The Vengeance of Rome (2 page)

Pyat is predictably keen on Mussolini's promotion of Italian engineering, praising the aeroplane known as the Macchi 52R and the Lamborghini automobiles. He also applauds Mussolini's notorious way with women; one appears to have been delivered up every afternoon to his office, unless matters of state precluded it, which they seldom appeared to have done. He would usually have them under the table, or up against the wall, employing all the famous gigolo charm for which Rome is famed. He appears to have had the same effect on the womenfolk of Italy that Elvis was later to have on the daughters of the Land of the Free. They knew which side their bread was buttered on, Pyat reckons; knew a good thing when they saw it. They knew that if you keep calling a man
Duce
, then he'll need to stay on top of things.

Mussolini was, Pyat assures us, ‘not corrupt. He was careless of money.' And Pyat himself has no worries about crossed allegiances: ‘I am a Fascist first, and an American second.' That was pretty much Ezra Pound's line, as a matter of fact. Pyat fortifies himself for his meeting with the great man with brandy, wine, and a few snorts of his favourite white powder; the
neige
. No point trying to change the habits of a lifetime. And you want to feel comfortable when you meet the great.
Cocaine's for horses, it ain't for men
: so went the old blues song, but no one ever seems to have told Pyat. Though he is curiously moralistic on abusers of variant substances: ‘I had always loathed narcotics and feared their habit-forming effect. Unlike the benign stimulant, the narcotics are deadly. Opium, morphine and heroin are all of such high toxicity they immediately alter the nature of the body …' How refreshing it is to be taught the art of temperance by Keith Richards.

Mussolini is keen on Pyat, or Peters as he is being called at this point. He regards his contribution to cinema as wholesome. He hails a fellow struggler in the jungle of modern history: ‘Let one man of the New Renaissance greet another as an equal.' And Pyat's engineering genius is on offer in the form of a desert ship, which can transport men and arms with unprecedented efficiency; a vast, motorised dromedary. Given Mussolini's plans to
provide himself with a decent African empire, this could evidently turn out to be useful. Pyat also falls into the hands of one of Mussolini's mistresses, at which point things start to get tricky, and before long we find ourselves in Germany before Hitler's rise to power in 1933.

In fact the year is 1931, a fateful year for Hitler and for Europe. This was the year of Geli Raubal's death, and had things turned out differently it could easily have been the year that ended Hitler's political career. Geli was Hitler's half-niece, and shared an apartment with him in Munich. According to the official accounts, she shot herself with Hitler's automatic. One speculation is that he somehow shot her himself, but a speeding ticket seems to have provided an alibi for Hitler here. Another theory is that a person or persons in his immediate circle did the killing for him. Geli had started to look like serious trouble. She had apparently been free on more than one occasion with her favours, and seems to have had an affair with Hitler's chauffeur. She wanted to go to Vienna for ‘voice coaching', whatever that actually meant; Hitler very much did not want her to do that. He of course had vivid memories of how sordid a marginal life in the arts in Vienna could be. Nude drawings of Geli by Hitler were said to have come to light at the time, images whose pornographic implications could have proved problematic. A number have subsequently emerged on the open market—they appear incompetent enough to be authentic. The kindliest interpretation is that Hitler engaged in a semi-incestuous dalliance, and let his avuncular propensities get the better of him. The unkindest interpretation is that Hitler pursued his interests in the most startling of sexual improprieties: coprophilia. With a particular emphasis on undinism.

The question of Hitler's sexuality, how twisted it might have been, and whether that offers some sort of clue as to the monstrosity of his other activities, seems to have been with us from the beginning. The psychologist Langer was commissioned by the American government to write a report on Hitler at the time of the war, and he concluded that the boy from Linz evidently had some pretty rum ways with him in the bedroom. An astonishing number of Hitler's female intimates committed suicide: Geli Raubal, Inge Ley, Renate Mueller, and Suzi Liptauer. Mimi Reiter tried unsuccessfully to hang herself in 1928. Eva Braun tried to kill herself in 1932 and again in 1935. She succeeded with Hitler's assistance in 1945, but by then they were both newly married, so it was less an attempt to get away from him than to get away from everyone else. Poor Unity Mitford (who had no physical relations with her beloved Führer) shot herself through the head on the outbreak of war and had to be shipped home to her family in
Oxfordshire, where she lived on for years, mourning the blindness of Britain in not understanding the greatness of her modern Siegfried.

Every so often the rumours would arise, then as now: Hitler expected unnatural, indeed disgusting things, from his women. Most appear to have been so repelled that they could never bring themselves to speak of the matter, except obliquely. According to these accounts, Hitler was aware of Nietzsche's injunction: ‘Going to see a woman? Take your whip.' But he appears to have placed the whip in the hands of the woman as soon as he was over the threshold. The name of the game would seem to have been: humiliation, discipline, chastisement, degradation. And the most sordid part of all is the last one, the part that appears to have involved coprophilia.

And so in goes our hero Pyat. Geli Raubal's death is here fictionally explained. The account is plausible enough, as a close political associate tries to quieten the half-niece with whom Hitler had been having his insalubrious sexual entanglement for some time by then. She had been walking around all that day clutching a dead canary, according to the records, as if she had just been down a coalmine checking for methane. And by the following morning the poor little bird herself would be found dead. Hovering around here is the curiously repellent Father Stempfle, Geli's confessor and a Nazi sympathiser on a grand scale. Is it possible he passed secrets on from the confessional, so that Hitler knew exactly what she was up to, and what she was contemplating? The possibility is explored. We might note here one of the most sinister parallelisms of twentieth century history: exactly one year later, Stalin's wife would also be found dead in his Kremlin apartment, with a bullet through her chest after a public row. That too was put down to suicide.

The mystery of Geli's death has never been resolved. That automatic, a Walther PPK 38, was a difficult one to use. You had to know what you were doing and exert strength and control, holding down the safety catch while pulling the trigger simultaneously. Could Geli have killed herself with this, even if she had wanted to? Someone, evidently troubled by all the inconsistencies, tried to reopen the case, but the documentation was subsequently removed from the archive when the Nazis came to power in Munich. It has never resurfaced. The Nazis were covering their traces; and there were plenty of traces to cover. They were a sordid lot, even before they got into power. And power, as Lord Acton reminded us, does not tend to improve a man's morals.

So Pyat, after some emergency coprophiliac training, helps Hitler regain his hideous composure by doing some things with him so disgusting
that they cannot even be repeated in this introduction. The reader will have to be a few hundred pages older before he or she has been fully prepared for the revelations, a chronicle in relation to which those tell-all tales regarding sportsmen and hookers in the popular press will read like prayer meetings in a nunnery. (Yes, folks, it really is that bad.)

Pyat does his bit to keep the historical motor turning. If there is such a thing as anti-erotic literature, then it must surely be the sex scene acted out here between a cross-dressing Pyat and Adolf Hitler. Oedipal inversion, invited besmirchings, self-loathing as a form of climax. You name it, it's there. Yeats remarked through his persona Crazy Jane: ‘Love has pitched his mansion in the place of excrement', but I doubt he would have expected that maxim to be acted out quite so literally as it is here by our boy Maxim, travelling incognito for the purpose as a posthumous half-niece to the soon-tobe Führer. And that immediately after providing his favours to Ernst Röhm, who had a well-advertised Greek way with fellow officers, women being of use to him merely as breeders, cookers and typists. Whatever else you can say about Pyat, he always was horizontally versatile.

There is only one excuse for all this: what we make of Hitler is effectively what we make of ourselves, in much the same way that what we make of the devil is what we make of God. We can only understand the light by understanding darkness; that is the principle of complementarity. If we want to understand how high we might go, we first must plumb the depths. And so we worry away at the Holocaust, the gulag, Pol Pot in Cambodia, the internecine savagery of Rwanda, and whatever else is ravaging our blue-veined planet at the moment. Out of the journey through darkness we might just discover the principles of illumination.

Dickens was at his most redemptive in
Great Expectations
, where it is understood that Pip's good fortune and education are based on crime, just as all modern nations can trace their own territorial possessions back to crime, expropriation, ingenious belligerence. Something in Dickens's imagination tells him that crime is at the heart of our history, so there is no point trying to ignore it. You might find the criminals turn out to be as human as you could wish. Not always. Bill Sikes, from
Oliver Twist
, is not worth saving, but Magwitch is. His redemption into love is twinned with Pip's own; the two become spiritually inseparable; the inheritor and the source of the bequest.

So what are we to understand we are inheriting? It is still possible to find old men in the East End of London who lament the passing of the Krays. They will tell you how safe the streets of London were back then,
when the Twins ruled supreme. A decent woman could go out at night with no fear of molestation. If you mention any of the individuals Reg and Ronnie molested themselves, often with life-changing force, they will shake their heads philosophically and say they almost certainly had it coming. Many hung on to a similar nostalgic regret in regard to the fascist regimes. Their only real regret, though it was seldom voiced in public, was that Hitler had ended up coming a poor second in that military Olympiad called the war. Given a different result, and if only he hadn't insisted on hitting the USSR when he did, there might well have been one, what magnificent films Leni Riefenstahl might have made of these events. The Goebbels children could have lived on to be handsome young Aryan men and women. Hitler would not have needed to be incinerated in the garden of the Bunker; he could have had a state funeral on a par with Churchill's instead. How different Europe might have been. How much anarchy might have thus been avoided.

The philosophical argument continues too. There are those who regard Nazism as the ultimate negation of all that the Enlightenment propounded; others (like Zygmunt Bauman) regard the camps as in some way the culmination of certain aspects of the Enlightenment—the instrumentality of thought, the teleological solution of history and the liquidation of all historical contradictions. The utility buildings of Auschwitz were built for a purpose: to rid the world of contradiction, and that was part of the Enlightenment dream, after all. It all comes down to what you reckon is the force that's contradicting you.

Pyat is unrepentant in this book, the darkest and most brilliant volume of the quartet, and it is appropriate that he should be so. His Jewishness, so vehemently denied, so unceasingly insinuated, takes him to Dachau, where he comes to his most startling conclusion of all: that God is either senile or insane. There are a few unusually short chapters in which Pyat once more denies that he is a Jew. ‘They all say that,' an anonymous voice announces. So there is a kind of subtext pressing through here. The
braggadocio
has not entirely swallowed the darkness, even as it collaborates with it. Pyat has been stained with his fair share of the century's filth.

So could Pyat not have had a revelation at the end, some glimmer of understanding of how mistaken, indeed catastrophic, so many of his beliefs and actions had in truth been? It is part of the burden of this extraordinary work to flatter us as readers by leaving that function with ourselves. The goddess of history in antiquity was Clio; our hero has been her servant and her gigolo. If he's truly Clio's son, then like Oedipus he's had some perverse
ways of demonstrating his filial affections. When Pyat finally comes face-to-face with his genealogy, in the Princelet Street Synagogue in Spitalfields, he denies it. I'm not the person you take me for, he says with vehemence. But then he would say that, wouldn't he?

Alan Wall
University of Chester
2013

I have at last completed the final volume of Colonel Pyat's memoir. His life began in 1900 and ended in 1977, a few years after he had commissioned me to help him write the book he originally intended to call variously ‘The Life of Mrs Cornelius' or ‘My Adventures with Mrs Cornelius Between the Wars'. He believed that Mrs Cornelius, a well-known local Notting Hill figure during the 1950s and 60s, was world-famous and that the public would pay him handsomely for his reminiscences. Mrs Cornelius had died a year or two earlier, her career as a minor film actress and entertainer completely forgotten. After publication of the first volume, her children almost immediately began litigation to stop me publishing any further work about her. Only in recent years did we reach an understanding. That is one reason why this volume has taken so long to appear. Another reason was the death of my original editor, the extraordinary John Blackwell, who had helped me considerably, both with translations and interpretations and whose loss has been felt by many other authors and publishers.