Anarchists and Volcanos

I've just finished re-reading Survivors in Mexico, a book by author Rebecca West, left unfinished  at the time of her death. The man who edited the book is Bernard Schweizer, (b. 1962-) a professor of English at Long Island University Brooklyn. Schweizer is a naturalized American citizen born in Switzerland. His education began at the Waldorf School, an elementary school in Biel, Switzerland, continued with an apprenticeship in health care, autodidactic study for the federal Swiss baccalaureate, backpacking around the world, two years of college study at the University of Lausanne, a B.A. in English earned at the University of Minnesota (Twin Cities Campus), and a Ph.D. in English literature from Duke University in 1997. He held a teaching and research appointment at the University of Zurich from 1996-1999, was a research fellow for the Swiss National Science Foundation from 2000-2002. He joined the faculty of Long Island University in 2002. 

  He has published several books and essay collections on topics in British and European literature, is a leading Rebecca West  scholar and has edited or co-edited a number of West’s previously unpublished and uncollected works. In 2003, he co-founded the International Rebecca West Society in New York and was the second president of the Society, after Carl Rollyson, a West Biographer and author of many, many biographies and books and a University Professor. (I don't know where Rollyson is at present. He is a staggeringly productive man who really gets around.)   

In 2013, Schweizer founded another scholarly organization, the International Society for Heresy Studies,  and is currently it's vice-president. Heresy studies is designed to provide an intellectual platform for philosophers, literary critics, theologians, historians, and artists who are interested in the dialectic between heterodoxy and orthodoxy, and who want to explore dissenting and heretical ideas outside of both confessional and anti-religious frameworks. He's the author of several books including Hating God: The Untold Story of Misotheism, and Christianity and the Triumph of Humor: From Dante to David Javerbaum, two titles that almost make me wish I'd stayed in school.  

Prof. Schweizer isn't limited to writing in academic-speak. He can write well enough to pass muster with someone who appreciates Rebecca West for her writing style. Schweizer's substantive introduction explains in detail how he pieced together the notes and manuscripts of the book. I expect the chapter headings were part of this piecing together. Chapters include Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, Trotsky, Mexico City, Race Relations and a dozen or so more subjects all in the best Westian prose.  My favorite part of the book though is that about Dr. Atl and the Reclus brothers.

 

West was a prolific writer. She began writing for the Feminist publications The Freewoman, and The Clarion while still in her teens. She must have been a gifted child, if only because she was interested in and reading about the Dreyfus case, which trial was in 1899, when she was only seven years old.  I've read two biographies of her; one book of letters; her semi-autobiographical novel; most of her better known novels; but none of her short stories and probably haven't made a dent in her journalism, though I have read The New Meaning of Treason, and A Train of Powder. I suppose I was trying to keep the memory of my father alive when, after his death in 1981 I felt compelled to read Black Lamb Grey Falcon. And when Robert Kaplan came out with his homage to Rebecca West with his book Balkan Ghosts,  I latched on to it, all the while congratulating myself for being prescient concerning Rebecca West's importance. And my love still grows.   

I know she has her detractors, and I respect their right to be right or wrong. I'm sure she made some errors of judgement and some errors of fact in Black Lamb Grey Falcon, but how could one not, in a book so huge? Anyway, history has a way of switching bogey men. One characteristic of R.W.'s writing which some might find annoying is her frequent use of hyperbole. For instance; in writing about Elie Reclus's attractiveness to women, she said..."There are two types of women which eternally attract Frenchmen, one tall and pessimist and Racinean, and the other small and optimistic and Molierean, and Arabella was highly Racinean." (Arabella was her paternal grandmother.)  

 Carl Rollyson gives a chapter to Survivors in Mexico in his biography Rebecca West A Modern Sibyl. With the help of her notes, he explains beautifully how a monumental book idea developed in her mind during her first trip to Mexico. That trip happened in 1966 at the end of a book tour in which she promoted her novel The Birds Fall Down, which had been a big success in both the U.S. and the U.K. The tour had been financed by The New Yorker editor William Shawn in the non-contractual hope that she might produce an article or two for his magazine. West's husband Henry Andrews accompanied her but was somewhat of an impediment due to mental lapses probably caused by hardening of the arteries. Henry was 72; Rebecca was 74. (He died two years later.)  She makes a few light-hearted comments about his flakiness but to understand her relationship with Henry is beyond the scope of this post. ...She loved him sometimes. Rollyson is very good about Henry, understanding better than the other biographers I've read so far that Rebecca knew that she was hard to love and not the most tolerant and patient of lovers.  

 

Here's how the book comes alive, for me. West extracts a tap-root from her own life to structure the expanse of the book. She goes back to her Paternal Grandmother. Arabella Fairfield was the second wife of Grandfather Major Charles George Fairfield, who, though he was Irish, served in the Third Scots Guards. He died in 1851 in middle age, of an infected gall bladder, leaving behind his attractive young wife, a daughter, and four young boys. Though she wasn't poor, had a pension and some property, they kept a low profile, both because of the potato famine and it's resultant poverty, and because she was member of an austere religious cult, the Plymouth Brethren, a cult also known as The Darbyites, after their founder, John Nelson Darby, a renowned preacher. Arabella, said Rebecca West,  "....looked like the figurehead of a ship and was a bigoted Protestant, ardently professing a faith hostile to ardor."   

   Mother and children divided their time between London in winter and Ireland in summer. In Dublin Arabella put an ad in the paper for a tutor, and one of the two Reclus brothers, Elie, responded. The brothers, Elie and Elisee, were political refuges from France, having been exiled due to their revolutionary politics. The two had dabbled for some years in different leftist sects from Switzerland to Paris, while at the same time attending University and picking up degrees; Elisee concentrating on Geography and Elie on Ethnography. For no particular reason that I could see, both Reclus brothers had a fascination with Volcanoes, which Elie transmitted to the children. All four boys loved Elie, and he stayed with them long enough to see two of them into the Military and two into Civil Service. 

*There were five Recluse brothers but for my purposes here we need only concern ourselves with the two.  

 

After his time with the Fairfield boys Elie continued his Anarcho-Syndicalist tendencies and with his brother was involved with the Paris Commune, and later, through political connections, became a director of the Bibliotheque Nationale. Rebecca West sums up her father's relationship with Elie this way: 

"Naturally, my father [Charles Fairfield] was in part Elie Reclus all his life long. Of course, Elie failed in his intention of instilling into his pupils no idea contrary to their mother's faith. It is true that my father was a Tory, but of the extreme sort which exalts the individual and would give the state hardly any powers at all, which is very close to anarchism, as conservatism often is today. When William F. Buckley junior tells his students that the only thing the state should be allowed to do is to regulate currency, he is making a remark which most of the great anarchists of the past would have happily endorsed. Since my father was so largely Elie Reclus, so am I, and that is why I have a certain insight into the mind of Dr. Atl, who had certainly read the works of the Reclus brothers and claimed to have been closely acquainted with both of them, and probably with truth, for they were always surrounded by anarchist sympathizers from all parts of the world, including a number from Latin America."
          

Some say Rebecca is, at least, expanding on her relationship with her father when she credits so much rubbing off of personality, but what was in her mind is guesswork at this point. I expect, (and I'm not alone); she had a father fixation. She does, certainly, romanticize him. And if that leaves her open to the critique of reaction-formation with the men in her life, well, I expect there's not too much room for argument there. Nobody's perfect.   

There was plenty about her father's story that could use a clean-up. Born the son of a British army officer in County Kerry, he had enlisted in the Army at the age of 17 and became a lieutenant. Gambling got him booted out of the Army. ...While working as secretary to the Soldier's Daughters' Home in Whitehall, he re-visited the Royal United Services Institute, which he had visited while in the Army and which contained a valuable collection of books, coins and badges. To bail himself out of gambling debts, he stole and sold a huge cashe of it's collection, was caught, and served five years hard labor. After prison, there is a lose of ten years, at least as far as my research is concerned. Is there any record of those years? I'd love to know. Was it during that time that he enlisted in the Confederate Army in America as a stretcher bearer? And was it after that episode in this life that he went to Mexico to see the Volcanoes?   

Ten years after he left prison he migrated to Australia, where he met Isabella Campbell Mackenzie, a Scot whose brother was the principal of London’s Royal Academy of Music. Fairfield was “a skilled horseman and a gifted orator”*..and charming. He and Isabella were married and moved back to London. Enough time elapsed for them to have three children, all girls, Cicely-Rebecca being the youngest. However, by the time they settled in Streatham, a district in south London, “Charles’s womanizing and squandering had led to a breakdown in the relationship. It was no longer a happy marriage.”*

*West's World: The Extraordinary Life of Dame Rebecca West;  Lorna Gibb;  Macmillan. 

 

What we know is that Charles Fairfield knew Elie Reclus well. Do we know that Dr. Atl and either one or both of the Reclus brothers knew each other? As far as I can tell Rebecca wants us to believe so. We do know that the Reclus brothers were two of the prime movers of Anarcho-syndicalism. And we know that Charles mentioned in a letter that he had met Dr. Atl. But as to a real physical meeting I'm not sure. ...I see it this way. It was a much smaller world in those days, and all three were in Paris at that time, perhaps the 1890s. Dr. Atl made it a point to hear Henri Bergson speak on several if not many occasions, and it is almost certain that both Reclus brothers did the same. Is there a connection between Anarchism, Revolution, Bergson's Elan Vital and volcanic activity? I think that element can be safely included on metaphoric grounds. As for his adoption of the Anarchist-syndicalist faith, West has this to say; 

"This was the most fashionable of all socialist theories at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. To apply the current test, it would certainly have been asked to a Truman Capote party, while Marxism, though well established, was just a little too dowdy for that, and social democracy, of the sort which has won in Great Britain, [circa 1960] would never have hoped to do more than read about the festivities in the newspapers." 

Born in 1875 into a wealthy Mexican family, when he was 21 his father sent Gerard Murillo to Rome to study law and philosophy, which he did, but at the same time he became more and more involved with painting, his first love, and, as West says, 

"Working for some time in Paris teaching studios, [Dr. Atl] adopted the Anarcho-Syndicalist faith. Of the nature of his treasured faith, Anarchism, most people will have to be reminded, for it is no longer modish. It rejected parliamentary Socialism in favor of a society formed of self-governing unions of urban and rural workers who minded their own business and left a minimum of power to the state, which it hoped to confine almost entirely to the conduct of international relations."       

 

In Europe, in addition to painting, he studied philosophy and law at the University of Rome, and heard Bergson lecture in Paris. In Italy he worked for the Socialist newspaper Avanti and became involved with Socialist causes. In 1902 he changed his name to Dr. Atl..  Here's Rebecca on the name change;

" ...[and]...he early changed his name to Atl, which is a word in the Aztec language, Nahuatl. That it means water, sperm, urine, brain-stuff, cranium, head, and war suggests that conversation in Nahuatl must be a risky game; but indeed, an idea can be seen passing in a stately way through these definitions, moving from an essential fluid (one without then one within man), extending to the idea of man's essential part, the intellect, and ending with what the Indians conceived to be man's essential occupation." 

 

In 1906 having returned to Mexico and connected with Diego Rivera, Francisco de la Torre and Rafael Ponce de Leon the three put together an exhibition of paintings sponsored by the editors of the magazine 'Savia Moderna'. Atl issued a manifesto calling for the development of a monumental public art movement in Mexico linked to the lives and interests of the Mexican people, a precursor of the Mexican Mural Movement launched in 1933. He was also commissioned by the Diaz government to design a glass curtain for the institute of Fine Arts under construction in Mexico City, which he did and which was executed by Tiffany's of New York. The curtain featured the two volcanoes overlooking the capital. 

He returned to Europe in 1911, and, in Paris, founded the newspaper Action d’Art, which related European Socialism to the political situation in Mexico. During the same period he printed a flyer against Victoriano Huerta; and also found time to study Vulcanology. 

 

 

On his second return home to Mexico Dr. Atl joined the Revolution on the side of the Constitutionalist forces led by Venustiano Carranza and through Carranza was appointed Director of the Academy of San Carlos, which, because he felt it was outdated and didn't belong with the Revolution, he immediately shut down. He founded the newspaper Accion Mundial and a journal entitled America. During the Revolution, he persuaded two young art students, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros, to join the Carrancistas and illustrated La Vanguardia, the Carrancista official paper.  

 

 

The following is taken from a talk given in Mexico by the artist and teacher Lucinda Mayo:

 

"The Revolution rejected the euro-centric direction the Mexican government had held onto into the 19th and early 20th century. Post-Revolution there was a new interest in Mexico's rich indigenous past and the current popular arts, music, arts and crafts, and folk dancing.  Dr. Atl prepared a two-volume study, Folk Arts in Mexico, published by the  government in 1922. No single artist influenced the 20th century Mexican art revolution as much as he, and – as Diego Rivera said, Atl “...was one of the most curious people ever born on the entire American continent. 

"He has the most picturesque story of any painter, impossible to even begin relating without filling several volumes. He introduced aesthetic theories, painted the finest colorful sensations with incredible brush strokes, led strikes, wrote criticism that set off sparks, agitated the populace, swindled morons, borrowed all his friends’ cameras,  organized their exhibits, and without having a cent, somehow subsidized dozens of them, while feeding them huge bowls of macaroni! He reinvented solid oil colors with Mexican minerals, planned businesses, formulated government programs, prepared presidents, "'...and got all my canvases sold at one time, so I could go to Europe.'"
 

Atl had a long career in Mexico as a landscape painter, often painting volcanoes* as part of his landscape. And he was a writer. In 1950 he wrote the book, "How a Volcano is Born and Grows - Paricutin, in which he told of witnessing that volcano's irruption in 1943, during which his leg was injured, later having to be amputated. He wrote about the Revolution. He even wrote a Novella, La Perla, which influenced John Steinbeck to write a similar novel, also called The Pearl. He had a famous, perhaps notorious affair with Carmen Mondragon, a movie actress turned poet and painter, who he called "Nahui Olin", a symbol of Aztec renewal meaning "four movements", the symbol of earthquakes. Long before he died in 1964 he had become a famous and beloved part of the cultural life of  twentieth century Mexico.   

*All active volcanoes of Mexico are listed in many places so you needn't rely on me for your volcanic literacy. The nearest I can tell there are 48 Volcanoes in Mexico. Mexico's volcanoes are part of the Pacific Ring of Fire and formed on the North American continental tectonic plate under which the oceanic Pacific and (in the south) Cocos plates are being subducted.
The most active volcanoes of the country are Popocatepetl, Colima and El Chichon, which had a major eruption in 1982 that cooled the world's climate in the following year. (I remember taking close note of that occurrence because I was, being way ahead of the pack, worried about Global Warming. Since then I've found other things to worry about.)

 

By now Amazon knows of my relationship with Rebecca and the other day sent me an offer I couldn't refuse, The Essential Rebecca West; uncollected prose put out by someone called Pearhouse Press, Inc., a selected collection of 16 book reviews and 7 essays, ...for me it's just a perfect bunch, a great gift to myself. Full of humor, ...and "off the nose" criticisms. (Off the nose being a term from jazz, or swing, or someplace, meaning coming in a little before or after the beat..., drum, bass, whatever..rhythm.) Among the essays is an extract from 'Survivors', "Cortez Meets Montezuma", which not only works well in 'Survivors', but just as well in this collection, book-ended by two smart essays on writing. For that piece she did a lot of reading, mainly from the writings of Bernal Diaz del Castillo, a soldier with Cortez on that fateful trip for Montezuma.  

 

Prof. Schweizer says it well in his introduction to Survivors in Mexico,  

"As in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, West brings her conventional historical material to life with brilliant interpretations and creative narrative extrapolations. She embellishes Bernal Diaz's stolid account of Cortes's first interview with Montezuma, for instance, so ingeniously as to shed a revealingly new, personal light on this fateful encounter." 

Bernal Diaz, who's writing she must have read carefully and with enthusiasm judging from the way she drew from it, was with Cortez on that expedition. Diaz, born in 1492, the beginning of the age of discovery, was an astronaut of his day. Colonialism was in its infancy and Europe was in dire need of gold.* Without it Western Civilization was going down the tubes, something that Marxists of today might wish had happened, but leaving that behind......,

*Probably one reason why there were so many alchemists around in those days.  

 

In The Essential Rebecca West there is an introduction by Anne Bobby, an American actress, who explains to her fellow readers who Rebecca West was since according to Bobby no-one had ever heard of her. [Well, O.K., My father was a Yugoslav,  ...and..., everyone's heard of H.G. Wells..., I guess, because of Tom Cruise...] 

As soon as Anne Bobby heard about Rebecca West she set about writing a one-woman show about her, starring, well, Anne Bobby. Of course she had help, probably lots of help, from Carl Rollyson and a grand-niece of Rebecca's, Helen Atkinson. For me though, there was one particular problem with the intro and that was a quote from the play. Is it from Rebecca West, or the playwrights? But wait, it sounds familiar. I went to my copy of Rollyson's The Literary Legacy of Rebecca West, to the end of the book, and there it was in the first few pages of chapter nine. 

Anne Bobby introduces the quote in the following paragraph;  "I remember a line from the play in which Rebecca traveling in Mexico with her husband, Henry, visits Trotsky's grave, and in speaking with his grandson feels the idea for what would have been her last book, her,  "Final algebra of human suffering...," take shape;

"I would tell (Trotsky's) story, and mixed into it...would be my marriage, my family background and Henry's, the Aztecs, Meso-American art, the Spanish conquest, Cortes and Montezuma, even Napoleon. For we were all exiles and survivors...Though it was a huge pyramid of a book to scale, I hardly noticed."  

Is that a direct Rebecca West quote? The last sentence in particular? If it is it must have come from Rollyson's research, or from that chapter, which, by the way, is fine by me.   

  

West's first trip to Mexico was in 66. My first trip across the border was in 1963, having hitch-hiked from Amagansett, N.Y. to Laredo, Texas. My impressions though were registered on a muddled if not blank slate of a mind, since I hadn't bothered to learn much of anything up to that time. I was twenty and stoned. Rebecca West was 74 and she had been reading and retaining ferociously for probably 70 years.

 

On her first trip to Mexico, stopping in Mexico City, they spent that  evening and several more watching the sunset from the penthouse restaurant of an expensive hotel, followed the next day by a chauffeured tour of the city and it's parks and monuments. 

One Sunday morning the driver took them to the Diego Rivera Museum, which is not the beautiful civilization that Bernal Diaz saw but a carefully arrayed ruins, austere and solemn. Inside the museum she felt a certain feeling of the interior of a pyramid. The shadowed walls were being used as a background for beautiful pottery and sculpture, 

""which were also grey and black, [but], went for nothing because they had been designed to stand in bright light or against bright colours; and since the intention of many of them was comic, they were as disconcerting as Rowlandson* drawings would be hanging in a crematorium." 

*[Thomas Rowlandson, 1757 - 1827 English artist and caricaturist of the Georgian Era.]    

 

She gives a brief biography of Kahlo without much enthusiasm, but then she can't help interpreting Frida's work, and it ends up that she sees Kahlo as beautiful and crazy; a schizophrenic-narcissistic slightly silly but competent artist. (Can you be schizophrenic and narcissistic at the same time?) Then as they continue driving through the city she lets loose with the following zinger which I love. They drove but she had  "...no idea for how long. It is odd that the evolution of our species never implanted a clock in our brains which would have been most serviceable, but perhaps Teihard de Chardin could have proved that this omission showed a divine care for the populations of Switzerland and Waterbury, Connecticut. [No footnotes for that, you're on your own.]    

But she's not through with Kahlo yet and after seeing her in a certain dress and learning the story of the dress, the China Poblano dress, she tells how China Poblano became a saint in the minds of the people and Frida Kahlo too, a saint in the eyes of the mythologizing cab driver, who lets her know in no uncertain terms that she, Kahlo, was "....so good, so kind. Think of what she and her husband did for Trotsky." 

It isn't far from the Rivera museum to Coyoacan , but West uses that cab ride as an introduction to the story of Trotsky's last days. And she tells the story with great sympathy for someone she believes was a great man. Was Rebecca West in love with Trotsky? I think she says as much somewhere but I've searched back and haven't found the exact spot, but Carl Rollyson says as much in his last chapter of The Literary Legacy of Rebecca West, a sensitive critique of Rebecca's last years, 1967-1983.

*

P.S. Notes:  I do think that in her time, (it was my time too, though I was much younger; I still, with the help of clarification by my parents, understood the social import of Trotskyism), to align yourself with Trotsky if you were on the Anti-Stalinist left, was the only sensible thing to do.

Was Rebecca over emphasizing her romantic feelings for Trotsky;  perhaps as a charm offensive on her Communist sympathizing fellow Socialists? Why did she continue to call her self a Socialist? I suppose she thought there was no alternative, particularly in terms of taking care of the poor; but I do enjoy imagining her spending time with William F. Buckley, [which she did], and in the evening having a drink and letting her hair down, so to speak.