by Paul Nizan
What a dazzling revelation, the day I grasped that I should never be able to assert myself, take my revenge or give my full measure except in fields other than those which you had chosen! We are not so far away now from this story . . .
When Rosen and you began to lean towards revolution, I followed you at once: it was at last a way of establishing a link between us. I could not complain, you accepted me as you had never previously done.
More than it did you, who came from far away, revolution struck me as easy. I saw it confusedly as the site of all possible opportunities for reparation and the slaking of resentment, and as a kind of paradise for the formerly defeated . . .
I was immediately more violent than yourselves. We were in a new set-up, where the old distinctions no longer obtained. I sensed other dimensions : the possibility of becoming your equal, in a world where only differences of intensity, speed and emphasis came into play, not those of social attitude . . .
I breathed easier for a few months; I was soothed; I was united with you by a complicity. I suddenly ceased to see everything as an opportunity for failure. Your tastes, your clothes, your successes, your attitudes, became failings rather than advantages; you were supposed to be ready to sacrifice them to a new loyalty, to which you could not refuse to admit me.
This respite did not last: I soon saw myself being reborn before my eyes; I stopped forgetting myself. I sensed that even amid our shared ambitions, you were marking out Heaven knows what new boundaries against me. When Rosen founded the journal, you allocated yourselves the big articles, the prophecies, the ‘messages’. You never left for Jurien or me, whom you despised, anything except reviews and critical comments. I was still only in your retinue, beneath you: there were still different levels. Do you remember that time earlier this year, around Easter, when Rosen and you certainly concocted something from which I was excluded: more than once, when I entered your digs, I caught you falling suddenly silent or talking of what ‘lovely weather’ we were having. So I had been pushed aside again – admitted only to your half-secrets and your esoteric life; excluded from your most intimate passwords and your deepest complicities. Never did I hate you as much as then. I was brought down to earth. It was as if I had inspired you with a physical disgust, against which you were yourselves ceasing to struggle.
I had an idea, which might perhaps save me – remember that I did not accept my ailment, but tried persistently to be cured. I joined the party.
I shall always see before me your look of perplexity when I gave you this news, it was around the end of May. Joining the party had for a year played too big a role in our conversations, and in what you used to call our problems, for my decision not to touch you: I was the first of our group to take the plunge. You were flabbergasted, humbled. You at last had something to envy me for – an act you did not yet dare decide upon. You did not follow me, you wanted to remain free, you contented yourselves with getting excited over those who had died on 1 May in Berlin.
Once again, I thought I could forgive you. There was a domain of politics and of the mind in which I had outstripped you; in which I was six months, or two months, ahead of you – you could not get over it . . .
I shall always remember my entry into the party as one of my rare moments of relaxation and peace. By chance, I had ended up in the cell at a factory in the 20th, a firm producing machine tools not far from Place des Fêtes. There were not many of us, eleven or twelve, it was an organization in which you could get to know one another. I was the only member drafted in, or ‘attached’ as they used to say in the party. Those fellows were extremely fine and friendly people, they did everything to put me at my ease. It was a period when there was still a great deal of workerism in the party, but they never made any allusion to my status as an ‘intellectual’, other than through a sort of kindly irony at which it was impossible for me to take offence. That little group of men gave me the only idea I shall ever have of a human community: one does not recover from communism, once one has experienced it . . .
No one called me to account for my past life, or my family. If I had spoken to them about my father’s profession, they would simply have remarked how there really are people doing some funny things that you never think about. Understand me clearly: the question of original social sin was absolutely never posed . . .
This kind of political friendship covered everything – but only in the present of each one of us. It concerned not merely action, the factory, war and peace, but personal problems, anxieties, our whole lives. Since the party was extremely isolated at that time – as it is again, since 1 August – the feeling of shared solitude created an extremely powerful bond: something like a carnal complicity, an almost biological consciousness of one’s species. For the first time in my existence, I felt a great warmth surrounding me.
My comrades were cheerful, they knew how to laugh, they were far more human than you were – you who were forever mouthing the words Man and Humanism. They were utterly free from resentment, or hatred: they were healthy constructors. The meaning of life shone out beneath the awkwardness of their words. I must have watched them in the way a child who cannot run watches other children at play: never did I see myself as more of a failure than among them.
I kept the secrets of my new life to myself. I did not tell you anything, but I pretended to know a great deal. I had a moment of pride the day Rosen, almost timidly, asked me in connection with some question or other:
— What do they say about it in the party?
I was your superior, your judge, each time I told you:
— All the same, we should make up our minds to raise the question of party control over the journal . . .
— There’s no hurry, you would say.
And I would reply:
— If we’re consistent revolutionaries, the decision is obligatory. The CP is the only authentic force in the service of the revolution . . .
The July holidays arrived. At the end of June, after the examinations, Rosen and you went away. I stayed alone in Paris: I did not have enough money that year to go away anywhere. I did not even have Marguerite, who was with her family in Britanny.
I was staying at the hotel in Rue Cujas where I still live. It was dreadfully hot. So, in order to escape the molten asphalt, the petrol and tar fumes, the scorched trees and dust of the Luxembourg, the troops of children and squalid lovers of the Latin Quarter, and the whores with their dubious underwear at the Taverne du Panthéon, I was cowardly: I went to see my mother at Neuilly. Down towards the bottom end of Neuilly, there is a kind of village rusticity. My mother talked, moaned – I soon fled her voice. I went to loaf around on the lawns of Bagatelle, where women from Suresnes and Puteaux would sleep on the grass and reveal their over-white legs; where young people played ball while the cars buzzed past like bees. I would sometimes climb up on foot to Mont Valérien, above the reservoir, and I would look at Paris and its vast conurbation swarming like living vermin; or I would stretch out under a tree and sleep, in that military air traversed by the bugle calls of the soldiers of the 5th Infantry regiment at their drill, which came up from Courbevoie. Not once did I think of going on to Le Vésinet, to see Jeanne again. I knew my aunt was still alive, and that Jeanne was looking after her. My mother said that her niece was fading away: the thought of her inspired in me not so much regret as a kind of strange revulsion . . .
Can you imagine the dinners with my mother: those tête-à-têtes under the sticky light of the pendant; the slithering of the maid’s slippers; the drone of my mother’s voice, as she talked to me about her youth in the 15th, about my father’s friends, my sister and her children? I was caught again in the spider-webs of my childhood. On Sundays I would take flight altogether, to avoid my sister and her troop.
That loneliness was dreadful. I wrote to Marguerite that I loved her, and I convinced myself of it for a quarter of an hour – although for that big, s
imple girl, to whom making love came as easily as breathing, I never felt anything but a fairly strong sensual attraction. Well, one has to live.
I regularly attended party meetings, which were not always very cheering. As you doubtless know, in spite of your journey (to England I believe), that whole holiday period was extremely tense and the CP, which was organizing a big campaign against war, came in for some harshly repressive treatment. In the last week of July, incidents multiplied. The worker and peasant congress, which was being held at Villeneuve-Saint-Georges after having been banned at Clichy, was broken up and ninety-six delegates were charged with conspiring against State security. Searches were carried out everywhere – in trade-union offices, at Secours Rouge, at L’Humanité, and more or less throughout France. By about the 31st, there must have been two hundred political prisoners at the Santé, the Petite Roquette and Saint-Lazare, or in the provinces. Then came 1 August. The day before, Briand – who had just taken over the premiership – had a majority of almost two hundred votes in the Chamber. During the evening, L’Humanité’s printshop was ransacked by the police. I was at Rue du Croissant, the whole place was black with cops, they were arresting printworkers at random. The unrest lasted until four in the morning, until the break of day. During the day, Paris was in a state of siege, police cars prowled about, horse-guards wheeled gently over the sanded macadam of the boulevards. In August and September the arrests continued. It was a vast conspiracy – the communists were accused of having planned for 1 August a ‘concerted revolution with the aim of overthrowing the government’. The strength of this accusation lay in its absurdity. In October, new indictments spoke of espionage, because L’Humanité had published letters from workers in the war industries. Almost all the leaders of the party and unions were arrested: Cachin, Barbusse and Vaillant-Couturier were charged with espionage; Doriot, Marty, Duclos and Thorez with conspiracy. After that, at the beginning of November we got a Tardieu cabinet and you must know about the subsequent course of events.
I have recounted all these developments only because they affected me deeply. The ease with which the government and police had smashed the party apparatus; the species of disarray that prevailed in many branches, where quite a few members were echoing rumours being put about by people like Joly and Gélis (the municipal councillors who had resigned) about the presence of police agents in the party; the departure of the opportunists; the hail of convictions – everything convinced me that the party had just suffered a defeat from which it would not recover. I had joined an organization destined for victory; it seemed impossible to me to associate myself with a defeat. People like me must be capable of loyalty only to winners. I was already drawing political conclusions from my personal deviation: the discouragement I felt suddenly seemed to me susceptible to generalization . . .
One afternoon when I was reading in the sun in the damp little garden of the bungalow at Neuilly, beneath an apartment building with closed shutters, my mother told me that Massart was expected for dinner and asked me to stay in. I do not know why I accepted. I rarely saw Massart, but I knew, with that intuitive certainty that sometimes survives childhood, that he had been – that he perhaps still was – my mother’s old lover. The images I conceived of that liaison were as repugnant to me as mouldy food. But Massart left me almost totally indifferent. I merely had an abstract contempt for him when I reminded myself that he was in the police . . .
It was so warm that evening, I doubtless lacked the energy to go out in order to avoid the meeting. Massart rang the bell at about eight. I saw him enter the hall, he was holding his hat in his hand and wiping its leather band, the maid said to him:
— How are you, Monsieur Massart?
— Warm, my dear, the superintendent replied, very warm . . .
I went into the sitting-room where my mother used to sew or knit all day long. Massart offered me his hand and I took it, it was damp.
— It looks as though the boy’s grown even more, he said. Actually, Marie, it’s been an age since I last saw your son.
We dined. We all three ate without enthusiasm, and my mother sent the maid to fetch lumps of ice from a cafe in Avenue du Roule: the ice melted at once, the red wine became lukewarm again.
— What a scorcher! said Massart.
I shuddered, it was just the kind of expression that caused the stifling, vile recollections of my childhood to erupt to the surface of my memory. The dinner ended and we went down into the garden, where the may-bugs came to dash themselves against the silk of the awning. My mother went back into the house to give the maid a hand. When we were alone, the superintendent told me:
— D’you know, I’m not at all sorry to see you, Serge, my boy? I can still speak to you without standing on ceremony, can’t I? You won’t object to such familiarity from an old friend? . . . I almost saw you born . . .
I assented, though I was rigid with anger and would have liked to make my escape. The superintendent smoked for a moment in silence.
— So we’re dabbling in communism, he said. It seems we’re collaborating in new subversive journals, alongside bankers’ sons? . . . Member of the Communist Party?
Aggressively I assented, and Massart began to laugh and mumble something about the malady of youth. He told me he had experienced all those fevers of growth and, in his adolescence, while he was doing his first year of law, had attended a number of anarchist meetings. He added that those diversions, which had no great consequences for the sons of bankers and industrialists, who could always return to the embrace of their class, might involve serious repercussions for a petty bourgeois with neither fortune nor backing. He also said he would have understood my joining the Socialist Party, in which it was possible to make a career and which had prospects of power; but that it was absurd to take one’s place in a party doomed to impotence, and which had just been severely defeated by a few police operations. I said nothing. Massart continued in a meditative tone:
— What are you going to do with yourself if you don’t pass your agrégation? Your poor mother tells me you’ve let things slide since your failure in the Normale exam, and that you didn’t even feel up to finishing your degree this year . . . She isn’t wealthy, she won’t offer you the luxury of two or three additional years of study . . . What’s the matter? Your politics? Girls? . . . Oh! I’m not asking for any confidences. Let’s never offend the modesty of a young male! We’ll talk again about all that . . . But I wanted to tell you . . . If you have any real troubles, Massart’s a friend. Have you never thought about the civil service? . . .
I leapt to my feet, I made no answer, I ran to the kitchen. In front of the sink, my mother was still wiping the plates which the maid was handing her. I said to her, in a strangled voice – I was beside myself:
— Was it you who asked that swine to offer me a position in his police force?
— Whatever’s got into you? she said. Yes, it was me . . . What about it? What if you ended up failing? A person has to keep his weather eye open, my poor child. Your poor father was in the civil service, after all . . .
— Neither cop nor supplier of coffins! I cried. I’d rather die first. Go and tell your superintendent that!
With that, I left the house and went to sleep at Rue Cujas. Since then my mother has been writing me tearful letters, which I do not answer.
I no longer know how I whiled the time away until the end of September. Marguerite came and installed herself once more in Rue Cujas; I saw her reappear with a relief that she took for happiness at seeing her again. I did not know whom to talk to. One day I remembered Régnier, whom I had visited with all of you in the spring. I made up my mind to go and see him, in order to talk about myself, ask him for advice, tell him about plans for books and essays: literature struck me as being a way out. I still believed in givers of advice, in priests.
One afternoon I arrived at Mesnil-le-Roi and rang the bell. Régnier, who seemed q
uite put out at seeing me, opened the door. I was afraid he had forgotten who I was, but he remembered me. The conversation went badly. All of a sudden, footsteps crunched on a gravelled path. A man appeared: he was in shirt-sleeves and had bare feet in leather sandals; he saw me and said to Régnier:
— Oh, you’ve got company, forgive me . . .
— You won’t be in the way, said Régnier.
— No, no, said the newcomer, I’ll leave you to your company, I’m going back upstairs to work.
The face seemed familiar, but I was paralysed by the effort I was making to put a name to it. Suddenly it came back to me and I exclaimed:
— Of course, it’s Carré!
In spite of a pointed beard which transformed him, I had just recognized Carré whom I had heard two or three times at meetings, and whose picture L’Humanité had published at the time of the conspiracy.
— That’s right, said Régnier, looking embarrassed. You won’t say anything?
— Have no fear, I said. I’m in the party. Tell him that . . . Forgive me for coming. But I was out walking at Maisons-Laffitte, I thought I’d just come and pay my respects . . .
— You’re very kind, said Régnier.
There was nothing more for me to do there, I was in the way, I awkwardly took my leave of your friend.
Several days went by. I had forgotten the encounter. One morning I woke from a dream: I had just disclosed Carré’s hiding-place to a man who at times had my father’s features, at times my own face. I had to touch Marguerite’s hip to assure myself I was no longer dreaming. How we laughed at psychoanalysis, when we were working at Sainte-Anne under Dumas!
When an idea makes its appearance, it has already in fact come a long way. It arrives perfectly formed and full-grown, it is too late to kill it. You cannot imagine how resilient an idea is, it must be harder to destroy than a man. This one haunted me for days. There would be whole mornings or afternoons when I would forget it – just as each time one thinks one is happy one forgets the anguish of death, the descent into the void – and then suddenly it would reappear. It was terribly hard and sardonic, as if all the time it had been playing hide-and-seek with me. It was like a motionless, sharply defined scene standing between myself and the world. I recall one of the last days: I was walking along the embankment, I was thinking about nothing – or vaguely about my body, my skin – I was looking at the Louvre windows opposite me and telling myself they reminded me of a memory that I would not be able to track down. It made its reappearance, just above and to the right of my head, with a stony glitter. Each time it grew, like a tic or an obsession, imperious as a gesture.
