Signatures

by David Pryce-Jones

  RAYMOND CARR

  English Fox Hunting

  1976

  MY SPECIAL SUBJECT as an undergraduate was the French Revolution. I took it in part because Raymond Carr was teaching it. He was different from other Oxford dons. He assumed that you were as clever as him and talked as though to an equal. There was something of Groucho Marx about him, though he was taller and much more elegant. Perhaps it was his way of seeing the funny side of things, or his laugh at the folly of those with opinions opposed to his. The register of his voice moved between counter-tenor and baritone, with an intermittent sort of guffaw.

  The lecture was at nine o’clock in the morning, in hangover time, not that that affected what Raymond might be saying. On one occasion his opening sentence was, “My God, Robespierre was a shit.” Charlotte Corday finished off Marat in the bath, the subject of a clearly improvised discourse from Raymond on what sets female murderers apart from male murderers. Unable or unwilling to draw a line between curiosity and mischief, he had called on Sir Oswald and Lady Mosley at Crux Easton, where they were living after their release from prison. He was there on the day that Julius Streicher, the most vicious and public of Nazi anti-Semites, was hanged. Raymond walked out once and for all when he heard Lady Mosley saying, “Let’s stand and drink a toast to a gallant Christian gentleman.” Raymond and his wife Sara had a house at Great Milton, a few miles from Oxford. I owned a Morris Minor and could drop in there uninvited, along with the jeunesse dorée of the moment. The atmosphere of permanent partying led Evelyn Waugh to write Raymond off as a “tipsy buffoon,” a phrase surely with an echo of envy. After I told A. J. P. Taylor that I was not prepared to have tutorials with someone as biased as him, I asked Raymond to be my tutor. It was against the rules to be taught by a fellow in some other college than yours, but Raymond paid no attention to trivialities of that sort. He once told me that he would admit to the college anyone with an x in their name, because they were likely to be foreign and exotic.

  Original and inspiring, Raymond brought the past alive. When he was about fourteen, his mother caught him reading as usual and had asked, “Don’t you have any ideas of your own?” María Jesús González wrote a massive biography that treats him as the greatest contemporary historian of Spain. In the years when she was at work on it, he would keep muttering, “God, how I wish the woman would go away.”

  The Jerusalem Committee was the brainchild of the ebullient Teddy Kollek; its purpose was to help him have his own way as Mayor of that city. Members of the Committee, Raymond and I were summoned to Jerusalem to discuss how to celebrate the three thousandth anniversary of the rule of King David. Professors and clergymen bombinated for much of the morning, until Raymond interrupted, “If I hear another German talking about his Geist [soul, spirit, spirituality] I won’t be responsible for the consequences.”

  The birth of one of his children had tested his own Geist. There were complications. The gynecologists asked him if they should save Sara or the child, as they could not save both. Sara, of course. When the moment came, the child was not breathing. Already summoned in case he had to give Sara the last rites, a distraught priest spilled holy water over the child who then came to life with a scream. Even a hard-bitten atheist like Raymond could speak of a miracle.

  I never saw him out on the hunting field but others would say his courage was alarming. He survived horrifying falls. The usual spoilsports criticized his book on hunting, whose final sentence is a quote from Trotsky of all people, and a typically brilliant tease: “The attraction in hunting is that it acts on the mind as a poultice does on a sore.”

  JUDY CASSAB

  Dianes

  1995

  THESE DIARIES BEGIN in April 1944, when Judy Cassab (née Judith Kaszab) had unpinned the yellow star from her clothing and was living under cover in Budapest, then in the hands of the Gestapo and the Arrow Cross, the Hungarian Nazis. Back from two years of forced labor in a Soviet camp, her husband Jansci turns up occasionally, still wearing his yellow star. Sheltering during the siege of Budapest, fifty of the most savage days in the war, Judy could nevertheless write, “I am still longing for my painting.” She and Jansci emigrated in 1951 to Australia and in no time at all Judy was exhibiting and receiving commissions to paint the portraits of eminent men and women. The diaries develop into a cheerful social almanac.

  Agi Yoeli (née Agnes Izak), an internationally recognized ceramicist and sculptress, put me in touch with Judy when I was in Australia. Both of them had grown up in a town in Slovakia known as Beregszasz to Hungarians and Berehovo to everyone else. Judy’s father ran a brick factory; Agi’s father ran a shoe-making business. In Agi’s apartment in Tel Aviv hangs a portrait in pencil and charcoal of her mother. Done by Judy at the age of sixteen, it is as beautiful and finished as an old master drawing. Except for this one drawing, everything they had possessed at Berehovo had been stolen or smashed.

  In 1944, Agi and her family were among thousands from Berehovo mustered in the yard of the Kaszab brick factory and then deported to Auschwitz. Agi was put to assembling fuses in the Birkenau factory within the camp. Her father and mother, her husband Laczy and her newborn child were murdered. At a station waiting for a train in the aftermath of the war, Agi recognized the SS woman who had killed this baby and was now passing herself off as a victim. Instead of having the woman arrested, Agi picked a bunch of flowers in the station master’s garden.

  NIRAD C. CHAUDHURI

  Thy Hand, Great Anarch!

  India 1921–1952

  1988

  NIRAD CHAUDHURI lived in a cosy North Oxford house with a front garden full of flower-beds. I’d come on the wrong day, he was expecting me tomorrow but his face showed only pleasure: no sense of discomposure or misuse of his time. The ground-floor sitting room had large speakers for playing music, and a word processor. Until now, he explained, he’d used a typewriter. Compact, he couldn’t have been more than five feet, if that. In his early nineties, he was wizened but energetic, well able to spring up unaided from his armchair. He moved about at a run with now and then a wobble in it, and his laugh was an appealing high cackle.

  When he was one hundred years old he published Three Horsemen of the New Apocalypse, remarking in the preface of this lament on the decline of civilization that he had never read or heard of any author producing a book at that age. Self-Destruction is a book he’d written in Bengali about the last hundred years in Bengal. On erotica, he’d penned a footnote in Greek, and he turns the page up in the middle of the book, commenting, “That’s mischief-making.” Indians, he says, began to display fossilized minds about fifty years ago. Concluding this must have a physiological basis, he has since then eaten only English food. He refers to himself as coming from the Bengali aristocracy. Now there’s nobody like him.

  Wordlessly, Mrs. Chaudhuri carried in cups of tea, but otherwise was invisible all afternoon, leaving us two men to get on with it. Theirs was an arranged marriage. European music, he says in Thy Hand, Great Anarch! has been his main recreation, and in his anxiety that she might not understand or sympathize, the first time they were alone together he asked if she had heard of Beethoven, and was reassured that she could spell the name correctly.

  Thy Hand, Great Anarch! is a resounding rebuke to the many tub-thumpers who accuse the British Empire of being a conspiracy to enrich a lot of murderers and thieves at the expense of innocent natives. Here is a fresh and contrary assessment of some of the current political and historical clichés about India and Britain and the relationship between them; it goes against the grain with an intellectual lordliness all its own for 972 astonishing pages, and it is without doubt one of the most original books published in the English language since the war. Already on page 20, Nirad Chaudhuri is thinking the unthinkable as he describes a strike in the Calcutta of 1921. English soldiers with rifles and fixed bayonets were standing by for violence. “I looked with admiration at their bearing,” he writes, “those alien soldiers, belonging to the army of our foreig
n rulers, seemed to me, who had always resented political subjection, to be the sole defenders of civilisation.”

  Kishorganj, the small Bengali town where he was born in 1897 and where he grew up, is a place he recollects with grace and hardly a touch of nostalgia. His father, a lawyer as well as a merchant, introduced him to the world’s high culture. Shakespeare, Napoleon, Raphael and Edmund Burke were household names. For the sake of the literature, Chaudhuri taught himself French and German. Immemorially settled in their ways, Hindus and Muslims were defenseless when in the twentieth century the hitherto unknown ideology of nationalism would pit one community against the other, culminating in irreparable exchanges of population, partition and massacre over the whole sub-continent.

  By the 1920s, Chaudhuri was a journalist publishing articles in English and Bengali, and later a commentator on All India Radio. “I stopped writing in Bengali in 1937,” he lets drop in Thy Hand, Great Anarch! “when I came to lose faith in the future of the Bengali people.” Eighteenth-century India had been stagnant. Hinduism and Islam had decayed to mere forms. Far from abusing or exploiting India, the British had vitalized it. In all Indian history, there had been no better government. Adapted from the British and transferred to Indians, nationalism in his perspective had proved to be nothing more than the mutual hate of Hindus and Muslims, and the hate of both for the British. The real shock, though, is that at the very moment when high-minded Indians were busy transplanting the British model of power and civilization, the British people had lost faith in themselves. Indians were acquiring a beautiful but empty shell. What was on offer was not worth having, it was “mindless aping of the lowest things in the Western democratic culture.” Abandoning India to this fate, the British were betraying it and that was their real fault. Looking very directly at me, Chaudhuri asked, “Why did the British rat on India?”

  Subjects of conversation swung from wine, books, roses, food and history to English customs and today’s lack of continuity. He had gone into print in the Sunday Telegraph with a defiant stance: “Today, I find St Augustine with his two great books to be more relevant to our existence than any book by a contemporary author.” He saw a series of social enigmas in Jane Austen. He backed up quotations from Mérimée’s Columba and delved out of a cupboard new recordings of Handel’s Messiah and Le Nozze di Figaro with the best contralto he’d ever heard. Then he played several recordings of “Vissi d’arte” in order to decide if the Tosca of choice was Lisa Della Casa, Tebaldi or Callas. Perhaps Welitsch?

  On the title page of my copy of Thy Hand, Great Anarch! he wrote, “My books have [intended word “made” accidently omitted] new friends for me out of strangers – and today I have had another experience of the same kind. Nirad C. Chaudhuri, Oxford, 12 May 1989.”

  Postscript. In an article I mentioned an error that Chaudhuri had made writing about the disaster of December 1941 when Japanese aircraft sank at sea the Prince of Wales and the Repulse, misnaming it the Renown. Soon I received from him the kind of letter written by someone apologizing for an unforgivable wrong.

  ALASDAIR CLAYRE

  A Fire by the Sea

  1965, ENLARGED EDITION 1973

  THE OLD EATON HALL in Cheshire was the place where Officer-Cadets doing their National Service were prepared for commission. Arrival there was something of a shock. The sheer mass of the building was unbelievable. Alfred Waterhouse, the architect, had designed a monument that represented the thrust and achievement of the Victorian age, and in particular the wealth of the owner, the 1st Duke of Westminster. In keeping with the post-1945 emphasis on equality, a later Duke had handed Eaton Hall over to the army. We lived in grandiose rooms adapted to dormitories. It never felt right to be clattering in studded boots down huge marble stairs or racing to a lecture past a majestic old master painting.

  Early one half-dark morning, we assembled for drill. Taking the parade was the Senior Officer-Cadet, identified by his shoulder flashes and cap badge as a Grenadier. Recruits from all five regiments of the Brigade of Guards did their basic training at the same barracks, Caterham in Surrey. I didn’t recognize him, but it was understood that guardsmen, like birds of a feather, flocked together. Instead he started to shout at me, “Stamp your feet, you idle Coldstreamer!” and the next thing I knew, this officious fellow was handing out extra drills as punishment.

  Some time later, and by then a second lieutenant, I had to take my platoon to Pickering in Yorkshire, where the army had a range for rehearsing with live ammunition the infantry tactic designated as Fire and Movement. It was winter and the ground was white. The camp was a cheap affair of Nissen huts left over from the war, with a mural that Rex Whistler had painted on his way through its sole redeeming feature. As I was crossing from one of these huts to another, I heard someone playing a flute. Opening the door, I was face to face with the Grenadier who had thought me idle. This was Alasdair Clayre. The music was Schubert, and he was reading Immanuel Kant. He had been Head of School at Winchester. We both had scholarships to Oxford and he would be going up to Christ Church and I to Magdalen at the beginning of the coming academic year. Meanwhile in the course of the military exercises at Pickering, he and his platoon won some sort of competition, and then had to give a demonstration to the rest of us.

  Several generations of Alasdair’s family had been doctors and lay missionaries, one of them his father. His mother was to tell me that the father had died when Alasdair was 19 and the loss was so testing that Alasdair could hardly get over it. However that may be, he had the confident good looks and manner of someone on the highway to eminence: a large head with strong features, brown eyes bright with intelligence, a laugh that was almost a shout. Those in contact with him soon recognized his exceptional intellectual energy. We made a point of attending the lectures of Edgar Wind and Isaiah Berlin, and on one particular occasion my attention wandered and I failed to follow the discussion. What was that about, I asked Alasdair afterwards. “Three things have been said today,” and he summarized them in unforgettably lucid language. (At a conference I once attended, Margaret Thatcher chose to speak last: she had the same power of synthesis and by coincidence also began by saying, “Three things have been said today.”)

  One afternoon I happened to meet Alasdair walking across Christ Church Meadows. No doubt we soon engaged in undergraduate chatter about the meaning of this and that. The profound but unapproachable part of his character suddenly took over and right there and then, ankle-deep in long grass, he sang Schumann’s great lament for the human condition, Ich grolle nicht, und wenn das Herz auch bricht (I bear no grudge even though my heart is breaking).

  For the summer vacation of 1957, friends of Alasdair’s proposed to charter a yacht that accommodated twelve people – each paying their share – and would sail down the Italian coast from Naples. He arranged for me to be one of this gang. We were still on the train chugging through southern France when he announced that his life’s purpose was to reconcile Wittgenstein and Christianity, something too far above my head to have any meaning. The train pulled into the station in Naples. I was lifting a suitcase down from the rack overhead when an arm came through the open window and our hand luggage was gone.

  The money in our pockets was all we now had. We decided it would have to do and we would board the yacht as planned. A few days later we were on a beach discussing how to get home. An elderly English lady approached and apologized for eavesdropping, but was sorry for us and offered to lend whatever money we needed. Behind her back stood her son and his wife grimacing, as much as to say, Mother’s letting herself be exploited again. By the time the yacht was back in the Naples marina, I had just enough money for a ticket to Rome and the gettone with which to call the only Italian I knew, Princess Letitia Boncompagni, a friend of my parents. She was in. It was a hot day when I found my way on foot from Rome station to the Villa Aurora. Unprepossessing as I must have been, the Princess greeted me with the realistic question, How much do you want? and invited me to the lunch party she was ab
out to give. So I met Ignazio Silone and Gian Carlo Menotti.

  When it came to Finals, the whole university seemed to have heard that the Chairman of Alasdair’s Examiners, the forbidding philosopher Professor J. L. Austin, had said that it had been a real pleasure to read his papers and congratulated him. Such a compliment was virtually unknown. It seemed in the natural order of things that Alasdair went on to win a Prize Fellowship at All Souls, the last word in academic prestige. The world was open to him. I joked that he would end up as His Grace Field Marshal Professor Lord Clayre.

  Clarissa and I were married in July 1959 and we saw a lot of Alasdair. At weekends we had the run of a cottage at Somerhill, the great Jacobean house with an estate on the edge of Tonbridge. The owners, Sir Henry and Lady d’Avigdor-Goldsmid, otherwise Harry and Rosie, and their two daughters Sarah and Chloe, used to invite house parties of the old and famous and the up-and-coming young. Alasdair was a perfect fit. After dinner, he might play his guitar and sing his own compositions, perhaps the melancholic “There’s a Cold Wind Blowing,” or the rather ludicrous “The Invisible Backward-facing Grocer.” The Goldsmids nicknamed him The Clarifier.

  In 1961, he and I published our first novels, mine entitled Owls and Satyrs, his The Window, both the kind of book that reviewers damn with faint praise about awaiting with interest to see what this author will do next. That same year, like any right-thinking intellectual at that moment, Alasdair went to Israel. An envelope addressed with Byronic spelling to Childe Pryce-Jones and postmarked Tiberias contained the words of a song for Clarissa. The opening lines are, “I heard a baby cry / And saw a mother lean her golden head/ Across the cradle with a lullaby,” leading to the final couplet, “And then a winter darkness, still and long / Closed over child, and golden hair, and song.” The intimation of the child’s death is unmistakeable, though I made nothing of it at the time. Isaiah Berlin happened to be in Israel, and he was more perceptive. In a letter to his Oxford colleague Stuart Hampshire in October 1961, he described an encounter with Alasdair and their discussion about which kibbutz might provide solitude and a private life. “I do not know quite what is wrong, but something certainly is,” Isaiah concluded. “There really is a screw loose somewhere – rattling audibly.”