Mexican Notebooks: 1940–1947

Serge, Victor

doi:10.64590/s9a

VICTOR SERGE

Victor Serge (1890–1947) spent the last six years of his life in Mexico, joining the exodus from Marseille in 1941 and remaining behind after the War. Here he completed his two most celebrated works. Memoirs of a Revolutionary evokes his vagabond anarchist youth, passage to revolutionary Russia, years as assistant to Zinoviev in the Comintern and Left Oppositionist, prison, exile; a cast of thousands from the Old Bolshevik generation recalled in vivid detail. The Case of Comrade Tulayev was the most powerful of his ‘documentary novels’ on the turmoil of the inter-war years. Extracts from Serge’s 1944, 45 and 47 diaries had appeared in Les Temps modernes in 1949 and were collected in a 1953 French volume, which also included notebooks from the 1930s. In 2010, three cardboard boxes of his papers were discovered in the archive of his late widow Laurette Séjourné in the small Mexican town of Amecameca. They included letters, drafts, photographs and a bundle of exercise books, tied up with string, covering the years 1941, 42, 43 and 46. Agone has now published the entire collection as Carnets (1936–1947). nlr’s selection takes up the narrative of Serge’s life where the Memoirs end, on the boat from Marseille. The notebooks contain thoughts on the world-political situation, impressions of Mexico, often caustic portraits of fellow exiles. Peter Sedgwick, his English editor, has pointed out the influence of Sorel in Serge’s anarcho-syndicalist formation: the Sorelian notion of a moral elite, alien to Marxism, informed his belief that the direction of history ‘depends to a very large extent on the calibre of individual human beings’, hence his remorseless judgements on his fellow men, seen in terms of their fitness for the revolution. His political assessments were often wide of the mark. Early predictions of a Soviet defeat and the collapse of Stalin’s regime give way to over-estimations of Moscow’s power; cautious prognostications for a limited social-democratic politics in post-war Europe are followed by speculations on an ‘acceptable’ technocratic collectivism. Serge boasted of conceiving the notion of parallel ‘totalitarianisms’, that most threadbare of Cold War liberalism’s tropes, yet wrote in 1947, ‘If the Soviet regime is to be criticized, let it be from a socialist and working-class point of view’. Of his comrades in the Mexico group Socialismo y Libertad, the French left-socialist Marceau Pivert would become a committed opponent of the Algerian War in the 1950s, while poum veteran Julián Gorkín enlisted with the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Serge’s likely trajectory had he lived beyond 1947 must remain a matter for speculation.

Mexican Notebooks: 1940–1947

Marseille, winter 1940–41. Narrow back streets dingy by day, lost in the shadows by night, criss-crossed by washing lines draped with clothes strung from the windows. Narrow and slippery, the stone oozing poverty, magnificent ancient mansions now lairs with vast entrances like caverns (carved gates, rue de la Prison). Stench. Pizzas, Greek, Russian, Annamite, Chinese restaurants. Rue de la Bouterie, the brothels with their lights out, Chat Noir, Magdeleine, Lucy, locked doors for the rush of sailors, notices in several languages. At the bottom of the alleyway, the port’s bright lights, spindly masts, Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde on the golden rock in the distance, the azure sky.

An Annamite or Chinese procession (funeral, festival?) files past in the rain under banners of cloth and coloured paper. Scampering, the thin, sallow faces of smart but sad coolies.

Lively square, ancient fine houses, baths, the church below the hospital. We go inside to admire the Easter crèche, with all its little figurines at work, sawing wood, shoeing horses, etc. For twenty sous, the figures move.

31 March 1941. People on the Ship. In search of a comfortable corner, the ‘economic emigrants’ have installed themselves between the central deck and the boiler room. Jews with money. Rent the crew’s cabins, stuff themselves, do deals with the personnel, keep to themselves, are suspicious of everyone, play cards, read Clochemerle. We call that corner ‘the Champs-Élysées’ and we invade it partly because it’s sheltered from the wind and the sun. They glare at us.

The foredeck is more crowded but has a slightly chic atmosphere because of a group of filmmakers and wealthy, well-dressed emigrants who behave as if they’re on the terrace of a café on the Left Bank.

The upper deck, which isn’t a deck strictly speaking but a sort of roof, cluttered with the lifeboats, is occupied by the Lams, the Bretons and Vlady.footnote¹ Jacqueline [Breton] sunbathes almost naked and scorns the world which couldn’t care less, and that irks her. Hélène Lam nurses Wifredo, who is ill, with swollen glands, sad, lying under a blanket, his head in his wife’s lap. His eyes like those of an ancient Sino-African child are full of an animal misery. Even though he’s getting better. I sometimes go up, from there you can see the entire ship and the entire ocean. It’s Montparnasse.

In the stern, rough wood tables under the tarpaulins, above the stairs to the hold. Tubs in which René Schickele’s daughter does her washing while telling me about Walter Benjamin’s suicide in Cerbère, in October 1940, after a fruitless attempt to cross the border without a visa; several friends had just made it to the other side, he failed, he lost his nerve. He sent his last manuscripts to Switzerland. He left us a remarkable essay on Baudelaire. Deck chairs, a sort of cowshed on one side, and on the other, the vile shared toilets made of plywood, erected on the deck. Rigging, tools, hordes of kids, washing, bare-chested characters shaving, ladies lying on their deckchairs in the sun. Our German International Relief Association group studies English and debates Marxism. The Stalinists in discreet little confabs around Kantorowicz and his wife, both thin, with sharp profiles, furrowed faces and a gaze that is both hard and evasive.footnote² Raucous, cheerful Spaniards. It’s Belleville.

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VICTOR SERGE

Mexican Notebooks: 1940–1947

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