The World of Yesterday (46 page)

I
N THOSE FIRST YEARS
, England did not really mean exile for me any more than Gorky had been in exile in Sorrento. Austria still existed, even after the so-called revolution and the attempt made by the National Socialists soon afterwards to take control of the country by mounting a surprise attack following the assassination of Dollfuss. The death throes of my homeland were to last another four years. I could go home any time I liked, I was not formally exiled or outlawed. My books stood untouched in my house in Salzburg, I still carried an Austrian passport, Austria was my country and I had full rights as an Austrian citizen. I was not yet in the cruel condition of a stateless expatriate, a condition hard to explain to anyone who has not known it himself. It is a nerve-racking sense of teetering on the brink, wide awake and staring into nothing, knowing that wherever you find a foothold you can be thrust back into the void at any moment. I was still only at the start of the process. But this time, in late February 1934, I felt a difference when I arrived in London and got out of the train at Victoria Station. When you have decided to live in a city, it is not the same as a city that you are only visiting; you see it in a different way. I didn’t know how long I would be staying in London. All that mattered was to be able to get on with my own work, defending my private and public liberty. Property meant tying myself down, so I didn’t want to buy a house. Instead I
rented a little flat, just large enough to take a desk and the few books I had not wanted to leave behind, fitting them into two wall cupboards. That gave me everything that a man who works with his mind needs. There was no room for me to entertain company, but I preferred to live in a small space and be able to travel freely from time to time. Subconsciously, I had already switched my life to a temporary rather than a permanent mode.

On my first evening—it was already getting dark and the walls were blurred in the twilight—I walked into the tiny flat, which was ready for me at last, and had a shock. It was just as if I had walked into that other small apartment, the place I had furnished for myself in Vienna almost thirty years ago where the rooms were just as small; the only welcome came from those same books along the walls, and I had a hallucinatory feeling that I was being observed by the eyes of Blake’s King John, the drawing that went everywhere with me. It really took me a moment to gather my wits; I hadn’t thought of that first apartment of mine for years and years. Was this a sign that my life, after ranging so widely for so long, was retreating into the past, and I was only a shadow of myself? When I had chosen my apartment in Vienna thirty years before, it was a beginning. I had not done anything yet, or nothing much, my books were still unwritten and my name still unknown in my country. Now the situation, curiously enough, was the reverse—my books had disappeared from their original language, and what I wrote from now on would be unknown in Germany and Austria. My friends were far away, my old circle of acquaintances scattered, the house with its collections and pictures and books was lost to me. I was in a strange place again, just as I had been then. Everything I had tried, done, learnt and enjoyed in the interim seemed to have been drifted away on the wind, and now, at the age of fifty, I faced another beginning. Once more I was a student who would sit at his desk and go off to the library in the morning, but I was not as trustful as before. There was a touch
of grey in my hair and a faint, twilight despondency weighing on my weary mind.

I hesitate to say much about those years I spent in England from 1934 to 1940, because I am already coming close to the present time, and we have all been through that to much the same extent, feeling the same fears aroused by the radio and newspapers, the same hopes and cares. We are none of us very proud of our political blindness at that time, and we are horrified to see where it has brought us. Anyone trying to explain it would have to level accusations, and which of us has any right to do so? There is also the fact that I kept myself very much to myself while I was living in England. I had inhibitions, and foolish as I knew my inability to overcome them was, in all those years of semi-exile and then full exile I kept away from outspoken company, feeling mistakenly that I had no right to join in discussions of the present situation when I was in a foreign land. In Austria I had been unable to do anything about folly in high places, so how could I try it here? I felt that I was a guest in this hospitable island and that if—with my clear and well-informed knowledge gleaned in Europe—I pointed out the danger Hitler represented, it might be taken as personal prejudice. In fact it was sometimes difficult to keep my mouth shut when I heard views that were obviously mistaken. It was painful to see how the greatest virtue of the British, their loyalty and their honest wish to think well of everyone in the absence of evidence to the contrary, was abused by brilliantly staged propaganda. I kept hearing that all Hitler meant to do was bring the ethnic Germans from outlying areas into the German fold, and then he would be satisfied and show his gratitude by rooting out Bolshevism. The hook was skilfully baited. Hitler had only to utter the word ‘peace’ in a speech, and the newspapers broke into impassioned jubilation, forgetting all the crimes that had been committed and never
asking why Germany was rearming. Tourists coming home from Berlin, where they had been carefully shown around and flattered, praised the orderly regime of the country and its new master, and the English were coming to think that his claims to a Greater Germany might be justified. No one here realised that Austria was the vital keystone, and as soon as it was broken out of the wall Europe would come tumbling down. As for the naivety, the high-minded trustfulness with which the British in general and their leaders let themselves be beguiled, I observed it with the burning eyes of a man who, at home, had seen the faces of the storm troopers at close quarters and had heard them chanting: “Germany is ours today, tomorrow the whole world.” The greater the political tension, the more I avoided conversation and anything else meant for public consumption. Britain is the only Old World country where I never published an article on current events in a newspaper or contributed to radio talks or public discussions. I lived anonymously in my little flat, just as I had lived in my small apartment in Vienna in my student days. So I have no right to describe Britain as if I were an expert on the subject, especially since I did not admit until later that, before the war, I never really appreciated the country’s real, deep-seated strength, which emerges and unfolds only at the hour of utmost danger.

I did not see many British writers either. The two to whom I had begun to feel close, John Drinkwater and Hugh Walpole, died prematurely, and I did not often meet younger writers, since I avoided going to clubs, dinners and public occasions out of the tiresome sense of insecurity that weighed on me because I was a foreigner. However, I did once have the special, truly memorable pleasure of seeing the two keenest minds of their time, Bernard Shaw and H G Wells, in a dispute which beneath the surface was highly charged, but to all outward appearances was both brilliantly and civilly conducted. It was at a small lunch given by Shaw, and I was in the half-intriguing,
half-embarrassing position of not knowing beforehand the real cause of the subliminal tensions that could be felt flying between the two Grand Old Men of English Literature like sparks of electricity from the first, when they greeted each other with a familiarity slightly tinged with irony. They must have had some difference of opinion on matters of principle, a quarrel that had only just been settled, or perhaps was to be settled at this lunch. Half-a-century earlier the two great men, both of them famous representatives of their country, had fought shoulder to shoulder as members of the Fabian Society in the cause of Socialism, itself still young at the time. Since then, in keeping with their very pronounced and different characters, they had moved progressively further apart, with Wells standing by his active idealism and still tirelessly building on his vision of the future of humanity, while Shaw increasingly contemplated both the future and the past with sceptical irony, exercising his mordant wit on them. Over the years they had also become opposites in their physical appearance. Shaw, an improbably sprightly eighty-year-old who nibbled only nuts and fruits for lunch, was tall, thin, always highly strung, with a wry smile playing around the corners of his loquacious mouth, more enamoured than ever of his own firework display of paradoxes; Wells, in his seventies, was still full of zest for life and appreciative of its good things. He was increasingly comfortable in appearance, small and rosy-cheeked, but relentlessly serious behind his occasional show of merriment. Shaw’s aggressive manner was dazzling as he swiftly changed from one attacking standpoint to another; Wells was tactically strong in defence and as always stood firmly by his own convictions. My impression was that he had not just come to this lunch for friendly conversation, but for a confrontation on principles. Unaware of the background to this conflict of ideas, I sensed the atmosphere all the more strongly. Pugnacity, often high-spirited but perfectly serious, was evident in every gesture, glance and word of the two combatants; they were like two fencers trying out their agility
with small, exploratory feints before launching into a serious attack. Shaw’s mind worked faster, and his intellect flashed in his eyes beneath those beetling brows when he answered or parried a thrust. The pleasure he took in wit and wordplay, honed to virtuoso perfection over sixty years, was intensified to the point of exuberance. His bushy white beard sometimes shook with his soft, sardonic laughter, and as he tilted his head slightly to one side he seemed to be watching the flight of his arrow, to see if it had hit the mark. Wells, of the red cheeks and calm, hooded eyes, was keener and more straightforward in attack; he too had a remarkably quick mind, but it did not strike such a dazzling shower of sparks. He preferred to thrust less fiercely, but with easy self-confidence. The strokes went swiftly back and forth, blades flashing as they fenced, parry and thrust, thrust and parry, always apparently just in play. A neutral spectator could admire all this, enjoying the cut and thrust of their sparkling swordplay to his heart’s content. But behind this swift exchange of dialogue, conducted on the highest level, there was a kind of intellectual anger tamed, in the civilised British way, to take a dialectically urbane form. There was a serious note in their playfulness and a playful note in their gravity; that was what made the discussion so fascinating—a keenly fought conflict between two characters who were poles apart, superficially sparked off by some down-to-earth matter, but really conducted from behind lines immutably drawn for hidden reasons of which I had no idea. However, I had seen the two finest minds in England at one of their finest moments, and the polemics which continued in print in the
New Statesman and Nation
1
over the next few weeks did not give me one-hundredth of the pleasure I had felt in their scintillating conversation, because the arguments in the pages of the journal were abstract, and a reader did not see the nature of the living writers who had produced them so clearly. In fact I have seldom relished the sparks struck off one intellect by another as much, and never before or since have I seen, in a comedy on any stage,
such a dazzling display of the art of dialogue as at that lunch, where it was all performed on the spur of the moment, without theatrical artifice, and in the most high-minded spirit. But I spent those years in England only in the sense that I was physically there, not with my whole heart and mind. Nerve-racking anxiety about the fate of Europe induced me to travel a great deal in those years between Hitler’s rise to power and the outbreak of the Second World War, even crossing the Atlantic Ocean twice. Perhaps I was driven by a presentiment that as long as the world was still open, and ships could navigate the seas in peace, I ought to gather as many impressions and experiences as the heart could hold, to be stored up for darker days, or perhaps it was a desire to know that, while distrust and discord were tearing our old world to pieces, another was in construction. Perhaps it was even a vague premonition that our future, including my own, lay outside Europe. A lecture tour taking me all over the United States was a welcome opportunity to see that great country, unified as it essentially is in spite of its wide variety, travelling through it from east to west and north to south. Even stronger, if anything, was the impression made on me by South America when I happily accepted an invitation to attend the International PEN Club Congress there. I had never felt it more important to show support for the idea of intellectual solidarity between all lands and all languages. The last hours I spent in Europe before setting out on this journey gave me plenty to think about on the way. The Spanish Civil War had broken out in the summer of 1936. On the surface, it was only an internal dispute in that beautiful and tragic country, but it really represented the preparatory manoeuvring of two ideological groups in their struggle for power. I had sailed from Southampton on a British ship, and expected that the steamer would avoid putting in at Vigo, usually its first port of call, in order to avoid the war zone. To my surprise, however, we did come into harbour there, and passengers were even allowed to
go ashore for a few hours. At the time Vigo was in the hands of the Francoists, and was some way from the real theatre of war. All the same, I saw something in those few hours that would have caused anyone unhappy reflections. Outside the Town Hall where Franco’s flag was hoisted, young men in rustic clothing, in parties usually led by priests and obviously brought in from the surrounding villages, were standing lined up in rows. At first I didn’t understand what they were there for. Were they labourers being recruited for some kind of emergency service, or the unemployed who had come for a distribution of food? But fifteen minutes later I saw the same young men coming out of the Town Hall again transformed. They wore neat brand-new uniforms, and were carrying rifles and bayonets. Under the supervision of officers, they were loaded into equally brand-new motor vehicles and driven through the streets and out of town. It was a shock. Where had I seen that before? First in Italy, then in Germany! Those immaculate new uniforms, new vehicles and new machine guns had suddenly materialised in both countries. And once again I asked myself: “Who is supplying those uniforms, who is paying for them, who is organising these obviously indigent young rustics to go and fight their own legally elected representative body, the parliament in power?” I knew that the state treasury and the arsenals were in the hands of the legal government. These vehicles and guns must therefore have come from abroad, no doubt brought in over the border with neighbouring Portugal. But who had supplied and paid for them? There was a new power here aiming to seize government in the country, and the same power was already at work in other places, a power that was not averse to violence, actively called for violence, and regarded all the ideas we valued and for which we lived, such as peace, humanity, reconciliation, as outmoded weakness. There were mysterious groups hiding under cover in offices and industries that cynically exploited the naive idealism of youth for their own ends, to promote their own will to power.
It was a desire for violence using a new, more subtle technique to bring down the old barbarism of war on our unhappy continent of Europe again. Something that you may have seen just once, but with your own eyes, is always more forceful than a thousand newspaper reports and pamphlets. I never felt that more strongly than when I saw those innocent young men, provided with guns by mysterious figures pulling strings behind the scenes, going off to fight equally innocent young men who were also their own countrymen. I was overwhelmed by a presentiment of what lay ahead—ahead of us and of Europe. When the ship sailed after several hours in port, I went straight down to my cabin. I would have found it too painful to take another look at that beautiful country, fallen victim to terrible devastation through no fault of its own. I felt that Europe, in its state of derangement, had passed its own death sentence—our sacred home of Europe, both the cradle and the Parthenon of Western civilisation.