Chancellor s Lectures 2015 From my Prison Cell Reflections in captivity on life, faith and death

Transcription

1 Chancellor s Lectures 2015 From my Prison Cell Reflections in captivity on life, faith and death Lecture Four, Thursday 21 May Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the fourth in my series of Chancellor s lectures for 2015: From my Prison Cell Reflections in captivity on life, faith and death. This is the final lecture, so by twenty past seven you will have your freedom; unless that is, you d like to attend next Tuesday s Question and Answer session. Note that I said Tuesday, not Thursday the26th May, at 6.30pm, in Vicars Hall rather than the Cathedral. Questions and comments submitted in advance are appreciated, but sight unseen on the night is fine too. So far this series has focused almost entirely on men; men who frequently expressed the pain of separation from their wives and families. Tonight s final lecture, however, will focus on two women who wrote about their ideas, experiences and feelings while imprisoned during the catastrophic events of the French Revolution and the Holocaust respectively. I refer to Marie-Jeanne Roland (usually referred to as Madam Roland ) and Anne Frank. [slide] Because the traumatic periods in which they wrote are of continued fascination, their reputation has been bound up with their value as witnesses to wider historical events. This is understandable, but I want to emphasize their significance as authors and personalities in their own right. In the past, Madame Roland has tended to be admired as a political heroine because she dedicated her writing skills to her husband s career, and then died via the guillotine a victim of the very revolutionary violence she helped to ferment. It is true she had insisted on playing a supportive, behind the scenes role, but in prison, when it became clear that both her political cause and her very life were lost, she took a rather different approach. As she wrote about her life, she reclaimed the attribution of work previously accepted as her husband s, brought to life her true role in the early revolutionary movement, and from behind bars seemed paradoxically to find new freedom as a writer. Anne Frank s diary recorded her present and future concerns because she was too young to focus on the past. Unlike Madam Roland, she never saw herself as an important witness to history. That, however, is what she has become, in helping to shed light on the impact of the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam, on a Jewish family forced into hiding to avoid deportation and death. She wrote to comfort herself, and to find her voice, hoping to use her diary after the war to write a book. Her diary uses 1

2 a letter form, enabling her to construct one side of an imagined dialogue with an ideal friend, who might also be her ideal reader. We read both Madame Roland and Anne Frank knowing how they died; Roland at the guillotine following a sham trial, Frank from typhus in a concentration camp. Their literary legacy, therefore, was in the hands of others, and indeed both have been subject to posthumous editing that removed material felt to be too candid or indeed sexual. In this way, ironically, social expectations were imposed on texts that consciously express resistance to such expectations. Both writers were unhappy with aspects of the roles mapped out for them as women, and use their prison writings to say so. Madame Roland was born in March 1754, [slide] the sole surviving child of eight pregnancies. From her early years she was enthusiastic and talented, studying literature, music and drawing. She was also strong willed, frequently challenging her father and instructors as she progressed through a varied education that included a single year at a convent school in Paris, and rather more independent study. She was influenced by Voltaire, Montesquieu, Plutarch, and particularly by Rousseau s understanding of feminine virtue and political philosophy. In the winter of 1780, at the age of twenty six, she married the philosopher Jean- Marie Roland de la Platière. [slide] Her husband, twenty years older, was politically ambitious, and his young wife proved a significant ally. She collaborated on a number of his works, and in particular his political writings and correspondence. She did this while attempting to conform to at least some extent to Rousseau s model of femininity, which involved operating within the bounds of male authority and the domestic sphere. With him and through him, she proved both powerful and influential as the French Revolution approached. In 1784, the Rolands moved to Lyon, building a network of friends and associates there, and began to express their political support for the revolution through letters to the journal Patriote Français. But it was after they moved back to Paris in 1791 that Madame Roland s influence reached its zenith. She was what we would call nowadays a brilliant networker; an invitation from her was sought after, if you wanted to gain access to the developing French government (in which her husband represented Lyon). She was also his secretary, increasingly using this position to, shall we say, adapt her husband s letters, but still sign them in his name. Her increasing influence, for all her silence during meetings, became recognised to the point that when her husband spoke, he was seen as reflecting the views of both of them. She saw herself as the ideal political wife, with her clear, opinionated judgements, and writing skills that enhanced his impact. 2

3 As a result of ideological differences, Madame Roland and her husband defected from the Jacobins in early 1792, together with others forming the moderate Girondin party. He was appointed Minister of the Interior, and she authored much of his correspondence, including a celebrated letter of protest to Louis XVI, urging Louis to pledge his loyalty and cooperation to the new republic, or suffer the consequences of escalating civil unrest. It may have cost her husband his job, but she remained proud of it! From this point, however, the Rolands became increasingly unpopular, speaking against what they saw as the excesses of the Revolution. On the morning of 1 June 1793, Madame Roland and a number of colleagues were arrested for treason, at the height of the Terror in Paris. Her husband escaped to Rouen with her help. In prison, she was allowed writing materials and occasional visits. Realising she was unlikely to stay alive for long, she wrote and rewrote her substantial memoirs with extraordinary speed. Five months after arrest, on the 9th November 1793, she went to the guillotine, [slide] leaving her prison writing in the possession of personal friends. First she wrote pen portraits of her husband s political colleagues, then a self-portrait for her daughter Eudora. Both texts are suffused with Madame Roland s vibrancy and fluency. In reflecting on her political partnership with her husband, she derided women who lacked the intelligence to be good company for their spouses. She considered it tiresome for women to be overly concerned with domestic trifles and wrote, I know of nothing... better calculated to make a man look elsewhere for his pleasures. [slide] In my opinion a woman ought to be able to keep her linen and wardrobe in good condition, or have it done for her, feed her own babies, manage her own kitchen, or even do the cooking without complaining about it, and at the same time to think and talk about other things and give pleasure by her presence as a woman. Here we see Madame Roland as a person of her time (none of us can avoid that) in appearing at least to endorse social expectations of the bourgeois married woman, while also pushing the boundaries as far as she could. For her, if you were doing the cooking, you should also be reading and writing and developing your mind. She wondered about women as writers, however, reflecting that men do not like it, other women were critical, and commentators would either say the writing could not be hers, or would pick holes in her character or talents. I delighted in writing pieces for him [her husband] which I thought would be useful, and when I saw them in print it gave me greater pleasure than if I had been 3

4 known to be the author. I am avid for happiness and I find it most in the good which I can do; I have no need for fame. In prison, however, and under the impending threat of death, Madame Roland did not remain so indifferent about her reputation. It is in prison that she reveals what she has done, in order to show her true colours as in independent woman. She writes about her own life because she has been subject to all kinds of accusation, wanting to be known as she really was: Now that my character has been hardened by political adversity and other troubles I desire above all to be frank I shall do myself strict justice, painting the good and the bad with equal freedom. She chooses to write about herself for a number of reasons, including making the present more bearable through remembering happier times. Her key idea, however, is to present truths which are applicable to others besides myself those who seek to understand the human heart through a novel or a play may find something worth studying in my story. Amongst those she hoped might be helped was some other unfortunate captive who might forget his or her misery in contemplating what happened to her. Madam Roland may be writing a personal narrative, but it is apparent she is doing so in response to the crisis around her. So, for example, she interrupts what she is saying, to lament the behaviour of the government she has helped create, but which now destroys everything it touches and devours itself. The horror she felt at the violence around her, combined with her own fears in prison, made her feel inarticulate and ready to lay down her pen; and yet we know she felt like this because of the eloquence with which she kept on writing. Her style is fresh and immediate, as can be seen in her vivid account of the events leading up to her arrest. Consider, for example her description of what happens after she seeks to return home, having failed to deliver a letter of protest to the Convention that has replaced the legislative assembly. Madame Roland engages a coachman for the journey home, they jointly rescue a small stray dog, and then a tense moment develops at a checkpoint: [Sit tight], said my driver very quietly, turning on his seat, it s the usual thing at this time of night. The sergeant came up and opened the door, Who s there? A woman Where have you come from? From the Convention. That s right muttered the coachman, as if he was afraid they would not believe me. Where are you going? Home. Have you no baggage? Nothing, look. But the session s over. I know, unfortunately for me, I had a petition to present. But a woman, at this hour? It s impossible. Most imprudent! It is undoubtedly unusual; it s 4

5 certainly not pleasant for me. I had the strongest possible motive. But Madame, all alone! How alone, Monsieur? Do you not observe Innocence and Truth? What more is necessary? I must accept your explanations. and you do well to do so, I said in a softer tone, for they are true. Roland mention of a companion ( How alone?) is a reference to the innocent little dog; a detail that may make this account seem a little improbable. We can never know exactly what was said to the sentry, but we can see the way that Madame Roland is representing herself in her writing: as operating with integrity at the heart of volatile events, challenging the role usually attributed to women. After about four weeks imprisonment, Madame Roland was put through a charade of release and immediate re-arrest on specific charges. She wrote, I was not daunted by the new calamity that had befallen me, but I was outraged by their particular cruelty in letting me taste freedom and then binding me with new chains, their barbarous device for cloaking my detention with legality. She was unsettled, however, but reflected: [slide] Why pay my persecutors the compliment of being upset?... they had not substantially altered the conditions I had already learned to endure I began almost to be annoyed at having been disturbed, and resolved to make use of my time and my faculties with the detachment of a strong character under duress. That is the way to defy one s enemies. In using her time well, her writing was paramount. When she suspected a manuscript had been burnt, she wrote this caused her more distress than anything else. She was also troubled by the conditions of poorer prisoners, and although some of her comments about them make her seem snobbish, she began to reduce her daily diet (for which she was paying) in order to set aside money for others. For Madame Roland this was not simply about altruism, but about living with her own conscience, and emphasising her resistance to what was going on around her. In her first memoir from prison, dated June 1793, Roland reflects on how, throughout history, the wise and virtuous have ended up in prison, often the victims of people they have sought to help. She defends her husband s actions in government, her language showing how closely she identified with him: Once we were out of office I thought it quite right Roland should avoid the fury of the mob. Ironically he did indeed manage so to do, while she was captured. It seems that her attachment to another married man helped to keep her in Paris, as did her own view of personal courage. She did not like the idea of escape, writing that When I was a child of twelve, I wept that I had not been born in Sparta or in Rome, and sought to model 5

6 her behaviour on patterns of stoic forbearance, whatever the adversity. Her husband had feared assassination, but she had already worked out the political value of such a death: Death at his post would cry out for vengeance and provide an object lesson to the Republic. In such writing Roland seems keen to disrupt her reader s expectations of the appropriate feminine response to such turbulent, violent times. She also imagines sacrificing her own life for her husband and her nation: I would rather die than witness the ruin of my country; I would consider it an honour to be counted amongst the heroic victims. Here Madame Roland correctly anticipates the circumstances of her death, but underestimates the impact on her husband. When news of her execution reached him, he committed suicide. As the violence deepened outside her cell, she also considered suicide, imagining swallowing poison in court, after a passionate speech from the witness box. This plan could not be carried out because it turned on the naïve view that she would be allowed the opportunity to speak, and could somehow procure poison. Neither came to pass, but Madame Roland proved true to her stoic ideals by going to the guillotine with great dignity and bravery. Before imprisonment, she had been content with a kind of political ventriloquism, in which she spoke through her husband. In prison, her own voice is fully unleashed. Take for example, her hostility to Danton, who she blamed for unleashing the violence of the mob: [slide] O Danton! This is the way you sharpen the knives against your victims! Strike! One more murder will hardly add to your crimes. You cannot escape eternal infamy for what you have done History will spew up your name with horror when it records the butcheries of [the Revolution]. She found this kind of writing cathartic and consolatory: I rather enjoyed composing vigorous tirades under the very noses of the brutes who would have murdered me if they had heard a single phrase. But she also hoped to inspire others to resist tyranny, and to ensure that Danton would not escape the judgement of history. The problem for France, she wrote, was that there were no real men around, only pygmies; or at least no men who showed the qualities she most admired and saw in herself, a woman: I burned with zeal for the prosperity of my country. Public affairs had become a moral fever which left me no rest. Madame Roland had a daughter she considered rather short of such qualities. She might have preferred the kind of daughter lively, opinionated, well-read, observant, ambitious, outspoken that we see in Anne Frank. [slide] Certainly Frank is Roland s literary daughter; she too wanted to write well, and do more than women of 6

7 her mother s generation. Her imagined reader was her female alter ego, Kitty, to whom her diary entries were addressed. Writing to Kitty enabled Anne to recreate conversations, come up with pen portraits of her companions in hiding, reflect on changes in her ideas, her state of mind, and indeed her body. She re-read and revised her diary, dreaming of beginning her career as a writer with a memoir based on it. Her diary did indeed become a book, but not in a way she expected. Two years after her death, her father published her diary, having first edited it according to his own ideas of appropriateness and decorum. Annelies Marie, Anne, Frank was born in Frankfurt in Weimar Germany to Otto and Edith on the 12 th June She had an elder sister, Margot. The Franks were liberal Jews, living in an assimilated community. Edith was perhaps the more devoted parent; Otto was interested in scholarly pursuits, and had an extensive library. Both encouraged their children to read. The family moved from Germany to Amsterdam in 1933, the year the Nazi Party won the municipal elections in Frankfurt, with anti-semitic demonstrations following almost immediately. By May 1940, they were trapped in Amsterdam by the German occupation of the Netherlands. Initially to protect Margot from a deportation order, in July 1942 the family went into hiding in some concealed rooms, a secret annexe, behind a moveable bookcase in the building where Anne s father worked. Their neighbours at home were told they had gone abroad. Hermann van Pels, Otto s business partner, his wife and teenage son Peter were also there, and they were joined a few months later by the van Pels dentist, Fritz Pfeffer, After two years, the group was betrayed and transported to concentration camps. Anne Frank and her sister Margot were eventually transferred to Bergen-Belsen, where they died of typhus in early March 1945: just a few weeks before the camp was liberated by British troops. Otto Frank, the only survivor, returned to Amsterdam after the war to find Anne s diary had been saved by one of the family s helpers, Miep Gies, and it was published in It has since been translated into many languages, the first English edition published in 1952 as The Diary of a Young Girl. After the group were arrested by the Gestapo, Miep Gies retrieved the notebooks and loose pages from Ann s diary from amongst debris strewn over the floor of the secret annexe. The last entry is dated the 1 st August Anne began her diary with a signed and dated entry for her thirteenth birthday, 12 th June 1942: I hope I shall be able to confide in you completely, as I have never been able to do in anyone before, and I hope that you will be a great comfort to me. [slide] Within a few days, this idea of her diary as confidante had crystallised: I want 7

8 this diary, itself to be my friend, and I shall call my friend Kitty. The first such entry is prefaced by Anne s favourite photograph of herself. I want to write, but more than that, I want to bring out all kinds of things that lie buried deep in my heart, she went on. Like Madame Roland, she found that writing about herself, as if addressing others, was cathartic and consoling. Anne came to imagine a wider audience than Kitty ; the Dutch authorities in exile broadcast an appeal for letters and diaries as historical resources, and from March 1944 she began to revise her diary with this archive in mind. Writing and reading were her chief occupations in the annexe; schoolwork, short stories written for herself or as birthday presents, a wide range of books in Dutch, German and English. These were her means of thinking about her life, her situation, and of achieving self-realisation through her literary endeavours. In October 1942 she wrote about her friends being taken away by the Gestapo: without a shred of decency, being loaded into cattle trucks and sent to Westerbork (from where more than a hundred thousand Dutch Jews were transported on to Auschwitz). [slide] It is almost impossible to escape If it is as bad as this in Holland whatever will it be like in the distant and barbarous regions they are sent to? We assume that most of them are murdered. The English radio speaks of their being gassed; perhaps that is the quickest way to die. I feel terribly upset. I couldn t tear myself away when Miep told these dreadful stories. Mixed in with this kind of eyewitness testimony (and note how early in the development of the camps, late 1942, a thirteen year old girl is aware of exactly what the Final Solution is about) is Anne s personal reaction and conscience: [slide] I feel wicked sleeping in a warm bed, while my dearest friends have been knocked down or have fallen into a gutter somewhere out in the cold night. I get frightened when I think of close friends who have now been delivered into the hands of the cruellest brutes the world has ever seen. And all because they are Jews. A gloom descended on the annexe, and Anne wondered if it was wrong to ever laugh about anything: Ought I then to cry the whole day long? No, that I can t do. After a year of confinement, some of it quite indescribable she described an ordinary day, including verbal sketches of the members of the group. In this way she explored different forms of writing, and a few weeks later does something different again: a vivid description of the communal duty of the day: potato peeling! 8

9 Pf begins [that is Fritz, the dentist], does not always scrape well, but scrapes incessantly, glancing right and left. Does everyone do it the way he does? No! Enne, zee here; I take ze knife in mein hand like zo, scrape from ze top downvards! Nein, not like zat like zis! I get on better like this, Mr Pf., I remark timidly. Anne s mocking of Fritz s German accent might also have reminded her of the irony of the group s origins as native German speakers. In late October and early November 1943, she began to use a literary image for the kind of prison neurosis she was going through; in his prison cell in Berlin, Dietrich Bonhoeffer used it too. Anne was feeling like a songbird who has had his wings clipped and who is hurling himself in utter darkness against the bars of his cage. Even outside You don t hear a single bird singing and a deadly sultry silence hangs everywhere. In philosophical literature the caged bird represents the soul trapped within the body, and here it represents the freedom Anne yearns for: both from physical confinement, and from the expectations of her mother s generation. On the 24 March 1944, after twenty months in the secret annexe, Anne wrote: I don t want to have lived for nothing like most people. I want to be useful or give pleasure to all the people around me yet who don t really know me, I want to go on living even after my death! And therefore I am grateful to God for giving me this gift, this possibility of developing myself and of writing, of expressing all that is in me. She describes how, when writing, her courage is reborn. She tells of a police search following a burglary in their building, and how they remained undiscovered just. In the wake of the trauma of this close call, she reflects on the big cultural and religious questions as well: Who has inflicted this upon us? Who has made us Jews different from all other people? Who has allowed us to suffer? It is God that has made us as we are, but it will be God, too, who will raise us up again. If we bear all this suffering, and if there are still any Jews left, when it is over, then Jews, instead of being doomed, will be held up as an example. Remembering the terrifying wait in the dark for the police to find them, she writes, I was prepared, as the soldier is on the battlefield. But now she has been saved again she recognises that during her time in the secret annexe she has matured and grown up: [slide] I am becoming still more independent of my parents, young as I am, I face life with more courage than Mummy; my feeling for justice is immovable, and truer than hers. I know what I want, I have a goal, an opinion, have a religion and love. 9

10 Let me be myself and then I am satisfied. I know that I m a woman, a woman with inward strength and plenty of courage! Madame Roland would have been proud of such sentiments, and recognised Anne s diagnosis of what was happening in the world: an urge to destroy, an urge to kill, to murder and rage. She would have sympathised also with Anne s temporary despair after the arrest of the man who supplied vegetables to the annexe, and had hidden two Jews in his own home. Anne wonders if it would have been better not to have hidden and gone through all this misery, but concludes, we still love life we still hope. Nonetheless the waiting is becoming intolerable: [slide] let the end come, even if it is hard; then at least we shall know whether we are finally going to win through or go under. That she could write in such a way is testimony to her imaginative resilience, and personal courage. What she was going through, as is often the case with highly imaginative people, also found an outlet in fiction. Anne wrote an unfinished novella called Cady s Life, which begins with a young girl in hospital after a road accident. Cady is a Christian, but has a Jewish friend named Mary. Going to visit, she finds Mary s home sealed up, and the inhabitants deported. Cady despairs at the thought of what has happened to her friend, and in her imagination sees a nightmare image of her: suddenly she saw Mary s little figure before her, shut up in a cell, dressed in rags, with a sunken, emaciated face. The story is left uncompleted just after this point, and it is hard, with the benefit of hindsight, not to see in this passage Anne anticipating her own end, with Mary dressed in rags, with a sunken emaciated face subject to malnutrition and disease. And yet it is also clear, from Anne s description of her daydreams, that she pictured lost friends of her own in just such a way, looking reproachfully at her, and feeling deserted. There are also, however, images of consolation in her writing. In a first person narrative called Fear, the writer is panicked by a wartime bombing raid. She runs from burning houses and devastation, until she finds herself in a meadow. No fire, no bombs, no people Above me the stars glistened and the moon shone; it was brilliant weather, crisp but not cold. This is reminiscent of Ann s description of her favourite spot in the annexe, where she can see the sky, a chestnut tree, and a large area of Amsterdam. [slide] As long this exists, I thought, and I may live to see it, this sunshine, the cloudless skies, while this lasts, I cannot be unhappy. She came to this place and this view when the frustrations of confinement felt especially hard. Yet it was only in her imagination 10

11 that she could enjoy the fresh air and natural world, and it was only in the imaginative world of her stories and diary that the young woman she dreamed of becoming, could find existence. So too, in prison Madame Roland used her imagination to create an image of how she wished her friends and posterity to remember her. This imaginative capacity is surely why both Ann Frank and Madam Roland are more than historic witnesses to the cruelty of their times, and why reading their work remains uplifting despite what we know of their horrible deaths. Something of their resistance, vitality and fortitude lives on in ways that continue to inspire. Such is the gift of their prison writing, and in different ways of the other figures I have considered in these lectures: [slide] Boethius and Bonhoeffer, [slide] Thomas More and Antonio Gramsci, [slide] John Bunyan [slide] and Oscar Wilde. And there are also my contemporary prison writers: [slide] American aid worker Kayla Mueller, Guantanamo detainee Mohomedou Ould Slahi, and Nigerian activist Ken Saro-Wiwa. In the final part of these series I want to briefly revisit their writings before unveiling my final contemporary figure. Kayla Mueller died in Syria in February this year; her final letter was then made public. It includes these words: [slide] I have been shown in darkness, light + have learned that even in prison, one can be free. I am grateful. I miss you all as if it has been a decade of forced separation. I have had many a long hour to think, to think of all the things I will do I have had many hours to think how only in your absence have I 25 years old come to realize your place in my life. Mohamedou Ould Slahi has been held without charge in Guantanamo since The postscript to his prison diary says this: [slide] In a recent conversation with one of his lawyers, Mohamedou said that he holds no grudge against any of the people he mentions in this book, that he appeals to them to read it and correct it if they think it contains any errors, and that he dreams to one day sit with all of them around a cup of tea, after having learned so much from one another. Ken Saro-Wiwa campaigned against the devastation of part of Nigeria by the oil industry, and was executed twenty years ago by a military government. In a letter to his son, to be published later this year, he wrote: [slide] You must expect the worst and prepare your mind for that. What you will always remember is that I did my best to fight the injustices I found in my society. Re-reading this letter two decades on, his son Ken Wiwa wrote: [slide] I have come to understand that those words were not directed at me, alone. They are meant for us, 11

12 the world, to make good the ultimate sacrifices that he and many others make to make the world a safer place. So who is my contemporary figure for this final lecture? It is an indictment of our times that there are so many unjustly imprisoned people across our world, as is seen in the work of organisations like Amnesty International and International PEN (the latter being a writer s organisation with a Writers in Prison Committee ). But for my final nomination I am looking in a different direction. A recurring theme in these lectures has been of prison as a metaphor for the human condition; you may recall Boethius haunting phrase about those who are prisoners of their own freedom. I therefore nominate myself, and all of you, as my contemporary prisoners. In what we write, and how we live, the challenge and inspiration offered to us is to ponder what is truly important and what is not; to discern what false ideas and attachments are imprisoning us; to realise just how important our families and friends are; to learn from those who are different and indeed hostile, and to keep alive the dream of being reconciled, around that cup of tea ; to fight injustice and support others who do the same, that the world might be a better and safer place. The apostle Paul wrote four of his letters from prison [slide] (Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians and Philemon). He also called himself a prisoner of Christ, and while this is clearly intended as a metaphor; but it is also true that he was imprisoned so often because of his commitment to Christ. In The Letter to the Ephesians, the first verse of Chapter Four, he writes: [slide] I therefore, the prisoner in the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called. In my imagination I hear Paul, and all the prisoners of whom I have spoken, begging us to learn from what it cost them so much to pass on to us, and lead worthy lives, lives worthy of the spiritual and political freedoms we are fortunate enough to have inherited, lives worthy of all that God is calling us to be. Thank you for your attention this evening, and throughout this series. Thank you. [slide] 12