The Bitter Taste of Victory (34 page)

For the Germans as well as the British and Americans, the Soviet dissention was a discomforting sign that the trial had not been a complete success. Reporting on the verdict, Gellhorn was optimistic that by demonstrating that ‘men of four nations could work patiently together to brand evil and reaffirm the power and goodness of honest law’, the trial had set a precedent for future co-operation. But West suggested in her
Telegraph
article that the Soviet objection made it seem as though the Russians had hoped ‘to use the Tribunal as a means of revenge rather than as a process of legal purification of the international
situation’. And the Western Allies remained anxious that the very presence of the Russians would discredit the trial, given Soviet Russia’s record of show trials in the 1930s, and that the Russians had committed many of the same types of crime as the Germans during the war, executing some 22,000 Polish internees and prisoners in 1940.
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For those who had spent eleven months in the Nuremberg courtroom, there was now nothing to do but return home and reacclimatise to the postwar world. Biddle and some of his colleagues delayed their departure by going to Prague for a couple of days, and took West along with them. Here they walked on famous bridges, looked at towers, spires and waterways and went to a screening of David Lean’s film
Brief Encounter
, which had just been released in Europe. West was amused to find that this was not a popular film in Czechoslovakia. ‘Sexual renunciation on secular grounds is not a theme which Central Europe understands.’ The Czechs in the audience asked afterwards ‘with some emotion’ whether it was really true that in England there were no other places than railway buffets where lovers could meet. Even here, the Nuremberg judges could not quite escape the trial. At one point during the film, Biddle fell asleep; waking up he pointed at a minor character on the screen and said, ‘My God, that man looks just like Göring’; he had dreamt his way back to the courthouse.
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The next day, Biddle developed flu but he and West managed to spend the afternoon alone together, wandering around the city and looking at churches. It was a brief interlude. The demands of ordinary life were pressing in on them and it was time to go back to their separate homes. On 4 October they returned to Nuremberg and dined alone at the Villa Conradti. West wore her best dress; Biddle, anxious as always, worried that their presence alone in the villa would attract gossip. The next morning they flew back together to London. West had expected to be collected by her husband but he had not received her telegram so instead Biddle drove her home to Ibstone, the journey made dreary by the knowledge of the separation that would follow.

West found the return even more anticlimactic than the previous one. ‘Coming home an utter letdown,’ she wrote in her diary that night. She complained to her literary agent that Henry was getting ‘odder and
odder every day’ and more destructively involved in the affairs of the household. Biddle visited her for a day but his letters were becoming gradually less frequent and by the end of October they had stopped. ‘Katherine has got him,’ she announced in her diary.
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Events in the outside world seemed to confirm West’s despair. On 16 October 1946 she heard that Göring had managed to commit suicide. Three days earlier the gallows equipment had arrived at Nuremberg; on 14 October the prisoners heard hammering from the gymnasium as the scaffold was erected. Göring had made an appeal asking to be shot as a soldier instead of hanged as a criminal but the court refused. On the fifteenth he killed himself with a phial of cyanide that he had somehow kept concealed from the guards. The next day the remaining ten condemned men were killed. The hangman botched the execution of Ribbentrop, who was first in line, leaving the rope to throttle the former foreign minister for twenty minutes before he died.

Journalists across the world were horrified to learn about Göring’s suicide. In the US, Erika Mann was lecturing in Spokane, where she was interviewed in white pyjamas in her hotel room. She told the local newspaper that she was ‘furious’ that Göring had been able to kill himself so easily. ‘I am not envious of his nice suicide instead of death on the gallows, but it really is scandalous that it should have happened.’ Mann was worried that the Germans would now think that the authorities had deliberately permitted Göring to take his own life. Rebecca West immediately cabled an extra thousand words to the
New Yorker
to end the article she had already sent them. She described how a dozen emotions had surprised her with their strength. She was angry that the ‘enormous clown’ had managed to spill the ‘wine of humiliation we had intended him to drink’ on the floor. She was frustrated that after all the absurd security measures surrounding the trial, the cyanide had somehow flowed. And she was worried that Göring’s odd final moment of triumph might lead to a resurgence of Nazism. But she also felt ‘a vague, visceral cheerfulness’, pleased that the beast caught in the trap had surprised its captors by making a final stand.
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If West had still been with Biddle they could have laughed about Göring’s suicide together. But as it was, the news confirmed her dissatisfaction with the world. She was unhappy and bored and escaped as always into illness. Like Erika Mann, West was a habitual somatiser. In 1941 she had written that the body calling for help ‘makes the appeal as strongly as possible’; ‘the outward and visible signs give onlookers an exaggerated impression of what the person who is ill or afraid is suffering’. Throughout her relationship with Wells she had responded to emotional crises with dangerous and violent physical illnesses that matched Wells’s own, once going completely deaf for a month. Now she was taken ill with symptoms which she described in her diary as an infection of the gums, toxic neuritis of the left arm and shoulder, and a high fever.
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On 11 November, West finally received a letter from Biddle, lauding Katherine for her sweetness and bravery and saying that he did not want to hurt his wife. Still very ill, West was outraged; she commanded him never to write again. ‘Men are all filth,’ she complained with effortfully marshalled resilience to Emanie Arling. ‘Don’t worry over Francis B. I’m doomed to have no luck. I shall just forget it, and get on with my work.’ Here was yet another man who had pursued her vehemently only to disappear once she had succumbed. She was left with a feeling that she was not destined for mutual love. Once again her public sexuality had laid her open to rejection, to being seen as castrating and having her own vulnerability ignored.
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In
Black Lamb, Grey Falcon
, West had written that ‘only part of us is sane’. People only partly loved pleasure and happiness, wanted to live into their nineties and die in peace in a house they had built. ‘The other half of us is nearly mad.’ That mad half loved pain and despair and wanted to die in a catastrophe ‘that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations’. West had witnessed the global consequences of this yearning for destruction in the blackened ruins of Nuremberg and Berlin. Now she was conscious, as she had been so often before, of the personal consequences of the division. She had yearned for pleasure and happiness as Biddle apparently had with her, but together they had willed into being a
catastrophe that left her lying feverish in bed, her arm and gums swollen and throbbing with pain.
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When she was strong enough to write, West returned to the Nuremberg trials, rewriting her articles into a longer essay entitled ‘Greenhouse with Cyclamens’, which she planned to incorporate into a book to be called
The Meaning of Treason
. Shawcross had invited West to Nuremberg in the first place as the official chronicler, but this was certainly not the book she was intended to write. The essay takes its title from a greenhouse in the grounds of the Faber Schloss where West had briefly stayed with the other correspondents before she was summoned to Biddle’s villa. She describes how, on one golden autumn evening, she walked in the garden and found the door of the greenhouse open. Inside there was row after row of flowering lilies, primulas and cyclamen, all growing healthily and colourfully. West was struck by the absurdity of the sight. This was a country where trade had collapsed; a town where it was impossible to buy even shoes, kettles or blankets. But here was a greenhouse that had continued to grow flowers in defiance of Hitler’s regulations and was now defying the Allies’ regulations as well.
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Here was a thriving business presided over only by a man with one leg and a girl of twelve. And talking to the man (a veteran of the eastern front), West found him to be a symbol of a kind of crazed German industriousness that made him long only for more work and not for pleasure. More than anything he wanted the trial to continue for as long as possible because he wanted to continue to grow and sell his flowers.

This is West at her best, approaching a public event from an oblique, private angle that enabled her to capture world affairs with a peculiarly vivid specificity. And the essay as a whole was fuelled by her disappointed fury with Biddle. ‘I have never been able to write with anything more than the left hand of my mind,’ West would write to A. L. Rowse in 1947, ‘the right hand has always been engaged in something to do with personal relationships.’ But the left hand derived its power, she believed, from ‘knowledge of what my right hand was doing’. ‘Greenhouse with Cyclamens’ gains its force from its personal passion; from her sense of the connection between private and public treachery.
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West was more outraged in this essay than in her previous article about the system that had allowed Göring to commit suicide and Ribbentrop to choke slowly to death. She complained that Göring should not have been given the chance to use his courage to weaken public horror at his crimes. The Nazis had ‘plastered history with the cruelty which is a waste product of man’s moral nature, as maniacs on a smaller scale plaster their bodies and their clothes with their excreta’; it was unfair that this Nazi of all Nazis should have been allowed to disguise his maniacal quality. This is Göring as the ultimate treacherous man. West, like so many onlookers, had always been disquietingly fascinated by Göring. Now that she was away from the beguiling tedium of the courtroom, she was furious that he had seduced his onlookers and got away with it. West complained too that the tribunal had undertaken the task of hanging ten men without bothering to enquire sufficiently into effective and swift methods of hanging. Justice had been done, but the reports of Ribbentrop’s slow death sounded not unlike the testimony describing the Nazi atrocities which had brought these men to the gallows. There were stenches, West found, that ‘not the name of justice or reason or the public good, nor any other fair word, can turn to sweetness’.
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If the trial as a whole had taken on a stench with hindsight, then so had the Nuremberg romances. In the essay, the brief mention of
eros
in West’s first
New Yorker
article was lengthened to a much longer disquisition on love. All the Americans at Nuremberg were in love, West now claimed. The men were on the wrong side of middle age, married to absent wives, and spiritually sick from a surfeit of war and exile: of course they were in search of the comfort of women. Now that her own love affair had ended, West saw all of the Nuremberg entanglements as doomed to transience. ‘To the desire to embrace was added the desire to be comforted and to comfort; and the delights of gratification were heartrending, like spring and sunset and the breaking wave, because they could not last.’
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Looking back, West thought that the many lovers in Nuremberg had hoped, like the defendants, that the verdicts would be deferred forever. They were sadly aware that once a decision was made about the lives of
Göring and Ribbentrop, ‘much happiness that might have been immortal would then be put to death’. The death of her own affair gains a curious grandeur from its temporal synchronicity with the deaths of the defendants. But this is a rhetoric of fate and she does not let Biddle off this easily. These temporary loves, she writes, were often noble, but there were some who would not let them be so: ‘There were men who said, “You are a good kid, but of course it is my wife I really love,” when these terms were too perfunctory, considering his plight and the help he had been given.’ These in effect had been Biddle’s words, as they had been Wells’s before him. West was angry that she had not received more acknowledgement of the comfort she had brought.
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