West of Japan

Asides and questions from commenters send me scurrying in delightful directions in search of new artefacts. I’m not sure that I’m ready, for example, for this jelly, music for older listeners from when I was a young listener. What a treat: sleek and cool and stripped of every trace of archness. Duran Duran never had it so good.

The timing—both band and place—couldn’t be more apposite, really, given the extent to which Japan’s been on my mind of late. I have rustled up the airfare and could make the money for a rail pass in time for the southern spring during which I’d hoped to return, but I’ve decided instead not to go back at the moment. My navigatory circle has shrunk to the home front and at the moment I want to read and reflect, not voyage. To go to cities new, now, would mean having similar experiences to those on my last journey, but in different places. I want there to be some change in me before I set off again: more language, more ability to read and recognise kana, something in myself that will mean the triad of person, time and place gets differently activated. There’s the material consideration, too, by which that money could also be spent on paying dog stud fees, or that zenith of suburban life, home improvement.

There’s the fact, as well, that I don’t really want to have adventures by myself at the moment. I want to have them with the good señor, and at present there are plenty of things to do at home. What does it feel like to be at present without wanderlust? It feels … limpid. It is a happy torpor.

Finishing at last To the Finland Station—having thanks to illness enough space and concentration to focus my mind on the last hundred or so pages of Wilson’s prose—has reminded me too of the inner worlds that demand to be travelled. Wilson is a dramatic manipulator of the best kind, a true literary critic, and not a historian in the pure sense. It is entertaining to watch him draw his analogies, make his connections, line up his figures, as if he had a model train in which a model Lenin was sitting, being pushed along a game-board back to St. Petersburg. Even as Wilson takes an eye-of-God perspective, there is still something of his working showing. The reader can see the connections by which characters are linked; in the case of Lenin and Trotsky they literally move toward each other from Siberia. (I had forgotten the phrase “conspirator name” and wondered at the life of the prison guard from whom Trotsky stole his working alias.)

I can see, too, how contemporary critics might have thought Wilson’s account of Lenin a hagiography. He seems either to admire him more than Marx—at whom, rendered in the text, one wants to throw a punch or at least offer a slap—but at the same time is working with a narrower range of sources. As the Marx family and Trotsky too emerge from the text, Lenin seems in places to withdraw beneath it, although some contemporary details also fade in light of being for Wilson more recent events. Jenny Marx’s difficult confinements and children dying young in London poverty are vividly imagined, whereas Trotsky’s two daughters, left with their mother in Siberia, largely recede. Only Wilson’s remark that Trotsky was willing to sacrifice his family for the revolution serves, indirectly, to allude to the deaths of almost all his children and his first wife in the Great Terror of the 30s. And I thought, too, how between Wilson’s completing the volume and its publication Trotsky too met his end.

Remember Stephen Fry’s contention that countless phrases may be coined everyday? This I thought in terms of Wikipedia’s recording of Trotsky’s last words. Can any among my commenters think of a legitimate context in which one might say again, “I will not survive this attack. Stalin has finally accomplished the task he attempted unsuccessfully before”?

Technology collapses time and space even more rapidly than words, to the extent that, while here you can see a traveller’s recent arrival at the Finland Station, here you can see a montage of Lenin images “with a song from the ‘best of communism’ album” (writes the poster, sovietgirl1917).

As for me, I am a follower of history and culture but not a follower of revolutionary Leninism. Wilson’s volume has done much, however, to clarify my understanding of the different variants of revolutionary socialism my communist friends possess, even as it does little to turn me in the direction of anything other than occasional, wary, fellow-traveller.