by Ramona Koval
Like many of my generation, my political reading started with Aldous Huxley and George Orwell. Animal Farm was a school text. And then I read Nineteen Eighty-Four. I’m not sure how good the teaching was, or how well I was paying attention, but I missed some of the lessons embedded in these books. I understood the rewriting of history by the state, its close observation of its citizens, and its manipulation of language, but I didn’t understand that Orwell’s state was not capitalist but socialist.
Brave New World was not a school text. Set in London in 2540 AD, Aldous Huxley’s novel describes a world that is one big happy state. I read the opening pages and the laboratory descriptions of the manufacture of children—the exact recipes for making everyone from clever Alphas to hopelessly stupid Epsilons, the inoculation of tropical workers with sleeping sickness and typhoid—and I thought Huxley had come up with quite a good system, especially as I regarded myself as an Alpha (I was good at school and loved to learn). I could see the frustration of people like Mama, who was clever but completely unschooled and therefore stuck with doing menial jobs, and decided that special breeding programs might be sensible. I’m not sure what I made of the soma and sex, but the class system stayed with me longer than anything else in the book. I thought of it as a system based on a meritocracy rather than on money and connections, overlooking the inequalities that were imposed well before birth.
I kept reading Orwell: Down and out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier, published in 1933 and 1937 respectively, and grew outraged at the mistreatment of the poor and the working classes. I think it was around this time, in my early teens, that I first heard of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
When I was fourteen years old I bought The Communist Manifesto and read it in my room, excited by the frisson that came from its seemingly dangerous ideas. How could you not like a book that began ‘A spectre is haunting Europe…’ and ended with, more or less, ‘Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Proletarians of all countries, unite!’
Was I a proletarian? I thought so. My parents worked in factories and had no money. I had forgotten by then that I thought I was one of Huxley’s Alphas as well.
In the meantime, Mama’s couch reading had taken a decidedly political turn too. In August that year, Soviet tanks trundled into Prague. She handed me her copy of Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s Selected Poems in which I read his most famous poem, ‘Babi Yar’, and she followed this with Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, his novel of life in Soviet prison and labour camps. After that she gave me Cancer Ward and The Gulag Archipelago.
Now I think it is strange that Mama and I never discussed the content of these books. Perhaps it was because they were too close to the novels about Nazi concentration camps that I knew existed elsewhere but not in our house.
It was as if Mama was in a silent order where ideas and knowledge were passed between us with nothing but the text to speak. She semaphored. I interpreted. I have no idea if we were using the same code.
How I would have loved to speak with her about passages like this one from Gulag:
If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
Like Grace Paley, my mother marched in the moratorium against the Vietnam War in Melbourne in 1970. To my surprise I met her in Collins Street after I had absconded from maths with my school friends to march. Far from being cross with me, she seemed pleased that we had discovered what a radical housewife she was. This was long before I had read Grace Paley. As far as I knew, Mama voted Labor. But I also remember her telling me about an argument she had with one of the mothers at my sister’s kindergarten, who became her close friend.
The woman had taken up the offer of a free university place that came in with the Whitlam government in 1972. She had enrolled in a politics degree and was discussing the Vietnam War with my mother and what it was the Vietnamese people themselves might want. My mother’s friend said that they wanted Communist rule, but Mama said that people just wanted full bellies and would vote for whoever provided them with this. What did anyone know, I heard her say, who hadn’t experienced war firsthand? Nothing.
That, of course, included me.
My friends and I were watching M*A*S*H on television. We were reading Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, set in World War Two, and laughing at the absurdities it describes. When Heller’s hero, Yossarian, is asked to continue flying dangerous bombing missions, the only way he can get out of doing so is to plead insanity. But if you were insane, you wouldn’t want to stop flying, so you must be sane to want to stop, in which case you have to keep flying. That’s catch-22.
I also read The Good Soldier Švejk, written in 1923 by Jaroslav Hašek. Heroism, loyalty and justice are given a marvellously absurdist treatment in this novel set in Prague at the beginning of World War One. The main character Josef Švejk, previously a dealer in stolen dogs, joins the Czech army and becomes a batman to several officers. With a mixture of enthusiasm, idiocy and luck, he survives a war in which fifteen million people die. Somehow, with his misunderstandings and misplaced loyalties (or does he understand things all too well?) he manages to turn his setbacks into victories. He spends much of the time in the novel imprisoned—at one point, in a lunatic asylum. Here is what he makes of this experience:
I’m blowed if I can make out why lunatics kick up such a fuss about being kept there. They can crawl about stark naked on the floor, or caterwaul like jackals, or rave and bite. If you were to do anything like that in an open street, it’d make people stare, but in the asylum it’s just taken as a matter of course. Why the amount of liberty there is something that even the socialists have never dreamed of…I liked being in that asylum, I can tell you, and while I was there I had the time of my life.
I long suspected that my father was a Švejkian figure—a simple tailor with a fondness for telling jokes who had somehow survived a war in which many millions had perished. His life lessons included not volunteering for anything, not voicing political opinions to anyone and staying at the back of the room. The story he told me about the woodcutter and the bird with the golden heart rang true to all his subsequent advice.
The first story that I ever had published was in a collection about Australian Rules football called The Greatest Game. My story ‘Thighs and Whispers’ was about how I had never been to a football match, but had determined as a child that following a footy team was something that all children should do. The story began with a recollection of my father’s extreme attitudes and how they applied to football teams. Living in St Kilda I intuited that it was the Right Thing to barrack for the St Kilda football team, even though I had no idea what that was. When I asked for a Saints scarf in red, white and black, like the other kids had, my father was very reluctant to buy one. As I type this, I realise that these are the colours of the Nazi flag too. But I think he was unhappy to make those sorts of statements, where, if the winds changed, he’d be in a difficult position. When I quizzed my parents about who they barracked for in Poland, my mother said they barracked for the winners—first for the liberation forces of the Red Army and then the occupation forces of the American Army.
I have been a member of several trade unions and had a brief stint in the ALP when I was asked to help write a women’s health policy in the early 1980s (requiring me to become a member), but I am not naturally a joiner. It was not that I was afraid of being on the wrong team in the event of a conflict, but that I could always see many sides of an issue, and it was hard to convince myself that one lot had all the answers. Apart from that, my reading was underpinning my sense that, even with the best ideas, politics was full of manipulators and ne’er-do-wells who enjoyed playing
backroom games to their own advantage. That even the best institutions were supported by vast idiotic bureaucracies, and that taking them on would lead to endless frustration.
In this vein I went on to read Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard’s Gathering Evidence: A Memoir, Elias Canetti’s Auto-da-Fé and the short stories of Swiss writer Robert Walser. These days there are many Russians who write absurdist anti-authoritarian satire, now that they can. Dmitry Bykov is one, and in his novel Living Souls he writes: ‘No one could deny that the main purpose of every Russian government, whatever its character and duration, was to crush its citizens.’ Bykov described to me the current Russian polity as a ‘cold civil war’ which is not so much about the murder of its citizens as destroying their brains.
Thirty years after I read Catch-22 I found myself standing in Joseph Heller’s Upper West Side Manhattan apartment in New York, overlooking Central Park. He was serving me tea and biscuits. While I interviewed him his fluffy little white dog ran in and out of the room.
In his memoir Now and Then he said that the short stories he was writing after his World War Two experience were plotted extravagantly and often ‘resolved miraculously by some kind of ironic divine intervention on the side of the virtuous and oppressed’. So I asked him how this outlook evolved into a book where the exploiters triumph, and the good and deserving get nothing?
‘What happened’, he told me, ‘is that my attitudes evolved in a Darwinian sense, and realism is realism, and what happens does happens, and what does happen in life is that the virtuous usually do not triumph, and those who are triumphant usually lack virtue, too often they lack conscience. It’s the difference between being very young and having a belief in the miraculous, and being a little mature and educated and knowing there is no such thing as the miraculous.’
Heller did something very few writers do: he gave the English language a new word—catch-22. But there is one writer who is the epitome of a certain kind of political writing, no matter which language you are reading. His work seems to rise from the depths of empathy and wisdom.
Joseph Roth was born in 1894 in the Ukrainian city of Brody, then part of the Austrian Empire, in a poor region in which Jews, Poles and Ukrainians lived. He went to the University of Vienna in 1914 where he studied German Literature and began to write poems. After World War One, in which he served with the Austro-Hungarian Army on the eastern front, he began to write for newspapers, in both Vienna and later in Berlin. When he was appointed Paris correspondent of the Frank furter Zeitung he was one of the best-paid journalists in Germany.
Roth’s greatest novel, which I read after I first encountered his journalism, is agreed to be Radetzky March, which follows three generations of the Trotta family: a soldier elevated to a position of nobility because of a brave act during a battle; an administrator; an army officer. The story of the family follows the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire—and the disillusionment of its supporters.
Poet, critic and translator Michael Hofmann has translated many of Roth’s books into English, Radetzky March included, as well as a collection of his journalism, columns and studies called What I Saw: Reports from Berlin, 1920–1933. They are marvellous pieces, full of wit and depth, written with the novelist’s eye for character and story, and a journalist’s duty of witness.
Hofmann explained to me that Roth was always rather syncopated. ‘He is a Jew in Austria, an Austrian in Germany, and a German in France. He is “red Roth” and a Habsburg loyalist; he is an Eastern Jew and an Austrian; he is gallant and passionate—both a kisser of hands and a kisser of feet; he is generous and unforgiving; he demands hope, and sees despair as a badge of reason.’
The collection includes the form that Roth made his own—the feuilleton, a short literary article said to be best at just a page, and written at a café table. Many of the pieces are from the earlier collection Ein Lesebuch für Spaziergänger (A Walker’s Guidebook) and take us around 1920s Berlin:
What I see…What I see is the day in all its absurdity and triviality. A horse, harnessed to a cab, not knowing that horses originally came into the world without cabs…I see a girl, framed in an open window, who is part of the wall and yearns to be freed from its embrace, which is all she knows of the world.
He walks the city thinking about traffic and railway crossings, visiting building sites or an auction of the exhibition of once-topical waxworks, writes profoundly about a sign in a railway carriage for ‘Passengers with Heavy Loads’, rides an escalator and visits homes for sick and destitute refugees. ‘All state officials’, he writes, ‘should be required to spend a month serving in a homeless shelter to learn love.’
Can you imagine reading a line like that in a newspaper today?
And, although he was intensely interested in politics, he preferred to approach it from the sidelines, and through a kind of poetic expression. Defending his style to his editor at the Frank furter Zeitung when he thought he was being sidelined he said, ‘I’m not a garnish, not a dessert, I’m the main course.’
His prescience is heartbreaking. In the last piece in this collection, ‘The Auto-da-fé of the Mind’, written in 1933, he begins:
Very few observers anywhere in the world seem to have understood what the Third Reich’s burning of books, the expulsion of Jewish Writers, and all its other crazy assaults on the intellect actually mean…It must be understood. Let me say it loud and clear: the European mind is capitulating. It is capitulating out of weakness, out of sloth, out of apathy, out of lack of imagination (it will be the task of some future generation to establish the reasons for this disgraceful capitulation). Now, as the smoke of our burned books rises into the sky, we German writers of Jewish descent must acknowledge above all that we have been defeated. Let us, who were fighting on the frontline, under the banner of the European mind, let us fulfil the noblest duty of the defeated warrior; let us concede our defeat.
Roth left Berlin in 1933 and settled in Paris, finding it hard to survive. He was a refugee, his wife was in a mental hospital in Germany, and he was drinking and spending what little he had, arguing with publishers and begging friends for cash. ‘And believe me, never did an alcoholic “enjoy” his alcohol less than I did. Does an epileptic enjoy his fits? Does a madman enjoy his episodes?’ he wrote to his friend Stefan Zweig.
In 1936 he was already describing himself as ‘half madman, half corpse’ and he failed to take up opportunities to escape to the United States. In 1939 he had come to the end. He died in a Paris hospital with pneumonia after days of delirium tremens. He was forty-four. He was saved the fate of many others, including his wife, who was killed the next year as part of Hitler’s eugenics program.
I am moved by the tragedy of his life, by the beauty of his observations of the world around him, by his inability to save himself, by the silence he encountered in response to his political writings, even though he had a platform and was saying important things.
And I see now that if I gathered all my favourite absurdist and prescient European authors in one room I would have a group of variously mad, alcoholic, outrageous, obsessive men. Some of them would be friends with each other, many would have read each other’s work. Loners and misfits often, I probably would not be interested in sharing their tables at the cafés and bars, or even having repeated conversations with them.
But I don’t want to marry them. I only love what they wrote.
CHAPTER 6
Does Comrade Ivanov write English?
My mother was a polyglot who spoke to me in broken English. I had a smattering of Yiddish, the kinds of words you might learn for parts of the body when your mother dries you after a bath, but I couldn’t construct a sentence. I knew some Polish swear words for archaic insults such as ‘white cholera on you!’ and ‘dog’s blood’, and a Russian phrase for ‘go fuck your mother’. When I asked her why she hadn’t taught me other languages, Mama said that she wanted me to learn good English. And she wanted to learn it too. But I can’t imagine communicating with my c
hildren in a language that I hadn’t yet mastered. I think, now, that keeping from us the languages in which she could express everything she knew was part of her need for secrecy. Perhaps she feared us knowing all she had to tell.
On my bookshelves are the text books for the languages that I have formally tried to learn—Hebrew, Yiddish, German, French, Spanish and Russian.
The Russian books are the oldest. After reading The Communist Manifesto, and identifying myself as a proletarian, so keen was I to unite with the other proletarians that I decided to learn Russian. I could read the great political tracts and I could possibly work as a spy for the revolution too. They didn’t teach Russian at Balwyn High, but they did offer it as a Saturday morning class at University High. I was fourteen and so I was allowed to go by myself. Learning Russian, Books 1–4 by Nina Potapova are slim grey hardbacks. Inside, readers are invited to send any remarks or suggestions about the books to Progress Publishers, 21 Zubovsky Boulevard, Moscow, USSR.
I must have been pretty impressed to have a line of direct contact with the Soviet revolutionaries at Progress Publishers, and began to spend my Saturday mornings taking two trams from North Balwyn to the university, and then walking across the campus to the high school, for the lessons, before taking the same route home. The teacher was immaculate, with straight bleached blonde hair teased into some kind of helmet shape, white boots and stockings and a mini dress. It was the beginning of 1968 and she was serious, just as I thought she should be, since the revolution was not something you took lightly.
So now I could add a new alphabet to the two I already knew—English and Hebrew—and experience the endless fascination of learning a new language. I discovered in the first lesson that this one dropped the articles—you just said ‘house’, not ‘the house’ or ‘a house’, and you didn’t have to use the English verb to be in the present tense—he here, bridge there.
