Victor Serge and his Contemporaries

NYRB Classics is bringing out a new edition of Unforgiving Years, which I haven’t read yet but probably will, to accompany its reissue of his The Case of Comrade Tulayev, which NYRB reissued a while back, and which I did read a while back in a battered old second hand paperback. Of Serge, the NYRB Classics editor says (link):

He is one of the greatest of twentieth-century political novelists, and his work more than holds its own—I'd even say overshadows—that of contemporaries like Andre Malraux and Ignazio Silone, not to mention such fading Cold War relics as 1984 and Darkness at Noon.

Hm, let me think about that. I resist calling 1984 a “relic.” I haven’t read it in years, but I’m one of those bitter-enders who thinks that Orwell was and is just as great as we always thought. Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon is, perhaps, a different sort of creature. It was surely an important political statement in its place and time, although I suspect serious readers recognized from the start that it was more important due to its context than it was for any possible intrinsic merit.

Silone—I wonder if anyone under 50 has even heard of Silone? He is perhaps a classic exemplar of the category of “troubled liberal,” and we know those guys all get chewed up by events. I read Bread and Wine a few years back and found it naïve—but it had a kind of charm about it, a good deal of the flavor of a certain time and place. I read Fontamara a couple years back in an Italian student reader, and made it the subject of my first-ever substantive blog post. I don’t suppose it was a “great” book—it seemed a bit manufactured, as if produced for a show—but its compassion seemed sincere and some bits were telling, and some bits tellingly funny. So, I’d say Silone is a keeper.

Malraux. Ah, Malraux. I certainly remember when we treated him like an icon. But I also remember assigning Man’s Fate to a class of undergraduates years back—it was for one of those get-to-know-the-faculty seminars that meet in your living room—and finding it almost indefensibly false. Good writing in its way, I suppose, but preening, self-aggrandizing moralism in a style that makes my skin crawl. I suspect in general, Malraux’s reputation as fallen pretty low.

So, where does Serge fit? As I say, I haven’t read Unforgiving Years, but on the strength of Comrade Tulayev, I certainly want to. Like the other authors mentioned here, I suppose he is in some sense a product of his time. But then again, who isn’t? The best of these—certainly Orwell, probably Silone—have a way of at once capturing and at the same time transcending their time, allowing them to reach forward and make contact with a very different time. On that score, I’d say Tulayev measures up. I think he did a good job of capturing some of the deceptions and of what Auden called the “Low, Dishonest Decade”—and, more than the deceptions, the self-deceptions that allowed some people to get themselves sucked into it.

I certainly wasn’t politically conscious in the 30s (!) but I was by the 50s (at least in a childish way) and I knew old lefties who said “We never knew! We never knew!” Serge is living proof that somebody knew, and tried to tell the truth before it was fashionable. That’s enough reason for Serge to survive and, I hope, to endure. I look forward to Unforgiving Years.

Postscript: The introduction to Tulayev is by the late Susan Sontag. NYRB calls it one of Susan Sontag's most ambitious and thoughtful late statements. I’m not persuaded: if I had read the intro alone, I might well have skipped the book. But that might just be a thing between me and Susan. Read the book because of Susan if you like, or in spite of her if you prefer. But do read it. And, probably, read the new one, too.

Lubitsch and Wilder bring you the Revolutionary as Dweeb

Il Teatro Buce enjoyed a screening last night of Ernst Lubitsch's classic Ninotchka with Greta Garbo.  It's good fun, perhaps not least because the dialogue has Billy Wilder's thumbprints all over it.  It does tend to drag after the first half or so and I suspect it wouldn't have its status as a semi-classic were it not so closely woven into the legend of Garbo herself.

But what impressed me most was not its Garbohood buts place in the narrative of the Soviet Union and our perception thereof.  This is 1939: of course we had long since demonized the Soviets for their violence and corruption.  No surprise there; but the movie offers us much more--not just violence and brutality but also meanness, cowardice and bureaucratic time-serving.  Especially in the early scenes we focus not on Garbo herself (she isn't there yet) but on three petty strivers who remind you of nothing so much as the Marx brothers cross-bred with the three little bats out of Pogo--figures of contempt or ridicule, not remotely of fear except insofar as we fear for them.

I've commented with admiration before on Victor Serge's  great Case of Comrade Tulayev, in which he demolishes any possible illusions about the intentions of the Soviet elite.  When I first came to political awareness in the 50s, there were still people who tended to mist over at the thought of Soviet crimes and malefactions.  I've often wished they could have studied Serge.  Silly me; all they needed to do was to go to the movies.

For extra credit, what were the names of the three bats in Pogo?  Go here.

Unforgiving Years: A Disappointment

I'm a big fan of Victor Serge's Case of Comrade Tulayev:  I don't know of any book that better captures the corrosive mix of paranoia and betrayal that crippled even the best intentions among Stalinists in the 1930s.  So I was a natural candidate for first-ever (2008) translation into English of Serge's Unforgiving Years.  Serge wrote the book (in French) in hr months before his death in 1947; the apocalyptic moment just after the detonation of the first atomic bombs, the moment of transition between one war and the next.  It is his attempt at a summing-up, a starting-over, of so much that he wanted to see and understand.

I got around to it this week, in a couple of long waits in a couple of airport lounges.  It was good company, absorbing and stimulating in its way, but in the end, I'd have to rate it a disappointment.  It's an honorable effort, but in the end, I'd say that Serge just  bit off more than he could chew.  He's a piercingly honest chronicler of the events he knows well at first hand, but I don't think he's got the technical skills for a Panavision epic.

We have three major scenes here; the first is Paris in the dark days around Munich--Alan Furst country.  It's a scene Serge understands well and his account of the Paris episode carries conviction although even here, uncharacteristically, there is a touch of Bulwer-Lytton in the prose.  The second is Leningrad during the siege; the third, Berlin just before and after the moment of collapse.  Each of these last two is earnestly narrated and there are flashes of first-rate story telling.  But a lot of it sounds artificial, as if he is recounting at second hand.

A short coda in Mexico is a train wreck: an attempt at summing-up in Mexico is just a train wreck.  In atmosphere, it's a pale reflection of Malcolm Lowry or B. Traven; in content, it comes close to mawkish.    The best you can possibly say is--who could blame?  Who could possibly have made sense of our predicament at that particularly uncertain wrinkle in time?   You've got to admire him for trying and the admiration alone is enough to keep you going, but in the end you can do him a kindness by putting this one aside and remembering his better work elsewhere.

Note:  I haven't read Memoirs of a Revolutionary, non-fiction, though I suspect it's worth the effort.  I did enjoy Conquered City--one of the two best on-the-ground accounts I know of the Russian revolution.  The other is, ironically, the very different We the Living by the very different Ayn Rand.

NYRB: Ten Favorites

Others have tried their hand; I will try mine--ten favorites from the formidable catalog of NYRB Classics:

• Alexander Berkman, Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist.  Oddly sympathetic account of a man who made it his life plan to be an assassin.

• Alexander Wat, My Century   A triumph of endurance and preserved humanity under unimaginable stress.  Like so many who lived through the worst the Century had to offer, he died a suicide.

• Nirad Caudhuri, Autobiography of an Unknown Indian.  Another hymn to civility and good order under another kind of stress.

• Richard Cobb, Paris and Elsewhere.  The most straightforwardly refreshing of NYRB's "we'll always have Paris" line.

• Yashar Kemal, Memed, My Hawk. Said to be hugely popular at home in Turkey.,  Though nominally a  novel, it is clearly intended to convey the reality of peasant life in the rural Anatolia.  I wonder how far it succeeds, how far it is a romantic delusion

• Murray Kempton, Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties.   In the 50s at Antioch, people used to scoot down to the libraries on Thursday so they could catch Kermpton's pyrotechnical wisdom in the radical/liberal New York Post.  The memories are not quite mine but they form the substrate out of (or into) which mine emerged.

• Andrei Platonov, Soul.  Here's one I had never heard of until NYRB came along.  Billed as a Russian writer, I think he might almost be better understood as Central Asian, or at the very least one who writes about the encounter between the two.

•  Victor Serge, The Case of Comrade Tulayev.  We never knew, the old lefties used to say, what a miserable tyrant Stalin really was.  Serge knew, and told the truth movingly and directly while lots of people were still in denial.

• Rebecca West. The Fountain Overflows.  An unexpected delight. I've long been a great fan of her Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, but I really wasn't prepared for the energy and vivacity of this loosely-jointed ramble through women's lives on the edge.

• J. F. Powers, The Stories of J. F. Powers.  An old favorite, rediscovered.  Powers wrote novels with NYRB also reprints, but he is one of those for whom the (longish) short story is the perfect form.  "Lions, Harts, Leaping Doves," ranks right up there alongside "That Evening Sun" or "Lady with Lapdog" or "My Dovecote."

Review:  I see that I favor nonfiction over fiction, Europe over America, the implications of World War II over all else.  I'm already startled and chagrined and what I have left out.  Where is Mavis Gallant, Rose Tremaine, Janet Hobhouse, Gregor von Rezzori Olivia Manning, J.A. Baker (I notice that the A-list is mostly men, the B-list,  mostly women; and my point is--??)?  Where are a dozen others (I think I've read about 100)?  Which is not to say that their list is unerring: I persist in my conviction that Curzio Malaparte is a narcissistic fraud; that there is a bit more Leonardo Sciasscia and George Simenon than they really need; and that Gershom Scholem really didn't get the point of his own story.  Oh, and way too many former consorts of Robinson Jeffers.  But it's a noble venture, executed with great skill and mostly good judgment.  I want them to keep at it for years to come though I suppose this kind of publishing venture either runs out of good material or just starts jumping the shark.  Before that, they should quit.