GORKI: Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, aged fifty-two, walks around the house at night like a ghost. He cannot sleep. He throws pebbles at a nightingale singing too loudly. Later, he falls asleep, only to be awoken feeling stranger than usual. His head swims. He grabs a nearby cupboard to steady himself. All right, all right. Nothing serious. Nothing serious! He gasps. He throws up. He falls. Doctors are called. Nadya is there. Vladimir is put back in bed. For a time, he cannot move one side of his body. Thoughts start forming in his mind, and then disappear as if into a heavy mountain fog. He tries to follow them into the mists, but then they are gone. Words that used to flow from him as if there was no gap between thought and expression at all now seem like strange-shaped objects in his mouth, which he cannot quite get his lips to fit around or his tongue to express. A neurologist is fetched from Moscow.
Speech returns, but it is slower, more forced. His language is impaired. (‘Years, years’, he says at one point, as if asking how long this will last.) He finds simple mathematical calculations difficult. He spends three hours trying to work out, by a painful process of arithmetic, the answer to the doctors’ question of what’s seven multiplied by twelve. For several weeks he cannot write properly. The doctors are stumped. A spinal tap reveals no particular disease. Vladimir’s symptoms seem too broad for a single, agreed diagnosis. Epilepsy, perhaps? Or–this can be only whispered, and is soon rejected as a hypothesis–syphilis contracted in Paris many years ago? His eyes are inspected by a top ophthalmologist, to look for any signs of disease there. Perhaps there are several things going wrong at once. Neurologists suggest neurasthenia. Others diagnose a hardening of the arteries, believing Lenin may have suffered a stroke. Maria and Nadya are there at Gorki to look after him. So is Vladimir’s brother Dmitri, a doctor.
Leon has just returned from a fishing trip, and is himself not well. He does not attend his old rival’s bedside. Comrade Stalin is called instead. Lenin has a very particular job in mind for him: to procure cyanide so that the impatient revolutionary can kill himself in the proper fashion should the paralysis get worse. Vladimir has been reading up on his symptoms. There is something impressively unsentimental about suicide, he decides. Stalin is sent back in to persuade the dictator that he will make a full recovery. ‘You’re being sly’, Vladimir tells the Georgian bank-robber. ‘When did you ever know me to be sly?’ Stalin responds.
Gorki buzzes with doctors, sworn to secrecy about the dictator’s true condition. A famous specialist is flown in from Berlin. The public are told Lenin has a stomach complaint and will recover soon. He is quite at home at Gorki now, with his Rolls-Royce in the garage (with snow tracks for bad weather), lots of books, his personal chef and a film projector which he can use to watch newsreels of Henry Ford’s assembly lines churning out new automobiles.
EICHHOLZ-IN-MURNAU, BAVARIA: A large house in the foothills of the Alps. Adolf is taking tea with the family of one of his party’s major supporters: an engineer, co-author of the Nazi party’s twenty-five-point programme of 1920 and one of Hitler’s teachers from his army course in 1919. (He lectured Adolf on the pernicious nature of debt interest.)
An unexpected guest arrives, another one of Adolf’s teachers, a historian who spotted his speaking talent when he found him haranguing the other students after class. The engineer hisses in the historian’s ear as he crosses the threshold. ‘Don’t quote anything in Latin which he doesn’t understand’, he whispers. ‘He’ll never forgive you’.
The former field-runner of the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment has acquired a more dictatorial tone of voice since he last saw him, the historian notes. His voice has become more of a growl. Adolf prefers not to talk about politics over tea. Instead, he gives his forthright opinions on alcohol and nicotine (both of which he detests) before going to play with the children in the garden, rattling a sweet tin to get their attention and chuckling along like a merry infant.
The historian’s son gives his opinion on the strange man. ‘Fanatical’, he says, ‘but trivial’.
ATLANTA, GEORGIA: Marcus Garvey, self-proclaimed Provisional President of Africa, arrives in the capital of the South for a business meeting with someone he thinks could be useful to the UNIA: Edward Young Clarke, the head of the Ku Klux Klan.
The two men speak for hours. The KKK leader explains he has nothing against blacks, he just wants America to be reserved for whites. Garvey wants black Americans to move to Africa; so do the KKK. On this rather shaky ground, an alliance of sorts is built. Garvey invites Clarke to come to New York to the UNIA convention in the summer.
Garvey writes a public letter defending his action. To speak to the KKK is plain common sense: it is to negotiate with those who really run the country. ‘In spirit and in truth America shall be a white man’s country’, he contends, however many anti-lynching bills are passed.
America offers comfort but Africa offers redemption. ‘Will you forget just for a while the beautiful lights of Broadway, the comforts afforded by a 1920 or 1921 model Sedan, and the temptation of a well-furnished parlor with Persian rugs’, Garvey asks, ‘and go to Africa, even now, and help to fell trees, help to clear the land and build up the city, build up the nation and extend the bounds of the empire?’
The messianic tone is back. Men like Du Bois are ‘living in the air’, Garvey writes, ‘as far from understanding the Negro problem of America and the western world as a monkey is in understanding how far Mars is from Jupiter’.
BERLIN: The anti-relativist physicist Ernst Gehrcke adds a new article to his anti-Einstein scrapbook: a review of the so-called Einstein Film, a two-hour educational movie about relativity taking Germany by storm.
More propaganda, as far as Gehrcke is concerned, full of clever trick shots and Dada-style splicing. (Eighty thousand pictures are taken in the course of making the film, and then cleverly cut in with the movie to create all kinds of illusions making the impossible appear real.) No better than advertising, really. The movie is shown at trade fairs, in research institutes, and wherever there is an audience willing to let themselves get thoroughly confused. ‘The Film of Physical Nihilism’, runs the headline of one review. German nationalists hate it.
MILAN–PARIS: Two journalists meet. Both are war veterans. One is the bull-headed editor of a national Italian newspaper, not yet quite forty years old. The other is an American newspaperman who has just hiked over the Alps with his wife (and a friend) on a kind of second honeymoon. Both believe in their destiny as great men. Both believe in the importance of having experienced war. Both love Italy, or at least their idea of Italy. Both know the power of words.
Mussolini sits behind a grand desk, lazily fondling the ears of a wolfhound puppy, and assessing the absurdly healthy-looking American who has come to pay him a visit. Then he languidly opens his big mouth and begins to talk very slowly to make sure his Italian is understood. ‘We are not out to oppose any Italian government’, Benito explains, with a hint of menace, ‘but we have force enough to overthrow any government that might try to oppose or destroy us.’ It is only a few weeks since several thousand blackshirts marched into Bologna and briefly occupied the city to force Rome to remove the region’s top civil servant, considered unfriendly to the Fascists. ‘The whole business’, writes Hemingway, ‘has the quiet and peaceful look of a three-year-old playing with a live Mills bomb.’
Later, with Hadley accompanying him, Ernest returns to the front line of 1918, to the place where he was wounded, the place that made him a hero for a while. Nothing is as he remembers it. The signs still say Fossalta, but to Hemingway the town which he passed through fifty times or more in his few months at the front line is now unrecognisable: ‘All the shattered tragic dignity of the wrecked town was gone.’ Instead of ruins, which might have conveyed to his wife the drama and pathos of what had happened nearby, they find ‘a new, smug, hideous collection of plaster houses’. Even the people are new: there are migrants from Naples and Sicily living here now. ‘I was here during the war’, he tells a young woman, by way of explanation for the unlikely presence of a couple of American tourists. ‘So were many others’, she replies flatly.
Crestfallen, Ernest returns to Paris. ‘Chasing yesterdays is a bum show’, he advises the readers of Toronto’s finest newspaper, ‘and if you have to prove it, go back to your old front’. Gertrude Stein has a name for Hemingway and his type, the men who experienced the intensity of war and now feel that nothing else quite matches it, who carry around with them a secret anger. It is a phrase she picked up from the owner of a Parisian garage where her Ford was being fixed. ‘That’s what you are, that’s what you all are,’ she tells Ernest, ‘you’re all a lost generation’.
GORKI: A small room, simply furnished: a bed, a desk, a chair, a Persian rug on the floor. Two tall trees shade the room. A mosquito net prevents the flies from getting in. For two weeks, the patient hardly moves. He tries to read but, at first, finds that all the letters flow together. Mostly he rests. Newspapers are strictly banned. There are no visitors from the Kremlin to bother him–these too are banned. Still, Vladimir’s mind cannot be kept completely free of political concerns. He asks about the ongoing show trial–tickets are only issued to reliable Communist Party members–of his political enemies, the Socialist Revolutionaries, just a month after the trial of the Moscow clergy ended. He asks about the harvest. Is there a threat from the locusts? He is made to drink carrot juice for his health.
In June the patient is moved back into the big house at the estate on a stretcher. He sits on the veranda in the sun. After a few days more he starts to feel mobile again, wandering from one balcony to another around the house. This will improve his digestion, he says. Vladimir asks that chairs be placed at regular intervals so that he can make it to one if he feels another spasm coming on (he calls these ‘snakes’). He makes a joke of it. Question: ‘When will the Commissar for such-and-such a department be assured of not falling?’ Answer: ‘When he is sitting in an armchair’. He starts reading a book about the artificial cultivation of mushrooms and asks why they are not doing more of it at Gorki.
Vladimir’s sister Maria bans the playing of the piano so as not to jangle her sick brother’s nerves.
MUNICH–BERLIN–LEIPZIG–KIEL: In late June, Adolf begins his deferred jail sentence for breaking up a Bavarian political meeting last year.
The same day in Berlin men in leather coats shoot up the car of Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau as he drives to work. A grenade finishes the job. The murderers are members of the Organisation Consul terrorist cell which killed Erzberger last year, who dislike Rathenau’s reparations policy and believe their prey to be one of the latter-day Elders of Zion. They escape on foot. Two are eventually tracked down to a medieval fortress outside Leipzig, where they are killed in a police siege. The driver of the getaway car is turned in by a family member and sent for trial.
Germany reels. Is there any end to the upheavals the country must go through? The Rhineland is occupied by foreign powers, the question of reparations hangs over the country’s future, stability is threatened from Communists and putschists of all stripes. There are tumultuous scenes in the Reichstag. Conservatives and nationalists are held responsible for Rathenau’s murder by having so vehemently condemned his policy on reparations. That very evening, the Chancellor invokes a special provision of the German constitution–Article 48–to push through emergency security measures. ‘Rising terror and nihilism, frequently cloaked in the mantle of national sentiment, must no longer be looked upon with indulgence’, he declares. ‘We cannot go on as we did before.’
Rathenau’s murder has wide implications. There is concern in Moscow that it may affect relations with Russia. Vladimir manages to hear of the murder despite the ban on newspapers at Gorki. (‘Well, did Rathenau slip?’ he slyly asks one of his interlocutors, unwilling to be drawn into a conversation about Germany.) After a period of relative stability, the German mark crashes against the American dollar. Rathenau’s picture appears on the front page of the New York Times above reports of a royalist coup in the works. In Germany, university lectures are cancelled. There is one exception. In Heidelberg, the anti-relativist and anti-Semite Philipp Lenard decides to carry on as before in protest at the overreaction to a traitor’s death. He is nearly thrown into the Neckar river as a result.
At Rathenau’s funeral, held in the Reichstag, his mother sits on a red brocade throne in what used to be the Hohenzollern royal box. After a short oration, the coffin is carried out past a statue of Kaiser Wilhelm–it is said some republicans wanted it covered in black cloth during the ceremony–and then raced by motorised hearse to the cemetery to prevent a riot breaking out around the German parliament. Albert Einstein is prominent amongst the mourners. Sympathy marches are organised in cities across Germany.
Rumours circulate of further assassination lists. The name Einstein is said to be near the top. After the funeral, Albert goes to see a play by Ernst Toller, and laments how far Germany has fallen: ‘O, people of poets and thinkers, what has become of you!’ He cancels public-speaking engagements, including at a prominent gathering of German scientists in Leipzig. Right-wing newspapers accuse him of running away, either because he is worried about being unmasked as a fraud or simply to create yet more media attention. ‘The Fugitive Relativity’, runs one headline. Einstein blames it all on the English and their damned eclipse expedition in 1919 for having made him so famous in the first place.
‘Where will this dangerous mental derangement lead us?’ he asks a friend.
DUBLIN–LONDON: An Irish constitution–approved in London–is published in Ireland, and an election held the same day. The treaty side wins.
But before the final tally is announced, news comes in from London which may change everything. An Irish-born retired field marshal in the British army–much hated by the IRA as a security adviser to Belfast–is assassinated on the steps of his London home on his return from unveiling a memorial to the dead of the Great War. The killers wave down a taxi to try to escape the scene. A shoot-out follows in the streets of Belgravia, near where Michael Collins stayed while negotiating the treaty last year. Both men give false names when arrested, though their true identities are soon uncovered. Both served in the British army in the war. One lost a leg below the knee. In France, they fought for freedom, they explain. Yet that same freedom has not been given to Ireland.
‘I do not approve, but I must not pretend to misunderstand’, declares Éamon de Valera. The Irish Times mourns the loss of a great Irishman in Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson. ‘Our whole country ought to be in mourning’, write its editors. Such an act can only further estrange north and south. ‘It may provoke reprisals and counter-reprisals, until not only Belfast, but the whole country, runs with bloodshed.’
There is shock and panic in the British capital. Some believe that Collins, through weakness or intent, must bear the blame. But suspicion falls most heavily on the rebels in Dublin’s Four Courts–the republicans who reject the treaty and want no Free State.
London demands immediate action be taken by the Irish government to dislodge the rebels, warning it will send in its own troops to do the job if not.
NEW YORK: Shuffle Along is coming to the end of its run in New York, after five hundred performances, and everyone wants a piece of its success. The fashion for black revues–or ‘Negro Revues’ as the newspapers call them–is spreading. In June, Strut, Miss Lizzie opens at the Times Square Theatre, a two-act musical entertainment (written by two white composers) that ‘glorifies the creole beauty’.
In July, Josephine Baker turns sixteen–which makes it legal for the twice-married chorus girl to work in the state of New York–and Shuffle Along goes on a nationwide tour, with Josephine as one of the show’s chief attractions, even if most people are more likely to remember her funny-girl antics than her name.
DUBLIN: Waving her credentials from an American newspaper, the intrepid Clare Sheridan talks her way into the Four Courts. Inside, she notes a Rolls-Royce armoured car on which someone has painted the words ‘The Mutineer’. The rebels are young. They have no proper uniforms. They do not stand a chance.
She interviews their leader. He arranges bullets on the table in front of him while he replies to her questions, clearly uncertain whether he should be talking to her at all. The republic is the only true cause, he says. The oath to the British Crown cannot be stomached. ‘Irishmen will walk into English jails with their heads high,’ he declares, ‘but they never can hold their heads high as subjects of a British colony.’ He calls Michael Collins an opportunist and a bully.
Guns open fire on the Four Courts the next morning, early Wednesday. It is not a very determined attack. Collins hopes the bombardment will persuade the anti-treaty IRA men to leave; he does not want to kill them all. Chunks of stone masonry crash down into the streets. Gunshots echo through Dublin. It is like 1916 again, but it is Irish fighting Irish now. Free State artillery pieces (borrowed from the British army) fire shells filled with shrapnel. Occasionally, they overshoot their target and the shells explode further afield. The British encourage the Irish to hurry up. Churchill offers British aeroplanes–painted in the colours of the Free State–to finish the job.
By Friday, the Four Courts are empty. The archive holding Ireland’s public records going back centuries is lost to fire. Pockets of resistance remain in Dublin’s central quarter. Several hotels are occupied. O’Connell Street becomes a battleground. De Valera joins the rebels, taking his oath of service just as he did six years ago. Provisional government soldiers slowly close the net. By the time the fighting stops, several dozen Irish have been killed–civilians, too–and civil war is beyond recall. Éamon de Valera–professor, prisoner, President and now fugitive again–escapes in a Red Cross ambulance.
DOORN: The Kaiser’s secret female correspondent comes to stay at Huis Doorn. Within a matter of days, Princess Hermine and Wilhelm are engaged.
One of the Kaiser’s sons warns his father that his remaining supporters in Germany will not look kindly upon remarriage so soon and suggests he think again before things are made public. (In response, Wilhelm calls him a good-for-nothing bum.) The Kaiser’s daughter comes to Doorn to discuss what she calls ‘The Subject’. She is convinced that her father has deluded himself and that Hermine will leave him as soon as she gets bored–which, she judges, won’t be long.
The Kaiser will not be put off. For once, he tells himself, he is not going to be told what to do. ‘I’ve given everything to the German people: my crown, my freedom, and yes, my wife’, Wilhelm complains to his adjutant. ‘My sacrifices stop with matters of the heart.’ A wedding in November is planned. Affairs will be kept under wraps till then.
ISTANBUL: In the Ottoman capital, there is anxiety amongst the Sultan’s supporters about his future, and squabbles amongst European diplomats over what to do should Mustafa Kemal and the nationalists lunge for Istanbul itself.
The French and Italians want a deal. Only the British seem willing to resist the rising star, their presence strengthened by the arrival of HMS King George V, the battleship on which Kaiser Wilhelm once hoisted the flag in celebration of Anglo-German friendship before the war.
Fearing they are about to be deserted, the Greeks threaten their British allies that they will occupy Istanbul themselves if necessary. The British Ambassador’s wife is outraged: ‘The cheek of them!’
Diplomats scurry around to give another chance to negotiation between Kemal and the Greeks. Venice is suggested as the venue for a peace conference, or perhaps the Italian-held island of Rhodes. It could even be held aboard a British naval ship. Time is short. The Turks will not wait for ever.
ACROSS SOUTHERN IRELAND: The fight moves out of Dublin and into the countryside. Michael Collins makes himself commander-in-chief of the Free State forces. He dons an army uniform and races around the country inspecting the troops and barking orders as he tries to end the conflict before it gets any worse. There can be no winners in such a war. The best end is a quick one.
‘Of all things, it has come to this’, he writes to an old friend, with whom he once jousted for the heart of Kitty, and who has now sided with the republicans against the government. ‘You are walking under false colours’, he continues, begging the recipient to change his mind.
The people are supporting the government. In much of the south, the republicans melt away. In Cork, they go out in an orgy of destruction and burning.
MOSCOW: For the inhabitants of the Kremlin, there is a strange absence over the summer months.
In place of the usual avalanche of telephone calls and memorandums and letters there is silence from the office of Vladimir Lenin. It is unprecedented. For some, it is not entirely unwelcome. But the absence of the leader slowly turns into a scramble for power. Émigré papers speculate as to the true state of the dictator’s health. Some write of his ‘retirement’. A deputy has taken over temporary duties of chairing the Sovnarkom, the cabinet. The Politburo is meeting without Lenin for the first time in years.
It is natural to have ideas about where this all might lead. The scheming has already begun. A bloc is formed that tries to sideline Trotsky. Stalin is its chief organiser, but not yet its leader.
OCCUPIED RHINELAND, GERMANY: Clare Sheridan discovers it is bloody hard to get a square meal in the Rhineland these days.
In the town of Aachen, under occupation by Belgian forces since 1918, she is told that there is no milk to be had. (The delivery of cows to France as war reparations-in-kind is blamed.) In Cologne, it is the British who are in charge, but the café along the way still has nothing to offer in the way of proper sustenance. In Koblenz, the Americans rule the roost, and here it is alcohol that is unobtainable. (Local children, Clare notes, have picked up the American word ‘swank’, which well describes the shiny new US Army uniforms compared to those of the clapped-out British.) In Wiesbaden, where Rhineland separatists tried to proclaim their own independent state in 1919–with the rumoured backing of Paris–it is French soldiers who are in control. A bevy of tourists have followed in their wake, taking advantage of the fall in the value of the German mark.
To a person carrying foreign currency Germany is cheap–if you can find what you want, of course. Clare buys a pair of fine leather gloves for the princely sum of half a dollar. Germans with any money spend it as soon as they can. Who knows what it might be worth tomorrow?
FRINTON-ON-SEA, ESSEX, ENGLAND: August is bittersweet for Clementine.
One year since little Marigold Churchill fell ill and died, and only a few months until her and Winston’s next child is due to be born. Clementine is still just about able to chase her elder children around the garden of the house they have rented for the summer holidays. The sea is not far away. The children compete in a tennis tournament at the local club. Winston is away in France–he tries to resist the casino at Biarritz and fails–but will be back before the end of the month, no doubt with plans for new sandcastles, as is his general inclination when on the beach.
‘I feel quite excited about the arrival of a new kitten’, Clementine writes to her husband: ‘darling, I hope it will be like you.’ Winston, in between corresponding with Michael Collins and Chaim Weizmann, recalls the awful sadness of the year before: ‘A gaping wound whenever one touches it and removes the bandages and plasters of daily life.’
He, too, looks forward to ‘a new darling kitten to cherish’.
GORKI: When the patient is feeling a little better, the doctors allow him into the garden to examine the flowers. He is deeply offended when one of the medical staff looking after him suggests he might be up to a game of draughts–but only with bad players. ‘They think I’m a fool’, he complains.
Dmitri brings his son to see Uncle Vladimir. Inessa Armand’s children are also allowed to visit Gorki. Vladimir’s sister Maria does not approve; but Nadya, his wife, does. There is a row, bringing on one of Lenin’s headaches again. A dog is acquired, to whom Vladimir develops a strong attachment. The impatient revolutionary is given various tasks to improve his motor skills. He tries basket weaving, but finds it irritating and gives up after one basket. He scrawls a letter to Stalin–his writing is so bad that Maria has to countersign–asking him please to rid him of the two German doctors who have been assigned to him: ‘extreme concern and caution can drive a person out of his mind’. At one point, Vladimir comes up with the idea that the Gorki estate tennis court should be used instead to breed rabbits.
There are pauses, obstacles, reverses–but as the weeks go by, the dictator’s health continues to improve. He is sleeping better. His dreams are less troubled. ‘You can congratulate me on my recovery’, Vladimir writes in his own hand to his secretary in July: ‘The proof is my handwriting, which is beginning to look human again.’ He asks her to start preparing books for him, firstly of science, then fiction and lastly politics (he is not allowed that kind of book just yet). A few days later he is able to celebrate the next breakthrough. ‘I have been permitted to read the papers!’ he tells Stalin. ‘Old papers from today, and new ones from Sunday.’
After an angry outburst against the ban on political visitors–it is the lack of politics which makes him ill, he tries to explain–the doctors allow Lenin to meet with fellow members of the Politburo. Leon Trotsky is invited, but does not come. Stalin travels down to Gorki. A bottle of wine is prepared to slake the Georgian’s thirst.
One day, Lenin sends a note to Stalin enquiring about progress with the expulsion of intellectuals he proposed before he fell ill. Vladimir picks on the staff of some magazines he has decided he does not like. ‘All of them must be chucked out of Russia’, he writes. ‘No explanation of motives–leave, gentlemen!’ Lenin’s note is immediately passed on to the GPU. At last Vladimir will be able to rid Russia of those annoying people who disapprove of him, the baying crowds he dreamed of earlier in the year, hoping for Lenin the mountain climber to fall from the snowy peaks to his death in the ravines below. But he won’t. Oh no.
SEEFELD, AUSTRIA: A momentous decision. Members of the inner circle of psychoanalysis–the Committee–decide to address each other using first names and the informal German Du. Sigmund Freud will continue to refer to the Committee using surnames and the formal Sie.
On holiday in Berchtesgaden he has sad news from Vienna to report to his family–the suicide of his niece Mausi, Anna’s prospective tennis partner, by poisoning.
EASTERN TURKESTAN: Enver Pasha, the last of the Ottoman Empire’s three wartime leaders to remain alive, is run to ground in Turkestan. His intrigues have caught up with him. His plans for a Muslim rebellion against the British, against the Russians, against the world, have come to this: a small band of followers, tracked down to a hillside lair. He dies with a Koran in his hand.
LAKE GARDA: What a transformation! The humble villa which Gabriele D’Annunzio got his hands on in 1918 is now being turned into a dream of Italian glory in plaster, paint and gold. Gabriele acquires colonnades, tombs and statues to fill out the garden. He creates a throne for himself and surrounds it with seventeen columns to signify the greatest Italian victories of the Great War (and a broken half-column to represent Caporetto). He calls his new palace the Vittoriale degli Italiani–the Shrine of Italian Victories.
The poet has zigged and zagged a bit since his Adriatic adventure. He has written some successful books, and then spent the proceeds as quickly as he can. His talent for extravagance is undimmed. He refuses the opportunity to stand for election–parliament would not suit him–but, somewhat quixotically, accepts a role as leader of the Federation of the Worker of the Sea, a union often in competition with Fascist syndicates in Italy’s main ports. Some whisper that drugs have got the better of him (cocaine, it is said). He is well known as something of a sex fiend, a condition he links to his creative passion. For most, however, Gabriele D’Annunzio is still the hero of Fiume. He declines to visit the town, despite the best efforts of his old legionnaires, who tell him he could take it over again whenever he wants.
As always, his attitude towards Mussolini is unclear. Should Benito consider him a risk? No doubt if Gabriele put his mind to it, he could be. But does he want the responsibility? His haranguing days appear to be over, at least in public. He prefers to communicate with his adoring fans in writing. Then, in Milan of all places, D’Annunzio is flattered into saying a few words in public–hardly a speech, and no one can quite understand what he is saying anyway. But the content hardly matters, for Gabriele is surrounded by a group of blackshirts while he talks. Though he does not even use the word, Il Popolo d’Italia proclaims this as D’Annunzio’s formal coming out as a Fascist. This is NOT what he intended, he complains.
A few days later the poet falls out of the window of his house and bangs his head. Was he pushed or did he jump?
GORKI: By the time the summer heat reaches its peak in August, ten million Russians are being fed every day by the American Relief Administration. There are almost no reports of deaths from starvation now. The situation is improving.
In Gorki, Vladimir has the worst seizure he has had for a long time. All he can say is ‘yes, yes’, then ‘no, no’, and finally ‘oh hell’. The right side of his body twitches. Doctors observe a reflex identified by Babinski–André Breton’s teacher at La Salpêtrière all those years ago–and generally associated with a disease of the spinal cord or brain. It takes nearly two hours for him to recover.
Another morning, at breakfast, he feels so good that he could eat for a hundred people. Stalin comes to visit again, wearing an impressive white jacket. Maria experiments with taking photographs of her brother with the Georgian bank-robber in his weekend finest.
BERLIN–MUNICH: The public order measures introduced by emergency decree after the assassination of Walther Rathenau are now passed permanently into law.
In Munich, Adolf Hitler, newly released from his one-month prison sentence, vehemently criticises the legislation. He claims its purpose is not to stabilise Germany but simply to shut down healthy criticism, free debate and alternative points of view to that of the so-called moderate centre. It is a flat-out lie, he declares, to say that the republic is somehow under threat.
Meanwhile, in the shadows, Adolf works on an idea for a putsch to take control of the Bavarian government, with the expectation that success in Munich would spark nationalist uprisings elsewhere in Germany. He tries to make peace with the most important nationally minded organisation in Bavaria, whose leader claims to be able to mobilise forces across the whole of Germany through allies from Stuttgart to Stettin.
The excitement comes to nothing. There is no coup. Hitler feels let down by his supposed allies. He swears he will not let it happen again.
NEW YORK: Based on all its legal and financial travails of the last few months, William Du Bois publishes an in-depth exposé of the Black Star Line, every bit as detailed as the New York World’s dissection of the Ku Klux Klan last year, and every bit as damning.
There are excerpts from sworn testimony showing the cack-handed management of the shipping line. There are stories of bills unpaid and monies stolen. There are tales of cargoes wasted and losses hidden. There is no need for much commentary. The testimonies and the figures speak for themselves. The exposé covers five searing pages in The Crisis–in between an account of the difficulty Shuffle Along is having in finding a new permanent home (white entertainment monopolies are blamed), a report on the latest push for the anti-lynching law, and a review of a French novel by a black author from the Gabon who has just won the Prix Goncourt.
Up the road, Garvey presides over the latest convention of the UNIA. A full-blown cult of personality has grown up around its leader by now. Recordings of his speeches are available for purchase; large portraits of him grace the walls.
BÉAL NA BLÁTH, CO. CORK, IRELAND: Late August. A tour around an Irish constituency by its elected representative. The day plays out hazily: drinks in various country pubs, a visit to a former schoolteacher, an encounter with an old friend of his mother’s, a meeting with his brother.
Michael Collins’s advisers are against such a journey at a time like this. But he insists: ‘Ah, whatever happens, my own fellow countrymen won’t kill me’. Éamon de Valera is said to be in that part of the island too, holed up in a hut somewhere. Perhaps the two will meet. It is evening before Collins’s convoy starts back to Cork, down a quiet valley, the light falling softly through a fine drizzle.
A cart blocks the road. Collins’s car slows down. A small IRA ambush party, on the point of dispersing after a long day’s wait, open fire. Another gunfight to add to hundreds before it these past few years. An hour of shooting. A bullet enters Michael Collins’s skull. Ebbing life, his body is carried around the Cork countryside in desperate search of a priest. Collins’s men get lost in the dark. They find blown-up bridges and rain-sodden fields barring their way.
The world’s newspapers report the death of a hero, a paragon of virtue, the humble Irish peacemaker. The ambush is magnified out of its true dimensions, and raised from a gunfight into a full-scale battle, with two hundred IRA fighters imagined as the slayers of this single man, his detachment outnumbered ten to one, his last generous words reported as ‘forgive them’.
How can Ireland ever recover from such a blow? Republican prisoners in Irish jails sink to their knees to recite the Rosary for their fallen enemy’s soul. Churchill sends condolences. On the day of his funeral procession in Dublin, an Irish flag is draped over Collins’s coffin, loaded on a gun carriage led by six black horses, priests and soldiers marching behind. A single flower, a white lily, rests upon it, too: sent by Kitty, Collins’s fiancée. No innocence left in Ireland’s war.
De Valera is still at large.
DUMLUPINAR, TURKEY: To divert the Greeks from the threat of an imminent attack, a false story is circulated that a tea party is to be held at Mustafa Kemal’s house in Ankara on a particular day in late August 1922. The Turkish attack comes the following morning at dawn. The Greeks fall back in disarray. At last Kemal is able to issue the order for their wholesale expulsion: ‘Armies! The Mediterranean is your immediate objective. Forward!’
Two hundred miles away, in Smyrna, word of the Turkish advance is met with surprise. But not yet with panic.
GORKI: Almost back to normal. One day, Vladimir is able to ride a horse for a mile or so. Nadya and Vladimir are taken out to hunt for mushrooms in a nearby forest. Vladimir jokes about an article by an English journalist referring to Nadya as the ‘First Lady’ of the Soviet republic. She is the ‘First Ragdoll’, he declares, a jovial comment on the poorness of her clothing.
Towards the end of the summer, Vladimir allows himself to entertain a truly delightful thought: a return to work in the autumn. He presses his case on his doctors. They see they have no choice. To prevent Vladimir Lenin from working would kill him just as surely as allowing him to work as hard as before.
Vladimir has plans for a reshuffle of his government. Perhaps things can be smoothed out between him and Trotsky. Leon is offered a position as one of his formal deputies (one of several). The principled non-tipper turned war supremo categorically refuses Lenin’s offer as humiliating. He has his heart set on a grander job managing the planned economy. Anyway, he is about to go away on a month-long holiday.
BLACK FOREST, GERMANY–NEW YORK: On the search for the best fishing this side of Horton Bay, Michigan, the Hemingways head to southern Germany, where their dollars go even further than in Paris. Indeed, with the rate of German inflation ticking as it is, a dollar seems to go a little further every day. For the first time in his life, Hemingway decides to grow a moustache. Back in America, a book entitled Tales of the Jazz Age is published.
SMYRNA: Broken Greek troops and hungry refugees are pouring into Smyrna. The quayside heaves with soldiers. This is not a retreat, it is a rout. It is not a setback, it is a shocking defeat. The Greek commander himself has been taken prisoner. The harbour is crowded with boats trying to make good their escape. Smyrna is left without police, without protection.
For a few days, the mood of Smyrna’s foreign and Christian communities hovers between despair and resignation. There is nothing to do now but wait. And what is there really to fear? Once the Ottomans ruled Smyrna, and it flourished. Now a different group of Turks will be in charge. Foreign ships lie at anchor, stern, iron-clad representatives of the Great Powers. Surely they will not allow the city to be punished. Kemal is not cut from the same cloth as Enver, Talaat and Djemal, and anyhow, Smyrna is not some remote and dusty Anatolian village. It is a key destination on Mediterranean shipping routes, famed for its Levantine cosmopolitanism, known to all the world. Besides the Europeans and Americans who live here, many local Armenians and Greeks hold foreign passports.
On Saturday, with no police to stop it, the looting starts. Greek military warehouses are emptied out. Rival groups of Greek soldiers shoot at each other in the streets as the political tensions between them break into the open. Sensible civilians stay indoors. Turkish cavalry enter Smyrna that afternoon and, despite a few gunshots aimed at them, process along the quayside in perfect discipline. Here is admirable evidence that the optimists were right: rule by the Turkish nationalists will be no better or worse than life under the Ottomans. The Turks assure the public that they will maintain order in the city. They will not allow the mob, from whatever community, to take over. But by evening the disturbances have already returned. Broken glass, gunshots, the occasional explosion: the sound of ancient scores being settled and opportunities for personal enrichment taken.
An atmosphere of suppressed panic takes over the Christian parts of the city. There is a rush for places of supposed safety. Armenians shelter behind the walls of their church compound. Europeans take cover in foreign hospitals. Native-born Americans head to the protection of the consulate, while naturalised Americans are gathered in the Smyrna Theatre. Anyone not formally entitled to be there is thrown out.