Signatures

by David Pryce-Jones

  I too would have been a Communist. No, I answered, I’d have been a democrat. Her riposte put an end to our collaboration: “How wet!”

  Postscript. In a paperback of Hons and Rebels, much the worse for wear, she wrote our names and below them, “house-swappers par excellence.” “Chacun son bum deal” were the words that Herb Caen, the local gossip writer, hit on for the swap.

  NANCY MITFORD

  The Water Beetle

  1969

  HER INSCRIPTION IS, “David Pryce-Jones after two very enjoyable days, from Nancy Mitford, 15 May 1970.” Those two days were indeed very enjoyable for me but hardly so for her, because cancer of the spine was giving her such pain that she could hardly sit still. A famous Paris neurologist, she wrote to me just before we met, told her she had “one of the very most painful things you can have, and there is no cure. Delightful outlook!” She had made her life in France, it was common knowledge, because the love of her life was Gaston Palewski, French of Polish extraction, a soldier and politician loyal to General de Gaulle, and sadly for Nancy the husband of another woman.

  According to Evelyn Waugh, her literary model, Nancy was a “nice cheap girl to take out for the evening. Costs you only eighteen and six for an orangeade at a night-club.” She had about three hundred letters from Waugh, which she had given to his son Auberon and was “much put out” to learn that he’d sold them. “I couldn’t have imagined that Auberon could do such a thing.”

  London literary gossip was what she wanted from me: Who had reviewed whom, and what was the reading public’s response? Who was up, who was down? In return, she told stories about her siblings. Here I learned that at the outbreak of war she had hit on the nickname of Sir Oswald and Lady Quisling for her Nazified sister Diana and brother-in-law Mosley. We Mitfords have our opinions injected from below, she said, a vulgar expression so out of character that when I reported it to whoever knew her, I was accused of invention.

  DOM MORAES

  Beldam Etcetera

  1966

  “I INTENDED TO BE like Rimbaud, maudit, at the age of twenty giving it all up,” Dom Moraes says of himself in his autobiography, My Son’s Father. Up at Oxford at the same time as me, he was another young poet turning himself into myth. Away in London a great deal, he acquired a reputation without trying for it. His poems were simple and beautiful, an odd mixture of engagement and detachment as though he was leading a secret life. Standing unbidden at the back of a literary cocktail party or a dinner with a glass in his hand, he had the looks of a debauched cherub. He spoke so little and so softly that he might as well have stayed silent. Marriage to Henrietta Bowler took him into the stricken world of Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and their friends and hangers-on, a good few of whom inflicted fates upon themselves more disastrous than Rimbaud’s. Now and again I would receive in the mail a new book with a squiggled ungrammatical inscription: “David love Dom.” At the first international literary festival in India, held in 2002 at Neemrana, I was a guest and there was Dom, still the debauched cherub but now with white hair.

  LAURENT MURAWIEC

  La Guerre d’après

  2002

  LAURENT MURAWIEC sought me out because his view of the Arab condition coincided with mine. I had recently published The Closed Circle, which is about one of the enigmas of the present age, namely why have the Arabs made such a frightful mess of things. They are heirs to a civilization of their own making. Since the end of the British and French empires, they have been their own masters, free to choose how to govern themselves to best advantage. New nation-states were supposed to replace the tribalism of the past. Some sort of modernization has occurred in forms such as urbanization or transport but little or nothing in spirit. On the contrary, for well over half a century now the Arab experience has been regressive: multiple wars and cross-border invasions, civil wars, military or political coups, assassinations of heads of state and other public figures, judicial murder, government by the will of an individual, not by law. Unable to end in definitive victory or defeat, these kinds of exercises in raw power are bound to be self-repeating, a perpetual treadmill of violence. In the circumstances there are no universities worth the name, no arts or sciences, no Nobel prizes for physics or chemistry, no advances in medicine. Arabs of course understand that they do themselves grave injuries. In their code of behavior, success brings honor and failure brings shame. Perhaps it is only human to shift their sense of shame on to someone or something else – the West, the United States, the Great Powers, Imperialists, democrats, oil companies, Christendom, Zionism or whatever. Through no fault of their own, in other words, history has come out badly for the Arabs and it will have to be reversed. Those who treat Islam as a fresh start outnumber those for whom it is a fossil.

  The Closed Circle was banned in the Arab world but nonetheless I have anecdotal evidence of support. The lady in charge of the obvious bookshop in Cairo showed me a pile of copies hidden in a back-room. In London, the Egyptian Ambassador bought two copies. An influential Iraqi told Weidenfeld, my publisher, that I was hard on the Arabs but recognizably writing as a friend not a foe. A friend of mine happened to be present when a Saudi Prince told his wife she couldn’t have my book until he’d finished reading it.

  When Laurent came to the house he was in the midst of one of the media tornadoes that can, and do, scatter bits of debris in Washington. His natural habitat was a high-powered think tank, first the RAND Corporation, then the Hudson Institute. The 9/11 terrorism had occurred some ten months previously and Osama bin Laden was a household name. A paper Laurent had written for the Defence Policy Board at the Pentagon maintained that the entire chain of terror, from planners to financiers and activists and propagandists, were Saudis. Spreading their version of Islam by these means, they could no longer be allies. The time has come, he thought, to take the Saudi out of Arabia. His book La Guerre d’après is a blueprint for this reversal of American policy in the Middle East. The scandal was less than it might have been because Laurent, originally French, wrote this book in his mother tongue.

  The great and the good on the world stage habitually play down the conviction of Islamist terrorists that they have Qur’anic sanction for their acts. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11 President George W. Bush saw fit to declare, “Islam means peace.” Politicians, commentators and churchmen everywhere have followed this lead and repeat that Islamist terrorists are misrepresenting or perverting their religion. Apologias vary. Some Islamist terrorists are supposedly motivated by poverty; others suffer some psychological derangement and should be hospitalized rather than face justice. Euphemisms like activist, extremist and radical serve the purpose of obscuring reality.

  Laurent was not having it. The Mind of Jihad, published in 2008, makes it very clear that what is atrocity to the infidel victim is devotion to the faithful perpetrator. Contemporary Arab-Islamic terrorism, he writes, is “the idolization of blood, the veneration of savagery, the cult of killing, the worship of death … exemplary actions pleasing to Allah and opening the gates of Paradise. In short, they are sanctioned by the highest religious authorities, they are condoned if not approved and organized by government authorities, they are praised by the intelligentsia and the media.”

  Laurent was a master of controversy in his day.

  V. S. NAIPAUL

  Among the Believers

  1982

  AS A MAN AND as a writer, Vidia Naipaul was a free spirit. There is nobody that I can think of to compare him to. One component of that free spirit is of course his use of the English language. Among many passages that have a place in any anthology of English prose is one in An Area of Darkness that likens the Taj Mahal to the Duke of Marlborough’s Blenheim Palace. Another is in Beyond Belief where a beautiful landscape is revealed to be the approach to Tehran’s Evin prison in which the Iranian regime does its torturing and judicial murdering. “Hate oppression; fear the oppressed,” is global advice from The Mimic Men. East of Suez, he observed, “all men are not brothers a
nd luggage is not safe.”

  Anyone who supposes Vidia to have been an unrelieved pessimist should read his early writings and particularly “The Night Watchman’s Occurrence Book,” one of the short stories in A Flag on the Island, a comedy that is also a perfect work of art.

  But being a free spirit had more to it than that. Vidia was born in Trinidad in 1932, outwardly one of the hundreds of millions destined to leave no trace that they had ever existed on this earth. I wonder what would have happened to Vidia if there had been no world war to turn the world upside down. Perhaps he would have been another Mr. Biswas immersed in day-to-day details, possibly a local journalist in the footsteps of his father. But Vidia had his chance and took it.

  Arrival in the England of the 1950s to take up a scholarship to Oxford was a hard test of character. In the years at the university he first began to be anxious that he might not succeed as a writer. Not long ago, his college wanted to hang a portrait of him that the artist had donated but Vidia refused permission, as much as to say that he would not return to the halls of unhappiness. If he could have been born with a private fortune, he liked to fantasize, he’d have been a businessman. A sure way to catch his attention was to talk about exchange rates or the Dow Jones. Meanwhile he drove himself to write.

  The novelist Anthony Powell was a self-appointed but influential keeper of literary reputations and by 1962 he was recognizing Vidia as “this country’s most talented and promising younger writer.” At the time I was literary editor of the Spectator and I invited Vidia to review for us. On a summer afternoon, he came to the office and we then went to have tea in a hotel nearby. On the way, we passed some workmen on a scaffold. We spoke about the British work ethic until Vidia drew the line, “I’m glad you said that. If you’d said anything else, I would not have seen you again.” I never got a review out of him.

  My wife and I made friends with Vidia and his wife Pat. Devoted to Vidia, protective and always on the alert to check that he was receiving his due deserts, Pat fell into the exclusive classification of Great Man’s Wife. Her face grey-white and tense, she was secretary, copy editor, publicist and slave, saving him from himself with frequent interruptions to conversations, “You can’t say that, Vidia.”

  My diary records a telephone call that illustrates how changeable the everyday drama of his life was:

  “How are you, Vidia?”

  “Very low, I want to die.”

  “I’m sorry to find you in this mood. I can’t think of anybody who has more to live for.”

  “There’s nothing I want to do, it’s the realization I’m no longer young, it afflicts all men.”

  “Well perhaps it’s not the moment to invite you to a party for my Cyril Connolly book, but that’s what I’m proposing.”

  “Oh how nice, I shall come, or if I don’t I’ll find a way of telling you.”

  Then I rang Pat, who explained, “He’s gone over the top” because the noise of builders in the house was getting in the way of the novel he was working on. Vidia came to that book launch and I told him I knew that noisy builders were upsetting him. He gave what my diary calls “a deep throaty laugh.”

  In 1979, I did an interview with Vidia and I have looked it up. At one point he says, “I hope I am recording and chronicling this extraordinary period of ours.” Then he continues, “I know that Trinidad, like India, the other ancestral strand, is a place without any possibility. If a place has some positive element you like to feel for it, it gives you a little hope. There is intellectual nullity there nowadays. No mind at all.”

  The Middle Passage and The Loss of El Dorado show that he knew very well how cruel and unjust some of the colonial past had been. There were sound reasons for the British to feel guilty and Vidia – the grandson of indentured laborers brought over from Uttar Pradesh – was in a strong position to add to them. Contemporary cause-mongers manufacture scandal by passing value judgments on the past in the light of the present, but he was not prepared to falsify reality in this fashion. Instead he put his mind to assessing the colonial past in the light of itself. The British had created a civilization that is open and available to everyone. On his travels, he found it was no coincidence that countries where mind operates were civilized, and those where it did not were uncivilized. Like Socrates, he thought that the unexamined life is not worth living. Vidia’s brilliantly emblematic phrase “The world is what it is” captures the view of history and human nature that mind had given him. Those who think that tinkering with reform or resort to political persuasion and revolutionary force is going to change the world into what they would like it to be are displaying a failure of mind. Fictional characters who illustrate the point are disturbers of the peace and destroyers of themselves and others. Guerrillas takes the real-life story of one Michael de Freitas, a Trinidadian like Vidia, and creates a frightening modern fable out of it. Imitating the American racist Malcolm X, Freitas raised money from gullible donors to start a Black Power movement in Britain. Believing that he was reshaping the world as he wished it to be, he took his white girlfriend to Trinidad and murdered her there. His illusion finished on the gallows.

  Unexpectedly, then, Vidia was conservative in the best sense, on the watch for causes and consequences. Critics of Western mind – of whom there are plenty – could hardly believe that someone from his background had drawn conclusions quite the opposite of theirs. In the eyes of some Indians he was a traitor to his race, and I once heard a Jamaican professor dismiss him as “too brown.” The West Indian poet Derek Walcott lampooned him as V. S. Nightfall, though he later apologized for it. A Marxist academic had the jargon for him as “a despicable lackey of neo-colonialism and imperialism.”

  The humbug of the anti-Western stance is thoroughly exposed in passages like this one from Among the Believers. “The West, or the universal civilization it leads, is emotionally rejected. It undermines, it threatens. But at the same time it is needed, for its machines, goods, medicines, warplanes, the remittances from the emigrants, the hospitals that might have a cure for calcium deficiency, the universities that will provide master’s degrees in mass media. All the rejection of the West is contained within the assumption that there will always exist out there a living, creative civilization, oddly neutral, open to all to appeal. Rejection is therefore not absolute rejection. It is also, for the community as a whole, a way of ceasing to strive intellectually.”

  After Pat’s untimely death from cancer, Vidia married Nadira Khannum Alvi, from Pakistan. Introducing her, he said to me, “She will bring a rare new fragrance to your social bouquet.” It fell to her to deal with the years of his fame. I am of the opinion that he did not care a damn what anyone thought of him. People were free to write books about his supposed bad behavior, his rudeness and intolerance. When it came to his conduct, he did what he did and people said about it whatever they said. On platforms he sometimes asked Nadira to answer questions addressed to him as though they were too boring for words. He also had some view of the continuity of literary life. Great men had engaged in controversies that are the stuff of history, and so should we. Liberal noses are there to be rubbed in the mess of liberalism. He rubbished Iris Murdoch for using the cliché “caring and compassionate.” Seated next to someone who described herself as a social anthropologist, he asked, “What is the word social doing here?” He told Michael Astor that a rich man like him ought to set an example and go to prison rather than submit to socialist taxation, for which the proper term is confiscation.

  Every writer should have a good row, I heard him say more than once. Besides, he knew he was in the right. The star guest at a literary conference in India, he simply shouted down a speaker inveighing against the former British imperial rule. The next day, the wife of the American ambassador was due to give a large formal dinner in his honor. But she took the view that terrorists and suchlike were following custom, and therefore were not at fault for what they had done. In a fury, Vidia refused to attend the dinner and persuaded many of the guests to
stay away too.

  With someone of like mind, he let himself go and could even sound diffident. “Tell me” was the signal that he was ready to listen and learn. We went together to a conference in Baku, capital of post-Soviet Azerbaijan. I had an introduction to Khadija, a journalist opposed to Ilham Aliyev, the President and hereditary dictator of Azerbaijan. She arranged for three dissident Azeri writers to come to dinner. Other guests were Tony Adams and his wife Poppy, daughter of old friends of mine. They were living in Baku because Tony, late of Arsenal and captain of the English national football team, was on contract to coach an Azeri team. “Tell me,” Vidia insisted to Tony Adams. The two of them had nothing in common, but their cross-questioning was so serious that the dissident writers never got a word in.