Faul Lines

by David Pryce-Jones

  Two days later, the Wehrmacht marched into Prague and Czechoslovakia ceased to exist. Mitzi felt this newest blow: “The Germans are entering Bucşani this afternoon at the same time as Hitler is entering Pressburg,” as Bratislava under German occupation had to be renamed. “The factory is our last possession, our only hope,” she wrote. Daily the factory was producing 27,000 kilos of yeast. For once giving a figure, she recorded that it had brought her 496,000 francs in April, with the comment, “not bad.” She and the family would be all right, she thought, if the annual figure came to four million francs. A competent businessman and industrialist, the managing director, Dr Albert Metzl, was likely to deliver, but for reasons that are not clear – maybe to do with Springer properties or perhaps his own Czech background – he was in Prague when the Germans took over what remained of Czechoslovakia and for a number of days they prevented him from returning to France.

  That same April, Mitzi heard from Alan that he wanted to go into politics. Like everyone who knew him, she thought this was out of character. “There also I cannot help,” she signed off with a sniff. Alan’s disposition was always to see both sides of any question and to make light of commitment. However, he had witnessed Nazism enough to take a stand against it. In a letter to the Spectator, he declared himself a Liberal because it was the only party with a policy of full and immediate rearmament.

  A by-election was due in the constituency of Louth in Lincolnshire. At a meeting of the party association on 12 May, Alan was adopted as Liberal candidate. The president was Mrs Margaret Wintringham, and next day a local paper The Advertiser reported what she said. She had evidently been briefed about how to present Alan without being constrained by the facts. Here, she told Liberal party members, was a candidate prepared to devote practically the whole of his time to the requirements of so important an office. He was a young man “who had studied many aspects of the agricultural industry in other countries.” No doubt she meant it sincerely when she went on, “A Liberal foreign policy, backed by a live League of Nations, is in my judgment the world’s salvation.” Alan, she said, was “an ardent temperance advocate and a non-smoker.” Presumably with a face as straight as Mrs Wintringham’s, Alan announced that if he won, he and his family intended to take up residence in the Louth Division. According to the paper, he was received with repeated applause.

  For something like twelve weeks he campaigned. Poppy accompanied him. Trading on connections, he persuaded the Liberal James de Rothschild to pay a flying visit, though regretfully aware that this might not be a vote-catcher. Briefly at some point he hired a truck and put a piano on it, playing to attract attention. Writing from a hotel in Lincoln on 28 May, he told his mother that at a meeting there cannot have been more than a hundred people but they had seemed to like it. He was just off to Worksop, Chesterfield, Chatsworth, Warrington, and Liverpool. Here he is on 10 June in the hotel in Lincoln: “I have made three long open-air speeches – and three impromptu ones – and now I know that speaking in public is the only thing I like. The short ones were rather terrifying. I drove into a village – any village – and summoned the people through a microphone; spoke for a few minutes, and then climbed out of the car and went among them shaking hands. The nicest people you ever saw each time! So far I have not been asked a single question; and have had, for fine summer evenings quite good audiences: 100 or so in a market place, and a lot more listening from behind their curtains. I am terrified by my own fluency: the Hitler of Lincolnshire, oh God.” And he signed, “Adolfo Chamberlini.” In Woodhall Spa on 3 August, he was writing, “I hope I converted some young Socialists…. Poppy’s temper was made very uncertain by the sea air at Sutton, where we slept yesterday.” The Conservative candidate was elected, but by a slimmer margin than had been expected.

  At a time with so many demands on him in such different contexts, it speaks well for his energy that he had managed to cram in writing a novel. Pink Danube was published by Martin Secker in the summer of 1939. In the copy Alan presented to Poppy he took his turn at writing doggerel:

  There is no need, my love, to pine

  Rather for Arthur’s love than mine;

  But damn the crisis, and galumph, re–joicing,

  through the life of Pumphrey.

  The nom de plume suggests that Alan was hiding his identity in the expectation of a succès de scandale. Precautions were not necessary. The novel fell flat. The reason for this failure was laid out very well in the review in the New Statesman of 29 July 1939 by Brian Howard – it must have been galling to be pulled to pieces by someone already a certified failure as a writer as well as a human disaster. Among considerable basic faults, he found, “The construction is wildly haphazard; there is very little feeling of inevitability, and, most disturbing of all, one senses that the author has not made up his mind about his own relationship towards his characters. His sympathies rise and fall, and revolve, and all one can do is bump along behind, swearing that detachment is the prime literary virtue.”

  Occasional sentences in the novel are flashes in keeping with Alan’s outlook, for example “Money is simply a short cut,” or “I was, I had to admit, too gifted.” In the period covered by Pink Danube, Nazis were putting Vienna fatefully to the test, and if he had found a narrative that took account of that he might have fulfilled the Tolstoyan ambition of his younger self. The novel has a first person narrator whose encounters with other people serve not to illuminate time or place, but only to illustrate his inner feelings and in particular his sexual ambiguity. He is made to say, “Half the queers in the world are only queer out of snobbery.” And Naomi, the leading female character, mirrors Mitzi as she was taking up with Frank, “If I ever marry again, I shall marry a queer man…. After all, many of the nicest men are. And they’re very easy to live with, everybody says.”

  Living in Hitler’s Berlin at that same period, Christopher Isherwood was writing comparable novels of self-discovery, but with just enough reference to the surrounding Nazism to give him the reputation of being a chronicler of the Thirties. Familiar as Alan was with Nazism in Vienna, he treats it here as incidental, as if it were operetta, so losing the chance even to be a pseudo-Isherwood. Deprived of any general issues, Pink Danube is harmfully one-dimensional. More telling still, here is a comedy of manners concealing a reality that was not comic at all. Alan knew himself but could not be open about it. Someone called Simon Wardell had stayed with him. “Eighteen, with very clear features and very bright blue eyes. Since I have tried to change, I found myself taking a new pleasure: ‘No, I shall never discover.’ I would not go to his part of the room, nor look at him when I talked to him. He talked almost exactly as I used to at eighteen; and when we went for a walk together I tried to be honest with myself. The attraction, I decided, was at least half non-physical. By a certain amount of self-deception, I would say that it was not physical at all … there was no active will to do anything about it, so I suppose the process of sublimation must have gone on. I think that perhaps if I could talk to Poppy about such things the sublimation would become complete. I should be released from my unwilling prison.”

  Poppy was twenty-five when this novel and the diary entry about Simon Wardell were written. No longer a girl kept in ignorance, she was familiar with Alan’s friends, incessant gossips virtually all of them. Perhaps she had moods and bouts of feeling unwell because she could observe for herself this complicated and incomplete process of sublimation, and found it not so easy to live with. At any rate, giving up as impulsively as he had set out in the first place, Alan never again engaged in active politics, and made no further sustained effort to write fiction.

  TWELVE

  Exodus

  THE HOUSE THAT Mitzi and Frank built at Montreuil is now a hotel. At the end of the park a footbridge leads to the eighteenth-century “dream house” that had caught the eye of Eugène and Frank. Mitzi waited until the 1960s before repairing the war damage and the looting. I didn’t like to tell her that in an antique shop we had found glass
and linen initialed MW. The whole place would one day belong to us, she would say, encouraging us to spend as much time there as we could.

  To return is to discover that everything has changed yet everything is also the same as ever. That part of the town is so quiet that it seems deserted. There’s a green with, on one side, the great defensive ramparts designed by Vauban and on the other a high wall with a suitably fortress-like door opening on to the garden surrounding the house. Frank took a lot of trouble over his flowerbeds. The bricks on the garden paths are laid out in a striking pattern of diagonals. The pool is as shallow as a bath so I could splash about in it unsupervised. Secure and spacious, here is some corner of a foreign field that is forever the Home Counties. As would-be squire, Frank was slightly over-dressed with his plus-fours and silk scarf knotted round his neck. Sometimes he carried me around on his shoulders. George, his huge dog, shaggy and white, is so good-natured that I am allowed to ride on its back. In search of distraction, Frank used to go to the golf course at Le Touquet, though not so often as he sidled off to the casino.

  “David was with us for a week,” my grandmother records in the last summer before the war. “We took him to Royaumont. He returns here with Elena in a few days.” I have Jessie; Elena has Nanny Stainer. Madame Provins is at the service of all of us. She is small, neat, unhurried and smiling. Her daughter Paulette has the bright looks and manners of a typecast French lady’s maid, and her husband Robert puts on a formal jacket and white gloves to wait at table. There is a chauffeur but on expeditions to Le Touquet Robert, faithful and watchful, often accompanies Frank.

  Fresh from the campaigning in Lincolnshire, Poppy took a cure at Bagnoles. She and Alan met up later in Nice, where they were joined on yet one more holiday by their old friend Kenneth Rae, this time bringing his young niece Jean Fort, (fifty years later she would be the formidable headmistress of Roedean). At the end of June 1939, Mitzi was in London. Harry and Vere had lunch with her, and during the course of it he forecast that if Hitler took Danzig there would be war. Back in Paris, she went on 20 July to the Gare de l’Est to greet Max Springer, a relation escaping at last from Germany with his wife Elizabeth and their twin sons. Georg and Heinrich were thirteen, lively and clever, “les enfants du miracle,” in her phrase, the miracle being that they were free. The Maisons-Alfort factory owned a house in Provence, and she arranged for them to live in it.

  “I am writing on the morning of 29 August. It could not look worse for England and France. Now one sees how the people were right who said one ought to have made war last year.” Several times Mitzi repeats that the crisis is playing havoc with her nerves. They were listening to the news on the wireless four or five times a day and kept themselves occupied blacking out the windows as a precaution against the coming air-raids.

  Reinforcing his warning, Grandpa Harry cabled that Alan and Poppy should come home urgently. Max had lent them a Peugeot, and they set off in it from Nice at six o’clock in the evening of Friday, 1 September, the day of the German invasion of Poland. To make room for Kenneth Rae and his niece they had to abandon almost all their luggage. Thanking Max for the car in a hurriedly written letter, Poppy described how the roads had been jammed by thousands of people who didn’t know how to drive – she’d never known anything so frightful. It was half past eleven before they reached Aix, where they had to spend the night on deckchairs in the salon of a hotel along with four Swedes, a Dutch couple and a dozen English people. Invited into one of the hotel corridors, they had had an hour’s sleep before taking to the road again at five in the morning. She’d put in a call to Max but the hotel owner didn’t come to find her when it came through. Half dead with exhaustion by the time they’d reached Royaumont, they met up with Bubbles and Eduardo. Lily was about to go to the factory. Telephone communications had been cut off. Next stop Montreuil, then England. “Like you,” she signed off to Max, “I haven’t stopped hoping.”

  Alan had a shot at teasing. “In the intervals of struggling into my own khaki, I must write to you, dearest Max, to offer my sincerest sympathy in your misfortune in being born a European. Think of those happy blacks in Guiana and on the banks of the Limpopo river. They think of it as a perfectly natural thing to boil one another in large pots – a war would, to them, be simply a waste of cutlets – nothing more. We are hurrying back to London on the evening boat, so I have no time to write a proper letter.”

  “And so the Crusade has started. God help us.” Mitzi followed up this invocation with the thought that the two nannies had been with her since 1906, therefore throughout the First War and now the Second War. “Poor old Chamberlain. His speech is wonderful.” Having heard it, she put her thoughts down on two closely written pages to Max. “Till last night I feared we would still give way to the lunatic and his gang. We have to finish the whole lot off, as life in Europe these last two years is no life at all. Poland is only one of the hundreds of reasons for which we are going to war and we iboks [family code for Jews] have more reason than anyone to give them all the hell we can. I know you will do your bit just as you can trust us all to do ours.” For the moment, she had all the cash she needed. The key to the safe in the rue de Surène was kept at the factory. She listed valuable possessions that Max was to hide in the farm: pictures by Vigée-Lebrun and de Dreux, the portrait of Jules Ephrussi, works by Falconet and Clodion, wall brackets from downstairs, the hall table. A thousand things had to be done. She was staying where she was. The children are fine, the duchesses [her term for the nannies had its element of getting her own back] holding up well. All meals at Montreuil would be taken together, lunch at 12.30 and dinner at 7.30, with paper napkins instead of linen. Alan has a job in London, she thought at the Foreign Office. Poppy could come over from York Gate any moment she wanted.

  “Nothing can be worse,” was Mitzi’s reaction on 17 September when the Soviet Union took over eastern Poland as agreed by the pact of Hitler and Stalin in the final days of peace. She was already aware of the developing persecution: “One can never change a German and I hate them all…. All the Jews are sent without their families to Lublin, worst of places in Poland where a terrible famine rules.” Dealing with her properties, she was pleased to see, Pokorny “dislikes the brute force and manners of the Germans.” More and more anxious, he was expecting the sequestration of the properties in Slovakia, and she instructed him to try to let them to the Teplà factory. He was free to make deals but he was never to sell anything anywhere to whoever it might be. In the event that any property was stolen, he was to note every detail with a view to recovering it after the war. She dreaded the day that Hungary might have to go over to Germany or Germany would walk in there – that would be “terrible.” When Pokorny appealed to the British Consul in Budapest for help, he was snubbed. The consul, he reported, had said that just because Mitzi had married an Englishman did not make her any less Jewish. Besides, how was the consul to know if she had made this marriage solely in order to safeguard her possessions. So angered was Pokorny by this interview that he had sent a letter of complaint to Vansittart.

  Painfully removed from reality, the authorities anticipated taking large numbers of German prisoners of war and had made arrangements to hold them in Dieppe. In mid-October Alan was posted there on military duty. British officers were not allowed to have their wives with them, but Poppy had her family in France and therefore obtained permission to cross the Channel. She and Lily drove via Montreuil to visit him in Dieppe, and for his birthday on 18 November he had leave to spend the day with Poppy.

  A particular Thirties touch that has survived the transition from private house to hotel is the painted or plasterwork decoration of the bedrooms, one with the theme of monkeys, another with the theme of parrots. Jessie and I shared a room. For much of that November I was kept in bed with earache. The pain was excruciating. The doctor diagnosed otitis and sent nuns to look after me. They wore habits. When they bent over me to pour some sort of oil into my ears their starched white wimples were ghost-like,
monstrous. I resisted the one who strapped a hot water bottle to the side of my head. “It is too pathetic to see him with his poor head all bandaged up, so upset and feverish,” Poppy reported to Alan. Pushed away by these nuns, Jessie must have been displeased. She taught me to kneel at the foot of the bed to say my prayers and ask God to make me a good boy, amen. Her compact with the Almighty was a private matter between them. Churchgoing was merely another of her household duties. “Old crows” was her term for lumping together everyone in religious orders.

  That Christmas was “merry, happy, lovely,” adjectives that didn’t come so easily to Mitzi. Bubbles and Eduardo, Poppy and Lily were staying there. On the day itself, Alan arrived from Dieppe for lunch and later drove back with Poppy who remained with him for 24 hours. Under the mistletoe Jessie kissed Frank and called him “Darling.” Bella Braun was also present. Ernst Braun, her husband and a Springer employee from Vienna, was away trying to obtain the papers to escape from Europe. (A letter of his, written in Chicago in 1948, reminds Mitzi that at Montreuil on 3 September 1939 he had heard her say that the eventual victor in this world war “will have to carry out the victory with Russia.”) “Poor Mande-liks,” is all she says of a Czech-Jewish refugee who was also there, with everything about him, including his first name, unrecorded. Accepted by the Intelligence Service, in the first days of 1940 Alan was posted to an introductory course in Cambridge. The Tatra could not be serviced, and on his departure from Montreuil he had himself photographed standing close to this trophy he was about to abandon in the garage.