Byzantium Endures (2 page)

In the previous two years I had come to know him well. He had found out that I was a professional writer and had, in fact, become hard to avoid. He pursued me. He insisted we could turn to a profit his reminiscences of Mrs Cornelius, who had died in 1975. He knew that I had already, in his terms, ‘exploited’ her in my books. He had recognised my deep interest in local history when he had seen me, some years earlier, photographing the old Convent of the Poor Clares as it was being pulled down. Much later he had come upon me filming the slum terraces of Blenheim Crescent and Westbourne Park Road before they, too, were destroyed. That was when he first approached me. I had tried to ignore him but when he spoke familiarly about Mrs Cornelius, referring to her as ‘a famous British personality’, I became curious. (I had my own interest in that extraordinary woman, of course.) Pyat became persuasive: the world would be eager to read what he had written about her. She was probably as famous as Queen Elizabeth. Amiably, I pointed out that she was merely a local figure in a tiny area of North Kensington. My own accounts of her were considerably fictionalised. Nobody thought of her as a ‘personality’. But he insisted there must still be money to be made from what he believed to be a massive public eager to read ‘the true accounts of Mrs Cornelius’s life’. He had approached the
Daily Mirror
and the
Sun
in an attempt to sell them his story (a terrifying collection of manuscript, hand-written in six languages on almost every possible size and colour of paper, collected in eleven shoe-boxes) but became suspicious of their suggestion that he submit it by post rather than in person to the editor. He trusted me, I was told, as he had trusted nobody but Mrs Cornelius herself. I reminded him, apparently, of Michael VIII, ‘the last great saviour of Constantinople’, and it was even possible that I was a reincarnation of that Byzantine emperor. He showed me a black and white reproduction of an ikon. Like most ikons the figures depicted could have been anyone. They all wore beards. His main reason for trusting me, I suspect, was because I humoured him. I did this from genuine curiosity about his own career as well as Mrs Cornelius’s (she had always been hazy concerning her past). Here, of course, I was moved by self-interest. Colonel Pyat’s was not a pleasant personality, and his intolerance and passionately-held right-wing views were hard to take. I bought him drinks in the same pubs he had attended with Mrs Cornelius. I hoped to gain raw material for new stories; but he had different plans. Without reference to me he decided I should be his literary adviser for ten per cent of his advance. Together, he told me, we should prepare a manuscript. I would then submit it to my usual publisher; my name and influence (as well as the fame of Mrs Cornelius) would enable us to sell the book for ‘at least fifty thousand pounds’.

I soon stopped trying to convince him that advances for first books rarely reached five hundred pounds and that I had no special influence with anyone. Instead, when I had the time, I visited his flat and began to help him assemble his papers. I found a translator
[
My old friend and sometime collaborator M.G. Lobkowitz
] prepared to handle the considerable quantities of manuscript written in Russian, bad German, Polish and Czech, though the majority was in bad English with, amusingly, most references to sex in French, and let him talk to me as I tried to fill in the gaps in his story.

I am not sure what would have happened to the project if he had lived. My own work had certainly begun to suffer. My wife tells me I became half-mad, completely obsessed with Pyat. I could not stay away from him. He had met a good many of the leading political and cultural figures of the inter-war years (often without realising their importance) and, although his instinct for obfuscation was highly-developed, he would frequently, it seemed unwittingly, reveal quite astonishing details. At first, because of his violent anti-Semitism, his hatred of the local people, his vicious and reactionary opinions of modern life, I found it difficult to respect his age and his sufferings or to keep my temper with him. It was Lobkowitz, who had seen much of what Pyat had seen, who helped me deal with him. ‘The great tragedies of history,’ he said, ‘are the sum of all our individual tragedies. It takes several million Pyats at least to conspire in the fate of the twelve million who died in the camps. His is a ruined soul.’ I thought this view overly-charitable, even sentimental, at first; but I came to respect it as time went on. Moreover, my fascination always overcame my distaste. I would visit him on Sunday afternoons to tape-record his monologues, some of which I found repeated almost verbatim in his manuscripts. I have not made much use of the obscure, polylingual material he left, but to give the reader an impression of what I had to cope with, I will quote in Appendix A a rather substantial amount of it, primarily to offer a clue as to the difficulties involved in translating, ordering and interpreting the papers. The facsimile on p. vi is of one of the more readily legible pages.

* * * *

Pyat was not in the usual sense a fool. Many of his remarks were astonishingly perceptive. It was his inconsistency in almost everything which made me decide not to attempt to over-formalise his material. Therefore the reader will find few literary ironies here and the use of devices common to modern fiction has, of course, been sparing: this narrative has not been shaped according to normal narrative expectations. It would be better to regard it not as the biography Pyat offered (Mrs Cornelius appears only infrequently in this volume) but as autobiography. It is the story of an extraordinary life and, as such, it contains extraordinary coincidences, paradoxes and occasional non sequiturs. For the first volume, which takes us up to the end of the First World War and the last stages of the Russian Civil War, I have selected material which deals pretty directly with this period in Pyat’s life. The completely discursive material I have left out altogether or set aside for later volumes where it will be more appropriate. On certain matters he remained vague - the time spent as a prisoner in Kiev is a good example - but the reader might discover clues, at least as to why he avoids mentioning these experiences in any detail, in other parts of the narrative. I have tried not to speculate while putting the story together and prefer to leave it to the reader to decide what is relevant; for the reader’s guess here is quite as good as mine.

Lobkowitz’s problems of translation have been enormous. Pyat wrote in colloquial Russian for the most part and, according to Lobkowitz, his prose often resembles the conscious artifice of Bely, Piln’iak and the later ‘skaaz’ writers from whom, Lobkowitz claims, Nabokov borrowed heavily. I am, I must admit, unfamiliar with modern Russian fiction, so have relied very heavily on Lobkowitz’s interpretations and references. Naturally, I have considerable respect for my friend. No one else could have coped so well with the problems. If Colonel Pyat possessed a ‘style’ in the literary sense, it altered its tone quite frequently. Editing and omission have resulted in the loss of a certain amount of the original’s inconsistent flavour (another reason for including some of Pyat’s more maniacal prose in an appendix rather than in the main text), though I think what remains of this ‘stream-of-consciousness’ writing offers at least an insight into his poor, baffled, terror-ridden mind. Lobkowitz was unable to translate in one or two places where the language used has so far been impossible to identify. A ‘secret’ or made-up language is sometimes a device employed by people with paranoid tendencies. I suppose it is fair to make it clear that in later years Pyat had a history of mental trouble and was occasionally institutionalised.

It has been suggested to me that I should include in this introduction a brief background to the second half of the book, which deals with Pyat’s experiences during the Russian Civil War, one of the most destructive wars of its kind in history.

A brief account is to be found in Appendix B (p.398). I have been content to rely very heavily on Lobkowitz’s own understanding of the situation in the Ukraine at this time, on the few occasions where I needed to clarify the narrative. One thing is obvious: considerable issues were at stake there. With its history of bloody

Cossack fighting, its appalling pogroms (notably those of 1905-6), its geographical position as a ‘border-land’ (which is what
U-kraine
actually means) rich in mineral and agricultural wealth, it would always have suffered violence, given the nature of the times. But without Bolshevik and Allied intervention it is fair to say it might not have suffered so much violence (including Stalin’s planned famines) at least until the German invasion of 1941 where all the terrors were repeated with increased force and efficiency. In many ways the recent history of the Ukraine can be seen as an intensified version of the history of our era. Most of the political issues are familiar to us. Most of the methods used to meet those issues are also familiar. Events in the Ukraine prefigured events through the rest of the world and that is one of the reasons why I became so fascinated by Pyat’s account. It was why I thought it was worth trying to make some sort of linear story out of material which was in its original state almost entirely associative and non-linear.

I had no interest at all in the Ukraine or its troubles until I met Colonel Pyat and I must admit that many of my ideas about the Russian Empire, developed from information he gave me, have since proved at very least inadequate. His view of events in Russia between 1900 and 1920 is as biased as any other view he held and Lobkowitz suggests that I make it clear to the reader that Pyat’s accounts are not always to be taken as accurate impressions of what was happening during that period, although, apparently, many of his claims, where simple fact is involved, have been adequately verified.

He was a difficult and exhausting man to interview and working with him took more than two years out of my life. (Editing the rest of his manuscript, which will tell his story up to the concentration camps and 1940, will take much longer.) Yet I look back almost with nostalgia to those Sunday afternoon sessions when my wife and I would visit his untidy two-storey flat and listen to his frequently harsh, sometimes sardonic, sometimes rolling tones as he pontificated against this race and that, against this political party and the other, against everyone who, in his view, had conspired to cheat him of his just rewards on Earth.

The flat was over his shop. It had originally been an ordinary second-hand clothes shop where, as a boy, I had often bought pieces of worn-out Edwardian finery. I think it had been one of Mrs Cornelius’s sons - almost certainly Frank - who, in the 1960s, had suggested renaming it ‘The Spirit of St Petersburg Used Fur Boutique’ to exploit the boom in tourism and fashion, which was to me a most unwelcome development. The premises are now run by a Hindu family which sells clothes manufactured in the new sweatshops of the East End.

Colonel Pyat’s place smelled of the former owners of his stock: of moth-balls, stale perfumes and sour old age; of bortsch and a brand of Polish vodka he favoured called Starka, a matured, mellow vodka with the colour of Irish whiskey. The vodka was his single extravagance and I believe he drank it because it was a private link with the Russia of his boyhood. It is for some reason cheaper than brands like Stolichnaya which are more familiar to Westerners, but it is almost impossible to buy in England. He obtained his supply, I gather, through Russian seamen spending their shore-leave in London and Tilbury. It had a more pungent odour than most vodka and was also a stronger proof. He only once offered us a glass, and that in return for some papyrussa cigarettes I had been able to obtain for him during my own travels.

Although disturbingly ignorant of much English culture (he had remained close to Mrs Cornelius and the poorer parts of Notting Hill since, claiming Polish nationality, he had arrived there in 1940), he was neither an illiterate nor a stupid man. His contemporary cultural references were peculiar - to TV programmes and films in the main - yet he despised the English for their lack of ‘refined sensitivity’. He despised us, also, for our lack of idealism, for our pragmatism and for our hypocrisy, yet blamed almost every problem not attributable to Jews or Bolsheviks on our ‘weakness’ in relinquishing the Empire. Thanks to Lobkowitz’s insights, I realised life had wounded Pyat so deeply that he sought refuge in fantasy and bigotry; but it could sometimes be very hard to listen to the vile, and all-too-familiar, racialism with which he so frequently regaled us, particularly since by now he had come to regard me, at any rate, as a fellow spirit, ‘one of the few real intellectuals I have met in this country of yours’. He would insist that there was virtually no cultural life left in England. What there was, he said, betrayed our appalling decadence. His day-to-day experience was that of many other bourgeois European refugees who, speaking no English and having little money and few friends, arrived in England and America before the War. They had had to settle in the working-class districts of our big cities and encountered insular people ignorant of most of the political issues and cultural background they themselves considered essential. The nuances and humour of working-class Londoners were therefore beyond him and the genial tolerance of the majority seemed to him to support the view that the English were careless and lazy, and had somehow betrayed his trust in them. He had possessed a romantic attachment to this country, as you will see.

It was this limited experience, of course, which led him to suppose that Mrs Cornelius was as famous as the Queen. All the people he met in the area seemed to possess greater interest in Mrs Cornelius (and more familiarity with her name) than they showed in, say, Adolf Hitler or Margaret Thatcher. This was why Pyat honestly believed the present generation would pay him more for his memoirs of a somewhat extraordinary but largely unknown Cockney lady than they would for his personal anecdotes of the great dictators. (I must admit that my own imagination was fired more by Mrs C than by Mussolini, but I realised that there were few who would share my enthusiasm. It could also be argued that I had a vested interest in her fame, as well as the colonel’s, for I had also made fictional use of him in one or two books, even before I had come to know him personally.)