While Mrs. Thatcher was Prime Minister, she invited a dozen supposedly well-informed intellectuals to dine in Downing Street and discuss the difficulty of getting it across to the public that they knew better how to spend their money than the government that took it from their pockets. Vidia was on Mrs. Thatcher’s left and I was on his other side. As they sat down, Mrs. Thatcher asked what he thought of the Prime Minister of Trinidad. “A gangster and a murderer,” said Vidia, to which she replied, “Quite.”
On the morning when it was announced that he had won the Nobel Prize, I rang up to congratulate him. “Oh, so you’ve heard of my little stroke of luck, have you?’’ he said. He and Nadira invited Clarissa and me to accompany them to Stockholm. At the ceremony, a white-tie affair, Vidia had to step up to a podium and speak for three or four minutes, not more. In the event, he held up his wrist-watch that had broken in the journey and picked out of the classics the story of the Emperor Julian, who, while training with his soldiers, had the “wicker part of his shield” snapped off, to leave him gripping only the handle. With the watch in front of him, Vidia completed a perfect parable about failure and success by quoting what the Emperor had made of his plight, “What I have I hold.”
HUGH NISSENSON
The Tree Of Life
1985
HUGH AND MARILYN NISSENSON were members of the network known as the Friends of Amos Elon (already alluded to in Amos’s chapter). Introduced by Amos, we met in Florence. I took them out of the city on a summer’s day to Ugolino, a country club with a swimming pool; on another occasion Hugh invited us to lunch at the exclusive Villa Medici, an architectural monument upgraded to five-star hotel. Hugh took trouble about his appearance and in my hearing once described himself as “spiffy.” Staying with us in London, he bought a sword-stick, and walked the streets with this innocent-looking object which is potentially lethal on account of the blade hidden in the handle. In their New York apartment was a foul-mouthed green parrot that Hugh wooed with the words “Give us a French kiss.” The parrot would oblige. Beneath its cage lay the immense white and fluffy Old English Shepherd Dog whose need for exercise regulated much of the day’s time-table. The Nissensons also owned a house in France, in the small town of Pontlevoy not far south of Blois. Hugh handed to Marilyn all responsibility for the French language. Having supper at the opera and seeing that Kurt Waldheim, the compromised Secretary General of the United Nations, was at the adjoining table, Hugh called out “Nazi bastard” loudly enough to be sure of being overheard.
This apparent gentleman of leisure was a dedicated artist. Consisting of half a dozen novels, some short stories and essays, his collected works pay homage to the power of story telling. In his view, literature deals with the whole human experience; nothing is so delicate or so brutal that it can’t be written about. From Homer and Virgil to James Joyce and Primo Levi, the greatest artists have told stories – mythologies, if you prefer – that explain to people how they come to be who they are. Put another way, culture is really the stories about themselves and their nation that people believe to be true, whether or not they are. Hugh lived and loved the stories that Americans tell themselves. For one of his novels, he taught himself to use an eighteenth-century musket. A novel purporting to be the diary of an early Puritan settler in the New World necessitated a trip to Britain and close study of the language of the period. A perfectionist, he kept on re-writing until the narrative does what he wants it to do. He consulted Marilyn, herself an author, and he treated films and television serials as primary sources. It was thrilling (his favorite superlative) when experience confirmed what was going on in his head.
Over the years, reviewers and academics have been writing the obituary of fiction on the grounds that everything that could be done in a novel has been done. Hugh believed in the classic art form and gave it a modern lease of life. In an interview that I filed for reference, he made a declaration of faith: “I really feel compelled to make beautiful things, beautiful artifacts, out of my words.” In a passage with a weird and wonderful imagery that celebrates the telling of stories, Vladimir Nabokov is speaking of Gogol but he might just as well be speaking of Hugh’s novels. “At this super-high level of art, literature is of course not concerned with pitying the underdog or cursing the upper-dog. It appeals to that secret depth of the human soul where the shadows of other worlds pass like the shadows of nameless and soundless ships.”
Below his inscription on the flyleaf of The Tree of Life Hugh wrote some lines of Swinburne’s which Marilyn tells me that he particularly liked to quote.
“Yea, is not even Apollo with hair and harpstring of gold,
A bitter God to follow, a beautiful God to behold?”
EDNA O’BRIEN
A Pagan Place
1970
COVERING THE YOM KIPPUR WAR of 1973 for the Daily Telegraph, I found myself once again trying to understand the ways of the Middle East. After the fighting was over, an Egyptian army corps was encircled, and Henry Kissinger and General Saad el-Shazly, the Egyptian Chief of Staff, were closeted in a tent in the Sinai desert deciding how to proceed. If Egyptian defeat could be presented to the watching world as victory, honor would be satisfied and a peace treaty might follow – a few years later, Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat were to prove the point. Back in London, I suggested to George Weidenfeld, my publisher, that I add another chapter to The Face of Defeat, my 1972 book about the Palestinians, a party at the mercy of an eventual peace treaty. George had just invited the well-named Aldine Honey to accompany him to Israel. Edna O’Brien made up the party. The Country Girls had established that the Irish literary tradition was safe in her hands, but it was said that she wanted to escape from the Ireland that is the backdrop of her novels. For some obscure reason I had the impression that she wanted to write something other than fiction and was thinking of a travel book for George to publish.
This unlikely quartet was staying at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. We went our separate ways but a day came when we all met up in the lobby. It was one o’clock, we were ready for the Coffee Room with the view from its big window. Always thinking ahead, George suddenly said that the war was over, people like us should show every sign of goodwill to the Arabs and we would have a proper lunch at the main hotel on the Palestinian side of Jerusalem.
At about half past one, the four of us entered that hotel’s dining room. Immediate hush. The atmosphere hardened. Elderly notables dressed in formal suits and ties occupied every table and every chair. They stared. Edna and Aldine were the only women present. We stood about. The headwaiter’s facial expression spoke more than any words. At last he seated us at the one and only table on a platform running along one of the walls – away from everyone else, yet in full view. Some time after two o’clock, unwillingly, the headwaiter at last placed before us a saucer with some olives. Holding one of these olives between pursed lips, Aldine invited George to take it. When he leaned forward to do so, he appeared to be kissing her. Horrified effendis had had quite enough. The room seemed to shudder. If peace brought scenes like the one they had just witnessed, these men preferred war.
Half an hour later we had still not been able to order a meal. George was determined to stick it out; I proposed instead that we cut our losses and go sightseeing. Under a clear blue sky, Edna and I made our way past the shops on Salah-ad-din Street going towards the Old City. The noises and colorfulness of Arab life were new to Edna and fired her imagination. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is at the center of historic Christendom and the closer Edna came to it the more the afternoon had the feel of a pilgrimage. Oh, she turned to me to say, if only the Mother Superior of her school back in Ireland or the Father who had taught the Catechism could see her now, what would they think!
Architecturally, the Church is fortress-like; on almost every day of the year, to enter is to pass from brilliant sunshine into the slightly mysterious gloom of the cavernous interior. Across the threshold, Edna prostrated herself without warning on the flagstones o
f the nave. As with the effendis earlier in the hotel dining room, there was a mass reaction. It was as if clerics and monks and acolytes in attendance, guardians of the shrine, tourist guides, had been waiting for this opportunity. Briefly the patter of footsteps hurrying from all directions, then the dog-pile with a storm of broken English that went something like this: Missie Missie, what are you, you Catholic, you Protestant, hundred shekels I show you everything, for you Missie special eighty shekels, you Armenian, you Orthodox, what are you? Then I could hear Edna saying, “David, get me out of here!”
Back in the King David, Edna gave me a Penguin paperback of what was then her latest novel. The cover shows a naked female form so artfully photographed and reproduced that there’s no telling what’s what. Edna’s inscription is, “David – in Jerusalem with love. Sorry about the cover!”
STANLEY OLSON
Elinor Wylie
1978
WHEN STANLEY OLSON came to live in England early in 1969, he was 22. His ostensible purpose was to write something about Leonard and Virginia Woolf and their publishing venture, the Hogarth Press. One obvious person to interview on the subject was Frances Partridge. I had heard all about her from her son Burgo when both of us were employed by the magazine Time and Tide and before the heart attack that killed him prematurely. From his account, I had her logged as a bad mother, a self-satisfied Bloomsbury snob, amoral, and to top it all off, a pacifist in 1940 of all years. Stanley’s friendship with her for a while gave me reservations about him.
Quite soon he knew his way around literary London. He fitted in. In appearance and in manner he seemed older than his years, mysteriously middle-aged. A perfectionist in matters great and small, he also couldn’t help cutting a dash. There was nothing bohemian about him. It was his style to exaggerate praise and blame, to speak comically about what was serious and seriously about what was comic. I once wrote about him: “Moan, whine, impossible, ignorance, awfulness, boredom, were favourite words in his vocabulary. In every sphere nothing but the best would do.” Tish Lampert, a sometime girlfriend of his, was American but nothing in Stanley’s accent or clothing or habits gave away his nationality. I knew there were Midwesterners of Swedish origins and vaguely assumed he was one of them. The London literati couldn’t help thinking of him as a Henry Jamesian character at home in books and conversation.
He lived in a pretty mews at the back of an exclusive Georgian square in the West End. I first met Sybille Bedford there. She and Stanley had a lengthy discussion about the apparently inadequate facilities for storage of several leading wine merchants. Once or twice, I caught sight of him pedaling through the traffic on a tricycle. Attached to it was an open trailer in which he conveyed Wuzzo, a particularly playful cocker spaniel in need of exercise in one of the parks. Lunching at Claridge’s, he would leave with sheets of the hotel’s headed writing paper, giving the impression of being at home there. An invitation from the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire to spend the week-end at Chatsworth was a passport to the higher social reaches. For fear that a servant might unpack his suitcase, Stanley bought a roll of tissue paper to spread between his clothes to make-believe that he had a servant at home.
Most of his friends assumed that Stanley must have private money. The country might be experiencing economic crisis but his extravagance ran unchecked. As far as I was aware, he made no effort to find regular work; he did a little freelance journalism and book reviewing, not enough to pay the bills. Years in the writing, his first book, Elinor Wylie, the biography of a Twenties poet now read mostly by academics, came out in 1979. I was sent a proof copy whose cover and title page misprinted the author’s name as Stanley Owen, an unprecedented error but a good example of serendipity. The inscription reads, “To David, with great pleasure from Stanley Olson OWEN.” A graphologist would be in his element analyzing Stanley’s handwriting, the letters so identical and minute that the words can hardly be read even with a magnifying glass. It looks as if he was making sure not to give anything away. Here is a sentence I have deciphered. “I absolutely detest Jacques-Emile Blanche: such a painful snob and such a poseur.” Or another, “How I agree with you about the complete awfulness of Graham Greene; never liked him, never felt any desire to try to like him and never understood why people go weak at the knee over him: nausea?”
Stanley’s second book, John Singer Sargent: His Portrait, was published in 1986, receiving a cloudburst of critical approval. He wrote to me, “I can never quite grasp why people had it in for Sargent because he paints Jews. Jealousy; they couldn’t get a commission? The Wertheimers were delightful people – even if the next generation has gone to seed rather.… But then I cannot understand anti-Semitism. It is a tiresome prejudice and worse, downright evil. But I could go on for pages. Thank God Sargent was a cut above those morons who looked at his subjects and sneered.”
The next project, a biography of Rebecca West, was making heavy weather. Stanley was becoming more than usually histrionic about the business of writing and more than usually spendthrift about the business of living. In July 1986 he had a stroke. I visited him in hospital and found that he could understand conversation but could only express himself involuntarily and exclusively in four-letter words. Three years later a second stroke was fatal.
His cousin and literary executor and now biographer as well, Phyllis Hatfield, was writing to me in 1991 with questions. In the opening pages of Pencil Me In, her book about Stanley, she describes dancing with him at his bar mitzvah. This came with the force of a secret suddenly exploding. His Russian-Jewish grandfather, an immigrant who could hardly speak English, had changed the family name of Olshanitsky to Olson because it sounded American. His father had made a huge fortune providing spare parts for electronics. Living in Akron, Ohio, the parents had thought it in Stanley’s interest to send him to a military academy on the East Coast. They could never have understood their son but they always paid his allowance and more besides, so they must have been proud of him. Phyllis Hatfield does her heroic best to present Stanley as a gifted young writer who had “an uncanny sense of how to be amusing” and viewed the ups and downs of life with “ironic detachment.” But that can’t be all there is to it. Instinct gives me the feeling that something very different, some element of fear too deep to bring into the open – the comic masking the tragic – must have driven him into exile and impersonation of an English dilettante.
IRIS ORIGO
War in Val d’Orcia
1947
“PORTRAIT OF A LADY” is the title of the profile that I wrote of Iris Origo, a borrowing from Henry James that is rather obvious but nonetheless fitting. The ladies in that great man’s life and in his novels were like Iris, connected to British peers and American millionaires. Highly cultivated, she was an old-fashioned bluestocking engaged in matters of the mind. Edith Wharton and Virginia Woolf both helped to start her literary career. Newly married, she and Antonio Origo, a Marchese, bought La Foce, a large house with an estate of 3,500 acres in Val d’Orcia, an unspoilt out-of-the-way valley south of Siena. Caroline Moorhead’s biography of Iris describes with the lightest of touches how between the wars Antonio was a Blackshirt and friend of Mussolini while Iris was presenting critics of Mussolini as heroic.
War in Val d’Orcia takes the form of a diary that reaches a climax in June 1944 when artillery starts to shell La Foce, partisans take up positions and German soldiers move into the house under the shadow of death and destruction. It falls to Iris as the Marchesa to take responsibility for the children of local villages, and she does so naturally, noblesse oblige as the French say. She and the children might well have been killed in the fighting. Danger did not bring fear with it and the happy ending, one feels, is well deserved. As the front line at last rolls on, a British Major is at the door asking, “Are you Marchesa Origo? The whole Eighth Army has been looking for you.” He brings the news that her cousin Ulick Verney of the Scots Guards is at GHQ only a few miles away. One sentence in particular shows how she has remained hers
elf through the experience of war. “I wish very much that I had a clean frock to put on.”
More than reportage, this book is a lasting testimonial. When I asked her to sign War in Val d’Orcia, she did not hesitate. “To David Pryce-Jones who, unlike the author, possesses a copy of this book.”
J. B. PRIESTLEY
Margin Released
A Writer’s Reminiscences and Reflections
1962
I TOOK IT FOR GRANTED that Priestley and I might not get on too well and it is safe to assume that he must have thought the same about me. Class-conscious monotonous pipe-smoking old bore from provincial Bradford meets sheltered young aesthete from smarty-boots London who is sneering only because he could never be anything like so popular. Characters in the novels Priestley wrote between the wars have names like Jess Oakroyd, Welkinghurst and Ormenroyd, they live in Coketown and Bruddersford and Brock-shire. He could speak of himself as Young Jack P. and talk about lads, or in pseudo-patois “t’folk back o’ t’mill.” He must be the last writer to sprinkle the page with expressions like “Bah!” or “Heigh-ho!” and mean them sincerely.
Socialism was buried in that vision of the country and of course it has shrunk to folksiness if it still exists at all. Its moment came in 1940 when a German invasion was a real possibility and the British nation was going to have to decide what was to be done about that. A traitor, William Joyce, was broadcasting from the Ministry of Josef Goebbels in Berlin that Nazi victory and British defeat were now imminent. Familiarized by the pitch of his voice as Lord Haw-Haw, Joyce made headway that rattled the government. Someone had to broadcast that we were all in it together. The moment called for sentimentality and sharing and Priestley was just the man for it. His war-time broadcasts on the BBC established him as a popular writer, perhaps the most popular in the country.
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