Signatures

by David Pryce-Jones

  Together Alasdair and I visited Wormwoods Scrubs and Pentonville for articles about the prison system. Alasdair took up architecture and in the course of qualifying won the profession’s major award, the Leverhulme Gold Medal. A Fire by the Sea is his one book of poetry, and he reworked and extended the contents for a subsequent, more presentable edition. “Pope Kept Awake at Limehouse” reflects his own experience of living in a studio near the Commercial Dock.

  Ten times the bray of “Bye bye baby” stuns the waking day,

  still as great ships glide by with silent lights

  loud “Bye bye baby” rocks the sleepless nights.

  He also collected folk songs, composing, performing and recording some of his own. Broadcasting, work and play, the cooperative principle, political economy, were subjects that fully engaged him one after the other until they were exhausted. Friends bandied about various theories to explain why he didn’t find a cause or a task or an office that would hold him and allow him to do the good for the whole society that he so evidently wanted to do. Perhaps he found everything too easy and was searching for something he wouldn’t be able to do.

  Although at first fully engaged emotionally with his numerous girlfriends, he dropped them without ceremony when the affair was exhausted. Over the years, one after another had come to sit weeping in our kitchen and they seemed to get younger the older he grew. In 1974 he married Felicity Duncan, a leading literary agent. Since her father was a Member of Parliament, the ceremony took place in a chapel in Westminster. The marriage lasted six years. Subsequently living on his own, borrowing a good many thousand pounds from his mother for a flat, he was evidently searching out new people in his life, or so we thought.

  A breaking point for Clarissa and me was Alasdair’s sudden and total conversion to The Process. This was an offshoot of Scientology operated by a couple who called themselves Mr. and Mrs. de Grimston, quite likely a pseudonym. The purpose of The Process was obscure. What was clear, however, was that everyone associated with it was obliged to make their money over to the de Grimstons. Like many others, Clarissa’s brother, David Caccia, admired and trusted Alasdair. A relation had left him a substantial fortune that he was ready to give the de Grimstons on Alasdair’s say-so. I had it out with the de Grimstons. I could not help noticing that in one corner of their office was a pile of books promoting Nazism and Fascism. Then I had to tell Alasdair that the whole point of being an Oxford philosopher and fellow of All Souls was to promote reason, not rubbish. It was inexplicable. Eventually he apologized, David Caccia did not beggar himself but the damage had been done.

  A few days into January 1984, I was walking towards the BBC when I spotted Alasdair coming out. Distress was visible on his face. For the past three years he had been researching and writing The Heart of the Dragon, a book about China from which a thirteen-part television series had been made. The book was now out and he’d just been interviewed about it on the BBC. He said it had been a fiasco, he couldn’t answer the questions, he’d dried up, he had to confess he didn’t read Mandarin Chinese but was restricted to secondary sources, he couldn’t be a serious historian. I tried to reassure him and said it didn’t matter anyhow, audiences wouldn’t remember if he’d performed well or badly.

  A few days later, Felicity telephoned with the news that he had thrown himself under a train. He was 48. A psychiatrist who had had sessions with him said that usually people on the borderline of genius and madness kill themselves much younger, when they are around 20. We had been granted these extra years with Alasdair and should be grateful for that. Have nothing to do with genius, the psychiatrist summed up, it creates and it destroys.

  LUCIEN COMBELLE

  Péché d’Orgueil

  1978

  ONE OF MY EARLIEST MEMORIES dates from June 1940. A four-year-old, I was at Royaumont, our family house near Chantilly. Woken up in the middle of the night I understood that the Germans might arrive at any minute. I dressed in the dark. The grown-ups were in a panic. All day long, we drove south. At some point we slowed down amid desperate people from all levels of the population clogging the road in a sauve-qui-peut already being compared to the biblical Exodus. The face of a woman staring through the car window has stayed with me.

  A good number of politicians and writers, with Irène Nemirovsky at their head, have come up against the fact that the absence of moral structure committed the French to save themselves at all costs, putting paid to any idea of sacrifice and resistance on behalf of the nation. As the German army was marching unopposed into Paris, to give one example of degradation, a solitary colonel tried to set up a machine-gun position at the Porte d’Orléans, only to be prevented by a police inspector. Or again, Otto Abetz, the German Ambassador, accompanied the troops in a civilian car flying a swastika. To his amazemernt, crowds in notionally Communist working-class districts turned out to applaud him.

  The decision not to defend the historic capital city of France led irrevocably to surrender and humiliation. Under enemy occupation life of course must go on. The relationship between victor and vanquished is decidedly ambiguous because it has to take into account all sorts of obligations. Disregarding a century’s experience of hostility and harm at the hands of Germans, a majority of the French became willing collaborators. Intellectuals, some of them very public figures, in particular miscalculated the costs and benefits of Nazi collaboration, compromising themselves and leaving a lasting stain on the national character.

  By general consent, André Gide was the leading French writer of the day. The armistice had hardly been signed when he was noting in his Journal, destined for publication: “To come to terms with yesterday’s enemy is not cowardice but wisdom; as well as accepting what is inevitable.” Each and every collaborator would have subscribed happily to that pronouncement. Gide retired to Tunis, where he lived out the rest of the war apparently unconcerned with events in his own country. Compare and contrast this self-indulgence to the campaign against Hitler led by Thomas Mann, by general consent the leading German writer of the day.

  Commissioned to write Paris in the Third Reich, I had assumed that former fascists and collaborators would not be willing to speak to me. Literary etiquette made me introduce myself first of all to Henri Amouroux. His history of the German occupation runs to ten monumental volumes, pulling off the exceptional feat of writing objectively with a patriotic bias. Enthusiastically, he opened his files, providing names and addresses and vouching for me. A dark underworld emerged.

  Jacques Benoist-Méchin still believed that it was rational for a defeated France to side with a Germany out for conquest. Morality did not come into it. “I was pushed by events,” was his excuse. He had been to Germany with his good friend Ambassador Otto Abetz, and he had accompanied Admiral Darlan to Berchtesgaden in 1941 to negotiate with Hitler over Syria. It had been impressive to meet Hitler, this “very extraordinary man” who had so much power. After the war he was sentenced to death and indignité nationale, but his presidential reprieve after a few years gave away that this was more for the sake of appearances than justice. Alfred Fabre-Luce, another influential intellectual, had taken greater care to cover his tracks. Henry Coston, himself a born conspirator, specialized in the accusation that Jews and Freemasons were conspiring to remake the world in their image, and the whole purpose of his career, implicitly murderous, was to denounce them to the authorities. In 1948 he was sentenced to life imprisonment with forced labor. Listening to him, I discovered that in the three years he actually served, he had forgotten nothing and learnt nothing.

  In this rogues’ gallery, Lucien Combelle stood out. A young man from a modest background, he had come a long way. Undoubtedly intelligent, he had literary ambitions and by the end of the Thirties he had become the secretary of André Gide. The writers he hoped to emulate valued achievement above equality. Pride in himself was the source of his Fascism. A key sentence, “I went and listened to the sound of the drums,” allows Péché d’Orgueil to be both confession and excu
se. Condemned to fifteen years of hard labor, he benefited from the amnesty granted to French fascists of all sorts. For several decades now, the European Union has been doing its utmost to reduce the concepts of occupation and collaboration to anachronisms in order to spare the feelings of French intellectuals of Combelle’s generation. The inscription here nonetheless conveys residual memories of shame and guilt. “Cette insolite histoire franco-allemande pour un historien anglais, une façon comme une autre d’être européen, en profonde entente cordiale.” I translate: “This exceptional Franco-German story which for an English historian is one among other ways of being European, with the deepest Entente Cordiale.”

  Postscript. Pierre Belfonds, a go-ahead publisher, bought the French rights to my book. A wretched first translation had to be scrapped. I was due to talk about the book on “Cinq Colonnes à la Une,” then the leading television program covering the arts. Four weeks before publication, Belfonds telephoned. Someone very important was objecting to my book but he could not divulge who this was, nor what the grounds for suppression were. All he could say was that he was not prepared to put the future of his firm at risk for my sake.

  CYRIL CONNOLLY

  Previous Convictions

  1963

  AS THE AUTHOR OF A BOOK about Cyril Connolly, I am sometimes asked why anyone should read him. Well, the case for the defense might open with a plea that he’s a pretty good representative of the 1930s intellectuals who took opinions from the Left and dined on the Right. At that time in the wake of James Joyce and Marcel Proust, it was an item of faith for would-be writers that a successful novel was the only literary success worth having. In Cyril’s opinion, a shelf life of ten years was enough to qualify a book as a masterpiece. “If it was any good once,” according to an aphorism of his that took account of changing taste, “it isn’t any good now.” Published by the hole-in-a-corner Obelisk Press in Paris in 1936, Cyril’s novel The Rock Pool was the kind of standard tribute to bohemian life that a good many of his contemporaries were also paying. In the course of researching in Cyril’s papers, I found notebooks of varying sizes in which he’d written a page or two of fiction and left the rest blank; so many false starts for that absent masterpiece.

  A stronger line of defense is the tone of his language as it ranges naturally all the way from humor to despair, sometimes combining both extremes. “Imprisoned in every fat man a thin one is wildly signalling to be let out” is a phrase of his that has become more or less common stock, and another is “It is closing time in the gardens of the West.” His humor was sudden and unexpected, for example describing being alone in the country with nothing to do and nobody to see as “practicing death,” or saying of the sexually charged Vita Sackville-West that she was Lady Chatterley above the waist and Mellors below.

  Finally the work speaks for itself. From 1940 right through the war and up to 1950, Cyril edited Horizon, a magazine of such a high literary standard that it has hardly dated at all. Week after week from 1954 and then for over twenty of the following years, he was to write the lead book review for the Sunday Times. Committing himself to be a regular critic, he made fun of it too, in the context of reviewing fiction: “Brave and agile, the reviewer enters the ring.… He disembowels a few old hacks. But his onsets eventually grow futile, his weapons are blunted, his words are stale … eventually the jungle claims him.”

  “At Eton with Orwell, / at Oxford with Waugh, / He was nobody after, / and nothing before.” Cyril’s much-quoted deflation of himself, written apparently impromptu in the visitors’ book of a friend. Born within six weeks of each other in the summer of 1903, the three of them were engaged in unacknowledged competition, very different personalities though they were. Orwell is on record saying, “Without Connolly’s help I don’t think I would have got started as a writer when I came back from Burma.” Only a few months separate the publication of Animal Farm, Brideshead Revisited and The Unquiet Grave. Orwell and Waugh both had their conception of the way the world should turn out; Cyril was lamenting the way he had turned out. In the manner of someone said to be drowning, Cyril in The Unquiet Grave sees his whole life pass before him, his loves, his travels, his faults, his admiration for the great predecessors who had left masterpieces for posterity. Proust had once written that human beings would always be dissatisfied because they want something other than what they already have. Cyril liked to apply this existential truth to himself in the original and elegant French, “Le plus grand amour c’est l’amour d’autre chose.” It was singular of him to make failure out actually to be achievement.

  Among books lying about in the house as I was growing up was The Condemned Playground. And there, in “Where Engels Fears To Tread” (whose sophistication and brilliance I only understood years later) a sentence suddenly stood out: “It was no coincidence, Pryce-Jones, that you have lived near three royal palaces.” The family name on the printed page!

  In the summer of 1953, my father took me to the Bayreuth Festival. Cyril Connolly was there, and so was George Weidenfeld, who had just published Ideas and Places, a book edited by Cyril and the first of his to appear on the Weidenfeld list. Both these men were on their own. A generous American lady, Jane Panzer (not necessarily a surname to flaunt in Bavaria at the time) had a huge car and a chauffeur. We were all driven to Pommersfelden, where Countess Schoenborn explained how an American General had tried to requisition the house, but she had turned him away on the grounds that it was too grand and its collections too important to be treated this way. On a sideboard in the dining room were rows of double eggcups in ornate eighteenth-century silver. One egg is never enough, Cyril said, but three is too many. Cyril also complained about his wife, Barbara Skelton. George was afterwards to maintain that Cyril had been licensing him to have an affair with her. I couldn’t have known it then, but this was the beginning of a drama that generated gossip still current years later.

  Barbara was beautiful and demanding. In Cyril’s papers is an enlarged photograph of her stark naked somewhere on a beach in a classic femme fatale pose. When she and Cyril divorced, George was cited as co-respondent. She then married George, and when she divorced him Cyril was cited as co-respondent. The symmetry was damaging for all concerned. Tears Before Bedtime and Weep No More, Barbara Skelton’s two memoirs, portray Cyril as a figure of fun, either to be laughed at or sneered at, in any case to be taken at his own valuation as a failure.

  Also in these papers is Cyril’s lengthy account, mostly in the form of handwritten letters, of an equally fraught amorous passage. He had then been married for ten years or so to Jean Bakewell, a freethinking American who nevertheless was tiring of Cyril’s wayward self-indulgence and had gone by herself in the summer of 1939 to stay with friends on the French Riviera. In London and far from feeling abandoned, Cyril was having an affair with Diana Witherby and had just learnt that she was expecting his child. (She was to publish poems in Horizon and collect them in a very slim volume; the unborn child would grow up to become a judge.) Cyril persuaded the seventeen-year-old Janetta Woolley (first Janetta Kee, later Janetta Jackson, later still Janetta Parladé) to drive with him across France and somehow help him explain to Jean about Diana. When they stopped for the night in the town of Tulle, Cyril was arrested by the local gendarmerie for détention de mineur. When I invited her to the house and we went over the burlesque documentation, she said she would sue if I put any of this in print. As soon as my book was out, however, friends and enemies were writing or telephoning that Janetta was going around accusing me of suppressing one of the most important episodes in the history of Cyril’s libido and my book was therefore no good at all. One unexpected critic on these lines was the war hero Paddy Leigh Fermor, who sought me out to say, “The trouble with you is that you belong to the wrong team.” I answered that I hadn’t known a match was being played.

  “David with love from Cyril – Somerhill Sept 1965 in gratitude for so many pleasant meetings,” Cyril wrote in my copy of Previous Convictims, a selection of his li
terary articles and reviews. Bibliophile that he was, he especially valued copies of books with inscriptions and associations. He asked me to correct the proofs of The Modern Movement, and repeated his previous “David with love from Cyril,” adding, rather ungrammatically, “who spotted everything but ‘exercises’ for ‘exercases’ but left wee Blakmur – gratefully, Cyril,” with the date December 1, 1965. By then, Cyril had married Deirdre, and they lived first in a house on the estate of Lord Gage at Firle, then in Eastbourne. At one point, we were a ticket short for a performance of Don Giovanni at Glyndebourne. Staying behind, a dishevelled Cyril came out of the house barefoot and wearing a bathrobe, and as he waved the black-tie party off to the opera, he started grimacing and mouthing, “In Italia mille tre.”

  Rosie d’Avigdor-Goldsmid refused even to greet George Weidenfeld, much less to acknowledge that some things might be in his favor. In the same spirit of solidarity, Rosie and Harry made a point of inviting the Connollys to Somerhill for the weekend or at least for Sunday lunch. In spite of a very full meal, we went one day to the tea-shop in the Pantiles in Tunbridge Wells. Waiting for his order of poached eggs, Cyril suddenly improvised in a voice loud enough for people at other tables to look round, “This is the start of a new literary movement, it’s a revolution. Down with Koestler! Down with Spender!” (I have D. H. Lawrence’s Pansies inscribed, “Stephen from Cyril with gratitude for benefit received and in the hope of benefits to come,” which puts Spender in his place without seeming to do so.) The Pantiles also had a very good second-hand bookshop. Cyril had first pick of books that had been delivered from the library of a poet who had just died, and he bought an armful. I found Indian Ass, Harold Acton’s early volume of poems. Cyril asked to have a look at it, and I only saw it again years later in Tulsa, Oklahoma, along with the rest of the archive he had sold to the university there.