Despite the general clamour, there was unmistakable listlessness and discontent. Nehru was in Delhi, Churchill in Morocco, Russell had been blown off course by a tantrum and was now sitting down in Trafalgar Square to delay the Bomb. Signor Levi was departing, though pausing to shake hands with me, excusing himself by his horror of public speaking. The eyes, behind spectacles, though confiding, were also shrewd. ‘Don’t forget,’ he repeated, almost whispering.
Trilling rejoined me for the afternoon session which began with a torrent of accusations from an exiled Polish painter, scorched face, hair like a black biretta, French like a grating file. Soviet generals had invited sixteen Polish leaders to confer with Marshal Zhukov; they complied and were shot. British generals had done likewise in Carinthia, betraying Russian and Serb anti-Bolsheviks to Stalin and Tito. Appeasement, he told us, was muck and sewage, sewage and muck. We should use scythes, we should use bullets, in extremity we should use… But loudening discomfort blocked out the last horror. We were, despite his outcry, appeased by an Italian actress in a dark velvet pyramid-shaped hat topped with blue aigrette. ‘Such sentiments’ – she spread hands – ‘such intolerance…’ her thick brows rose almost into the hat. She spoke of the onus of new circumstance, the dilemmas of crisis, the need to forget history, true or false. Listeners wavered between politely applauding sincerity and shrugging at operatics.
A diminutive Dutch lady had replaced the Brazilian chairman, and, the proceedings on the verge of lapsing into fuggy void, she signalled to a stocky Belgian ex-general, ‘The Hero of Gravelines’, ex-minister, whose savage temper was reputed to have helped lose King Leopold his throne. Unprepossessing as Southern Spite, he lectured us, reinforcing his reputation, rasping, threatening. Before he finished, it was as though the ‘Radetsky March’ had blown through us.
‘Retribution is sanctioned by religion but again and yet again is rejected as disgraceful, uncivilized. But, on behalf of millions, I maintain that, as Nuremburg proved, it can be necessary as bread, medicine, wine. It is tribute to the dead, the shattered and bruised. It restores moral balance, totality…’
He was grimacing as if about to chuckle, his thick moustache a caricaturist’s prize, his hands like a schoolmaster’s, raised against a class incorrigibly stupid. ‘The Crucifixion, bloody and torturing, was revenge, upon Evil, Tradition, Human Nature itself. My message, then? This. That whoever declares himself detached, unprejudiced, impartial, I fear as I fear smallpox.’
I would have liked to have heard Levi’s response. Though the Belgian was forced to his seat by unanimous dissent, Wilfrid shaking his head, Spender protesting, Trilling disapproving, I did not myself feel impartial towards those Russians or Germans, who had eliminated my family.
Though another had been granted the right, Odd Nansen was already speaking, compelled by feelings stoked by the Hero of Gravelines. Very tall, so stiff that, bending, he might crack, very noisily, he was using a clumsy but powerful French, surprising from his mournful, perspiring, spaniel-like face, and as if stubbornly breasting intractable waves. In mounting agitation, he constantly changed stance, anxious to reach all parts of the ballroom, even the tapestries, insignia of the deposed and lost.
‘I, too, am concerned with Retribution. In the camps I saw it. Day after day.’ This received a cheer, for Day After Day was the title of his recently published narrative of captivity. ‘M. Antelme will understand.’ Another cheer, Antelme half-rising. ‘Nor, in my hopes for European changes, do I crave the unreal. M. Cocteau has said, here in Paris, city of Voltaire, of Jaurès, that the purity of revolution lasts a fortnight. But a daytime’s purity is hard to discover anywhere. In the camps, good people volunteered as spies, as executioners, for a few extra months of life.’ His massive hands tightened, relaxed, as if of themselves. ‘Mesdames, Messieurs, all occupied countries supplied recruits for the SS. My Norwegians formed the SS Nordland Division. In the camps, we were privileged, Honorary Teutons. I myself, in respect for my father, was brought special food from the Commandant’s house.’ He quietened, as if confiding to old friends. ‘That Commandant had been a Christian missionary. We called him the Storm Prince. He had a greenish-yellow colour and brown, venomous, stinging eyes under that cap with its death’s head and crossed bones. He hanged seven thousand, anyone under his gaze, gypsies, Jews… anyone. Yet that man, with his tiny eyes, foul laugh, his sharp teeth, sharp as ferrets’, had charm. And we Norwegians, the privileged, thrust others aside to jostle for his favours. We all beat, kicked, betrayed. We stole food from the most wretched of all, the “Mussulmen”, hollowed-out remnants of life, who had totally surrendered. We lifted the arms of the dying, to snatch their bread. All Europeans are kin to the SS captain who told his American captors that he ignored terrible conditions because they only concerned others.’
While he wiped his face with a handkerchief like a tablecloth, a different silence enveloped us, not admiring, not purposeful but timid, actually afraid, though I was uncertain of what. The big, fair man, in the loose, ill-fitting blue suit, with the badly knotted tie and clumsy manner, swallowed, shook himself like a bear, resumed, unnaturally straight, as if barely recovered from surgery.
‘I must finish… finish I must, with this. Lenin instructed us that hatred is the gist of Communism. That, in a sentence, is the case against it and its imitators. So, I repeat… that in the camps, we, who should have been Europeans, refused to unite, we remained nationalists, sectarians, party members, haters. We preferred politics to civilization. None were immune, not even Jews. Now, in a new Europe, we have to share the boat with the young. If it sinks, the Storm Prince will rescue us, one armband red, the other black. So let us not, I appeal, be like the Wise Man of Gothland who sawed off the branch on which he sat.’
He received the loudest acclaim since Churchill, though Malraux’s arms still did not stir. Mr Spender was hot and scarlet with appreciation, agog for the New Europe, and Trilling and I exchanged comradely smiles. Wilfrid might be correct: that conferences, committees, certain schools, libraries, households, a particular walled garden, his Gascon bistro, were dikes against the barbarism that had poisoned assemblies, unions, regiments, erased a European civility like the Revolution before it. Yet, I hesitated, both Stalin and Eisenhower must have thought themselves as dike-kings, preservers.
Succeeding speeches were too professional, too righteous. The microphone was faulty, so that two women, internationally admired, were alternately shrill and inaudible. All seemed in rehearsal, not yet word-perfect, unlikely to start a children’s crusade, ridicule the virtues of suffering – the Pétainist curse – and the boldness of Internal Emigration. A Lyons historian eloquently demonstrated that the war had been won by the superiority of French values. A British woman minister, short, red-haired, argued that the war had been justified by providing opportunities for decolonization and social reform. An Austrian youth, who should surely have worn lederhosen, well nourished, pale hair smeared on honey skin, delphinium-eyed, spoke of his father, killed by Russians in Kiev, his mother, killed by the British in Dresden. However – his pretty, indeed angelic smile assured us – he forgave everyone. ‘Industrial West Germany will lead Europe.’ He awaited applause that did not come. A Czech philosopher apologized for his country’s attitude to minorities and declared that the problem of existential freedom was no problem at all. Trilling showed no relief.
The overall assumption was that violence, malice, greed were unnatural aberrations, divorced from the true nature of man. Studying the rococo ceiling, its glimmering foliage and Olympian calm, I yearned for some Hermes to lean down, grinning, but could only await the lavish banquet, itself much derided by the Left and Poujardist press. I had been alarmed by a proposal from a minority, that an all-night vigil on behalf of the dead should be substituted. Wilfrid, though seldom reliable in such matters, supported the hungry majority.