A. J. P. TAYLOR
English History, 1914–1945
1965
A TYPICAL INTELLECTUAL of the 1930s, A. J. P. Taylor made sure to enjoy the privileges he was busy criticizing. He was a rich man’s son. In 1919 his father sold his share of the family’s Lancashire cotton business and received £100,000 for it, or twenty million pounds in 1995 prices, according to Kathleen Burk, Taylor’s biographer. As a young man, Taylor joined the Communist Party, and in 1925 he visited the Soviet Union. Guilt may have been motivating him, but more likely at some instinctive level he felt it safe to support a total change of regime precisely because it would not happen. Nominally an agency facilitating foreign visitors, Intourist was actually an important tool of the Communist Party, controlling movement and conducting tourists to make sure that they saw only sites arranged to impress, like so many Potemkin villages. Taylor fell for it. Attending a postwar Party Congress in Communist Poland, he brought himself to say things that were sure to displease the Party, but all his life he remained the daftest sort of fellow traveler. He could write, “In the end, Stalin was a rather endearing character.”
The trick that brought him fame as an original historian was to stand received opinion on its head. For him, the British and the Habsburg empires had to be ridiculous while the nationalisms that destroyed them were popular. British statesmen who made peace were incompetent, while Germans who made war, like Bismarck and Hitler, were defensible. In The Origins of the Second World War, his most characteristic book, he argued that Hitler was a politician like any other, taking his chances where he found them. Nazism, then, was a set of accidents, not a deliberate program of conquest and mass murder. Not surprisingly, Taylor became the darling of neo-Nazis and Revisionists. It takes a very clever man to be quite such an idiot. When I told him that his depiction of Hitler was contradicted by a lot of documentary evidence, he snapped back, “I trod on their toes this time” as though that were a valid defense.
We ran into one another in the London Library when I was doing research for my book about Unity Mitford. Taylor immediately responded that he dined regularly with Sir Oswald Mosley, Unity’s Fascist brother-in-law, and he could take me along with him. I hesitated for a long time but eventually decided that Mosley knowingly or unknowingly might provide some useful leads. Dinner was in the Ritz. Old as he was by then, Mosley still had fantasies that the nation might call on him. When rhetoric wasn’t quite enough to make the point, he had a way of protruding his eyes, making his face look like a ridiculous mask. In his element, Taylor fed him political and historical subjects. Love of power was what had drawn this improbable pair together. It was fatal to Taylor the man to have no moral structure, and it was fatal to Taylor the historian to have no sense of truth. In the event that Mosley had become Gauleiter of a Nazi Britain in 1940, Taylor might very well have collaborated. As the meal was coming to an end, Mosley asked me for my opinion. I heard afterwards on the grapevine that my silence had unsettled him.
WILFRED THESIGER
Arabian Sands
1959
MARRAKECH IS ONE of the best-preserved Muslim cities not just in Morocco but anywhere in the world of Islam. Clarissa and I were spellbound by its appearance and its liveliness. In the middle of one night, however, I was woken up by a loud unfamiliar noise which I supposed had something to do with the boiler and hot water. Then I saw the cupboard trundling across the room. The sudden realization that this was an earthquake drove us, and apparently everybody else, hurrying and shouting out into the city’s open squares. A storks’ nest had been shaken off the ancient fortified wall and two storks were ceaselessly flying from the empty top down to the pile of twigs on the ground and then back up, evidently deciding whether to rebuild here or find some safer place. Later we were advised to give ourselves a treat by going to a French restaurant miles away in the High Atlas Mountains. The place proved nondescript except for a table at which sat two Englishmen. Instantly recognizable, Lord Auchinleck and Wilfred Thesiger looked their part as Field Marshal and explorer respectively. I introduced Clarissa and myself and so we had lunch next to these living legends.
Every spring, Thesiger brought his mother to Morocco and in this year 1979 they were staying in a small hotel in the Kasbah of Marrakech. Mrs. Astley was then nearing ninety. In 1910, already expecting Wilfred, she had made a three-week trek on a mule from a port on the Red Sea up to Addis Ababa, where her then husband, Wilfred’s father, was Minister. The British Legation was a mud hut and there were no wheeled vehicles in the whole country.
Arabian Sands is an Apologia Pro Vita Sua like no other, and a bravura passage in it conjures up memories from childhood in Ethiopia. “I had watched the priests dancing at Timkat before the Ark of the Covenant to the muffled throbbing of their silver drums; I had watched the hierarchy of the Ethiopian Church, magnificent in their many-coloured vestments, blessing the waters. I had seen the armies going forth to fight in the Great Rebellion of 1916.” The family photograph album has snapshots of corpses hanging from trees, of a man lying next to his arm and leg, severed in punishment. Thesiger was ten when his father died, and his mother settled with her four sons in Old Radnor, which consists of a few houses in a lonely part of Wales, country that he revisited to the end of his life.
In London, Thesiger was an attentive son who stayed with his mother. The product of Eton and Oxford (where he got a Blue for boxing), he was the personification of an English gentleman with a bowler hat and rolled umbrella. In the morning I would ring up, Mrs. Astley would mutter into the telephone and then I’d hear her bellowing in a very different tone, “Wilfred, cut along here, it’s for you.” I found it impossible to reconcile this conventional figure with the man who says of himself in Arabian Sands, “I wanted colour and savagery, hardship and adventure.” We were in his mother’s drawingroom one day when he fetched an envelope containing learned papers and listings of his travels and writings and out fell a passport photograph of a handsome Arab in traditional dress and keffiyeh, with Arab-style moustache and trimmed beard. This other self was unrecognizable, I told him and he gave me the photograph; I have it still. Whenever he came to dinner with us, I made a point of inviting admirers of his. Making no concessions, he spoke exclusively of his wars and travels. Women who had sat next to him used to complain afterwards that he never looked them in the eye. Most probably he was homosexual, but in that case he had repressed it so deeply that the least acknowledgement on his part was out of the question. I wonder how well he knew himself.
At the age of 25, Thesiger was one of the couple of hundred British members of the Sudan Civil Service who kept the peace for the many tribes long accustomed to internecine rivalry. In 1940 he was appointed Orde Wingate’s deputy in the campaign to liberate Ethiopia from Italian occupation. The Life of My Choice, Thesiger’s autobiography, offers contradictory opinions of Wingate. On the one hand he was “inspiring” and had “greatness,” while on the other he was “past the stage of rational behaviour.” Thesiger was shocked that Wingate summoned officers to his room, where he received them lying naked on his bed. Even worse, he could be seen lowering his trousers and cooling his bottom in waterholes from which others would have to drink.
For the first five years after the war, Thesiger explored Arabia, crossing the desert known as the Empty Quarter by camel. Motorized vehicles were available, but their use would have given the exploit a very different character, modern and out of keeping, whereas the primitive was noble. “All that is best in the Arabs has come to them from the desert” is a grandiose generalization in Arabian Sands. Thesiger does not spell out what the best is or was, but the Bedouin who accompanied him are shown practicing age-old virtues of courage and endurance and their exemplary conduct speaks for itself. Actually the crossing served no useful purpose, it was a test of hardship and adventure that he had imposed upon himself, much as someone might climb Mount Everest, say, or row alone across the Atlantic.
I first realized that Thesiger had transposed the m
yth of the Noble Savage into the Arab context when his brother Roderick told me about an incident in the Libyan desert during the war. Wilfred was with a Long Range Desert Group hundreds of miles behind enemy lines on a mission to sabotage a train bringing up reinforcements for the German army. As soon as the train was blown up and burning, Bedouin appeared from nowhere to loot what they could. Wilfred grabbed one of them, saying that British soldiers had killed those German soldiers because that was their duty, not so that scavengers could pick over the bones of the dead. He hit the man, broke his jaw, and the Bedouin scattered away into the sand dunes from which they had come. The punishment was pointless. The moment the British officers drove away, the Bedouin were free to return for the plundering. Their offense was to show Thesiger that he was romancing reality and what comes out of the desert is not necessarily the best.
An incident that quite unconsciously reveals how easily Thesiger persuaded himself that tribal brutality is heroic is written up in his Introduction to Bedouin Poetry from Sinai and the Negev (1991), the work of Clinton Bailey, an American-Israeli with a good claim to be the leading specialist of this academic subject. In the course of one of his travels, Thesiger had a meal with a local Emir and two men from the Yam tribe. One of the latter recounts an ordeal that Thesiger is passing on as evidence of the superiority of the Bedouin way of life. A party of Manahil tribesmen had attacked his encampment, killed his nephew and driven off the camels. He and others went in pursuit and shot dead four Manahil. Another Manahil, bin Duailan by name, remained behind to cover his companions as they escaped with the camels and he shot five of the pursuing party before his rifle jammed. This enabled the narrator to reach him and kill him with a dagger. “By God,” he continues, but now in praise of bin Duailan, “he was a man. I thought he would kill us all.” This was how he had gained a reputation for all to admire. Within a very short time, according to Thesiger, “bin Duailan’s exploit was being declaimed on the far side of Arabia.” The poetry may very well be beautiful and popular but it is celebrating lawlessness, raiding, robbery and casual murder.
Postscript. In her eighties, Mrs. Astley was run over by a taxi and her pelvis was only one of her broken bones. Roddy Thesiger told me that her injuries were so severe that the hospital staff agreed she would die in the night and treatment was pointless suffering. I want to see Wilfred, she kept repeating. He’s in Kenya, Roddy would answer, and he won’t be back for six months. Next morning, she was still asking for Wilfred, they set her broken bones, she lived for several more years and duly saw Wilfred.
GEORGE WEIDENFELD
Remembering My Good Friends
1994
“FOR DAVID AND CLARISSA, Intimates of the first hour,” is George’s inscription in handwriting so disordered that it suggests this ritual of putting his name in a book is a bore and he’s lost patience for it. When I became a Weidenfeld author, a number of people in the world of publishing whispered in my ear that George’s performance was all smoke and mirrors. There was more than a hint of Micawber about his finances, the ownership of his business and the sudden relocations of the offices, while the way he was continually re-inventing his wives and his editorial directors was the talk of the town. He disturbed the stagnant pond of literary London by publishing Saul Bellow, Mary McCarthy and Vladimir Nabokov. He kept Eric Hobsbawm on the list though he disliked the man and everything he stood for. To be rid of enemies, he suggested reversing Noah’s Ark and sending them out to sea, never to return. He was ready to risk the scandal bound to erupt from publishing Albert Speer’s books or Nigel Nicolson’s Portrait of a Marriage. With a sort of team spirit, he supported Michael Grant the classical historian, Paul Johnson, Antonia Fraser and other favorites. (Harold Pinter was known tongue in cheek as “the Shakespeare of our time” and after he and Antonia were married George took to referring to them as Goethe and Schiller.) One who blew hot and cold was Isaiah Berlin who nevertheless published his most celebrated book The Hedgehog and the Fox on the Weidenfeld list. Optimistic by temperament, he divided authors proven or potential into D and non-D, the initial standing for deliverer.
Friendship mattered to him but it was also tactical. George knew exactly whom to invite to his lunches and dinners, and how to speak the few pertinent words that marked the occasion, most likely a book launch. Generosity was instinctive and unfailing but with it came a sense that it might one day be repaid with some timely favor in return. A natural practitioner of raison d’état, he would be particularly effusive to anyone he thought disliked or resented him. Lord Goodman, the confidential lawyer to the chosen few, was about the only person George would have nothing to do with, rightly suspecting him of malpractice. The telephone might ring and George would be finding out if I had any information about the newest literary editor or the latest political appointment here or anywhere in the world. Conversations of the kind often ended with a plan, even a date, for kitchen supper in our house. Educated in Vienna, Clarissa spoke German with an Austrian vocabulary and accent, and George could never have enough of this unexpected return to the past. Among those whose delivery he mimicked were Adolf Hitler and Friedich Herr, an eminent professor who comically made learned historical points in the same pidgin German.
A collection of portraits and busts of Cardinals hung in his apartment on Chelsea Embankment. A wide window giving a view on to the Thames added to the formality of the drawing-room. George seemed an impersonation of these powerful single-minded cosmopolitan men and it was in keeping that he was invited to the annual summer conference that the Pope held at Castel Gandolfo. He would go to Bayreuth for the opera, to Jerusalem to sign contracts for the memoirs of Israeli politicians, to New York to be in the swim. When he had a single visitor, he liked to sit and talk in a small inner library room. I was there one afternoon when Kurt Waldheim, the decorated Nazi officer who became President of Austria and Secretary General of the United Nations, telephoned and asked for advice. They had been at school together before the war; George addressed him by a nickname. Then some time later, I was again there when Helmut Kohl, the ex-Chancellor of Germany, rang, also asking for advice. George spoke to them as equals. In September 2009, George’s ninetieth birthday was celebrated in a great white tent pitched with flair and ingenuity on a sloping hill that was part of the estate some thirty miles from Geneva belonging to the architect Norman Foster. For the occasion, George had had made a smoking jacket in huntsman’s style, yellow with black trimmings. The fireworks display was visible, we were afterwards to hear, as far away as the center of Geneva. Mark your diaries, George said in a speech, for the same day ten years from now when I shall be a hundred.
The last time I saw him, he showed me his family tree. A forebear in Prague in the sixteenth century had been a famous rabbi, his reputation apparently still remembered. George suddenly gave way to self-pity, saying, “What have I achieved by comparison?” And as he asked what ought to have been a merely rhetorical question, tears trickled down his face.
DAME REBECCA WEST
The Meaning of Treason
1949
“MY SALUTATIONS TO DAVID Pryce-Jones,” Dame Rebecca has written on the frontispiece of this book, with her signature and the date, 1973. At that time, the attraction of so many British people to Nazism before and even during the war seemed to me a worthwhile subject to write about. I had the example of Unity Mitford and her Hitlerite sister Diana Mosley already in mind. The Meaning of Treason was the obvious trail-blazer. Nothing much could be added to Rebecca West’s marvelous portrayal of William Joyce, otherwise Lord Haw-Haw, hanged for broadcasting throughout the war from Berlin. John Amery condemned himself to the gallows by pleading guilty at his trial, and she thought that all along he had “slapped the normal human process in the face.” I wondered if so expressive a judgment could be put into biographical form. We corresponded. “I probably know much less about John Amery than you do,” she wrote. “I should be so very pleased to see you and to be of any help I can.”
It turned out that
we had met once before in quite other circumstances. I was born in Meidling, my mother’s family house in Vienna. Dame Rebecca’s husband Harry Andrews, a banker and German-educated, had been in Vienna in 1936 dealing with the crisis caused by the collapse of the Creditanstalt, one of the factors creating the economic instability giving rise to Nazism. At my father’s invitation, the two of them came to Meidling. Dame Rebecca remembered seeing me when I was a few days old.
Since the publication of her first book, a study of Henry James, she had been a singular figure on the English literary scene, unconventional in behavior, in opinion and especially in the vividness of her language. A competitive Virginia Woolf found her “a cross between a charwoman and a gypsy.” In her life she had a number of lovers, famous men all, one of them H. G. Wells. After breaking with him, she wrote him a letter that shows her spirit. “I know you are a great humbug. I also know you’re a great man.” Anthony West, the son she had with Wells, seems never to have got over his illegitimacy. In her biography of Dame Rebecca, Victoria Glendinning surmises that public quarrelling energized the two of them.
To Rebecca West, Communism and Nazism were twin evils and she entered into close combat with apologists for either dogma. She suspected that Yugoslavia was doomed to be a testing ground for these political horrors and as war approached she went there to see for herself. Written in a few weeks, her Black Lamb and Grey Falcon in two hefty volumes is as remarkable a travel book as any in the language. She idealized the Serbs of Yugoslavia as magnificently and misleadingly as T. E. Lawrence did with the Sherifian Arabs in Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Long after her death and the disappearance of Yugoslavia, her book survives as literature.
Quite rightly, she advised me that she had sounded out relatives of John Amery and “it would not really be a suitable proposition” to write about him. Unity Mitford’s Nazism also slapped the normal human process in the face. The concluding sentence of Dame Rebecca’s review of my Unity book illustrates the genial way she made her language rise to her subject. “The moral atmosphere in which these events took place is that of a burnt-out fairground.”
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