Conversation when it was just us at home was often full of gaps. If I said something good, my father would make a note of it – ‘Ah, that’s very interesting’ – but then the subject would grind to a halt. He’d bring it up at the next Big House supper: ‘Matthew says.’ Well, it was flattering, and if challenged I could go on with whatever I’d intended to say. But what was so ephemeral about conversation at our dinner table that it could acquire substance only at Michael Astor’s?
Over time, as I crept up the classes at Westminster and joined the History Sixth, I learned how to argue at table. I remember one Sunday lunch at the Big House tackling an academic from Oxford about a controversy between A. J. P. Taylor and Hugh Trevor-Roper as to when Hitler had intended to start the Second World War. One said 1939 and the other said 1942, I can’t remember which. I did well on this occasion, but the more the academic looked at me with respect, the more I despised myself. I was reading his mind as to where the argument was going, and giving it back to him just a moment sooner. I knew I was bluffing.
Selwyn Lloyd, the Foreign Secretary, was sitting next to Michael at the other end of the table. In a deferential moment when we’d all turned to him to listen, he said that when he’d been appointed minister, he had no idea where the Foreign Office was. He’d had to ask a policeman. The company laughed. The old Etonians at the table recognized the patrician quality of not caring about power in itself – though perfectly ready to wield it if it turned up.
Michael didn’t know quite how to handle Lloyd. After lunch he said to him, ‘I can’t make up my mind whether I want to go upstairs and take a nap, or bring up a shotgun and give those pheasants on the lawn a bloody great shock.’ Lloyd laughed politely and said he thought he’d just lie on the sofa and read a book. The muted public-school hint was that, actually, he’d be working.
On 15 June 1959, Selwyn Lloyd signed a Foreign Office circular summarizing the communist front organizations in the West, and also their ‘free-world counterparts’, which, as he points out matter-of-factly, ‘are less familiar’. It’s an extraordinary document because it says, in effect, that the Russians have their front organizations, and we have ours; and they are evenly balanced. This presupposes a major strategic decision going back many years.
Paragraph 9 discusses the work of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. It reports without comment: ‘The organization is largely American-financed.’
The circular says that, with regard to the many international publications or organizations with which the FO is involved, it was necessary to remain discreet. Behind-the-scenes advice, without prodding, just a hint, no more than that. ‘It is essential that any such assistance should be so given as to avoid the impression that these organizations are consciously used as “Western” fronts; their strength lies in their very independence of such political ties, in contrast with their rigidly controlled Communist counterparts.’
This circular was reissued by R. A. Butler, a later Foreign Secretary, in January 1964. It points out that with the increasing international interest in the fate of political prisoners, some of the work hitherto covered by the IRD was now beginning to be taken over by independent organizations, such as Amnesty International. There’s a hint that the work of the IRD was now no longer necessary, in a world where information was increasingly accessible and awareness of injustice was increasing.
Over the summers of 1959 and 1960, my father sent me to Germany to learn German.
The first of these visits was to the family of his old friend Wolfgang Clemen, to whom he’d been introduced by Curtius in 1931. The Clemen family spent the summers in a huge house on the Chiemsee south of Munich. Wolfgang’s son Harald is still a friend of mine. As a child Harald wore Lederhosen – than which nothing is more krautisch. You wear them with a swagger, hands in pockets, swinging the shoulders as well as the feet, and you walk in a lumbering gait that is unstoppable. He was learning English, and what I heard of the German language consisted of flaming rows between him and his siblings, accompanied by the scrapings of a string quartet where the professor behind closed doors played second violin with his friends. Beethoven, of course. But not the late ones. They were too emotionally challenging, he said.
The following year I was sent into the deepest woods, I know not where. My hosts were called Erpenbeck and the old lady of the house was an ex-Nazi. Had been to jail for it, someone in the village told me admiringly. She loved nature and hunting and she hated her son-in-law, who was a gamekeeper. The disputes in that house were muted but tense. I think the gamekeeper must have been a Social Democrat, so thoroughly did Frau Erpenbeck despise him. She was in charge of everything. The gamekeeper’s wife was frightened of her mother and she chewed her food quickly in small blonde bites.
Frau Erpenbeck liked me, because I’m tall and blue-eyed. She took me hunting in the wood, screwing into the barrel of a hefty twelve-bore a short .22 rifle barrel with which I had no chance of hitting anything smaller than a house. We’d lie in wait for rabbits. Frau Erpenbeck panted behind me as cigarettes filthied the air in her lungs and alcohol pickled the food in her guts and then pop, another rabbit was missed. At the edge of the wood, under the oaks, the furry mounds that moved in the twilight would lie still for a moment then the ears would go up again and they’d go on feeding.
A young French boy joined us. Though only my age, he was in a bad way. His brother was off fighting in Algeria, and this boy knew all about the tortures going on in the name of Algérie Française. Wires were attached to your zeb, he pointed out this bit of anatomy on my body, and electricity was passed through you until you did whatever the army wanted you to do. Or alternatively you took a bedside lamp – like that one over there – and you stripped it down so that the prongs of positive and negative were visible and you shoved it against the zizi of a woman, if she was a woman. He was not old enough for military service but he would be soon.
The Erpenbecks kept a strange girl not much older than myself who worked in the stables. She was called Erika and we used to go riding together. She had mousy hair and no sense of humour and Frau Erpenbeck harassed her. One evening in the muddy courtyard of the farm I saw her carrying a goose. Its legs were tied. She put it on the ground and found a stick, then she picked it up by the legs and its neck curved up and it tried to look at her. Erika started tapping it on the head, not hard or viciously but with persistence. After about twenty taps the goose passed out. She put it on the ground, picked up its head and, using the same tapping movement and small knife, she made a hole in its skull. Then she held up the goose again and blood and brains seeped out gently on to the ground.
I thought it was the most erotic thing I’d ever seen. Erika wore a tight pleated dirndl like my mother’s.
One morning I went off by myself. I found a cool stream and a bank of sand and I set up a high-jump with sticks I cut with my penknife. I was jumping and singing and enjoying myself and time was passing happily, then my foot got caught on one of the upright prongs and I came down with a bang, slap on my back.
I was winded and frightened and I thought I would be crippled for ever. I looked up at a lozenge of sky over the Schwarzwald framed by fluffy trees and wondered, Do my parents love me? What have I done to be exiled to this bleak place? What are they doing as I’m lying here? Flying around the world being grand, while all that’s left to me is the sodden bank of a stream in the Land of the Nasties?
I knew my parents had had rotten childhoods. Maybe they just didn’t know how to bring up children? It’s not that children need much, I thought. A cuddle or two, a pat on the head as they’re doing their homework, a cheerful remark as you pass through their room, a hunk of bread and jam on the lawn in the afternoon.
I missed my family. But missing them was pointless. I lay there quietly thinking: No, my back is not broken. I can get up. But I went on lying there for a while wondering what on earth my father had wanted me to learn from the Erpenbeck experience. And what was this thing about Germany?
Coming back
to England I had to spend a couple of hours in Munich Hauptbahnhof waiting for a connection. I remember staring at several huge Bavarians drinking flagons of beer, standing by upturned barrels on top of which sat vast white radishes with their leaves still on, like green wigs. The men had greasy leathery Edelweiss sewn to their braces, felt hats with a pheasant tail-feather sticking out, and their knees were bare and they were fat. I thought, Cor! This is a country with muscle.
A major fight with my father took place after I’d come back.
We were looking at a TV documentary on the death camps in Germany. I said that if I’d been a fifteen-year-old when Hitler came to power, with no family background and no education, I probably would have listened to him and become a prison-camp guard and enjoyed murdering people, like anybody else. I was thinking partly of the matter-of-factness of Erika and the goose, partly of the insanity of expecting people to behave well in war. Homer was a glamorous cloak sitting on top of terrible things; yet sometimes these terrible things were also marvellous. I wasn’t 100 per cent sure that I would have become a death-camp guard, but I thought I could see an area where Hitler and Homer met. I wanted to argue that we are all of us receptacles of good and evil. Glory and horror are indivisible.
My father took it as a rejection of everything he’d ever stood for. This was not the reason why I’d been sent to Germany, to come back with a soft spot for the Nazis. He went wild with rage – which I suppose was my punitive intention, after having nearly killed myself high-jumping by a Bavarian stream. But I didn’t have the words to articulate my thoughts. The evening ended with violent emotions and slammed doors.
19
WITHOUT BANQUETS
DWIGHT MACDONALD WAS replaced by Melvin Lasky, who became the American co-editor of Encounter halfway through 1959. I don’t remember meeting the other editors of Encounter but I have a strong memory of Lasky.
The offices of Encounter consisted of a few rooms at the top of Panton House, a building on a side street between Piccadilly Circus and Trafalgar Square. From the window of my father’s office one could see Horatio Nelson on top of his column, larger than life and vaguely inhuman in the weathered darkness that lay beneath his wedge-shaped hat. He stood on roofs of slate that glittered like the sea. I could stare at him for a long time from inside this cluttered room before turning back to the tin filing cabinets and the overloaded desk.
On the wall hung a lithograph given to Stephen by Jean Cocteau. It showed Baudelaire looking longingly at a sack of money. The sack had wings and was flying away and the piercing look of Baudelaire was unable to stop it.
Across a corridor the office organizer, Margot Walmsley, kept charge of a much neater room. She was ash-blonde and fluffy and when she became flustered, she stammered. When years later Mum and I learned that she worked for British Intelligence, all we could do was laugh. It was so unexpected, yet so obvious. If the CIA was running something in England, British Intelligence would have had to participate.
Melvin Lasky’s office lay between Margot’s and Dad’s. Lasky was short, with a hard belly held in check by a waistcoat. His nostrils were large and he, like Kristol and Macdonald, wore a goatee. Behind him on the wall hung a dozen photos of himself next to various important people, and they also had goatees. Some of these photos were plausible: Lasky with Sidney Hook, for instance. I didn’t know anything about Hook other than that he was as near to being a communist as it was possible to be while simultaneously loathing all communist regimes. But Lasky with Leon Trotsky? Lasky with Sigmund Freud? The cumulative impression was that they were all fake. I think Dad and I laughed about this over lunch at the Asiatique, a cheap Chinese restaurant off Trafalgar Square. It was surely childish to hang these things on the wall, we thought.
The duel between Lasky and Spender had elements of snobbery on my father’s part. At one point he told a colleague that the trouble with Lasky, as with Macdonald and Kristol, is that they all came out of ‘the Bronx Box’. He was referring to the common background of Trostkyite radicalism which, in England, counted for nothing. But there’s also the suggestion that Lasky wasn’t altogether a gentleman.
Lasky was certainly no fool, but he and my father were playing to a different set of rules. Mel had no use for Stephen’s wishy-washy liberalism. He knew more about contemporary history, he was a fast and shrewd journalist and he paid attention to every piece of information that came out of the Soviet world. He could be arrogant and hard to work with and he made no secret of the fact that he thought the ‘creative’ side of Encounter was nothing but window-dressing for the serious business of writing articles on politics. ‘Elizabeth Bowen and all that crap’ was what he thought about the uses of literacy.
Yet the differences between Spender and Lasky only strengthened the total effect of Encounter. If a short story set in London’s bohemia appeared next to an article by the young Labour policy-maker Tony Crosland on the need for Labour to set itself new goals, the effect was to consolidate the Englishness of Encounter. London’s brand of socialism wasn’t as far to the left as that of the north of England, but it had a powerful tradition of its own. (Think of Charles Dickens.) But, come to that, British socialism had nothing to do with the United States. The mood of Encounter was British, which meant that the American political influence was left in the background.
Both Irving Kristol and Mel Lasky later boasted that they’d helped to push the British Labour Party towards the centre. But it takes two to tango. The Gaitskell wing of the Labour Party knew that Labour would never win elections if its radical base was not toned down. Encounter was the perfect magazine for Tony Crosland’s articles.
Lasky, trained in the ‘box’ or boxing-ring of City College, used the same ruthless tactics that the old American communists had used to infiltrate left-wing organizations in New York before the war: the interminable meeting, the overruled decision and the suppressed minute. Perhaps he expected Stephen to recognize this elaborate game and join in. The fact that he didn’t merely proved to Lasky that Spender was a weakling.
In a letter to Reynolds written in 1960, Stephen described how Mel worked.
What Melvin Lasky does is quite simply to accept so much material that there is no room in which to print most of it and I am reduced to having to write to people saying we cannot take anything. He also does not tell me what he accepts, and usually I learn about it weeks later. I am protesting as hard as I can, but conversations with him are almost impossible. He simply filibusters if you protest about anything, wastes hours going over every small point, and refuses ever to admit that he knows what you are talking about. He is the most wriggly person I have ever met.
A year later he wrote again to Reynolds:
I am getting to the stage of really detesting Lasky, who is the kind of person, clever, devious, philistine, whom I find it almost impossible to deal with … There is his endless commissioning of things without my knowledge, and the difficulty I therefore have ever to get things I have chosen or suggested (and got him to agree to) with the magazine. If ever I complain to the Congress they pretend to sympathise and perhaps do say something to Lasky. But he is in fact their man, being on their committees for deciding the projects of the Congress, and that sort of thing. Added to all this Josselson, the key man and father figure of the Congress has had two strokes, adores Lasky, and would probably have another stroke if I said what I really think. Above all, of course, they worship success. To them to say that we have a duty not to accept things and then not use them, or not to keep writers waiting 18 months before something is published – that we really have a responsibility to literature, which is writers – is pious cant.
In June 1962, Stephen wrote to Auden saying that unfortunately he’d lost Wystan’s recent translations from Brecht. I can imagine Lasky finding these on Dad’s desk at the Encounter office and just dumping them in the bin. Lasky hated Brecht. One of his greatest journalistic scoops on Der Monat had been to challenge Brecht to write an article critical of the Soviet Union, in answe
r to an article by Lasky criticizing the United States. Lasky published his. Brecht didn’t reply, and Lasky left the page empty with an editorial note saying they were still waiting for Brecht’s article.
In October 1959, a few months after Engaged in Writing was published, Stephen received a letter from Boris Pasternak. It was handwritten, and in English – a careful letter. It was clearly an overture of some kind.
Ostensibly Pasternak was commenting on some Encounter articles about his novel Dr Zhivago. But he went out of his way to mention that certain lines from an early poem by Spender had always meant a great deal to him. It was wonderful for Stephen to hear this. ‘The idea that Pasternak knew these lines, and had perhaps carried them round in his head for twenty five years, really thrilled me, more than any review I have ever read. I think the parrotlike way in which people say there is no “communication” nowadays is rubbish really; communication is having the faith that if you do your utmost someone somewhere does and will understand this and sometime somewhere you will know it.’
A correspondence ensued, though Stephen found it hard to keep things simple. He was besieged by Russian specialists advising him what to say. ‘I have received so much advice from Pasternak experts that I almost wish I hadn’t got into all this.’
Towards the end of the first letter, Pasternak had written: ‘My situation is worse, more unbearable and endangered than I can say or you think of.’ This wasn’t rhetoric. It was the truth. Nobody in the West could imagine the claustrophobia of a society in which nothing could be discussed and the penalties for non-conformity, if expressed in public, were so severe.
Lasky wanted to rush this into print and create a ‘stir’, but Stephen hesitated. He did not want Pasternak to get into trouble. Indeed, the letters were only published after Pasternak’s death in May 1960. Pasternak’s heirs immediately disowned them, and Stephen was appalled, but just as he was about to publish an apology he received a message through the Russian grapevine that Pasternak had wanted them to be published. It was just that nobody could ever have said so, officially.
A House in St John's Wood Page 23