Faul Lines

by David Pryce-Jones

  In the haul from the Sacré Cœur was the diary Unity had written in 1933 recording the affair that her elder sister Diana was having at the time with Sir Oswald Mosley of the British Union of Fascists. In a sense, Unity was trying to go one better than Diana. She knew Hitler and Goebbels but could only exclaim that they were “wonderful.” When I met Lady Mosley, I had the very different sense that she felt responsible for the fact that she was alive and Unity long since dead by her own hand. I had been born too late to understand Hitler and Goebbels, Lady Mosley thought, but I would live long enough to see statues to them put up in the capitals of Europe.

  The Mosleys orchestrated a campaign to stop the biography I was writing. They put pressure on everyone they could think of to withhold their testimony, and then to say I had misrepresented them. The sixth and youngest Mitford sister, the Duchess of Devonshire, surely had forgotten that once she had put me through after-dinner paper games in Lismore. I wrote to inform her about the projected book. Her response was, “Too many people are still alive who might be upset by it.” It was open to her to express love for Unity and abhorrence for her politics. Under cover of family solidarity, both these sisters instead chose to apologise for Nazism. In a letter to Alan, the Duchess gave the order “Call your boy off,” as though summoning to heel a disobedient dog, and followed up with a similar imperative to Liliane.

  (Another of my controversies enveloped her when The New York Times commissioned me to investigate the last days of the Duchess of Windsor. Valuable possessions of hers were turning up for sale; nobody knew why or what happened to the large sums of money obtained. The only person in a position to take advantage of the dying Duchess was her lawyer and executor, Maître Suzanne Blum. Liliane invited her and me to lunch and after publication of my article Blum accused her in a series of hostile letters of being my accomplice. Poor Aunty Lily!)

  The Duke of Devonshire meanwhile was transmitting messages that I should on no account pay attention to what his wife was saying. At Chatsworth, I was told, argument at dinner became so heated that the Duke had to send the servants out of the room. Unaware of how I knew what I knew, Lady Mosley and the Duchess accused me of twice breaking into the house, the first time to burgle Unity’s papers, and the second time to replace them.

  After a good deal of research, the thought suddenly hit me that Unity might have been a British agent, in which case she had succeeded in a most successful penetration of the enemy and my account would one day fall apart. Victor Rothschild introduced me to Sir Dick White, former head of MI6. Before the war, he had been stationed in Munich. The secret service archive will never be in the public domain but he was prepared to check it out for me. Unity, he said, would have been a useful liaison between Mosley and Hitler, but since she had no access to British official sources, she was not taken seriously. It was well understood that Hitler was feeding disinformation through her. Today, he concluded wryly, she would have been used without her knowledge to feed disinformation back to him, but the service did not then have the technique for that. Her fanaticism was thought eccentric enough to bring Nazism into disrepute, and so she was left to do her worst.

  At the last minute, Mosley tried to bring an injunction. We had sent him an early proof copy, he had three small harmless complaints that were accommodated but reserved his right to take other legal measures. The judge wouldn’t have it. When Mosley’s lawyers then said that they could not be responsible for the consequences, my lawyer advised me to fetch the girls from school and to ensure that nobody could tamper with the brakes of my car. Here was the authentic whiff of fascism. Invited to confront Mosley on television, I conscripted John Caute to rehearse with me all possible questions and answers that might arise. I was sure that Mosley as usual would deny that he had ever been anti-Semitic so I jotted relevant quotes on index cards, and had them arranged in my pockets. He duly lied and I read out a selection of these cards. “Did you really say that?” Melvyn Bragg the anchorman asked, and Mosley’s snarl of an answer, “I suppose so,” was a clincher. When finally Mosley left for home, the driver of the taxi took one look and said, “He’s not getting into my bleeding cab,” and accelerated away.

  My book became a nine-day-wonder, I can only suppose, because it brought out into the open collaboration with Hitler and the outlines of a British Vichy regime in the event of a successful Nazi invasion. The British flatter themselves that they had united to defeat a totalitarian enemy, and this was Our Finest Hour. Here I was pointing a finger at people whose beliefs and activities undermined this cosy national myth. I was to hear that I was “a traitor to my class,” a charge which concedes that England really did have its Quislings and Vichyites in waiting. Intending to analyse the social significance of my book, Bernard Levin, then the leading columnist on The Times, interviewed me over a period of several days. However many drafts he wrote, he finally told me, he couldn’t make sense of the storm, and gave up on the idea. It was left to Rebecca West to say what had to be said. She had known Meidling before the war and could remember seeing me there when I was a few days old. She had also studied the subject of treason. In a review she likened the moral atmosphere of my book to that of a burnt-out fairground.

  The obvious defender I could call on was Isaiah Berlin. A director of Covent Garden, he quite often invited me to the royal box. Amusingly, we discussed his blind spot about Puccini. I had been his guest in February 1974 when Alexander Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Soviet Union. A professor published an op-ed piece in The Times with the thesis that this was nothing new but a reprise of the historic debate in Russia between Westerners and Slavophiles. Isaiah had read the piece and immediately agreed that this was nonsense. Communism is quite another issue. Nineteenth century Russian political thought was Isaiah’s special subject, I said, he should write a response. The professor has his credentials, he demurred – I couldn’t get him past this cop-out. A guest once more in the royal box at the height of the Mitford clamour, I suggested that he intervene. You and your book have been shamefully treated, he said as we were taking our seats. Give the word, he went on, and I’ll lean out of this box to appeal on your behalf to all the good people down there. Which was his way of saying that he wouldn’t lift a finger. On Boxing Day 1976, he signed off with a postcard, “you can well afford to be (not very) bloody and entirely unbowed.”

  (Coinciding with Isaiah’s eightieth birthday in 1989, The Times published an article by Roger Scruton to the effect that Isaiah had every quality required to further the cause of freedom, and his reluctance to do so was a flaw in his character. Alas, some kind friend overheard me saying that I tended to agree with Scruton, and denounced me. Isaiah immediately telephoned and wrote to me at full pitch. My reported defence of Scruton’s “absolutely odious piece” upset him. He likened Scruton to the Black Hundreds reactionaries in Czarist Russia and to Goebbels, and further to Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, “horror figures in my life.” Among those commiserating, he made sure to let me know, were Lord Carrington, Arthur Schlesinger and Noel Annan. “Things are what they are, and so are people, and one must get used, particularly at my age, to them.” We met regularly but he remained wary. When The War That Never Was came out, he said, “Noel Malcolm has reviewed your book, he says you have written a good book, and if Noel Malcolm says so, then you have written a good book. I shall not be reading it.”)

  Decca thrived on close combat and I had expected that she’d find some reason for turning against me. At her request, I quoted in the epilogue her summing-up of Unity. The epilogue, she wrote to me, “somehow lifts the whole book to a new (and far more desirable) plane.” Sure enough, she took umbrage that I had depicted her Communism and Unity’s Nazism as two sides of the same coin. Once the book was in the shops, she published some critical comments about it and soon she was no longer in touch. In the literary pages of The Spectator which once I had edited, Anthony Lambton dismissed me as “a little white knight in armour, the champion of the Jewish nation,” and added an incoherent at
tack on George Weidenfeld for publishing the book – this from a man with no moral base at all, forced out of public life by his involvement with drugs and prostitutes.

  John Gross, now editor of the Times Literary Supplement, was a close friend who kept me in touch with news and views of who was in and who was out. He had given my book for review to Alastair Forbes, a writer whose long-winded style was a form of boasting that he had every inside story at his fingertips. His review was nothing but an ad hominem attack and John decided to reject it. Giving it the title “The Piece the Jews Rejected,” Forbes made a hundred photocopies and drove round London putting them into letterboxes, including mine. After some revisions had been made to this review, I found myself attacked in the pages that Alan had once edited.

  Saul Bellow once suggested that my childhood spell in Vichy France had brought me close-up to the Jewish experience. Paris in the Third Reich certainly touched on my background. Tom Wallace, editorial director at Holt, Rinehart & Winston, came to the house with a portfolio of photographs taken by Roger Schall during the German occupation. I was to write the text. Here were the stories and personalities mentioned in everyday conversation at Royaumont. Wartime conduct was as contentious as ever. Passed over in silence for the most part, surviving French fascists and collaborators led a conspiratorial existence in the shadows. Those who apologised were mostly insincere. One of them, Henri Coston, evidently thought he had been right to persecute Freemasons and Jews, and was still doing what he could within the law to carry on where he’d left off. Jean Leguay was the Vichy bureaucrat – the French Eichmann in fact – who had organised the deportation of Jews. He came to London specially and no doubt sincerely to tell me that he’d not done anything wrong. I got to know Ernst Jünger, whose account of occupied Paris is a tour de force, at the same time brilliant and inhuman. Arno Breker, the sculptor and doyen of Nazi art, had accompanied Hitler round Paris in June 1940, and the new work in his studio showed that he had learnt and forgotten nothing, Bourbon-style.

  At that time, the German occupation was a taboo subject as far as the general public in France was concerned. Pierre Belfond, a go-ahead publisher, had paid quite a bit for the French rights to my book and expected to make a splash. The first translation was so bad that it had to be scrapped and another commissioned. Four weeks before I was to appear with Bernard Pivot on Cinq colonnes à la une, the leading literary programme on television, Belfond rang up. Someone at the top of government had objected to my book, his identity could not be revealed, there was no legal recourse, publication now might well lead to the enforced closure of his firm and he wasn’t going to risk that. Belfond lost his investment and I was banned yet again. (Lloyd Ultan used the passage I had written about the children’s fantasy of Auschwitz as Pitchipoi and set it to music. The cantata was performed in Minneapolis-St Paul with Pinchas Zuckerman as lead soloist. Furthermore, Neil Tennant said that my book had inspired one of the songs of his group, the Pet Shop Boys.)

  Fritz Molden, the Austrian publisher and a man larger than life, used to say that the happiest and most carefree time of his life had been as a Wehrmacht soldier in wartime Paris. In fact, he took the immense risk of informing Allen Dulles and American intelligence. Fritz and his brother ran a festival in their Alpine village of Alpbach. I was to read a paper about literature and freedom, a subject about which everything has been said. Marcel Reich-Ranicki, the leading German critic, then followed on by mimicking me in a falsetto voice. Sitting next to me, Zbigniew Herbert, the Polish poet, leant forward and said to Reich-Ranicki in coarse German, “Shut your trap and sit down.” In mid-sentence Reich-Ranicki stopped and was back on his chair. I asked Zbigniew to explain the source of his power. In Communist Poland, the censor who had forbidden publication of Zbigniew’s poems on class grounds was Reich-Ranicki. A refugee in Germany, Reich-Ranicki had kept this secret, but Zbigniew could ruin him by revealing it.

  Up to that point, I had thought of myself primarily as a novelist but now political convictions began to matter more to me. It has been my good fortune to have free-thinking friends. Vidia Naipaul for instance held that every writer should have a public row such as the one I had over Unity Mitford. Paul Johnson, Frederic Raphael, Noel Malcolm, Tony Daniels and a few others have talents that keep alive the cultural tradition of the country at a time when it seems at a standstill. The wars in the Middle East had revealed Soviet brutality and cynicism, and the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 was another illustration of it. A few courageous Czechs and British sympathizers, with the exceptionally clear-minded Roger Scruton in the lead, launched an underground university to keep alive freedom of speech. On a first visit to Prague I spoke to a small circle of dissidents, and one of them, Michael Žantovský, showed me round the city. Neither of us could have imagined that he would one day be Czech ambassador in Jerusalem and then London. It was already 1989 when I went again, this time to Bratislava. Ján Čarnogurský, a lawyer, had arranged for me to talk about the Middle East to perhaps a dozen of his friends. In the hotel I received a message that the meeting was cancelled. The caller had left the name John, which seemed to me proof of authenticity. Wrong. The secret police had tricked me and now ordered me to catch the first bus out to Vienna: another ban. They arrested Čarnogurský and put him on trial. He served a few weeks, until, thanks to the Velvet Revolution, he was released from prison to become deputy prime minister.

  That same year, 1989, I was invited to go with a British delegation to an international conference in Budapest. I accepted partly because Amos Elon, the Pundiks, and Yoram Kaniuk on the Israeli delegation were long-time friends. László Rajk and other prominent Communists executed after the 1956 revolution had just been rehabilitated in the sinister process devised by the Communist Party to apologize for victims of its injustices, up to and including those framed for murder. The Soviet Union was disintegrating. The British delegates at this conference were herd animals, separate in body, that is to say, but instinctively identical in opinion. In a room full of people who had lived through the Soviet or the Nazi experience, and probably both, one of these representative British intellectuals declared that the Soviets may have had Stalin but we have Mrs Thatcher. These Israelis did not have the luxury of posturing like that, and were all the better morally and intellectually for it. The gesture of joining their delegation was a small one, but it gave me a sense of belonging.

  I contributed to Encounter at the tail-end of its great days as a monthly magazine when its editor Melvin Lasky asked me to write about Elie Kedourie’s essays. I admired the intelligence, humanity and unexpected humour that lay behind his austere manner. When he told me that al-Ghazzali was the purest of poets, I learnt Arabic to see if he was right. I also wrote about the week of high jinks I’d spent with Arthur Koestler in Iceland when both of us were reporting on the Spassky-Fischer chess match. Like John Gross, Lasky used to ring up to discuss the latest outrage; it might be the appointment of an unsuitable Leftist, another anti-American outburst by Harold Pinter or Stalinist whitewash from Eric Hobsbawm. Norman Podhoretz and his successor Neal Kozodoy encouraged me to contribute to Commentary.

  Glasnost and perestroika, I was convinced, were too good to be true. Choosing his moment, Mikhail Gorbachev would surely act as every previous General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party would have, and order a crackdown. The overthrow of Nazism, the comparable totalitarian system, had required a world war. Unless or until there was another world war the Soviet Union was free to do as it pleased. A few thousand protesters shot dead in the main square of Kiev or Tallinn, let’s say, would have shown the danger of trifling with the system. A possible variation was to declare military rule in East Germany, close the frontiers and if need be, stoke the crisis by declaring a nuclear alert. Measures of the kind might have extended Communism and the Soviet bloc indefinitely into the future.

  Published in 1995, The War That Never Was sought to explain why none of this happened. The former keepers of the Party’s ideological flame and those who h
ad replaced them made it clear that violence had only just been contained. Romantics took the view that Gorbachev was a noble character who would not stoop to bloodshed. Cynics preferred to think that he had deceived himself, the victim of an illusion that Marxism-Leninism really held the key to Utopia and he was advancing to it. In either case, history turned once again on the decisions of an individual and not on impersonal forces. Several who had had leading roles in the Gorbachev era requested payment for their interviews. We haggled. When I asked to meet Gorbachev, a member of his staff seemed surprised that I would not pay a fee of twenty-five thousand dollars. Alexander Yakovlev, the advisor who more than anyone justified the rupture with Communism, asked for merely one thousand dollars and accepted one hundred.

  In the United States the book was published as The Strange Death of the Soviet Union. On the strength of it, Hilton Kramer and Roger Kimball gave me the chance to contribute to The New Criterion, the magazine they have edited in order to achieve what Desmond MacCarthy held was the real purpose of all criticism in the arts, namely to build a coral reef against the incoming tide of rubbish. I wasn’t to know that all the time I had an attentive reader. When Jay Nordlinger became managing editor of National Review in 1999, I began to receive regular invitations to contribute to the magazine. Jay was as welcoming as once John Anstey had been. No editors in England are so congenial, no platform so open to me. I was just in time to become acquainted with Bill Buckley, a man of great gifts and great charm who lived long enough to see this magazine of his celebrate fifty years of publication, a feat almost unheard of in the world of highbrow monthlies. National Review has made an American writer of me. Whether I am chasing my father in this respect, fulfilling his literary aspirations or showing them up is something I cannot decide.