Signatures

by David Pryce-Jones

  October 24, 1961 is the date with his signature on the title page of The Anathemata. Thomas Dilworth says that this forbidding word is Greek for “things dedicated to the gods” or “significant things,” though what these might be I hesitate even to have a shot at. In any case, ten days later, on November 3, 1961, to be exact, our daughter was born and we named her Jessica.

  Postscript. No Pryce-Joneses lived in Wales. Great-uncle Victor had sold Dolerw, the family house at Newtown. Though English, Clarissa’s family did live in Wales and she had spent much of her childhood with them in the Wye Valley. Taking me back to Wales, she identified with the Welsh as much as I did, and probably more. Welsh nationalists began to set fire to cottages much like ours, belonging to people much like us. By the mid-Sixties, my father had settled in the United States. Out of the blue, he and I simultaneously received anonymous letters that had been typewritten on cheap paper. We were both accused of writing in the language of the English oppressor. This was treason. If we did not mend our ways, we could only expect the fate of traitors.

  ERNST JÜNGER

  Journal

  Volume 1, 1941–1943, and Volume 2, 1943–1945

  1951

  RESEARCHING FOR MY BOOK Paris in the Third Reich, I was just in time to catch some German officials or soldiers who had played a part in the occupation, for instance Dr. Ernst Achenbach of the Embassy and Gerhard Heller, the military censor who controlled French publication. Understandably, they tried to put themselves in the best possible light, claiming to have acted as much in French interests as in German. Ernst Jünger was different. A staff

  officer, exceptionally intelligent and exceptionally observant, he kept a day-by-day record of his life in Paris, afterwards publishing it with the title Strahlungen, and Journal in its French translation. Much more than a timely self-portrait, these diaries fix for posterity the historic moment when the long-drawn contest for power in continental Europe appeared to have ended conclusively in German victory and French defeat.

  After the war, Jünger was apparently in the habit of staying in Paris with a French lady. We arranged to meet at her address. He opened the front door and in spite of his eighty-seven years led the way up several flights of stairs. Born in 1895, he appeared to be a holdover from the era of Kaiser Wilhelm and Bismarck. His soldiering began with an improbable spell in the French Foreign Legion, on the wrong side, so to speak. A German infantryman, he spent virtually the entire First World War in the trenches on the Western front. Wounded fourteen times, he was the youngest soldier ever to win the Pour le Mérite, the Kaiser’s medal for bravery. By the time of his death in 1998, he was the last living holder of that now anachronistic award. In Stahlgewittern, published in 1920 and usually translated as The Storm of Steel, is a lightly fictionalized account of his First War experience; it made him one of Germany’s most celebrated authors. Two years later, Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis (Combat as an Internal Experience) was about the psychological value of warfare. In his view, battle is the proper test of a human being. I asked him how come he had been able actually to enjoy the First War. His answer was simple: “Killing Frenchmen.”

  Not a Nazi, Jünger was one of the first to ascribe demonic powers to Hitler, referring to him in his diary as Kniébolo (a name of unknown origin). Close enough to the central Nazi tenet that the strong engage in a Darwinian struggle for supremacy and the weak go to the wall, he could nonetheless pass as a fellow traveler of Nazism. A Captain in his late forties, Jünger had rejoined his regiment in time for the blitzkrieg of May and June 1940. An earlier diary, Gärten und Strassen (Gardens and Streets), describes a leisurely march through France, more like a parade that comes to the happy ending of luncheon with French friends in a favorite Paris restaurant.

  Trying to analyze why France had fallen in 1940, the eminent historian Marc Bloch wrote a book with the self-explanatory title L’Etrange Défaite (The Strange Defeat). To Jünger, there was nothing strange about it. The French had shown themselves unwilling to fight and die for their country. The Pétain government’s policy of collaboration accepted that Germany had to have its own way.

  Civilized, very well read, a linguist, botanist and zoologist, Jünger spent his time in Paris buying prints and books and visiting churches and museums. Recording the regular invitations he received to meet or dine with famous French artists and social celebrities, he passes no outright judgment on their friendliness. He extended the same amoral and apolitical approach to his military colleagues. Returning from the Eastern Front, a Colonel Schaer tells him there will be no more mass shootings; the sentence is completed with the neutral words, “now one has moved on to gas.” The most senior of his German friends was General Hans Speidel, then the Chief of Staff of Field-Marshal Rommel but transformed after the war into the General commanding NATO. As we talked, Jünger kept telling me that on Speidel’s orders he had written a paper about the power struggle in France between the Military Governor with the army at his disposal, and the SS. The paper would show the Military Governor in a good light but unfortunately all copies had been lost or destroyed. From the way he spoke, I suspected that snobbery had played a role. SS General Karl Oberg and his deputy SS Standartenführer Helmut Knochen, the real rulers of France, were too uncouth to be invited into Paris drawing rooms.

  Occasionally, Jünger’s inner self comes through. One summer night in 1942 he dined at the Tour d’Argent. The Seine could be seen from the dining room of this most renowned restaurant and he writes up in beautifully overblown prose the pearly color of the water and the reflection of the weeping willows on the riverbank. Then: “One has the impression that the people seated at tables up there like gargoyles, feeding on soles or the special duck, take devilish pleasure in looking at the grey sea of roofs under which some of the starving eke out their lives. In times like these, eating well and eating a lot induces the feeling of power.”

  Several pages of even colder brilliance describe the duty Jünger once had of commanding an execution squad. A German non-commissioned officer had deserted to live with a French woman. When he turned to crime and abuse, she denounced him. The man was tied to a tree whose bark had been ripped by previous firing squads, and within the strips bluebottle flies were busy nestling. Twenty-four hours after D-Day, a convoy of heavy armor went by in the street on its way to the front. The sight of the youthful crews prompted a perfect example of the dark romancing common to anyone who believes with Jünger that war is a fine and worthwhile test of a human being. The diary entry reads: “The approach of death glowed outward from them, the glory of hearts that consent to be effaced in fire.”

  ALFRED KAZIN

  A Walker in the City

  1951

  WE WERE IN the Century Club where Kazin greeted John Hollander, who had Peter Shaffer as a guest – critic, poet and playwright respectively. In conversation, Kazin and I disagreed about most things but on the title page of his book he wrote, “For David Pryce-Jones whom I am glad to know!” Note that exclamation mark. Subsequently he gives his credentials in a letter to me. In 1947 he was in Amalfi, he says, in a hotel where Isaiah Berlin and Maurice Bowra were also staying. Years later, he’s at a party in London when Isaiah approaches and says that they had encountered one another in that hotel in Amalfi. This was not a fortuitous recognition, I gathered, but rather confirmation of his own status.

  ELIE KEDOURIE

  The Chatham House Version

  1970

  TOWARDS THE END OF the Iran-Iraq war, Clarissa, an experienced tour manager, was offered the job of taking a few determined or possibly foolhardy tourists to sightsee in Iraq. I thought this could be the moment for me to take soundings of Saddam Hussein and his regime. A cautious Elie Kedourie warned that there was no way of knowing Saddam’s mind or what his intentions were. He might be thinking that now was the time to pick a quarrel with Britain, in which case I was an appropriate person to be fitted up with a false accusation and a prison sentence of twenty years. (It wasn’t long before Farzad Bazoft,
a journalist born Iranian but naturalized British, was treated as a spy and executed in Iraq.) Our visas had been granted immediately without demur, suggesting that we were being induced to walk into a trap. So I dropped out of the tour and missed the drama of a missile from Tehran that landed in the center of Baghdad close to the hotel where Clarissa’s tourists were the sole guests. Back in London for a post-mortem with the Kedouries, Clarissa described how old Baghdad had disappeared under cement with the exception of a single house in traditional style preserved as a museum. “That’s our family house,” Elie said.

  Elie didn’t like to talk about himself. Jews were the largest single group in the Baghdad into which he had been born in 1926 and his family was one of the most distinguished. He was educated in the English and the French language. Originally from Baghdad and then a refugee in Israel along with tens of thousands of Iraqi Jews, Nissim Rejwan told me how as a young man he had been employed at Mackenzie’s, the city’s English-language bookshop. Only a teenager, Elie was the sole subscriber in Iraq to Cyril Connolly’s Horizon. When the magazine arrived from London, Nissim would slip it out of its cover, read it through, wrap it up again and deliver it to Elie three days late.

  Elie was fifteen in June 1941 when Iraqi officers allied to Nazi Germany seized power. For forty eight hours, British troops did not intervene, and in that time mobs murdered an unknown number of Jews (from 180 to some six hundred, according to varied sources), wounded thousands and destroyed homes and shops. He seemed to have left Iraq for good in 1946 and a few years later to have been elected a senior scholar at St. Antony’s College, Oxford. As far as I know, Elie neither wrote nor spoke about what had happened to him or his house during the farhud, the Arabic for pogrom. Grievance and self-pity might do for other refugees, but not for him.

  As an undergraduate, I used to go to St. Antony’s to be coached by James Joll, a soft-spoken man of great charm, with fair hair and pinkish complexion and a slight splutter in his speech. From him,I first heard of Elie and the doctorate he had presented at Oxford. One examiner was Sir Hamilton Gibb, Professor of Arabic at Oxford and an eminent orientalist, and the other was James, who knew a lot about nineteenth-century politics in Europe but nothing at all about the Middle East. To ask James about the complicit part he had played in rejecting Elie’s doctorate was to bring a rosy flush of shame over his face. Gibb took the Arabist establishment view that the downfall of the Ottoman Empire meant that Arab nationalism was now the dominant ideology in the Middle East and support for it would rightly align Arab and British interests. Having lived with Arab nationalism, Elie knew better and events were to prove how right he was. Soon published under the title England and the Middle East, the failed doctorate is now required reading. The Introduction to a later edition is a masterly example of how to dismiss an authority like Sir Hamilton Gibb who isn’t everything he’s cracked up to be.

  A mutual friend, the lawyer Lionel Bloch, introduced Clarissa and me to Elie and his wife Sylvia. Austere in appearance and in manner, Elie had a smile that had some sort of finality about it, like a judge passing sentence. I had one or two tutorials in Arabic either with him or the equally quick-witted Sylvia. He was able to quote poems in several languages and he once said to me that you couldn’t appreciate the beauty of Arab poetry unless you read al-Ghazzali in the original. Their house in Hampstead was a meeting-place for like-minded academics such as Beverly and Ken Minogue, a colleague of Elie’s at the London School of Economics, and Frank Johnson and John O’Sullivan, both Conservative journalists. On one occasion, he volunteered to show us his notes for In the Anglo-Arab Labyrinth, a completely definitive book quarried from the archives to resolve once and for all the disputed question of what the British had or had not promised the Arabs in the First World War. A few brown envelopes contained scruffy bits of annotated paper, and that was all. He did me the favor of reading the manuscript of The Closed Circle. When we discussed the comments he had penciled in the margins, I found that he hardly needed to check references, his memory was a sort of Private Record Office.

  “Never take your eye off the corpses” was his steadfast advice to all and sundry trying to come to terms with the deadly rights and wrongs of the Middle East. A paragraph more or less at random from The Chatham House Version will serve to give an idea of his view of the world. Note the classic prose that does such justice to the moral confidence of his judgments. “It is the common fashion today to denounce the imperialism of western powers in Asia and Africa. Charges of economic exploitation are made, and the tyranny and arrogance of the Europeans are arraigned. Yet it is a simple and obvious fact that these areas which are said to suffer from imperialism today have known nothing but alien rule throughout most of their history and that, until the coming of the western powers, their experience of government was the insolence and greed of unchecked arbitrary rule. It is not on these grounds therefore that the appearance of the West in Asia and Africa is to be deplored.”

  Elie liked to speak of “settled society” as a value so important that it might well be worth paying the price of tyranny to have it. Nationalism has been the agent of destruction, and the paragraph quoted above continues his indictment of it: “A rash, a malady, an infection spreading from western Europe though the Balkans, the Ottoman Empire, India, the Far East and Africa, eating up the fabric of settled society to leave it weakened and defenseless before ignorant and unscrupulous adventurers, for further horror and atrocity: such are the terms to describe what the West has done to the rest of the world, not willfully, not knowingly, but mostly out of excellent intentions and by example of its prestige and prosperity.”

  Various essays single out some of the public figures whom Elie holds responsible for manufacturing romance out of Arab reality, for instance the politician Richard Crossman, the colonial official Sir Hugh Foot, Lord Mountbatten, above all T. E. Lawrence of Arabia who displays a “demonic quality” in pursuit of his aims for Arabs. Elie is a voice for millions of defenseless people who had no way of knowing that the imperial powers would set them up and then abandon them, closing their eyes to the corpses.

  J. B. KELLY

  Arabia, the Gulf and the West

  1980

  THE BRITISH EMPIRE is said to have been acquired in a fit of absentmindedness, and in 1960 the then Prime Minister Harold Macmillan gave a speech that marked its demise in another fit of absentmindedness. He spoke of a wind of change, as though Empire had nothing to do with human choices or politics but was a matter of climate over which no control is possible. What the metaphor conveyed was that the British no longer cared to keep the peace in far-off places as they had done in the past. In those far-off places, nationalist politicians, some of them unscrupulous agitators, well understood that what began as mob violence about some local issue ended in a demand that they should be empowered. It came naturally to the British elite, civil as well as military, to conclude that they had only to hand over power and independence to anyone who wanted it badly enough, and all would be well.

  One serious objector was John Kelly, originally from New Zealand and one-time Professor of British Imperial history at the University of Wisconsin. He and Valda, his wife, lived on Primrose Hill in London, and he first contacted me because he thought my book about the Palestinians had been unfairly reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement. He took these things to heart. In his view, the British Empire had been the sole guarantor of law and order in much of the globe. Attacks on the Empire were attacks on civility. Accused of wrongs they had not committed, those in Whitehall and Westminster who had any dealings with Arabs lost self-confidence. Officialdom internalized what in one of his essays he calls “Obsessive pre-occupation with Arab virtue and British wickedness.” This is the cause of “pre-emptive cringe,” a phrase he coined and which ought to ensure him an entry in any Dictionary of Quotations.

  A very determined character, he’d read through all the relevant archives and he had a way with words that crushed anyone trying to argue what to him were apol
ogetics and falsities. A journalist by the name of G. H. Jansen, for example, in his book Militant Islam describes Muslim traders in black Africa as “men of extraordinary spiritual power.” John jumped in: “What Mr. Jansen somehow fails to indicate … is that one of the staples of their trade was slaves, and that this traffic in Africans by Muslim Arabs was only brought to an end by Western Christians. It is difficult to understand how such a devout anti-imperialist as Mr. Jansen could have overlooked such a splendid example of imperialism in action as the destruction of the East African slave trade – a trade in Africans, conducted by Arabs, financed by Indians, and suppressed by the British.”