Isaiah sponsored me for a Harkness Fellowship and for entry into the Foreign Service, both times in vain. He argued against any involvement in the Hungarian revolution of 1956 or its aftermath, because the harm I might do to myself was greater than any possible reward. He also argued that I shouldn’t write Next Generation, a book about Israel, because I was a public schoolboy educated to think that Israel’s qualities are mistaken and its mistakes are intentional. One day in February 1974, when Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had just been expelled from the Soviet Union, I happened to be the guest of Aline and Isaiah in the royal box at Covent Garden, where he was a director. The Times had published an article by a professor with the thesis that this expulsion had nothing to do with Communism but was another episode in the historic debate in Russia between Westerners and Slavophiles. Isaiah had better qualifications than anyone to expose this pernicious nonsense but refused to do so because, he kept saying, the professor had his credentials, and I couldn’t get him past this evasion. A couple of years later, my book about Unity Mitford and other English fans of Hitler met with some residual pre-war fascism and anti-Semitism from Oswald Mosley and his supporters. A few telephone calls from Isaiah, and perhaps an article, would have been enough to stop the scandal. By chance, I was invited at the time once again to the royal box. Isaiah offered to lean out and make a speech to the opera-goers in the stalls below spelling out how badly I’d been treated. Such an exhibition of himself was inconceivable. This was his way of ducking out.
On a Saturday in June 1989, I opened the Times and discovered that Roger Scruton had written an article about Isaiah on the occasion of his eightieth birthday. Publication of this piece was in itself quite enough to rattle Isaiah, but there was much more. Apart from one paragraph of incomprehensible speculation about Isaiah’s personality, Scruton’s line was clear, his tone regretful: thanks to the Cold War, Britain and its democratic values were under sustained assault and Isaiah had not taken his due place as champion honoris causa of right-thinking people. That Sunday, I dined with friends in London and one of them must have denounced me for saying that, alas, I did think that Isaiah lacked civil courage and therefore didn’t do justice to himself or his convictions. On the Monday, Isaiah telephoned to say that he had heard I agreed with Scruton, and could this be true? A long typewritten letter followed. In his words, the article was absolutely odious, deeply offensive, loathsome, making false accusations, reminiscent of the kind of accusation right-wing liberals in pre-1914 Russia had to put up with from the Black Hundreds, also Goebbels-like. My response was upsetting, he said, because he had known me for so long and held me in such affection. I felt obliged to point out to him that Goebbels would have stopped him writing and excluded him completely from public life, while Scruton wished him to write more and be more active in public life. One must carry on as before, he concluded in his letter to me, adding in ink, “so be it” – and so it was. He made sure that I knew I had done wrong. Noel Malcolm, later a fellow of All Souls and therefore a colleague of Isaiah’s, reviewed The War That Never Was, the book I wrote about the implosion of the Soviet Union. I happened to run into Isaiah at the time and he said, “If Noel Malcolm finds that you have written a good book, then you have written a good book. I shall not be reading it.”
One evening Isaiah was one of ten guests at a dinner given by Mary and Sir Nicholas Henderson, generally called Nico, a public figure after a career as British ambassador in Warsaw and Bonn, Paris and Washington. Another guest was Lady Falkender, who had been Harold Wilson’s private and political secretary in Downing Street throughout his time as Prime Minister. When Isaiah was put on her left at the table, he said to Nico, I can’t possibly sit next to Lady Falkender, you’ll have to change the placement. The room was small, we could not help overhearing him, and then we had to shuffle around the table, elbow to elbow. During the meal, Lady Falkender hardly spoke and then left as soon as she could. What was that about? asked Nico. It turned out that the Times had serialized Lady Falkender’s diary, and in one passage she described an interview with Radji Parviz, the Shah of Iran’s ambassador in London from 1976 to 1979. Entering his study, she had found him reading something Isaiah had written. According to her diary, Lady Falkender had reacted, perhaps broken the ice, by saying, Isn’t Berlin some sort of charlatan? You see, Isaiah concluded, there could be no question of sitting next to someone who thinks me a charlatan.
Surviving Isaiah by many years, Aline sold Headington and moved to London. From time to time, I called on her. She liked to recall old days in the Avenue d’Iéna, and how my mother had been like a sister to her. Aline had spent the war in New York, and gave me copies of evocative letters my mother had written to her from London in those years. She might mention Isaiah anecdotally, but in my hearing never referred to the way I had upset him.
ADRIAN BERRY
The Next 500 Years
1995
IT WAS DIFFICULT TO KNOW quite where one was with Adrian. Good-natured, he would be welcoming and seemingly diffident, only to say something extravagantly wild, giving away that one had no idea what was going on his head. Quite possibly this was a protective strategy that he had developed to keep his parents at arm’s length and remain himself. His father, Michael Berry, owned and edited the Daily Telegraph, a position so demanding that he had not much energy or emotion for anything else. As the eldest son, Adrian was brought up expecting to inherit a great paper and the editorial responsibility that went with it. Adrian’s mother, Lady Pamela, monosyllabic Pam, was the daughter of F. E. Smith, Lord Chancellor and Earl of Birkenhead. Her social energy was unlimited and she used it to influence government and the arts. Her lunch and dinner parties were the talk of everyone who mattered, or who might one day matter, in Westminster, Mayfair and Fleet Street. Humor, reluctant or sardonic, crept into Adrian’s voice when he spoke of his mother herding the guests into the family home in Lord North Street.
One of those guests was Alan, my father, and Lady Pam invited him for a cruise on the Virginia, the Berry yacht, bringing me as a friend and companion for Adrian. Weighing over a thousand tons, the Virginia was a miniature liner, complete with an ex-Royal Navy captain in a uniform and a large crew. The drawing room had still-life flower pictures in the style of Matthew Smith, perhaps even by him. I must have been just eighteen, a year or so older than Adrian. My mother had not been long dead, and on board was Lady Elizabeth Cavendish, whom Alan was wondering whether to marry, as I was to discover later.
The Virginia first put in to Antibes. Alongside was a ship of similar size. There appeared to be nobody aboard. Adrian and I decided to explore. In a moment we were having to explain ourselves to Sir Bernard and Lady Docker, whose yacht this was. Snobbish England mocked him for making a fortune and mocked her for spending it with nouveau riche vulgarity. The Dockers were amused by our trespassing. They suggested inviting Adrian’s parents and then asked a steward to mix a cocktail that sent us dizzily back to the Virginia. Next day, we sailed past Corsica to reach La Maddalena, an Italian naval base on Sardinia. For security reasons, the authorities made everyone fill in a form that among other details asked for the names of father and grandfather. Hoping to pass themselves off anonymously, Lady Elizabeth wrote tenth Duke of Devonshire and ninth Duke of Devonshire, while Lady Pam wrote Gypsy Smith and Gypsy Smith.
Like me, Adrian went up to Oxford in September 1956 – in his case to Christ Church. The Suez crisis was upon us. British forces were invading Egypt. Undergraduates were going to the station to catch one or another train that would get them to London in time to join a mass demonstration. A life-long high Tory, Adrian telephoned the Oxford station master, introduced himself as the Proctor and asked for a loudspeaker announcement that undergraduates were forbidden from demonstrating and would be sent down if they disobeyed. The station master fell for it and so did most undergraduates. In much the same have-a-go mood, Adrian financed and edited Parsons’ Pleasure, a magazine so scurrilous that its life was short.
Leaving a par
ty at Christ Church late one evening, I was walking through the cloisters when I saw W. H. Auden approaching from the opposite direction. While we were chatting, Adrian came by. I introduced him to Auden and he invited us up to his room on the floor above the cloisters. Adrian had been at the same party as me and I knew he had drunk too much, but it seemed churlish to refuse. We reached the room but there wasn’t time to sit down. Suddenly Adrian was violently sick all over the papers and notebooks on Auden’s central table. None of the work on that desk could have been salvaged. To his great credit, Auden took it in good part. No reproach. Abandoning Auden to the task of cleaning up, Adrian and I hurried away.
Whenever we met, Adrian was likely to want to tell me about the latest report by some astronomer on the conquest of space or some new theory about the colonization of the planets. My recollection is that he had no formal education in any branch of science but was displaying the passionate enthusiasm of the autodidact. Science fiction has never caught my imagination, but Adrian’s futuristic world was a model of creativity and adventure with the odd brickbat thrown at any experts with contrary opinions. The mix of conventionality and mischief-making was his special element.
Silently he mourned that his father had been obliged for financial reasons to sell the Daily Telegraph. The promise of editorship vanished. The Virginia was sold to President Tubman of Liberia, who had a heavy cannon mounted on the deck, and this so unbalanced the ship that she capsized and lies on the sea bed somewhere off the coast of Africa.
JOHN BETJEMAN
Summoned by Bells
1960
MY FATHER WENT UP TO Magdalen College, Oxford, in October 1927. Immediately and brazenly, he ignored the university and college rules and regulations and was sent down in his second term. That was time enough to begin a lasting friendship with John Betjeman, then in his third year in the same college. They had a lot in common. Literature was a good thing in itself but they also saw that it was the way to get themselves talked about and invited by people whose invitations they wanted to have. Being amusing was much the same as being shocking for up-and-coming Vile Bodies, to borrow the title of the novel in which Evelyn Waugh sketched the bright young things of that generation. A particularly skittish passage in Summoned by Bells depicts Alan arriving for a drink on a Sunday wearing just a bathing costume and sitting at a harmonium to play a hymn whose verses have been re-written as lampoon, including the line, “and the pansies all sing flat.”
Betch (as I choose to render Betj, the usual spelling) inhabited a private land of his own, and the nicknames of his friends were a kind of passport for entry into that land. For obvious reasons Alan was Big Nose, which soon became a single word and then due to a typing mistake Bognose, or variously Bog and Boggins, and finally Captain Bog on the grounds that war-time rank was bound to be comic. A letter on February 18, 1933 headed “Darling Bog” congratulated him on becoming engaged to Joan Eyres-Monsell, but had advice: “You must explain that you were once inverted. She won’t mind at all.” Moving to Vienna ostensibly to write, Alan forsook Joan when he fell in love with Poppy Fould-Springer. Twenty years old, she had lived an extraordinarily sheltered life. On October 6, 1934 Betch wrote that he had been “staggered” to read in the Times the announcement of Alan and Poppy’s engagement. “Oh Bog, Bog, how I miss you and how I envy your success. Don’t marry without a long period of probation.… My God, Bog, have a care.”
In 1937, just over a year after I’d been born, Betch was describing me as a baby with “rabbit’s ears on his dress” and hoping that I’d grow up fit to sing treble in some surpliced choir. I have a photograph of him sitting at a table, pen in hand and notebook open. “Ici je suis dans Auxerre,” he wrote along the lower margin, and to one side, “Truly yours Jean Paul Sartre Betjhomme.” Sartre’s novel La Nausée was published in 1938, a clue to this photograph’s date.
Anglicanism in all its manifestations, liturgical and architectural, was sanctified in Betch’s private land, and he made no secret of it. The conversion to Catholicism of Penelope, his wife, lovingly nicknamed Filth or Philth, kept them apart for the rest of their lives. Betch precipitated a similar crisis in Alan’s marriage when he telephoned Poppy to tell her that earlier in the day he had entered Westminster Cathedral and caught sight of Alan face down on the floor with arms extended in the form of a cross, all in the ritual of conversion to the Catholic faith. Poppy had known nothing about this, and took it that changing his spiritual persona without telling her compromised their mutual trust. Forced to choose between her and Catholicism, he chose her.
In February 1953, Poppy died of cancer in Paris. She was 37. Three weeks previously, we had been together in Seefeld, then an undeveloped village in Tyrol, and one morning she had put on skis. Everyone in the family had thought it better not to tell me that she was seriously ill. My housemaster at Eton gave me the news and drove me to Heathrow so that I could be at the funeral in the Père Lachaise cemetery. To this day, I have no idea if Alan had listened to Betch and told her that he was an invert, and if not, then whether she had discovered it for herself. What I do know is that Alan took me back to school, and we found Betch waiting for us at the door of the house; he had spent the afternoon there. Years later, he told me, “I knew the Captain would be sad so I wanted to meet him on his return.”
Paul, his own son, was a year or two younger than me, but happened to be in the same house. After Poppy’s death, or in the next term, the two fathers took their boys out to tea a couple of times in The Cockpit, an ancient and picturesque restaurant in Eton High Street. I was old enough to understand that my nickname of Baby Bog signified admission to his private land. Betch spoke of and to Paul as The Powlie, or more simply It. None of us quite knew what to do for the best or where to put ourselves when he would say things like, I can’t be too sure but I think It is about to speak. As if he hadn’t heard, Paul remained self-contained and silent.
Poppy had not long been dead when Alan took me to Ireland. He did not disclose that the purpose of the trip was for me to meet Elizabeth Cavendish, then staying at Lismore Castle with her brother, the Duke of Devonshire. One morning when we were alone visiting the garden of another show-place, Alan sprang the surprise that he proposed to marry Elizabeth. I felt he was betraying Poppy and said so, my emotions running away with me. The consequence was that Alan spent the rest of his life in the United States, sometimes settled, sometimes unsettled. My stepmother manqué, Elizabeth was to complete a triangle by devoting herself to looking after Betch to the end of his life.
Betch didn’t seem to notice that he had become a national treasure. Pathos was his medium. We went on one or two expeditions in London in search of friends or sights, and he was embarrassed to be recognized in the street. Every Thursday morning, he was in the habit of entertaining the children in one of the wards in St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. I took my daughters to meet him and he told them that even if they peeled their grandfather Alan as they might peel an onion, they still wouldn’t know him. Now and then, postcards would arrive addressed to Baby Bog.
The title page of my copy of Summoned by Bells reads, “Inscribed for David P-J by John Betjeman ARTISTE & CALLIGRAPHER,” the two descriptive but imaginary nouns in capitals.
PRINCESS MARTHE BIBESCO
Le Perroquet Vert
1950 EDITION
IT WAS 1959 when I met Marthe Bibesco in her small apartment on the Quai Bourbon in Paris. By then, she was a wizened old lady, huddled in her shawl and her memories. We had tea. She talked French and English as though they were interchangeable languages. Her father, Ioan Lahovary, had been the Romanian Minister of Foreign Affairs. Her husband, George Bibesco, had a forebear who had been Hospodar of Wallachia, a title with more than a touch of Ruritania. Marthe was the last one still alive who could talk from personal experience about Marcel Proust and the aristocratic circle which he fictionalized. She had known pretty well everyone who had graced a Paris salon in the first fifty years of the twentieth century. Evoking the alm
ost ghost-like cultural scene of long ago, her memoirs and essays mostly came out in limited editions, octavo, with expensive paper and bindings aimed at bibliophiles.
A novel, Le Perroquet Vert dates from 1923, and she was giving me a reprint as a wedding present. The inscription reads, “Il savait se taire en souriant sur un secret délicieux.” In a literal translation: he knew how to keep silent and smile about a delicious secret. Clarissa and I had been married for a few months and that explains “delicious” but there was nothing secret about it.
In 1967, Clarissa and I went to Romania. Having experienced the Iron Curtain in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, I prepared for this journey by getting introductions from Miron Grindea. Born in the provincial Romanian town of Onesti, he had reached Britain and safety on the eve of the war. As a refugee, his extraordinary feat was to launch, edit and fund Adam, a literary magazine every bit as respect ful of high culture as Marthe Bibesco. Nicolae Ceauşescu and his wife Elena were already set on their egomaniacal course. On Miron’s recommendation, Nina Cassian, the poet, not only received Clarissa and me but somehow had scrounged an orange, usually an unobtainable delicacy which politeness obliged us to eat with ceremony and a sense of guilt. Another of Miron’s contacts was a Professor of literature at Bucharest University. I rented a car and we drove with him to a large and low house in dark stone about a dozen miles beyond Bucharest. This was Mogosoaia. Here Marthe had received the good and the great from all over Europe. Expropriated from the Bibescos, the place now belonged to the Writers Union. That afternoon, a lone guardian let us into damp abandoned rooms containing plastic chairs already dingy, and Socialist realist posters on the walls. The Communist fantasy that the happiness of some depends on the unhappiness of others was exposed in the ruination of this once great palace. Out of doors we sat on a bench at the edge of a lake. In or around the water, innumerable masses of frogs were keeping up an unbelievably deafening chorus of croaking, a dismal unvarying altogetherness that served as a metaphor for Communism.
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