I
MEET SCOTLAND YARD
Nathan Adler
IF
THEY HADN'T ASSASSINATED
Alexander of Yugoslavia and Premier
Barthou that festive day in Marseille; if the Duk:e of Kent hadn't decided
to marry the Princess Marina in mid-November, I might be taking tea
today in London and shaking hands with Picadilly or whatever it is every
good American does in England if he doesn't fly to Paris. Perhaps I'm
wrong; perhaps Scotland Yard had other reasons for deporting me.
It's likely, though, that the wireless story in the
New York Times
is true.
T he bullets of that embittered Croati_an ricocheted and affected a young
New Yorker setting out to discover the world anew and making a literary
pilgrimage to England.
For a long time I have wanted to write a book about D. H. Lawrence.
I think: of him as a man who lost his class; who, in the struggle between
his mother and father, transcended the Freudian implications of the per–
sonal conflict and was forced to choose between the class goals that his
parents represented. In doing so he anticipated by at least ten years some.
of the main currents of fascist consciousness. Towards the end I think
he recognized his mistake.
When I received an assignment to cover the British Film Industry
for a New York trade paper, I jumped at the chance. I felt it would
give me an opportunity to learn the English background I wanted so much
to know. I thought also of those English young men, many of whom
have not yet passed their twenty-fifth birthday, who are becoming the
musclemen and thugs for the Mosley fascists. I wanted to meet these
young men. I have k:nown my fellow twenty-four year olds along Sixth
Avenue and in the coffee pots, in New York; jobless, hoping something
will happen, saying something must happen, they don't care what,-even
war, so long as it happens, so long as it is different, so long as it isn't the
terrifying paralysis that is now destroying them.
Like many another person setting out to a foreign country I fortified
myself with letters of introduction. To a prominent literary agent from
a New York publisher, to a respectable and not too significant novelist,
to the son of a British Lord, a leading movie critic in London, to John
Strachey, to the editors of
Left R eview,
a Marxist literary magazine.
I also carried a letter to Sergei Eisenstein in Moscow, where I planned to
stop. These letters were to brand me as a dangerous conspirator, and,
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