by Mark Mazower
CHAPTER TEN
André
Max’s silence hid many kinds of secrets, not only political. In early 1920, when he escaped the Bolsheviks and returned to London, he had not yet made the acquaintance of Frouma Toumarkine, the woman who would become his wife and Dad’s mother. Nevertheless, he already had an eleven-year-old son awaiting him in London. His name was André.
The black sheep of the family, Dad’s older half brother was a shadowy and constantly shifting presence who was all but invisible to the Mazowers for most of his life, flitting in and out of Oakeshott Avenue in the early days, never saying where he had come from or where he was going, a man so absent from the record as it was passed down to us that I have been able to find only two or three photographs of him, one of these on the jacket of a book. I never met him and cannot say with any assurance what he looked like, how he dressed, what kind of taste he had in the things that count. For a long time I was not completely sure even when he was born, or got married, or when and where he died. Trying to understand where he came from and where he went has felt, and still feels, a bit like chasing a ghost.
André’s life was from its outset one of wandering and metamorphosis. By the time he could read, he had lived in at least five places. In the course of his ninety-five years, he went through three or four nationalities, changed his name officially at least once, and wrote under at least one name more. The idea of the family, which was fundamental for Dad, seems for André to have been for much of his life something to escape. To us children, he was scarcely part of our world at all, nothing more than the name of someone we learned later on had figured in Dad’s childhood but who never materialized or left the slightest trace on our way of life apart from a single book that he had written on Spain that always sat on the living-room shelf. Or at least so we thought. But as I look into it more closely, guided by the reminiscences Dad once shared with me—and I remember it was not a topic he wanted to dwell on because I had to persist and keep bringing him back to it—it strikes me now that in searching for André what I am really trying to flesh out is not so much the real André, whoever he might have been, as the absent figure who defined in Dad’s mind the kind of man he resolved never to become. The occasional references to him that we heard were not positive. But children, who can be so curious about the world, also have a capacity to take things without question. We never thought to ask what had happened to André or why. Was it that we detected subliminally some sadness or pain that was best kept out of sight?
I once consulted a booksellers’ search engine to see what would come up under his name. “André Mazower” revealed nothing, which was a disappointment but not really a surprise. Under “André Marling,” the name he had adopted during the war, there were several copies for sale of the book I knew about, Spanish Fare, a set of sketches of life that he had published in the early 1960s when he had been living in Madrid. But then, at the end of the listings, came something else:
Civiltà—Number 1
André Marling (Andrei Krylienko)
1987: Short-lived, 1 issue only. Journal privately printed for private distribution. Anti-Semitic sentiments. Traditional Catholicism.
Further research suggested that an “Andrei Krylienko” or “Krilenko”—he seems to have used both spellings—was also the author of an anti-Semitic tract called The Red Thread that appears to have circulated among New World Order conspiracy theorists in the United States. Its publisher, Omni, a California-based press, has been described as “a leading purveyor of radical traditionalist Catholic materials, including a cornucopia of rabidly anti-Semitic and conspiratorial writings.” The Red Thread is held in only two libraries: WorldCat—the online database of libraries around the world—categorizes it as “controversial literature.” When a copy came up for sale in a Midlands bookshop specializing in the far right, I bought it. Spanish Fare sat prominently on our bookshelf in the living room but Dad had never mentioned anything else that André had written, let alone something of this sort. I think he had known nothing about it.
When I also found copies of what seems to have been André’s first pamphlet, Money and the Modern World, which had been published in 1969 by an obscure London-based press called the Plain-Speaker Publishing Company, an entire political milieu began to take shape in my mind. Plain-Speaker’s authors included exiled Russian monarchists, sympathizers with General Franco, and other counterrevolutionaries. They tended to be for white Rhodesia and what remained of the British Empire, against immigration from the former colonies, and—to judge from the in-house journal—were viscerally opposed to what they called race mixing even while denying that this made them racists. They were to a man anticommunists and many of them were obsessed with history and where and why it had gone wrong. Hatred of Freemasonry was ubiquitous. And of course there were the Jews: Hitler had, according to one author, apparently been the puppet of a small cabal of Jewish masterminds who had tricked him into declaring war on Russia. It was like an extreme version of the kind of paranoid fantasizing that had gripped the imaginations of some Nazis between the wars. Only this was postwar England and the Plain-Speaker’s publishing address was the residence of George Knupffer, the son of a White Russian officer who had settled in placid Chiswick in southwest London and made his living as an inventor of oil-fired boilers while publishing screeds against world conspiracy and memorials to the deposed monarchs of Eastern Europe. He was known to MI5, which liked to keep an eye on people like him. In publishing with the Plain-Speaker, André found himself in the company of figures such as Arnold Lunn, a well-known champion skier and (less well known) ardent supporter of Franco; and a New Zealander, A. N. Field, a propagandist for white supremacy. And there was Pedro del Valle, a retired general of the U.S. Marine Corps, who was firmly convinced communists were taking over the United States. Del Valle had contributed a brief introduction to André’s pamphlet, describing the author as “a man of courage, a good Christian,” who was unafraid to take on the “moneychangers” and provided “a great light to guide us in our War of Liberation against the Satanic Powers which now hold sway over Christendom.”
Civiltà had been composed by André twenty years later. The forty-three typewritten pages stapled within a red paper cover looked like something one would expect to have been produced by a bunch of enterprising high schoolers. But inside there was a stern motto in capital letters: VETUSTATIS NORMA SERVETUR—“Keep the ancient rule”—and there were warnings of the imminent collapse of Christian civilization and forecasts of the approaching climax of the “6,000 year struggle between the forces of good and evil.” The author hoped his writings would lead to the formation of small groups of like-minded Christians, the nuclei of a spiritual revival. And there was a darker side: In the struggle between God and the Dark Powers that tried to frustrate His plans for the happiness of men, there was the usual archenemy.
By the time “Andrei Krylienko” came to write the third work, The Red Thread, his obsession with Jewish power had intensified. Now in his eighties, he presented the events of the past two millennia as the machinations of a secret conclave of Jewish elders, an enduring occult conspiracy that was the “red thread” of the title running from ancient Rome to the Rockefellers. If there was a thread, it was one woven from the intellectual influences that linked such ideas to the Tsarist secret-police forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, via a series of long-forgotten anti-Semites, men like the White Russian Count Cherep-Spiridovich, the author of The Secret World Government, or “The Hidden Hand,” and the Argentinian Hugo Wast, Jorge Luis Borges’s fascist predecessor as the director of the country’s national library.1 Although the material was secondhand, that did not mitigate the shock I felt on reading it. I wondered how it was that Dad’s older half brother, the son of a Russian Jewish socialist, could possibly have moved so far to the Right.
The story that had come down in the family was that when he was a baby, André had been brought by Max to London shortly before the First World War after An
dré’s mother, Sofia, a fellow revolutionary, had died. In the absence of a birth, marriage, or death certificate, it was hard to be sure. Max had preserved an almost total silence about how or why this had come about, and he never mentioned the subject to Dad.
What we can establish with reasonable certainty is that Max was living alone in London at the time of the 1911 census, and that André was with him beginning sometime in late 1912 when Max took lodgings for the two of them in a large Victorian villa called Ingleholme, on the corner of Bishopswood Road and Hampstead Lane in Highgate. This house became Max’s London base and was where André resided from the age of three and a half. Ingleholme housed a small school run by a Quaker couple, Joseph and Marion Hudson, and as Max was away on business nine months of the year in Russia, the Hudsons effectively became André’s surrogate parents for nearly a decade.
The Hudsons had evidently been chosen by Max with some care because they were serious educationalists: their “home school” was a progressive, almost avant-garde experiment in learning. Most of the house was given over to the school, which had around a dozen boarders along with a cook and three maids. “In a fine old mansion,” wrote a visitor, “in one of the healthiest suburbs of London, surrounded by trees and lawn and garden live Mr. and Mrs. Hudson with their own children and several others besides, under conditions for child culture seldom equaled. Nature, art, music, literature, history, work, play and mother love all unite to do their best.” The children cavorted about the garden in smocks and made their own medieval costumes. It was an unlikely start for a future right-wing conspiracy theorist.
Joseph Hudson was a pedagogue with radical sympathies and wide interests, a student of the American philosopher John Dewey who was on the school’s advisory committee. Marion Hudson had trained at the renowned Froebel Institute in South London, a pioneer of kindergarten education. The Hudsons looked after André well, and he became friendly with their son, twelve years older than him and a pacifist. Although the school vanished long ago and with it its records, a few scattered traces survive of their relationship. I recently came across a two-volume edition of Lewis Carroll on a shelf in Dad’s study. When I opened up the first volume, I found that it contained a dedication from the Hudsons to André, dated on the eve of his eighth birthday, March 2, 1917. It was the middle of the war, and he was apparently there without either of his parents, and the Hudsons must also have been feeling bereft because their son, Charles, was in France on the western front with an ambulance unit.
Max was working in Russia for the Yost Typewriter Company throughout the war, and when he returned in the spring of 1920, André had just turned eleven and Max had probably not seen him since he was five or six. A photo taken at the moment of their reunion depicts the two of them standing in a garden. It is hard to read and because it is small, no more than a snapshot, it cannot easily be magnified and their expressions remain elusive. Man and boy have the same slight declension of the head, but they stand at a remove from each other. Max is self-contained, as usual, and he seems subdued—his buttoned-up jacket gives nothing away. André leans off at an angle as if seeking already to distance himself from this semi-stranger. I know it is him because he has his right hand lodged firmly in his jacket pocket, in exactly the same way that he holds it in the picture that adorns the dust jacket of the book he published four decades later.
Max must have kept this—there are no others from these years—which suggests to me that it had been a moment he wanted to preserve. As to what André felt, there is nothing but the image to go on. Photographs are ambiguous and it may be a mistake to read into this one the sense of estrangement that was going to emerge in the coming years. It is impossible really to know what André made at this point of the gaps between Max’s visits or of his mother’s absence. He was surely lonely. Did he also feel that something shameful hung over his mother’s absence? Max and Sofia had never married and Dad thought André had suffered throughout his life from the taint of illegitimacy, a source of shame much stronger at the start of the last century than it is today. But in 1920 André may not have known about this and in any case the Hudsons do not sound like a couple to have been bothered by such things. When they retired and moved out to the Essex countryside, André went with them and got into one of the country’s leading grammar schools, the King Edward VI School in Chelmsford. He did well, finished up at an old Quaker school not far away, and won a place at Cambridge.
By then, the tension and pain in André’s relationship with his father had become unmistakable. Max was spending much more time in England after the spring of 1920 but he did not bring André back to London to live with him. And as his schooling was nearing an end a few years later, André got a real shock: In the summer of 1924, Max returned from one of his trips to Eastern Europe in the company of a thirty-two-year-old Russian widow—Frouma—and Ira, her eight-year-old daughter from a previous marriage. They had fled Moscow with little more than a suitcase and Max announced to André that he and Frouma had gotten married in Riga and that he now had a stepmother and a half sister. They had met in Moscow two or three years earlier, but tight-lipped as always Max had not said a word to André beforehand. With Frouma in charge, a family household was established on the Holly Lodge Estate and there was always a room for André. But Dad’s arrival on the scene in 1925 would have been hard emotionally for André too, and to judge from Frouma’s letters, his relationship with his father never recovered. In 1926 he spent the summer at a Quaker college, did some traveling in Germany, and then went on to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.
College became, in André’s words, “a second home,” freeing him of “the previous necessary but tiresome interventions of parents and school-masters.” Advised by a tutor that he should study economics, he dreamed of becoming a poet, rowed in a college eight, and ended up with a degree in English. He had fond memories of his time at Corpus Christi and became attached to the father figures at its helm.
Life in college in those days was not extravagant—Corpus had little of the ostentatious Christ Church partying idealized by Evelyn Waugh in Brideshead Revisited—but it was full of social distinctions all the same. There were the public schoolboys and those from grammar schools, boys from the gentry and those like André whose fathers were in trade. An exclusive dining club—the Chess Club—was for the college upper crust; naturally, they did not play chess. Corpus was a small place, intimate, and more than in most places, life revolved around chapel. Two pounds a week—a sum that amounted to André’s entire income seven years later—bought the services of a man who would wake you, light the fire, choose and lay out your clothes, and bring breakfast to your room. Dependent upon remittances from Max, André was not well-off nor was he a public-school man.2
One of the friends he made that first year, a man he kept up with for some time afterwards, was an Etonian called Henry. Captain and opening bat of the unbeaten Eton XI of 1926, Henry’s full name was Henry Edward Hugh Pelham-Clinton-Hope, the Earl of Lincoln and the future 9th Duke of Newcastle. The young earl had problems of his own, of a rather different kind than André’s. He had inherited a stately Italianate home in Nottinghamshire called Clumber House, a kind of Brideshead on steroids set on an estate of nearly four thousand acres on the edge of Sherwood Forest, with terraced gardens, the longest lime avenue in Europe, and a lake large enough that in its heyday a frigate and a yacht had been kept on it for guests. All this had strained the family fortune and the earl was the first in his line not to live there. Eventually it was demolished leaving behind little more than the stables, the garden temples, and the 7th Duke’s chapel. (Further indignity was visited upon the estate during the war when a top-secret weapon, a seventy-seven-foot 130-ton mechanized trench-digging monster, nicknamed Nellie, was tested on the grounds in the presence of Winston Churchill, who had hoped to use it in some imaginary replay of the First World War. Never deployed, it churned up swathes of the Clumber turf as if in some Waughian nightmare the new machinery of modern total war was
literally uprooting the old landed ways.) It is easy to see how the illegitimate son of a Russian Jewish businessman living in mock-Tudor Highgate might have felt the precariousness of his social standing, might have started to keep his friends and his family apart, and might have dreamed of the kind of lineage—and faith—that would be a source of pride rather than shame.
The main clue we have as to the direction of André’s thoughts at this time comes from an unexpected quarter. On the eve of the Wall Street crash, none other than T. S. Eliot wrote to a friend in banking that he had been visited by a recently graduated Cambridge student called André Mazower, the son of a Russian refugee with “some small business in the Midlands.” The boy apparently knew no Russian and his French was “a little rusty”; his English, however, was fluent, and Eliot, slightly baffled, concluded that his nationality “is rather uncertain.” André had some poems to his name, and though Eliot did not think much of them, he did what he could to find the young man some work.