Signatures

by David Pryce-Jones

  Now and again I would go and have tea in her spacious apartment with a view out over Hyde Park. At some point she went on a trip to the Middle East. In Jerusalem, Teddy Kollek, then the Mayor, gave a reception for her. Next stop, Beirut. The telephone rang in her hotel room and a voice said, You have been fraternizing with the Zionist enemy and I am from the PLO with orders to shoot you. I cannot be word-perfect but her answer was along the lines that she had lived a full and rewarding life, had only old age to look forward to, the dear boy should be sure to load his gun and come to the right floor, she would leave the door open for him. She heard no more.

  I like to think of her as the high priestess of the temple.

  MICHAEL WHARTON

  The Stretchford Chronicles

  1981

  OPENING THIS BOOK at random in order to recall the real Michael Wharton hiding under the pseudonym Peter Simple, I hit on this passage: “This is England’s End. And it may be right and fitting that modern England should end in a torrent of litter, shouting, iced lollies and mechanical uproar spilling down over the rocks and into the inviolable sea.”

  Here is a voice like no other. Michael was a heart-felt conservative. The custom of the past had made the country great and valued, only to be replaced by experiments that made the country small and unworthy. Much too clever to indulge in anger about a process of modernizing that he could not prevent, he turned to satire as the highest and most unanswerable form of political and social commentary. Socialists, ecologists, technicians and scientists, all manner of people, were busy creating an absurd and ugly life for everyone, when they ought to know better.

  Stretchford is the name that Peter Simple has invented for the kind of town that is a model hell. When he talks about it, his face takes on the hardness and coloring of a Toby jug. From time to time, one of the benighted might unexpectedly agree with some opinion of his, in which case Michael liked to quote a line from Virgil: nec tali auxilio nec defensoribus istis (not with such help, nor with such defenders). In other words, he will be responsible for himself.

  The Peter Simple column that he wrote for the Daily Telegraph made the kind of mark on the conscious public that Gulliver amid the Lilliputians had made. Peter Simple is the title of a novel by Frederick Marryat, a long-forgotten Victorian author, and I have no idea why Michael took it over for his purposes. True, he could be hard on himself. His ideal newspaper was The Feudal Times and Reactionary Herald. One columnar hero was Colonel Sibthorpe, a Member of Parliament in Victorian days who set his face against every kind of change so single-mindedly that he could not be considered serious and therefore nobody except Michael has ever heard of him.

  Memorable caricatures have escaped from the column to become part of the national literary stock. Mrs. Dutt-Pauker, for instance, is the owner of Beria Garth in Dorset, Glyn Stalin in Wales and Marxmount, the Hampstead mansion where she is grandmother to a “four-year-old, bearded, baleful-eyed Maoist demonstrator.” Other typecast enemies to be mocked to death are President Ngrafta of Gombola, the “brilliant progressive Tory MP Jeremy Cardhouse,” Dr Heinz Kiosk “chief psychiatric adviser to the South-Eastern Gas Board,” and the Earl of Mountwarlock whose major-domo is “one of the few practicing werewolves left in the Midlands.” Some thirty years ago, to give one more example of his inventiveness, the column purported to be a letter from Sandra to Clare Howitzer, an agony aunt. “My boyfriend, Jim, is a manic-depressive, one-legged, homosexual dwarf. He wears kinky boots, carries a flick knife, sucks ice-lollies all the time I am talking to him and is very hairy. I am wondering whether my love for him is just a passing teenage infatuation or whether we can establish a normal, adult, satisfying, psychologically complete love-relationship.” To which Clare Howitzer replies, “You have got a real winner there.” The satirist proves to be a prophet. At one point, I asked him what the effect of his column was. “Absolutely none at all,” and he added quickly, “I don’t expect to get more than a footnote in the history of literature.” Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver satire, the greatest in the language, has indispensable insight into human nature and the life of his period, and the same goes for Michael Wharton.

  ALEXANDER YAKOVLEV

  USSR: The Decisive Years

  1991

  A SUCCESSFUL POLITICAL CAREER in the Soviet Union depended on being with the winning side in any and every confrontation. This involved a process, largely invisible to outsiders, of allegiance and promises to the powerful, and betrayal of the friendship and principles of those without power. To the winners, rewards, to the losers punishment that ranged from dismissal and ostracism to twenty years of hard labor in the Gulag and judicial murder. Alexan der Yakovlev spotted early on that Mikhail Gorbachev was a winner, which committed him to unconditional support for glasnost and perestroika, though whether he really believed in the reforms he was promoting was a constant enigma. In return, Gorbachev appointed him to leading positions including membership of the Politburo. In the final months of the Soviet Union, the head of the KGB and other old-style Communists determined to get rid of Gorbachev, if necessary by force. Defending himself from becoming a loser, Gorbachev saw fit to dismiss Yakovlev. Had the so-called counter-revolutionaries succeeded in their aborted coup of 1991, Yakovlev might well have paid with his life.

  Politicians and commentators in the West were mostly disposed to take Gorbachev at his word and give him credit for making the world a better place. Whenever he appeared in some Western city, huge crowds turned out to admire and chant “Gorbi.” As reform began to contradict the basic tenets of Communism, however, I expected him to accuse the United States of destabilizing the whole Soviet order and then to declare a nuclear alert, close all borders, impose military rule and have the KGB commit a massacre in some city as an exemplary warning. Repression did occur, notably in the Baltic Republics and Georgia, but on a limited scale and apparently without central organization.

  My book, The War That Never Was (or The Strange Death of the Soviet Union in the American edition) addresses the question why Gorbachev had not tried to save Soviet Communism by resorting to maximum force as Karl Marx, Lenin and every previous General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party would have advocated without a qualm. Given such an outcome, Gorbachev’s successor as General Secretary might still be in the Kremlin.

  One possible explanation is that Gorbachev was a man of principle who would not make himself responsible for loss of innocent life. That is the noble image of himself that Gorbachev in his retirement has been doing his best to establish, presumably with an eye on posterity. An alternative explanation is that he really believed his reforms would enable a perfected Communism to deliver on its promises. In which case, he was simply deluded. Having heard him give a lecture and having read his book, I was pretty sure that he would take a line moulded to present himself as a hero of democracy, but all the same I wrote to ask for an interview. On one of my trips to Moscow in the early 1990s, I had an appointment at the imposing offices of the Gorbachev Foundation with Anatoly Chernyayev, a Gorbachev loyalist. Gorbachev was quite willing to talk to me, he said, the fee would be twenty-five thousand dollars.

  In the course of other trips in the republics that had comprised the Soviet Union or the satellites of the Soviet bloc, I had the impression from various former First Secretaries and Ideological Secretaries, all of them hardened Communists, that they were wondering why they had so tamely allowed themselves to become losers. Nobody had foreseen that reform would incite subjected people to mobilize on the streets. It was an irresistible matter of identity. Gorbachev did not give orders to open fire at Popular Front demonstrators because that would have been firing at his own program of reform. I was advised to talk to Alexander Yakovlev. Never before had a member of the Politburo come clean and admitted that Communism was a criminal enterprise from first to last, targeting the whole of humanity, not just Russia. He was known to have said that a single live bullet fired by a soldier at a mob was bound to be the end of Soviet power.

  Yakov
lev was always busy, in the provinces, away from his office, abroad. At one point, though, he had been invited to Israel and I flew there too. Early in the morning when we had arranged to meet, the telephone rang in the room of the hotel in Jerusalem. Announcing himself to be a professor acting for Yakovlev, a disembodied Russian voice said there would be no interview until I had settled the question of an honorarium (pronounced onn-or-rharium). One thousand dollars. I explained that it was not the custom in the West to pay for interviews. After lengthy discussion, we settled on a hundred dollars. Face to face with Yakovlev, I didn’t like to raise the subject and it struck me much too late that the professor was onto a scam and Yakovlev may have known nothing about what had been done in his name. Much later still, I came across the observation of Andrei Sakharov, dissident-in-chief, that he sensed in Yakovlev “an indelible residue of Leninist doctrine.” If so, it’s evidence that the success of nationalism and the failure of Communism were really and truly accidental.

  Postscript. Anatoly Lukyanov, a Gorbachev colleague turned opponent and sentenced to prison for his part in the aborted 1991 coup, also asked for a fee when I interviewed him. Fifty dollars.

  AFTERWORD

  “WHAT IS THE END OF FAME? / ’tis but to fill a certain portion of uncertain paper,” said Byron who awoke one morning to find himself famous as well as somewhat tetchy. What he intended to be a wisecrack fits Signatures rather well. The motor of fame is fashion, which is uncertain by definition. Here and now, it’s still not so difficult to turn notoriety into a synonym for fame by setting out to say or to write something shocking – “pushing back the frontiers” as progressive stars are prone to express it, preferably on television. The fate of novels and histories of serious purpose all too often is to become fodder for doctorates written by one specialist for the benefit of another. The Nobel Prize for Literature is supposedly one of civilization’s building blocks but a large number of winners are completely unknown to the general public. I would propose The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations as the model for a critical record of fame. A nucleus of writers survives from one edition of the Dictionary to the next, and together they provide evidence of what the nation thinks of itself at any one time. But many writers feature in one edition only to disappear without trace in subsequent editions. Universal genius is a law unto itself and the uncertainty of fashion is always cruel, but the personalities presented in Signatures at least deserve to be remembered by generations yet unborn.

  INDEX

  The index that appeared in the print version of this title was intentionally removed from the eBook. Please use the search function on your eReading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below.

  Abu Shilbayah, Mahmud: La salaam

  Acton, Harold: More Memoirs of an Aesthete

  Afternoon Sun, The (David Pryce-Jones)

  Aiding and Abetting (Spark)

  Alberto Angelo (Johnson)

  Alexander, Sidney: Marc Chagall

  Alexandria Quartet, The (Durrell)

  Alliluyeva, Svetlana: Twenty Letters to a Friend

  Amis, Kingsley: The Folks That Live on the Hill

  Among Believers (Naipaul)

  An Area of Darkness (Naipaul)

  Anathemata, The (Jones)

  Anatomy of Britain (Sampson)

  Anderson, William: La Vita Nuova (Translation of Dante)

  Annan, Noel: Our Age

  Appeasers, The (Gilbert)

  Arabia, the Gulf and the West (Kelly)

  Arabia and the Isles (Ingrams)

  Arabian Sands (Thesiger)

  Auden, W. H.: Adrian Berry and; Collected Shorter Poems

  Auschwitz and the Allies (Gilbert)

  Bainbridge, Beryl: Injury Time

  Baker, Elliott: The Penny Wars

  Balad of Peckham Rye, The (Spark)

  Barea, Arturo and Ilsa Barea: The Forging of a Rebel

  Bedford, Sybille: A Legacy

  Beer in the Snooker Club (Ghali)

  Beldam Etcetera (Moraes)

  Bellow, Saul: Humboldt’s Gift

  Berenson, Bernard: The Italian Painters of the Renaissance

  Berlin (Grunfeld)

  Berlin, Isaiah: First Love (Translation of Ivan Turgenev)

  Berry, Adrian: The Next 500 Years

  Betjeman, John: Summoned by Bells

  Beyond Belief (Naipaul)

  Biafra Goodbye (Gold)

  Bibesco, Princess Marthe: Le Perroquet Vert

  Bildnisse unserer Epoche (Breker)

  Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (West)

  Bodkin (Midwood)

  Bottle in the Shade, A (Levi)

  Bowles, Paul: Two Years Beside the Strait

  Brahms, Caryl: No Castanets

  Brave New World (Huxley)

  Breker, Arno: Bildnisse unserer Epoche

  Burney, Christopher: The Dungeon Democracy

  Byzantine Honeymoon (Glazebrook)

  Captain Vinegar’s Commission (Glazebrook)

  Carr, Raymond: English Fox Hunting

  Cassab, Judy: Diaries

  Chatham House Version, The (Kedourie)

  Chaucer, Jeff (Robert Conquest): A Garden of Erses

  Chaudhuri, Nirad C.: Thy Hand, Great Anarch!

  Claudius the God (Graves)

  Clayre, Alasdair: A Fire by the Sea

  Closed Circle, The (David Pryce-Jones)

  Collected Poems (Fuller)

  Collected Poems (Graves)

  Collected Shorter Poems (Auden)

  Combelle, Lucien: Péché d’Orgueil

  Comfort at Fifty (Levi)

  Condemned Playground, The (Connolly)

  Connolly, Cyril: Previous Convictions

  Conquest, Robert: The Great Terror

  Constance (Durrell)

  Continent Astray, A (Laqueur)

  Conversations with Stalin (Djilas)

  Country Girls, The (O’Brien)

  Cruelty and Science (Makiya)

  Curriculum Vitae (Spark)

  Dalrymple, Theodore: The Proper Procedure

  Dante the Maker (Anderson)

  Darkness at Noon (Koestler)

  Daudy, Philippe: Les Anglais

  Death of Comedy, The (Segal)

  Decline and Fall (Waugh)

  Diaries (Cassab)

  Diplomacy and Murder in Tehran (Laurence Kelly)

  Djilas, Milovan: Conversations with Stalin

  Doctor Zhivago (Pasternak)

  Don Fernando (Maugham)

  Double Thread, A (Gross)

  Dungeon Democracy, The (Burney)

  Durrell, Lawrence: The Alexandria Quartet; Constance

  Eleni (Gage)

  Elinor Wylie (Olson)

  Elon, Amos: The Israelis: Founders and Sons

  Enemies of Promise (Connolly)

  England and the Middle East (Kedourie)

  English Fox Hunting (Carr)

  English History, 1914-1945 (Taylor)

  Epoch and Artist (Jones)

  Exile and Return (Gilbert)

  Eye of the Beholder, The (Glazebrook)

  Face of Defeat, The (David Pryce-Jones)

  Faith and Power (Lewis)

  Far Cry from Kensington, A (Spark)

  Farewell to Europe (Laqueur)

  Fathers (Gold)

  Fault Lines (David Pryce-Jones)

  Fest, Joachim: Speer: The Final Verdict

  Fine Madness, A (Baker)

  Fine Old Conflict, A (Mitford)

  Fire by the Sea, A (Clayre)

  First Love, Translation of Ivan Turgenev (Berlin)

  Flag on the Island (Naipaul)

  Flight Into Egypt (Elon)

  Flutes of Autumn, The (Levi)

  Folks That Live on the Hill (Amis)

  Forging of a Rebel, The (Barea and Barea)

  For Whom the Bell Tolls (Hemmingway)

  Friend of Kafka, A (Singer)

  Fuller, John: Collected Poems

  Gage, Nicholas: Eleni


  Garden and Streets (Jünger)

  Garden of Erses, A (Chaucer, Robert Conquest)

  Gellhorn, Martha: The Honeyed Peace

  Ghali, Waguih: Beer in the Snooker Club

  Gilbert, Martin: The Second World War

  Ginsberg, Allen

  Girls of Slender Means, The (Spark)

  Glazebrook, Philip: Byzantine Honeymoon

  God That Failed, The (Koestler)

  Going Abroad (Macaulay)

  Gold, Herbert: Biafra Goodbye

  Goldberg, Michel: Namesake

  Good-Bye to All That (Graves)

  Gordievsky, Oleg: Next Stop Execution

  Grant, Michael: Greeks and Romans

  Gravel Ponds, The (Levi)

  Graves, Robert: Collected Poems; The White Goddess

  Great Fortune, The (Manning)

  Great Terror, The (Conquest)

  Greeks and Romans (Grant)

  Greene, Graham

  Gross, John: The New Oxford Book of English Prose

  Grunfeld, Frederic V. Berlin; Prophets Without Honour

  Guerillas (Naipaul)

  Halter, Roman: Roman’s Journey

  Harvest of Snow, The (Conquest)

  Hatfield, Phyllis: Pencil Me In

  Head in the Soup, A (Levi)

  Heart of the Dragon, The (Clayre)

  Helen, Queen of Romania

  Hemmingway, Ernest: For Whom the Bell Tolls

  Histoire de Flore (Revel)

  History of Zionism, A (Laqueur)

  Hobsbawm, Eric

  Holland House (Linda Kelly)

  Honeyed Peace, The (Gelhorn)

  Hons and Rebels (Mitford)

  Humboldt’s Gift (Bellow)

  Hunt for Zerzura, The (Kelly)

  Hurd, Douglas

  Huxley, Aldous: Island

  Ideas and Places (Connolly)

  Ignotus, Paul: Political Prisoner

  Injury Time (Bainbridge)

  In My Father’s Court (Singer)

  Inside the Third Reich (Speer)