My sense at the time was that the general public in the Muslim Middle East had expectations of a better future, one with justice instead of enforced obedience to a ruler without mercy. The Closed Circle posits that this must happen one day. Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, Ayatollah Ruhallah Khomeini’s seizure of power, the assassination of Anwar Sadat, the whole grisly chain of bloody causes and even bloodier effects means that this time of justice is postponed until reason overcomes superannuated religious and social codes, that is to say indefinitely. Communists tried to destroy Jews; the Nazis then had their turn at it; and now that Arabs and Iranians are operating more or less freely they put themselves next in line for genocide, intent on killing off the Jewish movement of national liberation. The subject of The Closed Circle and quite a lot of my writing is what makes people believe the extraordinary, irrational things they do believe and then act upon.
TWENTY-ONE
Influence?
AFTER THE SIX-DAY WAR, John Anstey extended my experience of Communism by commissioning me to write about the Balkans. Admirers in the Foreign Office and the media of Josip Tito and Nicolae Ceauşescu turned a blind eye to the secret police, the only structure that mattered in these dictatorships. At Tulcea on the Danube Delta, a speedboat roared past as the Securitate escorted Chinese officials in their Mao uniforms to see men condemned for years to cut reeds in water up to their waist. A pastor in Sighişoara preached that Communism had been sent to scourge the congregation for their sins. In Zagreb, Vlado Gotovac pointed out the secret police on duty in the street below his apartment; arrested, he received twenty years for nationalism. Entering a Belgrade bookshop, the poet Miodrag Pavlević and I backed out immediately at the sight of Alexander Ranković, the head of the secret police whom Tito had recently demoted.
The name and address of Milovan Djilas was in the Belgrade telephone book. I took a chance, rang him and was invited to his house. Many former Communists like him had broken with the Party, but familiarity with Tito and Stalin gave him special authority. His face, drawn and white as clay, testified to the thirteen years he had just finished serving in prison. The Soviet Union and China, he said, were in the process of dividing the world between them. Small countries like his, and like mine for that matter, would be obliged to take one side or the other unless the United States was a third party. To create this balance and to preserve freedom, he went on, it was imperative that the United States wins the Vietnam war. If you have any influence, he urged me, use it to that end.
At the time, a loophole enabled visiting academics to receive their salaries tax-free on either side of the Atlantic. Bob Williams from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop was now teaching at the California State University at Hayward, and he arranged for me to spend a semester there. Staying with Bob and his wife Hatch in 1968, I wrote most of another novel, Running Away. A new friend, the novelist Herb Gold, introduced me to nearby San Francisco, his hometown, and through him, I think, I met Mark Schorer, the distinguished critic and a moving spirit on the English faculty at Berkeley. He invited me to give a talk in the university about my encounter with Djilas. The very idea of American victory in Vietnam was quite enough to upset that audience, and its endorsement by Djilas of all people was unanswerable. By the end of that evening, the Schorers were almost alone to be still speaking to me.
That summer there were battles on Telegraph Avenue between the police and blacks and hippies who may or may not have been students. Tear gas was in the air, curfews were imposed and some two hundred demonstrators were arrested. I interviewed a surly Eldridge Cleaver, at that time a rabble-rouser preaching the downfall of the United States. The house was a fortress, its windows blocked, guns were to be seen indoors, and there were men making it plain they were ready to use them. Djilas hadn’t foreseen anything like this.
While I was in California, Clarissa and the two girls had spent some time at Deauville as Elie’s guests. When I rejoined them at Royaumont and heard that he had tried to go to bed with Clarissa, I insisted on paying for their hotel rooms. He refused to tell me the exact sum, so one morning I walked from the château over to the Faisanderie and shoved a bundle of notes into his hand. This may bear on what happened next. Alan telephoned to say that his house at Newport had been foreclosed and put up for sale. He had a mortgage with Amsterdam Overseas Corporation and by some oversight had not kept up with payments. He was asking for five thousand dollars from the Pratt-Barlow capital. In her boudoir on the top floor, Mitzi was against complying on the grounds that it would only play into his extravagance. If he knew his debts would be paid this way, he’d run up more of them. It turned out that Alan had received the money for the mortgage from Elie. Amsterdam Overseas was an arm of the Rothschilds. Alan, said Elie, hadn’t been bothered to respond to requests or letters. They wouldn’t sell the house over his head but they would like to hear from him if only for the sake of politeness. Back in London not so many weeks later, I got another telephone call from Alan to say that he didn’t need Pratt-Barlow money after all, he wasn’t about to jump off a bridge, he was going to marry.
Adrian’s crisis was simultaneous. Outwardly his career as film director and then theatrical agent had been successful. Well turned out, usually in a double-breasted, blue pinstripe suit and his hair combed perfectly, he looked as if he was a welcome habitué of the expensive restaurants where he liked to invite us. When he took his nieces Jessica and Candida to an ice rink he could still give an exhibition of figure skating. He dropped the names of Peter Ustinov, Mel Ferrer, Ava Gardner, John Huston and Laurence Olivier. One of his turns was to imitate Marlene Dietrich whom he’d seen in her dressing room, lifting her face by hoicking wrinkled skin up to her ears. We used to think it bad luck that his flat was broken into so often and burglars beat him up so badly. The police had rescued him almost senseless on a train at the end of the line in Southampton and after that he opened his heart. The burglars were rough trade. Terry, a chirpy go-getting Cockney, lived with him in Albany. A few hand-written pages survive in which Adrian gave himself up to some introspection: “I dread the thought of being a queer old bachelor of 70 – even 60.” Every so often, he would begin drinking. A small quantity of alcohol was already too much. The bender would last not more than a few days and then I’d get a message to visit him in a clinic, usually the Priory at Roehampton. Dr Conachy, a tough specialist treating alcoholics, kept him on the wagon for quite long spells. When Adrian didn’t respond, we’d go round to his flat and let ourselves in. A day will come, Dr Conachy warned, when we’ll find him dead. Once, perhaps twice, Adrian went to Newport to recover from a bout. But in The Bonus of Laughter Alan from faraway puts the rhetorical question, “What can a brother do?”
Adrian died in a smart hotel in St Moritz, the scene of his skating triumphs. He was only forty-eight. The room had been left untouched but his watch and cufflinks had already gone missing. He was found on the floor, with the telephone upset beside him. He must have realized that the mixture of alcohol and pills was fatal, tried to dial for help, and fallen. I had to identify him in the morgue, his face so twisted with fear and horror that he was almost unrecognizable. It turned out that in his will he had left portraits of his parents, Alan and himself to Terry. These pictures, Terry said, meant everything to him. To recover them, Alan paid five hundred pounds.
Soon I flew to New York for Alan’s wedding. Mary Jean Kempner came from Galveston, Texas. She was fifty-seven, six years younger than Alan, svelte, holding herself very well. A journalist and former member of the Office of Strategic Services, she had reported from China during the last war. The marriage was celebrated in January 1969 in her apartment in Beekman Place, one of New York’s most exclusive addresses. Standing next to me at the back of the drawing room was Evie Backer, a regular guest at Somerhill. I made some injudicious remark to her, and Evie bolstered her reputation for never having an unspoken thought, saying above a whisper, “Alan, we don’t think you ought to get married.” If they heard, the bride and bridegroom pai
d no attention. At the lunch, Brendan Gill of The New Yorker gave the witty and affectionate speech that I should have given.
“Have you got a wicked stepmother?” the five-year-old and wide-eyed Candida asked. Unlike Poppy at the time of her marriage, Mary Jean was a woman of the world able to judge for herself what kind of a husband Alan would prove and whether or not she had been married for her money. With unquestioning generosity, she settled the Amsterdam Overseas mortgage and put down a capital sum to pay off Tex Barker. After ten months of marriage, she took Alan to the house she rented in Portugal. There, one morning, she woke up with bruises on her body. The local doctor diagnosed aplastic anaemia, a form of cancer for which no suitable treatment was available in the country. Alan found himself once more with a mortally ill wife in the American Hospital in Paris. Within a matter of days, she was dead. Adding to the sense that he had been through this before, Alan had to give a home to Daniel Thorne, Mary Jean’s son by a previous marriage, now at the same age that I had been when my mother died. On a morning with a wintry sun, I sat next to Alan on a low wall outside a church in Paris waiting for the service for Mary Jean to begin. He spoke as usual about this and that while I marvelled at his self-control.
“I ought to be grateful for so much,” his diary entry for New Year’s Day 1970 opens. “But I feel rather dazed; missing Mary Jean; missing, as I have every day these sixteen years, Rese [shortened from Thérèse]; wanting my parents back, rather as one wants nanny, as a reassurance rather than a pleasure.” Stock-taking of the kind had become rare; the diaries of his years in America are really a social register. At the end of June, he flew over for family engagements. Jessica and Candida were to be bridesmaids at the wedding of my cousin Elisabeth de Rothschild at Royaumont. Sonia, our third daughter, had been born that April and she was to be christened at the church in Chantilly the following day. The first weekend in July, he spent with the Buccleuchs at Boughton. “Mollie in a needling mood: repeating that everyone had loathed Mary Jean and been distressed by my marriage (not true, of course), that I was volatile to the point of folly and so on. I realised that she had to get this out of her system…. Walter was charming: I have ‘my’ room, with the blue four-poster and the view.”
On a tour of the house and its treasures next day, Mollie spoke bitterly again. “Poor defenceless Mary Jean, in the grave. I tried to explain; but brought on a kind of suppressed hysteria. Then all came out well. Just before I left, Mollie took me into the morning room and said that she had prayed and prayed that something would remain of what had been: a love, however disembodied…. ‘You seem to love people in need,’ she said. ‘And you cannot imagine how great my need is.’ … She is impossible; and yet I only do love people in need, I suppose.”
TWENTY-TWO
Sonia
SONIA WAS two months old when I was invited to teach at Berkeley for a summer semester, and we set off five strong for California. Bob Treuhaft and his wife Jessica Mitford lived in Oakland, and we had exchanged houses with them. Entering the living-room, we could not fail to see their Communist Party cards prominently left on the table. However, we had the use of their brand new Mercedes-Benz while in London they had to make do with our proletarian Morris. On my first appearance in the English faculty office, someone introduced himself as my Vietnam instructor. The class would want to discuss the war, he said, I did not have the requisite knowledge so he would take over. There would be no discussion, I said, because I would send to the South-East Asia faculty anyone sidetracking the class in this way. You won’t get away with that, my instructor came back at me, and sure enough, I soon heard that there was a new British fascist on campus. In the beautiful early morning light, I would walk to the classroom past splendid buildings and lawns kept fresh with water sprinklers, enter and invariably come down to earth with a bump at the sight of the boarded-up window with its huge capitalised slogan in black paint, “Go fuck yourself, teacher pig.”
One day, Allen Ginsberg and a crowd said to be three thousand strong sat on the grass chanting for hours Om mani padme hum, and on another day Ronald Reagan, then governor of the state, had a very different crowd of three thousand faculty members laughing in spite of themselves at his sense of humour.
Everywhere we went, Sonia came too, for instance to the redwoods and Yosemite. Nothing indicated what was to come, and nothing explains it. Back at my desk in London, I would leave open the door to the adjoining room with her cot in it. Whispering, flirting, she would have me spending time with her instead of working. Before she was two, she knew her alphabet fairly well. In the summer of 1972, I had an assignment from John Anstey to drive a big BMW on back roads from Montreuil to Italy. Sonia did not become sunburnt like the others, we noticed, but since she was so fair we thought little of it. Back home in Wales, Clarissa’s mother thought Sonia was pale and ought to have a blood test. The Builth doctor very soon telephoned: Sonia had leukaemia and we were to take her to St Bartholomew’s hospital in London immediately. We could see our three daughters running in the meadow with ice creams in their hands. Clarissa rang Olivia Stewart-Smith, a cousin who lived nearby, and she came to fetch the two eldest girls. We drove off in two cars, and at a parting of the road waved goodbye. Our London doctor, John Creightmore, was waiting on the doorstep. I telephoned Agi’s brother Gabi Izak, a well-known blood specialist in Jerusalem, and whose almost miraculous avoidance of arrest and murder at the hands of Nazis in Hungary had made him fight to save life ever since. But there was nothing to be done. Spending not even a full twenty-four hours in hospital, Sonia died towards midnight. She was two and a half. In the following days Harry d’Avigdor-Goldsmid called unexpectedly at the house. Words didn’t come easily to him. His daughter and my childhood friend Sarah had drowned, and it has stayed with me as evidence of a great soul that he was equating our grief with his.
We were at Pentwyn in a snowy February when our son Adam, then four and the last born in the family, suddenly folded up. In spite of the hazard of driving in bad conditions up our steep hill, Dr Davies came from Builth to the house. On his advice, we had to flee once more as fast as possible to London, this time to the children’s hospital in Great Ormonde Street. Adam had meningitis. For several days he lay unconscious. On what by a fortunate coincidence was my birthday, he suddenly sat up and said he would like a boiled egg.
Shirley’s Guild is the novel in which I sought to come to terms with the death of a child. The doctors have no idea why Sonia succumbed to leukaemia, or why it was fulminating, as they label the form of it that put an end to her life so quickly. We have no clue whether we as parents did something wrong, or on the contrary did not do something we ought to have done. The subject of that novel, then, is destiny.
TWENTY-THREE
A Burnt-Out Fairground
JESSICA MITFORD, Decca to one and all, had a library of thousands of books, and Clarissa discovered some in which Unity Mitford had written her name and a few marginal comments in a childish hand. Her passionate support for Hitler had been a phenomenon of the Thirties; that much was common knowledge. An essay about her, I thought, might shed light on the irrational mentality of fanaticism. When I mentioned the idea to Decca, she handed me the nine letters from Unity that she had preserved. Unity had been the fifth child of her parents, Lord and Lady Redesdale, and Decca the sixth. I understood that Decca couldn’t sort out in her own mind the closeness she felt for her sister and abhorrence for Unity’s Nazism.
Many of her age and background had known Unity in England or in Germany. One of them was Mary Wooddisse, originally from Nottingham, who had been with Unity when Hitler first invited her to his table in the Munich restaurant of his choice. Her husband, Klaus Humbach, had been an S. S. doctor holding the rank of Colonel. Captured by the Soviets, he had been reprieved from a death sentence and was among the very last convicted war criminals eventually sent back to Germany. With Dostoevskyian intensity, he wanted me to relieve his conscience. At the outbreak of war, Unity had put a bullet into her brain. Her fr
iend Janos Almásy had taken charge of her papers and in due course he returned them to the Mitford sisters who deposited them in Chatsworth. A Nazi who flew a swastika flag above his castle, he had denounced his conservative sister Mädi to the Gestapo. What the Mitfords could not have known is that for purposes of revenge, Mädi had had time to appropriate one of Unity’s diaries and copy others. Mädi’s son, a priest, had inherited these papers and stored them in the attics of the Sacré Cœur in Vienna, the school which once Clarissa had attended. He gave me what he found in a trunk. The projected essay could now enlarge into a book.
Former Nazis remembered Unity. Hitler’s military adjutant, Colonel Nicholas von Below, used to find pretexts for entering the room whenever Unity and Hitler were alone, and he could assure me that Hitler had never done more than stroke her hair. Frau Ilse Hess, the wife of Rudolf Hess, and Henriette Hoffmann, the wife of Baldur von Schirach, both confirmed from personal experience that, whatever Unity may have wanted, the relationship with Hitler was platonic. The basis of their mutual attraction was that both loved causes more than they loved people.
A courtier who had fallen out of favour with Hitler, Putzi Hanfstaengl was sure she had denounced him. Enacting the past, he insisted on playing the Liebestod from Tristan on the same piano that he had played for Hitler. Rudi Simolin, eighteen at the time and not a Nazi, accompanied Unity inspecting the apartment in Munich Hitler was to give her. In front of the Jewish owners about to be forcibly dispossessed, Unity discussed colour schemes and curtains. Albert Speer was his usual equivocal self. At the end of his prison sentence, he settled in a house in Heidelberg. We sat in a room where the light of day hardly penetrated. My friend Roman Halter, a survivor of the Lodz ghetto, Auschwitz and a death march, had confronted him not long before with the evidence of war crimes. Speer for once admitted responsibility. This shadow of a human being had exact recall of everything to do with Hitler and was evidently still enthralled by him. The sister of Joseph Goebbels had known Unity well, but she was the one and only German who refused to be interviewed out of loyalty to the past. James Lees-Milne, the prolific diarist and in his youth a Mosleyite, was alone in taking the same line in England.
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