From Trotsky to Gödel

The Life of Jean van Heijenoort

Anita Burdman Feferman

• Editorial: A K Peters/CRC Press
• Año: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000153880
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Mathématiques
• Categoría: Mathématiques générales

This story of a highly intelligent observer of the turbulent 20th century who was intimately involved as the secretary and bodyguard to Leon Trotsky is based on extensive interviews with the subject, Jean van Heijenoort, and his family, friends, and colleagues. The author has captured the personal drama and the professional life of her protagonist--ranging from the political passion of a young intellectual to the scientific and historic work in the most abstract and yet philosophically important area of logic--in a very readable narrative.

III

Chapter Ten Out of the Shadow? The United States: 1939–1945

DOI: 10.1201/9781003072331-13

For the first few years, I was totally lost in New York, crushed by the city, the language, the buildings. It was very strange, very disturbing. In Mexico, Coyoacán had been a rather country-like place, full of trees, and then, all of a sudden, I am living on Lexington Avenue and I have no contact at all with nature. It was Bunny who helped me, saved me. Just the fact of having her near me in that huge city.

JEAN VAN HEIJENOORT, 1984

FOR ME, FALLING in love is easy. It’s leaving that’s hard.” Jean van Heijenoort was speaking of Trotsky, when he used those words to describe how he felt about his separation from the Old Man. Later, he would say the same thing about his emotional entanglements with women. For seven years Comrade Van had lived, breathed, and taken sustenance with his leader, following his every thought and making allowances for every misstep. “After all that time,” he said later, “I felt I had to get out from under the shadow of that man. I was twenty-seven years old. I needed to find out who I was.”

Feeling the need for independence was one thing, achieving it quite another. New York in November 1939 was a cold, dark, dreary city filled with noisy people always in a hurry: an environment hostile to life, Van concluded. In his description of himself as “totally lost and crushed,” the self-assurance and confidence the young revolutionary had acquired in Mexico seems to have vanished in the smoke of the metropolis.

Looking at him from the outside, however, one would hardly have noticed. Within a few months of his arrival in New York, the handsome Frenchman from Mexico had a part-time job teaching French at Berlitz and was engaged in full-time political work as Trotsky’s ambassador, meeting with the American Trot-skyites and corresponding with the Trotskyite groups in France and Europe. In the past seven years he had grown into the title of “Comrade Minister of Foreign Affairs” that Trotsky had bestowed upon him in Turkey when he was a green recruit of twenty.

Joel Carmichael, the editor of Midstream and a fringe member of the New York Trotskyite group in the early forties, remembered van Heijenoort’s first appearances in New York very clearly:

I used to see him at parties, in the early 1940s. He was very famous and glamorous in the New York political left because he had just come from Mexico—from Trotsky. People would whisper, “That’s Trotsky’s secretary.” He was very reserved, wouldn’t say much, and would just drift away from a group. Then there was this gossip about his affairs with women. So this handsome man who seemed absolutely gladal, turned out to be bubbling underneath like a volcano.

I knew him for more than forty years, but to this day, I haven’t the slightest idea what Van thought about Trotsky or Marxism or politics in general.

Van Heijenoort was not above responding to admiration when he was, as he put it, “on top of things.” In Mexico he had felt important and perhaps even glamorous because of his association with the Riveras and their influential friends. He had had a small taste of power and found it agreeable. He had even been given a commission as commandant in the Mexican police force, which he thought was ironic and very funny—”I, who have passed through the hands of most of the police in Europe,” he wrote to André Breton (who then turned around and used the phrase when he spoke of Comrade Van’s bravery). But New York was totally different from Mexico. Van was miserable, although at first, only Bunny was aware of it.

The primary source of his dismay was his relationship with the leaders of the Socialist Workers party, the major Trotskyite group in New York As Trotsky’s emissary and now the newly appointed International Secretary of the Fourth International, Comrade Van had expected to be received with enthusiasm by these comrades. Instead he soon discovered that his supposed friends had views and priorities at variance with his. If they were not exactly hostile, they were indifferent. His concerns were global, whereas those of the Socialist Workers, in his opinion, were narrow and parochial. The Soviet-German non-aggression pact had been signed in August of 1939 and Germany had invaded Poland in September. He was deeply worried about the war in Europe, but his American comrades were focused on party politics in New York

Nevertheless, he continued to work in liaison with the New York Trotskyites, and he wrote regularly for their journal, The Fourth International, on the progress of the war and the various political ramifications of events in Europe and North Africa. Stubbornly, against the odds, he persisted in his attempts to keep what he conceived of as the true Trotskyist position alive. This was a problem he had to deal with in the framework of his own poverty. Since he had no financial support for his projects, he was in the demeaning position of having to swallow his anger and ask for aid from an unsympathetic boss. Describing his situation later, he said, “I would go to Cannon [James Cannon, then the leader of the SWP] and plead for money to buy the stamps and stationery necessary to maintain my contacts abroad. He would sit there, scowling and saying, ‘mmmm, hmmm’ but otherwise, not a word, as I explained how much I needed and why it was necessary.” Grudgingly, Cannon doled out small amounts of cash, perhaps twenty dollars a month, but it was a humiliating experience.

There was, however, one great consolation that the inhospitable city offered to the sorely troubled van Heijenoort: the New York City Public Library, an island of quiet and culture, on Forty-second Street. A public library where anyone, rich or poor, educated or not, could enter to read or write or dream was a completely new phenomenon to him. There was no such place in either France or Mexico. When to his amazement and joy, Bunny told him about the resources at Forty-second Street and initiated him into its wonders, his life was changed and he almost forgave New York its sins. When he said, “Bunny saved me,” this was one of the things he was talking about.

“I would go there every day that I could,” he said later. “I’d be there when they opened at nine in the morning and I’d stay there all day, until five or six in the evening, absorbing, just absorbing. It was my greatest discovery.” More than a discovery, it was his salvation.

It was as if Mexico had been the desert, not the tropics, and he had to make up for years of drought by soaking up the plentiful waters of knowledge and information now suddenly available to him. And Forty-second Street was only the beginning. Now that he knew such wonders existed, when his Berlitz job took him to Baltimore and Philadelphia, he sought out the university and public libraries in those cities, too. Later, in Boston and Cambridge, or wherever he happened to be, he would make his home and his office in the library and spend as much time there as he possibly could. Repeating the experience of his youth, he again found comfort and security in books, in intellectual work and its trappings, and above all, in the certainty of mathematics.

At Forty-second Street, I had my seat; I would always sit in the same place. I was absorbing all kinds of things that I had no chance at before—such as Whitehead and Russell’s Principia Mathematica. I mean I didn’t read it, I wasn’t ready for that yet, but I looked into it. Gide on Dostoevsky, the Russian criticism of Einstein—that kept me occupied for a few weeks. And then I was reading a lot of political information on the Spanish Civil War, and on the war in general. I was not reading novels, except maybe once every six months.

Professor Sidney Hook, then at New York University, had a story somewhat at odds with van Heijenoort’s assertion that he had not had access to reading materials. According to Hook, the Trotskyites in Mexico used to send lists of books, and other wished-for items, to their supporters in New York, who would then do what they could to fill the requests. At one point it was noted that Trotsky was asking for some very serious scholarly stuff: Principia Mathematica, to be precise. Then the word went around that the Old Man had wider interests and greater brilliance than even his most passionate admirers had imagined. No one suspected that the secretary who wrote the letter might have had something to do with the nature of the request until many years later when the secretary turned up as a student at New York University. (Of course it is possible that the requested Principia never arrived or that Comrade Van never had time to look into it in Mexico, so that his first real encounter with Russell and Whitehead may indeed have been in New York.)

Besides absorbing, van Heijenoort was also producing. At his seat in the library, the quiet man led more than a double life. While one part of him was reentering the world of abstract thought, the political side was divided into a half-dozen or so different authors, all of whom were busy producing copy for the Fourth International, the New York Trotskyite journal. Using the names Vladimir Ivlev, Karl Mayer, Marc Loris, Daniel Logan, Jean Rebel, and Ann Vincent (the last, when he began to get draft notices for his masculine pseudonyms), he wrote a number of articles which were, for the most part, descriptions and analyses of what was happening abroad. Europe Under the Iron Heel, written by “Marc Loris,” is one example, an essay which sets out “to provide information for the non-European reader on the situation now existing on the continent which for centuries was the guide of mankind.” In The Political Misadventures of the French Bourgeoisie, also by “Loris,” he discusses the Vichy government, the resistance movement, and the emergence of Charles de Gaulle. His major focus was Europe, but he also wrote about Africa and Lebanon. Between 1941 and 1944, van Heijenoort wrote more than twenty articles based upon the research he was able to do in the library as well as information that he received from informants abroad.

As Secretary of the Fourth International, Comrade Van also carried on a large correspondence, gathering and exchanging information with Trotskyites in other countries of the world. Since almost all of Europe and by the end of 1941 the United States, too, was at war, maintaining contacts and transmitting messages was a much more complicated affair than a drop in a mailbox. Holding on to his old habits of secrecy forty years after the fact, van Heijenoort was initially close-mouthed about how he had managed to communicate abroad. He would say no more than, “Oh you know, there were sailors.” Only after insistent questioning did he finally explain that the Socialist Workers party had a network of seamen, rank-and-file members of the SWP who had joined the merchant marine instead of waiting to be drafted into the army or navy. These men sailed all over the world and acted as couriers. They were able to deliver and receive letters, newspapers, journals and other documents as well as messages which gave news about what was happening in the areas they reached. And occasionally even more direct sources of information were tapped. One sailor, on the Murmansk run, surely deserved the Man-of-the-Year award from the Socialist Workers party because, according to van Heijenoort, he managed to become the lover of a Red Army General, a woman, who, in intimate moments, unwittingly passed on all kinds of insider information.

Finally, the Forty-second Street Library served as van Heijenoort’s private club, his home away from home, his meeting place for social and intellectual discourse with the other members of the Forty-second Street crowd of readers, writers, thinkers, and hangers-on. Among these were Nicolas Calas, a surrealist art critic who would later become a professor of art history at Fairleigh Dickinson University, and Lionel Abel, who was translating Rimbaud and Sartre, writing plays, and would become an English professor at the State University of New York. Both these men spoke French, an attribute of great importance to the exiled van Heijenoort, who felt the assurance of being understood only in his own language. Calas, of Greek heritage, had lived in Paris from 1930 to 1940 and was an even more recent immigrant than van Heijenoort, and Abel, too, was conversant with French literature and culture.

Nicolas and Van met almost daily and became close Mends. “We used to spend endless hours, the two of us, walking and talking in the corridors of the Forty-second Street library,” Van said. (Even years later, his admiration for the library was reflected in the reverent way he sounded the words, “Forty-second Street Library.”)

We talked about everything, about politics and political situations, about Trotsky, about New York, about surrealism, about the Marquis de Sade, about Breton and Rivera and Frida, about Don Juan, Casanova … just anything.

At first, their conversations about Frida Kahlo and André Breton were a felicitous point of connection. Both Calas and Abel had known Breton in Paris (and they were all soon to see him again in New York), and, of course, van Heijenoort had known Frida very well in Mexico. But ultimately, van Heijenoort was irritated by Nicolas’ view of Frida and her art, and it became a point of contention. Calas had encountered Frida late in 1938, at the opening of her sensational show at the Julian Levy Gallery in New York. Everyone who was anyone in the art world had come to that show, and Frida, at her flamboyant best, had impressed Calas and others with what he called her “theatrical quality and high eccentricity. She fit completely the surrealist ideal of a woman,” he said.

Van Heijenoort’s response to this assessment was the same “that’s crap” that he had already rendered as judgment upon André Breton’s attempt to classify Frida. He suspected that Calas was simply repeating, if not plagiarizing Breton. “He [Calas] just wanted to capture her for the surrealists, but you couldn’t do that with Frida. You couldn’t fit her into your idea of something. She was independent of all that.”

Their arguments about Frida and art were only the beginning of their differences. Eventually Van and Calas argued on political matters as well, with such violence that their friendship could not withstand the strain. “Finally Nicolas just went too far,” Van said, “I had to break with him.” On the other hand, Van’s friendship with Lionel Abel, which was less charged, continued into the period when they were both settled into academic positions.

In the everyday world, Van had his wife, Bunny, to “save him” and to deal with life in the big city. He felt he owed his very survival to her, but their relationship was not on what he called “the intellectual plane.” She was warm and loving, provided home and hearth, and, not incidentally, was the major breadwinner, but she did not speak his language and, rightly or wrongly, deep down he felt that she really didn’t understand what he was all about. Whether he knew what she was all about is another matter. Understanding the feelings of even those people who were closest to him was never his best talent, nor was it his highest priority.

To say that van Heijenoort felt physically and emotionally adrift in his first years in the United States is understating the case, even though it appeared that his life was organized around a routine of teaching, library work, and political activity. The physical drift was concrete: he and Bunny were constantly on the move. They changed apartments because of noise or inconvenience and changed cities for economic reasons. But, besides the fact that none of the apartments they lived in ever satisfied Van, he also thought it was a good idea not to stay in one place long enough to become known and identified. They moved between New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore depending upon where the Berlitz job opportunities were best. As an experienced hair stylist, Bunny had no problem finding a job wherever they went. Baltimore and Philadelphia were cities where van Heijenoort found some measure of tranquility, where he could breathe more easily and feel released from the grinding tension of New York. The architecture in both cities pleased him; it was on a human scale. As always, he had his libraries and happily found himself a place in them. He particularly liked the public library in Philadelphia, a graceful red brick building with white trim, built in 1892.

The van Heijenoorts happened to be in peaceful Baltimore on August 21, 1940, when they learned the shocking news of Leon Trotsky’s assassination. Van, on his usual morning walk, spotted the black headlines on the front page of the New York Times: “Trotsky Wounded By Friend In Home—Is Believed Dying.” He returned home immediately, and he and Bunny sat listening and waiting at the radio. Later in the day, they heard the dreaded final words: “Leon Trotsky died today in Mexico City.”

“Darkness set in,” is the last sentence in van Heijenoort’s memoir of his years with Trotsky. Those dramatic words reverberating against his usual terse style of factual reporting or setting the record straight, make clear his intention to underline and heighten the effect of the tragedy. “Darkness” for Trotsky, but also darkness for the apostle who had loved Lev Davidovich so deeply. It was truly a black time for him and for Bunny who suffered with him. For days they just sat in a park, stunned. And...