The Laughter of Carthage

INTRODUCTION

IN THE FOUR and a half years since I finished editing the first volume of Colonel Pyat’s memoirs (Byzantium Endures) my own circumstances changed considerably. I became obsessed with discovering verification for some of Pyat’s claims after I received several letters from people who had known him before the War and whose memories of him were radically different. As a result my travels took me in his tracks and at one time it seemed I had condemned myself to continue his wanderings where he had left off in 1940. A retired Turkish bimbashi, one of Kemal’s revolutionary nationalists in 1920, assured me Pyat was an American renegade, a Zionist working for the British. Two vigorous octogenarians in Rome insisted he was a Polish Communist who planned to infiltrate the early fascist movement. In Paris it was generally agreed he was Russian, possibly a Jew, associated more with the criminal world than with the political underground. Not everyone knew him as Pyat (Piat or Pyate are variations). To several Berliners I met he was either Peterson or Pallenberg, but they readily confirmed that he was a scientist, an engineer. One German lady, presently living in Oxford, a Buchenwald survivor, was amused by my asking if she thought Pyat as successful as he claimed. She knew of at least one brilliantly successful invention, she said. Then she laughed and refused to continue. She had periods of mental instability.

In Kiev there are virtually no written records (since 1941 when the Nazis came) and even Babi Yar has no memorial (save the works of Yevtushenko and Antonov). It is part of a new autoroute. With its usual tact, the Ukrainian Soviet preferred not to recall an event which did not reflect well on Ukrainians in general (the Nazis were nowhere else offered the services of so many enthusiastic volunteers). America provided far more documentation, but this turned out to be as confusing as it was helpful. Some of the newspaper reports conflicted with Pyat’s stories, yet there is every reason to believe he was in a position to experience directly what the papers could only surmise. (Mrs Mawgan, for instance, is scarcely mentioned in the New York World anti-Klan campaign of 1921-23, but Mrs Tyler, whom Pyat dismisses in a line or two, is presented by the paper as one of the chief villains.) Similarly, the greasy, creased news-cuttings in Pyat’s own notebooks don’t necessarily confirm his statements written on nearby pages and unfortunately the dates and origins are frequently obscured or missing. One headline (possibly from the New Orleans Times-Picayune, late 1921) reads burns to investigate klan (about the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Investigation - pre-FBI - intending to take a thorough look at Klan affairs); the report verifies all Pyat says, except that the investigation began earlier than he claims. His accusations of bias and corruption are also frequently off-key. A case in point is that of The Memphis Commercial Appeal, which Pyat characterises as being ‘in the pocket’ of local politicians. In fact the Commercial Appeal won a Pulitzer Prize for its courageously relentless anti-Klan reporting and represents the considerable integrity of large numbers of Southerners who were outraged by and actively resisted Klan campaigns in, for instance, Mississippi, Tennessee, Alabama, even Georgia. (The Klan was far more successful in many Western States, including Texas and California, than ever it was in the Deep South).

Arkansas’s Carthage Democrat Gazette certainly mentions Major Sinclair’s airship in a piece headed local citizens aid flyers (Feb. 27, 1922) whereas I could find no record in The Kansas City Star of Pyat’s, by his own account, enormous reception there in 1923. Cuttings from The Toledo Blade, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, The Springfield Republican and The St Louis Globe Democrat all mention him as Peterson. The Indianapolis Times, The Dallas News and The New Orleans Times-Picayune are at best dismissive but frequently attack his ‘vile distortions’ of fact, his racial and religious bigotry. Sometimes Pyat seems to have failed to understand he was being condemned and proudly pasted the cutting into a position of prominence. The de Grion scandal of 1921 is mentioned in a Le Temps feature of the time and here M. Pyatnitski is described as a naturalised French subject. A piece headlined love blossoms as red terror rages turns out to be a theatre review from a Northern Californian newspaper in the Grass Valley region: Among the players in this moving musical drama were Mr Matthew Pallenberg, Miss Honoria Cornelius, Miss Ethel de Courcy and Miss Gloria Douglas.

My travels were not entirely wasted. They were of use when at last I settled down in a remote part of the Yorkshire Dales to try to make sense of the collection of manuscript I described in the first volume. I used my tapes of Pyat’s talks, a little of the other interview material from people I had met, but in the main again had to rely on the written work, discursive and repetitious as ever. While much of the earlier volume was written in Russian, a large proportion of this one was (except for sexual references, as always, in French) done in a peculiar semi-private language, predominantly English, Yiddish and German, with some Polish and Czech and a smattering of Turkish (as well as his ‘own’ largely untranslatable words) which characterises much of the material he himself identified as having been written between 1941 and 1947. There is nothing in Yiddish script. Again, without the help of M. G. Lobkowitz I could not have continued: Pyat, my friend believes, probably spoke all languages a little inexpertly, including Russian. Certainly his Yiddish, frequently mixed unconsciously with German and English, is a case in point. He claimed to have learned it when working for Jews in the Podol ghetto of Kiev.

Again I have retained a flavour of the original - spellings, grammar, polyglot ramblings and odd forms - together with a fraction (some might think too much) of his deranged outbursts. Where his opinions and interpretations changed radically, sometimes from page to page, as one bizarre rationalisation was replaced by another, I have let them stand, since they are the essential reflection of his personality. I have done my best not to make a specific choice or interpretation in the belief that another reader might easily understand something which I have failed to see.

It has not been easy to bring order to the work. Because of my own distaste for the majority of Pyat’s opinions, and the time involved, friends have frequently suggested I turn my ‘bequest’ over to an academic institution which could remain perhaps more objective. However Quixotic it seems, I insist that I made a promise to Maxim Arturovitch Pyatnitski to see his reminiscences into print. I feel I must keep that promise, in spite of the difficulties.

Special thanks to all those who gave their help in the preparation of this volume: to Linda Steele, John Blackwell, Giles Gordon, Rob Cowley, Robert Lanier, Helen Mullens, Javus Selim, ‘Petros’, Jean-Luc Fromental, Lily Stains, Dave Dixon, Paul Gamble, Mike Butterworth, Geoffrey Dymond, Mr and Mrs Chaykin, Mr and Mrs Jacobs, ‘Ma’ Ellison, Christian von Baudissin, François Landon, Freda Kron, Natalie Zimmermann, Lorris Murrail, Larry Snider (of California State University, Long Beach, Library), Sister Maria Santucci, Martin Stone, John Clute, Isla Venables, Professor S. M. Rose, and those others who have expressed their desire to remain anonymous.

Michael Moorcock

London S.W.

October 1983