In keeping with the ideology of that moment, the rest of the world mostly approved of the Israeli experiment in self-determination and saw it as the fitting and healthy response to the Holocaust. Europeans shared the country’s socialist roots and many of the young from everywhere on the continent volunteered in a spirit of idealism to spend time in a kibbutz, which passed the test because it was a collective. Arab acceptance of what had been essentially a demographic shift would have left Israel as an enlarged Jewish quarter with its distinctive values but still a minority in the end subordinate to the surrounding majority. Historic contempt for Jews, damage to self-esteem and the example of modern totalitarian states instead motivated Arab leaders to politicise and militarise their populations, changing them out of all recognition, prejudicing their future and in the process having the contrary effect of justifying and strengthening Israel.
In Syria and Lebanon I was just in time to catch the last few effendis who still were wearing a tarboosh and had the gracious manners that had captivated generations of English travellers. Petra was pretty much as Burckhardt had found it over a century earlier. We were alone there, and the only place in which to sleep was the police station. Abandoned, the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem was desolate, even creepy, under Jordanian occupation. Small boys swarmed out of ruined alleys to throw stones at Clarissa and me.
In London, The Spectator was looking for a literary editor. An interview with Iain Hamilton and Anthony Hartley, respectively the editor and his deputy, got me the job. The foreign editor was Robert Conquest, whose scrupulous study of Stalin’s Great Terror was dismissed as fascist by people I had been at Oxford with. One valued contributor was Evelyn Waugh, whose contributions were in long-hand without a single erasure. A mildly experimental piece by a young writer making his first appearance in print failed to please him, so much so that he wrote to ask me to explain it. I got from Henry Green the last thing he wrote, a paragraph recommending the banning of Nabokov’s Lolita in order to protect elderly men like him from running into the park and making fools of themselves. Angus Wilson’s reviews were ungrammatical and incomplete scrawls in biro. “Do what you like with it, dear boy,” he’d say and then put the telephone down. Vidia Naipaul’s early books have an astonishingly pure sense of comedy. Hoping to persuade him to write for The Spectator, I got to know him and his first wife, Pat, well. We talked about money and markets. On one of our walks in the park, he said that if he had been born into a wealthy family he would never have become a writer.
Hannah Arendt’s reportage on the Eichmann trial was published in October 1963, and Iain Hamilton agreed that I should review it. It took a very special type of intellectual to hold that banality was a word applicable to this man’s commitment to mass-murder. Cross-questioning had brought out his singular and sinister absence of human feelings. When she blamed Jewish officials for carrying out orders given by Eichmann and his staff, she revealed her inability to imagine the reality of Nazism. She excelled in passing moral judgements about events too frightful to be so simplified, and which in any case she had not lived through herself.
The Spectator’s owner, Ian Gilmour, had been in Oliver Van Oss’s house at Eton, though he had left before I arrived. A member of Parliament, he was supposed to be an open-minded, progressive Conservative, eventually earning the sobriquet “wet” when he was in Mrs Thatcher’s cabinet. His resentment of Jews was obsessive, ignorant and snobbish. I heard him inveighing against the Gaon of Vilna about whom he knew nothing, and he had an obsessive wish to attack the writings of James Parkes, a clergyman with a scholarly interest in Judaism and Israel. Jews, Gilmour believed like any Blackshirt or Islamist, by their nature conspire to do harm to other people, and to Palestinian Arabs in particular. A day was to come when he went bail for two Palestinians who had tried to blow up the Israeli embassy. The strain of talking to me drained the blood from his face, tightening muscular striations and grimaces in his cheeks that became suddenly chalk-white.
Gilmour’s wife, Lady Caroline, was Midnight Mollie’s youngest daughter and she made a point of gushing over her mother and Alan as though they were a couple of young hotheads who ought to be encouraged to run away together. (She had loved Alan so much, she told me after his death, that she had been unable to write a letter of commiseration.) Likewise, she made no attempt to keep secret her affair with the Labour politician Roy Jenkins. Whenever Alan was in England, he would stay in one or another of the Buccleuch houses as though in an extended family. On one occasion, he and Mollie drove from Boughton to the cinema in nearby Northampton. Emerging from the film, they found the car park locked. Appealing to a passing policeman to fetch the key, Mollie said, You see, I’m the Duchess of Buccleuch. Before disappearing into the night, the policeman answered, And I’m the fucking King of Romania. Alan also reported breakfast one Sunday morning when Mollie said to her son-in-law Ian, “There’s an article in the Telegraph written by David about Jerusalem, that’ll interest you.” “That is something I shall never read,” Gilmour replied, then put his newspaper down and stalked out with his breakfast unfinished. It was understandable that on the one and only occasion I was persuaded to go to Boughton, the Duke took care not to speak to me, not even to be in the same room except for meals. Researching in the Public Record Office, I was to find a letter from the Duke to Lord Halifax, then Foreign Secretary, informing him that on behalf of several dukes he would be presenting Hitler with a pair of Sèvres vases on his fiftieth birthday in April 1939. Only Jews could conceivably object, he went on, but they did not count. The permanent under-secretary, Sir Orme Sargent, had minuted tersely that the Duke seemed much too simple to meddle in these matters, and he wished he wouldn’t.
Slowly I began to understand that in my upbringing I had enjoyed the advantages of being my father’s son, and disadvantages might now outweigh them. I was at the outset of a literary career; he was ending his. Competition and comparison were inevitable. A short story of mine was once printed under his by-line. F. R. Leavis had published his attack on C. P. Snow in The Spectator. Given his conviction that Pryce-Jones was the name of a member of a metropolitan clique whose “discovered brilliances burst on us every year,” I thought it best to correspond with him under an alias. This introduced farce when this valued contributor set about arranging a meeting to discuss what he might write next. A knockabout character, Christopher Logue was one among several poets who owed their start to Alan. I had met him three or four times and at some party we were talking when Karl Miller, a literary editor keen to promote, or more likely demote, reputations, passed and said loud enough to be overheard, “Logue and Pryce-Jones, all that’s worst in literary London.”
Noel Annan, one of Alan’s oldest friends, took me on one side to say, “You do realize, don’t you, that your father is madly jealous of you.”
Evelyn Waugh and Alan were not so very different in their ambitions and aspirations. Editing Little Innocents, an anthology of childhood reminiscences published in 1932, Alan got a contribution from Waugh. As their lives diverged, though, Waugh took to referring to Alan as “the man Jones,” a phrase that hesitates between affection and superiority. “I used to know your poor dear father,” was how he greeted me at the reception held in the House of Lords after the wedding of his son Auberon, the name usually shortened to Bron. (Recovering from the near-fatal accident he had suffered on military service in Cyprus, Bron spent some time in the Hospital of St John and St Elizabeth, a short walk from Cavendish Close. Evelyn Waugh had not visited him there. By chance Alan was in the room when at last he came, and Alan reported him saying, “It is a soldier’s duty to die for his country.”)
Clarissa and I saw a certain amount of Bron and his wife Teresa. In the Financial Times I gave Bron’s first novel, The Foxglove Saga, a welcome. Aware that he did not have his father’s natural gift for writing fiction, Bron compensated by reclaiming for himself as best he could his father’s imaginative landscape. From the grave Evelyn directed Bron’s opinions. Without affection, on
ly superiority remained. For Bron, I was “the boy Jones,” regularly fantasized in one or another of Bron’s numerous media outlets as a Welsh-Jewish dwarf with a backlog of unspecified misdemeanours. While he had to earn his living as a hack, independent means allowed me the freedom to write only what I pleased.
Next Generation is a collection of composite sketches of people who seemed to me to represent some aspect of Israel as it was then. Everyone in the country had a story to tell of dispossession and persecution of one sort or another, and another story of recovery. The experiment in nation-building succeeded for the paradoxical reason that Arab and Soviet hostility isolated Israel for the two initial decades of its existence. I had the good fortune to arrive there at a time when these refugees from all over the world were taking advantage of enforced isolation to put in place their very own identity, culture and creativity. Editing Commentary, Norman Podhoretz had published an extract of Next Generation and Arthur Cohen bought the American rights for Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Reviewing the book for The Observer, John Gross saw the point of what I was saying, but in England this was a one-off, so to speak, that set me apart. Terry Kilmartin, that paper’s literary editor, did what he could to play my father off against me. Inviting Alan to stand in for Ken Tynan as theatre critic, he ceased asking me to review and let me know there was a political reason for this. Easygoing as he was, he was in the first wave of intellectuals after the Six-Day War to stick the label of fascist onto anyone who failed to condemn Israel. Arthur Crook, succeeding to the editorship of the Times Literary Supplement, spoke, dressed and eventually even came to look like Alan. Quite probably thinking that in the absence of Alan, parental responsibility fell to him, Arthur Crook said to me, “Dear boy, you do so many things so well, why don’t you give up writing?” With her wits about her, Clarissa then dug out the fact that also rather like Alan he had put away an unfinished novel. (When I published Running Away, he wrote a gracious letter to say that he had enjoyed the novel and Clarissa had been right.) Not long afterwards, Paul Engle invited me to spend a year teaching at the writers’ workshop he had founded and was directing at the University of Iowa. Arthur Crook claimed to have recommended me, either to make amends for his put-down or to provide an academic alternative once I’d taken his advice.
Jessica and Candida, our second daughter, were respectively three and one when in August 1964 we caught a Holland America liner to the States. Alice’s sister Betty came to help with the girls. In the roughest Atlantic weather the ship pitched and rolled so much that only three passengers were able to stagger to the dining room, Candida, me and an American who said, I sure get a kick out of watching that kid eat. In Newport, Rhode Island, we stayed in a house on John Street that Alan had been persuaded to buy by Nin Ryan, daughter of financier Otto Kahn and a grande dame in her own right.
I wondered whether to stay in the United States and settle there. Iowa City had every amenity. The surrounding countryside, especially Lake MacBride and its woods, was attractive. A bygone America could be sensed in farms that sold their unpasteurised milk and fresh eggs. At the same time, the university offered interest and variety: music, a course in photography for Clarissa, the sight of hundreds and perhaps thousands of students swinging golf clubs in unison, not least Professor Bargebuhr whose thesis was that historic Islamic monuments were actually the work of Jewish architects.
In the writers’ workshop I learnt more than I taught and in the course of the year I finished Quondam, my third novel and a comedy of manners involving the relationship of literature and money, always a vital issue. Paul Engle liked to reminisce about English poets he had known, for instance Edmund Blunden. R. V. Williams, otherwise Bob, was a novelist who spoke about his past more grippingly than he could render it as fiction. The child of a bigamous father, co-opted by an Italian mob, Bob had driven a landing craft in most of the wartime invasions. Living a short walk away, our closest companions were Mark Strand and his first wife Antonia. Throughout the winter we spent our evenings together. His poetry and then his prose poems express a view of the world with a beauty and originality all their own.
A native Iowan novelist at the workshop, Verlin Cassill did what he could to enrol me in his two obsessions, that the Warren Report deliberately obscured the conspiracy behind President Kennedy’s assassination, and that only a Jew could be a literary success in America. At a gathering of the English faculty, Cassill approached Renée Hartman, wife of Geoffrey, a foremost authority on Wordsworth, and herself a Holocaust survivor. “Next time we’ll get you,” Cassill said. The row reverberated round the campus. Cassill’s one companion in arms was Richard Yates, author of Revolutionary Road, a good writer evidently afraid that his talent was spluttering towards extinction.
To explore the States, Clarissa and I put the girls into the back of our station wagon and drove on and on. Electioneering, Senator Barry Goldwater was staying a couple of floors above us in the Brown Palace Hotel in Denver. I went up unannounced, and he gave me an interview that put paid to a lot of nonsense that Oxford had put into my head. We chased a burglar at two in the morning in Santa Fe and at Taos had lunch with Dorothy Brett, who had come there originally to join D. H. Lawrence’s planned collective, and took in the a university football match in New Orleans. We also travelled by train from a halt in Iowa for thirty-six hours to California. “Oh the vice of the English,” was the comment of George Cukor the film director, and our host in Los Angeles, when we said that all we wanted to see was Forest Lawn, immortalised by Evelyn Waugh.
In New York on the way back to England I spent a day inquiring into the Black Jews in Harlem, a sect of a few thousand whose belief in their Jewish identity seemed a counterpart to the Black Muslims. John Anstey, editor of the Telegraph Magazine, published it. A veteran journalist, he was well known to be difficult, demanding revisions and rewriting even or especially from famous writers unwilling to be edited. George Weidenfeld and his colleague Barley Alison had always accepted what I had written, and so did John Anstey. He communicated by letter, not telephone. Other contributors received two or even three pages of editorial criticism; I received paragraphs of polite thanks. For years I had a contract with him for twelve assignments, or six if I was writing a book and needed the time for it.
Once I wrote a piece in favour of Cardinal Mindszenty, then seeking refuge in the American Embassy in Budapest. Mitzi was furious, she had known the Cardinal since before the war, he had a German name originally and didn’t fit her schema of Unite The Impossible. This didn’t stop her asking me to travel behind the Iron Curtain on her behalf. She had set up a fund to pay pensions to former employees, nineteen of them, and it fell to me to check whether the Communist authorities were allowing these pensioners to exchange hard currency at a fair rate. In 1966 Clarissa and I first went together to the former Hungarian properties. Carelessly wrecked, Kapuvár and Pokvár were ghost houses, their past irrecoverable. Wherever he lived, Max had planted avenues of chestnut trees but these were now straggly and overgrown, if not uprooted. We took away some conkers as souvenirs. The stabling of the stud at Lesvár was roofless, blackened and burnt out by the Red Army. This was where the Soviet major had shot Trisollin, the Derby winner. To the people in the village inn, my round face and prominent eyes made me recognisable as a Springer descendant. It wasn’t much after nine o’clock in the morning when we began toasting each other with firewater of some sort. Don’t forget us, the villagers implored, one day you will be back.
(Now forty years later, the town of Kapuvár is much larger and new buildings come close up to Gustav Springer’s house. The facades are recognizable, and the wonderful ironwork of the balustrade on the main staircase survives. Otherwise the interior has been converted into municipal offices partitioned with cheap plywood, the rooms containing even cheaper furniture. Nobody has heard of Gustav Springer. Lesvár looks more abandoned than ever. At some point a country hotel, and today the private house of a government minister, the rebuilt Pokvár has the sort of evocative charm o
f the Turgenev novels Poppy was so fond of. The janitor had never heard of Max, Poppy and Alan and had no idea that he was showing us up the same polished wooden stairs on which they had trod. Partridge shoots are a thing of the past.)
Nagy Istvanne had lived all her life in the same house in the town of Ercsi and remembered the past. She was the widow of Pista, one of the foresters under Rimler Pal and a particular favourite of the family. Conscripted into the army, he had been taken prisoner on the Russian front and returned from captivity having lost his toes from frost-bite. In Communist Hungary he soon died. In Budapest one pensioner produced an album of photographs taken in 1930, and there are snapshots of the sixteen-year-old Poppy and the fourteen-year-old Lily in white linen dresses harvesting in the field with other girls their age. In the background is a fearsome threshing machine, a contraption with driving belts and pistons.
Romanticising Hungary, Mitzi did not have a good word to say for the Czechs. I never met Countess Otschkoy, a ci-devant aristocratic friend of hers trapped somewhere in Moravia, but she too was on the list for a pension. In Konopiste, in Slovakia, a former bailiff was one of the few Sudeten Deutsch not expelled from the country. In his house was the life-size portrait of a society lady, probably Mitzi’s mother. At Čachtice, a ruined castle where centuries ago Elizabeth Bathory had bathed in the blood of murdered girls, two elderly women were barefoot as they gathered bundles of sticks. Was Mitzi dispossessed for this?
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