Faul Lines

by David Pryce-Jones

  Contemporaries such as Julian Mitchell and Ved Mehta were already in touch with editors and publishers, and well on their way to becoming successful writers. Another poet, Quentin Stevenson, was praised by Edith Sitwell. Dom Moraes, the Indian Rimbaud, was also very young to have published. His big brown eyes gave him a lifelong childish appearance, but he was soon married to Henrietta Bowler. The friend of Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, she recruited the willing to wild bohemian London. Invited to a black tie dinner, I found myself sitting next to John Caute, and learnt that under the name David Caute he was the first person of my own age to be publishing a novel. At Fever Pitch was impressive. A Marxist who told me he intended becoming an English-language Sartre, John exposed my ignorance of praxis, Chernychevsky, Frantz Fanon and the rest of the obligatory apparatus. Under peer review, so to speak, I took on the protective colouring of the infantile Leftism that was the key to peaceful tutorials and a decent degree.

  Of course I recognized that the man who had thought it boring of me to wear a tie for my scholarship interview was A. J. P.Taylor. He had become a household name through television broadcasts on recent history timed to last exactly an hour and spoken without a script as though impromptu rather than carefully prepared. A way of walking brusquely through the college signified that he had better things to do than waste his time on undergraduates. His rooms were near mine in the New Buildings, and one night he came to my room without warning on some pretext of playing Stravinsky’s Histoire du Soldat. It was long past the time when girls had to be out of the college, and he had caught me with one who was evidently going to spend the night there. He overstayed his welcome but at least he did not have me sent down as he might have done.

  A messenger interrupted one of my tutorials with him to deliver his freelance earnings from the Beaverbrook newspapers. Cash, a bundle of notes that Taylor held on to, fondling and counting, while at the same time he was muttering to me, “This is what it’s all about.” Discussing the French revolution, he said, “I’ll show you what the Jacobins were about,” seized a poker and swung it at me, hitting the chair I had just jumped out of. And in yet another tutorial he suddenly asserted that there was no such thing as Gulag in the Soviet Union, it was horror-propaganda put about by White Russian exiles in Riga. But survivors have left testimonies, I answered. And you believe them? he sneered. Actually he had spoken out against Communism when it mattered at Congress for Cultural Freedom conferences, and I can only suppose he was putting me through some obscure test of his own devising.

  At the end of term, college fellows sit at the high table in the hall, and undergraduates come up one by one to hear in no more than a couple of minutes what their tutor has to say about their work. Taylor said of me, “It would do this young man good to go hungry and have to steal his food.” I started shouting in anger that while Taylor was safe in England giving vent to his spleen about the course of German history I was stealing food in Vichy France. Presiding, all silky smile, Tom Boase broke in, “We are not responsible if you take Mr Taylor’s advice.” I refused to have anything more to do with Taylor and might have been sent down for that too.

  By chance, I encountered Taylor in the London Library just after the publication of The Origins of the Second World War, his partial exoneration of Hitler that was raising a storm. “This time I’ve trod on their toes,” he said with very revealing satisfaction. I was researching my biography of Unity Mitford. Taylor had a dinner date in the Ritz in the near future with Sir Oswald Mosley, Unity’s one-time brother-in-law, and proposed that I join in and have a lesson from one who had made history. Eyes bulging as he spoke, Mosley was even more conceited and unrepentant than Taylor. The more Mosley defended his Hitlerite past, the more Taylor fawned on him. So frustrated was his love of power that if Mosley in 1940 had become Hitler’s British Gauleiter, Taylor would have been a natural collaborator.

  Raymond Carr of New College, a man with a more open mind and a wider range of interests, was prepared to give me tutorials. He also persuaded New College to permit the staging of a play, Down You Mad Creature, a skit of sorts on the Odyssey that I had written with Peter Levi. John Cox, later of Covent Garden, was our producer, and Dudley Moore, later of Hollywood, wrote the music. Dmitri Shostakovich happened to be in Oxford to receive an honorary degree, and he came to the party after the performance. So many went up to him speaking the Russian they had learnt in the navy that the KGB minders became suspicious and frogmarched him off.

  Whenever I was in Albany during vacations, Alan incorporated me into his literary life. I was present in A10 when Alan played the song from West Side Story, “Gee, Officer Krupke” to T. S. Eliot, with the intended compliment, “it might have been written by you.” Wincing as he listened, Eliot said he was sorry to see that Alan thought so little of his work. Also Alan’s guests in A10 were Sir Lewis Namier and his Russian-born wife Julia de Beausobre. When I let drop a typical Oxford apologia that Stalin at least had industrialised Russia, the Namiers bombarded me for the rest of the afternoon with statistics to the effect that the Romanovs had done better and, if allowed to, would have done better still. A disturbed Eugène Ionesco asked me to believe that a ghost was chasing him out of the house he had rented in Maidenhead to finish writing a play. I accompanied Alan to a cultural conference in Geneva, where the main Soviet speaker was Ilya Ehrenburg. He launched into a diatribe against Western intellectuals one and all, only to lunch at the same table as Alan and Stephen Spender, putting himself out to flatter and charm two men in a position to promote his career.

  In the summer of 1958 Francis Hope and I travelled together on the continent. He was pursuing Carol Gaynor, an undergraduate, and I was pursuing Clarissa Caccia, whom I had met at a ball and fallen in love with at first sight. Reaching Salzburg ahead of us, Alan obtained scalper’s tickets for us at the opera and introduced Francis and me to Sam Barber and Gian Carlo Menotti. Clarissa and her cousin Phyllida Barstow then arrived. What further determined my future was a visit to the so-called World’s Fair in Brussels. I wrote it up in an article for Isis, an Oxford student magazine. Soon afterwards, a letter arrived from John Guest, editorial director at Longmans, to say that he could tell from this article that I was a novelist and would I be sure to send him my first finished work of fiction.

  Clarissa also lived on fault lines of nationality and identity. Harold Caccia, her Anglo-Tuscan father, had been personal assistant to the Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax, and then to Anthony Eden. He did not subscribe to the policy of appeasing Hitler. He and like-minded colleagues in the Foreign Office, he used to say, never thought we might lose the war but couldn’t see how we would win it. Posted to the embassy in Athens, he had his wife and two young children with him in April 1941 when the Germans invaded Greece. Leaving by boat from the Piraeus with a party of commandos led by Peter Fleming, they put in to an uninhabited island by day. Clarissa was in a cave onshore when German dive-bombers sank the boat, killing several commandos including her uncle Oliver Barstow. Crete, Egypt, South Africa, the West Indies, were staging posts in a roundabout and dangerous journey that brought her to Liverpool. By coincidence, we both returned to England from our experiences of war in September 1941. We had still more in common: Clarissa had been educated in Vienna because after the war her father had been appointed British High Commissioner in the occupied zone. Her Austrian accent was raw, she used special dialect words, for instance hopatachik, meaning stuck-up (derived from the French de haut en bas) and sang songs with funny words, “Wer hat so viel binki-binki? Wer hat so viel Geld?” We had both been brought up with such nursery jingles as “Halli hallo, wer sitzt am Klo? Der Krampus und der Niccolo,” and we had similar responses to such music as the lyrical aria “Aber der Richtige, wenn’s einen gibt” in Richard Strauss’s opera Arabella. At Eton, her brother David had become a close friend, and we used to break the rules by slinking away on bicycles to the cinema in Slough. It took him by surprise that his little sister might want to marry me. (An amusing and gifted man, h
e was to die young of a brain tumour.) When Clarissa came to Royaumont to meet my relations, Jessie patrolled the corridor and at two in the morning suddenly entered my room on the pretext of asking if I was sure that Clarissa’s blond hair was not dyed. The silver pepper pot she gave us as a wedding present was, she said, “To grind away your troubles,”

  By my final year at Oxford, Clarissa was in Washington and had a job under Johnny Walker at the National Gallery. As British ambassador, Harold had weathered the Suez crisis. Engaged to Clarissa, I was staying in the embassy in April 1959 when they rang up from Royaumont with the news that Jessie had suffered a stroke. Her handwriting is completely uncontrolled in a letter she wrote on her deathbed to Mitzi, but the spirit is constant: “My dear Madame, thank you for all your goodness and kindness to me. I have not been perfect by a long way but I have done my best for all of you big and little. Bless you all, Jess.” I could not be there when she was buried next to Nanny Stainer, both of them close to Poppy in the Viarmes cemetery. “Well done thou good and faithful servant” is the inscription chosen by Max on the tombstone.

  Under some impression that I could combine a literary life and a diplomatic job, I sat the Foreign Office entrance examination. Those who then interviewed me were sure that with my background I would insist on postings in France and Germany and they were unconvinced when I said I rather fancied Mogadishu. At another interview a lady psychologist asked me what had been the happiest day of my life. My answer was that sunshine and clouds went together. And what, she went on, had been the unhappiest day? I had already answered that. Quite soon, I received a handwritten letter to say that out of a total of 150 marks, the minimum acceptable was 50, and I had scored 35. In a sorrowing tone, the letter informed me that I would not be able to cope with life, and advised that I go for professional treatment. This was not good news for my future father-in-law, soon to be Permanent Under-Secretary of the Foreign Office. Looking into it, he discovered that according to the psychologist, failure to provide specific incidents of happiness and unhappiness were grounds for absolute and permanent disqualification from any responsible job. At that time, furthermore, the Foreign Office could not countenance anyone with a French and Jewish mother. Luckily, Harold had a sense of the ironic and the ridiculous, and never held it against me that becoming a journalist I had enrolled in what the Foreign Office like to consider the Opposition.

  I wrote finals and married six weeks later in the twelfth-century chapel next to the house of Clarissa’s Barstow grandparents. I was twenty-three, Clarissa just twenty. Everybody encouraged us. Those who thought us too young kept their counsel. The gathering in the churchyard of Mitzi, the assembled Fould-Springers and Rothschilds, prompted Aunt Marjorie, widow of a Caccia uncle in Florence and in her day a steadfast fascist and anti-Semite, to jot down in her diary, “All the noses were there.” At the reception that afternoon, Alan whispered in my ear that Bobby Pratt-Barlow had died, leaving me the capital of half a million dollars with the life interest to him.

  Always generous, Cécile de Rothschild gave us the wedding present of a week on a yacht with a crew of a captain and a mate that we picked up on the Greek island of Hydra. In Austria on the way home, we visited the monastery of Stams. I was wandering by myself in the sacristy when a priest came in, advanced towards me and without a word started hitting my head. I put my arms up to ward him off, and he knocked my watch to the ground. Outside the monastery was a police station. The priest charged me with breaking off the diamond pendulum of the clock in the sacristy. At which point, a busload of German tourists entered the police station to testify that they had witnessed me doing it. The police sergeant on duty duly wrote down the particulars. If I had stolen the pendulum, it had to be on me. While I was trying to get him to search me, he asked why Clarissa spoke German like a native. Because her father had been the British High Commissioner in Vienna and she’d been at school there. And where were we driving to now? To Baron Elie de Rothschild at Scharnitz. The policeman stood up, saying that everyone knew the pendulum had been missing for at least ten years. Ordering the priest and false witnesses to leave, he begged us to take the matter no further. Apparently the priest had suffered a breakdown, we were to make allowances, but anyone who did not have the right credentials might very well have been framed. The false witnesses drove away before I could have it out with them, but they had given me a feel for the malice and lies of the Hitler period.

  Every inch an earl, Lord Drogheda, the managing director of the Financial Times, had offered me a job on the paper as a feature writer. The features’ editor, Nigel Lawson, gave the impression that he was bound for the top and had the generosity to be taking you with him – Roy Harrod, the economist and a fellow of Christ Church, Oxford, said he had never taught a better pupil. Gordon Newton, the paper’s experienced editor, gave me an early lesson in the way of the world when he called me in to listen to R.A. Butler on the telephone briefing against colleagues by leaking what they had just said in cabinet. After a while I was writing a daily column with William Rees-Mogg, who had the air of the editor of a great paper long before he actually was one. In a short space of time, then, I had acquired a wife, a house in Knightsbridge, the prospect of money one day in the future, and a career.

  Time and Tide was a rundown weekly magazine that the rich and idiosyncratic Tim Beaumont – a priest into the bargain – had bought in order to revitalize. It was something of a gamble to accept its literary editorship. The foreign editor Mark Frankland and the home affairs editor Richard West both wrote books as well as articles. Among contemporaries whom I was the first to put into print were Martin Gilbert and Francis Hope, the novelists Margaret Drabble and Susan Hill, and Tony Tanner, Cambridge’s specialist on American literature. Every Wednesday, Burgo Partridge, Julian Jebb and other regular critics brought in their copy and we’d have lunch. Burgo was almost sure to talk about his parents Ralph and Frances Partridge. He hated their Bloomsbury values of anything-goes so passionately that he had always wanted to murder them. As a little boy, he had shown his mother the grave he had dug for her in the garden. In a case of mistaken identity, the police did arrest him for murder. Assuming that the trauma had wiped out the memory of his deed, he made a false confession and wept when his father came to fetch him from the cells. This made such an impression that I was to take it for the donnée of my novel Safe Houses.

  In the first interview I did, Aldous Huxley described how his house in California had caught fire. Almost blind as he was, he had risked his life to save the manuscript of Island, his last novel. To have lost his library with its archive including letters from D. H. Lawrence was a foretaste of death, he said with impressive lack of self-pity. One occasional contributor was David Jones, the poet and painter, for whom art had to be a genuine spiritual experience. Arthur Koestler never kept his promise to write for the magazine. His circle of friends included Paul Ignotus, who looked too frail to survive the persecution by Hungarian Communists that he recounts in Political Prisoner, a book that ought to be better known. They would gather in his house for a drink before lunch on Sunday, and on one of these occasions around 1963 I heard Goronwy Rees tell the assembled company that Anthony Blunt had tried to recruit him into the KGB. Didn’t you know, said John Mander, then on the staff of Encounter, standing next to me, it’s Goronwy’s party piece. The security services needed years to catch up with common knowledge in this room.

  In any spare time, I finished Owls and Satyrs, my first novel, and sent it to John Guest. Clarissa and I had a summer holiday in Turkey. We had an introduction to a surviving Ottoman grandee who asked if Clarissa was really my wife. What a catastrophe, he went on, you have married a woman of the world, she’ll want clothes and jewellery; you should have done like me, married a peasant woman and kept her in the fields. While we were there, tanks came out into the street, the army staged a coup to depose Prime Minister Adnan Menderes and finally to hang him. By chance, we met Patrick Kinross, my parents’ best man and a Turkophile. By an even gr
eater chance, he had in his pocket an advertisement of a book by Dom Moraes with a flippant quote from a review of it I had written. We were alone in the Mena Yacht Club as his guests; its members were under arrest as Menderes’s cronies, and we could hear them howling in the prison across the water on the island of Prinkipo. On our return to London, a letter from John Guest was waiting to say he was delighted to be publishing the novel. The copy editor was Elisabeth King, sister of the novelist Francis King, and a letter from her just picked out turns of phrase she particularly liked. In this comedy of manners the main character is Alan, represented as a woman too preoccupied with herself to pay attention to others. I did not want to hurt his feelings, and this fiction was the way to come to terms. He never mentioned the novel, which I take as evidence that he must have read it and was determined to avoid any discussion that might arise. That was his way of coming to terms with me.

  NINETEEN

  Midnight Mollie

  AT DAWN ONE DAY while we were still at Cavendish Close, I was woken up by footsteps and the noise of a car starting. Peering out of the window, I saw a woman leaving the house in a dishevelled evening dress. A day or two later, I was to meet Alan for dinner in a restaurant. Plans had changed, he had this woman with him, and he handed me some money for a taxi home. The woman was Mollie Duchess of Buccleuch, known to all as Midnight Mollie.