So I was aware that he had been a teenage slave laborer making Wehrmacht uniforms in the Lodz ghetto at the orders of Albert Speer, Hitler’s Minister of Production. So I was aware that in February 1945 he’d been going through Dresden on a Death March from one center of genocide to another when the firestorm bombing of that city started; the SS guards ran away and Roman and others jumped up to their necks into the freezing Elbe and stood cheering the explosions and the flames – I think of those shivering fugitives whenever the firestorm is treated as a war crime. So I was aware that Roman alone of his immediate family had survived Auschwitz. Some 800 Jews had lived in the small Polish town of Chodecz, and Roman was one of only three of them still alive at the end of the war. When he then returned on foot to what had been his family’s house, strangers had appropriated it and they shut the door in his face.
Roman had been present the day that Albert Speer had inspected the workshop making Wehrmacht uniforms in the Lodz ghetto. The director, a well-known Jewish industrialist, had seen fit to pin on his striped prisoner clothing the medals he had won in the First World War. Then and there, one of Speer’s adjutants had ripped the medals off and knocked the man to the floor. Published in 1995, Gitta Sereny’s book about Albert Speer has the telling subtitle “His Battle with Truth.” Hard-headed as she was, she came to the conclusion that Speer hadn’t been lying at the Nuremberg trial to save himself from the gallows, that he really was a lesser monster than the other defendants. Working on her book, she “grew to like” him, injecting into her account a sentimental tendency to excuse him. Roman knew better. After Speer had served his twenty-year sentence, Roman wrote to him and they met. Speer remembered the incident at Lodz, agreed that he had been content to watch the beating of the director and above all that he was responsible for dispatching the workshop slaves to Auschwitz in the knowledge that they would be murdered. That was enough for Roman. All he wanted was the truth.
Nothing could have prepared him for the unprecedented dreadfulness he experienced on his journey. When he was young, crime had taken the place of law in his life and it would have been only normal if he had expressed himself with rage, hatred and bitterness. In that case, though, this book would have taken its place as one more testimony among the many others already half-neglected on the library shelves. Roman’s complete absence of anger and self-pity instead makes for a lasting renewal of humanity.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Island
1962
I MET ALDOUS HUXLEY in the bleak service flat in Chelsea where he was staying during his visit in 1961. The sitting room was colorless, the walls beige and bare. On a table was Iris Murdoch’s A Severed Head, the novel he happened to be reading. He was the first literary figure that I interviewed and I was not properly prepared for it. I thought (and still think) that Brave New World is one of the twentieth century’s masterpieces, on a level with Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita in its power of analysis and its black humor. But intelligence like his could slip into the higher foolishness, for instance advocating pacifism in the face of Communism and Nazism pre-war, and experimenting with hallucinatory drugs post-war.
Huxley had a very distinguished appearance. His was the impressive face of someone who followed the advice of Socrates and led an examined life with whatever degree of resignation. He pitched his words slowly and carefully in what I imagined was the way intellectual undergraduates had enunciated in the Oxford of his day. He also had fortitude. Some months previously, a forest fire had burnt out his house in California and everything in it. Gone was correspondence from friends, for instance D. H. Lawrence, Lady Ottoline Morrell and Bertrand Russell. There could be no question now of writing his memoirs. The loss of his past, he said, was “a particularly cruel way of enforcing the teaching of the saints and mystics.” On the other hand, he went on, this was preparation for the greater loss soon to come. In an act of desperate courage at the last possible moment, he had risked entering the blazing house in order to rescue the finished manuscript of Island that had been lying on his desk prior to its dispatch to the publishers. When he worked at home, he could write two thousand words on a good day and in the future he would be returning to the United States to build a new home and start all over again.
Island expresses for one final time Huxley’s lifelong wish that the world were a better place. It was the writer’s business to investigate what had gone wrong, and why. Civilization in its modern form as he saw it imposed alienation. Millions of children had never seen a cow and were upset to discover that milk didn’t start in a bottle. Science, manners, even the landscape were all changing for the worse. He had gone for a walk in the Surrey countryside which he had known and loved since boyhood, and where he had set the scene in Brave New World of the Savage’s heart-stopping revolution to be free even if nobody else was. Now he had found there an arterial road and the roar of “infernal machines.” Political power was in the hands of twenty or so men who were as irrational as the next fellow. William James had wanted to find a moral equivalent to war but the only suggestion so far was sport, and that wouldn’t do. My impression is that the pacifist in him expected Kennedy and Khrushchev between them to blow up the world. Just before leaving, I asked which of his novels he thought was his best, to which he answered that it was for others to say, and what was my opinion about Point Counter Point?
By coincidence, a day or two later I encountered him in the street and then a second time when I got into the lift in Harrods, of all places. On that last occasion his brother Julian was with him, and they were awkwardly silent when I greeted them, most probably wondering what my intentions were and whether I was tracking them.
PAUL IGNOTUS
Political Prisoner
1959
UNCLE PAUL, as he asked Clarissa and me to call him, had inherited the pseudonym Ignotus from his father, who was a journalist as well-known in Hungary as himself. Uncle Paul’s manner, his whole demeanor, was wonderfully old-fashioned, not to say courtly. He might come to kitchen supper, or we would have a drink in the bleak flat in Prince of Wales Drive where he lived, a lonely widower and very much an exile. He had no money, but survived somehow. It was rumored that his old friend Arthur Koestler took care of the financial side of things, even though – or perhaps, because – he is on record ascribing to Uncle Paul “the gullibility of a naïve liberal.”
60 Andrassy Street in Budapest was the headquarters of the AVH, the secret police of the Communist era. Now a public monument, this building still retains a row of cells, below ground level and therefore windowless and claustrophobic. Attached to the walls of each cell are photographs of those once arrested, detained, interrogated and tortured here. Taken long before I knew him, the photograph of Uncle Paul shows a thoughtful and gentle young man. Twenty-four hours in one of these sinister cells, one could suppose, might have been a death sentence for him.
Political Prisoner is Uncle Paul’s testimony. The book will always be a shock because the inhumanity it depicts is so ordinary; just a tale of cruelty and wickedness that has no point. Uncle Paul is speaking for himself, a very credible representative of the millions of men and women whose lives were similarly wrecked as though Communism had been some natural disaster against which nothing could be done, any more than against bad weather. Sentenced on trumped-up charges to fifteen years of forced labor, he took the chance to escape from Hungary in the revolution of 1956. The flight was so stressful that the child his wife had been expecting was stillborn. The book’s final sentence reads, “That little creature who had never seen the sun paid with her life for ours.” I have a letter from him dated November 12, 1973, a fortnight after Clarissa had given birth to Adam. The spirit and the grammar of this invocation to Adam are his: “Welcome in this bloody world! Don’t be despaired anyway; with parents such as yours even this world can be quite sweet.”
B. S. JOHNSON
Albert Angelo
1964
ONE OF THE BEST WRITERS we’ve got,” proclaims a strap acros
s the dust jacket of Trawl, the novel B. S. (Bryan Stanley) Johnson published in 1966. The words are not attributed to anyone and it may very well be that he wrote them himself. He lived in a handsome square not far from the City with a favorite restaurant at one corner. After a meal he’d go to some bookshop alone and once or twice with me. If he found one of his own novels, he made sure to prop it up conspicuously, in the window most likely or on top of a pile. If the shop had no copies, he’d rebuke the assistant along the lines of “You do realize, don’t you, that the Sunday Times calls this author clever and funny and likens him to Rabelais?” He carried on even after one assistant said, “There, there, Mr. Johnson, it’s quite all right.” Oh how desperately he wanted to be famous.
I was the Sunday Times reviewer who had praised his first novel, Travelling People, published in 1963. Maurie Bunde, one of its characters, is the victim of a heart attack and normally the pun on the name would have stopped me from reading any further. But here is an experimental search for new forms in fiction. The standard he-said she-said narrative has been exhausted, worked to death. In this novel, wavy black lines on three quarters of a page replace conventional story telling. Death is represented by two and a half black pages. These experiments come thick and fast. “It requires no small talent,” I wrote a bit heavily, “to make an engaging subject-matter out of style.” The letter thanking me for my review was an appeal for friendship.
Bryan gave off unhappiness like a scent. Born in 1933, he had some bad experience as a child evacuated in the war. Clay, a poem of his, has two final lines that may hold the key: “Doing the best thing for me to their mind:/war or parents: which did more to destroy?” He’d left his secondary modern school early and only the public library had made him a widely read and cultured man. I see him as he was in that local restaurant, hungrily eating, his face overweight with melancholy.
The poet Paul Engle had set up and still ran the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. I recommended Bryan to him. “Engle seems to have misunderstood,” Bryan wrote to me, adding, “I did not want to go this year.” Besides, he’d met someone just leaving for Iowa, who was “generally not looking forward to it.”
In 1969, Bryan published The Unfortunates, a novel of loose sheets with no pagination, supposedly to be read whimsically in any order. The author was therefore offering to share creativity with the reader. The French were doing that kind of thing. Bryan might have had all the fame he’d ever wanted as a homegrown Robbe-Grillet. The next thing I knew was that he’d got away, taking his own life and leaving something of a cult.
DAVID JONES
The Anathemata
1955
IN THE LATE 1950S, towards the end of his editorship of the Times Literary Supplement, my father took me to meet David Jones. A poet, he said. I had never heard of him. Since my mother’s death, my father had me on his hands and did his best to fit me into his life. I must have been at a loose end that day. It is just possible that this was his way of engaging me in serious things like religion and art that he didn’t care to discuss, most probably on the grounds that I ought to be able to think it all through for myself.
David Jones lived in Harrow and Alan drove there in the rather grand Bentley that satisfied one side of his character. With us was Father Illtyd Evans, an intellectual Dominican. Some local nuns were supposed to look after David but there was no sign of that. The room in which he slept was also the studio where he worked. A large picture window made the room seem more spacious and better lit than it was. Paper, old letters especially, painting materials, books, odds and ends, turned every surface into a clutter of heaped untidiness. Drawing pins in the four corners attached the picture he was working on to an easel. Nobody had yet mentioned to me that he was an artist as well as a poet. With great ceremony, he gave each of us a cup of tea and a Bath Oliver biscuit.
Born in 1895, David Jones was only some twelve or so years older than Alan. Their backgrounds were very different. David’s father was a printer, Alan’s father was a Guards officer, but both families had a sense of Wales and Welsh identity. One of David’s constant regrets was that he knew so little of the language. A time was to come when Alan and I bought Teach Yourself Welsh books, but we soon caved in.
Under the influence of the Jesuit Father Martin D’Arcy, famous for his social and his proselytizing skills, Alan and David Jones were among the many who at that moment had converted to Catholicism. Twenty Seven Poems is the self-explanatory and none too imaginative title of the slim volume that Alan published in 1935. Try as
I might, I have been unable to get much out of these poems; they seem devoid of emotion and coldly superior in tone, like exercises to provide evidence of talent on the part of an up-and-coming young writer. David Jones’s In Parenthesis, a prose poem published in 1937 almost coincidentally with Alan’s 27, is very different, not an exercise at all but a statement from the heart. Vaguely suggesting something that has been excluded when it ought to have been said, the title is too distant, too clumsy to do justice to this astonishing epic of the First World War. Enlisted in the South Wales Borderers, David had spent weeks in the front-line trenches at Mametz Wood and then been wounded in the Battle of the Somme. In some 200 pages of text and more than thirty of notes, he dramatizes the experience of soldiering and the phenomenon of Britishness down the centuries. A range of classical allusions, references and quotations, not to mention barrack-room slang, transforms the war into a mythology that is first of all personal, then national, and finally universal.
The preface is supposed to be helpful, so a paragraph chosen at random from it will give an idea of what David expected from the reader. “Every man’s speech and habit of mind were a perpetual showing: now of Napier’s expedition, now of the Legions at the Wall, now of ‘train-band captain’, now of Jack Cade, of John Ball, of the commons in arms. Now of High Germany, of Dolly Gray, of Bull-calf, Wart and Poins; of Jingo largenesses, of things as small as the Kingdom of Elmet; of Wellington’s raw shire recruits, of ancient border antipathies, of our contemporary, less intimate, larger unities, of John Barleycorn, of ‘sweet Sally Frampton’. Now of Coel Hên – of the Celtic cycle that lies, a subterranean influence as a deep water troubling, under every tump in this Island, like Merlin complaining under his big rock.” An awestruck Kathleen Raine, herself not the most accessible of poets, was to make the point that very few of us possess David’s “wide knowledge of history, of etymology, of the Christian liturgy, of many crafts and ways of making and doing, not to mention those Welsh sources which for most are the worst stumbling block of all.”
Since death consummates his vision of battle, David Jones has generally been praised as a pacifist ranking with Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. But on several occasions I heard him speak about the First War, and Mametz Wood in particular, with something close to nostalgia and certainly showing that he wouldn’t have wanted anything to be other than it was. There was about him some intimation of inner purpose, a spiritual calling, no less.
I think that a Bath Oliver and tea in a bone china cup formed so definitive an image of him because he saw the ways of the world as wicked. Real artists had no business entering the market place. True, he published in prestigious international journals like Botteghe Oscuro in Italy or Art and Literature in Paris and they were glad to put his name on the cover. The award of the well-endowed Bollingen Prize for poetry should have made him rich. However, the Inspector of Taxes in Harrow treated the prize as taxable income. Auden, T. S. Eliot, Henry Moore and Igor Stravinsky spoke for David at a tribunal but by the time the Inspector finally won his case all the prize money had to go in taxation and lawyers’ fees. Refusing to sell his paintings, he kept a pile under his bed and left them in his will to the National Museum of Wales. In 1959 a selection of his essays was published under the title Epoch and Artist. It is further evidence of his unworldliness that he dedicated the book to Saunders Lewis, a prominent writer in the Welsh language but a home-grown fascist who founded Plaid Cymru, the
Welsh nationalist movement. On the eve of the war against Nazism, Lewis attacked and badly damaged a Royal Air Force facility and was sent to prison for it.
David Jones had a fundamental unifying creed that in my view goes something like this: God created all things; when Man creates something he is paying homage to God; art is therefore by its nature sacramental; its beauty lies in the fact that it is a form of prayer. In an earlier period, a man so worshipful and artistic would indeed have become a monk. In the modern age, he had found refuge in this one-room monastery of his own, living exclusively for his art. In the mid-1930s, a rich well-wisher had paid for him to travel to Jerusalem. Rumor had it that the stigmata of Christ had then appeared on him. What he actually had was a recurrent psychosomatic rash, according to Thomas Dilworth, his latest biographer, who also records the horrors that overtook David when the psychiatrists got their hands on someone the likes of whom they’d never encountered.
Clarissa and I were married in 1959. We visited David now and again. It was a seal of friendship that he reviewed for me as literary editor a book about the Celts and then did the card that marked the ordination of Peter Levi into the Jesuits. Artistic marvels, his inscriptions consist of a brief text composed from biblical or classical sources and recorded on paper or vellum in a pastiche of Greek, Roman or Celtic lettering. One on the wall of my study reads, “Dic nobis Maria quid vidisti in via” (Tell us Mary what you have seen on the way). The royal blue of the lettering is set off by the scarlet of Maria and the edges are embellished by early Christian motifs.
Clarissa was expecting our first child when we received this letter from David, dated October 19, 1961: “It was very kind of you to come and see me. I did enjoy that. Here are some Welsh Christian names that I said I’d send to you. Girls first: Angharad, Eurfron (pronounced ire-vron meaning golden bosomed), Essyllt, Eurolwyn, Indeg, Teleri, Nest, Creiddylad (Cordelia) Morfudd (pronounced mor-vith, ‘th’ as in ‘then’), Modlen (Magdalen), Rhiannon (Great Queen), Modron (Matroa), Gwenfrewi (Winifred), Lowri (Laura), Sibli (Sybil), Mabli (Mabel), Marged (Margarite), Gwladys, Arianrhod, Creirwy, Bronwen (white bosomed), Gwenllian, Olwen, Megan, Blodwen, Gwenfron, Gwenhwyfar (Gwenever), Goewin (pronounced goy [to rhyme with boy] – win), Elen (Helen), Sîan (Jane), Sioned (Janet), Mair (Mary), Rhonwen (Rowena), Mallt (Matilda), Hunedd, Efa (Eve) pronounced a-vah, Generis, Hawais, Gwanwyn (primavera) Moli (Molly) – sorry, dears, it’s pretty hopeless because all these bloody names, lovely as they are, depend upon the Welsh pronunciation. There are thousands more, but I can’t think of ’em off hand. Well if it’s a boy, apart from the obvious Welsh names such as Owain, Idris, Llywelyn, Caradoc, Rhys, Illtud, it’s terribly difficult. Your idea of Caradoc is as good as anything. Any bloody Englishman can say Caradoc, and if you want other names, what about Isambard and David after yourself ? I think Caradoc Isambard David Pryce-Jones sounds damn nice.”
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