Telling Tales

by Penny Perrick

  Of all the riches-to-rags émigré lives that Anita encountered, Paul’s was the most extraordinary. Born in 1880, he was the son of Princess Marie Galitzine and General Paul Rodzianko, whose lands were in the Ukraine and who composed military marches including ‘Cassez Tout’, which became known as the ‘Rodzianko March’. The family estates were about the same size as the British Isles. After a privileged childhood, the younger Paul joined the Chevalier Guards and married Tamara Novosiloff, a maid of honour to the Russian Empress. During the First World War, Paul was an officer in the Tsar’s Imperial Guard but was, luckily, on a riding course at the Italian Cavalry School at Tor di Quinto when the Revolution broke out in 1917. He had placed his children in English boarding schools earlier in the year but his wife disappears from the story about this time – they may have been divorced by then. The rest of Paul’s family, after much hardship, managed to get out of Russia. His mother, who had been imprisoned and condemned to death, was rescued by the departing Swiss ambassador.

  Paul went to London, somehow managed to enlist in the Royal Fusiliers, and, later, because of his friendship with the British general Sir Alfred Knox, received a commission in the 10th Hussars. For a few years, from 1928, he was the instructor of the Irish Equitation School, which had been set up in 1926, both to advertise the new state and to promote the Irish horse. ‘Having found it in a state of depression, Rodzianko left the Equitation School with the capability of taking on the world,’ runs one testimonial. After six months of Paul’s training sessions, the Irish show jumping team won the Aga Khan trophy for the first time. Paul was, indisputably, the greatest riding instructor of the twentieth century and had himself been taught by two masters in horsemanship: the Englishman James Fillis, who could make a horse canter backwards on three legs, and the Italian Captain Caprilli, who invented the ‘forward seat’.

  As a fifteen-year-old Paul had seen the first, chaotic production of The Seagull at the state theatre of St Petersburg, in 1895. He had discovered the remains of a wedding party in Siberia, eaten by bears down to the last bridesmaid. He had walked the battlefields after the Battle of Tannenberg in 1915 and found a whole division of corpses; the six-feet tall, snub-nosed descendants of soldiers recruited by the then Tsar because they resembled him. He had identified the bones of the last Tsar’s pet dog in the blood-stained cellar of Ekaterinberg and had been summoned to lunch with King George V at Windsor Castle to give his account of the murder of the Imperial Family, cousins of the British king.

  Leonie may have thought him a noisy, hungry bore but Anita found him entrancing. On 4 February 1935, she wrote to Shane: ‘Paul Rodzianko stayed here [Glaslough] nearly three weeks and trained all the horses. He is delightful but so temperamental and Russian – thinks he can’t live without me and all that so I will be terribly nice to him till I come to U.S.A and that will be a good chance for it to die out. Don’t tell Ma or any one.’ It didn’t die out. Just over a year later Anita wrote to Shane: ‘Paul Rodyanko [sic] has improved my riding and also goes to church and prays on the days I hunt so what with his training and his celestial influence I have been lucky! Mum does not want me to go to Clare’s [who was then in Bisra] but I must. I am determined to – otherwise I will marry Paul just to annoy her.’ Then, on 17 May 1936, another alert: ‘As soon as Rodin is settled, I’m going to write Paul’s life.’

  Paul was not deterred by the Leslies’ disapproval. Glaslough must have seemed to him like a kind of homecoming. There was something Chekhovian about the dark woods and gleaming lake, the greenhouses and log fires, the elegant formality made possible by devoted servants and, best of all, a susceptible young woman who loved horses as much as he did and, unlike her grandmother, who preferred the witty gossip of London dinner parties, listened attentively to his dramatic life story. Anita admired his exuberance: the way he sliced off champagne corks with his sword or walked on his hands while singing Russian songs.

  Paul started to take over Anita’s life. She wrote his life story, which became the book Tattered Banners (1939), and collaborated on another title, Modern Horsemanship, posing for photographs in immaculate riding gear to show the correct position of hands and body. It’s a wonderful book; you feel that Paul knows exactly what it’s like to be a horse – he was a horse whisperer before the term was invented. But she knew that her involvement with Paul was playing with fire. In The Gilt and the Gingerbread, she wrote: ‘Mama’s efforts to halt what she regarded as an appalling match goaded me into it.’ When she tells Marjorie that she isn’t going to marry Paul, her mother says: ‘How could you be so cruel as to torture me about that man for nothing,’ and refuses Anita’s request to be allowed to travel around the world. So, two weeks later, in April 1937, Anita married Paul at the Harrow Road register office, with her friends Rose and Winifred as reluctant witnesses. Her account of her wedding day is bleak – ‘My heart had turned to lead at the word “wife”’ – but the letter she wrote to Marjorie from the Isle of Wight, where she and Paul were spending their honeymoon, paints a cheerier picture and suggests that the wedding, instead of being decided on the spur of the moment, out of spite, had been some time in preparation:

  Darling Mum, My marriage day was perfectly lovely – it went beautifully – thanks to you … I think both our costumes were extremely successful – and the flowers went so well with them. You looked lovely. I thought the party ‘went’ excellently – the room was always full never crowded. Everyone seemed to enjoy themselves much more than at a formal wedding reception …

  and more in this happy vein. These conflicting accounts call to mind E.L. Doctorow’s opinion that ‘I am led to the proposition that there is no fiction or nonfiction as we commonly understand the distinction; there is only narrative.’

  A perfect example of Anita’s ambivalence towards her bizarre marriage: in spite of writing in the 1980s to Harold Harris of how ‘hellish Paul’ had ruined her young life, in April 1965, learning of Paul’s death, she wrote in her diary:

  What a character he was. I am glad I could write his book [Tattered Banners] and give him some happiness – tho very little for our penniless, garret life was such a strain. It was like being married to a bear – or to the North Wind! … How much more worthwhile he was than any of the people I met at 12 Westbourne Terrace. I wish I had possessed a little money or a house or anything to help him during our marriage – I had not seen him for so long but now a loneliness fills me that he is not in the world.

  In her memoir, descriptions of her marriage continue miserably. She wrote of the Leslies: ‘Having brought me up to be as impractical as possible, the family blithely turned me adrift without any allowance when I married a penniless man.’ One wonders. Even on her honeymoon, Anita is instructing Shane to promote Rodin, which is doing the round of publishers, and it’s clear from this letter that Marjorie is preparing Anita and Paul’s first home, a flat at 154 The Grampians in Shepherd’s Bush, west London. Back from their honeymoon, the Rodziankos ate often at Westbourne Terrace – Marjorie had an excellent cook, Mrs Young – or at the homes of richer friends, so Anita’s domestic hopelessness wasn’t much of a problem. They went to exciting parties, many of them given by Rose Burgh, now separated from her husband. ‘She saw me struggling in the coils of a thoughtless matrimonial muddle and she sorrowed at my plight.’

  To outsiders, her plight looked like a rather interesting literary collaboration. In the acknowledgments in Tattered Banners, Paul wrote: ‘My thanks are due to ‘Anita Leslie’, my wife, for her invaluable help in writing this book’, the single quotation marks around her name making Anita seem rather ghostlike. Marjorie had no illusions about the book’s true authorship; in her copy, next to her own signature, she wrote ‘written by her daughter’, which it undoubtedly was. Anita’s girly fingerprints are all over it: the liberal use of exclamation marks, the small, fascinating details that brought the Tsarist era alive, such as boys having to sleep ‘in knobbly curl-papers till a few years before we started military training!’ It’s a sto
ry of revolution, regicide and exile, of life at Court and on the battlefield. That it was published during what came to be known as The Great Terror, 1937–8, in Stalin’s Russia added to the book’s poignancy.

  To Paul, wretchedly dispossessed, communists were synonymous with Jews. Thus his account of the murder of the Imperial Family: ‘Then the guard, headed by three Jews, began to shoot, somewhat wildly, as they were probably drunk.’ This is conjecture, although there is little doubt that the murder was particularly brutal. Paul’s impassioned anti-Semitism was transferred to his young wife. As well as jointly authoring books, the Rodziankos were training horses and, while on a visit to Glaslough, Anita sent Rose notice of another enterprise: ‘Here is one of my lingerie cards – give it to anyone who might be interested.’ She enclosed a green business card for ‘Olita Exquisite Lingerie’ with the name and address of a Miss Walker at 8 Lyndale Avenue. I have not been able to find any more information about this project.

  Anita’s uncle Lionel could see that Anita was unhappy when he and his future wife, Barbara Enever, visited the Shepherd’s Bush flat soon after Anita’s marriage. Although the visit had been previously arranged, Paul and Anita were out when Lionel and Barbara arrived. According to Barbara, who related the incident to her daughter, Leonie de Barros, when the Rodziankos did turn up, Anita tried to prepare a meal. Finding the meat safe empty, Paul shouted, ‘The Jews have stolen the meat.’ Supper consisted of gritty leeks. Anita looked bored. Barbara wasn’t impressed by the appearance of Rose Burgh, who claimed not to be able to open her front door on account of her long fingernails and needed help. Barbara thought that she overdid the effusiveness.

  Cousin Winston completed the final volume of Marlborough in 1938 and Shane continued to pester him to meet his protégés, one of whom was an air force pilot with concerns about the War Office. Like Winston, Shane now thought war with Germany inevitable. The Rodziankos, on the other hand, wanted only to extend the hand of friendship to Nazi Germany, in the belief that Hitler would restore Russia and, more particularly, Paul’s homeland, Ukraine, to a land fit for the poshocracy. To this purpose, Anita became involved with an old friend of Clare’s, Vladimir Korostovetz, a Russian exile who was now a naturalized British citizen and the author of several books on Europe. In the 1920s he had been the New York World correspondent in Berlin, where he had met and fallen in love with Clare. Although he constantly left bouquets of red roses at her bedroom door, Clare saw him merely as a useful translator and arranger of journalistic assignments.

  In 1939 Korostovetz became the uk representative of the exiled Hetman (leader) of the Ukraine, Pavlo Petrovich Skoropadskyi, the German-born former Imperial Army General, and Paul’s commanding officer, who had been toppled from power in November 1918 and was now living in Potsdam. It was probably through the Hetman that Korostovetz became friendly with the Rodziankos. On 13 March 1938 he wrote excitedly to Anita of his admiration for Hitler: ‘Yes indeed Hitler does not talk he acts and that is the single way to get on isn’t it? The stabilisation of Central Europe will go on now apace and then other parts of the world will need a strong hand to get things brought in order.’ Then, more sinisterly, referring to Paul: ‘I hope soon he will be of greater use for our common cause.’

  Enclosed with this letter is another one to Rose, with whom, like most men, he was besotted. This letter ends: ‘I kiss your hand’, whereas Anita gets only, ‘Yours very sincerely’. In Rose’s letter, written the day after Germany occupied Austria, on 12 March 1938, he is exultant: ‘Hitler is a great man … it is one step further towards clearing out the nests of international intrigues – his Austrian move!’ He believes that the ‘Red Plague’ will be wiped out everywhere: ‘You ask about Spain. Things there are going most excellently.’ He is convinced that Ukraine will soon regain its independence. In The Gilt and the Gingerbread, Anita makes a delicate reference to these unsavoury pre-war circumstances. She and Paul were touring Europe and met with two of Paul’s former commanding officers, the aforementioned Hetman and General Mannerheim, who was now Finland’s leader. Anita wrote of these visits: ‘I returned to England drugged with political issues I had never heard of before.’ This is hard to believe; married to Paul, she must have encountered his pro-Nazi views from morning till night. That spring, she had written to Rose about her life with Paul: ‘I feel his heavy mind and fuddled ideas simply clog my mental equipment.’

  Rose herself, now involved with a man referred to as ‘Pops’ was in Amsterdam having a yacht built, named Leprechaun. Years later she told her then daughter-in-law, Anita Burgh why she had left her first husband, Alkie Burgh. When they married, Alkie, having lost his fortune, had sold Northcourt, his estate on the Isle of Wight. Rose had bought it back, as well as much of the former contents, which she had tracked down, and given it to him as a wedding present. Three years later she was reading the newspaper in bed when she saw an advertisement for the sale of Northcourt and its contents. It was the last straw; she got out of bed and left. Walking out of a marriage was something she was to do more than once. It was Anita who should have considered leaving. On 15 July she wrote dispiritedly to Rose: ‘Having injections for exhaustion as all insides have gone wrong.’ But she and Paul were making more travel plans. On 3 August she told Rose: ‘We may go to Nuremberg as Hitler’s guests on September 5th but Paul is supposed to be back at work. Rather fun to meet all the Nazis.’ Her mental equipment was quite definitely clogged.

  On 29 September the Munich Agreement forced Czechoslovakia to cede the Sudetenland to Nazi Germany, which occupied the rump of the country the following year. Avishai Margalit wrote of the Agreement in On Compromise and Rotten Compromises (2010) that it was ‘a pact with radical evil, evil as an assault on morality itself’. Anita took a different view. A week after the signing of the Agreement, she wrote to Rose from Glaslough that war had been averted and ‘Mothers whose hearts ached with terror are going back to their bridge and scolding the cook.’ Korostovetz’s book, Europe in the Melting Pot, came out that month and Rose sent a copy to Anita who ‘read every word of it with ease’, since the peacefulness of Glaslough was conducive to serious reading, as well as outdoor pursuits. She told Rose: ‘I ride and chop trees all day – am getting quite subtle with an axe.’ Paul came to join her, and his loathsome influence may explain the shrill tone of her next letter: ‘Ireland was swamped with Jews during the crisis.’ Korostovetz’s book has made her dwell on ‘the evil genius – Lenin … to what extremes the human mind stretches’. She goes on: ‘Of course Germany is going to dominate Europe but as we can’t stop it for God’s sake let’s be her powerful friend – not her weak enemy!’

  At the time, this view was not an unusual one. Oswald Mosley’s party had adopted the slogan ‘Mind Britain’s Business’, which presumably, meant take no notice of what’s going on elsewhere. As far back as 1933 Winston Churchill had raged against the Oxford Union for voting for the motion ‘This house would not fight for king and country’; he called it ‘this abject, squalid avowal’, but he was still swimming against the tide. In 2009 Derek Malcolm, reviewing Stephen Poliakoff’s film Glorious 39 for the Evening Standard, recalled ‘my own well-born mother [who] strode around London with a placard reading “Hands Off Hitler”. My father simply went on hunting.’ And a Secret Service report from 1936 on Sidney Bernstein, then a cinema magnate, later the creator of Granada Television and a member of the House of Lords, divulged: ‘He always cuts the news films in his cinemas so that Fascist scenes etc. which might make a favourable impression are removed. Items about Russia are given prominence.’ The future peer of the realm was ‘reliably reported to be an active secret communist’.

  Anita still imagined that Paul’s fortunes could be restored. She wrote to Rose: ‘Korotovetz and Paul are very excited in London and keep hinting at action! We’ll ride in a troika yet darling.’ On the following day, 13 October 1938, she wrote to Rose:

  If there is a war I am going to work at propaganda behind the lines – Anti-Jew stuff – jus
t like the Bolshies in Russia only vice versa. Try to organise an anti-Jew Revolution and make a sort of Brest-Litovsk treaty with Germany! What do you think? Will you be my Mata Hari?

  The Brest-Litovsk treaty of 9 February 1918, initiated by the Ukranian-born Leon Trotsky and the Soviet government, recognized the sovereignty of the Ukrainian Peoples’ Republic. It must have been anathema to Paul.

  The rest of this chilling letter is devoted to one of Anita’s constant themes: the foulness of cities and the need to return to nature. ‘That is why it is so good for a man to have a “country place” and the earth is the best of masters.’ It was the twenty-fourth anniversary of her uncle Norman’s death: ‘The gardener who’s been here 35 years has just brought a laurel wreath to put on his cross in the church. Again one thanks God that war slipped by.’ The letter crossed with one from Rose, who is mopey and suffering from asthma in Amsterdam. She is getting Leprechaun ready for trials and regaling unreceptive Dutch listeners with tales of the little people of the hills, leprechauns, banshees, fairies and elves. Rose takes it for granted that ‘Germany will have all that Middle Europe’ and, like Anita, thinks that ‘we should go back to the land and simplicity while there is still time – it was our first heritage and so many have forsaken it for things utterly false, transitory, and of no depth or purpose’. She is advocating this way of life while waiting for furnishings for her yacht to arrive from England. She has harsh words for Anita, who is obviously ‘at cross purposes with the world, which is the expression of God’s will – for when you have achieved harmony with that force, the world will not hurt you any more’.

  It is difficult to excuse anti-Semitism, as Hermione Lee acknowledged in her biography of Edith Wharton:

  Her [Edith’s] attitudes were commonplace among upper-class Anglo-Americans, and the French, in pre-Holocaust times. But comparisons, historical tolerance, and recognition of the licence we all take in private correspondence do not make good excuses here.