Muriel and Penny often came to our family home in Florence as well. She relished stories, especially one with Italian politics and a conspiracy theory in it. One day I told Muriel how in the lobby of the venerable Winter Palace Hotel at Aswan on the Nile I had observed a respectable Scottish lady pick up a westernized Saudi wearing shorts and a baseball cap the wrong way round, boisterously telling one and all to call him Al. Here was raw material for the imagination. Muriel then sketched out the character and motivation of this unlikely pair, their past and present histories and where this encounter would leave them. Another unwritten novel crystallized around an Italian aristocrat who died of AIDS without an heir, leaving immense properties to his faithful old cook, a woman who could neither read nor write.
Aiding and Abetting is based on Lord Lucan who murdered the nanny of his children by mistake and then vanished without trace. The novel centers on the improbability of this humdrum character, a British Earl what’s more, behaving as he did. I had done my military service in the same battalion of the Coldstream Guards and knew him reasonably well. Muriel quizzed me endlessly about correct details, only to invent a second Lord Lucan, false yet indistinguishable from the first, illustrating the mystery of the human condition.
Her son Robin felt that his mother loved writing more than she loved him. The sacrificial element in their relationship was never resolved. The two rarely met as Robin made his life in Edinburgh. The final break between them turned rather mystifyingly on a question of Jewish identity and Jewish law. Expressed simply, Robin, an Orthodox Jew, believed that Muriel had not done right by her Jewish heritage.
Equally disturbing was the question of her biography. Martin Stannard, a university professor, had written a biography of Evelyn Waugh, and initially she approved of him. Reading an early draft, she was dismayed, then obsessively angry at his alleged misrepresentations. She need not have worried. A great deal of research has gone into the biography and with it a great deal of admiration. A sentence in the final paragraph is a summary of his viewpoint: “Her proper habitat, her art, lay in the age of the Holy Ghost. And there she remained, a ghost-writer for God, whoever He may be.” Going over to see her a day or two before she died, I found her saying, “I’m a soldier wounded on the battlefield.” And then some last words that are pure Sparkite, “I must remember to tell Doris that when one comes to die, one doesn’t give a damn.”
ALBERT SPEER
Inside the Third Reich
1970
A HUNDRED YEARS FROM NOW, Speer’s autobiography, Inside the Third Reich, is likely to be the one indispensable source for anyone seeking information about Hitler and Nazism, in the way that Talleyrand’s memoirs still influence what people know and think about the France of his day. With the possible exception of Goebbels, Speer was the most intelligent member of Hitler’s inner circle and he came from a secure background as well. A shared interest in monumental architecture and huge-scale town planning, we are to believe, led him to see Hitler as a creative force. He had shone, he wrote in his book, in the reflected glory of Hitler’s power, striving “to gather some of his popularity, his glory, his greatness, around myself.”
Joachim Fest in his authoritative book Speer: The Final Verdict quotes Hitler saying to Speer, “I’ll sign anything that comes from you,” a carte blanche he gave to nobody else. Fest gives credit to the idea that Hitler and Speer saw in one another the fulfillment of their most profound aspirations. They were two of a kind in their lack of ordinary human responses. Only a Shakespeare could do justice to the drama of the final days of the war when Speer ran the risk of dropping in on Hitler in the Berlin bunker and even offered to stay with him to the very end. Whatever mutual deceptions were involved, tears came into the eyes of both men. The German people had let Hitler down and he instructed Speer to give them the scorched-earth policy he now thought they deserved. So much for creative force.
A couple of years after this book came out, I began to research for the biography I would write of Unity Mitford. The same question had to be asked of her as of Speer: how much of her motivation was ideology and how much was opportunity? I had been in Vienna on Unity’s trail. After she shot herself and had been sent home to England, her friend and admirer, also a Nazi, Count Janos Almasy took possession of her papers. He had denounced his sister and brother-in-law to the Gestapo and they had hoped to get even one day by purloining or copying some of these papers. Their son, a priest, had kept them stored in a trunk in the attic of the Sacré Cœur. Up in that dusty half-lit setting he handed me the evidence of a dark past and I had it all safe in my briefcase when I caught the train from Vienna to Heidelberg where Speer lived.
Speer’s house had the feel of a sepulcher, the windows apparently designed to keep the daylight out. The carved wood furniture, heavy and stained, was redolent of the Germany of Kaiser Wilhelm. Speer was tall and thin, rather elegant in a well-cut grey suit. His eyes were lackluster and his manner was burnt-out. He began by saying that there wasn’t the documentation for a book about Unity, so it couldn’t be done. I opened my briefcase. “Ihr Buch ist gemacht,” he said, Your book is made. In common with all Hitler’s cronies, his adjutants and his staff, he was so impressed by the British peerage that he could not find the way through its class distinctions, referring to Lady Unity or sometimes Lady Mitford. As we went over details in her diaries, he became a different person. In his book he records that in Hitler’s company she alone was permitted to break a tacit agreement not to speak about politics, and now he remembered who had been present when and where, what had been said to Hitler and what he had replied. His astonishing recall seemed to re-kindle life in him.
For my part, I repeated to Speer what my friend Roman Halter had told me about the time he had inspected the workshop in the Lodz ghetto making Wehrmacht uniforms and did nothing when one of his men brutalized the Jewish director. Yes, he knew who Roman was, and yes, he had had the power of life and death over those Jews. Gitta Sereny put her finger on his evasive technique of generalizing about specifics “admitting a little to deny a great deal” as she summarized it. He knew he had spent his whole life in the shadows and couldn’t say why.
JOHN STEWART
To the River Kwai
1988
“FOR DAVID PRYCE-JONES who dislodged a small stone that became a small stream – this memoir – Gratefully.” Before John Stewart inscribed his book with this compliment, all I knew of him was that he lived in Paris and was a photographer whose work was widely published and exhibited. At a chance meeting for drinks in the house of a mutual friend, he told me that he was writing a book and asked if I would read what he’d done so far and tell him why he was stuck. With a sense of shock, I learned from his unfinished manuscript that he had been captured in the war by the Japanese and sent as a slave laborer to the infamous Burma railway. He described the ordeal with astonishing objectivity, but he had refrained from letting the reader know how he came to be so abstract, in short who he was. What should have been autobiographical was historical. What he had to do was give the reader reason to trust him.
He saw the point at once. It was simple. Stewart was an adopted name that hid the fact that he belonged to a very well-known Jewish family and he couldn’t build a convincing memoir without revealing his real identity. His cosmopolitan background, his education in France, his open-mindedness, even his father’s Rolls-Royce, all fell into place and explained who he was in the face of a life-and-death ordeal.
Enrolled in the Intelligence Corps, he arrived in Singapore in January 1942, disastrously timed for the Japanese to take him prisoner. He had learned enough of the language to be an interpreter. “Navigating through the labyrinthine Japanese mind,” he writes, “was, after food, everyone’s favourite intellectual occupation.” In Changi he had an inconceivably far-fetched encounter with Foujita, the well-known painter and a friend in Paris days but now an Official War Artist, who greeted him, “Mon pauvre ami, je ne vous demande pas ce que vous faites ici.” (My poor friend,
I don’t ask you what you are doing here.) Sadism and sentimentality were an incomprehensible combination.
The collision of cultures is recorded in a passage that deserves a place in any anthology to do with human nature and its extremes. Speaking to a cadet, John resorted to a Japanese word meaning “bad, inadequate.” Like someone possessed, the cadet reacted with a rant, frothing at the mouth, sending for his sword and preparing to behead the kneeling prisoner who had given such offense. John in fact saved himself by knowing and reciting what the victim is supposed to say ritually before the sword ends his life. The cadet dropped his sword, burst into tears and invited John to have some cake and a cup of tea, the one and only time when the slave laborer was treated as a guest. John’s misuse of language was wiped away because he had proved his respect for the whole culture.
MARK STRAND
Selected Poems
1980
AT THE END OF THEIR EDUCATION many of my contemporaries contrived to visit the United States exactly as fortunate young gentlemen would have gone on the Grand Tour in the eighteenth century. This was how to discover what was happening out in the wider world. The mail one day brought a book of his poems from Paul Engle and with it a letter that was more a command than an invitation. On the strength of my early novels and the book I had written about Graham Greene, Paul Engle was giving me the chance to teach creative writing for the academic year 1964 – 65 at the Writers Workshop of the University of Iowa. I was 27, husband of Clarissa, father of Jessica and Candida, and chances like this might not come again. We consulted the atlas in order to be able to locate Iowa. Creative writing would have to take care of itself.
Making conversation at the first faculty meeting, I said to one Professor that scholarship now meant collating James Joyce’s laundry bills. He drew himself up and said that he had been doing just that these past thirty years. The native Iowan novelist R. V. (Ronald Verlin) Cassill was the Workshop’s brooding spirit. He believed in conspiracy. Obscure technical factors convinced him that the real murderers of President Kennedy had not been identified. The supposed power of Jews obsessed him. His one disciple was Richard Yates, author of the cult novel Revolutionary Road, but given over in the Workshop to unhappiness, to judge by his hang-dog appearance.
Mark Strand was immediately recognizable as a talent of another order. Good-looking and fit, he had presence and a quick and self-deprecating humor. His laugh came with a slight squeal in it. Mark’s poems had already appeared in literary magazines, and Kim Merker, a fine-arts printer in Iowa City, was just publishing the first collection, Sleeping With One Eye Open, a beautifully produced book in a limited edition of 250 copies. “Nothing but the best” was Mark’s ambition, and he would achieve it without fuss in his poetry and in his career. A true artist and perfectionist, he was on a life-long journey to discover the inner self. In comparison, many contemporary poets are mere journalists. He found inventive language for anything beautiful or wonderful and could even make whimsy sound normal. “The future isn’t what it used to be” is, I believe, a quip of his that has become universal. From him I learned about Jorge Guillén, Carducci, Rafael Alberti and Elizabeth Bishop, a particular favorite. He might have got on well with the young Wordsworth or William Blake.
Mark and his wife Antonia lived a five-minute walk away from us. Through the grim winter evenings we played Crazy Bridge, picquet and bezique. We ate, we talked, we read. Antonia told stories, for instance how her mother had seized hold of the exhibited part of a flasher in the New York subway and dragged him protesting to the cops. Mark also told stories, notably about his father, a figure enshrined in heroic fantasy who may have served a prison sentence in Mexico City. Mark had bought superb pencil drawings by Bill Bailey, then unknown but an Old Master in the making. He introduced Clarissa and me to Daniel Lang, another classical artist.
Mark and Antonia went their separate ways, he marrying Jules and having a child with her, she marrying a psychiatrist on the West Coast. As poets do, Mark circulated after leaving Iowa City, writing to me from universities or institutions that paid him to take up residence, the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, the University of Utah, the American Academy in Rome, and so on. He sent me nearly all his books except those he wrote for children. Prestigious prizes and awards, the title of Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, did not affect what I can only call the innocence of his vision. The inscription of his New Selected Poems (published in 2009) is, “For David and Clarissa, for old times sake and with love.” At each meeting we took up where we had left off. Staying with me in Florence, he wanted to buy a leather jacket, so I took him to Bemporad, the obvious shop. After trying on jackets interminably, he suddenly walked out empty-handed. Staying with me in London, he arrived with two bottles of vintage Château Siran. Nothing but the best.
Here is a postcard from his New York address, not dated but probably 1978. “Our lunch in New York was too brief – in an effort to make up for it I shall visit London for a day or two in April. I am finally turning to prose. (Discount The Monument.) I just sold a humorous piece to the New Yorker and may become a regular food columnist for another magazine. I’ve written very few poems since The Late Hour – Did you like it? I met V. S. Naipaul at a party, one of the smartest people I’ve ever met, you can tell in 30 seconds. He’s your friend, isn’t he? How did your interview with Derek Walcott go?”
Or this letter from Salt Lake City, also not dated (possibly 1985 – the book he refers to is Mr. and Mrs. Baby), in answer to one of mine. “That was the nicest, sweetest letter anybody ever got about a book. It cannot be topped. No one need try. So, amigo, thank you. Thank you. Not that it is of astonishing interest, but the book was attacked twice in that paper fit only for a gorilla’s anus, The New York Times. First in the daily by an uncomprehending Japanese-American with no sense of humour, then in the Sunday by another idiot. Fortunately, good reviews are coming in. I mention this only to dispel your high opinion of literary opinion this side of the Atlantic. But the English … well, we can only wait and see. Chatto & Windus is bringing it out next year and they have a very high opinion of the book. Apparently their readers’ reports were amazing; I say ‘apparently’ because I haven’t read them. Having dipped my toes in the chilly sea of fiction, I am back to skinny-dipping in the warm pond of poesy.”
Postscript. Mark was so annoyed by the attitude to his work of The New York Times that he made sure his publishers did not send review copies of his books to the paper.
AMIR TAHERI
The Persian Night
2009
POLITIQUE INTERNATIONALE, a heavyweight journal published in Paris, put me in touch with Amir Taheri. An Iranian journalist in exile, he had one foot in Paris and the other in London. He made no great claims for himself, but his articles in the English-language press or in Arabic outlets like the Saudi newspaper Sharq al-Awsat are vivid and informative insights into whatever is going on in the palaces, the mosques, the barracks and prisons of the Middle East. He was among the first to understand that Ayatollah Khomeini’s seizure of power in 1979 is as definitive an episode in world history as Lenin’s coup in 1917. Islamism is an ideology of military conquest, but the mullahs run a regime so corrupt, contradictory and self-serving that in the end they are bound to be their own undoing. Optimist and humanist, Amir is a steadfast dissident.
“Once again I meet Amir Taheri for tea at Richoux’s in Piccadilly,” I read in my diary. “He’s exactly punctual. Charming, soft-spoken, extraordinarily well informed, he carries the entire recent history of the Middle East in his head. I quiz him about the period that Ayatollah Khomeini spent in France at Neauphle-le-Château, courtesy of the stricken shah of Iran: names, dates, sequence of events, all are in place as if he’d prepared for a viva. If there were a hundred of him, al-Qaeda and jihadis would be perceived as public enemies with no future prospects.”
In September 2008, Alexandra and Roger Kimball came to stay because Roger had organized a
conference in London on soft jihad. Besides Amir, among the usual suspects attending was Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an exile from her native Somalia and a root-and-branch critic of the Islam of her upbringing. Previously in a review of Infidel, her autobiography, I’d written, “If there’s hope for reform in Islam, it lies in the example she sets.” Again from my diary, “So graceful a figure to be so steely.” Also, “Amir Taheri came to lunch, and invited us and the Kimballs to dine in a Persian restaurant near his flat in Marylebone. He’s for sanctions and against bombing Iran.” Next entry: “Amir Taheri came here from a demonstration at the Iranian embassy. Protesters are going to occupy it next week, he says, half the embassy staff are on their side. He doesn’t think there’s going to be a massive crack-down … things will turn out all right but it’s hard to see quite how the regime might collapse. Amir proposes to write a book on Islam’s place in the modern world, what it ought to be. No more biography of Ayatollah Sistani, as previously planned. He was full of information as usual, and I’ve never seen him laugh so much.”
BENJAMIN TAMMUZ
Requiem for Na’aman
1982
AT OUR FIRST MEETING, Benjamin Tammuz asked if Alan Pryce-Jones was any relation. Since my father got around everywhere, this was a question I was used to. Alan’s book about Beethoven had been published in 1933 and now I learned that it had been translated into Hebrew. At the time a teenager in British Mandated Palestine, Tammuz had read the Hebrew edition and said that he had been influenced by it. His own novels, Minotaur especially, have a resonance all their own. The inscription he wrote in my copy of Requiem for Na’aman is in Hebrew and I cannot read it.
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