NOTHING VERY MEMORABLE happened to me in Moscow.
My stay coincided with the closing days of an international drama festival. Some of the delegates were staying at my hotel, and I used to look forward immensely to breakfast, when they could be heard discussing whatever play it was that they had seen the night before. The play almost always had a monosyllabic but arresting title, like Blood, or Mud, or Youth, or Rust. The conversation about it used to go something like this:
An American Lady With Teeth: Well, Professor, wasn’t last night a wonderful experience?
The Professor (a tall, thin, mild Englishman with very short trousers): It was certainly a most – er – unusual piece.
Young Mr. Schultz (in a rasping voice): The lighting was bum.
(Mr. Schultz is a very dapper few from Columbia University. He once had a one-act play performed in Watertown, N.J., and is inclined to be Olympian with the others. He sits at a little table by himself, pretending to read a novel in Russian.)
Miss Possey (a very intellectual girl from Leeds): It wasn’t the lighting so much as the cyclorama. One would have thought Boguslavsky would have got further than the cyclorama.
The Swiss Delegate (a human enigma): Yes? No?
Helen (the Professor’s daughter. Fearfully keen, but a little out of her depth): Which was the cyclorama? The old woman with a wheelbarrow? I didn’t like her. I thought she was just silly. I mean, there didn’t seem to be any …
Young Mr. Schultz (aggressively oracular): The cyclorama is a permanent concave backcloth, on which the light-values …
The American Lady (who disapproves of Young Mr. Schultz): But the emotional calibre of that play! It left me quite limp. Didn’t it you, Miss Possey?
Miss Possey (who is made of sterner stuff): Frankly, no. I found the symbolism overstated.
The Professor: My egg is bad. Oh, dear.
Helen: Never mind, father. We’ll get another one.
The Swiss Delegate (in a burst of self-revelation): The works of Shakey-speare! I love them greatly!
(This bourgeois admission creates an awkward silence. The Swiss Delegate glances round him like a hunted thing, blushing.)
The Professor (coming to his rescue): I confess I was a little puzzled, last night, as to what exactly was the significance of the young sculptor.
The American Lady: But surely that was obvious enough. He stood for – well, for sculpture …
Helen (brightly): And for youth, too, don’t you think?
Miss Possey: I fancy there was rather more to it than that. The young sculptor seemed to me to be the playwright’s answer to the whole question of what should be the place, what should be the function, of the plastic arts of a community absorbed in the process of industrializing itself. The young sculptor’s failure came when he threw those fish out of the window; and his failure surely symbolized the failure of the plastic arts to justify …
Young Mr. Schultz (with gloomy satisfaction): He wasn’t a sculptor. He was a geologist.
(While all are rejoicing at the discomfiture of Miss Possey the Swiss Delegate leans over to the Professor and says, in a stage whisper of the utmost urgency: ‘You have some toilet paper, please? Yes? No?’ The meeting breaks up.)
I myself was not, except vicariously, involved in the drama festival. But I did go to one play. It was at the Kamerny Theatre, which has a reputation for sophistication, and at which, two years ago, I saw a farcical comedy called Sirocco, which owed nothing save its title (and that unintentionally) to Noel Coward. The interior decoration of the theatre recalls the gun-turret of a battleship. This time the play was Negro, a translation-cum-adaptation of Mr. Eugene O’Neill’s All God’s Chillun Got Wings, a production of which in London, rendered memorable by the performance of Mr. Paul Robeson and Miss Flora Robson, I had reviewed a few weeks before. The play is, of course, concerned with the Colour Bar.
I suppose that Soviet Russia has always suffered from persecution-mania. If you defy the world there is some justification for believing that the world’s hand is against you. The consciousness of this inconvenient circumstance was very much alive when I was in Moscow; people were more sensitive to criticism, and much more sensitive to ridicule, than they had been two years ago. (This was particularly so in the case of the Metro-Vickers trial.) One could almost foresee the growth of an officially sponsored feeling of self-pity (this, of course, would not affect the outlook of the majority of the population, who have lived on nothing else for years.) However that may be, it was to this growing sense of unjust oppression that I attributed the important place occupied by the negro in Russia’s cultural sympathies.
Negro had been an established favourite for several months; and I was told that attendance at a performance of Uncle Tom’s Cabin formed part of the curriculum of Leningrad school-children. As a play, All God’s Chillun misses greatness; it is short, violent, staccato, and its execution lacks that measure of artistic detachment which would have enabled the author to do justice to his theme. The Russian production was interesting and effective; it was amusing to note the points on which it diverged, for ideological reasons, from the original.
The most noticeable difference was that in Moscow every scene was preceded by a song: or rather by two songs, sung respectively by a bourgeois (easily recognizable as such from his habit of wearing a tail coat, a straw hat, and a Leander tie) and by a negro. They were popular songs, but so allotted, that, while the bourgeois always sang about the good time he was having, the negro seemed to be concerned entirely with the tremendous amount of work he had on hand. Within the scenes themselves there were few important alterations, though the negro’s struggle to make good in spite of capitalist oppression was given a more specifically class-significance than the American author intended, and there were several interpolated hits at the Salvation Army, which, for some mysterious reason, was very unpopular in Russia at the time. For me, the most striking departure from precedent was that, when the negro married the girl, they descended the church steps to the strains of Annie Laurie.
The chief actor, in Mr. Paul Robeson’s part (there were no negroes in the cast), gave a very creditable performance in a quieter and more naturalistic key than is usually to be met with in the Russian theatre, where ‘straight’ acting too often betrays the fantasticating influence of the ballet. On the technical side Moscow had London beat; expressionistic devices vividly conveyed the jarring rhythm of the New York streets, where most of the action takes place, to heighten the emotional tension. The production was a very skilful and sensitive piece of work.
The audience struck me as being rather more restive than is usual in Moscow, and during one of the graver scenes there appeared to be a small animal, possibly a rat, at large in the dress-circle. But as to that I could not say for certain.
My impressions of Moscow, as here set down, are fragmentary and superficial. They are not intended to be anything else. In the course of my life I have spent eight days in that city. I should do both you and myself a disservice by treating it otherwise than sketchily.
Besides, on my last visit I never really got to grips with Moscow. Between me and the numerous and fascinating problems of modern Russia there loomed the figure of a man I have never seen. For four days he dominated my life. His name was Jimmie Mattern, and he was engaged on a solo flight round the world.
He had landed at Moscow a day or two before I arrived, the wings of his plane under their coating of ice profusely speckled with the autographs of admirers. With the minimum of delay he had flown on eastward.
There is no one more inconsiderate than your spectacular aviator. The American correspondents, whose duty it was to keep the world informed of Mr. Mattern’s progress, all agreed that he was a delightful man, but they wished fervently that it had never occurred to him to fly round the world alone. For them his inconvenient gallantry meant all-night sessions at the telephone, waiting for a call to announce his arrival at Omsk, his departure from Tomsk: it meant a constant va et vient between the hotel and the censor’s office in the Narkomendal: it meant a perpetual angling, through distant and unreliable agents, for a Personal Statement from the young hero, who was a man of few words and seldom more than semi-conscious when he landed.
Living with the journalists in the hotel, I, too, became infected with the spirit of this vicarious chase. Perhaps out of an instinctive sympathy for my haggard and unshaven colleagues, I allowed the flier to corner my curiosities. The teeming millions of Russia were obscured by a single – or more properly a ‘lone’ – Texan, whose whereabouts were unpredictable and whose continued existence was constantly in doubt. My catechisms about the Five Year Plan and the food-supply were indefinitely shelved. I asked no questions about current ideology; no one would have had time to answer them if I had.
I escaped one afternoon from that atmosphere of tense but disillusioned expectancy to visit one of the Moscow broadcasting stations. It is housed in the Telegraph Bureau, a sufficiently impressive building, but the offices and studios have a slatternly and aimless air, in this respect contrasting unfavourably with the B.B.C., whose interior suggests a cross between a liner and a lunatic asylum, both very up-to-date. I was treated with the greatest kindness, a short fat girl translating for me in French while a female official explained the principles on which their programmes are constructed.
They sounded rather dreary programmes, beginning at six in the morning with physical jerks and continuing, all through the day, to try and do you good in one form or another. There is a children’s hour, and an hour for the Red Army. The big men in the Government seldom broadcast. There are no licences, and no check on the number of receiving sets, though listeners are supposed to pay a nominal subscription. They receive thousands of letters, all of which are answered, the best verbally at the microphone … And what did my countrymen think of their broadcasts in English?
The question took me off my guard. I forgot how sensitive these earnest people were. I said I was afraid we didn’t take their English broadcasts very seriously.
I was not forgiven.