by Allan Massie
I thought to myself: how can a man be so horribly wrong and yet strike a true note? But I did not speak and waited for Gaston to continue.
‘Delightful, isn’t it? Yet that nonsense will find willing ears in Germany, it will enter and take possession of generous and idealistic souls there. Yet it’s pernicious and frail itself.’
‘Frail?’ I said. ‘It doesn’t sound frail, and doesn’t your author, whoever he is, condemn frailty?’
‘Each man reprobates the weakness which he recognises in himself.’
Gaston closed the book and smiled. I said:
‘And what is your weakness?’
‘Optimism,’ he said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Simply that I believe in the future of mankind and am horrified by the temerity of such belief.’
As he spoke, he lifted his head to gaze across the Place St-Sulpice, and this let me see the strong line of his jaw, like the jaw of an ideal self-conscious dictator. He picked up his glass of Vichy water – Gaston never drank alcohol in those days – and his long upper lip extended itself along the rim like a serpent drinking. I was all at once aware of the force emanating from this spare man in the neat dark suit, and surrendered to it.
For perhaps two years I was intellectually intoxicated by him.
‘Spengler is false history,’ he said, ‘and yet it is the historical view of life which can alone make sense of the world today. That is why what is happening in Russia is merely the logical extension of our own Revolution, which overthrew feudalism but then found itself trapped in bourgeois aspirations and surrendered to them. Pointless to blame the men of ’93; they could not be other than they were on account of their historical conditioning. But we, at a distance of more than a hundred years, can now properly recognise them as a link in a necessary chain. It is therefore all the more evident when we look at our France of grocers and country notaries, that our Republic cannot endure, and that we must, and inevitably shall, aspire to the eradication of class conflict through class conflict and so arrive at the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.’
I condense a thousand conversations in a paragraph, and when I asked him how we, who were not proletarians, could possibly belong to the new order of things, he explained that as intellectuals we were the fulcrum of change.
And for two years I believed him. I all but joined the Party. I contributed to the review he established. I did so anonymously, at his suggestion – a suggestion which in fact amounted to a command.
‘There will be a time,’ he said, ‘when it is useful to have your name. At present it is more useful that you should not be publicly associated with us …’
He breaks off there, and indeed one of the features of these papers, intended, I am almost sure, as a draft of these by now tantalising confessions, is their inconclusive nature. It is as if Lucien always draws back from any full commitment even to his own past. Of course, if he was writing this in the winter of ’42–’43, it’s not entirely surprising that he should have hesitated to reveal much about his association with the Communists. Stalingrad had after all been fought – or was still being fought, about the time he started on his confessions – and the Communists had moved from the support for the Vichy regime which they displayed till June ’41 towards taking the lead in the Resistance. Nobody could then be sure that anything he wrote was safe, even in his mother’s house, and so I wonder less at Lucien’s reticence than at his willingness to commit himself to memorising at all.
And of course the question which is always asked of any Communist, or former Communist, rears up, particularly in the light of that last sentence: when he broke with the Party, was the rupture sincere or a tactical ploy?
His close association with Gaston Hunnot seems to have been limited to these two years, but Hunnot, himself a somewhat mysterious figure, one whose achievement always fell short of his promise, was to play a part in my father’s tragedy.
Lucien’s emotional life during the 1920s, which were also his own twenties, was barren. He mentions briefly that he and Marcel Pougier were lovers, and that surprised me, because elsewhere Lucien shows himself hostile to homosexuality; yet he continued to be friends with Marcel to the end. I leave it to you to make what you can or like of that. Otherwise he was involved with nobody. He lived only through his intellect, and that was in a state of continual ferment. He didn’t know what to believe from one year to the next.
It was his instability which exposed him to Charles Maurras. I’m sure, Hugh, that you know more about Maurras than I do. My early ignorance was of course such that on that visit to my grandmother’s after the war I quite failed to detect the influence of Maurras in those essays of Lucien’s which I referred to. Maurras now seems absurd with his ideas of racial purity, his Latinity, his notion that the four enemies of la vraie France were the Socialists, the Freemasons, the Jews and those whom he called météques, people of mixed blood. Or have I got that wrong: weren’t the Protestants also one of the enemies? Poor Maurras: he concocted an ideal France that only a very few Frenchmen could recognise. Unfortunately, Lucien was one, though even Lucien at times was able to recognise his mentor’s absurdity. When Maurras said in one of his articles: ‘One would have preferred to give this advice to the King in his cabinet rather than through the pages of a newspaper,’ Lucien scribbled, ‘But what makes the poor dear man believe he would have been one of the King’s counsellors?’
Nevertheless Maurras was important to him, even though he was never himself a member of Action Française. He wrote of Maurras once, in 1935: ‘I respect his diagnosis of our condition, which is absolutely just, but like many doctors he can prescribe no remedy that does not fill one with incredulity. For the fact is, that we are landed with the regime of the parties, unless some exterior or interior tragedy occurs. And because I can’t help believing that the worst regime may yet be preferable to even the best-intentioned revolution – for revolutions never perform their best intentions – I accept it as it is, and am even prepared to serve it, in the hope of mitigating its worst absurdities and ameliorating its defects.’
Pompous, ridiculous, yet somehow decent: there you have Lucien.
CHAPTER SEVEN
HE WAS ATTACHED to the London Embassy in 1928. For his first year there he was lonely. He had all the prejudice against England which Maurras encouraged in his disciples, and he hadn’t yet realised that there were sectors of London society ready to adore any personable young Frenchman of good birth and pleasing appearance who could speak tolerable English. So he attended only official dinners, and in his free time, which was plentiful, read in his own rooms or browsed round art galleries. He read seriously, for he was consciously preparing himself to play some great role, the exact nature of which had not yet been revealed to him, in his country’s history. There are a good many letters to his mother from this year. Few are worth reproducing in full. They are mostly banal – commonplaces about the frightful climate (till he suddenly realised the delights and beauty of a London spring), enquiries about her health, reassurances concerning his own. There is some political talk, even though he must have known that she took no real interest in that. These were optimistic years, after Locarno, and one can see Lucien moving into a more centrist position, convinced that French interests could be secured through international co-operation and the League of Nations. More than once, he expresses the hope that he might be transferred to Geneva: ‘It is there that the future of civilisation will be forged.’
Then, in his second autumn, he discovered a new and surprising enthusiasm. One of his few English friends, a banker called Nicholas Elbeach – he had a French mother who was a distant cousin of ours, which was how the acquaintance had been formed – invited him to Northamptonshire for a weekend. The local hunt was meeting. They found a mount for Lucien, and in the damp morning, with mist shrouding the beechwoods and the air soft and tremulous, Lucien fell in love with the activity and with an aspect of England which was altogether new to him. He returned aga
in and again. By December he had two hunters of his own, which the Elbeaches amusedly stabled for him. He rode with an audacity which seemed foreign to his nature, and perhaps it was; perhaps it was his nature’s response to this foreign and unexpected delight. He became for the first time in his life – for the only time, I’m afraid – a popular figure. People – the squires, the farmers, the scattering of country gentry and their progeny who zoomed up from London in Bentleys or Vauxhall sports-cars, or piled into early-morning trains – were first amused and then a little flattered and finally delighted by the zest with which this taciturn young Frenchman, whose silence and generally reserved manner contradicted the national stereotype they had accepted, threw himself into their favourite, their (in their view) national sport. ‘That young Frog rides like the very Devil,’ they chuckled. By the New Year he had four horses and was hunting three days a week – the Embassy was not demanding and the hours he had formerly spent in the Tate or at the Wallace Collection were now devoted to pursuing the fox over the ploughed fields of the Midlands. By March he was ready to ride in the members’ race in the point-to-point, though Lady Elbeach warned him that he would probably break his neck.
‘However,’ she said, ‘you ride like a man born to be hanged, so you probably won’t. I must say, when Nick brought you down that Friday, I never thought we would be preparing you to race. Actually, when he said you were prepared to be put up, we all thought it a great joke. Just shows how wrong you can be about people.’
It was on one of these March days that he met Polly. Their encounter was lacking in romance, for Lucien rose covered in mud from a ditch to see his horse galloping away, and at that moment Polly, clearing the hedge, sent him sprawling again as he had to dive to escape her horse’s hooves.
‘You might have killed me,’ he said to her that evening. ‘In fact I thought my last moment had come.’
‘I’m so sorry. There was no chance of stopping. Did you catch your horse?’
‘He came to rest about a mile off, and one of your peasants obligingly seized him. Do you call them peasants?’
‘I call them chawbacons, but most people say farm-workers,’ she replied.
Polly was eighteen, dark as a gypsy and thin as fashion dictated. She was ready for love, having endured one London season where she was bored by the callow boys she met at dances, and then having spent the winter in disgrace in her father’s house because of some transgression which any girl of today would regard as absolutely normal behaviour. She was indeed ignorant in the way no modern child could be, but that, I suppose, is the way things were then.
Lucien fitted the ideal on which she had brooded through the wet and windy months of her sequestration. He was ten years older than she; he had a career – girls at that time seemed to revere the Diplomatic in a way that they haven’t for thirty years or more. He was silent and distinguished in appearance, and looked as if he was nurturing a secret sorrow. He rode gallantly and was not given to boasting; and he was foreign and it had become smart to have a foreign lover. It was not surprising that she should fall in love with him, and it was in her nature that, having done so, she should set out to get him. She had after all been brought up with a single-minded intention; her duty in life was to marry suitably and well, and part of Lucien’s attraction was that, being foreign and Catholic, he strained the concept of suitability to the limit. Polly did not share her sister Aurora’s determination to shock, but she had a sufficiently rebellious streak, which expressed itself in an impulse towards the unconventional, and a willingness to act in a manner likely to dismay her parents.
Certainly her father, who was quite convinced that an unnecessary war had been fought entirely because Great Britain had been inveigled into it by the perfidious French, who had then let down their allies, was not likely to welcome the idea of his favourite daughter marrying a Frenchman – not even one who displayed conspicuous courage in the hunting-field. He always indeed regarded Lucien’s enthusiasm for hunting as some sort of trick.
And then there was the matter of religion. That question delayed the marriage for at least six months. My grandfather could hardly contemplate the idea of his daughter marrying a Roman Catholic. He was an old-fashioned Low Church Anglican who regarded the Roman Church as all ‘stinks and lace’. The delay made Polly desperate. She proposed to Lucien that they should live together; ‘That will force his hand,’ she declared. To her dismay he was as horrified by the notion as her father was intended to be. He couldn’t consider ‘compromising’ her in this way. She was very angry and threw a shepherdess (Dresden ware) at his head. For a fortnight there was a coolness between them. Each thought the other was being unreasonable. Then Polly went to him, and told him she was sorry. He broke down and wept, assured her he adored her, and that the proof of his great love was his willingness to wait till her father consented. But of course it had to be a Catholic marriage, otherwise he wouldn’t feel ‘properly married’. And there was nothing he wanted more.
Polly saw she was caught in a trap that could contain her for ages, and she couldn’t bear the idea of being so contained. The high-minded obstinacy of her father, and of the lover who refused actually to become that till formally bound, exasperated her. It seemed absurd, out-of-date, and she couldn’t bear anything old-fashioned. So, to resolve the matter, she went to her father and told him that he had better consent to the marriage on Lucien’s terms because she was already his mistress, was going to have a baby, and he refused to marry her except according to the Catholic rites.
‘So,’ she said, ‘either we do it his way, or your grandchild will be a little illegit. I don’t mind because I love Lucien anyway and am quite happy to go on being his mistress.’
My grandfather was furious, naturally enough, but couldn’t contemplate the prospect of his daughter’s disgrace. He gave way, fulminating against the serpent-like perfidy of the French. The odd thing was, however, that from the day of the wedding he developed an enormous respect for Lucien. Himself a man of imperious will, he was enchanted to discover, as he thought, that he had a son-in-law whose will was even stronger than his own. The respect even survived the revelation that Polly wasn’t pregnant at all. Indeed this gave him a wonderful opinion of his son-in-law’s cleverness. From that moment for the next ten years he would justify any position he adopted by saying ‘and I know Lucien will agree’; conversely the discovery that Lucien on any occasion thought differently from him caused him great disquiet. In the end this was to his advantage. It was Lucien’s doubts about Hitler, more and more freely expressed as the decade advanced, which prevented him from following his younger daughter Aurora’s lead and conceiving an admiration for the Führer. The Nazis were eager to flatter him, as an English Lord and the father of the Führer’s English friend, and he did enjoy being treated as someone important. All the same, the reflection that Lucien thinks ‘there’s something a bit off about the fellow’ prevented him from making a complete fool of himself. Indeed I suppose it saved him from being imprisoned under the notorious Regulation 18(B) of the Defence of the Realm Act in 1940.
Do I seem to make light of this, Hugh? To treat this question of their marriage so much less seriously than they would have regarded it themselves, at the time? It is because it is so difficult to take other people’s lives seriously. At one point in my life I tried to write fiction, you know. I failed because I could never imagine reality. Then I turned to biography, and my victim – Smuts, if you must know – seemed even less real. And yet I fully agree with that thing of Ortega’s about man’s best image for himself being a novelist and that ‘man is what has happened to him’. The trouble is that, as I am aware of how fully my own existence can only be explained by what goes on in my head, I am baffled by the unreality of any portrayal of a person which is unable truthfully to tell me what is happening in his. And so I fall back on irony, while real novelists, I suppose, turn to invention; and make their lies seem the better truth, which is what Polly did in respect of that mythical and decisive preg
nancy. But if the novel is an image of life, or life a sort of fleshy novel – and the two propositions seem opposite sides of a coin which is valid currency – then the problem must be the existence of other people. Man himself may be a novelist, but he can’t make a novel only of himself; and the trouble is that other people are only seen from the outside, however skilfully novelists try to disguise the fact.
Take for example that scene, remarkable, grisly and, as it were, authentic in Le Temps Retrouvé, in which the narrator is invited by Jupien to spy on Charlus being whipped by the young butcher or whatever he is; well, there everything about the feelings which Charlus experiences would be, if representing a scene from real life, only supposition. Of course, as criticism, you will say, this is so much nonsense, because it is not real life, but a novel; and you are quite right; yet if real life is a sort of novel, then it remains one told in the first person, and the only sure knowledge we have is of the narrator. Everyone else is only observed, as in a film, in which one action is required to stand for a whole way of life, ocean of feeling, or history of experience. Choose the significant detail, you say; but the choice is arbitrary. We cannot play God in the novel of life.
CHAPTER EIGHT
IN 1930 MY father was transferred to the Berlin Embassy. Now, when I write the words ‘Berlin 1930’, you, and most Anglo-Saxon readers, will at once summon up a picture of which I can hardly suppose myself capable of disabusing you. You already have all the significant details you need, and you know the city too well. Isherwood has written it all for us, and it is almost impossible to think of Lucien and Polly there without wondering when they will encounter Mr Norris, whether Sally Bowles will be found singing in the Nachtlokal they frequent, or whether, stumbling through the economic disruption of the Depression, they will bump into Otto Nowak. If none of these, surely Bernard Landauer (whom we know, do we not? to have been in reality Wilfrid Israel) will invite them to dinner. The fact is that anyone trying to create Berlin 1930 is up against a master; it is like attempting a tragedy in blank verse and avoiding echoes of Shakespeare. This is part of what I mean when I say that our knowledge of what is real is conditioned by the imagination of others.