Signatures

by David Pryce-Jones

  Walter’s later books tend to have titles like Farewell to Europe and A Continent Astray: Europe, 1970–1978, charting the moral collapse of the continent. The legacy of the totalitarian ideologies is that European nations are now lifeless and their fate is to become museums; their inhabitants will be tourist guides, guardians, even gondoliers he says at one moment. The inscription he wrote for me in this book runs, “For David Pryce-Jones who will read it in Florence – I envy him.”

  PETER LEVI

  The Flutes of Autumn

  1983

  OCCUPYING THE BEST PART of one of my shelves are twenty-eight books by Peter Levi – by no means his whole output – and a dozen or more of those desirable items described in dealers’ catalogues as “v. scarce.” Most of them are presentation copies with a quote from the classics bolstering his signature. A good few titles, for instance Pancakes for the Queen of Babylon, A Bottle in the Shade or A Head in the Soup preserve the memory of his special squeaky and skittish laugh. Comfort at Fifty has an annotation in his hand, “Five anti-platonic sonnets.” Here’s an offprint from the Heythrop Journal of his article on the Podgoritsa Cup, a clear glass patera apparently of uncertain origin. In a throwaway footnote he likens it to one similar by Acaunissa who “probably worked at Vichy under Hadrian.” Another offprint, this time from the Classical Review, opens, “If we had Cyriaco of Ancona’s full and original journal and drawings, his immense importance as an archaeological traveller would be even more obvious to everybody than it already is.” Cyriaco’s numerous journeys, Peter continues in his own manner, “are as hard to unravel as very old cobwebs.”

  Within a few weeks of arriving at Oxford, I had heard of this astonishing Jesuit from Campion Hall who’d been out walking on a road when an elderly lady ran him over. The mere naming of Father Peter Levi SJ sounded like satire, turning him into a Vile Body along with Evelyn Waugh’s Father Rothschild SJ. Painfully witty, my grandfather Eugène Fould used to joke that Jews who become Christian clerics are “deserters in uniform.” In plain language, you can always tell a Jew. Word had it that Peter’s father Herbert, known as Bert, came from a large Sephardi family with roots in Baghdad and Constantinople. The house where Peter had spent his childhood was in Ruislip, and somewhere there in a field or a wood. Faith had come to him and he qualified it as “axiomatic,” whatever that might mean. At any rate, Peter’s father, his elder brother Anthony, his sister Gillian and of course he himself, all became Catholic converts. More than that, Anthony joined Peter as a Jesuit and Gillian entered an enclosed nunnery. His mother Mollie, a born Catholic, lived in Eastbourne where she established herself as a character by owning a Rolls-Royce.

  Peter was obliged to serve his novitiate at the Jesuit College of Heythrop. He tended to make fun of it, at least to me. One day the Heythrop Hunt met in the park and a jolly huntsman cantered past to call out to Peter, “Just over from Ireland, padre?” The animals of Chipperfield’s Circus wintered nearby, and more than once their exercising scattered the meet. After tea on a Sunday, the trainee Jesuits would gather in the hall to say goodbye to visitors, and I do not forget the look on the faces of all within earshot when Peter said, “It’s such a relief to be here and discover that theology is a real subject after all.”

  Where did poetry fit in? His natural gift for language and imagery was the obvious feature in everything he wrote. He never dated his letters but I have kept almost a hundred of them for their literary quality. One in front of me now, at random, says that Shakespeare is “the knot in whom all ropes end.” In another of these letters, he expressed very well the abstract character of his poetry that some admire and others find too one-dimensional. He was trying to “live by something which seems to me religious for which the appropriate words are the consecrated ones, to do with darkness, hermit, rocks, springs of water, God, the just man.” Nothing concrete there, nothing personal. He translated Yevgeny Yevtushenko, the poet of Nikita Khrushchev’s thaw, and he was present when Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, the poets of the Beat Movement, did a reading in praise of the H-bomb to a room full of nuclear disarmers. “My poems are getting worse and worse,” Peter wrote to me, “I’m going to become beat for a cure.” In a letter from 1965 or thereabouts, he discussed his poetry. “Sometimes I long for it to be like other people’s poetry, and my aerial and earth wired in the ordinary human way, as I always believe they so easily could be.” This leads to a cri de coeur: “Christianity is not always easy for poets or poems.”

  There was something spiritual and striking about Peter’s appearance, as though he had stepped out of an early Byzantine icon. Almost as striking, not to say exotic, Dominique de Grunne was a Belgian aristocrat and an ex-Benedictine monk as well, now at Oxford working on an interminable doctorate. Sympathizing with Peter’s emotional tug-of-war between poetry and faith, he introduced him to the university’s Grand Bohème circle. In a letter to me, for example, Peter describes himself browsing over a non-poem “when who should appear but Dominique. He took me out to tea with Iris Murdoch and her husband, both whose devoted fan I immediately became, in life as well as literature I mean – he was digging in a bamboo clump and she was writing very steadily. They talked about a journey to Spain where he kept imagining eagles and there were some Cocteau policemen.” Dominique lived in the picturesque Bishop King’s Palace and allowed Peter and me to put on a short play we had written. Our next joint venture, Down, You Mad Creature (according to John Fuller the best play title since The Magnetick Lady) was a loose fantasy in verse based on the adventures of Ulysses. In Oxford to receive an honorary degree, Dmitri Shostakovich came to the performance, only to be hurried away by his KGB minders who suspected that the high number of Russian speakers in the audience could only mean a set-up.

  From Campion Hall, Peter was sent to teach classics at Stonyhurst, unlikely as it was that he would fit into a traditional Catholic school. “This damp and dismal place,” he wrote to me, “I get woken up by birds and the boys talk longingly about summer and about what the Greeks ate and what it looks like when a car smashes into an ice lorry.” He once took a troop of Boy Scouts from Stonyhurst to the Auvergne, and sent me a postcard with the news that he had led them to taunt an obstreperous station master by singing out of the train window at some station the old favorite that is almost a folk song, “Il est cocu, le chef de gare” (the station master is a cuckold). Another postcard has a five-word question and nothing else. “Who invented the soutien-gorge?”

  Arriving at the Vatican for a stay of two months, he was handed a piece of wood. A colleague explained that this was a chastity stick, which served to tuck in clothing without touching any untoward part of the body. Peter’s future came under discussion when he was on holiday with others (but not me) in the house of Dominique de Grunne at Retournac, near Le Puy. Those present pressed him not to take his final vows as a Jesuit, holding so forceful an inquisition that he ended up crouching under a table, so it was reported.

  My copy of The Gravel Ponds, published in 1960 and his first slim volume, has the enigmatic inscription, “ … as if the thing in doing were more dear than being done.” My first novel Owls and Satyrs was published more or less at the same time. Peter was generosity itself. “Your novel is really a marvelous piece of work, deeply fresh and original, painful I thought but in just the right way, very surprising all the time.” He kept this up. “I really believe you have really got the enormous palpable, growing promise one used to believe all one’s friends might have when one was fifteen.”

  From time to time, he stayed with us in London. Dated January 2, 1963, a diary entry of mine comments, “Everything about Peter is of a piece. There are no corners in which you feel that he has hidden those parts of himself which he doesn’t want to show.” That Saturday evening we went to a wild party. “Peter said that he wanted to earn the approval of poets and writers, and that anyhow he liked the company of bohemians.” At one point in his novitiate, he was told to go to one of the central London railway stations to meet a
young Spanish girl and accompany her to Campion Hall where she was due to take up a job as a maid. She had never before been abroad and spoke no English. That day, he and his bohemian friends had too long a lunch and by the time he got to the station no Spanish maid was to be seen. Wondering what on earth to do, he wandered up to St Paul’s cathedral and there she was with her suitcase sitting at the base of the statue of Queen Anne. In all innocence she told Peter that she knew this statue of the Virgin Mary would keep her safe.

  Almost certainly, the Jesuits took fright at the realization that Peter was a law unto himself and this could well turn into scandal. “Here is a sad little letter,” he wrote to me. “They have put off my ordination for a year. An ambiguous purple and pink cloud hangs overhead and the first heavy drops are falling with a musical sound. It means I shan’t be spending next winter in Italy.” In another letter he dug himself in. “If there were to be changes of deep-level personality or any of that jazz, I should be off my ecclesiastical launching-pad before one could count down to zero … but they’re amiable animals, and I can’t take seriously these resentful-sounding growlings.” David Jones nevertheless designed an ordination card. It is one of his finest works of lettering. The name Melchisedek in Greek capitals colored an unimaginable flamingo pink stretches right across the center and at the very bottom the dedication reads, but in Welsh, “from David the painter to Peter the poet.” The ordination duly took place in Eastbourne, with Peter face down and arms extended to form a cross on the floor of the church, under the genial gaze of an overweight cardinal and the scowl of thin atheist poets straight from bingeing in Soho.

  A Hellenist through and through, he made friends with Greeks who mattered like Seferis or Nikos Gatsos;, he translated Pausanias and wrote his own books about the country. “Everything too good to write about – Parthenon in dark misty moonlight of an eclipse, huge lemon and black butterflies, an owl toowhitting [sic] across the Plaka, rich rich [sic] costume dances (I was so drunk with it I fell asleep and had to have ouzo to get sober) and Oh the sky.” Some of his postcards carry Afghan stamps, relics of a ride in the company of Bruce Chatwin just before that country became a battlefield. He gave me a rather bitter description of his opposition to the colonels who took power in a coup in Greece. “Trying to negotiate relief for the families of people in prison or deprived of work, and when people are tortured not pretending it hasn’t happened. Not very glorious, is it? Perhaps you fear I am doing something more active. Well, I’m not.” He believed that British and American agents – he called them spies – were investigating him. A letter written in this authoritarian period shows dissatisfaction with the demands he was making on himself. “How come I have never been to prison in my life? Arrested yes, in Foustat (Cairo) on the steps of the Cathedral (Benghazi), held (Corfu and Athens), deported, summonsed (as a boy with an airgun in the woods) and arrested at sea by Admiralty Marshals (Cowes 1973 ) but never once in jug.”

  His superiors made sure that in England he saw a very different side of life. “I’ve just been in Manchester in a hostel for destitute men, meths drinkers and very young and illiterate gypsies and industrial accidents and mild psychotics, a world like the seeds of our own world come true, nearly everyone alcoholic, destitute, ragged, all marriages broken, all jobs lost. There was one night on a brick croft (a sort of bomb site) in the snow, with one or two despairing and unrelievable men staring at the ashes of a grand piano, no more fuel, snow thickening, six hours to daylight.”

  Peter left the Society of Jesus and the Catholic priesthood to marry Deirdre Connolly. Theirs was love at first sight, though the distracted Cyril Connolly made a characteristic quip, “I don’t know what she sees in this Peter rabbi.” They lived in a country cottage, appropriate for a story with a happy ending. Shade Those Laurels was a comic novel that Cyril had begun and Peter was to complete and publish. Like Cyril, he developed a taste for good food and champagne and the wanderer from the mountain-tops bloomed into a family man. Writing with a fountain pen, he made extraordinarily few corrections on the pages of thick notebooks and that suggests enjoyment. From the cottage streamed poems, reviews, scholarly articles and biographies of Horace and Virgil, Shakespeare and Milton, Tennyson, Lear, Pasternak and others. He seemed the last true man of letters.

  Postscript. Caryl Brahms did not share the good looks of her cousin Peter. She was dumpy and her wobbly eye did not help. She lived in one of the Regent’s Park terraces, collected glass walking sticks and was inseparable from Ned Sherrin, who was clever and amusing and evidently indifferent to female looks. The two of them knew everything there was to know about the theater and television. They contributed to That Was the Week That Was, one of the first programs to conflate satire and rudeness. “Be happy in your stint in America,” Caryl wrote on the title page of No Castanets, one of her many novels, this one set in nineteenth-century Brazil. She added to the air of improbability that accompanied Peter everywhere.

  BERNARD LEVIN

  Taking Sides

  1979

  COMING DOWN FROM OXFORD, I became a feature writer at the Financial Times as well as the paper’s deputy theater critic, reviewing plays that Cuthbert Worsley, the leading critic, thought not worth his while. The moment the performance was over, those of us with a piece to write in time for the first edition had to rush out and find a taxi to drop us at offices in Fleet Street or nearby. So I got to know Robert Muller, Herb Kretzmar, Milton Shulman and Bernard, the kosher butchers as they were known in the trade.

  For fear of being accused of conspiring, it was a matter of etiquette never to speak about what we had just seen on stage. Bernard knew his Shakespeare by heart, always had an apt quotation from the plays, and was often critical of performances at Stratford. One evening there, during the interval he happened to go to the WC and so did I. Two unlikely young roughs were already in the place, and one of them said, “That’s Bernard Levin.” Bernard disliked it when strangers recognized him, for fear of what he might hear and the conversation that would ensue. The other rough type responded, “Yeh, ain’t ’e got small feet.”

  A fussy dresser, a man making the most of himself, there was an element of caricature about Bernard. Invited by the publisher George Weidenfeld to a small lunch supposedly prepared for shop-talk, Bernard took one look at the main course of sheep brains and fainted dead away, falling off his chair. Quite a time passed before he could tackle the scrambled eggs especially served to him.

  Under the by-line Taper in the Spectator, nominally the voice of the Establishment, he became an immediate celebrity as a scourge of politicians, daring to say out loud what others kept to themselves. When he joined the Times, the paper described him on its front page as “savage, clever, cunning, witty and brilliant,” adjectives that any of his columns–sometimes twice a week and sometimes three times – could easily prove. His style could be mannered or direct and even colloquial as needs be. Posterity will be able to smile at Sir Bullying Manner and Sir Shortly Floorcross, wordplay on the names of the cabinet ministers Manningham-Buller and Hartley Shawcross. Once and possibly twice, he corrected the Latin of John Sparrow, the punctilious Warden of All Souls College, Oxford. It was a public service that he took apart so memorably the defects and lies of malefactors of the day like Eric Hobsbawm, Gore Vidal or David Irving, at the same time publicizing the persecution and deportation to the Gulag of Soviet dissidents and refuseniks. Perhaps he had in mind the symmetrical date of the French Revolution but even so it was some years before 1989 that he predicted the coming collapse of the Soviet Union. Nobody could take the place of George Orwell as a commentator on present rights and wrongs, but Bernard came closer to it than all the others.

  My biography of Unity Mitford raised the sort of historical, legal and moral questions that usually drew the best out of Bernard. Shortly before publication in the autumn of 1976, Sir Oswald and Lady Mosley, Unity’s elder sister, tried to have the book banned, or failing that, discredited. In their view, it was unjust that Unity or anyone els
e should have to pay a price for admiring Hitler and Nazism. As the Mosley campaign was getting under way, Bernard rang me up for an interview. On two consecutive days he came to the house and went away with pages noting what had been said. On the third day he rang again to say he was sorry but the article for some unfathomable reason didn’t work and he was scrapping it. I suspect that the anti-Semitism of the Mosleys and Mitfords and their friends was too emotional a subject for him to squeeze into fifteen hundred words. He never explained his dissatisfaction, but it speaks well of him that he maintained his standards by giving way to it.

  At about the same time, he brought me into a row of his making. The London Freelance Branch of the National Union of Journalists was in the hands of the hard Left. Some thirty of them invariably attended every meeting, intimidated the rare moderates who had bothered to turn up, and passed resolutions in favor of Che Guevara, say, or the Frelimo in Mozambique. Bernard persuaded enough of us to join the Union in order to vote the hard Left out and put a stop to political gesturing. John Vaizey, the economist and on this occasion willing lobby fodder, was sitting next to me. When I asked him how many Soviet agents were in the hall, he stood up, pointed his finger at them and counted, “Seven.” Bernard’s motion for democratic reform of the union passed, and then he and his girlfriend at the time, the statuesque Arianna Stassinopoulos, took a few steps towards the door. The hard Left squad broke up. One of them lifted a chair high into the air and went for Bernard seemingly intending to smash it on his head. Some of them then began shouting anti-Semitic insults at Bernard. We summoned the police who arrived almost immediately and cleared the hall. My impression is that for Bernard this was all in a day’s work, once again.