On 14 October 1962, in the classic pose of a public-school boy after lunch, legs straight out from a leathery armchair, I picked up a newspaper and saw on the front page that Kennedy had threatened Khrushchev with atomic war unless he recalled some ships carrying Russian missiles to Cuba.
I was horrified. I’d paid no attention to the Bay of Pigs fiasco, I had little interest in unilateral disarmament, I’d gone on only one ‘ban the bomb’ march and I disliked Bertrand Russell. I’d dismissed the subject from my head, for the simple reason that it would never happen. Politicians would never dare take such a risk. Yet here we were, on the brink of the smouldering pit.
For me this was the beginning of the Sixties. I was never an ‘easy rider’ or a counter-culture protester, but when Kennedy gave his ultimatum I thought: Gambling with the end of the world is dumb, this man should not be in charge of a government. The hero of that dreadful confrontation was never, for me, Kennedy. The hero was plump, occasionally foolish, even though ruthless, Nikita Khrushchev.
This did not mean I automatically supported Russia from that moment on, but it did mean I was an early convert to one of the great illusions of the Sixties: where power is involved, there’s nothing to chose between one side and the other. There is just one System, and it incorporates all of them – all the leaders, all the manipulators of manifold destinies. But, for my father and everyone around him, Kennedy was the great white hope of liberal democracy. I could not say to him: Politicians like Kennedy are not fit to wield power. It wasn’t serious. Yet the thought refused to fade. It inhibited me from talking to him thereafter about politics.
Decades later, I received confirmation that my gut reaction hadn’t been as foolish as I’d assumed. In Venice, I happened to sit next to a diamond merchant who’d formerly worked in the Kennedy administration. I mentioned my reaction to the Cuban missile crisis; and he said Yes, I was right to have been terrified. His job at that time had been to establish an alternate chain of command for all the key government positions, down to forty levels below the President. He told me that Kennedy had prepared his country for a first-strike loss of a hundred million people.
I thought of what Dad had told me about Tom Driberg and asked my stranger in a Venetian restaurant: ‘Wasn’t there anybody in Washington who could phone Moscow and head things off?’ He said, ‘No, there wasn’t. You’d be amazed how little communication there was at government level. We’ve been meeting secretly ever since. We need to go through the whole thing again and again and see what went wrong. People on both sides still break into a cold sweat’, said the diamond merchant casually, ‘at how close we came to ending the world.’
22
A NICE LITTLE NICHE
THE WINTER TERM of 1962 meant getting into Oxford. It was harder for me than for most of my friends in the Upper Sixth because at this point I was confused. My love-life was ahead of those of my friends but my ability to concentrate was shot to pieces as a result.
In those days each college set its own exam. First was Christ Church, which reserved a number of scholarships for Westminster boys. Instead of letting me read up to the last minute, the day before the exams Maro insisted we go to not one but two films, afternoon and evening, in order to make me ‘relax’. And I had to smoke a cigar after dinner. Next day, I sat the exam in the gym at Westminster feeling sick. The silence and the race against the clock just seemed silly.
A fortnight later in the interview at Christ Church, they asked me if I’d accept a place instead of a scholarship. One of the dons was yawning. He’d probably been up all night glossing Euripides. Another seemed to have been felled by a catatonic depression. I looked round and decided I didn’t like any of them, so I said, ‘No.’
Stephen wrote in his diary:
Suddenly I realised that I wanted him very much to go to Oxford, that it is an élite, that his friends Conrad Asquith and Philip Watson are going there, and that if he doesn’t he will be left behind by the best members of his own generation. I felt this specially driving into Chipping Norton to get the Sunday papers. It is a thought that runs contrary to my principles and even my sympathies, but I realised that I thought of my Oxford contemporaries as in some way superior beings. Going there makes one enjoy such conversation and exchange of ideas in circumstances of easy companionship and comparative leisure with the best contemporaries of one’s generation, during their most formative years.
Next stop was Merton, where we had to stay for three days while we wrote our papers. Oxford was cold and bells rang all around us every fifteen minutes. It was a bad winter and heaps of snow turned black with diesel fumes stood endlessly on the pavements, like the grotty graves of scholars. A neurotic boy kept me up all night saying how miserable he was in Scotland. In the interview, I said that I wanted to become a painter and they said, ‘Why not start now?’ The Scottish lad got a scholarship, I flunked.
In the car driving down the Haymarket, Dad told us that I had to concentrate on getting into Oxford. I said I wanted to become a painter. He lost his temper. We got out of the car and Maro tried to quench my hot tears as I blinked up at the billboards of Albert Finney starring as Martin Luther in John Osborne’s play.
Third stop, New College. By this time my father was in a turmoil. I was not to say that I wanted to paint. I was to say I was very interested in English Literature. ‘You have to show them that you’d be a nice person to teach.’ Freddie Ayer was asked to coach me in how to take an interview. He was kind. He was also having an affair with Mougouch at the time, which meant he was interested in the situation. He told me to keep eye contact and answer clearly – it really wasn’t all that difficult.
At my New College interview I was asked by John Bayley what I thought of Walter Pater, and I could manage an answer. I could ‘burn with a hard and gem-like flame’, at least on that occasion. Finally, I was offered a place.
By this time it was mid-January 1963. I felt humiliated. My mother had obviously arranged what she used to call ‘a three-line whip of friends’. What was the point of proving oneself on these terms? Maybe I should have failed five straight exams from December until May by waving my paintbrush in front of those carbuncular professors?
The offer of a place came with a proviso: Matthew must do something about his languages. My mother devised a plan to send me to France to improve my French. I avoided taking a decision and hid with Maro in a flat near Barons Court that she’d just moved into, sharing with Bimba MacNeice and Eliza Hutchinson. Bimba was the daughter of Louis MacNeice, so she was part of the brigade of poetic offspring. It was a great flat. Bimba’s room was wedge-shaped, like the prow of the ship about to sail out of London towards the West Country. Food, conversation, books, sex. Unfortunately, I didn’t bother to tell my mother that’s where I was. I’d assumed she knew. It wasn’t hard to guess. I made a wooden bed for the Pirelli mattress Maro had just bought and painted a small canvas of the roofs of the Queen’s Tennis Club outside the window.
At the end of January, my father wrote a savage letter to Mougouch.
‘I feel I simply must consult you about money. Since Matthew left school I have left his income exactly as it was, namely one pound per week.’ He was prepared to subsidize my stay in France as soon as it materialized. But ‘as far as I can make out he is living as before in the flat of Maro … We have never been told by him that he intended living there, or living separately from us. If he had wanted a room alone we would have been understanding about it and helped him to get one. But I don’t see how we could have financed this arrangement.’
If they intended to live together, he wrote, then Matthew and Maro should pay their own way. ‘It might be quite good for them if they are going to cohabit to realize what the responsibilities of doing this are – that they should support themselves.’ Matthew ought to be in the South of France by now. ‘I am just not going to pay for situations which are presented to me as faits accomplis.’
Here again I hear my mother’s voice speaking through my father. Lef
t to himself he would have realized he was being absurd – an Uncle Alfred complaining about the youth of today. But if my mother complained enough, he’d give in and become a funnel for her anger.
Twice, my father wrote that Mougouch was not to show this letter to us, but she ignored these instructions and handed it over to Maro with one of her grand gestures: make of this what you can. Maro merely read it and put it away. She took it as a straightforward message from Natasha: my mother didn’t want us to live together.
I wondered if I hadn’t hit upon the one thing that would irritate my parents: domestic bliss. If I’d run away to Buenos Aires with a sailor, my father would have understood. If I’d begun to hang out at the Colony Room with Francis Bacon and drink all night, he’d have sympathized, because this was the ‘lower depths’, and therefore creative. If I’d starred in a porno movie shot in a cellar in Soho, he would have been secretly amused, because it would have reminded him of his experiences around the docks of Hamburg when he was young. But happy straight coupledom? No, not that!
At the time I didn’t know about Dad’s obsession with Rimbaud’s ‘derangement of the senses’, but I knew that he hated property and was helpless domestically. The difference between us wasn’t trivial. There was some world-view involved. He thought that art needed a state of permanent unsettlement. I thought – we thought – that houses had their own needs and virtues, so did the streets, and also and more serenely the beaches. Art was in there somewhere, not an inevitable by-product of tidiness but as the flowering of analogy among objects that felt happy with their own weight.
In 1962, the World Marxist Review published an article by Ernst Henri entitled ‘Who Financed Anti-Communism?’ He revealed that the financial backers of the Congress for Cultural Freedom were the Ford Foundation and the United States government. This first article prompted the Irish diplomat Conor Cruise O’Brien to write a hostile review of the 100th number of Encounter. From this moment on, my father’s relationship with Encounter became increasingly equivocal.
On one of my father’s visits to New York at that time, Jason Epstein warned him about the rumours that were floating around in the wake of these articles. The CIA is involved in your life, he said, as tactfully as possible. As Epstein told me recently: ‘All your father said was, “Oh,” in that way of his.’
They were having lunch at the Périgord restaurant, just a couple of blocks from the office of the Farfield Foundation. This entity, owned by Julius Fleischman – his friends called him Junkie – was one of the official backers of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Many New York intellectuals were sceptical. ‘We strongly suspected that the Farfield Foundation, which we were told supported the Congress, was a filter for State Department or CIA money,’ as Diana Trilling later put it. The title of a book of her essays, We Must March My Darlings, suggests that Diana was cheerfully cynical about left-wing politics.
After lunch, Stephen walked uptown to the Farfield office and talked to Jack Thompson, the man in charge. He was told that there was no truth whatsoever in the rumours. Then Stephen strolled back down to Epstein’s offices and told him what Thompson had said. And that, Epstein told me, was the end of the story.
Epstein liked Spender. ‘A sweet man, and very bright.’ All the same: ‘I always thought that he couldn’t have been that innocent.’
Jack Thompson had been an instructor at Columbia University. He was an expert on prosody and a friend of Robert Lowell. Then Lionel Trilling, Diana’s husband, obtained a job for him at the Farfield Foundation. It’s confusing – if I may cut a long story short. Trilling was supposed to be the great liberal critic of his time, yet many of the neo-cons of the future came from his circle.
I am not a conspiracy theorist and my book can do nothing to calculate the damage done by the CIA’s plot to turn world culture into an instrument of American foreign policy. I am very interested, on the other hand, in the question of who knew what at any given time, because this is a social question. In the USA, the plot involved the universities, the literary journals, the directors of foundations and congresses, the theatre world and the art world. How much was known, or at least guessed, in New York at that time? At those cocktail parties, did everyone know what position his neighbour represented? Was there some overlap between the intellectuals and the intelligence services, as there was in London?
When the American Committee for Cultural Freedom was in one of its perpetual crises about money, its Chairman Norman Thomas was overheard to say, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll ring up Allen.’ Meaning Allen Dulles, head of the CIA. A thousand dollars arrived in the post soon afterwards – perhaps not from CIA funds, for Dulles was a rich man and a personal friend of Thomas since their university days. Diana Trilling thought the money came from the CIA, ‘but none of us, myself included, protested’.
I asked Jason Epstein whether anyone in New York knew Cord Meyer, the man within the CIA who was in charge of cultural affairs. Meyer had begun his career admirably, working for three years with the United World Federalists to consolidate world peace by creating an agreement between the United States and Russia. Only when he realized, at the San Francisco Conference of 1948, that the Russians were using these meetings for the purpose of propaganda did he change his mind. (It was a trajectory similar to that of Christopher Mayhew in England at the same time.)
Epstein spoke to me as if Meyer was someone he’d occasionally talked to, but I had the impression that they did not share the same common ground as existed among a similar circle of people in London. All power in England, political cultural and financial, is concentrated in the capital, but in the United States there’s New York and there’s Washington and the usual social overlap is not so frequent. However sympathetic Meyer may have been, he was not accessible. Yet, although Epstein’s sense of outrage at the manipulation of culture has, if anything, increased over the years, his sense of recrimination for those personally involved has diminished. The problems of government are huge. Those in charge do the best they can. ‘He himself I am sure was a well-meaning, rather simple-minded guy, as I understand it. He must have thought he was doing something useful, the CIA … I can see why he might have done it innocently, without thinking it through.’
Back in London, my father wondered whether he shouldn’t resign from Encounter. The 100th issue would provide the perfect occasion – with a cover made for it by Henry Moore, obtained by Stephen. Instead, an alternative financing was arranged through Cecil King, the newspaper magnate. Both editors stayed in place; and King got on well with Lasky. Meanwhile Stephen encouraged his friend Frank Kermode to take over his own role.
I remember that at one Sunday lunch in London at this time Richard Wollheim asked my father who actually paid for Encounter. ‘Well, that’s the mysterious thing,’ was Dad’s answer. The backing had been found by Malcolm Muggeridge. ‘Of all people,’ said Dad. Muggeridge was an eccentric author who’d become passionately anti-Soviet during a trip to Russia in the Thirties, where he’d witnessed an artificial famine in the Ukraine created to force peasants into collective farms. ‘Malcolm just said, “Leave it to me,” and in a matter of days, there the money was.’ My father told this as a funny story of no consequence.
Richard Wollheim was a man of powerful but unpredictable opinions. For instance he loathed Parma and adored Padova – or perhaps it was the other way round. He was head of the Philosophy Department at London University, his political views were usually to the left, he’d worked in Field Intelligence in the war and he was fascinated by the Encounter story. At this dramatic moment, he also was asked if he’d like to become a co-editor with Stephen. He looked through the accounts and turned the job down. Years later, I tried to ask him about it. He just smiled. We were out of England by then. He looked around our garden surrounded by olive trees and said, ‘It makes a lot of sense.’ When I asked him what he meant, he just nodded and smiled and said, ‘Just take it from me, it makes a lot of sense.’
Painting a landscape in the style of Cézanne at
the Château Noir, 1961.
In the middle of February 1963, I went off to the South of France with Conrad Asquith, who’d landed a place at Christ Church in hurdle one. We planned to live in Marseilles.
At lunch at Chapel Street shortly before we left, Paddy Leigh Fermor asked whether we knew what we were letting ourselves in for in choosing Marseilles. What if we were accosted by some ‘Apaches’? I said I didn’t know what an Apache was. ‘Come on, Mougouch, let’s show Matthew how an Apache gets his girl.’ They stood up, Mougouch perhaps reluctantly. Paddy tipped out the bread from a wickerwork basket and put it on his head, tilting it forward so that it covered his eyes. Then he stuck a fag on his lower lip and turned to Mougouch: ‘Viens, môme!’ He started pulling her this way and that. ‘Gently, Paddy,’ said Mougouch laughing. ‘You’re going to break me.’ I thought: An Apache routine would be unthinkable at Loudoun Road, and yet Mum thinks of Paddy as one of her oldest friends.
Marseilles turned out to be cold and hard, so we found a room outside Aix-en-Provence at the Château Noir, a big house once used as a studio by Paul Cézanne. The surrounding landscape still held many reminders of paintings by Cézanne: the pine outside my bedroom window, the shimmering trees going up the hill to the quarry of Bibémus, where he’d also painted. I tried to emulate Cézanne: green on green with short sharp strokes, sitting in a path among the pines where the sunlight never kept still. I’d be joined by our landlord, who pretended he was Cézanne’s illegitimate son. Once he looked over my shoulder and said, ‘Ouai, les Anglais sont toujours bon à faire les épinards.’ The English have always been good at painting spinach.
Maro came out for Easter. I abandoned Cézanne and painted two large cheerful images of her in the style of Matisse. We moved to another room in the same Château Noir, where the tachiste master Tal-Coat had worked two years previously. His paint-marks were still visible on the walls. And M. Tessier, the landlord, brought to our attention the fact that André Masson lived down the road towards Le Tholonet.
A House in St John's Wood Page 28