Signatures

by David Pryce-Jones

  Evelyn Waugh was the first to point out that she was neither nostalgic nor apologetic. Continuing to give primacy to personal feelings and fates, she brought the past into the present. Her fiction has an afterglow, like Lampedusa’s The Leopard. She’s been in love with Aldous and Maria Huxley and other famous men and women, but it was difficult to extract from her anything about them. No name-dropping.

  She took pride in her knowledge of wine, paying her way by buying twenty or thirty cases en primeur, and waiting for the right moment to open one case and sell the rest. When she came to the house, I consulted a friend who was in the trade and he recommended Château Verdignan. Sybille had not heard of it, she sniffed and tasted and said, Never mind, there are ten thousand vineyards, you can’t know them all.

  SAUL BELLOW

  Humboldt’s Gift

  1975

  Humboldt’s Gift is Saul Bellow’s tenth work of fiction, and Barley Alison, its London publisher, was highly anxious about it. I imagine she had paid more money for it than was sensible. Saul was known to say that people bought his books not to read but to leave them lying on coffee tables as evidence that they were highbrows. Barley intended to have this book sold, read and talked about. I was to write it up in the Colour Magazine of the Telegraph.

  Preparing to come to London for the publicity, Saul set Barley’s nerves jangling. Her recent letters, he wrote, had been “charming and impossible, heavenly and hellish.” She was underestimating his fatigue and overestimating his strength. He had no objection to meeting me and dining together, for some reason thinking the meal would be Provençale. But the BBC was after him, and his last experience with them had been dreadful. He spelled it out to her: on a sweltering day in Chicago ten men had come into his house, turned off the air conditioning, blown the fuses, asked ignorant and clumsy questions, and he was never again going to spend four hours under the cameras, with artistic picture editors all the more pleased the grimmer and queerer they made their subjects look.

  In the event, Saul proved easygoing. It happened to be another sweltering day, and we sat it out in the shade of a tree at the center of one of the Kensington squares. He was in a mood to tell stories, reminiscing about the state school that had taught him Latin, and about his childhood friend, the son of Italian Mafiosi bootleggers in the years of Prohibition. In 1968 there were student riots here, there and everywhere, including Chicago. A member of the conservative-minded Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, Saul had been greatly distressed by the violence. By chance in the street he encountered his childhood friend, now a capo famiglia, and told him what was happening. The question then was, How many are there? About two thousand. Right, give the word and we’ll have them out by two o’clock.

  I told him how as a small boy I had been in France in the blitzkrieg of 1940, taken by my aunt Helene (always known as Bubbles) and her husband Eduardo Propper de Callejon, a secretary at the Spanish Embassy in Paris, to Cannes in the Vichy zone and then to safety in Spain and Morocco. Saul said, You went through something close to the Jewish experience. He felt that he had never quite done justice to his experience of being Jewish. Anti-Communism for him was a straightforward matter, but fear of what critics would say compelled him to hold back on unfashionable semi-mystical beliefs that he held about human nature, and he regretted what he could only stigmatize as cowardice.

  Over the years, Saul read and generously endorsed several of my books. Passing through London, he would come to kitchen suppers in the house, sometimes alone and sometimes with Alexandra, his Romanian wife and a mathematician. He was a first-person writer whose fictional protagonists one and all are projections of himself. So much so that Joseph Epstein, who knew him well and is himself a writer with style and imagination, raises the possibility in an essay that Saul couldn’t construct convincing plots because he “wasn’t truly a novelist.” A master of language, though, without a doubt. His letters are second only to Byron’s for their immediacy and vivacity. I find myself quoting him quite often, for instance his Socratic view that the unexamined life is not worth living, that death is good for some people, and the analogy that Israel is a moral resort area, what Switzerland is to winter holidays.

  BERNARD BERENSON

  The Italian Painters of the Renaissance

  1952 EDITION

  AFTER THE DEATH OF POPPY in February 1953, an immediate question for Alan, my father, was what to do about me. The obvious solution was to send me for the entire school holidays to stay with Poppy’s mother, my grandmother, called Mitzi by some and Mary by others. Exploiting every form of theft from legal chicanery to strong-arm Gestapo squads carrying the loot off in armored cars, the Nazis had dispossessed her wherever she had property. Having spent the war in Canada, she was unsure where to live in Europe outside German-speaking countries. In the lobby of the Hotel Excelsior in Florence she overheard a conversation about a desirable property for sale in Arcetri, a cluster of old houses that is virtually a suburb of Florence but whose olive orchards and cultivated strips have the look of traditional countryside. San Martino was a farmhouse, a casa colonica done up as a villa between the wars. The seller, a baroness, judged it prudent to return to her native Germany. No sooner had Mitzi moved in than hopeful Communists painted a hammer and sickle on the portal. Poppy did not live long enough to visit San Martino, but she imagined the Communists dispossessing Mitzi, just as the Nazis had done, and maybe even slitting her throat. “I’d like to see them try” was Mitzi’s response to this warning.

  Alan was extremely attentive to Mitzi. His letters to her were regular bulletins, and he addressed her on the first page invariably as “Darling.” In a characteristic gesture of largesse, he had bought a second-hand Bentley, and proposed that we drive it to San Martino. On the way there, we could take in the Pont du Gard or the Roman remains at Nimes and Orange, but in the years to come, he said, I would surely have plenty of opportunities for classical sightseeing. Part of his task as editor of the Times Literary Supplement was to be in touch with famous old writers, and with them it was a case of now or never. Architectural monuments would always be there, human monuments would not. He arranged that we were to call in on Somerset Maugham in the South of France, Max Beerbohm in Rapallo and Percy Lubbock near Lerici, where Shelley had drowned.

  The fourth famous old person was Bernard Berenson. Some years before, my grandmother had invited me to accompany her to Bruges and I could recall museums with some of Memling’s dough-faced portraits. My housemaster at Eton had taken several of us around the National Gallery. Otherwise I knew little or nothing about art or art history and had no special feeling for either. Until I was in Florence, I had never heard of Berenson though he was then at the height of his fame. Every door was open to him. He had identified great artists, authenticated their works and been involved in the selling of masterpieces to the best collections, in the process building his own fortune. His library was one of the finest in Europe, and according to rumor he had read all the books in it. Mitzi and BB were two of a kind, both assuming that their reputation and social success put them on an equal footing with the men and women in the brilliant aristocratic and literary circles in which they moved. After her first husband’s death, Mitzi married an Englishman and through him acquired the new name and identity of Mary Wooster. BB had been born in Lithuania as Bernhard Valvrojenski, but made his way in New York and Paris and Berlin with a measure of assimilation as Bernard Berenson. Mitzi and BB both converted to Christianity. I was then seventeen, and could not have had any realistic idea of the psychological pressures or the experiences that drove people like these to be so fearful about their Jewish origins.

  Even a teenager like me was invited to lunch with Berenson and expected to refer to him as BB. We drove across the Arno to Settignano. At the top of a wooded hill, I Tatti seemed an imposing country house. BB was in a wheelchair in the garden. Small, neat and very tidily dressed, he had the sharply defined features of someone accustomed to command. A trim white beard a
dded a touch of informality. Courtiers came to pay homage, the guests, ourselves included, fussed around him. We sat down to lunch about twenty strong.

  BB had put me on his left, and early in the meal he asked what I was doing at school. I had just been admitted to the Eton College Literary Society, and I explained to him that the members met once a week in one of the headmaster’s rooms and took it in turns to read something they’d mugged up and written, usually on some safely conventional subject. And what will you be writing about? BB asked. The Norman Kings of Sicily had been my first choice but they were confusing, and the Dreyfus affair was simpler. I had read one book about it, and I also was aware that Mitzi’s husband and my grandfather, Eugène Fould, had been cut out of the social life of Paris on the grounds that all Jews couldn’t help having treason in their nature and were guilty like Dreyfus. The name of the Marquis de Jaucourt had come down to me as the one and only person in high society who had crossed the Place Vendôme to shake my grandfather’s hand. BB turned red with anger. He raised his voice. Everyone else was silent. A passage in his diaries Sunset and Twilight gives an impression of the passion in his voice at that lunch. “I lived through the affaire, and was in Paris off and on through most of it. Anti-Semitism was rampant. Paris was reeking and drenched and soaked with it, and most Academicians and other writers were anti.… High society rabidly anti-Jewish. Never have I encountered such expressions of hatred, of loathing, as I used to hear against Jews from the mouths of Parisians.” From the far end of the table, someone whom I’ve always and perhaps mistakenly thought was Hugh Trevor-Roper, broke in with some distracting question.

  Unintentionally, I had said something about the condition of Jews in general, and him in particular. Jews were rounded up and deported in September 1943 when Italy dropped out of the war, and German Nazism became the order of the day. Although Berenson was among the best-known Jewish personalities anywhere in the world at that time, he was at the mercy of murderous thugs. Friends spirited him away from I Tatti to safety in the house of the Marchese Filippo Serlupi, who had diplomatic immunity as Ambassador of San Marino to the Holy See. At the end of the war, BB was able to pick up life at I Tatti at the point where Italian Fascists and German Nazis had compelled him to abandon it. The air of normality was deceptive. Next to him was this schoolboy who didn’t grasp that a dining room full of guests with silver on the table and old masters on the walls was all very well but was the symptom of an unhappiness too deep to cure.

  In the course of my career, several publishers and friends have suggested that I write a life of BB. His conflicts of interest and the ambiguities of his character are beyond resolution. It’s trivial but still indicative that after that lunch he gave me a copy of The Italian Painters of the Renaissance, the book that made him famous, and whose dust jacket spells his name Bernhard, although he signed the title page “with the best wishes of Bernard.” Of course it was now out of the question to write a school essay about the Dreyfus affair. Alan came up with the suggestion that I should give an account of the great men I’d been introduced to on our journey. He proposed the working title of “Four Human Monuments.”

  Back at Eton, I spent my spare time writing up these encounters. An uncomfortable silence fell over the room when I finished reading this first attempt of mine at journalism. Nobody had a comment. Robert Birley, then the headmaster and a kindly man with a lot of abstruse knowledge at his fingertips, at last said that it wasn’t done to write about one’s friends, and besides, if they were famous it was snobbish.

  ISAIAH BERLIN

  Translation of Ivan Turgenev,

  First Love

  1956 AND 1982 EDITIONS

  AS A CHILD, my mother lived in one of the apartments of 54 Avenue d’Iéna, a handsome house close to the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, and Aline de Gunzburg lived in another. First as girls, then as adults, the two were the closest of friends. By the time I came up to Oxford in 1956, my mother had died, Aline had married Isaiah Berlin, and the two of them were as good as family to me. I was always welcome at their house in Headington, a typical English gentleman’s residence built in stone in a setting of lawns and old trees. A manservant, usually Portuguese, opened the front door. The ground floor rooms were spacious, and Aline’s classical good taste and beautiful possessions made the most of them.

  To the right of the hall was a study for Isaiah, a room of organized untidiness in which he sat for hours dictating letters that kept selected friends up to date with his news and views, his anxieties and hopes, and since his death they have been edited and published in four hefty volumes. He was generally supposed to be working on a book, even a series of books, about the political and philosophical ideas that have made the world what it is. That huge and self-perpetuating correspondence exhausted his time and his energy, and excused the missing masterpiece.

  Isaiah wore heavy old-fashioned suits, and out of doors an old hat of brown felt, giving him a conventional appearance. The expression on his face was one of amusement and curiosity. I couldn’t help thinking he looked like the hero of a cartoon by H. M. Bateman and something quizzical or funny in every sense of the word was about to happen to him. His rapid-fire conversation suggested that he couldn’t quite keep up with his thoughts. Fluent in Russian, Hebrew and German, he held his own in French and Italian.

  Up to Headington came André Malraux, Edmund Wilson, Teddy Kollek, Shostakovich, Stravinsky, the great and the good visiting one of their number. I once asked him if he attributed greatness to anyone he’d met, and after a moment’s hesitation he came up with Virginia Woolf (who hadn’t reciprocated). Anyone with intellectual aspirations would certainly be familiar with his characterization of people as either Hedgehogs or Foxes, and they will also have understood from him that desirable ends are often incompatible. It used to puzzle me that he accepted social recognition such as knighthood, the role of first and foundational President of Wolfson College, the Order of Merit, and yet spoke lightly and even dismissively about these achievements. This might look like false modesty, but the real driving force, I think, was the timidity inherent in his Jewish identity. An inner spirit warned him that it was all too good to be true, that critics were disguised Cossacks and that clever Jews like him had to pay the price. Backing carefully into the dangerous limelight, he could hope to be all things to all men, and get away with it.

  Hitler and the Holocaust were issues that he left to specialists. Several times I heard him say that, all things considered, Stalin was worse than Hitler. He might have been a Sovietologist as influential as Leonard Schapiro or Robert Conquest, but limited himself to anecdotes, for instance about his meeting in Leningrad with Anna Akhmatova or his trip out to Peredelkino to spend a day talking to Boris Pasternak about Doctor Zhivago. Zionism was the one and only firm commitment in his life, and every year around Christmas he and Aline would escape to Israel.

  Even so, he kept to his standards as well as his compromises. When he found himself in a hotel lift with Menachem Begin, he refused to talk to a man who had resorted to terror in the cause of Zionism. In London, he lunched regularly with Eric Hobsbawm, who not only remained an apologist for Stalinist mass murder to the very end but held that the state of Israel ought to be liquidated. Isaiah also practiced the same double standards with Richard Wollheim, a professor of aesthetics who so dreaded being identified as Jewish that he denied there was any such thing as anti-Semitism and meanwhile refused to leave a long-distance flight that had landed at Tel Aviv for fear that his feet touch “imperialist” soil. I also heard him say quite often, perhaps out of unacknowledged competition, that Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism was a bad book whose opening sentence contained two mistakes. Had he used his gifts and his experience to write a comparable post-mortem of contemporary ideology, he might have exercised the kind of definitive moral and political influence in British national life that Raymond Aron enjoyed in France.

  All allowances made, it was entertaining and often a surprise to be in Isaiah’s com
pany. Once when I was staying with the Berlins in their flat in Paris, the three of us went with Nicholas Nabokov, the musician and cousin of the novelist, to a cinema in the Champs-Élysées. The tough hero of the film was supposedly an Oxford don. The whole audience was then obliged to listen to Isaiah and Nicholas discussing at full blast which Oxford don could be the model for the lead in this film. The manager loomed up to ask for silence. The film’s theme music, the two of them went on to speculate, had been lifted from some other composition, and they started singing to identify the original, whereupon the manager threw us all out into the street.

  “Liberty, efficiency and democracy, three beautiful but incompatible ideals. Discuss” was a question that candidates for an All Souls Fellowship one year were invited to answer. Jeremy Wolfenden, a contemporary of mine at Eton and Magdalen College, had written a paper consisting of a brief series of aphorisms, so brilliant that Isaiah was keeping it in his room. We read them. At least I knew before everyone else that Jeremy would have the Fellowship. On another occasion, I had lunch at Headington with Isaiah and Roy Jenkins, then the university’s Vice-Chancellor. They discussed who should become Provost of Worcester College, a position vacant at that moment. The name of the historian Hugh Thomas was in the air. Basing themselves on personal stories nothing to do with scholarship or proficiency, those two establishment fixers agreed that Hugh “really would not do.” On the other hand, when two friends of mine, William Miller and Paul Thompson, published an article in an undergraduate magazine about eavesdropping on Soviet radio traffic during their national service, I told Isaiah that they were to be tried at the Old Bailey for breaching the Official Secrets Act, and he immediately contributed ten pounds to their defense fund.