Back in the 60s, when I picked Victor Serge’s Memoirs of a Revolutionary off the shelf in my dad’s library, I must’ve been out for the kind of thrills I’d found in Trotsky’s autobiography. But Serge’s Memoirs made My Life seem like Boys’ Life. I’d go on to prize testaments by other unillusioned radicals—such as Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia—but Serge was the secret writer who freed me from pink innocence. He made me a Communist Party-pooper (forever).
In Notebooks: 1936-1947—reprinted this year by NYRB—Serge mused on the fate of his memoirs in an 1943 entry:
The book is done and here I face an impasse. Is it publishable?[1] It’s dense and a difficult read for I wanted it to be precise and well thought out not an emotional tale of the adventure of the Self, which would be necessary for a best-seller. But that’s not what’s wrong with it: it accuses the Stalinist regime pitilessly, objectively; it accuses even more than my novel, [“The Case of Comrade Tulayev”], considered unpublishable “at this time” in New York by virtue of what a publisher called an “unwritten law” that prohibits critics of Russian despotism, our ally. And so, the richer, the more intense, the more irrefutable and the better it puts its finger on the wound the world is suffering from, the less chance of being published.
Serge wasn’t given to self-pity but he noted it got harder to live a life in struggle as he got older. No longer able to do…whatever to feed his family, “all that is left to me is a brain which no one needs right now and which many would prefer perforated with a definitive little bullet.” A line that recalls the black humor of one of Serge’s exchanges with Gide (who’d helped free Serge from the Gulag and then, informed by Serge’s relentless protests, publicly rebuked himself for his prior positivity toward Stalinist Russia):
Our long, disjointed conversation turns to the relationship between masters and disciples. I quote the words of Zarathustra-Nietzsche: “If you want to follow me, deny me.”
Him: Buddha says: “If you encounter me, kill me.”
Me: Don’t repeat that too often. They’ll do it. They won’t miss…
Serge was on the run from Stalinists and fascists during the unforgiving years chronicled in Notebooks. Stateless and penniless, he landed in Mexico where he found a modicum of safety, though Stalinists kept him from finding steady work as a writer and openly argued in Mexico City cafes about whether it was time to do him in. Serge arrived in Mexico not long after Trotsky was murdered there. (Notebooks includes Serge’s report on the assassination, which was published in Sartre’s Les Temps Modernes.) He remained close to Trotsky’s widow and wrote up his sad visits to her tomb-like dwelling where they mourned slain revolutionaries and wondered at careers of amazing betrayers.
Serge’s own tie to Trotsky was knotty. He greatly admired the “Old Man” and defended him against Stalinist calumnies, but he knew Trotsky wasn’t the One to lead a fight against totalitarians. Trotsky had devolved into a sectarian, becoming an incipient authoritarian who couldn’t take criticism. In a Notebooks entry, Serge recalled how Trotsky blew up at him when they disagreed about a strategic matter: “You are an enemy who wants to be treated like a friend.” A sentiment that sounds like it belonged in Stalin’s mouth/mind.
Serge wasn’t a self-lacerating hater of old Bolsheviks. He resisted (too much, probably) those who imaged Stalin as “Lenin’s heir.” In response to a theorist who’d argued in Partisan Review that Stalin’s regime was best understood as the fulfillment, not the betrayal, of the 1917 revolution, Serge stood up for his former comrades. While he allowed Lenin and his party’s “Jacobinism contained the seeds of Stalinist totalitarianism,” he averred: “Bolshevism also contained other seeds, other possibilities of evolution.”
Those itals are his, but I doubt it’s my own biases that make me underscore Serge’s clarity that Bolshevism/Leninism was dead and unrevivable. Drawn into the orbit of independent leftists in Mexico who looked back longingly to 1917, he was struck repeatedly by the irreal quality of their discourse.
Serge’s truth attacks—“most [militants] would be charmed to have a tiny party of thirty thousand in Spain or France that would believe itself pure and that would be powerless”—irritated wannabe Bolshies. But he insisted it would be a “suicidal mistake” for socialists not to identify as democrats.
In the immediate coming period the essential thing would be obtaining the reestablishment of traditional democratic freedoms which are the precondition for the rebirth of the workers and socialist movements…That Stalinism…constitutes the worst danger, a mortal danger which we would be mad to aspire to fight on our own…That we must seek influence on the terrain of democracy, in the Constituents and everywhere and accept many compromises with intransigence of the spirit.
Serge himself managed to embody intransigence and flexibility. He aimed to treat his opponents fairly, though he allowed totalitarians made it almost impossible to live by “the rule of absolute respect for others.” His Notebooks are defined by his 360 degree objectivity about comrades and enemies and tweeners like Andre Breton. Serge’s views of Breton et al. were characteristic of his rigorous approach to politics of culture: “The Surrealists’ revolt was nothing but a revolt of the literary cafes…Yet there was, there is, something alive, a kind a painful and daring revelation in Surrealism. It’s just that the Surrealists are rather small compared to their discovery.”
Serge wasn’t dim about “irrational man.” Tight with psychoanalysts, alive to intuitions of novelists, he wasn’t above, say, mulling over premonitions. An entry in Notebooks on that subject has taken on a slightly surreal resonance due to events that took place around the time of his death (per this account in the foreword to the new NYRB edition):
On Monday morning, November 17th, 1947 Serge went to [his son] Vlady’s house to give him a poem he’d just written…Somewhere along the way he died…
Vlady would recount:
“I found him on the operating table in the police station. A yellowish lamp illuminated the sinister room. The first thing I noticed were his shoes: they had holes in them. This shocked me greatly, because he was careful about his dress though his clothes were always of the cheapest. The following day I was unable to draw his face, for they had put a plaster death-mask over it. I limited myself to drawing his hands, which were beautiful. A few days later, I received his poem, ‘Hands’.”
Vlady was a painter who pointed his father to the work of Mexican artists. Notebooks is enlivened by Serge’s portraits of those artists and by his own eye for Mexican people and places. My favorite entry in the book might be his painterly account of a day-trip to Mexico’s highlands…
A good road, climbing gently takes us right below the snow line. The rarefied air is impregnated with light; the weather is cool. Pine and fir woods, calm, transparency. Feeling of space, of lightness, skimming over the surface of the earth…The Vera Cruz road passed between Ixxtaccihuatl and Popocatepetl. From this crossroads the horizons of the virgin planet can be seen, the snow slopes of Ixta, sheer and gentle, the more massive and rounded slopes of Popo, the green woods downhill, the plains below resembling the sea; piles of horizontal clouds, and above their vapor a bluish peak, the Malinche, and further away the sparkling peak of the Orizaba…The road is made of rust-colored volcanic ash which becomes gray as we climb higher. We walk in short steps in an intoxicated breathlessness, you want to run, perhaps to dance. You feel a lightness of soul as if the transparency of the world and the cold whiteness of the snow purified it, cooled it, freed it—and your chest weakening, your heart vacillating. (A beautiful place to die.)
He’s still on a high when he and his party come down to a festive plaza in the valley town of Amecameca where they watch a wedding “out of the 1830s” and “incredible buses fill up with indios”:
You wonder if the moment will come when these vehicles will no longer be able to take even one more passenger in a sombrero but in fact that moment never comes. Young girls are returning from mass, probably the daughters of the town caciques, wealthy and smiling. One of them is of a rare beauty (but perhaps it’s simply the enchantment of the plaza and the nearby mountain): Pure Spaniard, straight nose, large laughing mouth, dressed tastefully, sober mantilla, jacket of grayish white, short skirt, black fishnet stockings on squat, muscular legs. She erases the image of a perhaps leprous beggar…
As Serge walked on, taking in more distant peaks, digging the interior of a gorgeous church, he seems to have erased for a moment horrors he’d written about in the entry that immediately preceded his account of his trip to “Popo” and Amecameca. That entry, “The Extermination of the Jews,” recorded his response to reading The Black Book of Polish Jewry. Serge may have lived through decades of Stalinist terror, but the Nazis’ “rationalized exterminations in purpose-built factories” was beyond his imagining: “one’s lucidity is shaken.”
Serge’s trip to the highlands may have steadied him, but he didn’t get much of a respite from mind-breakers. The next entry in his Notebooks—“American Intellectuals in the face of the Stalinist USSR”—addressed a special 1944 issue of New Republic devoted to apologetics for the Soviet Union. While I wouldn’t equate clocking opinions of prog fantasts with the experience of reading The Black Book, there’s no doubt it must’ve been confounding for Serge to page through that issue of New Republic. According to the magazine’s correspondents, the Soviet Union wasn’t a polity founded on slave labor in concentration camps, but one shaped by “democracy in production.” And, per N.R., there was nothing to that canard about Soviet censorship. Serge went through each article before advising “lovers of intellectual curiosities to put aside this issue of New Republic and open it in a short while, let’s say a year.”
Seventy-five years down the line, it’s still a trip to read about those Fellow Travelers.
Serge surely worried his own journey might be headed for a dead end. But he was protected by a kind of pride that had zip to do with ordinary egotism. While he’d learned not to trust in vanguard parties, he still believed he was one of the fortunate few:
In the midst of historical catastrophe, most men choose neither their role nor their death. To see clearly from time to time—this is without question a tremendous privilege: to feel strong enough to uphold those authentic values that are more durable than empires, even totalitarian ones—that is to be among the chosen…
We should be so lucky.
Note
1 Not until 1951, when it was published posthumously in France.