Signatures

by David Pryce-Jones

  What worked for the British, in his view, works for everybody. The Soviet Union, he thought after a trip there in 1945, “shows a wisdom in dealing with its own peoples … the wide Soviet land glitters and hums with their dance and song.” He dismissed George Orwell as “a bit of a misery.” Reviewing The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold in the New Statesman, he speculated that Evelyn Waugh was so pretentious that he had to be on the way to a mental breakdown from which he wouldn’t recover.

  Priestley and his wife, the archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes, lived in a very desirable eighteenth-century manor a mile away from Shakespeare’s Stratford-on-Avon. Socialism had not lowered their life-style. We walked up and down the carefully mown lawn and it was rather endearing to hear him say that his floppy black hat made him look like a Chinese executioner. He thought he had “a rather special public which belongs chiefly to the professional middle class. Fashionable types don’t bother with me, but because I’ve never been in fashion I’ve never been out of fashion. There’s a kind of contempt for writers, isn’t there?” Avant-garde was not a term of praise. Our pastors and masters, humbugs the whole lot of them, were imposing themselves in the name of the State or the Good Life. The letters he received, he growled, were all from the Inland Revenue. “Just because I think the lot of them have gone barmy doesn’t mean I’ve become a Tory. Soaking the rich, indeed! The only thing they’ll soak in are the waters of the Caribbean.” Harrumphing midway between boasting and complaining, he was the last man of letters with a Leftist patent of about 1910. And by the way, Phoenix, Arizona, was where he and his wife liked to spend the winter; the dry climate suited them very nicely.

  GWYNEDD RAE

  Mary Plain in War-Time

  1942

  THIS WAS THE FIRST BOOK inscribed by its author that I received. Gwynedd Rae had a vivid imagination and used it to invent stories for children about Mary Plain, an endearing and frisky little bear from the zoo in Berne. It has always seemed to me that Paddington Bear has to be a close relation of Mary Plain and lawyers might be able to make something of that.

  Gwynedd Rae became a neighbor when my parents’ house in London was bombed and they moved to Kent. I was six years old, and due to the accidents of war I had been in the hands of relations in France, Spain and then Morocco. I spoke English with a French accent. On a Sunday we would walk from our Castle Hill Farm through woods to reach Knowles Bank in time for tea. Old Mrs. Rae ruled this unpretentious and attractive eighteenth-century house in brick. What with shawls, lace, a scarf, some sort of cap, she might have sat for Whistler’s Mother. Both of us determined to win, we played drafts, halma, spillikins, snap and Snakes and Ladders.

  Kenneth Rae, her son, had published my father’s books and after the war devoted his time and money to creating the National Theatre. Known as the Owl Man on account of his thick spectacles, he featured in the Mary Plain books as the person who allows Mary to live more as a human being than a bear. Neither he nor Gwynedd had married. Tall and strong-boned, she looked rather masculine. Years later, I found that in the war she had written letters to my father urging Christianity. This Mary Plain book brings me into the story. Among the illustrations is a drawing of me, a very good likeness too and surely destiny for a six-year-old.

  JEAN-FRANÇOIS REVEL

  La Tentation Totalitaire

  1977

  THE NEW YORK TIMES commissioned me in 1977 to write a profile of Jean-François Revel. Having written a column for ten years or so in the weekly magazine L’Express, he was a ringleader of French intellectual life, holding the fort with Raymond Aron, his colleague on the magazine. I spoke of “his steady and witty onslaught against humbug in all its forms.” He had committed himself to defending one of the simplest and most urgent propositions, that “democracy is diminishing to the point of extinction, and this ought not to pass unchallenged.” Now was the time for all good men to come to the aid of freedom and sanity.

  La Tentation Totalitaire (translation unnecessary) is a polemic against what he considered a permanent infatuation with Stalinism. Appeasement of Hitler had been a mistake for which Europe had paid a very great price. Appeasement of Soviet Communism was a mistake of the same order and it came in numerous forms, for instance Euro-Communism, Finlandisation and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. The words “Americans Go Home” repeatedly chalked on the walls in French cities or the hundreds of thousands demonstrating against the positioning of cruise missiles in what was then West Germany, made no distinction between fear and hope. Across the continent, the slogan “Better red than dead” became believable and popular because of, or in spite of, the crafty implication that surrender to the Soviet Union was the pathway to survival and peace. For reasons too profound for psychological treatment, Revel warned, free human beings wish, at least with some part of themselves, to be relieved of their freedom, even if they will have to be sorry for it afterwards.

  Jean-François inscribed this book, “Pour David Pryce-Jones, en souvenir de nos agréables entretiens à Paris, bien amicalement J-F Revel le 2 Septembre 1977” (translation still unnecessary). He encouraged me to ring him up whenever I was in Paris. He looked for dragons to slay, and he slew them, occasionally taking me as a spectator. At one literary gathering, he did not let the film director Agnès Varda get away with saying that she never read Solzhenitsyn because he was on the Right. One other time, we were at his publishers. In the hall of the building, a writer of some fame greeted him but he did not reply, because as he later explained, the man had been a collaborator in the war. “He has the look of someone who enjoys life too much to want to spend it picking fights,” was my way of saying in the profile that he had long since given up bothering about his waistline in favor of good food in good restaurants. The most unlikely of the dozen or so books he signed for me is Un Festin en Paroles (Putting banquets into words), published in 1979 and nothing less than a history of gastronomy, or as he expressed it on the title page, “Pour Clarissa et David, cette promenade littéraire à travers l’archéologie de la cuisine.” A few days after publication of the profile, I received a telegram. “Merci pour ce magnifique article stop je vous promets de maigrir sans maigrir amitiés Jean-François,” which might go into English as “I promise to thin down without thinning down on friendship.”

  GREGOR VON REZZORI

  Memoirs of an Anti-Semite

  2007

  YOU HAVE A HOUSE in Florence, an acquaintance of Russian origins by the name of Alexis Gregory said to me, then you must meet Grisha von Rezzori, he’s a real cosmopolitan. The Italian surname with its German ennoblement is a hybrid that made him unique. He lived at San Donato in quite a large house hidden in woods so far off the beaten track that it seemed he must have wanted solitude. Not so. He encouraged visitors. There was a guesthouse to which Bruce Chatwin had invited himself for the weekend and stayed eight months finishing a book.

  Grisha was well built, rugged, a survivor with a post-Habsburg image and tweed jackets cut for him by the tailor in Principe’s, the shop in Florence where the fastidious went for their clothes. His eyes were blue, his voice deep. Beatrice, his wife, stood back as literary life passed over her head. Glossy magazines carried articles about her and the modern art gallery she ran in Milan. On the walls were pictures, experimentally abstract for the most part, and on the side-tables were photographs from the previous century of her Armenian forebears who had lived distinguished lives in Beirut and wore Ottoman uniforms complete with medals and tarboosh.

  Czernowicz, or Cernăuţi in Romanian, the main city of the Bukovina, was the birthplace of Grisha and coincidentally of a number of Hollywood film producers. Grisha’s fiction evokes a place and a time of which nothing is left except stories and memories, some comic and some sad. Commissioned before the war in supposedly the best regiment in the country, Grisha had been one day the officer mounting the guard at the royal palace of Sinaia when orders and drill came out wrong. The memory of that shambles of a parade with soldiers marching out of step in different dire
ctions still made him laugh. On the spare front paper of my copy of Memoirs of an Anti-Semite he drew a cartoon of an officer in ceremonial order with bear-skin and sword, saluting a lady lying invitingly on a couch. The caption conveys a whole way of life: “An officer of the Unsprezece Rosiori never accepts money from women.” According to Grisha, a commission in this cavalry regiment was the social peak of the beau monde of Romania.

  Stalin took advantage of the pact with Hitler in August 1939 to invade and incorporate the Bukovina among other territories. Living in Berlin in 1940, Grisha asked the Romanian ambassador for advice. If I were you, as Grisha recalls what the ambassador said, I would go underground and get lost. Grisha claims to have spent most of the war in Berlin nightclubs, as described in a novel with the rather labored title Oedipus siegt bei Stalingrad. He and his friends were eventually obliged to wear German uniforms, giving the false appearance that they were fighting for the Third Reich rather than using it as a bolt-hole. He spoke freely but I sometimes asked myself if he was also speaking fully.

  Queen Helen of Romania, once the monarch, was now a refugee like him. Her house in Florence, the Villa Sparta, was a combination of austere grandeur and discomfort. The windows seemed designed to keep light out. Although Queen Helen had known hardship and dispossession, she had good looks and held herself with an imposingly straight back. Whatever the news, good or bad, she had a habit of limiting her response to “Ach, fancy!” spoken with such an accent that it sounded like German. “Dinner with Queen Helen,” an entry in my diary in 1980 reads: “The Villa Sparta is sold. By November she must be out and in a flat in Lausanne. She shows me with her finger on the table how close she will be to the Palace Hotel. Her lawyer has made everything as difficult as possible. She has to justify each possession she takes out. The customs are counting her shoes and dresses…. She is not going to Prince Charles’s wedding, she thinks there may be an attempt to spoil the occasion.”

  A theme of hers was how unjustly the Allies treated her father in 1918. The diary continues, “What was the name of that journalist before the war who knew everybody? Pryce-Jones?”

  “Pryce-Jones is me, Ma’am.”

  “Pryce-something, then.”

  “Perhaps you mean G. Ward Price, Ma’am.”

  “Yes, he told me we were entering a new Dark Age. And so we are, he’s proved more right every day.”

  Queen Helen read me a letter written in English from her niece, Queen Sophia of Spain, evoking the recent official visit to Spain of Nicolae Ceauşescu, General Secretary of the Romanian Communist Party, then seeking a role as intermediary in the Cold War. As the parties were making their way through the corridors of the Escorial Palace in Madrid, Ceauşescu stopped and asked for his presents. It is the custom to give suitable gifts to official visitors, he said, and he was surprised to find his Spanish hosts so disobliging. Be quick, King Juan Carlos whispered to Sophia, go to the safe, find a diamond brooch and wrap it up. She did so, but then in a shambles of another order, couldn’t find in which of the many Palace reception rooms the Ceauşescus were waiting for their pay-offs.

  ERICH SEGAL

  Love Story

  1970

  SOME BRILLIANT PEOPLE, for instance George Steiner, make you feel stupid while others, for instance Erich Segal, make you feel as brilliant as them. I first heard him give a lecture, really a tour de force, on the unlikely subject of Jews in the classical Olympic Games. Slight but evidently athletic, he had been a runner in his time. When I then buttonholed him, it was as if we were the oldest of friends. France had played a large part in his education, as in mine. Presented with the Légion d’Honneur, he asked me to come along to the ceremony. Pinning on the decoration, the French ambassador innocently asked, “Sur quel champs de bataille avez-vous gagné votre médaille?” (On which battlefield did you win your medal?) “Paris,” Erich answered, launching into conversation about literature.

  His Hebrew was also fluent. I possess a scarlet silk yarmulke that he gave me for Seder one year. He commuted from his home in Hampstead to Wolfson College in Oxford. Thinking that my Latin and Greek must be at a working level, he also gave me volumes he’d edited in a series headed Oxford Readings which went from Greek Tragedy in 1983, via Aristophanes in 1997 to Menander, Plautus and Terence in 2001. The Death of Comedy is Erich’s guided tour through world literature (with a nod in the title to George Steiner’s The Death of Tragedy).

  Anthony Powell in one of his reviews makes the point that selfpity is the necessary ingredient of a bestseller. Love Story, I take it, is a drama, even a melodrama, with the requisite element of self-pity. To me, Erich gave no sign of ever being sorry for himself or embittered by experience although universities in the United States refused to grant him tenure; jealous colleagues whispered that a best-selling author like him couldn’t be a scholar; and in his thirties, unusually young, he developed Parkinson’s disease. He inscribed his books in handwriting whose increasingly unreadable squiggles testify to physical infirmity but also to superior character and courage.

  ALAN SILLITOE

  Raw Material

  1972

  NOT MANY NOVELISTS have influenced me, but Alan Sillitoe is one of them. I had been brought up to think of literature as the recording of the human comedy. Some of those who kept the record, I understood, suffered and sacrificed, sometimes to a greater extent than other people. What couldn’t be enjoyed could still be understood. Coming up to Oxford as an undergraduate, for the first time I was made to feel that the attitude I had towards literature was selfish, that only the rich and the spoiled could afford to reduce a major art form to entertainment. The human comedy was a figment, then, a delusion. Writers knew, or ought to know, that in reality they were engaged in class warfare. According to Stalin, writers were “engineers of the soul,” which in practice meant that they were state officials dictating the beliefs and practices that would propel the working class towards its pre-determined victory over other classes, something many Oxford intellectuals would have considered the approved ending of the Cold War. At a college party, some don asked me what I was doing. Working hard, I said. He took hold of my hand, ran his fingers over it and said, “Not manual, I see.”

  Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) and its successor The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (1959) seemed to be dispatches from the front line of the class war. I had no experience of a character like Arthur in the former novel or of the anonymous Borstal boy in the latter. Conversation in a Sillitoe novel that went, “Well, my old man ain’t never got no fags either, but I wun’t bother to save ’em for ’im if I found any,” sounded fresh and convincing in grammar as well as subject, giving voice to people who had no voice. The dust jacket of Loneliness carries the sentence, “His father was a labourer at a bicycle factory in a Nottingham suburb where Mr. Sillitoe grew up.” I doubt that my father had ever set foot in a factory or a suburb either, for that matter.

  A phenomenon of the class war is the individual who benefits from inherited privileges while denouncing and doing whatever can be done to destroy them. Oxford University in my day turned out such characters in their thousands as if their three years as undergraduates had been a sustained tutorial in how to make feelings of guilt an integral part of their self-satisfaction. I was one such. My early novel The Sands of Summer is indebted to early Sillitoe, except that he had lived what he wrote and I had to imagine everything. Put in its real light, he was a genuine protester, I was merely patronizing.

  As literary editor of the weekly magazine Time and Tide, I asked David Caute, an Oxford contemporary and friend and Marxist too, to review Sillitoe’s Key to the Door. He spoke for many other critics and most of the literate public when he wrote with approval, “Clearly Sillitoe attaches the highest value to the honest, fearless instinct of a proud working man,” and he spoke particularly for me when he went on to pass the exclusive class judgment that Sillitoe “now stands in the forefront as describer and interpreter of working class life.” I invited Sillitoe t
o contribute and he came to the office. Picture my surprise that he wanted to review the new edition of the Baedeker Guide to Spain, and a novel by William Saroyan, master of the sentimental ending.

  Raw Material is a last word, an adieu to the hard and fast subject matter of class that had hitherto singled him out. Success is good for some people. Through his own efforts, the bitter young rebel from Nottingham evolved into a bohemian living in a house like a barn in a fashionable district of London, happy to entertain, to travel and even to write poems.

  ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER

  A Friend of Kafka

  1970

  I INTERVIEWED ISAAC SINGER IN 1970. He lived on the Upper West Side of New York in an apartment block that enclosed a courtyard. Scrubby trees and bushes planted at its center gave the whole building a dark and foreign air. On the mailboxes, the polysyllabic names from Eastern Europe were like a transplant from Krochmalna Street, a setting in which the mythical Jews of Singer’s fiction had lived their mythical lives in a mythical Warsaw. He gave me A Friend of Kafka, another collection of his short stories that had just been published. On the title page he calls me “a young and already great writer,” but weakens the compliment by misspelling my surname. At the same time, he presented my daughters with a copy of Zlateh the Goat, one of his several books for children, inscribed, “To Jessica and Candida and to their charming parents with love.”