The Vengeance of Rome Read Free Page B

They will tell you how safe the streets of London were back then,when the Twins ruled supreme. A decent woman could go out at night with no fear of molestation. If you mention any of the individuals Reg and Ronnie molested themselves, often with life-changing force, they will shake their heads philosophically and say they almost certainly had it coming. Many hung on to a similar nostalgic regret in regard to the fascist regimes. Their only real regret, though it was seldom voiced in public, was that Hitler had ended up coming a poor second in that military Olympiad called the war. Given a different result, and if only he hadn’t insisted on hitting the USSR when he did, there might well have been one, what magnificent films Leni Riefenstahl might have made of these events. The Goebbels children could have lived on to be handsome young Aryan men and women. Hitler would not have needed to be incinerated in the garden of the Bunker; he could have had a state funeral on a par with Churchill’s instead. How different Europe might have been. How much anarchy might have thus been avoided.
    The philosophical argument continues too. There are those who regard Nazism as the ultimate negation of all that the Enlightenment propounded; others (like Zygmunt Bauman) regard the camps as in some way the culmination of certain aspects of the Enlightenment—the instrumentality of thought, the teleological solution of history and the liquidation of all historical contradictions. The utility buildings of Auschwitz were built for a purpose: to rid the world of contradiction, and that was part of the Enlightenment dream, after all. It all comes down to what you reckon is the force that’s contradicting you.
    Pyat is unrepentant in this book, the darkest and most brilliant volume of the quartet, and it is appropriate that he should be so. His Jewishness, so vehemently denied, so unceasingly insinuated, takes him to Dachau, where he comes to his most startling conclusion of all: that God is either senile or insane. There are a few unusually short chapters in which Pyat once more denies that he is a Jew. ‘They all say that,’ an anonymous voice announces. So there is a kind of subtext pressing through here. The
braggadocio
has not entirely swallowed the darkness, even as it collaborates with it. Pyat has been stained with his fair share of the century’s filth.
    So could Pyat not have had a revelation at the end, some glimmer of understanding of how mistaken, indeed catastrophic, so many of his beliefs and actions had in truth been? It is part of the burden of this extraordinary work to flatter us as readers by leaving that function with ourselves. The goddess of history in antiquity was Clio; our hero has been her servant and her gigolo. If he’s truly Clio’s son, then like Oedipus he’s had some perverseways of demonstrating his filial affections. When Pyat finally comes face-to-face with his genealogy, in the Princelet Street Synagogue in Spitalfields, he denies it. I’m not the person you take me for, he says with vehemence. But then he would say that, wouldn’t he?
    Alan Wall
University of Chester
2013

Introduction
    I have at last completed the final volume of Colonel Pyat’s memoir. His life began in 1900 and ended in 1977, a few years after he had commissioned me to help him write the book he originally intended to call variously ‘The Life of Mrs Cornelius’ or ‘My Adventures with Mrs Cornelius Between the Wars’. He believed that Mrs Cornelius, a well-known local Notting Hill figure during the 1950s and 60s, was world-famous and that the public would pay him handsomely for his reminiscences. Mrs Cornelius had died a year or two earlier, her career as a minor film actress and entertainer completely forgotten. After publication of the first volume, her children almost immediately began litigation to stop me publishing any further work about her. Only in recent years did we