The Return of Lanny Budd

by Upton Sinclair

  The affair was in its second day when Lanny stepped off the aeroplane. He had barely time to arrive at the Savoy Hotel before Boris Shub called him up in a state of excitement. He wanted Lanny to come to his place to have dinner and hear about it, and Lanny did so.

  He met several American and German writers, all bubbling over. They had gone quite innocently to the afternoon session, expecting to hear discourses on the announced topics, ‘The Author and Spiritual Freedom’ and ‘The Function of Literary Criticism’. But at that session Colonel Dymschitz had presented a Soviet writer named Vishnevsky, editor of a Moscow magazine and author of a melodramatic Soviet film called We Are from Kronstadt. This gentleman, wearing his three rows of ribbons and decorations, had told the writers of Germany that the United States was planning a war of aggression, but the Soviets knew how to deal with warmongers; he had summoned the German writers and the German people to fight shoulder to shoulder with the Soviets against the American imperialists. His discourse continued:

  ‘Reactionary forces in Washington and London are trying to create an “iron curtain”, but the Soviet nation is watchful and cannot be frightened, not even by atomic bombs … Brothers, comrades, we know how to answer. If you need us, call for our help and we will fight together’.

  There had been thunderous applause from the Communists, watched of course by their wizened little cultural commissar out of uniform. The German and American liberals had sat in stunned silence. They had left the hall debating what to do about it and had consulted with the chairman scheduled for the following morning, a German editor named Birkenfeld who happened to be more liberal than the Reds had realised. He had agreed that if an American writer would prepare a speech answering Vishnevsky, he would introduce that writer and give him a hearing.

  VIII

  A volunteer had come forward, Melvin J. Lasky; he had come out of New York’s intelligentsia, and while writing precocious historical essays had earned his living by running the elevator in the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. He had come to Germany as a soldier and now was back as correspondent for the New Leader and the Partisan Review. His age was twenty-seven, and he was entirely unknown to the Germans; it was presumptuous indeed for him to undertake such a task, but there was nobody else. Now, Shub said, he was shut up in his apartment, hammering away on a typewriter. They would have dinner and give him until the middle of the evening, and then go and help him translate his speech into acceptable German.

  So it was that Lanny first came to meet Melvin Lasky, who was to become a friend. He was a medium-sized fellow who wore a tiny reddish goatee—something that intensely annoyed the opposition, since Bolshevik propriety required men to be smooth-shaven. He worked the night through on that speech, and Shub and Mrs Birkenfeld and Lanny helped him until the small hours of the morning.

  At ten o’clock they were all seated in the second row of the theatre. Leading Soviet novelists and playwrights, all decorated, occupied the front row. There was the embittered Vishnevsky, and there was Kataev, a playwright and novelist who had once written a satire on Russia’s crowded housing conditions that had been a hit on Broadway, but who was writing no satires now. There was Gorbatov, a Soviet writer whom Shub had met on the River Elbe, at which time he had tried lamely to apologise for the dreadful treatment being meted out to the millions of Russians who had been seized by the German Army and were now being taken back and put at slave labour by the Kremlin. Also, of course, there was the cultural commissar, setting the pace for their applause.

  The correspondent Lasky was introduced, and he started tactfully and seductively. He congratulated the Congress upon ‘the spectacle of German authors again meeting freely together, critically exchanging ideas and making plans to defend and extend their newly born liberties’. He waited while the Russian translator rattled off his words, and the Russians all applauded. He told how American writers had been struggling for ‘honesty, frankness, and social realism in literature’. The Russians all nodded approval of that; it was the Soviet formula.

  He went on like that for a while, and if he had stopped there he would have been hailed as a great writer. But among the examples of American wartime censorship he mentioned that we were ‘not allowed to publish Leon Trotsky’s biography of Stalin. The edition had already been printed and distributed, but officials in Washington thought it might embarrass relations with Moscow. During that time many honest and independent books which were critical of the Soviet dictatorship, the Communist one-party system, the Soviet apparatus of political concentration camps and slave labour, were postponed and withheld; but I am glad to say only postponed. They have all since been published’.

  Those, of course, were awful things to be said in the presence of Russian writers; it was literally the first time such words had been spoken in Berlin, for Americans had been forbidden to criticise their Soviet allies. Looking squarely at the decorated Russians in the front row, Lasky continued, ‘We know how soul-crushing it is to work and write when behind us stands a political censor, and behind him stand the police. Think how it must shatter the nerves of a Russian writer to worry constantly whether the new party doctrine of the revised state formula of “social realism”, or “formalism” or ‘objectivism’, or what have you has already become passé and the mark only of a decadent counterrevolutionary tool of the Fascists’.

  The cultural commissar arose and stalked out and was followed by Kataev, the satirist who had stopped satirising ten years ago. Other Communists in the audience began to interrupt. ‘Warmonger! Throw him out! What about Eisler?’ They shouted that again and again—referring to a Soviet secret agent who had been arrested in New York and was soon to jump bail and escape. But Lasky went on to finish his peroration about the function of the writer as a champion of liberty of the mind and spirit, and the opponent of every form of oppression. He included that sentence from Edmund Burke which Lanny had supplied: ‘The arguments of tyranny are as contemptible as its force is dreadful’. So it is that the thoughts of great men survive and re-echo down the ages. So it is that, in the words of Shelley, ‘Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind’.

  IX

  The Reds hissed and booed this speech, but the Germans gave the speaker an ovation. As Lasky walked down the aisle people crowded around him and grasped his hand. The aged Ricarda Huch, whose good name the Soviets were trying to exploit, embraced him and thanked him warmly.

  Then, in the afternoon, when there was a Soviet chairman, the writer Kataev arose to fight for his cause. Said he, ‘I have acquainted myself with the speech of the so-called American writer, Lasky. I am very happy finally to have met a flesh-and-blood warmonger face to face. We have no such specimens in the Soviet Union. This is a very instructive spectacle. I don’t know what books Lasky has written. I know other American writers, but Lasky is completely unknown to me. I believe that if Lasky should ever be immortalised through a monument, the grateful Americans will mark it with the inscription: “Tomb of the Unknown Writer”.… Today the decency of men is measured by their relation toward democracy and the Soviet Union. What the unknown Lasky has said about the Soviet Union is naturally a lie from beginning to end. Such lies are not new to us. Dr Goebbels also used to resort to similar methods to incite against the Soviet Union. How that ended is known to all’.

  For weeks thereafter the reports of that literary duel continued to re-echo throughout the Soviet Union and its captive lands. It was a way by which suppression and oppression defeat themselves. In their fury the oppressors and the defenders of oppression fail to realise how they are making known the very facts they wish to suppress. The widely circulated Literary Gazette of Moscow devoted almost a full column to the affair, describing the scene in these terms:

  ‘The commotion in the hall increased. Outraged by the long speech of the “guest”, listeners demanded that the demagogue be removed. Amid outcries of “This is unheard of! He is abusing the privilege of a guest!” the swindler was forced to stop talking, to leave the scene, a
nd soon thereafter to disappear from the auditorium’.

  But he did not disappear from the Russian press, and least of all from the Communist press in Berlin. They continued to heap insults upon him. They commented upon his beard, ‘a cheap Hollywood imitation of Trotsky’. They called him a warmonger and a Fascist. The cultural commissar published an attack of thirty-five hundred words, longer than Lasky’s speech; he found the young man’s appearance ‘repulsive’ and linked him with the atom bomb.

  The persons whom Lasky had been trying to impress were the young Berlin intellectuals, and among them there developed a sort of Lasky cult—they even went so far as to adopt his notorious goatee. For, in the words of Boris Shub, he had told young Berlin what young Berlin had been waiting to hear. He had cut through the sham humanitarian pretence of the Communist cultural front. He had spoken the truth, as ‘the woman on the pedestal’ understood it. Shub was alluding to that odd occupation by which the unknown writer had been earning his living on Bedloe’s Island in New York harbour.

  There were consequences of that Congress among the Americans also. Less than three weeks after the affair General Clay authorised his director of the Information Control Division ‘to attack communism in every form wherever it exists, and to cite each exposed example of its day-to-day work’. So came that change for which Lanny had pleaded with Under Secretary of State Acheson; it became known among the Americans as Operation Back-Talk. One of its developments was the publication of a monthly magazine dignified, cultural, and literary, in the German language. Its title was Der Monat, and the unknown writer Melvin J. Lasky became its editor.

  X

  Bernhardt Monck had no time to attend congress sessions, but Lanny told him about the affair, and he in turn imparted the latest evidence dug up by the Katyn investigation and the developments in the affairs of the Volkischerbund. Kurt Meissner was still in East Berlin and apparently meant to stay there; he was working actively to keep what he called the German spirit alive. He had insisted that Fritz should go on with his studies.

  The deaf French girl—they smiled over this—was still in Wendefurth. She had made the acquaintance of one of the Bund, a man named Hans Schufurt, and was sending information; she didn’t say how she was getting it, but so far it agreed with information from other sources. Heinrich Brinkmann, who was the leader of the crowd, had gone to Hungary. They had a printing press there, so probably Brinkmann had taken the plates.

  This business of spying was like groping in the dark; every now and then your fingers touched something. You weren’t able to feel all around it, you had just a tiny contact and you had to guess what it was, and how to fit it into the rest of the environment which you had touched. It was a dangerous environment; you were apt to touch something with a sharp steel point, or something very hot, perhaps a high-tension wire.

  Lanny asked about Fritz and the girl, and Monck said that apparently neither had discovered that the other was a spy. They were separated now, and Monck hadn’t questioned Fritz closely about it because he didn’t wish to awaken the suspicion in Fritz’s mind that Monck had ever known or heard of Anna Surden. Perhaps Fritz might choose to confide in Lanny, and this might be important in throwing light on both of them.

  Monck, who had a secret way of communicating with Fritz, made an appointment, and the lad came to Lanny’s hotel room, after taking precautions to make sure he was not being followed. His happiness at seeing his admired American friend was touching; he was having a lonely time of it, he said, and was in need of encouragement. Both he and his father were living in the presence of danger. Fritz was posing among his fellow students as a secret Nazi sympathiser, and more than one of these had disappeared from the college; the Communist secret police had come to their lodging in the small hours of the morning and carried them away.

  As for Kurt, he was posing as a Communist sympathiser and trying to get the Communists to let his music be published, while at the same time he was whispering Nazi treason to trusted Germans; he was getting funds from sources about which he never spoke, not even to his son. The mother was taking care of six children who were going to a school run by a Communist supervisor. The mother had only one old woman to help her, and she had no idea what either her husband or her oldest son was doing. Lanny listened to the details of this picture and got a new realisation of the state of tension in which these one-time German provinces were caught. Soviet communism, American capitalism, German National Socialism, and old-style Russian and German nationalisms—it was like half a dozen tornadoes tearing a house to pieces.

  ‘What’s this I hear about your having a girl?’ demanded Lanny.

  ‘Oh, Herr Budd, I am embarrassed about it! My conscience troubles me. I thought I saw a chance of happiness, but, of course, it couldn’t be. Nobody can be happy in these times’.

  ‘Who is the girl?’

  ‘Her name is Anna Surden; she lived in Wendefurth but I hardly knew her. She came back looking for her family. They were all gone, not a trace of them! She came to me to ask if I knew what had become of them, and so we had a talk. She was lonely and I was lonely—and you know how it is’.

  ‘I know how it is’, Lanny said, helping out. ‘Weren’t you afraid of getting her into trouble?’

  ‘I took precautions’.

  ‘Weren’t you afraid she might find out what you were doing and talk about you?’

  ‘She has no interest in politics, Herr Budd. I made sure about that, I don’t think she knows anything about such questions. She was just a lonely, frightened girl and interested only in being loved’.

  ‘Didn’t she ask you questions about what you were doing, how you were earning a living, and so on?’

  ‘She did, but I evaded them by saying that my father was taking care of me, and that I was studying hard, even on vacation’.

  ‘Didn’t she ask about your father?’

  ‘Sometimes, naturally, because he is a famous man and everybody wants to know about him. But I assure you I didn’t say a word that could make any difference’.

  ‘Where is she now?’

  ‘She is staying on in Wendefurth because she has no other place to go, Herr Budd. She wanted somebody to take care of her, and wanted to get some kind of work. She had a little money that she had earned. Then I had to come back to school; my father insisted upon it, and I couldn’t refuse to obey. So I left the girl very sad.’

  ‘She writes to you?’

  ‘Yes, but I try not to think about her because I have a job to do. How can I think of marriage in my position? She says she will wait for me, but I can’t give her much encouragement’.

  Nor could Lanny give encouragement to Fritz. He thought of the man named Hans Schufurt, from whom Anna was getting information. Knowing Nazi men, Lanny was sure she wouldn’t get much from him by remaining true to Fritz. There just wasn’t any place for either love or marriage within the sweep of those tornadoes. Only one thing Lanny could say to hearten the lad; he could renew that promise he had made to see to it that no punishment should be meted out to Kurt as a result of what Fritz had reported to AMG. It was the gang that the Americans were after and not a crippled musician.

  XI

  The two Rembrandts which Lanny had come to inspect complemented each other in a curious and dramatic way. They were both portraits of the artist: one representing him as a youth, bright-cheeked and smiling, jaunty and with a feather in his hat; the other showing him as an old man, careworn and infinitely melancholy. The face was somewhat bloated; drink had been responsible for that, and the costume and surroundings told the world that this old man had managed his affairs very ill. His work, which the world now esteemed so highly, had pleased his patrons little; his fame had declined, and failure was written upon his features. To hang those two paintings side by side in an art museum would be to move the soul of every visitor, and preach a sermon concerning a painter’s life and times.

  The latter of these works was in a Schloss near Hanover, in the British zone. Lanny would have liked
to rent a car and travel by the autobahn, but he was told that the Reds had purposely let it deteriorate and it was badly pitted. They made all kinds of delays and trouble about the necessary permits; they were following a policy of pinpricks to discourage British, French, and American travel. So it was cheaper and quicker to be flown, and Lanny would require only British papers, which had already been provided by Washington.

  In the bombed-out city of Hanover, now being slowly rebuilt, he hired a car and drove himself out to a country estate to meet a wealthy steel man from whom he had offered to buy the same Rembrandt some twenty years ago, but in vain. Now the world had changed, and the steel man with it. Then he had been a well stuffed as a German Wurst, but now he was thin and frail looking; his hair was white and scanty, his face was lined, and his hands trembled so that he kept them on his knees while he talked. Yes, he was willing to sell the painting, but only for a high price, because it was the last of his treasures. It was a wonderful work, a famous work, and surely it had not deteriorated in value. ‘Look at it, Herr Budd, and make sure it is what I claim it to be’.