BOOKS
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Europe was in full retreat. Trotsky turned his full invective against this
"coquettish moralist," even though Serge had been close
to
him and had
translated six of his books into French. Serge (Trotsky wrote) was a
poet, that is
to
say not a person
to
be taken seriously, a "bridge from
revolution to reaction." Serge did not reply. The whole affair turned
into an
ad hominem
attack and Weissman notes that when Serge pub–
lished in
Partisan Review
an article called "Marxism in Our Time,"
Trotsky wrote about it "without any evidence of having read it." Serge
faced social and political ostracism during the Paris years; most pub–
lishers did not want his books. When he wanted
to
find work as a
proofreader the Communist unions tried
to
declare a strike.
On the day the Germans entered Paris, Serge left for the south of
France with his son Vlady; like so many others he was helped by Varian
Fry in Marseilles. Another lifeline, according to the biographers, was the
Partisan Review
fund for European writers and artists, established mainly
by Nancy and Dwight Macdonald. It was Serge's fourth exile and seventh
flight in twenty years. The stay in Marseilles lasted far longer than antic–
ipated.
It
proved to be impossible
to
get even a U.S. transit visa for him
because of his anarchist past; having been a member of the CPSU, an
executive member of the Communist International, and even one of the
Red Army General staff (during the civil war in Russia) may have been
less a hindrance after the Soviet Union became an ally. Serge left Mar–
seilles in
1941
and, after some further adventures lasting several months,
reached Mexico by way of Martinique and the Dominican Republic.
The fall of France is described in one of his novels
(The Long Dusk),
written in Marseilles while waiting for his visa; it was the only one of his
novels published in English in his li fetime. A very young Irving Howe
reviewed it in
Partisan Review,
saying that Serge was one of the still–
responsive survivors of a destroyed generation who had retained his
socialist convictions tempered by a warming humanism. Howe did not
think very highly of the literary value of the book ("neither his political
work nor his novels are as significant as the man himself"), but he con–
cluded, "Others will write better novels on these themes but
to
few will
we respond so warmly." Serge's life in Mexico was anything but trouble
free. All his life he lived in dire poverty. Small fees from articles pub–
lished in the U.S. (in
Politics, Partisan Review, New Leader,
and
Mod–
ern Review)
were a lmost his only income; he felt very lonely; and the
Stalinists, as before, were out
to
get him. He spent a considerable
amount of time defending himself against various Stalinist calumnies.
Serge continued
to
write fiction as well as nonfiction (mainly on the
Soviet Union and its future), but he had no certainty that what he wrote
