Communism and other disasters
Adam Zamoyski
VOLCANO AND MIRACLE: A SELECTION OF FICTION AND NON-FICTION FROM `THE JOURNAL WRITTEN AT NIGHT' by Gustaw Herling, selected and translated by Ronald Strom Viking £18, pp. 273 Gustaw Herling Grudzinski was born in Poland just after the first world war. The second, coming when he was barely 20, propelled him through a range of experi- ence that included two years in a Soviet Gulag on the White Sea and three of active service in the Polish army. After laying down his arms in 1945, he took up the pen.
His book A World Apart, prefaced by Bertrand Russell, was one of the first, and remains one of the greatest, pieces of concentration-camp literature. It was a minor best-seller and was translated into several languages. Typically, Gallimard would not publish it, in spite of the support of Albert Camus, because it upset the cosy Sartrean view of the Soviet paradise.
Herling was also one of the founders of the Polish literary monthly Kultura, pub- lished in France, which was one of the great beacons of free thought and literary excellence in the night of Europe's division. Its influence radiated not only over the Polish and much of the Jewish diaspora, but also all over communist Poland, and into Russia and Czechoslovakia.
He left the editorial team soon after its foundation and came to live in London, and then in Munich, where he worked for Radio Free Europe. But in 1957 he went back to Kultura, to which he contributed a continuous stream of reportage, comment, literary criticism and fiction. Occasionally, he would deliver a literary masterpiece, such as the novella The Island, but most of The Journal Written at Night, as his regular contribution was headed, is more akin to a prolonged dialogue with his readers.
Herling is remarkably familiar with the languages, the literatures, and the cultural highways and byways of Europe. With breathtaking facility, he leaps from Dostoievsky and Kafka to classical authors, and from there to art and politics. And to just about anything else — the cats of Naples and a curiously evanescent love- affair in Venice with a criminal twist do not seem remotely out of place. For he is as much at home writing about the frescoes of Pinturiechio as about communism.
It is nevertheless communism, or rather totalitarianism, that lies at the heart of his preoccupations, as it must with any think- ing inhabitant of this century. He belongs to a generation that experienced it at very close quarters and sought not only to understand it but also to find alternatives to the spiritual void it created in its wake. He clearly saw that all believers in commu- nism or any of its sibling movements such as fascism, were destined to reach a state of despair when the new 'religion' failed to deliver. In one powerful piece he sees the events of 1968 as an explosion -of this despair — how many other commentators perceived this at the time?
Herling's interest in the problems of totalitarianism sits well with his other over- riding passion, the observation of events such as great plagues, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. He is fascinated by the dark caverns in man's nature, which are only revealed at moments of tremendous stress. As he observes the behaviour of the survivors of a southern Italian village, most of which has been obliterated by an earth- quake, or delves into the archives concern- ing the Neapolitan plague of 1656 (with Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year in one hand), he draws some thought-provoking parallels between those situations and human interaction in the Gulag or during the Holocaust. Faced with man-made apocalypse or natural cataclysm, conven- tional forms of behaviour are similarly overtaken by darker reactions. Some of the best passages in this selection are set in the Mezzogiorno at moments of crisis, for it is there that some of these reactions come out into the open in the most spectacular ways, While the translation is generally excellent, the choice of the pieces in this selection is unfortunate. Most of them are of general interest and have an almost journalistic facility, and anyone will enjoy Herling on the liquefaction of the blood of St Januarius. But no doubt with the intention of giving a balanced picture of the Journal, the translator has included some that make sense only by reference to people, events and writings of which the average reader will have only a dim idea, if any. Footnotes, or at least a glossary, would have helped, and the absence of either is a serious flaw.
`.55-year-old fancying an 18-year-old . . . why can't we have some realism?'
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