Signatures

by David Pryce-Jones

  MICHAEL GRANT

  Greeks and Romans

  1982

  HE INSCRIBED more of his books for me than any other author. They seem to be potboilers only because he had a gift for making scholarship look easy.

  ROBERT GRAVES

  Collected Poems

  1975

  AGOOD NUMBER OF PEOPLE know what they know about Roman Emperors only because they are familiar with Robert Graves’s I, Claudius and Claudius the God, which may claim to be the most popular historical novels ever written. They served as parables about power and the moral dissolution of power holders past and present, a central twentieth-century pre-occupation. I also thought that Graves had written Good-Bye to All That, his autobiography published in 1929, with such bravura that his wartime experience as a Captain in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers became part of the British national story. Here was a description of how the old, incompetent and heartless as they were, had sacrificed the young on the battlefield, in spite of which here he was recounting the ways and means of coming to terms with the whole ordeal. Every schoolchild is now presented with that version of the First World War and its consequences.

  Graves’s advice to a young writer is to find a good woman and marry her. He’d had four children with Nancy Nicholson, none with Laura Riding, and lastly four more with Beryl Hodges. As I was making plans to interview him, Beryl reminded me that Robert was eighty-one, hinting that it wasn’t really worthwhile to fly out to Majorca.

  The village of Deya, then unspoilt, sits on a rocky height above the shore and with a view of the Mediterranean beyond. They lived in a sizable house he’d built there before the Second World War. Graves looked like one of the ancient gods, with a mystique about him. The white curls of his hair and a gladiator’s nose broken boxing long ago, suggested an antique bust. On one finger was a scarab and on another an Arab amulet and round the neck a Maori talisman of some green stone. He asked me to guess what they were. The persona matched the literary output. Volumes of his poetry, collected essays, novels, histories, more than a hundred titles in all, took over a wall of his study. For some reason, his books did especially well in Communist Poland, he said, and the royalties had piled up but the local currency of zlotys was not convertible, so the money had to be spent in Poland. Beryl and he and one or two of their children were planning to drive out there in a van, buy whatever electrical goods and cameras were available, and sell the lot on returning to Majorca.

  A steep descent through trees led to the sea-shore. There was no proper path. Graves and I were slipping and sliding on leaf mould, pebbles, twigs and so on. Having had enough classical education to acquire a sense that knowledge of Latin and Greek is the beginning of wisdom, and I must have been thinking to please Graves when I quoted Virgil, facilis descensus Averni (the descent to Avernus is easy). But as I was pronouncing the place name I had a sudden doubt about its case. Could it be Averno? I made a noise that might cover alternatives. Disproving Beryl’s fear of his loss of memory, Graves immediately picked up my prevarication. “What was that last word?” Averni, I plunged right in. He growled.

  Postscript. In 1968, Graves was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for poetry. A delighted Peter Levi told me the story of its presentation, and as far as I know it is true. As Poet Laureate, Cecil Day-Lewis had to accompany Graves. On the way to Buckingham Palace, Graves became more and more manic. They stopped at Hawkes, the military outfitters, and bought a regimental tie. To calm him, Day-Lewis kept repeating, “Remember you are Captain Graves of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers.” In front of the Queen, Graves said that the two of them had something in common. And what might that be? “Both of us are descendants of the Prophet Muhammad.” The Queen made the gesture behind her back that tells attendants she needs rescuing; a box was thrust into Graves’s hand, and the mortified Day-Lewis took him home. His wife, the actress Jill Balcon, was waiting on the doorstep to say that they had to return to the Palace urgently and be sure to bring the box. In the panic of the moment, Graves had been given some order or award due to Lord Mansfield. And when Graves once again found himself in the presence of the Queen, he had just time to get out, “As I was explaining about our descent from the Prophet …”

  JOHN GROSS

  Editor of

  The New Oxford Book of English Prose

  1998

  JOHN GROSS WAS an intellectual, even a highbrow, though neither word seems quite right for someone with so much humor in him, such charm, and whose social gifts were always in evidence. Ideal guest that he was, when did he find the time to do all that reading? He appeared to know everybody and to possess some extra-sensory perception of who was in and who was out, with all their pluses and minuses. Hour-long telephone calls with him were as good as a news service.

  Every year at the beginning of summer he used to give a party in the Basil Street Hotel in Knightsbridge. He liked to call himself “the Elsa Maxwell de nos jours.” His guest list was so comprehensive that people mingled who normally would not have tolerated being together in the same room. It wasn’t the occasional flashes of silence that made his conversation perfectly delightful, as Sydney Smith pinned down Macaulay, but the creative flow of it, a name leading to another name, an anecdote to another anecdote, each one a gem of gossip, irony and quirkiness. “Stop me if I’ve told you this” was one of his leitmotifs, and another was, “Before you go, there’s just time for one more story if you can bear it.” His memory was flawless, his quotations word-perfect. Most of all, the intention was to laugh, not to hurt.

  It is possible, though I think it unlikely, that the story-telling was protective, an appeal for friendship because in his inmost self John was timid, on the qui vive for fear that something or somebody nasty might be in the offing, so it was as well to be all things to all men. More probably, he just agreed with Kingsley Amis’s password for today that change means worse, therefore it’s sensible to make do with whatever raw material is at hand.

  Temperament forced him to enlist in the culture wars of the moment. The cause of these wars no doubt lies in unfathomable depths of history, empire, the death of kings, resentment of one’s elders and betters, and who knows what besides. The effect is felt continuously in matters great and small. People have to adjust to the political goals on offer, to reinterpretations of the past, to the way reputations are manipulated to rise and fall, to the uses and abuses of language. As the theater critic of the Sunday Telegraph, John particularly held out against reading into plays and operas all sorts of moral or political messages at odds with the original work. At one point he asked if I didn’t think that pop music was the great cultural divide. Those born in the era of this immense but mindless revolution in taste and manners were condemned never to understand those born before it, as we had been.

  John’s regular contributions to the New Criterion under the rubric “London Journal” were dispatches from the front in the culture wars, and they are every bit as illuminating as George Orwell’s similar London letters to Partisan Review, written during the real war with the Germans. When Tony Blair had just become Prime Minister, John pointed out that he spoke of “rebranding” Britain as though dealing with a supermarket; the wider conclusion was that this encouraged the nation to wave goodbye to its historic identity, a pointless and unsettling step. The BBC was also coarsening the culture, John believed, in one typical instance concocting the nonsense that Wordsworth knew Coleridge to be a better poet than he and therefore pressed him to continue with drugs in order to destroy him. After 9/11, John was particularly incensed by a BBC television program when Muslim extremists accused the United States of bringing this outrage on itself, and his comment revealed his state of mind. “You start thinking you can’t be surprised anymore – not when it comes to left-wing opinion-makers at least – but you end up being surprised nonetheless.” Over the last twenty-five years, John would wryly underline, nobody from the BBC had been in touch with him. Culture wars are fought from the trenches, in close combat.

  Most of the cor
respondence from John that I kept simply evokes company and good times. “I do hope that I didn’t outstay my welcome the other night; if I did I can only plead it was the pleasure of seeing you that kept me.” Writing from a Park Avenue apartment, he hopes we can meet in New York. For five long years, he had the Sisyphean task of reviewing two books every week for the New York Times. He seemed to manage this easily, and the goings-on of his colleagues on the paper added to his repertoire of irresistible stories. By this time, he was also a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and to Commentary – in other words, he occupied a position in no-man’s land.

  One postcard asks rather typically if I have read a review by a critic we both held in low esteem, of a new book by a famous novelist we held in even lower esteem. “In a grim way it might amuse you.” And here’s another dated March 1981 with a portrait of Mao Tsetung gazing with poster-like uplift into the distance. A strip across the bottom of the card reads, “Father’s Mind Was Set on a People’s Republic.” On the reverse are five printed lines all in capitals: “The Youth of Today – Narcissistic – Depraved – Dangerous. All Over the World Right-Thinking Folk Are Crying Out This Thing Has Gone Too Far. Our Young People Are Sick. A New Magazine Chronicles the Terrors of Teen Tyranny. Time Is Running Out – Final Days – Edited by John Stalin.” Underneath this inspired but presumably fictitious name, John has simply jotted “T.L.S.” and thanks me for a review for him of Saul Friedländer’s When Memory Comes. Now an eminent historian, Friedländer described unforgettably what he had gone through as a child in the war, and drew the conclusion, equally unforgettable, that Jews “obey the call of some mysterious destiny.”

  John was only thirty-four when he published The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters, but the book has the scholarship and poise of someone at the close of a long and thoughtful career. It also opened a front in the culture wars. John wrote that some English men of letters had been gifted while others were boring, but all had contributed to a literature that was a national glory. Academics with university salaries, however, had then driven them out. Critics had become either too specialized to be of interest or they were just doormen at the discotheque. Although he was cataloguing men of letters as a more or less extinct species, John chose to become that very thing himself, like a latter-day Eminent Victorian, but one who reserved the right to flick ink from the back of the classroom. At various moments in this role as man of letters, he was literary editor of the New Statesman and of Melvin Lasky’s Encounter, a commissioning editor with the publishers Weidenfeld & Nicolson, and from 1974 to 1981 the editor of the Times Literary Supplement.

  The official history of the TLS compliments John for maintaining an extremely high standard of reviewing, “helped by the fact that he had no difficulty in discussing almost any subject with his contributors on an equal intellectual footing.” Roger Scruton, for one, tells me that he was virtually unknown until John commissioned lengthy articles from him. Another contributor whom he introduced was Alastair Forbes, a member of a well-connected Bostonian family who had made his home in London and Château d’Oex in Switzerland. His know-all name-dropping and a prose style that was a log-jam of sub-clauses gave him a certain cachet. My biography of Unity Mitford was an ideal opportunity for him to show how much more he knew than I did, about Unity, Hitler, the other Mitfords, the whole political and social background of Unity’s drama. When he asked to review it, John weighed the pros and cons for several days before accepting the risk, he told me afterwards. In the event, Forbes took the line that my father and I had moral defects that destroyed the right to have opinions. Alan had edited the TLS from 1948 to 1959. An embarrassed John rejected the review, whereupon Forbes re-titled it “The Piece the Jews Rejected” and circulated a hundred or so photocopies around London, including one put into my mail box. The scandal persisted until John eventually published an edited version of the review.

  For a writer, as John put it, “the fact of having been born a Jew can mean everything or nothing,” or, he adds in a rather characteristic qualification garnished with a bracket, “(more usually) something in between.” Shylock, published in 1992, was John’s first attempt to discover through the medium of print what being Jewish might mean for him. Shakespeare’s Jew has long been a stereotype, a villain who has become part of world mythology. The demand for a pound of flesh has provided an enduring foundation for anti-Semitism. Actors have tried to play Shylock as a comic character, or as noble, heroic and ultimately tragic. What’s always left, though, in John’s conclusion, is “a permanent chill in the air.”

  John’s memoir of his childhood and upbringing, A Double Thread: Growing Up English and Jewish in London, addresses his identity as an English Jew more directly. He dedicated the book to his children, Tom and Susanna, of whom he was limitlessly proud. His recommendation was that everyone with these two threads in their identity should feel relaxed about it. John did not enter the sea of the Talmud, as he put it in the words of a religious dictum, but his father, a doctor, and his bookish mother gave him a sense of Judaism, including Hebrew and Yiddish. His experience was very different from Saul Friedländer’s, but he too could come to think that Jews obey the call of some mysterious destiny.

  John’s upbringing was, nevertheless, overwhelmingly ordinary and English, for which he was grateful. During the Second World War, the family moved from the East End of London to Egham – “A Small Town in Surrey” is the title he gives to the relevant chapter. What formed him were boys’ comics, the songs of those pre-pop years, period films, teachers in friendly schools who led him to the poetry of Eliot and Auden and the prose of James Joyce, even cricket, and not an anti-Semite or a proper Communist anywhere on the horizon. The path was short and straight to an Oxford scholarship in a college whose Warden, the majestic Maurice Bowra, liked to boom to the attending world, “All my geese are swans.”

  An innately modest man, John made no claims for himself. A spasm of disavowal would certainly have crossed his face on hearing that he has influenced literary perceptions and taste and will continue to do so. His anthologies – The Oxford Books of English Prose, of Comic Verse, of Essays, of Literary Anecdotes, and The Oxford Book of Parodies, (which came out just before his last illness when he was still able to take pleasure in the reviews) – are celebrations of the English literary tradition, its range and its civility.

  FREDERIC V. GRUNFELD

  Berlin

  TIME-LIFE BOOKS 1977

  SON RULLAN, Fred Grunfeld’s house, was an abandoned monastery in the Majorcan countryside near Deya. The road to it petered out into an improbable dusty track through fields planted up with crops. A good place to get a lot of writing done, and Fred did a lot. Born in Berlin in 1929, he came from a family that owned one of the most elegant stores at the city center. He had experienced the stormtroopers smashing up plate-glass windows. Growing up in New York, Fred answered to Stalin’s jibe about “rootless cosmopolitans.” Prophets Without Honour (1979) is a detailed and moving account of the men and women who had given Europe the cultural life that was destroyed before Fred could take what would have been his rightful place at its forefront. Although written for the mass readership of Time-Life Books, his Berlin is a requiem for the by-gone Weimar Republic. Other subjects of his range from a social history of Hitler’s Germany, a biography of the sculptor Auguste Rodin, to travel books and studies of Kings and countries, and even games and musical instruments.

  We dined in what in the days of the monks must have been the refectory, now all candlelight and shadows. Another guest was Henri-Louis de La Grange, the great authority on Gustav Mahler. When the conversation turned to Mahler’s symphonies, Fred could keep up with him. He was only fifty-eight when he had a fatal heart attack.

  ROMAN HALTER

  Roman’s Journey

  2007

  AS SOON AS I COULD concentrate on the causes and effects of the Second World War, I began to make no allowance for Germans but took against the whole lot of them. Hitler and Nazism
had been a blot on humanity, and the German nation was responsible. A Gestapo

  official with the name of Doctor Six had put together a list of over thirty thousand Britons destined for summary execution in the event of a successful occupation of the country and my father was on it. My mother, Viennese and Jewish, would have been deported and murdered. As I attempted to explain to myself the inexplicable, I found that the German language and the literature, even the poetry, couldn’t help but convey an uncritical sense of superiority. In culture as in soldiering, Germans were able to do what other people couldn’t or wouldn’t.

  In one of his several successful but spasmodic incarnations, my old Oxford friend Alasdair Clayre was an architect. Through the Architectural Association he met Roman, an artist and designer especially in the medium of stained glass. Alasdair introduced him here, there and everywhere. Gentle in manner, usually smiling and speaking with the well-controlled bravura of a foreign accent, Roman had the air of a man of destiny. Friends with a house on the Costa Brava invited us at the same time, and there he swam with one or the other of my small daughters on his back. Physically very strong, he lifted a full gas cylinder as though it was a bottle of milk.

  Sometimes he’d talk about the European past or the Middle Eastern present, always succinctly as if there was nothing more to be said. He’d send me war-time reminiscences that he’d written up and published and gave me a landscape he’d painted of Jerusalem, quite a miniature but glowing with color.