Natasha picked up on his underlying unhappiness. She invited him to dinner at Loudoun Road on the following Tuesday. She enlisted the support of Alec Murray, an elegant fashion photographer, and Jocelyn Rickards, a painter and costume designer, two fans of his who she thought would amuse him. He’d told her at Jamie’s, ‘no literary heavy-weights’, and these two were no threat.
Chandler was drunk again at this first visit to Loudoun Road but he assured the company that he never suffered from hangovers, as if this were the problem. Alec and Jocelyn drove him back to the Connaught Hotel.
Next day, in his thank-you note to Natasha, Chandler wove a fantasy around Jocelyn, with whom he’d just had lunch. Far from having taken off her clothes as he’d hoped, she’d ‘outmanoeuvred’ him with an affectionate hug in Bedford Square. He’d gone on to share a few Scotches with another woman whom he’d met on the boat coming over, and in his letter he made another joke about sharing a drink and sharing a bed. Would Natasha like to come to supper with him soon? He had an arrangement with the head waiter at the Connaught so that he was always served the most interesting wines.
All of which sounds like a pass so outrageous that it couldn’t be real. If it had been, my mother wouldn’t have gone, but she was curious. She went, and thereafter they met frequently. Lunch for just the two of them at Boulestin or La Speranza was a rare luxury for her. The only drawback was Chandler’s despair, but for my mother that was an attraction. She saw herself as a saviour of desperate people.
After one meeting at the Connaught, she witnessed Chandler break down in tears of self-pity. She wrote him a letter of support, which he later destroyed. He regretted its loss: ‘it would have been a comfort in bad times to be able to show myself that a greatly adored person once felt about me like that’.
A fortnight later Stephen came back from a party for Louis MacNeice, which had been followed by a broadcast for the French Service of the BBC, and found Chandler on the sofa assuring Natasha what a great genius she was in her music and how she should work harder at it, and that Stephen – Ray turned to him – should be more supportive. As he pursued this theme, Ray said knowingly: ‘Stephen knows quite well what I’m talking about.’
Next day Stephen and Ray went together to the BBC to listen to my mother playing the Mozart C Minor Concerto with the Glasgow Symphony Orchestra. ‘Orch bad’, says Chandler’s diary. That evening Chandler again took up the theme of my father’s lack of appreciation for my mother’s talent. My father, exasperated, wrote in his journal: ‘he has the drunkard’s sense of moral superiority, and his way of finding a wound and rubbing salt monotonously into it’.
This is reconstructed from documents, but I was also present at the time. A memory of Chandler slumped on the sofa comes into focus, smiling good-humouredly, leaning attentively towards my mother. Not that I was old enough to be included in grown-up dinners. I passed the peanuts at cocktail parties – the classic observation-post for the children of writers in the Fifties. Chandler disapproved of children, which only made him more interesting. It was fun to be scowled at and smile back.
Mum took him to a hospital for a check-up. Bottles of Scotch fell out of his pyjamas when she unpacked his bags. When he was asked to leave the Connaught, she helped him to move to a furnished flat on Eaton Square.
Natasha told Stephen: ‘it’s no good dreaming one’s way through life’. The remark disturbed him, but not because Natasha was giving him a warning as to her state of mind. Was she saying that she dreamed of living a different life? Or did she feel that her relationship with Chandler was dragging her into something that depended, on both sides, upon fantasy? If so, Stephen paid no attention. He turned it into a ‘poetic’ thought for the benefit of his diary: what’s the difference between ‘dream’ and ‘vision’?
My mother always saw herself as the pragmatic member of the family, the one with her feet on the ground. But real pragmatists don’t think of themselves as such. They either are or they aren’t. My mother wasn’t. Have you bought the aeroplane tickets, Dad would ask? ‘Yes of course.’ But ‘Yes’ in this case meant she hadn’t, she felt guilty, but she would buy them immediately and Dad would never know. So it would be all right to have told a lie. Which is fine, except then she’d forget to go out and actually buy the tickets.
On 24 July, Chandler came to dinner and refused to stay behind with the men when the women went upstairs to ‘powder their noses’, as was the custom at the time. The men talked downstairs of the railway workers’ strike and the policy of the Trades Union Congress. Back upstairs on the sofa in the piano room, Ray entertained the ladies. ‘Psychologists think neuroses begin in childhood, but I pick up mine as I go along.’ I have a memory of this moment. Chandler slumped so deeply among the pillows and the women he seems part of the upholstery.
He was too much for one person to handle alone. Apart from Natasha and Jocelyn and Alec Murray, there were Alison Hooper (with whom we’d run that race in Portofino), and the novelist Kay Cicellis, and perhaps others. My mother, in the article she wrote about Ray years later, described this group as a ‘shuttle service’, and the expression is typical of her desire to demonstrate her practicality. It suggests something between home nursing and a taxi rank.
In retrospect, she saw what she did for Ray as purely humanitarian, as saving someone from self-destruction. Alison Hooper’s name for her was ‘Stern Daughter of the Voice of God’, from Wordsworth’s ‘Ode to Duty’. According to Alison, Mum was ‘essentially a Cause-girl’, if not at times even ‘a Mother Superior’. She threw herself into the quest of saving Ray with all of her ‘awful power’, wrote Alison, quoting Wordsworth – although perhaps with a friendly topspin.
And was there sex between Natasha and Ray? No, there was not. ‘Stern Daughters of the V. of G. do not go in for affairs with crapulous old men,’ wrote Alison firmly to Chandler’s biographer years later. Instead, there was something more interesting and more complicated: a love affair that existed in each other’s mind, a test, a duel – and since it was preordained that Chandler wanted to die, it was a duel to the death. Thus Mum would be summoned to the Connaught at three in the morning with a message that unless she arrived in half an hour, there’d be ‘a mess like strawberry jam outside on the pavement’. It was comic, but he also meant it; and she’d get out of bed and go.
The Paris office of the Congress for Cultural Freedom had accumulated objections to Irving Kristol over the winter of 1954, and during the following summer they decided to fire him. He suspected that Stephen might have had something to do with this move, ‘for reasons I no longer recollect, and may never have comprehended’. He wasn’t too upset. He was fed up with the pusillanimous Brits and wanted to get back to New York.
Charles Turner, Hansi Lambert, Lucy Lambert, Stephen, Nicky Nabokov and Samuel Barber on the terrace of Hansi’s chalet in Gstaad in the year when we went for a Mediterranean cruise together.
In late July 1955, there was a full meeting of the Congress in London to discuss his replacement. Melvin Lasky came from Berlin, Mike Josselson and François Bondy, the editor of Preuves, came from Paris, with Nicky Nabokov who was in charge of the musical programme of the CCF; then Dwight Macdonald himself, the possible replacement; and, in London already, Irving Kristol – who seems to have been perfectly happy to discuss his replacement – and Stephen.
Of these people Mike Josselson, Nicky Nabokov and Mel Lasky were probably aware that the Congress for Cultural Freedom was subsidized by the CIA. But although this sounds conspiratorial, the line connecting Paris to Washington was elastic. Mike Josselson’s position was that of a European rather than an American. He understood and respected the independence of the intellectuals he was employing. There was no question of telling them what to do. If worse came to worst, someone might have to be replaced, but until that happened he had to be trusted. Nicky Nabokov, for example, was a key link to European music. Without him, it would have been difficult to have organized the big festivals which were the CCF’s showcase
s of Western culture. But he was also hard to control, for his feud with Soviet Russia, and with Russian music, was personal.
Encounter was only one of many magazines which the Congress for Cultural Freedom was sponsoring. Post-colonial Africa, India, the Far East, were all places which were being targeted by communist propaganda, and the CCF needed to support local initiatives providing intellectual resistance; or start such initiatives itself. This could mean anything from giving money to a magazine that was in difficulties, to founding a new one, or starting a project involving a theatre group. These plans could become very detailed. Jennifer Josselson, Mike’s daughter, remembers a discussion during which her father went over a project to build a theatre somewhere in sub-Saharan Africa: ‘if we are building a theatre, let’s put it near a market-place where people will have a better chance of going to it’.
Keeping an eye on the activities of the Paris office was John Hunt, who had been sent out to take over should Josselson succumb to a heart attack, which at times seemed imminent. When he arrived, Hunt had had little experience of the kind of meetings he now attended. His found them stimulating but very chaotic. As his role was that of an observer, he could join in the discussions and make suggestions, but he could not tell the others what they should do.
Regarding the independence of the sixteen or seventeen magazines that the CCF ended up supporting, John Hunt told me recently that they were satisfied if 60 per cent of published articles were in some way pro-American. In the case of Encounter, the proportion was always higher, so there was no question of interfering in the way it was run.
While the others wondered whether Macdonald might be too maverick to be put in charge of the politics of Encounter, Stephen concentrated on his views on literature. ‘My colleagues certainly have one characteristic in common,’ Stephen wrote in his diary after a hot three days of discussions, ‘They are all Philistines. They dislike poetry and distrust everything which has high standards.’ As for Dwight, ‘his knowledge is so patchy, his self-assurance so great’. For instance, one of the things they discussed was whether they should run some articles on contemporary television. Stephen suggested that it would be interesting to write an article about television in Russia. Dwight said, ‘Do you mean to tell me that they have television in Russia?’
The committee felt unable to come to a decision. Dwight was just too unpredictable. As Kristol put it later, ‘Dwight has spent a fruitful life and a distinguished career purposefully being a security risk to just about everyone and everything with reach of his typewriter.’ He was accepted as a ‘roving editor’ for a year.
Ten days later, from 5 to 20 August 1955, my father and I went away as the guests of Hansi Lambert, a Belgian woman from an old banking family related to the French Rothschilds. Hansi kept an important political salon in Brussels at the time. Mum stayed behind with Lizzie while we sailed around the Mediterranean in a long sloop dated 1904. Dad kept an intermittent diary, but he never wrote it up properly, which is a pity as the interaction of the guests was as tense as a who-done-it by Agatha Christie.
Léon Lambert, the son of Hansi, fell in love with Chuck Turner, the friend of Sam Barber, but Chuck wasn’t interested and Sam became irritated. Emile de Staerk, assistant to Paul-Henri Spaak who was one of the founders of the European Union, spent so much time talking to the men that Lady Kitty Farrell got bored with all of them and turned her attention to the captain. The Lamberts found it impossible to stay anywhere for more than a few hours and this in turn annoyed the captain, as the crew could never go off duty. Getting provisions was difficult and the boat had an unusual appetite for water. There was a humiliating moment when at some remote island Cécile de Rothschild’s yacht took their boat’s promised supply of water and they had to wait four hours for more to accumulate. That evening Hansi murmured, ‘We’ve always been the poor relations.’ Which greatly amused the writers and the musicians, whose money problems were of a much humbler kind.
Cyril Connolly was on this boat. I remember him well. Cyril, with his ironic voice that somehow managed to be both neutral and facetious, teased everybody, beginning with himself. Dad’s diary includes Cyril’s running commentary on himself as he took too many grapes for breakfast. It ends with Cyril advising himself out loud to put the skins and pips on Stephen’s plate so that when the Lamberts joined them, they’d think that Stephen was the greedy one.
I remember one devastating remark of Cyril’s. It became one of Dad’s favourite stories, though for some reason he didn’t put it in his diary. Léon, bored with having to listen to the mixture of gossip and idealism from Stephen, Cyril and Sam, said that he had a good mind to give up his bank and sit around for the rest of his life, just talking, like them. Cyril said, ‘Please don’t do that, Léon. If there’s one thing sadder than a banker, it’s a banker without his bank.’
I was only ten, and frequently I got in the way by humming and hopping and fidgeting. Cyril said I was as irritating as a fly, and as flies needed to be swatted, he was going to roll up a magazine and swat me. The only question was which magazine could be spared for this messy task. The Lamberts thought this was very funny, but one day I said something sharp to Cyril and he stopped. He didn’t frighten me. I could see in his small eyes surrounded by fat a nervous child peeking out, hoping not to be rejected.
On the Lambert yacht in a photo taken by my father.
My father gives a more high-minded version of this clash of wills. According to this, Cyril was complaining about a reader of Horizon who’d told him she couldn’t understand his magazine. It seems that I piped up, ‘You should have told her that you make it as clear as you can.’ My father wrote that since my remark was sensible, Cyril treated me thereafter as an adult.
At the very end of the diary, my father writes this:
At Poros, I had a walk with Matthew, in which we had a very interesting conversation. He told me that he had three great worries in his life. I remember two of these, and forget the third. The first worry was that people at his school told him that during the war I had been a Communist, and against England. He wondered whether I could not resolve this problem by giving him a signed document, in which I stated that really I had been a member of the British Secret Service. I told him I had not been a communist during the war, nor a member of the Secret Service. The second worry was about our being in debt. He was afraid that I might die suddenly and leave a lot of debts, which couldn’t be paid, and then they would have nothing to live on, and the television would be taken away.
I mentioned the British Secret Service? Aged ten? Was I already aware of something odd about my father’s background? I remember this conversation, especially the bit about who pays for the TV if Dad dropped dead. But the Secret Service?
The boy who’d made me nervous about my father’s behaviour during the war was called Cunningham. For a while, back at the Hall, he’d become the bane of my life. Whereas in carpentry class Cunningham was making a Wellington bomber, I struggled week after week with a hexagonal teapot-stand. I was jealous, also admiring, and so it was a surprise when he called me out. ‘My father says that your father was a coward in the war. He ran away! What are you going to do about it?’ Boys gathered round. A fight, a fight!
I had no desire to punch Cunningham or be punched back. I reported what he’d said to my father. Dad said mildly, ‘He’s mixing me up with Wystan. Cunningham? I suppose he must be the son of Admiral Cunningham.’ And what had Wystan done in the war that made Cunningham so upset? ‘Oh,’ said Dad vaguely, ‘he just stayed on in America.’
I was entirely on Cunningham’s side. Wystan should have come back and dressed himself in martial khaki. Conduct unworthy of an Englishman. Behaviour incompatible with the standards of the Beano and the Dandy and the Wizard, copies of which I read by torchlight under the sheets.
Over August 1955, while Dad and I were away on the Lamberts’ yacht, Mum prepared for a concert alone in Loudoun Road.
Chandler was attentive, perhaps too much so. My mothe
r was nervous and sometimes she didn’t have time for him. He wrote later: ‘I remember those awful days late last summer when you were breaking yourself in half trying to build a programme and would go to bed exhausted and cry. That was before you knew you were really ill. And I wasn’t allowed to see you or even telephone you, for fear of distracting what little energy you could summon up for your “instrument”.’
She was ill. It was hard to keep going. Whenever she did see Ray, she complained about her relationship with her husband: his spendthrift attitude to money, his impracticality, his infatuations with young men. It was exactly what Ray wanted to hear, as he was fascinated by illness and he loathed homosexuality. A year later he wrote: ‘I think you should have left Stephen long ago, but I have gone into that, and I know one does not always have a free choice. And it is always possible that you are much fonder of him than you have ever admitted to me.’
She also complained about money. When he’d first invited her out, she told him she ‘didn’t have tuppence to her name’. She said she could never hear a knock on the door without a flicker of fear that it might be a creditor with an unpaid bill. It was an anxiety held over from her childhood. Chandler said it was monstrous that she didn’t have her own bank account, and he gave her a cheque so that she could open one. Later it emerged that she’d carried this cheque around in her purse for months without cashing it. This fascinated Chandler. There was something erotic about it: his cheque, her purse.
On 9 September, my mother learned that she had to have an operation – of what kind, I do not know. Chandler wrote in his diary that the day scheduled for this procedure was ‘the fatal day’: 12 December, the first anniversary of the day on which, the previous year, his wife Cissy had died. The coincidence preyed on him.
My father decided that what his wife needed was a holiday; and Chandler was evidently falling to pieces. Maybe the two of them should just go off for a holiday by themselves? Obviously Stephen was exasperated. He probably needed the house to be empty so that he could work; or maybe he was just bored with Chandler. But he also hated illness, especially in women. Meanwhile Natasha wanted to save Ray, and Ray thought he was going to save Natasha.
A House in St John's Wood Page 15