The Vengeance of Rome

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 reach an understanding. That is one reason why this volume has taken so long to appear. Another reason was the death of my original editor, the extraordinary John Blackwell, who had helped me considerably, both with translations and interpretations and whose loss has been felt by many other authors and publishers.

When I moved to Texas, and deposited the papers and tapes still in my possession with Texas A&M University, I was able to interview one or two of those friends and acquaintances of Pyat’s who were by then living in the USA, among them Colonel H.W Mix, who saw long service with the CIA before retiring to Florida, and Karl Schnauben, who served a prison sentence for his SS activities but had settled in Wisconsin, where he had family. I also interviewed survivors and relatives of survivors from the 1930s and 40s with whom I could check various accounts of Nazis and ex-Nazis who had known Pyat in Germany, including Kurt Ludecke, Ernst Hanfstaengl, Issolde Krone and the woman who still prefers to be called ‘Catherine Oberhauser’.

In England I had been fortunate enough to discover Desmond Reid, who had acted in films with Pyat in Germany, and Major John Nye, who had served in British Military Intelligence and had been well acquainted with Mrs Cornelius and Colonel Pyat since the 1920s. Over a hundred, Major Nye retired to Wexford in Ireland and in 2001 died in the care of his eldest daughter, Mrs O’Dowd, formerly Lady Begg.

The task of turning Pyat’s vast collection of papers and tapes into some kind of coherent narrative has been considerable. Where Colonel Pyat repeated a story, it often varied a little, depending on the context, and I had to choose the account which seemed most credible. Some of the least likely stories, however, have been confirmed by other sources, so I have done my best not to confine his reminiscences only to the mundane. Much material was written in a variety of languages, including a kind of international patois he developed for himself. Chiefly, however, he wrote in English, Russian, French, German, Italian and Yiddish, though here and there I came across pages in Turkish, Spanish, Greek, Arabic and Hebrew. Most of the languages, with the exception of Yiddish and Russian, were rendered inexpertly and even the Yiddish was not always exact. I have attempted to give some of the original material’s flavour, with its disgressions and sudden switches into other languages. Almost all the tapes I made, for instance, are in English and these form the basis of the narrative. I have, as usual, limited Colonel Pyat’s racialist, homophobic and other diatribes to the minimum, especially in the light of the recent revival of anti-Semitic rhetoric in parts of Europe and America, but his memoir would not be understood, I believe, if I had removed everything I found offensive. This particularly concerns the scenes in which Adolf Hitler appears. That these descriptions and ideas are the antithesis of my own I am sure the reader realises.

I am extremely grateful, too, to my friends Lord David Holland and Professor Richard Meadley, who supplied me with missing information. My wife Linda Moorcock did an heroic job of reading and editing my manuscript. She also did much of the final typing and had to live with Pyat for some twenty-five years. She will be as relieved as I am that I have at last completed the work as I promised. Others to whom I am grateful for their conversation and ideas on the subject include my late guardian Dr Ernst Jellinek, Peter Ackroyd, my first wife Hilary Bailey, Barrington Bayley, the late Angela Carter, Tom Disch, Jean-Luc Fromental, M. John Harrison, Dr David Harvey, Harvey Jacobs, Richard Klaw, Dr Rafael Medoff, Dr Josef Nesvadba, Stuart Reid, David Shapiro, Iain Sinclair, Lili Stejnes, Emma Tennant, Alan Wall, Claire Walsh, Zoran Zivkovic, my friend and agent Howard Morhaim, my friend and agent Georges Hoffman, and my good friend and father of my god-daughter Oona, Christian, Count von Baudissin, who also looked over the final manuscript and made valuable suggestions, as did Anthony Rudolf, who shares an interest with myself and Sinclair in the Princelet Street synagogue. My other much loved friend who helped me with her insights and encouragement through the whole course of this volume and died too soon to see it completed was Andrea Dworkin to whom I dedicated an earlier volume. She died far too young. She was as close to me as any sister and I miss her terribly.

One last note: I was able to verify much of what Pyat wrote about his time in Italy, Germany and elsewhere by interviewing survivors or reading texts like Ludecke’s. It became plain to me in this process, as I searched through hundreds of books, newspapers, magazines and documents, that only those who did not wish to know about the Nazi concentration camps and treatment of Jews from 1933 onwards, did not know, and that the American and British governments of the day by no means did everything they could and, in my view, should have done to resist Hitler and his policies. For further information about this shameful episode in Anglo-American foreign policy, I refer you to the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies (of which I am a member) at their website: www. Wymanlnstitute.org

Michael Moorcock,

The Old Circle Squared,

Port Sabatini, Texas

May 2005