When they talk about the rather depressing world situation, Clare suggests Charlie should go into politics to change things for the better. He works himself up into the role of great political speaker, and harangues the dunes, bellowing slogans at the imaginary masses. Clare is reminded of Leon Trotsky.
Eventually, the press catch up with the happy troupe. Charlie gets that hunted look on his face again. It is time to go.
TARRENZ BEI IMST, AUSTRIA: In early October, a young French couple arrives in the mountains of the Tyrol region. André and Simone Breton (née Kahn), married about the same time as the Hemingways and a little after the de Gaulles, are on their honeymoon. André has decided that they will spend a part of it with Tristan Tzara in the small village of Tarrenz. Breton tries to rekindle that spark of friendship which he once felt was so strong. It is no use. Tzara is bored by the monkish André and does not try to hide it, only hanging around for a few days before flying the coop muttering something about renewing his visa. Breton and his wife leave soon after.
They travel on to Vienna, where Breton hopes to meet another hero of his, the one man who he thinks might understand the earth-shattering significance of Breton himself. It is nearly a year since that experiment in automatic writing with Soupault. Breton feels sure that Sigmund Freud will want to know about it.
For days, André prowls restlessly around Vienna with a press photograph of the great Austrian psychoanalyst in his jacket pocket, trying to summon the courage to ring the bell of Berggasse 19. He walks past Freud’s building several times. But each time, his resolve to go inside cracks at the last minute. Eventually, frustrated at his cowardice, he writes a note to Freud from his hotel. He is promptly invited over the next day at three in the afternoon, during Freud’s visiting hours. Simone waits in a nearby café while Breton heads off for what he hopes will be a great meeting of minds. Wait till Tzara hears about this!
Simone has barely had time to drink her coffee before André is back, in a huff. Yes, he met Freud and no, he doesn’t want to talk about their encounter. The newly-weds march around Vienna in silence until dusk.
WASHINGTON DC: After four years, America and Germany are no longer at war. A peace treaty passes the Senate in October. Woodrow is furious. The treaty is the same as that he signed in 1919, he fulminates–but without the League. A ‘national disgrace’, he writes.
Woodrow is slowly getting used to the role of an ex-President. He works on a book about America’s place in the world. He takes the odd phone call from the other partner in his law firm (though there is not much business Wilson is willing or able to accept). He corresponds with ex-servicemen, addressing them as ‘comrade’ in his letters. He insists on slowing down the automobile to exchange greetings when he sees wounded soldiers on the street.
The former President finds much to criticise, of course, in his successor. One day, he writes an angry note on how the Republicans abuse one of his own slogans–America First. He accuses them of interpreting it to mean America must act selfishly in the world, whereas he meant it as an expression of the nation’s calling to lead it by example. These things rankle.
The newspapers are filled with concern for Woodrow’s health when he misses his regular Saturday theatre outing. For a week, he is unable even to see visitors. He commiserates by letter with another man struck down by illness this autumn: that energetic New Yorker Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
MOSCOW: Trotsky receives a letter from the head of one of the more recent acronyms in Soviet Russia: Istpart, an organisation dedicated to writing the history of the Communist Party and the Bolshevik revolution, as demanded by Lenin. It has already started publishing the collected works of the impatient revolutionary.
Trotsky cannot fail to be flattered. ‘Why not begin to prepare a complete collection of your writings?’ the letter asks. Why not indeed? Trotsky may have had his fallings-out with Lenin in the past, he may have rubbed people up the wrong way, but no one can deny his prestige. The two men are so closely associated in people’s minds that during the civil war children thought of them as one person: Lenintrotsky. ‘It is high time it was done’, the Istpart director writes. ‘The new generation, not knowing, as it should, the history of the party, unacquainted with old and recent writings of the leaders, will always be getting off the track’.
LONDON: Michael Collins, scourge of the British secret service and the most famous Irishman yet to be snapped by the British paparazzi, arrives in town. His habits remain those of a fugitive. ‘How did you get to Hans Place this morning without being discovered?’ asks a reporter who catches up with him at the smart address where the Irish delegation are being housed. ‘I always watch the other fellow instead of letting him watch me’, Collins explains. ‘I make a point of keeping the other fellow on the run, instead of being on the run myself.’ He reminds the reporter that his newspaper, the Daily Express, once called him a murderer. It now refers to Michael Collins as the ‘big, good-humoured Irishman’ and comments on the softness of his voice.
He is no stranger to the city. He once shared a cramped flat with his sister in a boarding house in Shepherd’s Bush. Working as a clerk like thousands of others come to make their way in the imperial metropolis, he attracted no particular attention during his stay. An Irish patriot, to be sure. A good-looking young man in a rough-and-tumble way, always ready for an argument about politics or an opinion on the latest playwrights. A regular in the local pubs. Times have changed. Now he has at his disposal a six-storey house not far from Harrods, complete with his own staff brought from Ireland. (It ‘makes the place feel less strange’, he explains in a letter home.) The boy from Cork has become a celebrity. Half proud, half appalled, he sends Kitty a package of newspaper clippings. ‘What do you think of the enclosed?’ he asks. ‘Writing all bosh. I never said any of those things. Just a few remarks. Newspaper men are Inventions of the Devil.’
Collins feels the weight of responsibility upon his shoulders, to try and achieve for his people what thousands of Irishmen and -women, dead and alive, have struggled for in vain this past century and longer. He cannot sleep the night before the negotiations begin, and stays up writing a letter to Kitty. At eight o’clock in the morning, alone, he seeks out the Catholic church he used to go to all those years ago, and attends early-morning Mass. Two Rolls-Royce motor cars drive up to the black door of Number 10 Downing Street a few hours later. Tuesday, 11 a.m. Michael Collins, his hat tipped down firmly in front of his face, fairly dashes from the car into the residence of the British Prime Minister (to avoid being photographed, some speculate). Journalists look for any signs that members of the Irish delegation are carrying guns under their coats. A crowd was gathered outside, mostly made up of Irish well-wishers. They sing hymns to pass the time.
David Lloyd George glad-hands the Irish by the door, greeting them one by one as they come in. The rest of the British negotiating team, unwilling to shake hands with men they consider murderers–Collins most of all–are already upstairs, seated on one side of a long, imposing table. Winston Churchill is amongst them, taking time away from the rest of the empire’s problems to try and hash out the Irish situation. ‘In the past when England was in the mood for peace, Ireland was not, and when Ireland had been in the mood for peace, England was not’, Lloyd George tells the gathering, suggesting that the desire for peace on both sides has created a window of opportunity which must not be missed. But there is a stiffness to these first meetings. Positions are laid out. Platitudes are exchanged. The leader of the Irish delegation, Arthur Griffith, scribbles a letter to de Valera that evening. ‘The most difficult part has yet to be discussed’. He signs off, ‘In haste’.
Over these first days, meeting sometimes in the morning, sometimes in the afternoon, the Irish and the British get the measure of each other. The talks roam widely. What should Ireland’s future trading relationship with Britain be? How should financial issues be dealt with? What about defence? Subcommittees are set up to deal with particular issues (Michael Collins is
the sole Irishman on several of these). For the Irish, these are not dry, impersonal matters; they are charged with emotion and experience. Collins expresses his fury at British police having the temerity to search passengers arriving in Ireland for weapons. ‘I would certainly never allow myself to be searched in this way’, he says. The Pope sends a telegram to the British King, wishing him success in bringing peace to his people. De Valera does not like this at all. He scolds the Holy Father, telling him the Irish are no one’s people but their own. The atmosphere in London is not improved by news that an IRA arms shipment has been seized in Hamburg, Germany, and a cache of weapons discovered in Cardiff, Wales.
As usual, Lloyd George charms and bullies in equal measure–his own side as much as the Irish. ‘Fertile in expedients, adroit, tireless, energetic and daring in ways which would be reckless apart from his uncanny intuition’, reads a character study drawn up for the Irish team before their departure. In London, Arthur Griffith finds the British Prime Minister to be ‘a humorous rascal’. Lloyd George extemporises one day on the sheer quantity of Irish produce sold in Britain, taking it as a token of the eternal bonds tying the two islands together, and which no man should rend asunder. ‘You don’t buy it for love of our beautiful eyes’, Griffith replies to these flights of lyricism. ‘No, on account of your beautiful butter’, the Prime Minister parries good-naturedly in return.
Michael Collins blusters, dogged in pursuit of his arguments, infuriating in his tenacity, occasionally cavalier in his language but, on the whole, constructive. The British are impressed by his force of personality, his swagger–he appears to think he has defeated the British Empire single-handed–and the quickness with which he understands the essentials. He naturally tends to dominate on the Irish side. He has political imagination. But he is not a details man. ‘Good feelings are better than good clauses’, he says at one point, arguing that a generous settlement will be better for all than one which appears mean. De Valera is informed of the state of play by courier.
The talks edge quickly towards a dangerous precipice, the two issues on which war is most likely to reignite: the partition of Ireland into North and South, and its relationship with the empire. On partition the Irish are insistent: no man can rend asunder what God has put together. Ireland is one, to divide it is unnatural. The British respond that they cannot coerce loyal northern Protestants into Dublin rule. Collins shakes his head. ‘It is you have made the position and you must repair it’, he retorts. Still, he leaves open the possibility of some kind of compromise, a border commission perhaps.
The imperial question is more intractable. The problem is the Crown. The British see its acceptance as a matter of cardinal importance: the warrant of Ireland’s future amity and guarantee of Ireland’s permanent commitment to imperial defence. In most matters, they urge, the Crown would be just a symbol, reflecting Ireland’s place in the evolving structure of the empire, as an admitted equal to the independent nations of Canada, Australia or New Zealand. But in Ireland, the Crown denotes obeisance, not collegiality. It seems to suggest that Ireland’s statehood is a gift to be bestowed by an enlightened foreign monarch, rather than the inborn right of the ancient Irish nation. And, in any case, how can a British monarch now be accepted when an Irish republic has already been proclaimed? De Valera’s idea–that Ireland be associated with the empire, but not be part of it–is kept in reserve for several days, and then presented by the Irish as a compromise. There ensues some discussion of the precise meaning of the word ‘adhere’ in the context of this proposal.
Much hinges on such wordplay: a people’s fate, an empire’s solidity. ‘It is a matter of drafting’, an Irish delegate argues. The Irish offer a permanent alliance. The British demand an oath of allegiance at the very minimum. The Irish baulk.
BOLOGNA: Albert’s first lecture in Italian–a language he half learned as a teenager–goes down a storm. Like everywhere else he goes, the local university offers him a job.
After his German mangling of the Italian language, and with his son Hans-Albert in tow, Einstein embarks on a little rail trip around the country, making it as far as Fiesole, outside Florence, where Einstein père et fils visit old friends. Albert takes careful note of the exchange rate. The German mark is not what it once was (and it seems to be getting worse). He also notices a change in his physique, from the rakish physicist-about-town, a bundle of nervous energy and ambition, to the portlier middle-aged man of the people. (Einstein is forty-two.) ‘My little paunch is taking on an ever-more threatening shape’, he confesses in a letter to his stepdaughter.
On their way back north, Albert stops in Zurich, where he plays music with his sons–‘intelligent, musical and still very childish’, in their father’s opinion–and dines most evenings with his ex-wife Mileva in the family apartment. (To forestall any nasty rumours–and avoid any unwelcome questions from Elsa–Albert takes a room in a nearby inn rather than spend the night on his ex-wife’s sofa.) Then it’s off again by overnight train to Holland, for a lecture series at the University of Leiden.
Albert has been invited to visit Japan next year. He cancels a planned appearance in Munich on account of concerns about politically motivated disturbances. Elsa writes about a new domestic assistant she has hired in Berlin. ‘Another pretty housemaid!’ Albert responds. ‘Unlucky soul that I am: cover her in a veil when I get home’.
NEW YORK–RUSSIA–MOSCOW: ‘Remember, these are the gray days of the revolution, everything has settled down into the monotonous, undramatic task of reconstruction’, Louise Bryant writes in an article about her latest trip to Russia, quoting the Russian feminist Alexandra Kollontai: ‘If you look for that high elation you saw here in 1917 you will be disappointed’. Advances have been made for Soviet women’s education and childcare. But there are hardly any women in the political institutions of the regime. Men are less inclined to recognise their failings, Kollontai explains.
It is one year since John Reed’s death. Louise tries to gather his papers together. There is talk of a movie of Ten Days that Shook the World. In October, a memorial service is held in the New York Central Opera House. Edgar Hoover has sent his men to observe. The two-thousand-strong audience sing the Internationale and the ‘Red Flag’, accompanied by an orchestra of Latvian immigrants. One of Louise’s poems is read out:
Three ikons
And your photograph
Hang on the Wall
You’ve been there so long, dear
With the same expression on your face
That you’ve become an ikon
With the rest
Louise recalls how Russia’s grand drama caught her husband’s imagination, how he went to ‘fulfil the mission of the most humane government the world has ever seen’. She ends with a plea to help the millions starving in the country he came to love: ‘today, Russia is being crucified for her ideals’.
As the operatives of the American Relief Administration fan out across Soviet Russia, they find devastation. Buildings have been stripped of floorboards for firewood. In Kazan, the city’s sewage system, left unattended, has flooded the city’s basements. Communication is difficult: telegrams take two weeks from Moscow. In Tsaritsyn, the Americans are forced to rely on the services of a Baltic German who picked up a little English on a visit to Chicago years ago or else use two interpreters: an American and a Russian lady who both happen to speak French. In Orenburg, they find several thousand Polish prisoners of war living in an abandoned train.
Villages are silent, deserted. No one bothers to record who has died. By October, the Americans are feeding sixty-eight thousand Russians a day; by November, three times that. By December, the figure stands at half a million and the American relief workers have arrived at the shores of the Caspian Sea. As winter draws in, peasants resort to cannibalism. The soul has departed the body; the meat should be used. Children’s flesh is considered especially sweet. A man murders his wife for supper. ‘I had enough of her’, he is reported to have said. Cemeteries are ra
ided for corpses. The world is upside down.
The same day on which Louise addresses the mourners at the Central Opera House in New York, the impatient revolutionary lectures propaganda officers in Moscow. The new economic policy is, he admits, a ‘strategical retreat’. But ‘when the Red Army retreated, was its flight from the enemy not the prelude to its victory?’ This is war fought by other and more devious means. A frontal attack would not work. The enemy must therefore be outflanked, and their weapons turned against them. We will let the capitalists re-enter Russia through the front door, Vladimir tells them–‘and even by several doors (and by many doors we are not aware of, and which open without us)’–in order to defeat them in time. They will profit, they will squeeze Russia. Let them! Meanwhile, ‘you will learn from them the business of running the economy, and only when you do that will you be able to build up a communist republic’.
Vladimir’s words are darker now. The promise of redemption is far off. The Bolsheviks thought their 1917 enthusiasm would make communism a reality with a commanding snap of the fingers, he admits. They were wrong. ‘It appears that a number of transitional stages were necessary–state capitalism and socialism–in order to prepare–to prepare by many years of effort–for the transition to communism’. He predicts that a future capitalist war will kill twice as many as the last: twenty million rather than ten million will die. This is what makes the struggle so essential–and why it is so vital to focus on ends rather than means. Dreams of utopia cannot be allowed to get in the way of practicality. ‘The proletarian state must become a cautious, assiduous and shrewd “businessman”, a punctilious wholesale merchant’. There is no other way.
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