism of the IB. Świerczewski confirmed that in the battle of Brunete, in mid-1937, IB troops had succumbed to “general panic and flight;”2 the XIIth IB was ordered disbanded by the Spanish command. According to him, the French volunteers were demoralised, undisciplined, and dirty; the Germans were in somewhat better condition, but still “did not notice or see the depth of the disintegration;”25 the Polish brigade personnel did not keep their rifles clean, used their bayonets as tentstakes, and fraternised unacceptably with the Spanish troops, toward whom the Poles acted in an “uncomradely” way; the British and Canadians did not seem to know how to keep their weapons in decent order. A Spanish Communist brigade inspected by Świerczewski contrasted so starkly with the IB troops that the Soviet commander confessed that he was “embarrassed”. He further observed that the “internationalists live our own isolated life… we rarely allow the Spanish into our midst.”2 American cigarettes were distributed to the British and Americans, while the Spanish went without tobacco; the foreign brigades were provided with their own distinctive food, but not the Spanish; the IB health facility at Albacete, southeast of Madrid, treated only foreigners. Desertion was commoner among the foreign IB than the Spanish, but went unpunished in the former case. At the same time, Świerczewski stated openly, “The internationalists had, and have, complete, absolute power, even though in the majority of the brigades and units the percentage of Spanish has reached the impressive number of 60-80 percent.”2 A second report by Świerczewski was submitted to Moscow in mid-1938, in which the Soviet officer described increased “international” desertion, Spanish discontent with the presence of the foreigners, and alleged sabotage. Świerczewski had adopted the hysterical idiom of the Moscow trial prosecutors in claiming the existence of a far-reaching conspiracy of fascists, “Trotskyists,” and foreign agents acting within the left forces. These disclosures about the IB, whose reputation for heroism and selflessness had been embroidered for decades, 125
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delivered a powerful blow to the image in Spain of the Soviets and other Communists in the civil war. This was not the least because much of them originated with Świerczewski, who became deputy defense minister in the Polish Communist regime after the second world war, and had the credibility of candor as well as Moscow’s long-standing approval. Finally, Spain Betrayed included a document that, for many in Spain, has resolved the still-continuing historical argument over the “May events” of 1937. An anonymous report written only weeks before the May combat, sent to General Kliment Yefremovich Voroshilov (1881-1969), with the endorsement of Dimitrov, described increasing polarisation between the Communists and non-Communists on the left. Rather than wait for the crisis to turn into direct confrontation, the report recommended that the Communists “hasten it, and if necessary, provoke it.”28 This has been interpreted, especially by Catalan historians — and not merely the defenders of the anarchists and POUM — as proof that the “May events” were the product of a deliberate Communist plan conceived at the highest reaches of the Kremlin. In sum, Spain Betrayed demolished entirely the historiographical edifice on which a defense of Spanish Communist conduct in the civil war had been erected, and vindicated the critical authors who, beginning with Orwell, had accused the Soviet government of subverting the Republican cause. The Comintern in Latin America
Because they spoke Spanish, many Latin American CI agents were sent to the peninsula during the war. In 2004, the Russian historians Lazar and Viktor Kheifetz, father and son, assisted by the Swiss historian Peter Huber, issued in Russia and Switzerland a limited edition volume, La Internacional Comunista y América Latina, 1919-1943: Diccionario Biográfico (The Communist International and Latin America, 1919-1943: Biographical Dictionary).29 Based in large part on archival research in Russia by the Kheifetz pair, this book revealed that Andreu Nin, once he had gone to Moscow, had become popular among the Latin American Communist leaders, and served as the Kremlin’s expert controller of CI member parties from Mexico to Argentina. Many more fascinating figures appear in the Kheifetz, Kheifetz, and Huber universe of Bolshevik colonization in Latin America. The incredible Iosif Romualdevich Griguliavicius was born in a Karaite family — members of a 126
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heterodox Jewish sect — in Lithuania under the tsars in 1913, and died in Moscow in 1988. In between, his exploits included getting a Sorbonne degree, editing Communist periodicals in Polish, breaking Communist leaders out of jail in Brazil, and working in Spain as a Soviet assassin implicated in the murder of Nin. He was sent back to Russia before returning to the Western Hemisphere as an auxiliary in the murder of Trotsky; his task was to establish backup networks for that group of killers, in California as well as Mexico. Grigulevich, as he is more generally known, fled to California after the Trotsky slaying. His espionage tradecraft, and particularly his skill in reinventing himself, is so flamboyant as to seem doubtful. After World War II he was, using a false identity, named ambassador to the Vatican and Yugoslavia by the leftist but anti-Communist Figueres regime in Costa Rica! He used this post to plot the murder of Tito, although no attempt was carried out. In 1950 he returned to Russia where he took up an academic post. Grigulevich has gained a belated prominence in works on the history of Soviet espionage. In the same year the Kheifetz, Kheifetz, and Huber dictionary was published, a biography of Grigulevich by the Costa Rican journalist Marjorie Ross was published.30 Other New Works
A few other books in the bibliography of the Spanish civil war published after the death of Franco are worthy of special attention. Two outstanding volumes deal with what increasingly is a perennial theme of authors on the conflict, the “May events”. The first was printed in 2003 in Barcelona and dealt with the role of a much cited and little-understood anarchist grouping, the Friends of Durruti, mentioned by Orwell. The Friends of Durruti was considered the main node of anti-Communist militancy in the CNT-FAI, and was led by the journalist Santiago María (Jaume) Balius Mir (1904-80). A great deal of speculation about the group was put in print, in several languages, but little solid documentation apart from its own periodical, El Amigo del Pueblo (The Friend of the People), its “manifesto,” Hacía una nueva revolución (Toward a Fresh Revolution), and a small number of interviews with Balius. A book titled La Revolución Traicionada (The Revolution Betrayed), authored by a young anarchist and situationist writer, Miquel Amorós, presents a definitive biography of Balius, and is an indispensable source for Spanish war historiography.31 Amorós drew from all the relevant archives 127
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throughout Spain and internationally. Balius was a child of the middle class and was pursuing medical studies when he was struck by poliomyelitis. Balius, the radical anarchist figure, and his friend the POUM military commander Josep Rovira, two of the most remarkable and best-remembered among their people, if secondary and least-studied figures in the civil war, had begun their political lives in Estat Català, the main nationalist cadre fighting for Catalan independence. Like many early 20th century nationalist movements, Estat Català has become firmly respectable in Catalan public memory. Balius formulated the exceptional proposition that the proletariat and the bourgeoisie formed separate nations in every country. But the movement drifted to the right during the 1930s, was excluded from the regional government of the Generalitat after the events of 1936, and was considered an equal enemy of the anarchists, POUM, and Communists. Its leaders, labeled as fascists, fled to France. Balius and Rovira evolved toward the Workers’ and Peasants’ Bloc (BOC), a predecessor of the POUM led by Maurín, although Balius ended up firmly affiliated with the CNT-FAI. A final, new and important accession to the bibliography of the Spanish civil war is a collection of letters by an American Trotskyist woman active in the POUM, Lois Cusick Orr (191780s), published with supplementary materials by her husband Charles Orr and edited by Gerd-Rainer Horn, a historian employed at Warwick University.32 Lois Orr, as a strict Marxist, was hostile to Catalan nationalism; even offensively so, with a particularly provincial American manner. She worked in the English-language press and radio department of the POUM. On September 27-30, 1936, she wrote a letter to her family in the U.S., in which she noted that while all mail leaving the Spanish Republic was supposed to be censored, POUM correspondence abroad avoided the censor because the party sent a twice-weekly automobile to France to use the postal service there. In a sentence profoundly anticipatory of the totalitarian future of Communism and its collapse, while deeply affecting in the sentiments it evokes, Lois Cusick Orr wrote, “POUM does not believe in censorship”.33 Notes 1. 0See Ronald Radosh, Mary R. Habeck, and Grigory Sevostianov: Spain Betrayed: The Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War, New Haven 2001; España Traicionada, Madrid 2002. 2. 0See George Orwell: Homage to Catalonia, London 1938, 128
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reprinted and translated in many editions; Franz Borkenau: The Spanish Cockpit, London 1937; Gerald Brenan: The Spanish Labyrinth, Cambridge, UK 1943. 3. 0See, for example, Bertrand M. Patenaude: Stalin’s Nemesis, London 2009. 4. 0Victor Serge: Memoirs of a Revolutionary, London 1963, p. 216. Stepanov, born Stoyan Mineff (1891-1959) and also known as Stefanov, was assigned the revolutionary alias “Moreno” (“dark”) while active as leading Comintern representative in Spain. See the not-always-reliable work of Branko M. Lazi and Milorad M. Drachkovitch: Biographical Dictionary of the Comintern, Stanford 1986 (second edition.) 5. 0Víctor Alba and Stephen Schwartz: Spanish Marxism vs. Soviet Communism: A History of the P.O.U.M., New Brunswick, NJ, USA 1988. 6. 0Víctor Alba, ed.: La Nueva Era (The New Era), Madrid 1977; La Revolución espanola en la practica) The Spanish Revolution in Practice), Madrid 1978. 7. 0Anonymous: “Els papers de Salamanca són ja a Barcelona, segons el Ministeri de Cultura,” (”The Salamanca Papers are now in Barcelona, according to the Culture Ministry,” Europa Press [agency], Madrid, January 31, 2006. 8. 0Joaquím Maurín Juliá (1896-1973), a former CI official, was the cofounder of the POUM with Nin. See CEHI printed catalogue: História del POUM, Documents per el seu estudi (History of the POUM, Documents for its study) Barcelona, 1985 9. 0It should be noted that in both the main POUM trial and the Rovira trial the Spanish Republican judiciary found the defendants innocent of “high treason and espionage,” but guilty of involvement in the “May events,” resulting in minor penalties. Notwithstanding the argument of certain historians that the Spanish Republic had been completely taken over by the Russians, significant parts of the state remained independent of their control. The trivial sentences imposed on the POUM leaders illustrate this fact; in Russia or a completely Russian-dominated state, they would have been executed. 10. Víctor Alba, Marisa Ardevol, et al., eds.: El Proceso del POUM: Documentos Judiciales y Policiales (The POUM Trial: Judicial and Police Documents), Barcelona 1989, p. 75. 11. Víctor Alba, Marisa Ardevol, et al., eds.: El Proceso del POUM, op. cit. 129
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12. See, for example, Juan Andrade: Notas sobre la Guerra civil (Notes on the Civil War), Madrid n.d. [1986?] 13. G. Munis: Jalones de derrota, promesa de victoria: Espana 1930-39 (Signposts of defeat, promise of victory: Spain 1930-39), Madrid 1977; Revolución y contrarevolución en Rusia (Revolution and Counterrevolution in Russia), Llerena [Extremadura] 1999; Internacionalismo, sindicatos, organización de clase (Internationalism, Tradc Unions, Class Organization), Llerena 2009. 14. Abel Paz: La Cuestión de Marruecos y la República Española (The Moroccan Question and the Spanish Republic), Madrid, 2000. 15. M. Dolors Genovès, director, and Llibert Ferri, investigator/ screenwriter: Operació Nikolai (Operation Nikolai), Barcelona 1992 (documentary film). 16. Javier Rioyo and José Luis López-Linares, directors: Asaltando los Cielos (Storm the Skies), Madrid 1996 (documentary film). 17. See www.fundanin.com. 18. Eladi Romero: Itinerarios de la guerra civil española (Guía del viajero curioso) (Spanish Civil War Itineraries – Guide for the Curious Traveler), Barcelona 2001. 19. See www.christiebooks.com. José Peirats: The CNT in the Spanish Revolution, 3 vols., Hastings (UK) 2001, 2003, 2006. 20. Ronald Radosh, Mary R. Habeck, and Grigory Sevostianov, op. cit. For a selection of the “Mask” intercepts, see Nigel West: Mask: MI5’s Penetration of the Communist Party of Great Britain, New York 2005. 21. Spain Betrayed, op. cit., p. 8. 22. (Much detail on the internal nature of the FP was only available to foreign historians before 1975 thanks to the cited work of Munis.) 23. Spain Betrayed, op. cit., p. 243. 24. See Stephen Schwartz: Sarajevo Rose: A Balkan Jewish Notebook, London 2005 for a discussion of the XIIIth IB. 25. Spain Betrayed, op. cit., p. 437. 26. Spain Betrayed, op. cit., p. 444. 27. Spain Betrayed, op. cit., p. 453. 28. Spain Betrayed, op. cit., p. 450. 29. Spain Betrayed, op. cit., p. 194. 30. Lazar Jeifets, Victor Jeifets, Peter Huber, eds.: La Internacional Comunista y América Latina, 1919-1943: Diccionario Biográfico (The Communist International and Latin 130
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America, 1919-1943: Biographical Dictionary) Moscow/Geneva 2004. 31. Marjorie Ross: El secreto encanto de la KGB: Las cinco vidas de Iósif Griguliévich (The Secret Game of the KGB: The five lives of Iosif Grigulievich), San José, C.R. 2004. 32. Miquel Amorós: La revolución traicionada (The Revolution Betrayed). Barcelona 2003. 33. Lois Orr with Charles Orr, edited by Gerd-Rainer Horn: Letters from Barcelona. London 2009. On the Orr couple also see Alba and Schwartz, op. cit. 34. Letters from Barcelona, p. 72.
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on anarchists in fiction David John Douglass
Geordies — Wa Mental
Stardust and Coaldust David Douglass is a long-standing and well-known member of the National Union of Mineworkers in the Durham and Doncaster coalfields. He was a coalminer for 40-plus years and a branch official of the Union for 25 years, as well as a member of its Yorkshire Executive during its most testing and dynamic period. He remains a full member of the NUM and is still active in the internal affairs of the Union, as well as being one of its more public and well-known representatives and a published author and historian of the coal communities.
Geordies - Wa Mental ISBN 9781873976340 352 pp, £12 (inc p+p)
The Wheel’s Still in Spin ISBN 9781873976364 480 pp, £15 (inc p+p)
Ghost Dancers ISBN 9781873976401 540 pp, £15 (inc p+p)
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Pitman David Douglass’s autobiographical mining trilogy, Stardust and Coaldust, is a first-person, insider’s view of, probably, the last generation of miners and their union. Following on David Cameron’s description of ‘a broken Britain’, these books come close to describing who broke it and how. Geordies – Wa Mental, the first volume in the trilogy, tells the fascinating story of the radicalisation of a working-class Geordie ‘baby-boomer’ during the first twenty years of his life and provides a unique and valuable insight into the political and cultural movements of the 1960s. The second volume, The Wheel’s Still in Spin, deals with the period from the end of the 1960s to the coming to power of Thatcher. In this 15-year period, dramatic events in the world revolution course around the globe. Dave Douglass transports us back to a time conventional histories have tried to forget or bury or rewrite. ‘The Wheel’ was surely in spin, and there was no telling whom it was naming. This volume, told through the perspective of one its working-class revolutionary activists, explains the history as viewed from the ground and a number of those turningpoints and crossroads. David Douglass joins up the dots, along with some telling insights into the hidden world of underground labour in its harsh and gritty reality. Throughout the whole story the air of sexual freedoms, which broke free of constraints in the previous decade, survive and prosper. This is a time, when the world was up for grabs, the earth resounded to the world revolutionary impulse. The genii were free from the bottle, and the music was up loud. From where we all stand now, that distant period seems dim and becomes dimmer with every new law and every new brick successive governments have placed on the wall. Soon, they hope, no-one will remember how close we came, to finishing with the whole scumbag system of greed, privilege and power. Ghost Dancers, the third and final volume, provides a definitive history of the Great Coal Strike of 1984/85 and the background to it. It explodes the prevailing myths around that epic period, and corrects the inaccuracies in dozens of books previously penned by academics and journalists. Written by a participant at the sharp end of that struggle, it deals uniquely with the post-strike period, which hitherto no other writer has attempted to describe, nor any commentator understood. It portrays the efforts of the miners to stay in the ring and on their feet, in the run-up to the John Major assault in ‘92/’93, and the last stand of the miners as a social force. The book reveals the harsh internal relations within the National Union of Mineworkers in the post-strike years, set against a backdrop and commentary on other world and domestic events like the Poll Tax, the Gulf War, and the Good Friday Agreement. Inevitably, it addresses the role of Arthur Scargill both during and after the strike – which in the author’s view displays two distinct and conflicting aspects of his leadership. However, Dave shows how the central role in both periods was that played by the miners themselves, organised in their Union. Dave has not sought to exclude those smaller, more personal aspects that intersect this trajectory and link the personal to the political, the major to the minor. Though it is not written in the style or with the pretensions of academic neutrality, Ghost Dancers will be an essential reference for any serious academic study in the future. Together, the three volumes record the last stand of the last generation of pitmen and their communities.
ChristieBooks PO Box 35, Hastings East Sussex, T4341ZS
Christie Books
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WR: MYSTERIES OF THE ORGANISM Anarchist Realism and Critical Quandaries First posted in Rouge (No. 14, 2010) Cinema
Richard Porton Dušan Makavejev’s WR: Mysteries of the Organism, while something of a cause célèbre upon its release in 1971, could certainly be dismissed as dated if it was merely the sexual liberationist tract promoted by its adherents — and scorned by its detractors — during Makavejev’s heyday on the repertory circuit in the Seventies. Some of the more insightful recent commentary on WR in fact struggles against reductionist interpretations, a necessary task since the film itself, with its reinvention of intellectual montage and embrace of an essayistic, manic digressiveness, is structured to forestall facile commentary. Makavejev’s playful, allusive film, an apt case study for testing the capabilities of a robustly contextualist criticism, cries out for what, following Clifford Geertz, social scientists, as well as a recent generation of literary critics, refer to as ‘thick description’. For resourceful critics, WR is also the perfect vehicle for flights of essayistic fancy. Raymond Durgnat, a famously digressive critic himself, compared Makavejev’s magnum opus to an ‘adventure playground’. Given Durgnat’s fondness for idiosyncratic critical detours, his BFI monograph on WR represents a near-seamless fusion of author and subject matter.1 Eminently suitable for critical foraging, WR has been discussed from a dizzying array of perspectives: the vantage points of Reichian psychoanalysis (with contributions from both disgruntled Reichians as well as less orthodox disciples of the heterodox psychoanalyst2); the ambiguous legacy of Sixties counterculture; film culture and politics in the former Yugoslavia; and Makavejev’s conflation of fiction and
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documentary, among others.3 Since all of these aesthetic and political tributaries reflect an anti-authoritarian impetus, it’s surprising that critical literature on the film hasn’t yielded a full-fledged anarchist analysis — even though there are inklings of one in some of Durgnat’s observations, Amos Vogel’s conclusion that Milena Dravic’s speeches include some of the ‘saddest, most disillusioned indictments yet WR: Mysteries of the offered against Stalinism in any film’, and Makavejev’s own Organism (1971) summation of the film as a condemnation of ‘the pornographic essence of any system of authority and power over others’.4 This is not to say that anarchism provides some sort of Rosetta Stone for decoding WR in a glib or ‘totalizing’ manner. Yet Makavejev’s resistance to the Manichean platitudes of the Cold War era —abjuring both Western consumer capitalism and Eastern European state socialism — is quite congruent with a contemporary anarchist ethos that oscillates — as WR itself does — between utopian exuberance and melancholy resignation. The sad contours of Wilhelm Reich’s life, documented in the film’s non-fiction interludes that chronicle the travails of a man expelled from both the German Communist Party and the International Psychoanalytic Association, reinforce assumptions that anarchism is at the heart of the film’s political unconscious. If WR has an anarchist thrust, it’s conveyed slyly through an accretion of paradoxes that accelerate gradually within Makavejev’s sardonic deployment of montage. Stale assumptions concerning the consumerist West and the benighted East are imploded through a series of incongruous transitions and juxtapositions. Tuli Kupferberg, the anarchist poet best known for his work with ‘The Fugs’, opens the film with a mournful piece of comic verse that contains the phrase ‘out of paradoxes, man creates our world’. (While commentators often refer to Kupferberg’s poem as doggerel, this sentiment shares affinities with proto-anarchist William Blake’s cosmology — e.g. ‘Without contraries is no progression’, a famous line from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.) A desire to traverse standard ideological assumptions underlines a sequence in which Reich’s daughter, Eva ReichMoise, standing outside her farmhouse in rural New England, declares that the world went awry after her father’s death. A 134
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cut to a traveling shot of the prison where Reich was incarcerated is accompanied by what Durgnat terms an ‘accordion and zither duet in a silvery-sounding peasant waltz’, an incongruously jaunty ditty that almost strives to re-locate the grim penitentiary in the zanier fictional realm of Yugoslavian political infighting that dominates the latter half of the film. As the voice-over informs us that ‘Reich died a free man’, there is a transition to a re-enactment of the pulping and incineration of many of Reich’s books by the FDA (Food and Wilhelm Reich Drug Administration) in lower Manhattan during both the late (1944) 1950s and early 1960s. This gloss on a shameful episode in U.S. censorship, eerily reminiscent of suppression of dissident literature in the Eastern Bloc during the Communist era, is followed by Eva Reich’s fiercely contradictory assessment of the political antinomies of her era and a final valedictory to her father. On the one hand, Ms. Reich-Moise’s assertion that individuals are manufactured into good state citizens in the Soviet Union superficially resembles right-wing anti-Communist rhetoric (and her claim that ‘nobody smiles in Russia’ resembles a similar formulation made by Ayn Rand before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee during the blacklist era.) But when Makavejev asks her about the ‘American Dream’, she immediately proclaims that the ‘American Dream is dead’. Unlike Rand, Reich-Moise is clearly not a right-wing libertarian but a refugee from urban strife whose communitarian ideals hark back to certain ideals espoused by nineteenth-century American individualist anarchists — especially a penchant for agrarian self-sufficiency — and Peter Kropotkin’s vision of anarchist communism.5 There’s little doubt that autocratic state socialism sullied and distorted complex terms such as ‘individualism’ (which was almost always prefaced with the admonitory adjective ‘bourgeois’) and ‘collective’ — which, in Eastern Europe, became synonymous with the imperatives of the authoritarian state. Within both the lexicon of the left and anarchist circles, individualism is a particularly fraught and contradictory term. Whether Left Hegelian Max Stirner, best known for his eccentric tract The Ego and Its Own, should be considered an anarchist at all still inspires a certain amount of ferocious debate within the anarchist milieu. In Peter Marshall’s Demanding the Impossible, an expansive history of anarchism that, finds room for almost every left-libertarian tendency, 135
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Stirner, despite his enshrinement of the ‘primacy of the unique individual’ is deemed an essential figure within the anarchist tradition. The Ego and Its Own, a fascinating if often maddening book does not merely trumpet the virtues of the autonomous self but ultimately comes down in favor of a ‘union of egoists’ (a stance congenial to artisticallyminded anarchists such as Oscar WR: Mysteries of the 6 From a practical viewpoint, Wilde and Emma Goldman). Organism (1971) however, Kropotkin’s ‘communal individualism’, tied to a cooperative notion of ‘mutual aid’, has proved much more influential. WR’s slightly tongue-in-cheek treatment of the Reichianinfluenced therapies of the 1960s, which many people believed degenerated into New Agey narcissism when the ostracized doctor’s disciples transformed the master’s work into disciplines like Gestalt therapy and Bioenergetics, reveal a creative tension between a Stirnerian ‘communist egoism’ and an insular politics of the self. The chasm between the socialist Reich of the Thirties, advocate of ‘worker democracy’, and the New Reichians of the Sixties becomes clear in a sequence that follows calm explanations of somatic therapies by Drs. Alexander Lowen and Myron Sharaf. A woman in the midst of a tension-releasing exercises grasps furiously at a towel while exclaiming, ‘Give it to Me!; It’s mine’. Durgnat postulates that this maniacal intensity might correspond to a ‘some mad, yet deep, fusion of body, desire, and property, in a word “possessive individualism”’.7 Alternately, there might be a modus operandi to align this woman’s angry desires with the playful polemic published by an American Situationist group For Ourselves during the Seventies: The Right to Be Greedy: Theses on the Practical Necessity of Demanding Everything — a document that interweaves Stirnerian egoism and Debordian Situationist tenets. This manifesto differentiates between ‘narrow greed’ —‘a holdover of from times of natural scarcity… represented in the form of power commodities, sex (objects)’ and ‘communist egoism… the egoism which wants nothing so much as other egos; of that greed which is greedy to love’.8 Of course, For Ourselves’ anticipation of an imminent era of ‘postscarcity’ might appear antiquated during the ongoing Great Recession, as well as a betrayal of the working-class anarchism 136
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pioneered by Bakunin and his disciples during the nineteenth century. Peter Marin’s fear that the more authoritarian offshoots of the New Age such (e.g. est) entailed a ‘denial of history and the larger community’,9 that ignored the fact that ‘human fulfillment hinges on much more than our usual notions of private pleasure or self-actualization’ expressed the wariness of many who feared that the path taken by Neo-Rechians was more redolent WR:Mysteries of the of fascist than left-leaning tendencies. Organism (1971) with WR’s Eastern European fictional narrative offers an equal Dušan Makavejev number of multi-layered paradoxes. Milena (who shares the name of the actress who plays her, Milena Dravic), is the driving libidinal force of the latter half of the film, a Yugoslav feminist activist and sexual revolutionary who makes clear that Reichian theory should be wedded to orgasmic practice. Yet when pontificating about ‘free love’ in a vaguely Renoiresque courtyard, she comes off as a party hack spouting liberatory slogans: ‘Our road to the future must be life-positive… socialism must not exclude human pleasure from its program’. Invoking the spirit of Alexandra Kollontai, the Soviet feminist whose reformist suggestions for implementing sexual equality were quickly jettisoned by the Leninist regime, she argues that the October Revolution failed when it abandoned the promotion of free love; what Marxist humanists used to label ‘the subjective factor’. Her authoritarian paeans to sexual freedom pigeonhole her as a peculiarly repressed apostle of emancipatory desires. As Durgnat quips, she resembles ‘Germaine Greer and Margaret Thatcher rolled into one’.10 Oddly enough, the phrase ‘free love’, at least to certain ears, is more redolent of Victoriana than the writings of Kollontai — a quaintly libertarian motto evoking anti-authoritarian figures such as Edward Carpenter11, the nineteenth-century gay rights pioneer and Whitmanic mystic who proclaimed that ‘Eros is the great leveler’. Milena’s theoretical enthusiasm for free love is not matched by an equally vigorous sexual athleticism. She seems to regard the concrete orgasmic pleasure experienced by her roommate Jagoda as slightly vulgar. Jagoda’s noisy romps with her boyfriend, Ljuba the Cock, imbue the film with an earthy comic brio that remains unaffixed to any preordained ideological agenda. In terms of WR’s extrinsic narrative concerns, Milena’s sexual 137
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politics are compromised by her infatuation with a visiting Russian ice skater, the facetiously named Vladimir Ilyich (as in Vladimir Ilyich Lenin). From an allegorical perspective, Milena’s oscillation between reformist zeal thinly disguised as a Yugoslav-style ‘revolution within a revolution’ and a man who embodies Soviet rigidity mirrors the contradictions of Tito’s rupture with Stalinism. For anarchists, the Yugoslav regime’s rhetorical embrace of workers’ control and self-management exemplified a statist co-optation of anarcho-syndicalist ideals. Appropriating the jargon of libertarian socialism, the Yugoslav Federal Assembly passed a legislative act in 1950 entitled ‘Basic Law on the Management of State Economic Enterprises and Higher Economic Associations by the Work Collectives’. An ideal that once corresponded to workers’ spontaneity ‘from below’ congealed into a state-ordained legislative dictate. Like Milena, Yugoslavia was caught between a faux-libertarian veneer and Stalinist temptations (themes pursued in Man is not a Bird (1965), Makavejev’ ribald portrait of tensions within a Serbian copper factory). In a characteristically paradoxical maneuver, the most wholeheartedly anarchist exhortations are mouthed by a drunken worker and sexist lout named Radmilovic. Verbally assaulting Milena with impassioned rants against ‘Marx Factor’and the ‘Red Bourgeoisie’, it’s no wonder that many critics invoke Milovan Djilas’ concept of the ‘New Class’. Expelled from the Yugoslav Communist Party in 1954, Djilas’ assertion that cadres in Communist countries formed a bureaucratic elite that maintained power over the working class was, for true believers, the secular equivalent of blasphemy. However boorish, Radmilovic is the film’s antihierarchical dynamo, a straightforward champion of the Bakhtinian ‘lower bodily stratum’ and advocate of a postsyndicalist ‘refusal of work’ who interrupts the dour spectacle of V.I. and Milena’s romantic interlude by crashing into their bedroom and nailing the clueless Russian into the wardrobe. Unlike Western European post ’68 films such as Godard and Gorin’s Tout Va Bien (1972) — a film which advocates a less reified mode of workers’ control than the one that briefly thrived in Yugoslavia — there is not a smidgen of agitprop in WR. This is not only because Makavejev, intimately familiar with the doublespeak of ‘actually existing socialism’, rejects political bromides in an open-ended manner. It is also because Makavejev’s penchant for synthesizing ribaldry and melancholy 138
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belongs to a distinctly Balkan tradition that is more carnivalesque than hortatory. As the film’s montage becomes more frenzied towards the film’s end, it begins to resemble the most delirious film never made by Eisenstein; a manic feast of loopy ‘tonal’ and ‘overtonal’ thematic collisions. One case in point involves furious cross-cutting between an artist constructing a plaster Dušan Makavejev cast of Screw co-editor Jim Buckley’s penis, footage culled from Mikhail Chiaureli’s The Vow (1946) featuring an actor impersonating Stalin as benevolent patriarch, an anguished mental patient beating his head against a well, and Tuli Kupferberg, dressed in army regalia and fondling a rifle with masturbatory frenzy. Durgnat views this montage cluster as a ‘pre-text, a bare foundation for a quite complex integration by the spectator’s mind’. More tangibly, this sequence’s trajectory can be described as a dizzying dance of straightforward tumescence (Buckley), sublimation as ideologically warped tumescence (Stalin), and repressive detumescence and/or mock tumescence (the mental patient and Tuli K.). In other words, to recast the phallic motifs, with their implied correlations to the healthy sexuality promoted by Reich in The Function of the Orgasm and the critique of political cum sexual repression in The Mass Psychology of Fascism, utopian possibilities are incessantly disrupted (analogous to the motif Durgnat labels ‘Communismus Interruptus’) by dystopian realities. Makavejev’s unwillingness to make a choice between revolutionary optimism and salutary pessimism doubtless inspired Joan Mellen’s glib dismissal of WR as an exercise in ‘fashionable despair’.12 Accusations of left melancholy aside, it is more reasonable to argue that Makavejev’s ambivalence on the subject of revolutionary zeal reflects hard-won lessons concerning a malaise discussed by Russell Jacoby: the realization by Reich and other radical Freudians such as Otto Gross that: authoritarianism infested and distorted the aims of the revolutionaries themselves. The revolutions of the past failed, 139
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Gross declared, because the revolutionaries harbored an authoritarianism bred by the patriarchal family. They secretly loved the authority they subverted and reestablished domination when they were able. 13
In rather literal terms, the footage of throngs of Chinese Maoists brandishing ‘The Little Red Book’ (which follows Milena’s exhortation on ‘free love’) reinforces a fear of revolutionary fervour that has not only become authoritarian but, has long ago, to employ Situationist lingo, achieved the status of ‘the concentrated spectacle’.14 Despite an awareness of this vicious circle, it seems unfair to accuse Makavejev of resignation, stoic or otherwise. Even when, at the film’s conclusion, the unfortunate Milena ends up decapitated by her Leninist paramour, she is able to speak on the dissecting table — proclaiming that V.I. was a ‘genuine red fascist’. A zealot even as a corpse, she proclaims that she is not ashamed of her ‘Communist past’. As a spectral presence, she thereby affirms the coupling of Communism and Fascism formulated in Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism without, however zealously deluded, capitulating to a quiescent conservatism. While WR’s intricate skein of political paradoxes have intrigued many critics, some usually lucid voices could not cope with Makavejev’s formal breakthrough. An admirer of Man is Not a Bird and Love Affair, or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator (1967), the late Robin Wood sniffed that WR offers a ‘stylized, mostly comic charade...while largely denying the audience the sympathetic involvement of the earlier films… The focus is on the ludicrous excesses of Reich’s later years… Makavejev thereby undercuts Reich’s apparent endorsement of “liberation” without providing a rational critique of it’.15 In retrospect, what is at fault here is less Makavejev’s indifference to an audience’s ‘sympathetic involvement’ than the weakness of a critical practice more bound up with Leavisite ‘moral seriousness’ than an aesthetic that emphasizes disjunctiveness, dialogue, and paradox. What remains exhilarating (and no doubt unsettling to many) about WR nearly forty years after its release is the fact that the film provides the audience tools with which it can formulate its own rational critique. Durgnat’s metaphor of the ‘adventure playground’ is more apt than ever in locating the locus of a film that — to employ a film studies cliché — not only ‘resists closure’ but also resists authority, whether political or personal, in every shot. Within this freewheeling universe of 140
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discourse, the legacy of Wilhelm Reich becomes a multivalent prism that ultimately sheds light on a largely submerged anarchist history. First posted in Rouge (No. 14, 2010)
Notes 1. Raymond Durgnat, WR — Mysteries of the Organism. London: British Film Institute, 1999. 2. For example, James De Meo, director of the Orgone Biophysical Research Lab in Ashland, Oregon has little hesitation in terming WR ‘pornographic’ and a ‘deliberately distorted misrepresentation’ of Reich’s life. See his Critical Review: WR: Mysteries of the Organism at: http://www.orgonelab.org/makavejev.htm Despite a mere fleeting reference to Makavejev in a footnote, the Reichian Myron Sharaf, interviewed in the film, is clearly more sympathetic. See Myron Sharaf, Fury on Earth: A Biography of Wilhelm Reich. New York: Da Capo Press, 1994, 3. See, for example, Pavle Levi, Disintegration in Frames: Aesthetics and Ideology in the Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav Cinema; (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007. Lorraine Mortimer, Terror and Joy: The Films of Dušan Makavejev. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.; Paul Arthur, ‘Escape from Freedom: The Film of Dušan Makavejev’, Cineaste 27, no. 1 (Winter 2001) 4. Amos Vogel, Film as a Subversive Art. New York: Random House. 1974, 155. 5. There are certain affinities between Reich-Moise’s appearance in WR and that of Mildred Loomis, an aging, back-to-the-land anarchist individualist, in Joel Sucher and Steven Fischler’s documentary, Anarchism in America (1983). 6. See Peter Marshall, Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism. London: Fontana Press (Harper Collins), 1993, pp.224-225. 7. Durgnat, p, 23. 8. See For Ourselves, The Right to be Greedy: Theses on the Practical Necessity of Demanding Everything at:
http://libcom.org/library/right-be-greedy-theses-practical-necessitydemanding-everything (Theses 6 and 8). 9. Peter Marin, ‘The New Narcissism’, anthologized in Freedom and Its Discontents: Reflections on Four Decades of American Moral Experience. South Royalton, Vermont: Steerforth Press, 1995 p. 45. 141
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10. Durgnat, p. 33. 11. See Sheila Rowbotham, Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love. London and New York: Verso. 2008. 12. Joan Mellen, ‘WR: Mysteries of the Organism’, Cineaste 5, no. 1 (Winter 1971-1972), 18. 13. Russell Jacoby, The Repression of Psychoanalysis: Otto Fenichel and the Political Freudians. New York: Basic Books, Inc. 1983, p. 43. 14. For a synthesis of Situationist thought and Reichian ‘character analysis’, see Jean-Pierre Voyer, Reich: How to Use at http://www.bopsecrets.org/PS/reich.htm. For another fusion of libertarian Marxism and Reich, see Maurice Brinton, The Irrational in Politics at http://www.uncarved.org/pol/irat.html 15. Robin Wood, ‘Dušan Makavejev’, in Richard Roud ed., Cinema: A Critical Dictionary. London: Secker and Warburg 1980, p. 656. Dušan Makavejev
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