Abstract
PEN International's 1948 charter and its accession to NGO status made it one of the most globally recognisable institutions promoting and securing freedom of expression for writers and artists as a fundamental human right. PEN's transition from dinner club to NGO involved a post-war reckoning with how to respond to institutional abuses of power and how to secure rights for those who had lost the traditional protections of the state. George Orwell and Stefan Themerson, writing on the 1944 PEN conference, offer insight into the political challenges PEN faced after the Second World War regarding state power and the rights of refugees.
What right to speech do the stateless have? Through what mechanisms and to what extent are individual freedoms circumscribed for those without a nation? In the late years of the Second World War, amidst the discussion of the post-war landscape and the discourse around international protections regarding human rights, authors gathered in London to celebrate the tercentenary of John Milton's Areopagitica, that famous tract on free speech. Organised by PEN, the event inspired displaced Polish author Stefan Themerson to ponder the question of freedom of speech in the context of institutions in an era of violence and uncertainty. In Themerson's embrace of linguistic play and irreverence shown towards cultural norms and institutions, and through multiple tellings of his first meeting with another displaced person, the German artist Kurt Schwitters at the PEN conference, he presents a challenge to how we think about the guarantees which underpin our speech. In a probing and often absurdist manner, Themerson, in two key texts – Bayamus and the Theatre of Semantic Poetry (1949) and ‘Kurt Schwitters on a Time-Chart’ (1967) – points to the pitfalls of universalist rhetoric around speech and human rights. In this article, I will review Themerson's use of the PEN conference as a meditative point to consider the rhetoric around rights in the context of the refugee crisis in England.
The 1944 PEN conference was held at the French Institute, South Kensington, London (22–26 August). It was organised out of, and hosted by, PEN's London Centre, albeit with PEN International's General Secretary Hermon Ould taking point of most of the correspondence and organising. The conference differed in several respects from their annual congresses, which were disrupted by the war, with a gap between the 1941 Congress in London and the 1946 Congress in Stockholm. In the promotional letter, the five-day event was billed as honouring Milton's defence of freedom of expression, with speakers who would address the ‘place of spiritual and economic values in the future of mankind’. 1 The conference attracted a number of individuals who interpreted its theme variously. Most tended to engage the ‘spiritual and economic values’ theme of the gathering more than directly address either Milton or his Areopagitica. The event opened with a welcome message from E. M. Forster and hosted participants such as Herbert Read, Harold Laski, and Mulk Raj Anand presenting on Milton, and others like Olaf Stapledon, C. E. M. Joad, and H. Levy, focused on the conference theme, with a nod towards ‘liberty’ in many of the addresses. Indeed, some of the criticism which the conference received can be traced to the heterogeneous mixture of societies that were platformed – the Rational Press Association, South Place Ethical Society, the Progressive League, the Aquinas Society, the Institute for Jewish Learning, and the Society for Cultural Relations with USSR all donated money and sent speakers. The reception of the event was mixed, and George Orwell, who attended one panel, rather infamously criticised it in the opening of ‘The Prevention of Literature’. He acknowledged that while political and economic concerns were addressed, the conference lacked a point of view. In his estimation, not tackling the institutional pressures which limit, co-opt, or corrupt speech was dangerous. 2 There are conceptual limits to Orwell's critique. As I will show below, displaced artists like Themerson and Schwitters were keenly aware of these, especially in regard to how freedoms may be imagined and for whom. As David Dwan notes, Orwell ‘liked to criticise other people's freedom-talk [… and he] refused to get embroiled in the metaphysical niceties of freedom: all the arguments he declared, were on the side of determinism, but everyone retained an “instinctive knowledge” of the freedom of the will’. 3 Even so, the universalism of who that ‘everyone’ included came under pressure by the end of the war, and as Lyndsey Stonebridge has emphasised, ‘[w]hat Orwell saw was restricted by his Englishness, as he himself understood better than some of his later advocates for whom his vision became the late universally trustworthy reference point in a world of collapsing truths’. 4 Using the references to Jewish refugees in 1984 as her example, Stonebridge argues that ‘what Orwell could not comprehend […] was where the implosion of the moral claims of the European nation-state left a politics committed to equality and consensual citizenship’. 5 Stefan Themerson, in contrast, would offer a more nuanced take on the state of the post-war liberal order and international human rights, especially as the plight of refugees troubled what were previously seen as secure universal truths.
Refugees in London
Unlike with Orwell, the event itself was never Themerson's central focus. Rather, it served as a setting for the meeting with Schwitters and a foil for what Themerson found valuable in Schwitters's work. The Schwitters that Themerson met at the 1944 PEN conference had lived through a decade of various forms of harassment, displacement, and confinement. Reproductions of his work were placed in the travelling ‘degenerate art’ shows arranged by the National Socialists in Germany between 1933 and 1936, and his freedom became so precarious he fled to Norway in early 1937. After the invasion of Norway in 1940, he escaped to Britain on the icebreaker Fridtjof Nansen, and was detained as an ‘enemy alien’ at Camp Hutchinson on the Isle of Man until his release in 1941. 6 The camp held many intellectuals and artists, and the camp commander supported initiatives like an art show and a camp newsletter (Schwitters contributed to both). 7 The newsletter, simply titled The Camp, was generally consumed with items on camp life and attitudes towards the war. Schwitters contributed a short story called ‘The Flat and Round Painter’ to the ‘Exhibition Number’ (13 November 1940). Simply told, the story concerns three-dimensional objects drawn in the air – a queen, her page, and the artist himself – who one-by-one float into the sky, rapidly expand, and suddenly burst. The story concludes after the artist bursts, noting ‘and with him burst the ability of the painters to paint round figures round in the air with round brushes. Therefore, painters now paint plain, flat figures with flat brushes on flat canvas’. 8 What proceeds as a lightly told tale of floating figures with some fun wordplay (e.g. the page ‘shivered and schwittered, like the air under him schwittered and shivered’ as he chased after his queen), ends on a bleak and tragic note. 9 Not only are the figures in the story destroyed, but the means to reproduce them are lost, and thus the world they inhabited is lost. It is possible to read the queen as representing Schwitters's art and career in Hanover, suddenly destroyed, and the page representing his years in Norway painting, hoping to return to his former life and his work. With the loss of both, and his internment on the Isle of Man, the artist faces the destruction of all that he was and stood for. 10
Themerson, too, found his way to London by a circuitous route, and like Schwitters, found a way to reflect on his circumstances through his writing. He arrived in London in 1942 following two years where he was stranded in France. A Polish-born filmmaker and writer, he had moved with his wife, the artist Franciszka Themerson, to Paris in 1937. When war broke out in 1939, he joined a Polish army outfit formed in France, and as the country was overrun he fled, with the assistance of the Red Cross, to a settlement of displaced Poles in Voiron, then part of Vichy France, where he remained until August 1942. Stefan entered Britain by virtue of his active service status in the Polish army (to which he remained attached in various film-related capacities until the end of the war). 11 He had spent nearly two years in Vichy France trying to secure the necessary visas to exit – to either the United States or Britain. He had no luck with Varian Fry at the Emergency Rescue Committee or with the officials at the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society in securing an American visa. 12 Franciszka, who had meanwhile been separated from Stefan, joined an evacuation to Britain in 1940 and spent her time in London first locating him and then working to get him the required documents to get out of France through Spain and Portugal. She often worked through an intermediary – her friend, the artist and Blok founder Teresa Żarnower, who was then based in Lisbon – also in efforts to get food to her family in the Warsaw Ghetto until that became an impossibility. 13 Stefan's time in Voiron and Marseille is worth its own attention, including more focus on the provisional communities of writers and artists to which he belonged, as well as the public services he was able to use, such as lending libraries and bookshops (mainly in Marseille but also around Grenoble). The collected correspondence, diaries, and other documents from this period in Unposted Letters (2013) detail how Stefan negotiated a chaotic sequence of shifting bureaucratic requirements while also being threatened by increasingly oppressive measures against Jews in Vichy France, and at the same time, writing, debating, and attending lectures and other events put on in Voiron, Marseille and elsewhere. 14 In this unique milieu, Themerson began drafting what became his satirical novel Professor Mmaa's Lecture. Within a termite hive, Professor Mmaa, a sort of termite Maurice Maeterlinck, offers his observations on the ‘homo’ (humans) and holds forth on social, political, and biological topics. While it is outside the scope of this article to explore the particulars of Themerson's satirical targets, either in Voiron or elsewhere, the text clearly shows him working through the turmoil he is experiencing in the Polish community in Voiron. Themerson explores his sense of belonging – insofar as he is able to belong either in Voiron or later in London, and his own insistence on a defined individualism within those contexts – across several texts he started writing in the 1940s (Professor Mmaa's Lecture was published in 1953). So, when he arrived at the PEN conference, he was open to the message even as he had his own distance from the community assumed by its speakers.
Bayamus and Semantic Poetry
Schwitters's art, and Stefan Themerson's memorialisation of their meeting and friendship, were conditioned by their experiences of displacement and statelessness. The PEN conference happens to have been a symbolically loaded event for them to have first met at, especially as the conditions under which they were able to attend were not entirely voluntary. The estranging effect of their respective situations was initially captured by Themerson in his novel Bayamus and the Theatre of Semantic Poetry (1949). The book presents a London slightly askew as the narrator is led to the titular theatre by the three-legged Bayamus. On the way to the theatre, they stop at a cafe where they meet Karl Mayer, the co-writer of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, whom the narrator believes to be dead (indeed, he died a month before the PEN conference, an event which has already occurred in the timeline of the story). After the narrator praises Mayer's filmic innovations and ponders his demise, Schwitters enters mid-conversation. Mayer had just finished lamenting the silence which may greet the end of a film, to which Schwitters replies, ‘I don't mind […] I’m used to it. People always bawl when I’m reciting dada. But I don't mind’.
15
In a reference to Schwitters's ‘Ursonate,’ a long sound poem, structured as a sonata without instruments, and scored as a series of phonemes to be uttered, his entrance in this scene raises the topic of oratory, audience, and reception – all prefiguring a situation the narrator finds himself in later on in the theatre. When Schwitters next speaks, he announces his interest in found-objects, citing a specific example: When I was on my way to the Pen-Club conference called to celebrate the tercentenary of the publication of Milton's Areopagitica, I found near the Institut Français a piece of wire from a house which had been bombed two hours before, and during Mr Forster's speech, I made a space-sculpture out of it. One always finds beautiful things lying around.
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Such contrasts, especially as they are framed by the spaces they occupy – outdoors and within an international organisation – raise questions about what speech might be protected, how, and by whom. Themerson does not seek out answers to such questions in Bayamus. Instead, he often tests where common sense and received wisdom derived from, stretching logic to often absurdist degrees. In a conversation about how unusual it is to have three legs, Bayamus posits that one-legged individuals are just as extraordinary. The narrator counters with a violent story about his uncle becoming one-legged. In the mid-1920s, his Jewish uncle was shoved off a Warsaw tram by some aggressive university students, and when he landed a wheel of the tram amputated his left leg. The narrator insists this was not extraordinary, but ‘quite natural’: Quite in accordance with the ordinary, observed processes of nature; quite in accordance with logical notions of cause and effect. If somebody who was a Jew set himself against a baptised person engaged in the acquisition of knowledge at Warsaw University or engaged in a course of study at Warsaw Polytechnic, then he got thrown out of trams. That was quite ordinary and quite normal. Quite in accordance with the body of rules, usages, or principles, with the procedure, action and behaviour recognised by custom and usage as correct. I knew that under suitable conditions nothing could prevent the inherent latent capacity for exerting energy from exerting it in the direction of cutting legs off, and I knew that under suitable conditions nothing could prevent the hidden, unexerted powers of intellectual or spiritual action from constructing an argument to justify such a powerful wish to enjoy leg-cutting, or to obtain shoes by that method.
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Themerson's use of the concept of ‘semantic poetry’ was very elastic over his career. In Bayamus, in the words of a speech given by the narrator in the Theatre of Semantic Poetry, he argues that Semantic Poetry's business was to translate poems not from one tongue into another but from a language composed of words so poetic that they had lost their impact, – into something that would give them a new meaning and flavour. I had been fed up with political oratory and with ezrapoundafskinian jazz plus joyce plus dada-merz plus some homespun rachmaninoff glossitis.
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Schwitters and the Liberty to Utter
In his mixed-media collage essay ‘Kurt Schwitters on a Time-Chart’ (1967), Themerson recounts his first meeting with Schwitters to explore Schwitters's working through his own sense of statelessness in his art. This piece is difficult to summarise usefully as Themerson deliberately jumps between straightforward biography, collage, and multiple time charts, including one tracking three dogs. At one point, in handwriting, he beckons: ‘[t]his space, reader, for you to fill with whatever you consider relevant’.
23
First, he opens with two small photos of himself and Schwitters – Themerson in his Polish military uniform and Schwitters in a suit – and proceeds to describe meeting at PEN, their outfits, and how they were received in those outfits.
24
I was in the uniform of the Polish army, he in the grey, worn-out suit of a German refugee. That at least was how we looked in the eyes of some of our neighbours. The logic of the time was to infer from some ‘public image’ individuals to the aggregate, to mix the mess thoroughly, and then to infer down from the aggregate to other individuals. To some of the onlookers, he was just another German (and once a German always a German, almost a camouflaged nazi), and I, quite undeservedly, one on whose white eagle a bit of the glory earned by Polish soldiers reflected; to others, however, he was an heroic victim of nazidom, and I, again quite undeservedly, one to be blamed for some of my generals’ nationalism or what not.
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Mr. E.M. Forster was delivering his speech. Seeing Schwitters bending the wire, some distinguished writers thought he was an electrician or a plumber who had got lost into their PEN by mistake. Nevertheless, there, at that meeting, it was he, Schwitters, who was practising what the speakers were preaching. They quoted Milton: ‘Give me the Liberty to know, to utter, & to argue freely, according to conscience, above all Liberties’.
30
Yet, Themerson's projection of what others made of Schwitters may have been misguided. As John Katz, an invited speaker, reported in the South Place Ethical Society's Monthly Record, the condition of the space was such that Schwitters's handling of a piece of rubble would not have necessarily looked out of place. A note of gay insouciance was struck from the outset by the President, E.M. Forster, when he instructed us what to do if, ignoring the alert, we should hear the alarm bell warning us that the doodle-bug was overhead. What we had to do was duck. As things turned out, we did not have to duck; though the windows of the French Institute in which we were meeting had been blasted only a few hours before the conference started […] And with the blinds down and the lights up because of the broken glass!
32
Themerson's actual position on PEN is more complicated. He eventually became a lifetime member in 1952 and PEN sought out people to write an obituary when he passed, but he was not afraid to speak his mind about the organisation. In the early 1950s, when PEN established the Writers in Exile, he wrote that ‘[w]riters are never, writers are nowhere in exile, for they carry within themselves their own kingdom, or republic, or city of refuge, or whatever it is that they carry within themselves’. However, he also allows that ‘at the same time, every writer, ever, everywhere is in exile, because he is squeezed out from the kingdom, or republic, or city, or whatever it is that squeezes itself dry’. Ultimately, he is not rejecting the idea of support for Writers in Exile, but the duality: ‘1. freedom of expression 2. writers-in-exile [… as it] derives from reasoning which I personally find fallacious’ 33 The fallacy of this formulation, in his view, which either backgrounds the political condition of stateless or displaced persons such as himself (although he would eventually be naturalised as a British citizen in 1954), or worse, reduces people such as himself to that condition only, derives from a suspicion he held of organised ideas or assumptions about what a writer's or artist's obligations are, which is what he expresses next in the Time-Chart.
Themerson's associative leap to ‘Liberty to bend a piece of wire into a space sculpture’ leads him to a more expansive reading of both the Areopagitica and ‘freedom of expression’. It is not a purely performative move – the stakes for Themerson and Schwitters are deeply personal and deeply political. It may perhaps seem that the act of putting two innocent words together, the act of saying: A Flower, & A Bit of Wood, is an innocent aesthetic affair. Well, it is not so at all: Tickets belong to Railway Companies (or to the State), Flowers – to Gardeners, Bits of Wood – to Timber Merchants. If you mix these things together you are making havoc of the Classification System on which the Regime is established: you are carrying people's minds away from the Customary Modes of Thought, and people's Customary Modes of Thought are the very Foundation of Order (whether it is an Old Order or a (in his case: Nazi) Order) […] you
And yet, the additional complication for Schwitters remained how that presence was circumscribed by the state and the society into which he was thrown. Mira L. Siegelberg opens her book Statelessness: A Modern History (2020) by discussing Schwitters and his merz collages, noting that ‘his works from [the 1920s] powerfully evoke the way in which the First World War unsettled the basic concepts that defined political reality. The map of the world, it seemed, would need to be remade entirely’.
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In the face of the upheaval of the Second World War, Schwitters was faced with an additional political quandary: how did the identity category ‘German’ constrict or override the category ‘artist’? How could he continue to express himself in his displaced circumstance? Themerson clearly recognised this quandary, writing about Schwitters, but easily referring to his own circumstances: The trouble with Schwitters was that he didn't like to be classified according to the set of rules against which he revolted. You can perhaps be an Italian futurist, or a Russian futurist; a French cubist, or a Belgian Congo cubist; a German expressionist, or a Japanese expressionist; but you cannot possibly be an Italian, or French, or German dadaist. You are either a dadaist or a German, &c. &c. You cannot be both. And when you are being refused a job in a factory, you want to be refused because you are a dadaist, or a merzist, and not because you are a German or something else similarly irrelevant, irrelevant if you are Dada, if you belong to the Internationale of the Spirit.
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Ultimately, in memorialising his meeting with Schwitters, Themerson spotlights his own plight and the plight of all other refugees struggling to have a voice. ‘Kurt Schwitters on a Time-Chart’ ends by acknowledging this struggle with a description of a gathering at Themerson's place. Schwitters and a Polish poet friend Themerson names only as ‘A’ are there.
38
During the meeting, Themerson invites Schwitters to perform Ur Sonata which ‘A’ begins to mock. Themerson is conflicted. They were the same age, nearly. Both were men of the world, by which I mean rational, experienced, and tolerant; the ways history had treated them were not dissimilar, both had great talent, enormous senses of humour, and stood by their convictions […] If they could not make peace, why should the rulers?
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Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
