Trotsky (11 page)

Having re-created
Man at the Crossroads
in Mexico City, Rivera resumed work on his National Palace mural, completing this and one other mural by the end of 1935, at which point he entered into a kind of exile from the muralist movement that had been inseparable from his name. Nine years would pass before he would be offered another government wall in Mexico. His sense of isolation was magnified by his continued ostracism at the hands of former comrades, led by muralist Siqueiros, a master of political vitriol. No wonder Rivera was increasingly attracted to the figure of Trotsky, a fellow exile, a heroic and tragic figure, and a man with an enlightened view of the arts.

In the autumn of 1936, when Trotsky was imprisoned in Norway as a result of Soviet diplomatic pressure in the wake of the first Moscow trial, and when no other European country would allow him entry, Rivera agreed to approach President Lázaro Cárdenas and ask him to offer Trotsky asylum in Mexico. When Cárdenas granted the request, the Communist attacks on Rivera became an onslaught. Now he really was a Trotskyist.

Diego Rivera’s frescoes are far more impressive viewed in the original than as reproductions on the page—a claim not all his fellow muralists could make—and thus Trotsky’s estimation of his art was bound to rise accordingly as he was introduced to the murals in Mexico City and Cuernavaca in the beginning of 1937. The sheer physical scale of the murals and their grand narrative sweep could not but inspire awe. Here was class-conscious art accessible to the masses and on permanent public display. “Do you wish to see with your own eyes the hidden springs of the social revolution?” Trotsky wrote in the summer of 1938. “Look at the frescoes of Rivera. Do you wish to know what revolutionary art is like? Look at the frescoes of Rivera.”

Trotsky was no less fascinated by the artist himself, his imposing physical presence and outsize personality. He admired the passion and devotion Rivera brought to his work. Naturally, he felt a strong sense of solidarity with him for the unceasing slander campaign he had to endure as a so-called Trotskyist painter. And of course he was delighted to have a great artist associated with the Fourth International.

Trotsky’s secretaries shared the Old Man’s enthusiasm for Diego and his art, but it was not long before they began to take a more skeptical view of his professed Trotskyism, and even of his Marxism. Diego was a free spirit, and he made no attempt to hide this fact from them. Perhaps he enjoyed scandalizing them. “You know, I am a bit of an anarchist,” he liked to say to Van, and he would tell stories about how the political repressions in the Soviet Union had begun before Stalin, in the time of Lenin. “He would say nothing of this, however, to Trotsky, to whom he showed another face.” Van recalled that on one occasion when he allowed his skepticism about the painter’s politics to peek through, Trotsky reproached him for it: “Diego, you know, is a revolutionary!”

Trotsky and Diego were drawn together by circumstances beyond mutual respect, fascination, and dependence. Diego was fifty years old, only seven years younger than Trotsky, who in his exile years was surrounded mostly by much younger acolytes. Both men were world-famous and they thus experienced that unspoken bond that exists between celebrities. Both were well traveled and had overlapped for several years in Paris, where Diego fraternized with Russian émigrés and even took a Russian as his common-law wife. Among his friends was the Russian writer Ilya Ehrenburg, who based the title character of his 1922 satirical novel,
The Extraordinary Adventures of Julio Jurenito and His Disciples,
on Rivera and his anarchic ideas and temperament. Trotsky and Diego addressed each other in French and in English, and their conversation was enriched by the occasional Russian word or expression.

All of this helps explain why these two apparently mismatched individuals were able to establish a special connection. “Of all the persons whom I knew around Trotsky from 1932 to 1939,” Van testifies, “Rivera was the one with whom Trotsky conversed with most warmth and unconstraint. There were indeed limits that could never be crossed in conversation with Trotsky; but his meetings with Rivera had an air
of confidence, a naturalness, an ease, that I never saw with anybody else.” Trotsky even tolerated Diego’s penchant for telling risqué jokes in French, even though they made him squirm.

Diego’s friends and acquaintances understood that his artistry extended to the telling of tall tales. Trotsky knew how to tell a story well, how to make the truth compelling—witness his inspired recollection of the
Cirque Moderne.
Diego’s imagination, however, often became un-tethered to any reality. Stuffed with elaborate supporting details, his tales were as wide as they were tall. Often they related to his personal background and experiences. He was of Spanish-Indian and Portuguese-Jewish descent, but apparently this was not exotic enough. He once declared to an audience in Mexico City that his ancestry was “Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, Russian and—I am proud to say—Jewish.” He told a reporter that he was “three-eighths Jewish.” He also claimed that his great-grandmother was Chinese. On one occasion he boasted that his mother “passed on to me the traits of three races: white, red, and black.”

Frida used hand signals to alert potential victims when Diego was embroidering or inventing out of whole cloth. She defended her husband’s fabrications as products of his “tremendous imagination” besides, “I have never heard him tell a single lie that was stupid or banal.” Trotsky, who was disposed to categorize individuals, was prepared to make generous allowances for the demands of “artistic temperament,” but he should have realized early on that there was no one like Diego Rivera.

Diego’s precarious politics and infinite imagination aside, those who observed their interactions up close must have wondered whether the two contrasting friends were bound to clash: the rigid, prickly, angular Trotsky and the reckless, riotous, gargantuan Diego. The lion and the elephant. Diego bathed irregularly, dressed carelessly, and seldom arrived on time for anything. Trotsky, meanwhile, was a stickler for neatness, regimen, and routine. Both men had tremendous work ethics, but Diego’s self-discipline was restricted almost entirely to his painting. And with brush in hand, he tended to lose track of everything else.

Frida, whose supply of patience had to have been titanic, called her husband the “enemy of clocks and calendars.” She once painted him as
an overgrown infant in her arms, which must give some indication of what it was like to be married to the man. A British economist, upon meeting Diego for the first time in Mexico in 1938, was struck by the contrast between “the considerable subtlety that his work often displays” and the “childlike simplicity, friendliness, and frankness” of his personality. He loved to make mischief and may have enjoyed flaunting his artistic temperament in Trotsky’s presence, as when he greeted him at home in San Angel with a parrot on his head. James Farrell observed of Trotsky that there was an “exactness” about him: “There was not, however, much spontaneity in him—or, rather, his spontaneity was kept in check.”

Estimations of Trotsky’s personality tend to shade into explanations for his political downfall. His rigidity is seen as of a piece with his haughtiness, which constrained him as a politician. He could inspire the masses, but once Bolshevik rule had been consolidated and the masses had been taken out of the equation, he lacked the personal qualities necessary to organize and lead a political faction in the struggle against Stalin following Lenin’s death. The odds were in any case heavily stacked against him, not least because of his late entry into the Bolshevik Party, the extensive paper trail of his often corrosive polemics with Lenin before 1917, his ethnicity, and the vastly superior political instincts and unmatched ruthlessness of his opponent. Hubris alone, therefore, cannot explain Trotsky’s downfall, but to the extent that the limitations of his personality are held responsible, it is seen as the tragic flaw.

Some of the most damning evidence comes from comrades who fought by his side, not least Natalia. She later recalled that when he was leader of the Left Opposition in the 1920s, his comrades repeatedly urged him to loosen up a bit, “lest he be thought haughty and arrogant”—which of course was already the case. He dreaded their social gatherings, which required him to engage in that unproductive exercise, small talk. “Nor did he care for the
double entendres,
touched with vulgarity, which were so freely bandied about.” The chief perpetrator in those days was the puckish Bolshevik journalist and jester Karl Radek, who had a special talent for telling bawdy jokes but had to clam up whenever Trotsky approached. Natalia explains that “although Trotsky, too, had a sense of humor, it was of a different kind.”

As she proceeds with her defense, Natalia begins to protest too much. “The fact was that he used the familiar form of address to hardly anyone, that we neither made nor received visits—in the first place we had no time—and that he went to the theater only very occasionally.” Trotsky’s circle of friends was restricted to comrades dedicated entirely to the political struggle, she proudly asserts. “But he established the warmest relationships in spite of that.” The examples she puts forward, however, describe not genuine friendships but the loyalties of younger comrades.

Natalia’s apologetics only serve to reinforce the devastating portrait of her husband drawn by the American writer Max Eastman, who was Trotsky’s biographer and the translator of his books into English. Eastman’s judgment was that Trotsky lacked “the gift of personal friendship” and that this doomed him as a politician. “Aside from his quiet, thoughtful wife, toward whom his attitude was a model of sustained gallantry and inexhaustible consideration, he had, in my opinion, no real friends,” Eastman observed. “He had followers and subalterns who adored him as a god, and to whom his coldness and unreasonable impatience and irascibility were a part of the picture…. But in a close and equal relation he managed to get almost everybody ‘sore.’ One after another, strong men would be drawn to him by his deeds and brilliant conscientious thinking. One after another they would drop away.”

Eastman’s Trotsky gives the impression of someone who has studied the handbook on how to conduct a friendship. “The part he played was that which a high idea of personal relations demanded of him, but since the whole feeling was not there he fell often and too easily out of the part.” Farrell, whose acquaintance with Trotsky was comparatively brief and who, unlike Eastman, remained on good terms with him to the end, found this profile convincing. The man who could move the masses, Farrell agreed, had a proclivity for “seeing individuals as servants to an aim and an idea rather than as personalities in their own right.”

Eastman describes the scene at an “anniversary smoker” in the Kremlin in the early twenties, where he discovered Trotsky, who was offended by tobacco smoke and rarely drank alcohol, wandering about “like a lost angel, faultlessly clad as always, with a brand-new shiny manuscript case under his arm, a benign sort of Y.M.C.A. secretary’s smile put on for the festivities, but not an offhand word to say to any
body. It seems a funny epithet to use about a commander in chief, but he reminded me of Little Lord Fauntleroy.”

Try as she might, Natalia cannot rescue Trotsky here. She recalls his attendance at a New Year’s Eve party in 1926 given by his brother-in-law, Lev Kamenev, at his Kremlin apartment, directly above their own. Trotsky’s purpose was not entirely pleasure, as he intended to use the occasion to gauge the mood of an oppositionist group from Leningrad. To Natalia’s surprise, he returned almost immediately and in a foul mood. “I can’t stand it,” he fumed. “Liqueurs, long dresses and gossip! It was like a salon.”

Trotsky’s favorite distractions were hunting and fishing, the essential activities of his exercise regimen up until his departure from Turkey in 1933, after which—in France, Norway, and then Mexico—security concerns restricted his opportunities. Hunting and fishing were not Diego’s pastimes, but like Trotsky, he enjoyed escaping Mexico City by automobile. Hansen’s letters and notes record the excursions undertaken by Diego and the Old Man—usually identified as “the OM,” or as “LD,” for Lev Davidovich, his first name and patronymic, which is how the staff addressed him. On November 3, 1937, Hansen reports that, “Last Sunday we drove in the Dodge to the base of Iztaccihuatl, the volcano north of Popocatepetl, and ate some ham sandwiches and tacos with Diego and Frida and Hidalgo. It was a very pleasant drive and a relief for L.D.” Later that month the destination is the Huasteca region, 150 miles to the southeast, where the OM spends “a few days relaxing and drinking mineral waters in the company of Diego.”

A trip to Guadalajara in July 1938 offered varied diversions, including car trouble: two tires blew out, one when the car was traveling at a speed of 60 miles per hour. “The Old Man enjoyed especially pushing the car out of the mud holes. It made him feel twenty years younger, he declared, as it reminded him of the civil war days. He had not pushed a car out of a mud hole since that time.” July falls within the rainy season in Mexico, which explains the ubiquitous presence of mud. “On occasion it was really funny, Diego half up to his knees in mud and so stuck he couldn’t move himself without help, and the Old Man one time taking a header into the mud when the car gave a sudden lurch backward.”

It begins to sound like the kind of material Hollywood turns into a buddy movie, yet tourism in the company of Diego required a certain amount of patience and stamina. He was never without a tiny scratch pad tucked in the palm of his hand, in which he was constantly sketching whatever came into view: faces, flora, churches, everything, turning over page after page. A typical distraction appeared during the expedition to the volcano in October 1937. “We came through a village where a funeral was in process—black coffin, hexagonal—fitted to the body—ordinary boards—so we had to stop while he sketched that.”

These unscheduled stops could get on Trotsky’s nerves, as revealed by Hansen’s remark about a less enjoyable trip to Guadalajara: “Visiting churches (time
LD lost patience
over
Diego
& and his churches & buying in mkt place & we return alone).”