Trotsky (22 page)

Breton’s initial draft contained a formula borrowed from Trotsky’s
Literature and Revolution:
“Complete freedom in art, except against the proletarian revolution.” But Trotsky, aware of how this caveat could help produce an abomination like socialist realism, expunged the qualifying phrase and called instead for an “anarchistic” freedom in the arts. This did not mean art for art’s sake, however. The manifesto closed with an exhortation: “Our aims: The independence of art—for the revolution; The revolution—for the complete liberation of art!”

To translate these principles into action, the manifesto called for the creation of an International Federation of Independent Revolutionary Artists, first with local and then national branches, leading to
the convening of a world congress. As it turned out, the Paris branch, under Breton, was the largest, with sixty members; and there were small branches formed in Mexico City by Rivera and in London. But all three organizations were short-lived. In Europe, the threat of war, not the declarations of avant-garde artists, was the chief preoccupation. In the United States,
Partisan Review
published the Breton-Rivera manifesto, but the editors’ efforts to organize an American chapter of the federation proved to be, as they informed Trotsky, “a resounding flop.”

Trotsky and Breton parted on July 30, 1938, as the sun shone brilliantly on the patio of the Blue House. Trotsky presented Breton with the original joint manuscript of the manifesto. The poet was clearly moved by this gesture. He gave Trotsky a portrait of himself by Man Ray, with the inscription: “To Leon Trotsky, in commemoration of the days spent in his light, with my absolute admiration and devotion.”

There remained one piece of unfinished business between the two men, which Breton decided to attend to in a letter he wrote to Trotsky during the voyage to France. He confessed to feelings of inhibition whenever he was in Trotsky’s presence; its cause was the “boundless admiration” he felt for him. It was a “Cordelia complex,” wrote Breton, invoking the name of the youngest of the three daughters of King Lear. It paralyzed him whenever he came face to face with the greatest of men—a pantheon by now reduced to Trotsky and Freud. “Don’t laugh at me, it is quite innate, organic, and, I have every reason to believe, ineradicable…. But I won’t bore you any more with these personal explanations. Let them serve merely to do justice to our misunderstanding on the road to Guadalajara, which you have every right to want to have clarified.”

Trotsky, who was quite capable of delivering encomiums to Marx, Engels, and Lenin, evinced a certain queasiness at this manifestation of his own personality cult, and he let Breton know about it. “I am sincerely touched by the tone, so amicable and cordial, of your letter, dear friend, and—should I say it?—a bit embarrassed. Your eulogies seem to me, in all sincerity, so exaggerated that I am becoming a little uneasy about the future of our relations. From the danger of being embarrassed by the eulogies of friends, I am—thank heaven!—well protected by the much more numerous insults of my enemies.”

As he wrote these lines in the late summer of 1938, Trotsky could not have imagined that before the year was out, he would be forced to count among his enemies the man he had recently eulogized as Red October’s greatest painter.

Diego Rivera’s name had been appended to the manifesto for an independent revolutionary art, even though he had not written a single word of it. Rivera had consented to this arrangement, yet looking back on how the friendship with Trotsky unraveled, it appears that this was the start of the trouble. Not long afterward, Rivera began to behave like a man with something to prove, above all to Trotsky.

Frida’s absence from Mexico, which seemed to disorient Diego, no doubt influenced the course of these events. In early October she left for New York to prepare for her one-person show at the Julien Levy Gallery, on Madison Avenue at 57th Street, opening on November 1. From there it was on to Paris, where Breton had arranged an exhibition of her work. The Paris show, called “Mexique,” placed Frida’s work among pre-Columbian sculptures, old paintings, Surrealist photographs by Manuel Álvarez Bravo, and Breton’s personal collection of what Frida called “all that junk”: masks, dolls, whistles, ornate frames, sugar skulls, pottery, and an assortment of
retablos.

An underlying source of friction between Trotsky and Rivera concerned the painter’s interactions with the local Trotskyists. The Mexican League numbered only about two dozen active members, which did not inhibit them from splitting into factions, as Trotskyists were prone to do. Rivera’s fame, money, and force of personality enabled him to impose his will on these comrades, although he had trouble making up his mind. His near-total absorption in his painting, meanwhile, left him little time to devote to routine organizational matters. The effect on the local Trotskyists was disruptive and demoralizing.

During his first year in Mexico, Trotsky did not perceive a problem. On the contrary, he gushed to Hansen about the painter’s “incomparable
political intuition and insight” and he waved off Jan Frankel’s warnings that Diego was a political wild card. By the summer of 1938, however, Trotsky’s opinion had changed. Rivera possessed an abundance of “passion, courage, and imagination,” he observed, qualities that made him “absolutely unfit” for everyday administrative work. Several times Trotsky said to Diego directly: “You are a painter. You have your work. Just help them, but do your own work.”

In order to ensure Rivera’s disengagement, Trotsky arranged for the founding congress of the Fourth International, meeting in Paris in September 1938, to pass a resolution, which he helped draft, declaring that the painter would no longer be an active member of the Mexican League and would instead sit on the Pan-American committee. Comrade Rivera was a figure of international stature, too valuable to the movement to be allowed to squander his energies on the minutiae of local politics. So went the reasoning behind the resolution, yet its wording was brutal, making Rivera sound like an errant comrade being punished rather than promoted. Trotsky later lamented this choice of language, although he had endorsed it.

Eastman, in his wide-ranging criticism of Trotsky’s personal deficiencies as a politician, underscored his “gift for alienating people.” Its source, he determined, was “failure of instinctive regard for the pride of others, a lamentable trait in one whose own pride is so touchy.” Eastman, whose own touched pride informed this judgment, might have added Rivera to the list of Trotsky’s casualties, but the case of this enfant terrible defies simple explanation.

One day Diego came to a meeting at the Blue House carrying an essay he had written about art and politics which he proposed to read aloud. Trotsky demurred. His limited Spanish would enable him to comprehend only half the presentation, he explained, asking that the discussion be postponed until he had a chance to read the essay. Taking this as a snub, Diego accused Trotsky of wanting to get rid of him. “The idea of my wanting to be rid of Diego,” Trotsky marveled in a letter to Frida, “is so incredible, so absurd, permit me to say, so mad, that I can only shrug my shoulders helplessly.”

It was at this unpropitious moment that the O’Gorman affair erupted. Juan O’Gorman was a painter and an architect, a friend of
Diego and Frida who had designed their linked homes in San Angel. Commissioned to paint frescoes inside the terminal building of the Mexico City airport, he used the opportunity to editorialize by caricaturing Hitler and Mussolini and their confederates. These images confronted the Mexican government with a political dilemma.

Trotsky and Diego Rivera, 1937.

Bernard Wolfe Slide Collection, Hoover Institution Archives

The previous March, President Cárdenas had nationalized Mexico’s petroleum reserves and expropriated the equipment of the British and American oil companies, a coup that prompted Britain to sever diplomatic relations and to boycott Mexican oil. Germany and Italy replaced Britain as Mexico’s main oil purchasers. O’Gorman’s provocative murals threatened to cause a diplomatic confrontation that might lead to an economic crisis. In response, General Francisco Múgica, the minister of communications, gave the order to have O’Gorman’s inconvenient artwork destroyed.

Rivera loudly condemned this act of “vandalism,” which he imagined to be a reprise of the Battle of Rockefeller Center. He denounced
Múgica, who happened to be Trotsky’s most important ally inside the Cárdenas government, as a “reactionary bootlicker of Hitler and Mussolini.” Somehow he seems to have expected Trotsky to echo this vituperation, but Mexico’s most controversial exile saw the matter differently. The O’Gorman episode had nothing in common with the fate of the Radio City mural, he instructed Rivera. The obliteration of the airport frescoes, however repugnant, was carried out in the interest of national independence. “Mexico is an oppressed country and she cannot impose her oil on others by battleships and guns.” Rivera accused Trotsky of putting his asylum ahead of his principles.

This is where matters stood toward the end of December 1938, when Rivera struck the match that ignited this combustible mix. Intending to compose a letter to Breton in Paris, he asked Van to come to San Angel to serve as his typist. In the course of dictating his letter, Diego began to speak critically about Trotsky’s “methods”—at which point Van stopped typing. Diego assured him that he intended to show the letter to Trotsky and he asked him to continue. “With any other person I would have left,” Van explains. “But the relations between Trotsky and Rivera were exceptional.” He decided to accept the painter’s word that he would talk to Trotsky. “We will have it out,” Diego promised.

Returning to the Blue House, Van placed the letter on his desk, where it was discovered by Natalia. She brought it directly to Trotsky, who exploded in anger. Rivera’s indictment of Trotsky was based on two recent episodes in their dealings with the local Trotskyists. These were trifles, yet Rivera made them the basis of his complaint to Breton that Trotsky had carried out a “friendly and tender” coup d’état against him.

Trotsky could easily demonstrate the falseness of the allegations. Using Van as his emissary, he asked Rivera to revise his letter. Rivera agreed and made an appointment with Van but canceled at the last moment; then he arranged a new time to meet and canceled again. “He was obviously going through an emotional crisis,” Van comments. “The words ‘friendly and tender’ in his letter to Breton show that he was still attached to Trotsky.”

As the new year began, Rivera continued down this destructive path, launching a number of initiatives with small anarchist and trade-
unionist groups hostile to the Trotskyists. Trotsky called these intrigues “purely personal adventures” by which Rivera intended to impress him with his political mastery. Together with Natalia, Trotsky visited him at home in San Angel and passed what he felt was as a “very, very good hour” with the painter; some time later, Trotsky met with him alone. After each conversation he assumed that their differences had been resolved, only to discover otherwise.

On January 7, 1939, Rivera sent a letter of resignation to the secretariat of the Fourth International in New York. Trotsky refused to accept it, reasoning that Rivera was too important to let go without one final attempt at reconciliation. Hoping to enlist Frida in this effort, he wrote to her in Paris, telling his side of the story and pleading that her help was essential. “Now, dear Frida, you know the situation here. I cannot believe it is hopeless.” But Frida saw things differently, boasting to friends in New York that Diego “told
piochitas
(Trotsky) to go to hell in a very serious manner….
Diego is completely right.
”

She may have reconsidered this opinion after her return from France in March. Within a few months she and Diego divorced, only to remarry the following year in San Francisco. There is no hint that Diego’s new willfulness was brought on by a discovery of his wife’s affair with Trotsky. Unable to consult Frida, Trotsky had no way of knowing this, however, and he may have been sweating it out.

Mexico’s presidential politics managed to aggravate the Trotsky-Rivera imbroglio. President Cárdenas, elected in 1934, could not run again and was preparing his succession. He failed to get his party’s approval for a candidate of his choice, however, and was forced to select a conservative politician instead. This caused confusion on the left about which candidate to support in the next election, more than a year away. Hoping to influence the presidential succession, Rivera founded the Party of Workers and Peasants. Taking the controls of this vehicle, he executed what Trotsky called a “series of incredible zigzags” in search of “some political magic.” Trotsky now had to consider that people might think—and his enemies choose to believe—that he was collaborating with Rivera and thus breaking his promise to steer clear of Mexican politics. If only for appearances’ sake, he had to separate himself from the painter.

Trotsky also decided that he could no longer remain under Rivera’s roof. “It is morally and politically impossible for me to accept the hospitality of a person who conducts himself not as a friend, but as a venomous adversary,” he wrote privately on February 14, one year after his guardian had mortgaged his San Angel home in order to reinforce security at the Blue House. Trotsky must truly have believed that the breach was irreparable, because he knew how difficult it would be to find an affordable home to rent that provided comparable security. Nor had the sense of danger abated. The daily
El Universal
had recently reported that about 1,500 former foreign volunteers in Spain—Poles, Germans, Austrians, and others—would be given asylum in Mexico in coming weeks. Trotsky assumed that these refugees had been selected by the GPU.