Eileen, back from the kitchen with a bowl of fruit – arthritis, in this memory, has not crippled her yet – sends me for water to wash it. By the time I bring it, Seán has finished quoting Michael-quoting- the-cop, and is telling about a journalist who reportedly went into a confession box in Rome, with a hidden tape recorder, then later published a provocative exchange with the priest.
‘Italians’, Seán reflects in his own voice, ‘lived with popes for so long that they learned to defend themselves against them. They developed nerve.’
Watching Eileen, I remind myself that if something off-colour strikes her as earthy, she will accept and enjoy it. Admiring earthiness is part of the cult of the people. We are a contradictory lot: gossipy though shy, indiscreet though prudish and, as I reflect on that now, it strikes me that it would not be until the late Sixties that reading gay literature led me to understand enough to even wonder what Michael and his policeman lover could have been doing in that bed.
*
Earlier, saving face had been de rigueur and drove a tenacious English lover of Michael O’Donovan’s – alias Frank O’Connor – to change her name to O’Donovan by deed poll, before daring to join him in Dublin along with their infant son. Frank, though, possibly alarmed by her nerve, took off shortly afterwards for the US, where he met and married someone else. Both Mac Liammóir and Myles na gCopaleen had other names – as indeed did I who, when teaching in London, called myself ‘Miss Whelan’. So who or what did we all think we were? Chameleons?
A deeper dilemma was mocked by Myles – alias Flann O’Brien alias Brian O’Nolan – in his savagely funny novel, The Poor Mouth, in which Gaelic-speaking natives of his imaginary Corcha Dorcha grow so bewildered by the misery of their lives that they wonder if they are human at all.
*
When Lauro and I reached LA in 1966, we discovered that we, who, when last in the US, had had to show ID before buying alcohol, now belonged to a reviled older generation. ‘Never’, ran a slogan, ‘trust anyone over thirty.’ The US had changed. Hippies, Black Panthers and anti-war movements, Pacifica Radio, Ramparts magazine and Angela Davis were part of a new scene where it seemed hard to know whom to support. Black people, clearly, had legitimate complaints, and so did young men who risked being more or less press-ganged into fighting in an unpopular war. But what about the druggy, flower-toting hangers on? They struck me as narcissistic. Maybe I was square? Maybe one should be? None of the street demos I had attended in Paris and London had doubled as picnics, and participants represented a cross-section of society. Here many seemed to be spoilt, frivolous and middle class.
Disciplined young policemen, sent to keep order at UCLA anti-war gatherings. were regularly insulted by students, who needed no provocation to barrack and jeer ‘Up against the wall, mother-fucker’ at the under-privileged boys of their own age who stood to attention and stared stoically ahead. My grandfather, I remembered, had been a cop. I hadn’t known him, but did know that in the Ireland of his day, joining the army, the police or the church was a classic step up the social ladder. Nobody, I was sure, had called recruits ‘mother-fuckers’.
A hippie we knew asked us to adopt his under-age girl friend so that he could get the detention centre in which her biological parents had put her to release her to us, so that he and she could continue their love affair. We refused. What did he expect? We – and he – were over thirty – and she looked thirteen.
We stayed some years in the house in Venice where groups of hungry hippies occasionally dropped in for whom I might make pasta or omelettes. Drugs, someone explained, sharpened the appetite. So who did I think I was? Cook? Protester? Possibly a decorator, for I painted the walls, made bookshelves from planks and tables from doors and, in free moments, joined the anti-war rallies surging and merging up and down the boardwalk. Meanwhile some furniture which we had bought in Florence had arrived and raised the tone. A dealer we knew there used to drive around Tuscany looking for solid walnut cupboards and chests which country priests had in their sacristies and were often eager to sell or even trade for a TV set. The designs were timeless, since provincial cabinet-makers hadn’t changed their prototypes in five hundred years. Cheap Mexican pieces, available in LA, though far more crudely knocked together, used some of the same patterns.
All week Lucien and the children of our French and Italian friends attended the French Lycée, wearing the claim cogito ergo sum picked out in gold thread on their blazer pockets, and learning to use the subjunctive so that, like good Europeans, they could feel and voice doubt. At weekends they sometimes dressed as hippies.
When we first reached LA, friends from Reed College who had preceded us there sat me down and filled me in on the history of SNNC (Students’ Non Violent Co-ordinating committee, pronounced ‘snik’), CORE (the Congress of Racial Equality) and the Civil Rights Movement generally. These friends were Bahais whom we had seduced into drinking alcohol at Reed parties, only to find them, two hours later, making for their car on all fours having turned out to have no resistance to the stuff at all. Now they had reverted to being teetotallers and wouldn’t have drink in their house. Pomegranate juice was supplied instead, but the friendship languished.
The query ‘Who do you think you are?’ could be as hard to answer in California as in Corcha Dorcha. And cogito ergo sum didn’t help, since neither thought nor identity was stable. Luciano Z, a professor of medicine, was the first of our friends to illustrate this, when he fell for a hippie called Pauline, changed her name to Paola, divorced his Italian wife, implored her not to tell his mother what he had done and proceeded to remake the Californian Paola in her predecessor’s image. LA at that time was full of adults who, bemused by the youth cult, tried to relive their own first, fine careless raptures and start afresh. Wives, children and dogs fell victims to the impulse and, in our case, the scapegoat was our pet.
Lorenzaccio, a young Labrador whom I had rescued from the pound when I first came, had nowhere to go when it was time for us to give up our Venice bivouac and head for London where we planned henceforth to spend six months of each year. Some of Lauro’s colleagues joked that he was now a jet-setter, then began spending half of every year in Europe themselves.
This was before the English anti-rabies regulations were relaxed to allow dogs to travel. So feeling that Lorenzaccio needed a steady home, we began looking for a responsible, dogloving family who would take him over.
As his great joy was bounding through ocean surf, barking at seabirds, and our friends the Wohls lived by the beach, we entrusted him to them. Unhappily no sooner had we left the US than Bob Wohl quite unforeseeably divorced his wife and, in the ensuing reshuffle of property, Lorenzaccio was given to a passing Japanese. By the time I learned this, we were in London, and all trace of him had been lost. I tried not to wonder whether it was the Japanese – surely not? – who ate dogs. Koreans perhaps? But could the Wohls, who were Swedish, distinguish between them? Anyway, what right had we to blame anyone for anything after letting down our trusting dog? Lucien, too, I’m afraid, found moving to an English boarding school a bit of a jolt.
*
Shuttling between London and LA and renting houses through the UC housing bureau led to our spending time in every part of that city. Looking back over twenty or so years, I remember staying in Westwood, Santa Monica, Bel Air, Beverly Hills, The Hollywood Hills, Laurel Canyon, Beverly Glen, Pacific Palisades and even Malibu where the Irish novelist, Brian Moore, had a seaside house which he and his wife Jean sometimes lent us. Our social profile changed with the luck of the draw, and we could feel delighted or horrified on first pushing open the front door of a new house. The smartest one we rented belonged to a scientist and was so high up in Bel Air that the hawks which hovered on the lookout for prey were sometimes below us. Wildlife in some of the ravines was almost tame. Deer, racoons, coyotes and possums were common and so were hummingbirds. The climate changed too as we drove up from sea level to the cool hills.
*
Frien
dships matter when you are living far from home and in a country you don’t much like. In LA, though, they could be hard to maintain.
Its residents were prone to move on, and when our close friends Josie and Franco Fido left, we felt bereft. In their case, the momentum propelling them to the East Coast was powered by a rumpus which hardly involved them, yet led to their leaving as neatly as two balls side-swiped by another one can be shot across a snooker table. What happened was that ageing Fascists who had been cocks of the walk in the LA Italian community in the days of Mussolini, and resented being replaced by young, lefty Italians, got wind of a row in the UCLA Italian Department, where teaching assistants were said to be swopping As for sexual favours. Eager to make trouble, the old Fascists described the department to the local media as a covo di comunisti – a communist lair. Franco was the department chairman just then, so his relations with UC fund-raisers may have grown strained. All I know for sure, though, is that not long after being fingered on TV as the head of a communist lair, he left and that, cheeringly, his career may well have benefited, for exile took him to pleasant places such as Brown in Providence, Rhode Island, where we spent a delightful Christmas with him and Josie in their elegant Greek Revival house, then to Stanford and Harvard. But until Lauro and he retired from teaching and we all moved back to Europe, we saw far too little of them.
*
Meanwhile in 1980 another friend, this time an entertaining and erudite Parisian called Pierre Pathé, fell badly foul of the law, and a letter from Maura Teissier reached me in LA, reporting that he had been arrested and charged with being a Soviet spy. Though this sounded like a joke, it was backed up by newspaper clippings in which ‘Freelancing for the KGB’ was a recurrent headline. Later another friend sent a set of notes taken at Pierre’s trial which I still have and which make clear that he was actually charged with being a ‘disinformer’, a word so new at the time that the press thought it might have been invented – or translated from Russian – to fit his case.
Article 80 of the French penal code, however, provided for people like him. You could, it specified, be jailed for up to twenty years ‘for having had secret dealings with agents of a foreign power intent on harming the military or diplomatic status of France or its economic interests’. Public indignation was sharper than might otherwise have been expected because of Pierre’s background. His father, Charles Pathé, is credited with having ‘industrialised’ the film business, and one of Pierre’s brothers-in-law at the time of the trial was the head of Renault and would be appointed French ambassador to Washington the following year.
Pierre Pathé, noted Le Figaro, ‘knew a lot of people. He moved in the highest circles, among the most prestigious political and scientific personalities of France, who sought him out because of his brilliant conversation and his superior intelligence. He was the perfect carrier of disinformation.’
So his connections did him more harm than good. They roused the wrath of the state prosecutor who, after harping on Pierre’s privileged origins, asked, ‘How does a man like you come to betray?’ then added oddly, ‘I use the word in a literary, not a legal sense.’ There are gaps in the notes I was given, some explained by the word ‘inaudible’. And some comments seem oddly self-referential: ‘You’, reproached the same prosecutor, ‘were my age when you chose Soviet Russia,’ then referred to his own ‘modest career in the law … I didn’t read your book about the Soviet phenomenon,’ he noted, ‘lest it poison my mind.’
Listeners might have wondered if he was echoing the harangues of the ferocious old Paris witch-finder, Jean Bodin, and poisoning his own mind. ‘Taking legal proceedings against someone because of their possible influence,’ the prosecutor went on, ‘is unknown in the West. This is the first time a court has sentenced anyone for such a crime. So we are creating jurisprudence.’
Did he hope this would look good on his CV? Perhaps it did.
*
By the time I got to France, Pierre had spent months in Fresnes jail, a short train ride from Paris, facing a five-year sentence – though the prosecution had asked for ten. The supposedly influential intellectuals who had spoken in his defence may not have helped him much, for France – as ever – was fiercely divided and, as even the prosecution acknowledged, the case was odd.
What had started the trouble was that the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire, France’s MI5, had been keeping an eye on a soviet diplomat attached to UNESCO. They knew him to be a member of the KGB, and, on seeing him with Pierre, began watching Pierre too. While doing this, they saw him in a café in a working-class part of Paris handing documents to the Russian and accepting an envelope in exchange. They then arrested both men. The Russian was promptly deported and Pierre, who admitted having received modest sums of money from Soviet contacts to help finance Synthesis, one of the magazines he ran, was accused of complicity with an agent of a foreign power. He explained that the cash was payment for articles he had written for the Soviet press – and indeed what he had just handed to the Russian proved to be a fresh selection of these. The prosecution’s admission that they did not regard him as a spy, but were setting a precedent by pursuing him as an agent d’influence, might seem to have weakened their case. Yet there he was in Fresnes. ‘Serving as a scapegoat?’ queried left-wing newspapers. Several editors and heads of academic institutes spoke up on his behalf, but this backfired when opponents said he was dangerous precisely because he was friendly with – and in some cases related to – people of influence on whom his influence could have a bad effect. Synthesis, they claimed, had a dual purpose: it was both cover and a way of passing on information. ‘Very clever!’ sneered the counsel for the prosecution.
*
People at Amnesty International, whom I phoned to ask for help when I got back to the UK, were pessimistic. Pierre had no constituency, explained the man who came to the phone, and when I asked if this didn’t prove that he was unlikely to be either dangerous or engaged in a conspiracy, the answer was that it made it hard to rally support.
When I visited Pierre in jail, neither of us alluded to the fact that a jail was where we were. Instead. we chatted about friends and Ireland and my novel, No Country for Young Men, which had recently appeared and he had read. Ironically, he complained that my depiction of my compatriots was ‘harsh’, which made me wonder whether he felt that I too had betrayed my country. Poor Pierre! He looked ghostly. The prison walls were painted a pale grey and he, who was wearing a sharply tailored, grey summer suit – clearly not prison issue – seemed to merge into them. He was sixty-nine.
It was painful at the end of my visit to leave him in that bleak place, where we both assumed that he had almost five years still to serve. Luckily, as it would turn out, Mitterrand and his Socialists took power the following May and had him released.
Pierre’s sentence had been tougher than his friends expected, for not only had he proven to be older than we had supposed, but his motivation for acting as he had seemed to be a romantic Russophilia, which was noted even during his trial, when he spoke throughout of ‘Russia’ rather than of the Soviet Union. To the customary query as to whether he had anything to say, he had replied, ‘I would like to tell counsel for the prosecution that I never thought … that the Soviet model of socialism would suit France.’
That, Maura Teissier and I agreed, was bewildering.
‘Just as well’, she told me, ‘that you didn’t take him too seriously.’
‘Nor you.’
‘Nor Berenice nor Rosemarie, wouldn’t you say?’
‘And certainly not Chantal.’
Over a number of years, Pierre had fallen serially in love with five of us, four of whom were Irish, and seemed to have romanticised Ireland in much the way he had Russia. We, he assured us, were more idealistic than Parisian women.
‘Did you notice’, Maura wondered, ‘what the minutes of the trial say about his ex-wife, “Miss Russia of Paris”?’ She seems to have attended it – or tried to. Apparently she sat wit
h the press on the first day, but on the second was asked to leave by one of the defence lawyers.
According to the news clippings, even the psychiatric expert who had been brought to assess Pierre agreed that he had an unusually brilliant mind. But clearly – and this reminded me of the flower-children of a dozen years earlier – he had not, as my mother would have put it, ‘a pick of common sense’. This was obvious in small ways. Once, when I was staying with the Teissiers and Lauro was elsewhere, Pierre had flown to Florence to urge me to get divorced and marry him. ‘You’, he told me, ‘are the woman I should have married.’ And he refused to believe me when I protested that, in fact, Lauro and I were well suited. This may have been due to Maura’s telling him that, like swans, Irish women mated for life.
He was, said the expert, emotionally cold and secretive by nature. This could be in reaction to his father’s notoriety, but he had no psychiatric troubles. Then she talked of Lacan’s theories about the importance of fathers, but the notes left these out.
Before he left Florence Pierre had told me, as though I had not discouraged him at all, that when married we would not have much money because he meant to go on publishing Synthesis.
‘But,’ noted Maura when I told her this, ‘he’ll have no money now for that either.’
*
Another paradox:
Shortly after this I took part in a literary festival in Japan, where the liveliest person I met was an Irish Sacred Heart nun who told me that when first taking vows she had asked her superiors to send her to work with the poor, but instead, – perhaps to test her will? – was sent to teach in the order’s school for aristocratic girls in Tokyo, which she now ran. She invited me to dine with some of her former pupils who had become elegant adults, whereas she – whose will seemed startlingly intact – chose to appear in a cardigan which might have come from a car-boot sale. If her mentors ever let her switch back to her first vocation, she already had the kit.
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