by Mark Mazower
The connection was less fortuitous than it might appear at first sight because Eliot had close ties with André’s college. One of Eliot’s friends there was the historian Kenneth Pickthorn—reputedly the rudest man at Cambridge—who would invite him periodically to dine with the fellows, and it was Pickthorn who had recommended André to Eliot. In the summer of 1928, when André first contacted the poet to seek advice about his future, he told him he was thinking of going to Harvard to study for a doctorate in English. He had been born in Paris, he said, and hoped this would get him one of the places the university offered French students, but added he would need financial support since “he was not in a position to accept an allowance, even if it should be offered him, from his parents.” The Harvard idea came and went, as many of André’s ideas would, to be replaced by the thought of finding work in Paris, a fashionable destination for Cambridge undergraduates in those years. But Eliot evidently saw something in André, or felt sorry for him, because he did not give up trying to help him.
What was it that attracted Eliot’s solicitude? Was it André’s obviously thorny relationship with his father, which may have reminded the poet of his difficulties with his own parents? Or perhaps a seriousness about faith and an ambivalence about Judaism, which is signally unmentioned in André’s account of his “Russian” background? These were the years in which Eliot was received into the Anglican communion and started to describe himself as an Anglo-Catholic, and his example provided both a positive impetus to seek solace in the idea of the church and a negativity about Jews that it is hard, in the light of André’s later writings, not to see foreshadowing what was to come. In his correspondence with Pickthorn during these years, Eliot slips easily and quite often into a kind of casual anti-Semitism. There are also his 1933 lectures, After Strange Gods, an unpleasant fusion of spiritual anxiety and snobbery, with their praise of the “blood kinship” of “the same people living in the same place,” their emphasis on the social value of a “unity of religious background” and the judgment that the presence of “any large number of free-thinking Jews” is “undesirable.” It was at Corpus that Eliot was to deliver his better-known lecture “The Idea of a Christian Society” in March 1939—a call to treat Christian values with intellectual respect, to appreciate that modern democracy was as much in crisis as fascism or communism, and to change the way economic life in particular was organized so that it might facilitate rather than impede a life of devotion.
Eliot felt at home at Corpus, a place where the fellows had to be of the Christian faith, and where many of them took their Christianity seriously. Indeed, the college was in those days something close to what one of its products describes as a “conservative-Anglican plot.” Caustic and demanding, Pickthorn, who was later an MP, was a college dean and a dedicated mentor to his young men. Two history dons—Geoffrey Butler and his nephew Rab—were superbly connected within the Conservative Party and keen to revitalize it. And presiding over all of them was William Spens, a brilliant if Machiavellian educationalist who became master during André’s time in Cambridge. Spens was much in the public eye, prominent in debates about the direction of the Church of England and its relations with Rome. All three of these distinguished conservatives—Spens, Pickthorn, and Eliot—in one way or another extended their sympathy and friendship to the politely spoken, talented young undergraduate.
Eliot had had understandable difficulty figuring out André’s background. Downplaying his Jewish connections, as one would have been likely to do in that milieu, André had emphasized his links to France, his birthplace. And he had flaunted his estrangement from Oakeshott Avenue by underscoring his resolve not to accept any financial support from his parents. In reality he remained for a long time more dependent upon his father and the whole Mazower household than he had admitted to Eliot. But his ambivalence towards it and his desire for distance could not have been made clearer: The thing he wanted, whether it was Harvard or Paris, was to get away.
Money was a bit of a problem, as it would be always, I think, for the future author of Money and the Modern World. In the summer of 1929, after graduation, he spent a month working as a temporary clerk at a bank in Paris, probably thanks to Eliot, and stayed on a few months more in the French capital before he had to go back to Oakeshott Avenue. In 1930 he had a longer spell in Paris, working for the White Star shipping line, but when that ended in the autumn of the following year, he returned to England penniless. Eventually, he made enough from binding and repairing books to rent a room on the fringes of Fitzrovia, heading back to Oakeshott Avenue again when things were bad to run errands for his father.
His nationality is rather uncertain. The truth is that André was stateless. He had entered England in 1912 on a Russian passport, and it was as the subject of a defunct empire that his details were entered on the Central Register of Aliens. To be an alien was a demeaning business. The file the Metropolitan Police Service kept on him was supposed to record every change of address or employment, every trip abroad, and he was obliged to notify them regularly. His irregular status did not prevent him traveling but did make coming and going more fraught. Because he had been born in France, he found that he was entitled to French citizenship and in 1932 obtained his passport through the consulate in London. But although this regularized his status, it also rendered him liable to conscription into the French army, and so he applied to the Home Office for naturalization as a subject of King George V. With Spens (who was now the vice-chancellor of Cambridge), the earl, a headmaster, and the Hudsons’ son among his guarantors, he had no difficulty. The police reported that he seemed respectable and did not frequent extremist circles; MI5 had no objections. One of his testimonials referred to him as a “charming, highly intellectual man, deeply devoted to old England.” Vice-Chancellor Spens described him as a friend who came to visit him and his wife “at every available moment”: André was then twenty-three, and Spens was fifty.
Highgate had become a last resort. Showing up on the doorstep in Oakeshott Avenue one day he seemed “starving” and “penniless.” Although he was just about making ends meet, he remained dependent on Max financially for long stretches of time. Otherwise there was little contact: By the early 1930s he wanted to keep the Mazowers firmly separate from the rest of his life. He came, Frouma wrote, without telling them where he had been and left without saying where he was going; if they wanted to get in touch with him, they were told to write to his bank. “He was like a sort of specter in the background,” was what Dad remembered.
The author of one of his testimonials told the Home Office that he believed André had been neglected once Max remarried, and this was without doubt what André himself felt. His relations with Max were so thorny that Frouma feared to leave them alone for very long, and her letters convey the tension that his visits brought into the house. “Family seems to burden him,” she wrote. He needed the family but he also resented it. It is hard to imagine that he ever got much overt sympathy from Max, who not only found it more or less impossible to express feelings of tenderness but had been obliged to earn money from boyhood to help his own family and had paid for André through school and college even as the Depression deepened his own financial difficulties. Might not Max have read into André’s seeming failure to make something of himself—to contribute in any way that Max recognized—a deeper failure of his own, in which the psychic costs of having turned his back on active revolutionary politics were shot through with disbelief at how he could have produced such a politically conservative and impractical son? André’s evident shame at his parentage cannot have been easy for Max to bear because he was a proud man, and he does not seem to have ever regarded his own lineage as something to be rejected. Each was already writing the other out of the script of his life.
There was a mutual turning away. The last of only two photos of André in family albums filled with innumerable pictures of everyone else must have been taken by Dad in the back garden at Oakeshott Avenue sometime in the mid-1930s. U
nwilling to face the camera, André stares off to his right, hands as ever wedged in his pockets, as formally dressed as his father tended to be, and like Max wearing his jacket tightly buttoned. It is an image of a man wishing things were different, wishing he were anywhere but there.
When the war broke out, André was determined not to let his unusual name prevent him from joining up. Rebuffed initially by the navy on account of his foreign birth, he served in the Auxiliary Patrol, working bravely through the Blitz amid the flames and debris of burning buildings along the Thames, before going to Dunkirk to help evacuate British troops and narrowly escaping being stranded there himself. It was then that he decided to change his surname to Marling. A German invasion seemed imminent, and many immigrants were doing this, alarmed at the surge in anti-Semitism that took place in wartime England. On the same day as André gave up Mazower, Ernst Rosenwald of 72 Belsize Park Gardens became Ernest Ronald; Jacob Finklestein of Alvington Crescent Dalston became Jack Marks; Solomon Smelovitch of Bridge Road Leyton turned into Sidney Somers; and Wolf Hecht became William Hart. Did they do this in order to appear less foreign in the eyes of their fellow Englishmen or for fear of being arrested when the Germans landed? One cannot imagine the Gestapo, which had already drawn up its search lists of wanted Englishmen, being fooled for long: All they needed to do was to peruse the pages of The London Gazette where these changes were formally announced.
His first name, on the other hand, was left untouched. If André was motivated principally by fear of a German invasion then why did he not go the whole hog and become a properly English-sounding Andrew? I think the answer is clear enough: It was not so much to get away from the Germans that he changed his name as to establish his distance from Oakeshott Avenue and his father. Whereas Mazower pointed east to the Polish-Russian borderlands and was at best unclassifiable and at worst suggestive of Jewish origins, André had different connotations, French above all and shifted easily into and out of a Russian variant—Andrei—which was Christian in its associations, not Jewish. Or perhaps the real desire ran deeper than that: Was not his first name one of the very few ties that he had to his mother, the name by which she knew him and that she had chosen, perhaps for its Tolstoyan connotations?
The surname Marling reassured naval minds unnerved by the suspiciously alien Mazower, and in May 1941 André became a temporary lieutenant in the Royal Naval Reserve. He was probably on the HMS Enterprise when it took part in a celebrated clash in December 1943, engaging a group of German destroyers and torpedo boats in the Battle of the Bay of Biscay, and sinking several of them. On board the aircraft carrier the HMS Vengeance the following year, he passed through very different seas, sunnier and warmer, catching a glimpse of Spain, the country that was soon to become his first true home, then sailing through the Mediterranean—now safe for British shipping—and on to the Pacific, docking at Ceylon before reaching Sydney where the aircraft carrier was fitted with more effective guns for protection against Japanese kamikaze attacks. He must have found the return of peace difficult and austerity Britain drab. At thirty-eight he was old to find a new career and moved around Marylebone to a series of rented rooms while searching for a way to make a living before deciding to leave the country. He spent a few weeks in the spare bedroom in Oakeshott Avenue and then, on Christmas Eve 1948, he was at the port of Southampton embarking on a rackety steamer bound for Spain and South America. Most of his shipmates were Polish refugees and their families, leaving the devastation of Europe and its displaced persons camps for a new life in South America. It must have been a lonely exit from the country in which he had grown up and for which he had fought with courage. Henceforth he was only to return for visits.
A new phase in his life now began—in Spain. The country was slowly recovering from the ravages of the civil war under the dictatorial rule of General Franco, and André rented a small flat in the old Moorish quarter of Madrid. He found a job as a night watchman at the British embassy and then, for more than a decade, worked in the English-language service of the national radio station. He became fluent in Spanish, knowledgeable about the country, and increasingly drawn to its antiquated ways. Spain’s isolation from the rest of Europe, its slow industrialization, and the conservative values and religious rhetoric of the regime seem to have made him feel at home, and it was while he was there that he converted to Catholicism. Christianity would play an increasingly overt part in his life and thought.
He would come back to stay at Oakeshott Avenue occasionally, usually for a week or two around Christmas, but relations between him and his ailing father did not improve. Opting to live in Franco’s Spain was a powerful statement in itself—the Mazowers had been staunch antifascists during the Spanish Civil War—but André’s conversion to Catholicism seems to have been something Max found really shocking. One episode stuck in everyone’s mind. During a visit, presumably after a difficult exchange with his father, André became so frustrated that he seized the ax they used for making kindling, marched out into the garden, and started hacking down a horse chestnut tree. As his stepmother protested, he was defiant: “I planted this tree, it’s mine, I can chop it down if I want.” Dad never forgot André with a set look on his face going out and chopping the tree down. “That was rather typical, from what I remember. He was quite erratic.” (In fact, as we shall see, there may have been a specific reason, of which Dad was unaware, behind this outburst.) In the entire course of my childhood, I cannot remember a single occasion when Dad lost his temper with us. He was very slow to anger and when he did, it almost always manifested itself in other ways. It is as if André was a kind of polar opposite—unsettled, self-isolating—of the man Dad was already halfway to becoming. After his departure for Spain, André left almost no possessions in the attic of Oakeshott Avenue, just a couple of boxes with old notebooks and an oil painting in muted grays, browns, and blues of a thin man smoking a pipe.
In Madrid he married a younger woman who had fled Stalin’s Russia, and they had a son. And in 1963, he published Spanish Fare, a series of sketches drawn mostly from the radio talks he had given. The book conveys his affection for the country and its people, and expresses an easy intimacy with their habits. The author does not hide his conservative leanings, and like a modern Cassandra he warns about the perils facing Western civilization, mostly from the materialist barbarians across the Atlantic; but the preaching is held in check by anecdotes and local color. There is certainly nothing like the extremism of the views that are on display in his later pamphlets: Defiant and tenacious in holding these beliefs, he was probably already conscious that they raised hackles and would disqualify him from polite society. Later on he seems to have tried them out on a few writers, scholars, and public figures and been discouraged by their reluctance to take them up, by what he saw as their hypocrisy in being unwilling to preach what they inwardly believed. On the back jacket, there is a photograph of the author, a somewhat stern-looking figure in profile, jacket buttoned and hands firmly placed in its pockets, staring across a terrace from the side of the frame with the Madrid skyline behind him. With his receding hairline and small neat mustache, it is not hard to see a resemblance to Max. It is the image of a proud man, wounded by life but defiant, standing at an angle to the world.
Two years after the book was published, Dad had to go to Spain on business. Max had been dead a long time and Frouma had just died. As he was clearing out the Oakeshott Avenue house, Dad found some old notebooks in the attic which seemed to belong to André so he got in touch and went to his flat in Madrid. It was ten years or more since they had seen each other but he found André little changed physically. As they chatted over tea, however, it dawned on Dad that in other respects André had changed quite a lot. It was not just that he said nothing at all about Max’s death, or Frouma’s; he had left Dad’s world in other ways as well. Dad wrote later to a relative: “He struck me as slightly mad, certainly politically … very right-wing and very pro-Franco and anti-Semitic.” For Dad, the gap was unbridgeable
: “I just felt we had very little in common. His fascism rather upset me. Anyone who supported [Franco] and what he stood for, I really didn’t want to have anything to do with. That was ’65.”
And that would have been that, except for the papers from the old house that Dad had brought with him to Madrid. Another twenty years or so elapsed, and one night in 1987 the phone rang and who should it be but André. Later on, Dad recounted their conversation: “ ‘Oh dear, where are you? Are you still living in Madrid?’ ‘No, on Lake Geneva, on the French side. I wanted to ask you, Bill, do you remember handing me an exercise book?’ I said, yes. He said, ‘Did you look at the first page?’ I said, ‘I can’t remember’—I remember there were some poems in it, I really didn’t remember, this was [twenty] years later. He said, ‘Well, there is some writing in Russian. As I don’t speak Russian. I had a friend of mine here translate it. I’ll send you a copy.’ ”
When the translation arrived, there was for once an address: André, now nearly eighty, was living in a small village above Lake Geneva. What he wanted to talk about was the mystery of his birth. The notebook had belonged to his mother, and for the first time we were confronted with the question of who she was and what had happened to her.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Krylenko Connection