Jerusalem Commands

INTRODUCTION

I MUST APOLOGISE to readers who did not expect to wait some eight years between the second and third volumes of Colonel Pyat’s memoirs and I hope they will forgive me when they understand the difficulties involved in preparing his papers for publication, in transcribing tape-recordings and fitting those into some sort of chronology. Meanwhile my own work had to be done, so it was not until February of 1986 that I found time to travel to Morocco and then to Egypt, taking part of Pyat’s own journey by sea and by land (being lucky enough to rediscover the now dry Zazara Oasis), ultimately to Marrakech. Here the Colonel’s account of the fabulous court of El Glaoui, Pasha of Marrakech, differs somewhat from Gavin Young’s sketch in Lords of the Atlas.

Once again, in Marrakech and the settlements of the Sub-Sahara, I was fortunate, meeting many people willing to help in my research. Several of these remembered the Colonel as ‘Max Peters’. Many older people, I discovered, revered him. They said he was the greatest Hollywood star of all. They were disgusted, they said, by the jealous rumours suggesting he was Jewish. Yet in Egypt scarcely anyone knew of him. I was lucky enough to talk to a retired English policeman in Majorca. He had been in the Egyptian Service under Russell Pasha (whose memoirs also confirm much of Pyat’s account) during the time Colonel Pyat was in that country and remembered many of the facts almost identically, especially in relation to the drug- and slave-trades. Apart from their variant points of view, the facts and names agree in important detail and further research, in The Egyptian Times and other papers of the day, make it clear that ‘al-Habashiya’ was a well-known character, controlling Cairo’s red-light district and with interests in every wicked business from Timbuktoo to Baghdad. Sir Ranalf Steeton and the other Englishmen Pyat mentions are more elusive, although Steeton undoubtedly ran some kind of film-distribution business, and, of course, we have all heard of Quelch’s brother.

My retired policeman vaguely remembered a Max Peters. When I mentioned Jacob Mix, however, he became enthusiastic. ‘The embassy chap. CIA, wasn’t it?’ He had known Mr Mix well, he said, not in Egypt but in Casablanca just at the beginning of the war, and they had kept in touch. The colonel’s old friend was now retired and living in Mexico. I was astonished at this revelation and excited, for here was someone who could, if they had wished, have told Maxim Arturovitch Pyatnitski’s story from a very different perspective.

As soon as I was back in England I wrote to Mr Mix and we corresponded. That correspondence was extremely helpful in assembling the present volume, but it was not until May 1991 that I was able to get to his part of Mexico, and make the journey to the village where Mr Mix lived ‘in heavenly exile’, just outside Chapala, on the shores of the beautiful polluted lake.

Mr Mix had retained the so-called ‘Ashanti’ good looks Pyat had described, though his beard and hair were pure white so that I was unwittingly reminded of the benign Uncle Remus in Disney’s Song of the South. Until he spoke, it was hard to believe he had been an American spy. He was courteous in a delicate, old-fashioned way, typical of Southerners of his generation, and his quiet irony was also familiar. In spite of his advanced years, he was relatively fit. Certainly he was happy to talk as much as he could about his time with Colonel Pyatnitski, of whom, he said, he had fond memories.

Mr Mix admitted that Pyatnitski often made Adolf Hitler seem like Mother Theresa but said he had remained fascinated by him partly because of the contradictions, but the main reason for his staying with the Colonel was, he said, entirely self-interested. ‘The man was plain lucky,’ said Jacob Mix, laughing. ‘I held tight to him the way you hold on to a rabbit’s foot.’ He confirmed that the Colonel had, indeed, won fame as a film-star in B-Westerns and serial ‘programmers’ for several shoe-string independent producers of ‘Gower Gulch’ (the Hollywood location of most such operations) and showed me a box-office placard in full colour, with vivid reds and yellows, solid blacks. It was for a film called Buckaroo’s Code and showed a mounted cowboy, a bandanna veiling the lower half of his face, waving out at the audience. The film starred Ace Peters and was from a studio called DeLuxe. It was clearly from the period of the mid-1920s. Sol Lessor, whom I knew in the late 50s, mentioned his involvement with a fly-by-night outfit making dozens of cheap Westerns and adventure movies for theatres that needed to show at least two features, a serial, a cartoon and a newsreel to remain competitive. Mr Mix also let me see a cigarette card issued in England by Wills and Co. - a cowboy in a tall white Stetson, with a dark bandanna hiding his nose, mouth and chin, with the caption Ace Peters as THE FLYIN’ BUCKAROO (DeLuxe). There had been other memorabilia, said Mr Mix, but most of it had been lost when, shortly after his retirement, his flat in Rome was set on fire.

I had never thought I would associate Colonel Pyat with one of my childhood heroes. Many boys who grew up in postwar Britain read the exploits of The Masked Buckaroo in the weekly and monthly ‘penny dreadfuls’ of the day. Although he originated in America, he survived longer in Britain. Like Buck Jones, The Masked Buckaroo was a potent folk-hero. Jones had been forgotten in America after his death in the famous Coconut Grove fire in 1944, but survived in the UK with his own magazine until about 1960. The Masked Buckaroo magazine itself folded in 1940 due to a shortage of newsprint. Colonel Pyat had a few tattered copies from the 20s and 30s and they are seen rarely, even in specialist catalogues. My own collection was inherited from my uncle, a great Western enthusiast.

I mentioned to Jacob Mix that in his fashion Colonel Pyat had spoken highly of him. This made the old Intelligence agent laugh heartily. He remembered Max’s praise, he said. He was as helpful as he could be and some of his detailed information was invaluable in making sense of parts of Pyat’s manuscript. Sadly, Mr Mix died very soon after we had enjoyed his company and hospitality and is now buried in the ‘Protestant Cemetery’ near Chapala.

With no experience of formal religion I found the colonel’s views often baffling and frequently primitive. He argued that any social stability we had was due to our efforts to make the best of God’s gifts. We were duty bound to maintain and extend that stability. For me Pyat’s argument, that entropy is the natural condition of the firmament and that the physical universe, being in a perpetual state of flux, was not an environment friendly to sentient life, though couched in modern scientific terms, had a somewhat mediaeval ring. ‘Constant change is the paramount rule of the universe,’ he claimed. ‘To reduce the rate of entropy, we must make enormous efforts, using skill, intelligence and morality to create a little justice, a little harmony, from the stuff of Chaos.’ His flying cities represented a kind of clearing in the universal turmoil. He valued the ideals and institutions of democracy, he said, ‘as embodied in the pre-war United States’. The only cause to which he subscribed at his death was, I discovered, Greenpeace. ‘I shared my love of nature with all the real Nazi leaders,’ he told me. ‘We were great conservationists long before it became fashionable.’ He claimed he himself had played an important part in a successful recycling scheme in Germany but when I asked him for details he became oddly elusive and changed the subject entirely, asking me if I knew the German rhyme from The Juniper Tree by Grimm.

This was a typical strategy of his, veering off into an exotic literary byway or contentious political track so that anyone who had come too close to some truth he was in danger of recognising in himself would be carried into fascinating excursions or bound from conscience to respond to some of his more reactionary outbursts. It could also have been that I was not always sensitive to every associative leap he made - from recycling to Grimm, for instance - and it is when I have doubts of this kind that I wonder if I am perhaps the best editor for these memoirs. At such times I am seriously tempted to abandon the whole thing - lock, stock, barrel, papers, tapes, notes, scrapbooks and all the half-festering, crumbling, encrusted bits and pieces of that old man’s extraordinary life, most of which dates from before he was forty. After he settled in England he had few very dramatic adventures.

I cannot claim that Pyat’s ravings make any great sense to me - it was hard enough to follow him in interview when I could ask him for dates or clarifications - but the family claims he makes perfect sense and if so I suppose it’s fair to say I lack their imaginative gifts or, indeed, their considerable experience. I really had no idea what Pyat’s memoirs would reveal nor can I guess why the family spend so much needless time and money on useless lawsuits. My rights were not merely moral but legal. I have the colonel’s own letters giving me his papers in trust until such time as I have edited them into what he called ‘our Mrs Cornelius book’. His story will go up to 1940, when he arrived in England, whereupon I am to offer the papers to the Bodleian Library, Oxford, where they will be available to any bona fide researcher. The tapes, however, remain my property. This has now at last been established through a long process of law and I hope we can all return to our normal lives without rancour. I for one am distressed at the enmity I have earned from a family whose interests I believed I faithfully served, much as I have served Colonel Pyat’s. It does not seem to me either respectful of the dead or of the truth to obscure the ‘negative’ side of a biographical subject. I say once more and for the last time - I never wished to show the slightest ill will towards any member of the family, especially Mrs Cornelius, for whose memory I continue to hold the greatest affection and admiration.

But spades, as Colonel Pyat often insisted, must be called spades and if A Notting Hill Family was not completely flattering to Frank or Jerry, neither did it trivialise them. This study was my first non-fiction and I do not deny that as a thesis it perhaps deserved its success but as a popular book it gave something of a false impression of the family and I did everything I could to make amends in the many books which followed that first one’s wholly unexpected success.

Part of Colonel Pyat’s fascination for a person like myself, with almost wholly contradictory views, was his larger than life manner and concerns. Everything was always marvellous, grandiose, romantic, and perhaps in some ways I remain the best medium for a man possessed of such a vivid and singular imagination.

I cannot, however, explain his lapses into foreign languages (he was not wholly fluent in any and I have reproduced parts of his manuscripts exactly as he wrote them) and there is no consistent reason for his using them, except where he describes some of his sexual adventures (almost always in French). As for his racialism, my own views and actions on the subject are a matter of record, but I was duty bound to keep some of his to me quite disgusting opinions. Sadly, his is a voice which did not die in 1945 and seems to have more echoes now than at any time since the end of the War.

More than once, in the past eight years, my wife has mentioned how like my subject I have grown and I must admit the thought was distasteful, since I have so little in common with him, but I have observed in mental hospitals how the traits of one patient can be passed on to another until the imitated symptoms become as established as the real, so it is indeed possible that frequent exposure both to Colonel Pyat and everything he left behind did have some effect, although I was insulted by one critic’s suggestion that I had failed to distinguish between myself and my subject.

Lastly I should mention the considerable debt I owe to my wife, who helped especially with the additional research, to John Blackwell, whose steady eye and sound judgement got me through some of the worst times, and to Langdon Jones, who so successfully reconstructed Mervyn Peake’s Titus Alone and whose remarkable skills were invaluable in putting this book together. I would like to thank those already mentioned in previous volumes, together with friends in Egypt - especially ‘Black-and-White Josef, Mustafa el-Bayoumi, Colonel ‘Johnny’ Said and the El Fawzi family, all of whom helped keep me on Pyat’s trail, to ‘Rabia and her sisters, her mother, grandmother and brothers, for their wonderful hospitality and help as I followed the colonel to Marrakech; to Jean-Marie Fromental, who was able to verify much of what Pyat reported of 1920s Marrakech. Thanks also to ‘Mad Jack’ Parker, The Ephemera King of Crawley, who was able to supply me, from his own stock, several pictures of Ace Peters as The Masked Buckaroo. I must also recognise the special help of Sir Alan and Lady Taylor for invaluable information about Egypt, of the Manchester Savoyards, Francesca V. (‘El Enaño’) Luce-Maria and Jesus of Ajijic, Old Doc Gibson of Delaware, Captain Robert Harding, Lord Shapiro and Waterbury Pasha, whom I visited at his home near Reading to look through his remarkable collection, much of which, he claimed, came from the famous al-Habashiya house after it was opened up by the Nasser authorities in 1957. It is not something I would wish to do again. All I shall say here is that I feel able to vouch for the substance of Pyat’s story but must leave it to readers to make what they wish of his interpretations.

Michael Moorcock

December 1991