Signatures

by David Pryce-Jones

  “Connolly’s being funny again,” he said of himself in Enemies of Promise, though the line between giving pleasure and giving offence couldn’t ever be very clear. He couldn’t resist being funny, even about friends as loyal as Rosie. She would sign off a telephone call by blowing three make-believe kisses into the receiver, mwah mwah mwah. Cyril imagined her offering him a birthday present, he could have whatever he had set his heart on. A tree, Rosie, that’s what I’d really like. A tree, Cyril darling, of course you shall have a tree, order it and send me the bill. But Cyril darling, what’s this, a thousand pounds for a tree? Yes Rosie, it’s a very rare tree that’s come all the way from China, mwah, mwah, mwah.

  We were living in Kensington in 1971, in a house big enough to give a party to launch my novel Running Away. It was a fine summer evening. The guests met on the lawn, among them not only Cyril but also, quite naturally, George Weidenfeld, the publisher of this book. When Cyril came out at the back door we suddenly realized that we had unconsciously committed the faux pas of inviting two men who everyone there knew were not on speaking terms.

  At the far end of the garden was a medium-size bench. George and Cyril were not shaped to squeeze up there for any length of time, but they did, uncomfortable and bulbous but out of earshot. They were almost the last to leave. On several occasions later on, one or the other would tell me how glad they were to have been reconciled in my garden.

  Breakfasting at Somerhill, one of the guests told Cyril that the character Everard Spruce in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour was obviously an unflattering caricature of him. A furious Cyril pulled from his pocket a letter from Waugh denying in strong language that Spruce was based on him, and using even stronger language to blast anyone and everyone who thought he was – surely the kind of face-saving lie to which novelists can be driven. The sparring match between the two had opened with Cyril’s generous review in the New Statesman of Waugh’s first novel Decline and Fall. Several Waugh books have insupportable characters, clowns really, the name Connolly fixing their lowly or buffoonish status. It is never clear if Waugh is being malicious or giving way to his idea of a private joke.

  The Tablet, the weekly edited by and for Catholic intellectuals, sent Waugh a review copy of The Unquiet Grave. “Twaddle” was his instant reaction on reading the book, and in red ink he jotted bad-tempered or scornful remarks. He cannot have imagined that Connolly would ever read them. Waugh was pleased to note in his diary that his review had caused consternation. In the aftermath, Cyril nonetheless spent a weekend with Waugh and devoted a whole issue of Horizon to The Loved One, Waugh’s American extravaganza. In 1971 a series of unlikely events put Waugh’s review copy of The Unquiet Grave into Cyril’s hands. Offended, he took those red ink jottings at face value. Waugh himself was already dead. Cyril’s only redress was to sell the books that Waugh had presented him, special editions with inscriptions though they were. Writing about Waugh one last time he didn’t try to get even, being more thoughtful than rude: “A genuine ill-doer and not merely an ill-wisher to the human race, is an object of fascination.” There’s competition in it, maybe even admiration. It comes to mind that when George Orwell was dying, Cyril arranged for Waugh to visit him in hospital. Orwell had intended to write about Waugh but he was too close to death to finish the essay. In his judgment, “Waugh is about as good a novelist as one can be while holding untenable opinions.” These three writers disagreed but their opinion of each other is the literary centerpiece of the age.

  ROBERT CONQUEST

  The Great Terror

  1968

  THE QUESTION WITH BOB is whether he was a poet who happened to be a Sovietologist or a Sovietologist who happened to be a poet. I tend to think the former, because poetry answered to his view of making whatever there is to be made out of emotions, colors, life itself. Published in 2009 when he was in his nineties, Penultimata, contains about a hundred new poems. One of them, “Last Hours,” best expresses the let’s-get-on-with-it Bob that I knew and liked.

  Dead in the water, the day is done.

  There’s nothing new under the sun,

  Still less when it’s gone down.

  He and his two closest friends, Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin, proved their vocation by playing the games with language and perception that poets play, three Musketeers at a time when not much else was disturbing the quiet little cemetery of English literature.

  My friendship with Bob goes back to 1963 when he was foreign editor of the Spectator, and I was its literary editor. At the time, the Soviet Union appeared to be gaining the upper hand in the Cold War, and its criminality at home and abroad was a regular subject for discussion with others on the staff, for instance Tony Hartley and Iain Hamilton. It was amazing that so clear-minded a chap (he liked the word) as Bob should ever have joined the Communist Party, what’s more in 1937, which thanks to Stalin was one of the most frightening years in Russian and indeed European history. In 1944 he was posted to Bulgaria as a liaison officer to Bulgarian units fighting under Soviet orders, or to put it bluntly, preparing for a Communist take-over under cover of driving the German army out. After this formative experience, he joined a department of the Foreign Office set up to research the Soviet Union.

  Communism was to the twentieth century what sorcery had been to the Middle Ages. The claim of the foundational doctrine of Marxism to be a science was pure witchcraft. Something known as the dialectic was said to be the key to progress, and everybody had to make sense of this figment. The state was supposed to wither away, leaving us all to look after ourselves as though back in the Garden of Eden, yet in the starkest of contradictions the Communist state granted itself ever more total power over the individual in every aspect of daily life. The organizing principle of class became a sentence of death, exile or dispossession for tens of millions of men and women defined as bourgeois, capitalist, kulak or whatever could be profitably exploited.

  Bob had spent the Sixties studying Soviet demographic statistics and census returns in order to measure as accurately as possible the drastic fall in population brought about by Stalin’s criminal policies. The Great Terror, published in 1968, was straightforward in language, firm in tone and careful in depicting the ruthlessness with which Stalin had sent to their death millions of Party members, soldiers from the rank of Field Marshal downwards, princes and peasants and anyone else whom he judged fit to distrust. Eight years later, on the eve of the Gorbachev era, Bob’s The Harvest of Sorrow was the first fully documented account of the Soviet collectivization of agriculture and the famine deliberately induced in the Ukraine which also cost millions of people their lives. Only when the Soviet Union was reincarnated as Russia did he go there and meet the people whose fate he had brought to the world’s attention.

  A mystery of the age is the eagerness with which so many people in the democracies took at face value whatever the Soviet Union said about itself. Suspending their critical faculties, Western Communists and fellow-travelers had no trouble justifying mass murder, subversion, treason and mendacity. The sophisticated and the unsophisticated alike, the rich and the poor, seemed in a trance, spellbound. It was phenomenal that intellectuals (with old Etonians such as Perry Anderson or Neal Ascherson foremost among them) should be deceiving themselves as much as they were deceiving others.

  Two versions emerged of everything that had occurred concerning the Soviet Union. On the one hand, Bob was the leading historian telling the truth about atrocious events, and on the other hand, Eric Hobsbawm was the leading propagandist falsifying these same events. For him, Communism was bound to triumph because the Soviet Union could do no wrong, whether it was invading other countries or oppressing the defenseless. He was skilled at misrepresentation, for instance whitewashing Communism as “a formidable innovation” in social engineering; and simply omitting everything that told against him, for instance the massacre of Polish officers at Katyn or the concentration camps of the Gulag. Bob pointed out that Hobsbawm suffered from a “massive denial of r
eality” and added very characteristically, “If he chooses to write rubbish, then good luck to him.” David Caute, a friend of mine since Oxford and himself influenced by Marxism, put the issue once and for all in a review: “One keeps asking of Hobsbawm: didn’t you know what Deutscher and Orwell knew? Didn’t you know about the induced famine, the horrors of collectivisation, the false confessions, the terror within the Party, the massive forced labour of the Gulag?” Another Oxford contemporary, however, once asked me how I could bear the company of the well-known fascist Conquest. (Constantine Fitzgibbon, a colleague with a career very similar in war and peace to Bob’s, gave his Sixties collection of anti-Communist essays the ironic title Random Thoughts of a Fascist Hyena.)

  In an interview in 1994, Hobsbawm gave away that his high hopes for Communism still had a total hold on him. The astonished interviewer picked him up: “What that comes down to is saying that had the radiant tomorrow actually been created, the loss of fifteen, twenty million people might have been justified?” To which the response was “Yes.” Proven morally corrupt by his own words, and wrong by the course of events, Hobsbawm nonetheless had at least ten honorary doctorates from well-known universities, and received the prestigious Companion of Honour from Prime Minister Blair. Bob had just two honorary doctorates and no civic awards in Britain, though a grateful George W. Bush in the United States did give him the Medal of Freedom.

  Towards the end of his life, Bob required the help of Liddie, his solicitous wife. His voice became almost inaudible, his handwriting almost illegible. We would have to gather round closely in the effort to catch what he was saying. Among other things, he felt that the limerick was a literary form with unexplored potential, especially suited for taking pretentious persons down a peg or two, and he protected himself from the libel laws by circulating some of the cleverest of them anonymously. The most-quoted of his limericks is a masterpiece of Sovietology:

  There was an old Marxist called Lenin

  Who did two or three million men in.

  That’s a lot to have done in,

  But where he did one in,

  That grand Marxist Stalin did ten in.

  A Garden of Erses is a collection that came out in 2010, and from the inventive rhyming, humor and raunchiness it was easy to deduce that Jeff Chaucer, the ostensible author, was really Bob. When eventually all his limericks can be published unexpurgated, they will help to qualify Bob for immortality.

  ANTHONY DANIELS

  ALIAS THEODORE DALRYMPLE

  The Proper Procedure

  2017

  EIGHT OF TONY’S BOOKS are on my shelves, most of them credited to Theodore Dalrymple, his favorite nom de plume. All are marvelously idiosyncratic, the work of someone closely observing the human comedy while himself standing apart from it. A prolific journalist as well, his articles are usually about behavior consistent with the doctrine of original sin. The prose has two registers, one of which is controlled mockery of the many who ought to know better; and the other is the warning that things are awful and we have yet to see how much more awful they will become. In many respects he is the Charles Dickens of the modern age.

  A doctor by profession and resolutely curious by instinct, Tony has made himself familiar with all the ills to which everybody is heir. Work or foreign travel familiarized him with every sort of pain and failure. In Liberia at a time of anarchy, he happened to see thugs sawing the legs off a grand piano, an example of cultural barbarism so extreme that nothing could ever be done except report it. By the time he was employed as doctor and psychiatrist, first in Birmingham’s City Hospital and then in its Winson Green Prison, he had every reason to subscribe to the credo of the genuine conservative, namely that the veneer of civilization is frighteningly thin, hard to create but easy to destroy.

  In the early 1990s, Tony made his mark with a short pithy column for the Spectator, afterwards collecting the whole lot into a book, If Symptoms Persist. “For David and Clarissa, in praise of the modern world, Theodore” is what he wrote with typical gamesmanship on the title page of my copy, following up in the foreword on the very next page with what he really thought: “I am convinced that the poverty of spirit to be found in an English slum is the worst to be found anywhere … for sheer apathy, for spiritual, emotional, educational and cultural nihilism and vacuity, you must go to an English slum. Nowhere in the world – at least in my experience – are people to be found who have so little control over, or responsibility for, their own lives and behaviour.” Worse still, they are under the illusion that others, “the Social, the doctor, the Housing, the Council” will come to the rescue and “make them whole” as he puts it.

  A good twenty years later, he went over this ground once more in The Proper Procedure, a collection of short stories. The opening passage of the opening story goes, “Life in Percy Bysshe Shelley House, a concrete tower opposite its identical twin, Harold Laski House, was growing more and more intolerable.” Note the compressed suggestion of the multiple horrors of town planning, bureaucracy, contemporary architecture, cultural pretension and elitist patronizing of the uneducated masses. What a wonderful satirical effect the juxtaposed names of Shelley and Laski have! The very next paragraph gathers speed: “What a country! The people couldn’t even speak or spell their own language properly, and hardly knew that any other languages existed. They knew nothing of their own literature and cared even less; their pleasures were coarse and brutish, their food revolting, their manners, if such you could call them, appalling. It was not so much that they lacked refinement, these people; rather they hated refinement and persecuted it wherever they found or even suspected it.” No wonder Tony wrote for me on the fly-leaf above his signature, “Something to quell your optimism, if ever you feel any.” Several generations of intellectuals have succeeded in imposing their belief that the collective is superior to the individual. They have encouraged inspectors, social workers, administrators, planners, civil servants and indeed virtually all employees of the state to redesign our culture, what’s left of it, to adapt the title of one of Tony’s books. The unrefined men and women whose sad fate so upsets Tony are victims of theories developed in libraries and now being tested to destruction. Who would have thought, Tony put the question in one of his articles, that within a few years of the conclusion of the Cold War Britain would have undergone so much creeping Sovietization. Intellectuals come standardized these days, they have much the same education, much the same friends, much the same experience from which to draw much the same conclusions, with the witless togetherness of herd animals. And who could conceivably have imagined that someone defending old civilized ways of living would necessarily be compelled to go against the grain.

  PHILIPPE DAUDY

  Les Anglais

  1989

  LIKE A BULL, Philippe Daudy charged through life. Born in 1925, he had an energy that seemed to be powering ideas, and what’s more, ideas that rapidly evolved into projects.

  Eight formative years of his childhood were spent in Ethiopia, where his father, Bernard, was a doctor. Researching for the Pasteur Institute, Bernard died from a snake-bite. Back in France, Philippe was still a schoolboy when the Germans overran the country. His teacher was dismissed because he was Jewish. Philippe’s reaction was characteristic. Mouvement Ouvrier International, the resistance movement he joined, was on the Left, quite likely a Communist front, consisting mostly of Yiddish-speaking Jews and Spanish Republican exiles. When they attacked the German transport depot at Villeurbanne in Lyon, Philippe was hit by a bullet that passed close to vital organs. For fear of being denounced, he could not be treated in a hospital. Never extracted, the bullet was to give him permanent trouble. At the end of the war, many members of this resistance movement proposed first of all to shoot collaborators and then to become Communists. Philippe, still only twenty, was one of those who argued them out of both courses of action.

  Joining Agence France-Presse, the news agency, Philippe covered the post-1945 fighting in Greece and Korea, and
he was a foreign correspondent reporting from Tito’s Yugoslavia – rather too favorably, he came to think. In 1968 he married Marie-Christine Gouin, a childhood friend of mine since we had been neighbors at Royaumont. Once the commission to write a book about Britain was signed, they moved to London and bought a house in deepest Chelsea. I was able to introduce Philippe to some of the people he wanted to interview. The first draft of Les Anglais was too conventional he decided, so he rewrote it. The sympathy he revealed to all things British in his final version contrasts with the condescension that came naturally to Anthony Sampson, whose Anatomy of Britain was a sort of competitor.

  One day Philippe said to me that the ancient Greeks believed in daimon, an untranslatable word which he took to mean being possessed by a spirit stronger than oneself. Supposedly thanks to my daimon my books were so many judgements about the rights and wrongs of this world, so many attacks and defenses. And this from a man who had been in a fire-fight with the Gestapo and stood on a platform in a crowded hall to tell the truth about the Soviet Union.

  MILOVAN DJILAS