Wednesday, November 13, 2019

Searching for Jan Valtin


Retirement is something you have to feel your way into.  It took me about a decade to realize its principal point for my life: that there is precious little that I am actually obliged to do.   I realize that I spent a professional career largely defined by deadlines, due dates, and the prompt appearance at duly scheduled meetings.  Furthermore, I felt obliged, in order to “keep up” with my field to read a lot of poorly conceived and poorly written scholarship that dispirited rather than enlightened me.  Just as I shall never have to grade another final examination, I shall never have to read another book on Queering the Quest or Questing the Queer?  Artistic Obfuscation of the Sexual Subject in the “Chivalric” Poems of Reinhardt von Eisenbach.  I can spend my time reading Longfellow’s “Song of Hiawatha,” which is how I spent some happy hours during the last week.  Talk about multicultural!  Anyway, the unfortunate feeling of pressing obligation made its unwelcome though thankfully brief return last week.  This is how it came about.

Ten years ago I published a book, The Anti-Communist Manifestos, in which I studied the political and cultural impact in the United States and in France of four best-selling books of anti-Communist tendency.  Probably the least known of the four—although it had been the best-selling book in America in 1941—was Out of the Night by Jan Valtin (the pseudonym of a German sailor named Richard Krebs).    I hope it is not immodest to say that my book has played a role in animating a certain scholarly interest in Valtin/Krebs, a rather mysterious figure who claimed to have been a Communist espionage agent and who was accused by some enemies of being a Gestapo agent.  Together with one of the leading French historians of Communism, Guillaume Bourgeois of the University of Poitiers, I had planned to help organize an international scholarly conference devoted to him.  Serious illness has for the last year somewhat curtailed my activities, however, and I am unable just for the moment to travel to France to participate in my “own” conference.  Bummer.

But Guillaume had the idea that I might at least be present as some kind of spectral presence on a screen; I could send a short contribution by video.  In my professorial life I had naturally given video-recorded lectures many times.  But always I had behind me the technical resources of a university’s Audio-Visual Department or of the private corporation that was paying for the lectures.  Now I had to try to come up with something on very short notice.  I didn’t think my phone, even if I could miraculously learn how to use it, was the right tool for the right job.  How fortunate for me then that my elder son Richard is a sound-recording engineer, and indeed one of the best in the trade.  Sound engineers are not of course the same as videographers, but the two work together and complement each other.  As luck would have it Rich was briefly between assignments in distant parts and proved his filial affection by agreeing to help me out even at the expense of upending his family plans.  So I am grateful not only to him, but to a wonderful daughter-in-law and granddaughter, who tolerated the disturbance.

So on Monday afternoon Rich arrived at my house lugging a large, heavy, stoutly built box containing the state-of-the-art video camera he had borrowed from a brother in the trade.  Taken from this box and assembled, it was one of the most magnificent pieces of techie equipment I had ever seen.  Rich told me that it costs $50,000, of which the lens accounts for four-fifths.  I hope that this was hyperbole, but fear it probably wasn’t.  When it comes to a borrower or a lender being, I am a flat-out Polonian.  My mind was haunted by memories of the Maupassant short story of the lost borrowed necklace.  I was glad to get definitive word that Rich got the precious instrument safely back to Brooklyn.

I had spent so much energy fretting about how it might be possible to produce a video in forty-eight hours that I had given practically no thought to what I would actually say should we be able to find the necessary equipment.  But I did have a couple of hours to sit and think about it, and I was able to jot down a few notes, gather a few show-and-tell items, and stretch out a rather minimalist youtube presentation  to nearly half an hour.  The big question about Out of the Night, which must remain the fundamental written text for any study of Krebs, involves its historical reliability.  It was presented to the public as straight autobiography, but I have had to conclude that it is largely a work of fiction.  Like many novels it is enriched by the author’s personal experience, but as an “historical document”—the category to which its author and publisher assigned it in 1940—it doesn’t come close to passing the smell test.  One of the Irish bishops is supposed to have remarked of Gulliver’s Travels, at the time of its publication, that there were parts of the work he could not fully credit.  Let us say I have a similar reaction to Valtin’s book, though that is far from the reaction of many of its readers.  I pursued this theme, along with a couple of others, in my little talk; and although in the video my son Rich was not able to transform his paternal pig’s ear into a silk purse, he did come up with something surprisingly plausible.  What a great guy!

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