Conversations with Stalin
1962
ONE OF JOHN ANSTEY’S editorial suggestions was that I should write about the Balkans for the Telegraph Colour Magazine. So in the spring of 1967, I found myself in Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, which at the time was just one of the seven different entities of the Yugoslav federation. I had an introduction to Vlado Gotovac, a Croatian nationalist and open advocate of reform, all of which the Communist regime would find intolerably provocative. The look on his face made it immediately obvious that he believed my visit was bound to be recorded and held against him. Leading me to the window, he pointed out numerous policemen in plain clothes standing by shiny black cars, evidently a team keeping him under surveillance. In due course he was arrested, tried and sentenced to four years in prison.
In Belgrade, the poet Miodrag Pavlovi´c took me to a bookshop. The man I glimpsed browsing before we hastily backed out was Alexander Rankovic, until lately chief of the secret police that had maintained Josip Broz, alias Marshal Tito, in power as head of the Yugoslav Communist Party and President of the country. Tito had lived in Moscow for five years, astute enough to survive Stalin’s Great Terror. “Tito is a smart fellow!” Stalin said approvingly, “He has no problems with enemies–he has got rid of them all.”
During the war, Tito had two equally important but incompatible objectives, to drive the German army of occupation out of the country and to prepare for the post-war Communist take-over of power. Milovan Djilas, his deputy and a hard-line Communist with the blood of so-called class enemies on his hands, had accompanied him on missions to Moscow. Tito then broke with Stalin in the first assertion of the very same nationalism that eventually would destroy the Yugoslav federation. Stalin famously boasted that he had only to shake his little finger and Tito would fall. Tito’s immediate transformation from Party hero to Party villain was the manipulation of opinion that George Orwell unforgettably defined as a Two Minutes Hate. James Klugmann, for instance, a member of the Central Committee of the British Communist Party, had worked clandestinely through British Intelligence to put Tito in power, but now wrote to order From Trotsky to Tito, a polemic designed to trace a straight line of treason between the two.
In a similar transformation from Party hero into villain, Djilas became Tito’s arch-critic, as Ian Kershaw expressed it in the second volume of his comprehensive history of twentieth century Europe. For Djilas, Communism in practice was a social system that enriched and privileged the unscrupulous few and impoverished everyone else. To the world at large, Soviet Communism was evidently a cover for Russian imperialism. Tito had him sent to prison for nine years. While serving the sentence, Djilas wrote Conversations with Stalin. Posterity will always have to take into consideration this unique and frankly devastating memoir of Stalin in the crisis of war.
Out of the blue, I telephoned him. He invited me to his house. Only a few months earlier, he had served out his sentence, and still had what he called “the look of a convict.” A Montenegrin, he had grown up amid banditry, feuding and rebellion. First and foremost he was a dissident, willing and able to tell the truth as he saw it, no matter what the cost. “I know nothing about you,” Djilas said to me, “you may be a spy or provocateur. But if you have any influence, use it to tell the Americans that they must win the war in Vietnam.” The United States alone had the strength to stand between the Soviet Union and China. If it were to withdraw, he feared, countries including his and mine would be compelled to take sides in a merciless battle of the great powers for supremacy.
Hearing this point of view, Mark Schorer, an eminent biographer and chairman of the English literature faculty at Berkeley, arranged for me to speak about Djilas on the university campus. There were even promotional posters. Djilas had credentials. Nevertheless, those who came to listen to the talk were in favor of withdrawing in order to lose the war, and they were noisy about it too. In common with dissidents, I failed to convince.
LAWRENCE DURRELL
Constance
1982
ANOVELIST IS SUPPOSED to create his or her own world, fictional but believable, and word of mouth in the Oxford of my day kept on promising that this was what Lawrence Durrell had done. And so he had. The Alexandria Quartet fixed in my head a whole carnival of characters suave yet exotic, with names like Mountolive and Pursewarden, who expressed themselves in aphorisms, quotations and generally playful literary language. Latter-day Cleopatras, the womenfolk – Clea, Justine, Melissa – were working their passages through the cultural mix-up of the Middle East complete with Copts and Muslims. At home, the British were living in the darkness of Look Back in Anger, the void of The Birthday Party, the morbid paintings of John Bratby, and Durrell was a light to lighten them. Nobody else was writing like that.
The Suez campaign of 1956 for a few days looked likely to provide my introduction to Egypt. My national service had not much longer to run, but my regiment was on stand-by, busily camouflaging whatever they could with paint supposedly as yellow as the desert. Many of the men had previously been stationed along the Canal. Shufti and bint and baksheesh were familiar terms in their vocabulary. A ditty that went, “King Farook, hang his bollocks on a ’ook” told you what the guardsmen were thinking. At the last minute, we were stood down and I went up to Oxford as planned. More than ten years were to pass before I was in a position to match the extravagant world of The Alexandria Quartet against the grime of Egypt.
Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian strongman, had used his 1956 victory to militarize the country. The kind of Levantine characters who had caught Durrell’s imagination had no means to defend themselves. Dispossessed, their businesses and fortunes sequestrated, Alexandrian Greeks, Italians, Jews, Armenians, fled to the United States and Canada, lucky to escape with their lives. Victor Simaica Bey was one particular family friend whose estate was confiscated. Waguih Ghali’s novel Beer in the Snooker Club has a scene in which a rich lady is obliged to hand out to expectant but shame-faced fellahin the legal right of each to a miniscule strip of her land. Worse was to come as Nasser lent himself to the Soviet Union, opened concentration camps for those who might disagree with him, and squandered the country’s future in wars that led nowhere.
By the time the Daily Telegraph Colour Magazine sent me to interview Durrell in 1982 to coincide with the publication of Constance, he had settled down in Sommières, a historic fortified village in Provence. The foundations of the bridge across the river Vidourle had been laid in the reign of the emperor Tiberius. “Monsieur du Rèle,” the locals called him. The house he lived in had been built around 1900, a provincial villa with the only slate roof in this region of semi-circular terracotta tiles. The rooms were sparse, impersonal except for some Chinese lacquered boards and a framed sheet of manuscript that Stendhal had written. The verandah room in which he lived and did his writing had pastel-shaded stained glass and a table with a green plastic cloth. Impervious to his surroundings, he evidently had no interest in what money can buy. “I’m terribly flush” was one of the first things he said, as though that was that.
Durrell was a homunculus, a sprite, one of the company of Pan, stocky, his shoulders broad and his legs bandy. A bulbous nose made his head seem disproportionately large and strong. He was wearing a blue shirt and white shorts so ill-fitting that his private parts were exposed. He lived with a much-younger woman and presumably she might have told him to arrange himself but he had sent her out of the house and we never met. Accompanying me, Clarissa and our son Adam, then nine, said nothing at the time, but down the years couldn’t help remembering this give-away sight.
Bored to be questioned, bored to be famous yet proud of it too, Durrell laughed at the literary hoo-ha of publishers and agents. His papers have long been in the University of Southern Illinois, and he joked about a couple of American academics “who know more about me than I know about myself.” In the same tone of delighted disdain he said, “I’m in the Michelin Guide as one of the tourist attractions here. Couples ring the b
ell to shake my hand when I’m probably naked in the swimming pool. Partly it’s my fault because I made the mistake of appearing on French television.”
At about ten o’clock in the morning he started in on the red wine. The old soak, the smoker, the bar-room story-teller, the fabulator, the poet, the colonial, the stag, he could even play the part of the colonel frowning at the young of today who go in for what he called “squirty couplings” and think that’s all there is to life. Which reminded him that he’d been employed to rescue a film script set in ancient Egypt, so he had eunuchs parading with papier-mâché phalluses sixty foot high: “That’s not box-office,” the producer had said.
The moment I was back home, I received a letter hotfoot from Durrell with a request not to mention one or two things from our conversation. I wasn’t aware that he’d been filling me in with what he described as his “yogic theories about fucking.” Whatever these theories might be, he was afraid that they would “hamper the free-selling run of the book and raise blushes and irritation” on the part of Telegraph readers. Within a few volatile years, a change of taste had turned his fiction first into a requiem, and then without warning it vanished out of sight down one of the twentieth century’s literary rabbit-holes.
AMOS ELON
The Israelis: Founders and Sons
1971
FOR MOST OF 1962 I was living in Haifa or Tel Aviv gathering impressions for Next Generation: Travels in Israel, which was published a couple of years later. Some of those I met and even wrote about became lifelong friends and one of them was Amos Elon, whose reporting for Haaretz, the daily newspaper of record, had already made him an internationally known journalist. Born in Vienna in 1926, he was seven when his parents brought him and his sister to what was then the British Mandate of Palestine. His Hebrew, German and English were fluent. Immensely well read, he had a sardonic sense of humor and excelled in pointing out ignorance, inconsistency and stupidity. Once upon a time, a great many Jewish intellectuals wrote and talked their way to fame in the cafés of Vienna, and that was the course Amos’s life would naturally have taken. It is hardly an exaggeration to think of him in the same frame as Joseph Roth or Stefan Zweig.
On behalf of Haaretz Amos was in Hungary at the time of the anti-Communist revolution of 1956, then their correspondent in Washington, finally travelling extensively in order to write his first book, a suitably ambiguous portrait of post-Hitler Germany with the title Journey Through a Haunted Land. Establishing himself, he married Beth, an open-minded American prepared to make her life in Israel. Tel Aviv was then a city whose inhabitants rose early in the morning and went to bed early in the evening. The Elons were different. Their house was a sort of unofficial media center for anyone on some reporting assignment. Karl Meyer of the New York Times, the Magnum photographer Erich Lessing, Herbert Pundik editor of the Danish paper Politiken, were among those who liked to think there was a secret self-selected network known as the Friends of Amos Elon. When Amos pushed his spectacles high on the bridge of his nose or took them off altogether and started describing reality in the Middle East, it was time to listen. He had an undoubted streak of melancholy, which at first I thought was an individual trait, until I realized that everyone in the country had the same deep-down but unspoken regret that they could no longer live wherever they had once lived.
What now looks like Israel’s Golden Age of enforced isolation came to an abrupt end in May 1967 when Gamal Abdel Nasser ordered Egyptian units to take up positions in the Sinai Desert. The watching world wondered whether Nasser might make good his threat to eliminate Israel. John Anstey, editor of the Daily Telegraph Colour Magazine, sent me to cover what became known as the Six Day War. On the day when I caught up with Amos, he was back home in his house on Hazayit Street in Tel Aviv, too exhausted to talk except to say that he had been at the front somewhere in Sinai in a jeep with General Avraham Yoffe, a man larger than life in more ways than one. The General was standing up and surveying the battle through field glasses when Amos heard him groan, “My God, war is boring!” (At that time, the novelist Mordecai Richler remarked just as memorably that if planes were overhead he’d rather they were ours.)
Nobody that I know of had anticipated that the Palestinians on the West Bank of Jordan and in Gaza would ever come under Israeli rule. Writing in the New York Review of Books and the New Yorker, Amos was among the very first to propose unilateral Israeli withdrawal from all Palestinian territory, in effect arguing that victory in the Six Day War had given Israel unwanted responsibility for other people and that was no victory at all. Put another way, the Arabs were to pay no price either for going to war or for losing it. No Israeli had previously written a book like Amos’s Flight Into Egypt, published in 1980. An official guest in the country, he met and admired the then President Anwar Sadat, Mrs. Jihan Sadat and other Egyptians whom he took to be genuine peacemakers. The repeated attempts to restart a peace process seemed to me fanciful; I tend to believe that on the evidence available a Palestinian state is bound to be an Arab tyranny like all the others, and not worth having. Those in the know often expected Amos to reject my opinions lock, stock and barrel, but he never did. In spite of our differences, he even gladly endorsed my book The Closed Circle: An Interpretation of the Arabs.
Touring in Tuscany, Beth had visited Buggiano, a small but beautiful town on top of a steep hill about an hour from Florence. On impulse, Amos and Beth bought a house in a secluded spot at the end of a lane. The more time they spent there, the more their critics accused them of turning their backs on Israel and nationalism, so making a bad situation worse. We saw the Elons so regularly that I am pretty sure their retreat to Buggiano was motivated as much by aesthetics as by politics. Here was an ideal setting for reading and writing, for growing fruit and making wine.
We had inherited a family house high up at Arcetri on the southern side of Florence, and together with Beth we prepared a surprise fiesta in the courtyard to celebrate Amos’s sixtieth birthday. Guests were to come from six countries. Karl Meyer edited a Festschrift of some twenty contributors whose columns made and unmade reputations, while he himself observed that what distinguishes Amos’s writing “is its passionate and humanizing sense of fairness; he deals justly with friend and adversary, despising the wretched little orthodoxies that unworthily divide them.” I still see the look on Amos’s face as he entered the courtyard and the assembled guests sang for him.
I hear Amos telling stories, for instance how President Johnson had summoned Abba Eban, the Israeli Foreign Minister, to Washington and opened conversation by saying, “I was a-sitting here scratching my ass and thinking about Is-ra-el.” In one session at a conference, the egregious South African novelist Nadine Gordimer said that if Amos was sincere about the Palestinians he would go to a barricade and get himself shot dead on their behalf, and I hear him reply, “Did you get yourself shot on behalf of Mandela?” A woman by the name of Dina Vierney sued me for describing her as the teenage model and mistress of the sculptor Maillol. I hear Amos immediately quoting from memory a passage from the diaries of Count Keyserling, social busybody par excellence, recording that Vierney had indeed been the mistress of Maillol. I hear him describing how he had come to Vienna to be interviewed on television in the aftermath of the first invasion of Iraq, when an old man in front of a shop displaying books about the Middle East turned to him and said that he hoped Saddam Hussein would throw the Jews into the sea. Why is that? Amos asked. Because some of them might come here, was the unexpected answer, and life would then become bearable again. Beth wrote comprehensive books about Italian cuisine, practicing it herself at the highest level, and one day just before lunch I hear Amos warding off his diet by saying to her, “I don’t want any of your Third World food.”
The Pity of It All (2002), his last and most powerful book, is the master-work of a lifetime, a heart-felt and fully researched account of the Jewish experience in Germany from nineteenth-century emancipation to the Third Reich. As Amos had found for himself, it
is wishful to believe in happy endings, and Jews should always have in mind where else they can live. On a visit to Buggiano I saw him one last time rising up the stone stairs of his house on the chair lift chanting some dog-Latin and giving a very good imitation of a papal blessing.
JOHN FULLER
Collected Poems
1996
AT THE LAUNCH PARTY, John, a friend since we were undergraduates, unscrewed a pen and wrote impromptu, “From a Georgian to an Edwardian.”
NICHOLAS GAGE
Eleni
1983
THIS BOOK IS ABOUT EVIL, specifically an act of evil particular to Greece in the twentieth century. The relating of what happened further raises the more general and indeed abiding question of how the individual to whom evil is done should rightly and properly respond. There are ambiguities. To do nothing might be to follow the biblical injunction to turn the other cheek, but it might also leave the victim to internalize the evil and blame himself for what another did. Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, but the avenger will almost certainly have to be as morally defective as the evil-doer.
At first glance, Nicholas Gage looked like a Brooks Brothers type of American. He was reputed to be one of the best investigative journalists on the New York Times, specializing in stories about cops and robbers. In person, he was soft-spoken, self-effacing. It seemed all of a piece to learn that his name was an anglicized form of Nikola Gatzoyiannis. Investigating in professional style the life and death of his mother, Eleni, however, he is not dealing with identity but touching the heights and depths of human emotions.
Eleni lived in Lia, a village in the Grammos Mountains just on the Greek side of the frontier with Albania. According to a very summary sentence in the book, she was “an ordinary peasant woman, subject to all her doubts, fears and prejudices planted by her upbringing and her primitive world.” A day came when fifteen heavily armed men turned up in the village. Communists were taking over the region. The world war was giving rise to a civil war on the issue of who would rule peacetime Greece. At the Yalta conference, the great powers decided which countries were to be in the Soviet bloc and Greece was not one of them. Preparing for a long-term militant future, the Greek Communist Party then organized the unprecedented atrocity known as the Paidomazoma. This was the effective kidnapping of as many as 28,000 children between the ages of three and thirteen and their transfer to the Soviet Union or to the new People’s Democracies in Eastern Europe. Eleni could not submit to such an affront to her instincts and beliefs. She enabled her children to escape without her and rejoin their father already in the United States since before the war. The Communists accused her of treachery, tortured her, held a kangaroo trial and finally put her before a firing squad. “My children!” the unfortunate Eleni screamed as she died.
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