Faul Lines

by David Pryce-Jones

  The snobbish side of Alan was flattered to have a duchess running after him. As though they were in the same social set, he used to refer to her as a cousin whom he had known since childhood. It looks as if Midnight Mollie took up with Alan while Poppy was still alive, but I cannot be certain about that. A rather withered beauty by then, she had evidently had a past from which her nickname derived. She and her husband Walter, the Duke of Buccleuch, were on distant terms, each going their own way. Rumour had it that the Duke was not the father of all his children. His mistress was a rich South American lady.

  From my perspective, Mollie had her claws into Alan and would not let go. Possessive, she was also supercilious, drawing attention to herself with a mincing way of speaking unlike anyone else’s. She simpered. The staple subjects of her conversation were the Royal family, her own family, and problems with domestic servants. She expected Alan to entertain her as though he had a fortune as large as the duke’s, no expense spared. Over the years he was to pay for their flights on public and private aircraft, for safaris and hotels and five-star meals that he could not afford but which the rapacious Mollie took for granted. Invitations to stay in the duke’s great houses of Boughton and Drumlanrig were what she could offer, and it was enough to tether him. A letter to me has no date, but since it is written on Cavendish Close writing paper it has to be early in their relationship: “Boughton was very pleasant – no other guests: the children enchanting. We fished for tadpoles, collected cowslips, went for long walks, did a little local sight-seeing, including a very unsuccessful visit to Burghley, which was shut when we got there (just Mollie and I).” Telling my daughters Jessica and Candida to call her Granny, she was too obtuse emotionally to work out that this was bound to miscarry. Indignant at the implied claim, they hit instead on “Mollie Duchess,” which says all that there was to say.

  Poppy’s death was a blow to Alan as a man and a writer from which there was no recovering. His diaries record a social life as hectic as ever, but this was a front for loneliness and mourning. Already in September 1955 he is contemplating how “to wind up my intricacies with Mollie.” The same diary paragraph elaborates, “Castle Hill keeps coming back and I wonder how I can go on living without my darling…. I can’t go on getting tangled up with people and then explaining to them that I am only looking, like Orpheus, for my lost Eurydice.” His papers contain a good few letters from Mollie that he never opened. There are also a good few self-analyses, one of which has the date of June 1956, about the same time that he was painting the idealised picture just quoted of those tadpoles and cowslips. “I have smashed my link with Mollie and caused her a misery which I can’t assess because I can’t bring myself to open her letters. Why? Conscience? Boredom? Claustrophobia? I don’t really know. It is all bound up with a shirking of the act of love, yet that too may be no more than an equal horror of nympholepsis and impotence.”

  Up from Oxford, one evening as usual I went from A9 into A10, never imagining the discovery I was about to have. The place seemed empty. I opened the drawing room door, turned on the lights and there on the sofa was Alan with a rent boy. Surprise turned immediately into a feeling of guilt that I was in the wrong. I backed out, closed the door and stood in the narrow entrance wondering what to do. Pretty soon hurrying past me on the way out to the landing, the rent boy in his embarrassment made sure not to catch my eye. Instead of speaking about this incident, Alan and I behaved as though it had never occurred.

  The hero-worship I had felt for my father was beginning to transform into questions. I was obliged to ask myself what Poppy had known about the man she had married. Had she been aware of rent boys? What had she made of the fact that by and large his friends were homosexuals? Where did the rent boy leave Midnight Mollie? I was often hearing that she hoped to marry Alan. Was she better informed than Poppy had been, perhaps indifferent, or maybe supremely self-confident?

  Doris was the only person I could turn to. White-haired with a slight blue rinse in it and careful to dress for the West End, she had once been approached in Bond Street by an Austrian who kissed her hand and spoke under the misapprehension that she was Princess Lobkowitz. Like Jessie, she had worked so hard that her legs had swollen. Like Jessie too, she was possessed by the sense of duty, which meant keeping oneself to oneself. A Dorset farmer’s daughter, she took the realistic view that people do what they do, and it is nobody’s business to be censorious. Midnight Mollie might pester Alan and propose this and that, but she’d never leave the Duke, she enjoyed being a duchess far too much to become plain Mrs Pryce-Jones. Doris had some phrase about the boss liking his oats. What she minded about the rent boys was that one of them had stolen a Cartier bedside clock given to Poppy as a wedding present from Lulu de Waldner, with the lettering Love From Lulu replacing the clock-face numerals.

  On 19 May 1960, Alan notes in his autobiography, he flew to New York and his life up to that point “closed abruptly.” The Ford Foundation had taken him on for six months as a cultural advisor. On the last day of November that year he was writing to Mitzi on paper from the Shamrock Hotel in Houston that he was dashing from San Francisco to a university in New Orleans. Even if the Ford Foundation did not extend his contract, “I shall be very tempted to stay on here for a few years (in New York, I mean) and just write, coming back to Europe in the summer…. I love it so in the U.S. One can escape, and I perceive that in London I never can.”

  A9 was given up, and A10 let to Lord Gladwyn, the former British ambassador to the United Nations. (His wife Cynthia had such an artificial air that many years previously Poppy had joked that she looked like a broken porcelain figurine badly glued together, nicknaming her Lady Seccotine.) “I shall never willingly again make my home in London, nor (if I am honest with myself) in Europe again,” Alan was opening his heart to Mitzi in a letter of 6 August 1960. “For the first time since I tried to make a life by myself I find that I can relax, work, avoid bores, make a little money, feel well, feel simple – and it’s a magical sensation…. I see myself very well spending the last years of my life with extreme contentment writing away in Boston or New York – or anywhere in the clearer, fresher air of the New World. I feel like Florestan climbing up out of the dungeon.”

  The job at the Ford Foundation put a gloss on the reality that actually he was escaping from Midnight Mollie and from me. He could leave her letters unopened if he felt like it, and I wouldn’t be bursting in unawares at the wrong moment. Doris retained her upstairs room in Albany but would go over to America in the summer to keep house for Alan. Calling on her for a cup of tea on two or perhaps three occasions, I found a youngish American by the name of Tex Barker. His friend Alan had insisted that on a visit to London he was to be sure to contact Doris. Tex was so silent that it was hard to attribute any character to him. When I asked Doris about him, she just laughed saying, We know the boss. But did we? In his papers are a number of letters that are unattributed but he thought worth preserving. Someone signing Andrew wrote from Malta, “Hallo, my dear old fruit.” Someone else wrote from H. M. S. Excellent, and Chuck wrote from the U. S. S. Chas. S. Sperry, “I don’t know how I will ever repay you for what you have done for me.” Graeme in Sunderland asked, “Can you tell me how to cope with repressed homosexuality?”

  A letter of mine dated in December 1962 to my grandmother says that Alan has been in London as the librettist of Vanity Fair, for which Julian Slade composed the music. Unlike Salad Days, the previous musical that made Slade’s reputation, this one ran for a few days only. I go on, “He has decided to go to America for good. He will have no job and will rely on Pratt-Barlow money for his main financial support.” That money was in a trust. At a joint meeting, Roger de Candolle, the Swiss banker in charge of administration, told us that Bobby’s purpose had been to prevent Alan from spending the capital. Roger de Candolle had spoken very bluntly, “and made my father blush.”

  In fact, the Ford Foundation renewed Alan’s contract, and he became an alternate book reviewer for the New
York Herald Tribune, then still an independent newspaper. Doris’s real worry was that Alan was living beyond his means. She saw him paying for Midnight Mollie and Tex, for an apartment in Manhattan and his house in Newport; she knew the costs that his social successes were incurring. The diaries he kept from then on consist mostly of names of people and the invitations that he gave or received. He seems to have found his place in a circle of people like the Parisians he had known as a young man, with a taste for the arts and the means to indulgence in whatever they liked. One such was Robert Rushmore, who published two works of fiction that are not much good but have elements of his demonic character. A kind friend, John Richardson, he of the red high-heeled shoes and biographer of Picasso, saw fit to tell me that in the matter of sex Robert was afraid that he was going to split the Pryce from the Jones. Another kind friend was Clarice Rothschild who lived in a very grand Park Avenue apartment. She let drop to me that Alan had complained, “What did I do to David that he dislikes me so much?”

  TWENTY

  Middle East and Middle West

  OWLS AND SATYRS made almost a thousand pounds, enough money for John Guest to invite me to meet colleagues of his and ask what I would like to write next. A book about Israel, I said. Longmans initially offered an advance of one hundred pounds, but the very next morning I received a letter to the effect that they had to consider their Arab markets and when they proposed a hundred pounds they had meant fifty. Taking me on without demur, George Weidenfeld became my publisher of choice. Qui plume a guerre a, to have a pen is to have a war, so Voltaire thought, and George Weidenfeld has backed my pen and its wars through thick and thin. Once again, Isaiah Berlin advised me against embarking on something with much to lose and little to gain. Eton, Oxford and the Guards, he surmised, was a combination virtually certain to dispose me against the noisy egalitarianism of Israel.

  Poppy had never practised any Jewish ritual, nor taught me anything about Judaism. On Sundays, she would accompany Alan and me to Pembury church next to Kent College for Girls. I had no inkling of a scene that had taken place shortly after the move to London. John Betjeman had rung her up to say that he had seen Alan face-down on the floor of the Catholic cathedral in Westminster in a ceremony of induction. For months he had been taking instruction from the Jesuit Father D’Arcy. Poppy, I was to discover, had given him the choice: either Catholicism or her, not both. Her Jewish identity had been revealed only that once in the tumbledown orchard at the back of Castle Hill, when I had come home bursting to ask questions about Jews wanting world war. Here was a secret of Poppy’s heart to explore.

  Harry d’Avigdor-Goldsmid had made available the Bothy, a very small cottage in the kitchen garden of Somerhill. Clarissa and I spent occasional weekends there. By way of rent, whoever was in the Bothy had an obligation to add to the party by dining in the big house. Among dozens of familiar guests were Enoch Powell, Cyril Connolly, Sacheverell Sitwell, the virtuoso violinist Jascha Heifitz, Sidney Perelman who wrote scripts for the Marx Brothers, and George Backer publisher of the New York Post and a Democratic Party politician. “The trouble with Evie,” he said of his pixie-like wife, “is that she’s never had an unspoken thought.” Gerard Bauer, another star visitor, wrote a column for the Figaro, and his friend Madame Naar did not make even a shot at the English language. Handpicking her contemporaries, Sarah gave them the chance to meet the old and the famous.

  Harry was parliamentary private secretary to Duncan Sandys, then a cabinet minister. One weekend, Duncan Sandys set about impressing everyone by performing the trick in which the conjuror appears to be sawing someone in half. He made a complete hash of it, not once but twice. I said, that’s politicians for you, having made a mistake they make sure to repeat it. Wim and Lia Van Leer overheard me. Even by the standards of Somerhill they were exceptional. Wim’s father, Bernard Van Leer, was a successful Dutch industrialist who in 1940 had negotiated his departure to the United States, taking along his private circus in which a hundred Jewish refugees were passed off as circus hands. Wim’s adventures included posing as a carpenter to enter the newly built concentration camp of Buchenwald and reporting on it; piloting and crop-dusting; sharing a house for six months in Tel Aviv with Arthur Koestler as Israel was fighting its war of independence; acquiring from his father a factory in Haifa making steel barrels. Playing with words in several European languages, he never learnt Hebrew. To him, any and every orthodox Jew with side-curls was a “Mickey Mouse.” Sweltering on a hot and sultry day, he sighed, “Zionism is a winter sport.” He emended the words of Tipperary to “It’s a long way to Petah Tikvah,” a humdrum town in Israel. His documentary film about Israeli experts working on projects in Africa had the title, “Dr Lowenstein, I presume.” “Christmas comes but once a year” was his signature tune at Somerhill, “and when it comes it brings Van Leer.” Lia kept him in order, just. As a teenager, she had escaped from Moldavia to mandated Palestine. Most of her family had been murdered in the war.

  Wim and Lia knew of a flat to rent opposite their house in Panorama Road at the top of Mount Carmel in Haifa. Our eldest daughter Jessica had been born an exact twin of the son of Princess Margaret and Tony Armstrong-Jones. “The Jones baby,” was the newspaper headline I read driving home. So I wrote to them that it had been a great day for the hyphenated Joneses, and received a wonderfully stuffy acknowledgement from some equerry. Jessica was four months old in February 1962 when Clarissa and I put her in the back of a Morris Minor and drove off. To help look after her, nineteen-year-old Alice Moorhead came too. On the way through Italy we stopped at San Martino. When we were out of the house, my grandmother saw an opening to advance Unite The Impossible, and summoned Don Fosco, the parish priest, to come round at once. Frank’s former room had been preserved as a shrine, and in it, behind our backs, the complaisant Don Fosco and Mitzi improvised some sort of blessing for Jessica.

  Israel then was a laboratory in which to observe how Zionism, essentially a nineteenth-century national liberation movement, was transforming Jewish identity. For most Jews in Europe, Nazi genocide had put an end to the former identity based on religious practice. How to survive now was the question. Was the loyalty demanded by nationhood merely emotional, even tribal? Poppy and her family might think themselves assimilated and secular, but to everybody else they were still primarily Jews. The trial of Adolf Eichmann was under way in Jerusalem. Listening to the evidence of his key role in wiping out Jewish life in Europe, people very often burst into tears. I was in court for the final session when his appeal was rejected. Very soon afterwards the news came through that he had been executed. Outside the courthouse, strangers began talking to each other. In the uncertainty of some and the relief of others, it seemed to me, lay the difference between Jew and Israeli.

  The two rooms of the flat were scarcely furnished but had a spectacular view of the bay of Acre and the night-time illuminations of the city and the shore. Three wide balconies provided a Mediterranean touch, and from the one where I sat and worked, I could look down into the barracks next door, more like a cheerfully mixed school than a military installation. A Coldstream drill sergeant would have been horrified by the lack of discipline and the inattention to turnout.

  As someone English who had been in Vichy France, I had a curiosity value. Evenings were spent with the Van Leers and their friends; Pinchas Yoeli whose father had been box office manager in Bayreuth and emigrated by himself in 1935 at the age of fifteen to become a professor and cartographer with an international reputation; his wife Agi from Berehovo in Czechoslovakia, an Auschwitz survivor free from self-pity and a ceramicist whose wonderfully imaginative work is exhibited widely; Yaakov Malkin born in Warsaw, a public intellectual, lecturer and at that time director of the Arab-Jewish Cultural Centre at the top of Panorama Road; his wife Felice, an artist, chiefly a portraitist, from Philadelphia. Sometimes I found myself in the Café Rom amid people speaking their mother tongue of German, and sometimes I sat in cafés on Dizengoff Avenue in Tel Aviv with writers,
Amos Elon and his wife Beth, Yoram Kaniuk, Benjamin Tammuz, Herbert and Susie Pundik. For a month or so we were lent a flat on Hayarkon Street, where l could pass Max Brod who had fled from Prague with his friend Kafka’s manuscripts in a suitcase, and Marek Hłasko, an early dissident, whose novel The Eighth Day of the Week explains why he had fled from Poland.

  An old-timer who had held several important posts, David Hacohen had served with the British on sabotage operations in the Middle East during the war and could reminisce about two colleagues of his who had lost their lives, Sir Anthony Palmer and Adrian Bishop, Maurice Bowra’s sometime-lover. Expecting me to be as involved in the minutiæ of Israeli politics as he was, he took me to a meeting of the Mapai Party. In the chair, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion placed me next to him, and out of the side of his mouth kept up a running commentary, most of it derogatory, about the speakers. At one point he gave me a short disquisition to the effect that Germans might appear the worst anti-Semites, but what they’d done under Hitler was an aberration not to be repeated. The worst anti-Semitism was in France, where bigotry was endemic and the French incurable. He insisted that I walk home with him for a cup of tea. I hadn’t been with Mrs Ben-Gurion for more than a few minutes before she wanted to know if I was circumcised.

  Atallah Mansour, a Christian from Nazareth, was the Galilee correspondent of Haaretz, the leading daily paper, and the first Arab to write a novel in Hebrew. His memoir, Waiting for the Dawn, makes it plain that he and his family never felt resentful about Israelis but were determined to stand up for Arab rights. That matter-of-fact approach would have questioned the terms on which Jews were to have a state of their own and almost surely have persuaded the Zionist national liberation movement to accommodate the Arabs more easily. Arab culture excluded any such possibility. Rashid Hussein, a Muslim from the village of Musmus in the part of the Galilee known as the Little Triangle, was a close friend of Atallah Mansour’s. In the tiny house he shared with his mother, all I saw of her was her bony hand stretching around the door with the food she had cooked for us. His poems are collected in a volume with the title Sawarik, rockets. For him, as for other prominent Palestinian writers such as Mahmud Darwish or Ghassan Kanafani, the complete purpose and subject of their work is glorification of their nation, even though it still does not exist as such. In a trajectory that seems symbolic, he joined the Palestine Liberation Organisation in Beirut, worked for it in the United States and died there after accidentally setting fire to his bedroom.