Crucible

by Charles Emmerson

  Newspapers show pictures of the Black and Tans, kitbags slung over their shoulders, marching to the boats which will carry them home. The provisional government spins the affair as British ‘surrender’. Republicans are unconvinced. They see Collins as a man who has made a pact with the enemy and received power in return. This is no revolution. It is a sell-out.

  A conference for the worldwide Irish diaspora opens at the Hotel Continental in Paris a few days later. Supposed to be a family reunion, it soon turns into a fight. The different factions barely talk to one another. William Butler Yeats gives a paper on ‘The Plays and Lyrics of Modern Ireland’. Another Irish expatriate writer, James Joyce, is unable to attend. He is busy finishing a book, a few blocks away.

  PARIS: Ernest Hemingway makes a discovery of major literary significance: a bottle of good French wine can be bought (and drunk) for just sixty French centimes, equivalent to eight American cents. The good news must be shared. ‘The dollar’, Hemingway informs Torontonians planning their next foreign adventure, ‘is the key to Paris.’ A single dollar will buy two good meals.

  The city is fizzing. Anyone can be who they want to be–or claim to be: a champion boxer, a Grand Duchess, a great artist. All a young journalist has to do to make a living is head out to the nearest café, soak up some atmosphere, talk to a few blabbermouths (these are easily found), and write the whole thing up as Parisian colour. Not much work, and the folks back home love it.

  In February, Hemingway files a piece about the charmingly innocent Russian émigrés who hang around the cafés of Montparnasse waiting for some sudden change of the political weather that will whisk them back to Petrograd. (A few waiters remember a different Russian crowd from before the war, led by a certain Trotsky; the real old-timers recall a man with a goatee called Vladimir.) In March, the Café de la Rotonde features in another Hemingway article as a hang-out for American poseurs–‘the scum of Greenwich Village, New York’–with their bleached hair, artists’ smocks and foot-long cigarette-holders. ‘They are nearly all loafers’, the Toronto Star’s man in Paris tells his readers on the other side of the Atlantic. ‘If the exchange ever gets back to normal they will have to go back to America.’

  For Ernest, Paris seems a gateway to all that matters. Everything is available. Everything is fascinating, from the Senegalese soldiers in the Jardin des Plantes to the roaring crowds at the horse races to the one-legged war veterans, ghosts from another age. ‘Paris is so very beautiful’, he writes, ‘that it satisfies something in you that is always hungry in America.’ Within a couple of months, he has met the Idaho-born poet Ezra Pound, who decides that Hemingway is the man to teach him to box; a woman called Gertrude Stein who seems to know everyone in town (‘She is about 55 and very large and nice’, Ernest writes to his mother); and James Joyce, whose manuscript for a rather bulky book has only just been handed in to its Parisian publishers, on Joyce’s fortieth birthday.

  At last, people seem to take Ernest seriously not just as a fine journalist, or even as a fine boxer, but as a man of letters, an American homme de lettres. He rents a room, away from the apartment, away from Hadley, as his study. Here, crouched for hours over his Corona typewriter, he tries to distil his experiences of Paris into paragraphs, and then turn those paragraphs into single sentences. Ernest Hemingway feels that he is becoming a real writer at last.

  The mills of the gods grind slowly;

  But this mill

  Chatters in mechanical staccato,

  Ugly short infantry of the mind,

  Advancing over difficult terrain,

  Make this Corona

  Their Mitrailleuse

  ISTANBUL: An envoy from Ankara is ushered into the perfumed presence of the Sultan. He declaims the loyalty of Mustafa Kemal to His Imperial Highness. The Sultan shuts his eyes and remains silent, lips pursed. He no longer believes such protestations.

  The winter is harsh. The Greeks are in crisis. They can rely on no one but themselves, and their strength is at an end. In western Anatolia, the Greek army clings on to the territory it occupies, hungry and tired. If it leaves, the Christian population will have to go too.

  Everyone awaits the Turkish offensive from the east.

  MUNICH: Adolf rages against the nomination of Walther Rathenau, a patriotic Jewish industrialist who used to revere Kaiser Wilhelm, as Foreign Minister. ‘Jewish pig!’ shouts the crowd when Rathenau’s name is mentioned at a Nazi rally. ‘You’re not allowed to say that these days’, says Adolf, mockingly. ‘He’s a human being again now he’s a minister.’

  Hitler enjoys these exchanges. They show his mastery over his supporters. They complete his thoughts and he completes theirs. Insinuation is the game. Adolf makes an allusive remark about something, dropping a heavy hint about his own opinions–and then the audience answers out loud what he really means but cannot say in public. The speaker and the audience are entirely complicit. Adolf tests how far he can go, skirting close to the edge of Germany’s laws on defamation and incitement to violence without crossing the line.

  ‘Our young girls are being pursued by Jews’, he declares in one speech. ‘Every Jewish man caught with a German blonde’, he says, ‘should be…’ He lets the words breathe a little. ‘Hanged!’ shouts the crowd. ‘I wouldn’t say hanged’, Adolf replies, as if appalled at the idea of a lynching, ‘but a court of law should certainly condemn them to death.’

  WASHINGTON DC: A federal anti-lynching bill conceived in the wake of the 1917 St. Louis massacre finally comes to a vote in the House of Representatives. If passed in both houses of Congress and signed by the President, counties where a lynching occurs may be fined ten thousand dollars; officers of the law who fail to prevent it may be imprisoned.

  The bill’s opponents call it unconstitutional. Criminal law is a matter for the states. To give the federal government a back-door means of intervening would turn America from self-government to tyranny (‘from a democracy to a bureaucracy’, says one Congressman). Some call it an assault on Southern chivalry. ‘In Pennsylvania it may be possible for a black brute to lay his lecherous hands on the fair form of a virtuous white girl, deflower her youth, blacken and wreck her life, and by counting out a thousand filthy dollars walk out of the courtroom’, says a Congressman from Georgia. Not in his state. In Georgia, the penalty is death–and no Act of Congress or Presidential proclamation will be allowed to alter it.

  Such arguments cut little ice with Du Bois. Constitutionality can be no bar on justice and progress. Lynching is ‘public debauchery’. It is a stain on America’s reputation and a threat to domestic order. ‘Either the United States can and will end lynching or lynching will end these United States.’ The bill passes the House of Representatives by 230 to 119. An electric wave of jubilation radiates out from Washington to the black communities of America. To become law, the bill must still pass the Senate.

  GORKI–MOSCOW: A note from Lenin to the boss of the Kremlin staff: ‘Stalin’s apartment. When? What red tape!’

  Vladimir’s irritation with the slow work of government is titanic. ‘The departments are shit; decrees are shit’, he writes to one functionary. ‘To find men and check up on their work,’ he tells him, ‘that is the whole point.’ Lenin demands show trials of those he considers to be enemies of the regime and scolds the Commissariat of Justice for its slow work. Abuses of the new economic freedoms should be met ‘with every means, including the firing squad’. When the Tsars ruled the roost, prosecutors were simply removed if they did not get enough convictions, Lenin notes approvingly. ‘We managed to adopt the worst of tsarist Russia–red tape and sluggishness–and this is virtually stifling us, but we failed to adopt its good practices.’

  Vladimir feels tired all the time. He finds it harder to concentrate. He has dizzy spells. He tries to hide the seriousness of his illness. Doctors hover around him uncertainly.

  A new acronym is created. The Cheka becomes the GPU, or State Political Directorate. Its headquarters and personnel are just the same as be
fore.

  WASHINGTON DC: ‘I love you’, reads Woodrow Wilson’s Valentine note to his wife Edith. ‘You are my inspiration and my constant joy.’

  Woodrow seems more chipper this year than last. His personal correspondence is livelier. Though hardly back to his old self, his physical health improves. He is mentally less flexible than he used to be, but seems more upbeat about the world and his place in it. His chosen historian–and former press secretary–is working on a more favourable version of the Paris conference, to blast away those critical books already published. He contributes to ‘The Document’, a manifesto of Wilsonian principles being prepared by his supporters to reboot his vision of America. He declines to give his support to the anti-lynching bill now making its way towards the Senate, deeming its timing inopportune and its constitutionality questionable.

  ACROSS IRELAND: The departure of the British from the south of Ireland is swift. Barracks are abandoned. Yard sales are held in former garrison towns. Within weeks, the old regime is gone (the least change is in Dublin, where British forces remain in strength). What will replace it is not yet clear.

  The provisional government is weak. Rival centres of authority make claim to be the heirs of Ireland’s historic struggle. The people’s loyalties are split between Michael Collins and the treaty or Éamon de Valera and its repudiation–or whatever local figure has the influence (and guns) to sway them. Personality as much as principle determines who goes which way. Old friends fall out; new enmities are born. Collins and de Valera tour the country making speeches. Both warn against division, and blame the other side for bringing it about. They warn of further and still deeper splits to come. If the treaty is implemented and a new vassal state brought into existence, de Valera cries, real Irish freedom will only be achieved by the most tragic of all conflicts–a war between the Irish themselves. ‘They will have to wade through Irish blood’, he tells audiences in County Kerry and County Tipperary, full of men who have guns and are ready to use them. Incitement to civil war, declare Éamon de Valera’s opponents. Just the facts, protest his allies.

  Rival military forces form in southern Ireland: a new, regular army under the provisional government (small, at first) and an unruly bunch of irregulars (most members of the IRA go this way) dedicated to unsullied republican virtue. Having always preferred their own counsel to that of Michael Collins or Éamon de Valera, local warlords raid banks and post offices to raise money for the republican cause. They follow their own path to the republic. They fire gunshots in the air to intimidate pro-treaty gatherings. They threaten to disrupt a planned election, seen as the stamp of approval for the establishment of the Free State. They pursue vendettas against their enemies–real and perceived. Michael Collins goes to the republican section of a Catholic cemetery in his native County Cork. Men with guns bar his entry. He is no republican any more, they tell him.

  Southern Protestants flee to Belfast to find safe haven in the north; Catholics terrorised by sectarian violence flee the other way. The north’s regular police stand aside as loyalist militias–‘match-and-petrol men’, some call them; others use the term fascisti–raid Catholic households in search of IRA weapons, smashing things up as they go. In Belfast, a Catholic pub owner and the male members of his family are murdered. ‘You boys say your prayers’, he is told as they are lined up to meet their maker. The police are implicated. This is not government but gang rule.

  ‘Protective measures’ directed from the south may be required, Michael Collins warns, burnishing his credentials as a man of force. Arms are shipped north for a coordinated offensive with the IRA.

  GORKI–MOSCOW: Vladimir’s headaches are worse than ever. He battles with depression. He finds himself thinking in riddles and metaphors. His mind is pulled this way or that by fleeting obsessions. Then he becomes listless again, as if he were losing his mind entirely.

  One day, he imagines himself somewhere on a mountainside. He is walking up the mountain. The view is tremendous. He has conquered a string of obstacles behind him. He is higher than any man has ever been before. The peak is ahead, the summit is in sight–but it cannot be reached directly. It is impossible. There is a different path. But it too is dangerous to reach. One could slip. Hours must be spent cutting into the rock to get a good foothold. He has to tie a rope around himself to prevent himself from falling. He can half hear the voices of the people far below, peering up through their telescopes. They jeer. He’ll fall in a minute! Serve him right, the lunatic! The mountaineer must not give in to despondency, he tells himself. He must not fall. He must not let himself be shaken.

  Vladimir finds himself thinking about Rosa Luxemburg. He is annoyed at the delay in publishing her collected works–unpardonable. She made mistakes, of course. She was wrong in 1918 when she wrote that nasty letter worrying about dictatorship overpowering the force of revolution. But she corrected herself. Vladimir is reminded of the old Russian fable of the eagle and the hen. One day, after swooping and soaring high in the sky, the eagle decides to rest for a while atop a plain farm chimney, there being no impressive rock nearby. The hen notices and says: why, I could fly there, if I wanted to. Why are eagles considered better than hens? Ah, quite right, the eagle responds from the sky, eagles may sometimes swoop lower even than hens, but a hen can never soar into the sky like an eagle. Rosa Luxemburg, Vladimir decides, was an eagle.

  In early March, Vladimir confides in one of his doctors his fears that he is finished. His nights are spent in anxious insomnia, worrying about the work he has to do the next day and that he knows he cannot manage. Thoughts of suicide cross his mind. Perhaps every revolutionary should be made to retire at fifty, he tells the doctor. The doctor tells him to stop worrying. There is no obvious disease of the brain. To get better, he needs rest. He must relax. He must give fewer speeches. He must go into the fresh air–another trip to the villages outside Moscow perhaps. He must not let himself get worked up. Yes, yes, yes!

  Doctors are called in from Germany, at great expense, to investigate Vladimir’s condition further.

  BELGRADE–SOFIA–NEW YORK: White Russians were once considered grand, exotic creatures, forever on the point of returning home and reclaiming whatever fantastic wealth they had left behind. These days the Soviet Union looks here to stay. White Russians are left with the question of survival. General Wrangel tries to keep his men together by getting them jobs in construction squads building roads in Serbia or working in the mines and forests of Bulgaria.

  In March, a one-eyed Russian admiral arrives in New York on a Greek steamer from Istanbul, alongside some refugee opera singers from Petrograd and former officers from Wrangel’s army who have decided to start a new life in America. They are sent to Ellis Island for processing. And then they disperse: the admiral to his wife’s family in Philadelphia, the officers to Gary, Indiana.

  VIENNA: Sigmund Freud is upset. He misses his daughter Anna, who is visiting Berlin and Hamburg. ‘I have long felt sorry for her for still being at home with us old folks’, he writes to Lou Andreas-Salomé, ‘but on the other hand, if she really were to go away, I should feel myself as deprived as I do now, and as I should do if I had to give up smoking!’… Given such conflicts,’ Freud writes, ‘it is good that life comes to an end sometime or other.’

  Freud’s spirits are lifted by news from the wider world. The steady global march of psychoanalysis since the dark days of the war continues apace. Despite last year’s untimely death (suicide again) of a leading light of Russian psychoanalysis, Dr Rosenthal, a Russian Psychoanalytic Society has been formed in Moscow. The same week, Freud receives word from Calcutta of a new psychoanalytic group there–local Bengalis call it the Eccentric Club–founded by a long-time Indian correspondent of Freud’s, Dr Girindrasekhar Bose.

  From Calcutta, Freud is sent a portrait–supposedly of himself. It is called an ‘Imaginative Portrait’: ‘a painting by someone’, he notes, ‘who is said to be a famous Indian artist, and which represents his idea of my person, of whom he has neve
r seen a likeness’. The result is predictable: ‘Naturally he makes me look the complete Englishman’.

  Freud is blissfully unaware of a short and bitter article that appears that same month in the newly revamped Littérature by that young Frenchman André Breton, who visited him in Vienna last autumn. Breton makes Freud, the man he once hero-worshipped as a smasher of realities–just like him–look bourgeois and ridiculous. His apartment building is ‘mediocre’, Breton writes, located in an ‘out of the way’ corner of Vienna. Freud’s collaborators, pictured in a photograph on his waiting-room wall, are said to be ‘vulgar-looking’. His maid is ‘not particularly pretty’ either. Then there is Freud himself, a ‘little old man without any particular charm’ and the appearance of a small-town doctor.

  Simone now understands her husband’s foul mood that day in Vienna. He felt patronised. Freud’s only interest in receiving the foreign visitor was the chance to boast about a translation of one of his works in some French-Swiss journal. He took no interest in Breton’s own work, except as a means of furthering his cause in France. Freud’s parting words while patting André on the back and guiding him towards the door still sting: ‘We’re counting on the young.’

  QUINTA DO MONTE, MADEIRA, PORTUGAL: Charles Habsburg, the Emperor of Austria, the King of Hungary, a man who once counted his castles by the dozen, has been reduced to the status of a beggar. His money has run out. No one wants to look after him.

  On Madeira, he is left relying on the generosity of a local Portuguese hotelier, who allows Charles, Zita and their family to stay for free in his summer retreat in the mountains above Funchal. In the hotter months of the year, such a place is a paradise: a view over the ocean, lush vegetation, a cooling breeze. In winter, it is cold and damp, surrounded by mists that seem never to clear up. The house is impossible to keep warm. The children’s tutor lives in a hut at the bottom of the garden. There is not enough to eat. There is only cold water for washing. Zita is pregnant.