Double Duty

Lorna Scott Fox

Victor Serge: The Course Is Set on Hope by Susan Weissman
Verso, 364 pp, £22.00, September 2001, ISBN 1 85984 987 3

In The Long Dusk, Victor Serge’s novel about the fall of France, his alter ego Dr Ardatov escapes death just as the author did, on a boat out of Marseille in 1941. One of Ardatov’s companions, a much younger woman, Hilda, joins him on deck. She says something intense, he counters with something pompous. With a familiar irritation, she thinks: ‘I wish you were thirty years younger. I wish you were as you are and also a brute . . . I wish to understand so much less.’ Régis Debray echoes her annoyance when he writes, in a 1985 introduction to Serge’s notebooks or Carnets: ‘I’d have wished, I won’t say for more heart and less intelligence, but for him to have been a little less the conscience and a little more the witness of his time, as of himself.’

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Vol. 25 No. 10 · 22 May 2003 » Lorna Scott Fox » Double Duty (print version)
Pages 25-27 | 3927 words

Letters

From Ian Birchall

Lorna Scott Fox (LRB, 22 May) is dismissive of Victor Serge's 1923 writings on Germany, describing them as 'ultra-left'. Since Serge was writing for the Comintern press his analysis reflected the official line of the German Communist Party; only after revolutionary hopes collapsed did he permit himself some critical reflections in Clarté. The great merit of his writings was that they showed the impact of hyperinflation and political disintegration on everyday life in Germany, as captured in his portrait of the elderly intellectual coming back from the suburbs bent under the weight of sacks of potatoes, who as a result writes no more.

Scott Fox is wrong, too, to claim that in his last years 'he had written off the working class for the time being.' In late 1946, only a few months before he died, Serge wrote to the French socialist René Lefeuvre: 'We shall get nowhere if we seem more preoccupied with criticising Stalinism than with defending the working class. The reactionary danger is still there, and in practice we shall often have to act alongside the Communists.' Serge clearly still saw himself as an active member of the anti-Stalinist Left.

Ian Birchall
London N9

From Lorna Scott Fox

I don't know why Ian Birchall (Letters, 5 June) thinks I was being 'dismissive' in calling Victor Serge's muffled deviations from the Comintern line on Germany 'ultra-leftist' – nothing wrong with that in my view. But he is right to qualify the tendency. Serge, I wrote, had been sent by the Comintern to analyse the German Revolution, but what follows – 'which he did often, from an ultra-left perspective' – should have read 'which he did, often from an ultra-left perspective'. And Birchall of all people should agree, since he writes, in his introduction to the texts collected in Witness to the German Revolution: 'It is also possible to detect a certain ultra-leftism in Serge's account, perhaps deriving from his anarchist past, but also reflecting a continuing weakness of the German revolutionary tradition.'

Birchall's second claim, that Serge retained faith in the working class to the end, I would dispute more strongly. Of course he 'still saw himself as an active member of the anti-Stalinist Left', but this does not mean he still regarded the working class as the anointed agent of historical change. In November 1944 he wrote in his diary: 'The events of 1917-18 cannot repeat themselves at the end of this war. The old opposition between socialist revolution and capitalist reaction has been replaced by a civil war between Stalinist totalitarianism and democratic socialism. Conservatism and neo-Fascisms are the beneficiaries of this tragedy.' Such an analysis recurs in many of Serge's political writings, even before the war, as well as in the late fiction. Note, by contrast, the consistency of his scepticism towards social democracy.

Lorna Scott Fox
Seville