OTHER COPYRIGHTED WORKS

VILLA AIR-BEL (2006)

Alexander Werth, France in Ferment, p. 174: The Place de la République was cordoned off (…).  The cafés were shut, and the Hôtel Moderne, usually so brightly lit, looked dark and deserted.  The electric signs in the whole square were turned off.

[p. 46] Warned in advance, the police cordoned off the Place. The cafés were closed; the Hôtel Moderne, usually a blaze of lights, was dark, and all electric signs in the area had been extinguished. 

Alexander Werth, France in Ferment, p. 178: Policemen, driving in a van through a crowd of rioters, kept kicking in the face of those who happened to be near.

[p. 46] (…) A police van drove through one group of rioters, kicking at the faces of those standing nearby. 

Alexander Werth, France in Ferment, p. 178, 179: [T]he rioters erected several barricades (…)  It was not until 12:30 that comparative order was restored.

[p. 46] The crowds responded by erecting barricades. The clashes were violent and lasted past midnight.

Alexander Werth, France in Ferment, p. 179: Four demonstrators were dead; two more were to die of their injuries a few days later.  The number of injured is uncertain; officially only sixty-four were reported to have been taken to hospital; twenty of these had bullet wounds.

[p. 46] Six demonstrators were killed and the official number of wounded was put at sixty-four, twenty of whom received bullet wounds.

Alexander Werth, France in Ferment, p. 179: According to official figures—which sound improbable (…)—the number of casualties was much higher on the side of the police: it is given as one hundred and forty-one.

[p. 46] The police claimed 141 policemen were injured, four shot.

Alexander Werth doubted these official numbers of police casualties.

Herbert R. Lottman, The Left Bank, p. 3: (…) Ehrenburg had mocked the Surrealists, who he said were involved only with “pederasty and dreams,” while living on inherited wealth or a wife’s dowry.”

[p. 53, Chapter The Congress and the Case of Victor Serge—Paris 1935] He [Ilya Ehrenburg] mocked them [the Surrealists] as “busy studying pederasty and dreams” while “spending their inheritances or their wives’ dowries.”[1] 

Endnote: Mark Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind, p. 418.

Herbert R. Lottman, The Left Bank, p. 3: (…) [T]hey really preferred “onanism, pederasty, fetichism, exhibitionism, and even sodomy.” As for their politics: “The Soviet Union disgusts them because people work in that country.”

[p. 53] They preferred “onanism, pederasty, fetishism, exhibitionism, and even sodomy,” he wrote, and “the Soviet Union disgusts them because people work in that country.”

Endnote: Lottman, Left Bank, p. 3.

Mark Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton, p. 418, citing Ilya Ehrenburg: “In the face of all this, they have the nerve to call the rag they publish Surrealism in the Service of the Revolution.

[p. 53] They had the nerve to call the rag they publish Surrealism in the Service of the Revolution.

[p. 53] “I’ve come to settle a score with you, sir,” he said.. .

“And who are you, sir?” Ehrenburg replied.

“I am André Breton.”

“Who?”

Breton repeated his own name several times, each time adding one of the epithets that Ehrenburg had used. . . . Each of these introductions was followed by a slap. . . .  Ehrenburg did not even defend himself.  He stood there, protecting his face with his hands.  “You’re going to be sorry for that!” he blurted out.

Comment.  Though the preceding text is formatted as a citation, there is no endnote.  (The source is, in fact, Mark Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton, p. 418.)

Mark Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton, p. 419: Ehrenburg’s threats had not been idle, however, for as a member of the Congress committee (…) he immediately demanded that the Surrealists be stripped of their right to speak—failing which, the entire Soviet delegation would walk out.  An international Communist event without the participation of the Soviets was unthinkable; (…) the committee voted to censure the Surrealists.

[p. 53] Ilya Ehrenburg did get his revenge. He was a member of the organizing committee of the International Congress of Writers, and he demanded that the surrealists be stripped of their right to speak. If not, the entire Soviet delegation would walk out. To go ahead without [p. 54] the Soviets was unthinkable. The committee voted to censure the surrealists.

Susan Weissman, Victor Serge: The Course Is Set on Hope, p. 5:  In 1933, Serge was again arrested and deported to Orenburg where, for three years, he and his son nearly starved to death.

[p. 60] Serge and his son were alone now. (…)  Unable to work, he and his son nearly starved to death.

[p. 61] Serge published an open letter to Gide in the left-wing newspaper Esprit, in which he warned him: (…) [p. 62] Remarkably, all he was asking of him on his trip was to keep his eyes open.

Comment.  For some reason, Sullivan here overrules Weissman’s scholarship.  Whatever the facts, Esprit, was not a “left-wing newspaper.”

[p. 62] His foresight was absolutely useless. He protested that Western party leaders swallowed it all: "the killing, the nonsense, the cult of the Leader, the democratic Constitution whose authors are promptly shot!"

Comment.  This is one of many instances where Sullivan happens to zero in on quotes from Victor Serge’s memoirs or from the Dwight and Nancy Macdonald Papers (examples of both follow) that had been previously singled out by Serge biographer Susan Weissman.  Indeed, there appear to be few—if any—quotations from Serge’s memoirs or the Macdonald papers that were not previously cited by Weissman.  The source cited by Sullivan, however, is always Serge’s memoirs or the Macdonald Papers.  In her book, Weissman had underscored that “The correspondence with Dwight and Nancy Macdonald throughout this ordeal is a testament to their generosity and solidarity” (p. 263).  But the reader of Villa Air-Bel would have no reason not to assume that the author herself discovered the Macdonald papers and the quotations she makes from them.

[p. 135] By astonishing luck, he found an empty taxi for himself, Laurette, his son, and a Spanish friend who had joined them.  (…) The taxi drove through the Fontainebleau woods under a barrage of shells, (…).  Strangely, along with dread, Serge felt a kind of euphoria.  Even though he had lost all his possessions once again —books, personal objects, manuscripts—he experienced a sense of release. Europe had been living in a “suffocating blind alley,” and everyone knew it couldn’t last.  He wrote in his memoir: "The leap into the unknown has been made. It will be black and terrible, but those who survive will see a new world  reborn.”

Endnote: Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, p. 358.

[p. 159] One evening Charles [Wolff] took Miriam to the Cinéma Pax movie theater in Toulouse.

[p. 159] [T]he floor strewn with straw for bedding. It was now a dormitory for refugees.

[p. 159] Suddenly the political and intellectual refugees she had been hearing about had human faces. She met Hitler’s unflattering biographer, Konrad Heiden;

[p. 159] Katia Landau, whose Communist husband had been murdered in Spain by the Stalinists and who herself had been jailed in Barcelona;

[p. 159] and Justus Rosenberg, a fifteen-year-old boy, who was the son of Danzig Jews.  He had cycled down to Toulouse from his collège in Paris.  She immediately nicknamed him Gussie.

[p. 159] She also briefly met the German poet Walter Mehring who, she learned, was not only one of Germany’s finest poets, infamous for the anti-Nazi songs he’d written, but was high on the list of the Nazis’ most wanted.

Susan Weissman, Victor Serge: The Course Is Set on Hope, p. 245: In November 1939 Dwight Macdonald sent Serge a cheque for $38 and remarked: 'In these tragic times, I often think of you and wonder about your life in France. You can be sure you still have many friends (unknown to you) and admirers in this country.'

[p. 217] He had published an extract from Serge's novel Ville Conquise in his magazine the previous November and he had sent a note along with a check for thirty-eight dollars: "In these tragic times I often think of you and wonder about your life in France. You can be sure you still have many friends (unknown to you) and admirers in this country. (…)"

Endnote: Letter from Dwight Macdonald to Victor Serge, November 14, 1939. Macdonald Papers, Box 46/27. Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library.

Susan Weissman, Victor Serge: The Course Is Set on Hope, p. 245:

By some luck I managed to flee Paris at the very last minute. We have been travelling in freight trains, spending nights in the fields . . . in the Loire country we were so tired that we lay down behind some stones and slept through an entire bombardment. Nowhere, in this completely chaotic world, were we able to find any asylum. Finally the roads were barred and we were stranded in the small village in the south from which I am writing you. I do not think I will be able to remain here since I know no one and have neither roof nor money nor chance of earning anything.

Of all I once owned – clothes, books, writings – I was able to save only what my friends and I could carry away on our backs in knapsacks. It is very little, but fortunately includes the manuscripts which I have already begun. This letter is a sort of SOS which I hope that you will also communicate to my known and unknown friends in America. I have no money for stamps; I will be able to send off perhaps one or two letters, but that is all. I must ask you to immediately undertake some action of material aid for me. I have scarcely a hundred francs left: we are eating only one meal a day and it is a very poor one at that. I do not at all know how we are going to hold out.

[pp. 217-218] Macdonald read Serge’s letter with growing alarm.

By some luck I managed to flee Paris at the very last minute. We have been traveling in freight trains, spending nights in the fields. In a little village in the Loire country we were so tired that we lay down behind some stones and slept through an entire bombardment. Nowhere, in this completely chaotic world, were we able to find any asylum. Finally the roads were barred and we were stranded in the small village in the south from which I am writing you. I do not think I will be able to remain here since I know no one and have neither roof nor money nor chance of earning anything.

Of all I once owned—clothes, books, writing—I was able to save only what my friends and I could carry on our backs in knapsacks. It is very little, but fortunately includes the manuscripts which I have already begun. This letter is a sort of S.O.S. which I hope that you will also communicate to my known and unknown friends in America. I have no money for stamps; I will be able to send off perhaps one or two letters, but that is all. I must ask you to immediately undertake some action of material aid for me. I have scarcely a hundred francs left: we are eating only one meal a day and it is a very poor one at that. I don't at all know how we are going to hold out.”

[p. 218] He assured her that, however untenable things became, "I must hold out and again I will make every effort to hold out. (…)"

Endnote: Letter from Victor Serge to the Macdonalds, August 19, 1940. Box 46/27. Macdonald Papers.

[p. 221]  Finerty resubmitted Serge's dossier to Francis Biddle, solicitor general of the United States, with letters of support from John Dewey, Eugene Lyons, Meyer Schapiro, Sidney Hook, Margaret Marshall, Frederick Reustle, William Troy, Max Eastman, James T. Farrell, and Adolph Berle.

Endnote: Letter from John Finerty to Francis Biddle, Solicitor-General of the United States, October 8, 1940. Box 46/ 27. Macdonald Papers.

Susan Weissman, Victor Serge: The Course Is Set on Hope, p. 248: [T]his was an appropriate time for the Old Man to go, 'the blackest hour for the working classes: just as their keenest hour saw his highest ascendancy'.  Serge wrote to Fritz Brupbacher on 23 August: “But he was the prisoner of his own orthodoxy,  Trotsky's disappearance leaves me in a singularly perilous position since now I am alone, the last free witness – more or less – of a whole era of the Russian Revolution.

Source cited: Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, p. 365.

[p. 222]  When Serge read the news, his first remark was that this "blackest hour" was an appropriate time for the “Old Man” to go, but he was devastated that a great mind could be so easily extinguished.  He had had strong disagreements with Trotsky, accusing him of authoritarianism and of being "a prisoner of his own orthodoxy."  With Trotsky dead, he now felt that he was in a singularly perilous position. He was alone, "the last free witness—more or less—of a whole era of the Russian Revolution."

Endnote: Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, pp. 350, 365.

[p. 222]  He wrote to Nancy Macdonald, knowing she knew Trotsky's widow, and asked her to express "to Nathalie Ivanovna all the despairing affection that she inspires in a handful of dispersed, but nevertheless faithful friends—despite their different political views."

Endnote: Letter from Victor Serge to Nancy Macdonald, August 26, 1940.  Box 46/27. Macdonald Papers.

[pp. 256-257]  Sometimes they would sit in the library around the porcelain stove while Victor Serge told them stories.

Susan Weissman, Victor Serge: The Course Is Set on Hope, p. 256: The men were taken to the hold, the women given third-class cabins.

[p. 279] [T]he women were directed up the gangplank to the third-class cabins while the men were taken to the hold.

[p. 279] "One must eat everything one can get down," he [Serge] told her. "And hold it down."

Endnote: Gold, Crossroads Marseilles, 1940, p. 276.

[p 279] One never knew if there would be a next meal.

Susan Weissman, Victor Serge: The Course Is Set on Hope, p. 17: In the Memoirs Serge described their descent into violence as 'a kind of madness' and 'like a collective suicide'. [Footnotes cites source.]

[p. 287] Serge disengaged himself from their criminality, describing their descent into violence as "a kind of madness" and a form of "collective suicide."

Susan Weissman, Victor Serge: The Course Is Set on Hope, p. 18: Kibalchich was singled out as the intellectual author of the Bonnot band's crimes, and sentenced to five terrible years in prison, spent in solitary from 1913 to 1917. (…)

Serge was released on 31 January 1917. Expelled from France, (…)

[p 287] But when the gang was arrested, he was sentenced to five years in solitary confinement as the "intellectual author" of the group. He was released in 1917 and expelled from France.

Susan Weissman, Victor Serge: The Course Is Set on Hope, p. 256: [L]iving there with us were the collaborators of Mr. F, but a whole plot has been woven in order to force us to separate, on the pretext that the co-workers of the Emergency Rescue Committee could be compromised by their close relations with me! The enormity in all of this, is that despite the clarity of the scheme and the profound esteem that unites us all, it worked – as a result of the atmosphere. I am once again faced with the housing problem, and it is tied to many others

[p. 366] His detainment at the Lazaret was longer than that of the others, and he found the incarceration grueling: scorching heat, no running water, and twenty-five francs a day for the "indescribably nasty food."

[p. 368] During their stay, the U.S. naval attaché John A. Butler, captain of the U.S. Marine Corps, visited them. In his confidential report to Washington, Butler remarked that Serge was a "brilliant, well-trained observer, whose first thoughts are against Stalin, although he is for democracies."

Endnote: Weissman, Victor Serge, p. 261. 

[p. 368] Butler indicated that Serge was waiting in the Dominican Republic for a transit visa through Cuba en route to Mexico.

Susan Weissman, Victor Serge: The Course Is Set on Hope, p. 259: Dwight Macdonald wrote to Serge on 2 June 1941 that Serge could only get a US transit visa if he agreed to testify before the Dies Committee.

[p. 368] In June Dwight Macdonald wrote to say that Serge could now get a U.S. transit visa only if he agreed to testify before the Dies Committee,   [Concluding quote has reference to Letter from Dwight Macdonald to Victor Serge, June 1941. Box 46/1131. Macdonald Papers.]

Susan Weissman, Victor Serge: The Course Is Set on Hope, p. 262.  Serge described to Mary Jayne Gold how he and Vlady adapted themselves to the hot sun in Ciudad Trujillo by working from dawn to lunch (…).  [Footnote is to Serge to Mary Jayne Gold, 10 Aug. 1941, from Ciudad Trujillo.  Serge archive, Mexico.]

Susan Weissman, Victor Serge: The Course Is Set on Hope, p. 263: They (…) suffered tropical heat.

[p. 368] By working from dawn to lunch, Serge and Vlady adapted themselves to the tropical heat. 

[p. 268-269] In four weeks he finished his book Hitler contra Stalin: La fase decisiva de la guerra mundial (Hitler against Stalin: the Decisive Phase of the World War) which he dedicated to the workers of the Mexican revolution. According to Susan Weissman, Serge's biographer, the tiny Mexican publishing house that issued it, Ediciones Quetzal, "was ruined after publishing such an uncompromising anti-Stalin and anti-capitalist analysis of World War II."

Comment.  One of two instances where the research of Serge scholar Susan Weissman is acknowledged in the body of Villa Air-Bel.  (The endnote refers mistakenly to page 363.)

Daniel Bénédite, La Filière marseillaise, p. 258: Fry: “ Alors, Danny, nous allons passer de courtes vacances que nous avons bien méritées (…)”

[p. 382] As the two men started back to Marseille, Fry insisted that they turn this into a real vacation. They deserved one. 

Daniel Bénédite, La Filière marseillaise, p. 258:  Il fait un temps superbe, nous nous promenons sur la Croisette, (…) dînons dans les petits restaurants du Suquet.  Puis c’est Antibes, une excursion à Cagnes, une pointe jusqu’à Vence.

[p. 382-383] Dreading what awaited him, he wanted to put off their return as long as possible.  The August weather was exquisite. They walked along the Croisette and dined in the small restaurants in Cassis.  Then they went to Antibes, took an excursion to Cagnes and went as far as the town of Vance [sic].

Daniel Bénédite, La Filière marseillaise, p. 258:  A Nice, nous allons rendre visite à Henri Matisse qui nous invite paternellement à prendre le thé dans son atelier de Cimiez au décor de plantes exotiques et de grande cages peuplées d’oiseaux multicolores.

[p. 383] At Nice they visited Henri Matisse, who had invited them to tea in his famous atelier de Cimiez [sic] filled with tropical plants and exotic caged birds.

Comment.  Mistranslation: Cimiez is a neighborhood in Nice.  Proper translation would have been: “in his famous studio in Cimiez.”