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  SIGNATURES

  SIGNATURES

  Literary Encounters of a Lifetime

  DAVID PRYCE-JONES

  Copyright © 2020 by David Pryce-Jones

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

  stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by

  any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording,

  or otherwise, without the prior written permission of

  Encounter Books, 900 Broadway, Suite 601,

  New York, New York, 10003.

  First American edition published in 2020 by Encounter Books,

  an activity of Encounter for Culture and Education, Inc.,

  a nonprofit, tax exempt corporation.

  Encounter Books website address: www.encounterbooks.com

  Manufactured in the United States and printed on

  acid-free paper. The paper used in this publication meets

  the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48—1992

  (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

  FIRST AMERICAN EDITION

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Pryce-Jones, David, 1936– author.

  Title: Signatures: literary encounters of a lifetime / David Pryce-Jones.

  Other titles: Literary encounters of a lifetime

  Description: New York: Encounter Books, 2020. | Includes index. | Summary:

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019043396 (print) | LCCN 2019043397 (ebook) |

  ISBN 9781641770903 (cloth) | ISBN 9781641770910 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Pryce-Jones, David, 1936– | Pryce-Jones, David, 1936—Friends

  and associates. | Authors—20th century—Biography. |

  Intellectuals—20th century—Biography. | Literature, Modern—20th century. | History, Modern—20th century. | Civilization, Modern—20th century.

  Classification: LCC PR6066.R88 Z46 2020 (print) |

  LCC PR 6066.R88 (ebook) | DDC 828/.91409—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019043396

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019043397

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  Mahmud Abu Shilbayah, La salaam

  Harold Acton, More Memoirs of an Aesthete

  Sidney Alexander, Marc Chagall

  Svetlana Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters to a Friend

  Kingsley Amis, The Folks That Live on the Hill

  William Anderson, Translation of Dante, La Vita Nuova

  Noel Annan, Our Age

  W. H. Auden, Collected Shorter Poems, 1927–1957

  Beryl Bainbridge, Injury Time

  Elliott Baker, The Penny Wars

  Arturo and Ilsa Barea, The Forging of a Rebel

  Sybille Bedford, A Legacy

  Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift

  Bernard Berenson, The Italian Painters of the Renaissance

  Isaiah Berlin, Translation of Ivan Turgenev, First Love

  Adrian Berry, The Next 500 Years

  John Betjeman, Summoned by Bells

  Princess Marthe Bibesco, Le Perroquet Vert

  Paul Bowles, Two Years Beside the Strait: Tangier Journal, 1987–9

  Arno Breker, Bildnesse unserer Epoche

  Christopher Burney, The Dungeon Democracy

  Raymond Carr, English Fox Hunting

  Judy Cassab, Diaries

  Nirad C. Chaudhuri, Thy Hand, Great Anarch! India 1921–1952

  Alasdair Clayre, A Fire by the Sea

  Lucien Combelle, Péché d’Orgueil

  Cyril Connolly, Previous Convictions

  Robert Conquest, The Great Terror

  Anthony Daniels, alias Theodore Dalrymple, The Proper Procedure

  Philippe Daudy, Les Anglais

  Milovan Djilas, Conversations with Stalin

  Lawrence Durrell, Constance

  Amos Elon, The Israelis: Founders and Sons

  John Fuller, Collected Poems

  Nicholas Gage, Eleni

  Martha Gellhorn, The Honeyed Peace: A Collection of Stories

  Martin Gilbert, The Second World War: A Complete History

  Philip Glazebrook, Byzantine Honeymoon: A Tale of the Bosphorus

  Herbert Gold, Biafra Goodbye

  Oleg Gordievsky, Next Stop Execution

  Michael Grant, Greeks and Romans

  Robert Graves, Collected Poems

  John Gross, Editor of The New Oxford Book of English Prose

  Frederic V. Grunfeld, Berlin

  Roman Halter, Roman’s Journey

  Aldous Huxley, Island

  Paul Ignotus, Political Prisoner

  B. S. Johnson, Albert Angelo

  David Jones, The Anathemata

  Ernst Jünger, Journal, Vol. 1 and Vol. 2

  Alfred Kazin, A Walker in the City

  Elie Kedourie, The Chatham House Version

  J. B. Kelly, Arabia, the Gulf and the West

  Arthur Koestler, The God That Failed

  Walter Laqueur, The Missing Years

  Peter Levi, The Flutes of Autumn

  Bernard Levin, Taking Sides

  Bernard Lewis, Faith and Power: Religion and Politics in the Middle East

  Rose Macaulay, Going Abroad

  Kanan Makiya, Republic of Fear

  Olivia Manning, The Great Fortune

  W. Somerset Maugham, Don Fernando

  Jessica Mitford, A Find Old Conflict

  Nancy Mitford, The Water Beetle

  Dom Moraes, Beldam Etcetera

  Laurent Murawiec, La Guerre d’après

  V. S. Naipaul, Among the Believers

  Hugh Nissenson, The Tree of Life

  Edna O’Brien, A Pagan Place

  Stanley Olson, Elinor Wylie

  Iris Origo, War in Val d’Orcia

  J. B. Priestley, Margin Released: A Writer’s Reminiscences and Reflections

  Gwynedd Rae, Mary Plain in War-Time

  Jean-François Revel, La Tentation Totalitaire

  Gregor von Rezzori, Memoirs of an Anti-Semite

  Erich Segal, Love Story

  Alan Sillitoe, Raw Material

  Isaac Bashevis Singer, A Friend of Kafka

  Muriel Spark, A Far Cry from Kensington

  Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich

  John Stewart, To the River Kwai

  Mark Strand, Selected Poems

  Amir Taheri, The Persian Night

  Benjamin Tammuz, Requiem for Na’aman

  A. J. P. Taylor, English History, 1914–1945

  Wilfred Thesiger, Arabian Sands

  George Weidenfeld, Remembering My Good Friends

  Dame Rebecca West, The Meaning of Treason

  Michael Wharton, The Stretchford Chronicles

  Alexander Yakovlev, USSR: The Decisive Years

  Afterword

  Index

  For Alan

  1908–2000

  WITH LASTING AFFECTION

  DIC NOBIS MARIA QUID VIDISTI IN VIA

  PREFACE

  THE CONVENTION IS that if you happen to meet authors and have just bought or acquired a book of theirs, you ask them to sign it. Particularly stuffy authors might refuse but in most cases they feel flattered and duly inscribe your name and theirs on the title page or the flyleaf of the book in question. If the mood is right, they may add “with best wishes” or something of the sort. At a superficial level, of course, such signatures are only the equivalent of an autograph album. There’s more to it than that, however. Added value perhaps, but association certainly. The human race lives by the stories we tell ourselves about our identity and our purposes, and that signature helps to make the author’s story part of the reader’s story.

  Signatures is autobiographical in the sense that I’m looking at the story
I tell myself about how I have come to be who I am. The story that my parents told of themselves is of course the point of departure. They had started their married life in Meidling, a district of Vienna, in a house built by Gustav Springer, a successful magnate and grandfather of my mother Poppy. By the time I was born in Meidling in 1936, my father Alan Pryce-Jones had published five books. Some who stood round my cradle said, David, that’s a lovely Welsh name, and others said, David, that’s a lovely Jewish name. Alan liked to say that my first spoken word was Gorki, as though I were already picking up on Russian writers.

  My generation in Europe had to deal with the fact that the whole continent had first almost gone Nazi and then almost gone Soviet Communist. By 1940, the Gestapo had expropriated Meidling, and Austria was occupied enemy territory. Nothing was ever again going to be what it had been. A good many of the authors who signed a book of theirs for me are survivors from the Age of Dictators, and I wanted to know what they’d been through and how they’d survived.

  After the war, Alan became editor of the Times Literary Supplement, and in one or two rooms of the house books piled up on the floor waiting to be read. Authors sent him their books for review, quite often writing something relevant and revealing on the title page. He introduced me to people I would never have met otherwise and by now these signed copies seem to me like tickets of admission to the select company attempting to make sense of this world.

  SIGNATURES

  MAHMUD ABU SHILBAYAH

  La salaam

  ARABIC, NOT DATED

  AFTER THE SIX DAY WAR of June 1967 was over, I spent a lot of A time on the West Bank and in Gaza. For the previous twenty years, British Palestine had been divided between Israel, Egypt and Jordan. Now that the parts were re-united under Israeli jurisdiction, my assumption was that the moment was bound to have come for a treaty settling the relationship between Israelis and the Arabs. Moshe Dayan, the Minister of Defence, announced that he was waiting for a telephone call. Flippant though it was, the remark reveals the value system that has been operating for a long time throughout the Western world to give political reality to the conclusions of the battlefield. Victor and vanquished decide how to conduct themselves, the one reacting to the propositions of the other in a process akin to bargaining that is strictly rational and inclining to democracy. Dayan’s telephone did not ring because Arabs have a value system that is not just different but totally incompatible, and it too has been in operation a long time. The high and mighty as well as the poor and humble have to gain honor and avoid shame because these values determine what people will think of them. Defeat at the hands of Jews is a shame so absolute that only military success is able to wipe it away. What is at issue here is status, something personal and irrational, not open to measurement or bargaining, and inclining to dictatorship.

  Arabs of course have ways of making peace. Harold Ingrams, a British official in the days of empire, describes in his memoir Arabia and the Isles his career of treaty-making between warring Arab tribes, a process so delicate and personal that it might well last several generations. Those involved have to be men of experience and authority, ceaselessly attentive to the imperatives of shame and honor for victors and vanquished alike. If they were to conduct themselves according to the Israeli value system, they would have become self-declared losers, disgraced by the shame of it and immediately rejected by their people.

  The 1967 war had left the inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza pretty much in a state of shock. Fearing the worst, more than a hundred thousand of them had fled their homes and were refugees in Jordan. Some houses had been wantonly destroyed in the small town of Qalqilya, but otherwise the war had been almost a formality and there was nothing to fear. It was safe to go anywhere and to talk to anyone.

  The formation of public opinion was the business of a few individuals generally referred to as notables. Qadri Tuqan, the el-Masris, Hamdi Kanan, Sheikh Ali Ja’abari from Hebron, Rashad Shawa the mayor of Gaza, were men of experience and authority. They had handsome houses in which a room or two was furnished with seating along every wall. It didn’t seem to matter if discussion fell silent and there was nothing for it except another cup of coffee. Friendship and rivalry were hard to distinguish. Some thousands have the surname Barghouti, for example, but which one speaks for the family or is it for the tribe? At the time, all they could do was to insist that the Israelis withdraw unilaterally from the territories that had just been fought over and then they, the Palestinians, would see what to do next.

  The values of shame and honor dictated what to the Israelis was simply the demand for an undeserved gift, tantamount to saying that no costs had to be paid either for starting a war or for losing it – something contrary to every Western treaty ever signed. Those same values were evident when, a few months after the end of the war, self-selected Arab representatives met in Khartoum and passed a resolution that there could be no peace, no negotiation, no recognition of Israel. As the issue became one of honor and shame, local notables and their followers no longer had the prerogative to determine their future. A political vacuum was created which the various groups in favor of armed struggle and terror made haste to fill, and continue to do so right up to the present.

  At the time, Mahmud Abu Shilbayah was one of the leading Palestinian intellectuals on the West Bank. In person he was a little overweight, his face framed by heavy spectacles and a keffiyeh. His book has a paper cover with the red, white and green of the Palestinian flag on it, giving it the look of a clandestine publication when in fact it is the usual evocation of nationalism as the solution to everything. We sat in a café in East Jerusalem while I tried to explain that in the absence of anything like the social structure of a nation, his nationalism was bound to remain a literary abstraction and nothing could come of it. Nevertheless, on the title page he wrote, “To my friend David Pryce-Jones hoping my people will get a real peace.”

  HAROLD ACTON

  More Memoirs of an Aesthete

  1970

  DURING THE WAR, I had an initial impression of Harold Acton when he came to stay for quite some time with my parents, Alan and Poppy. Their house had been destroyed in the blitz, and they rented a flat in Athenaeum Court in Piccadilly, conveniently close to the War Office, where Alan was then at work. For fear of being buried alive, Poppy refused to go down to a shelter. In my memoir Fault Lines I have described how night after night we sat in the dark with the windows open as a precaution against blast. This was apocalypse worthy of John Martin, the visionary painter. Searchlights fitfully illuminated the room, relieving all of us in silhouette. Against the rolling roar of the bombers and the crash of anti-aircraft guns,Harold taught us Chinese to help pass the time. He sang Chinese songs learnt in the Thirties when he lived in Peking, as he persisted in calling it. From then until the end of his life, “nin how,” the Mandarin for “How are you?” was as good as a password.

  I was seventeen when I first went to La Pietra, the house on the Via Bolognese in Florence that Harold had inherited from his father, Arthur Acton. Every visit was entertaining, wonderfully operatic. A gnarled old lodge-keeper in rustic clothes and a floppy hat spent a lifetime opening the gate at the entrance. Then as now, cypresses lined the long straight drive, and the heraldic coat of arms of a Renaissance cardinal adorned the imposing façade. A manservant would be waiting at the front door. The house seemed to exist in some timeless sphere of its own, uncompromisingly Italianate.

  Harold always received guests in the same cramped corner of one of the reception rooms with a view on to the garden at the back of the house. Spindly uncomfortable chairs formed a tight semi-circle, and Hortense, Harold’s mother, used to perch on one of them, a dolllike presence in a black dress set off by a necklace of prodigious pearls. At that first meeting, I knew already that she had given orders to lock up all entrances to the house at nine o’clock at night, so if Harold was not yet home, he would have to climb in through a window as though still an Oxford undergraduate caught by college rul
es. I also knew that she habitually had one cocktail too many. Supposedly she had once failed to notice a guest committing some frightful social solecism, because, as Harold said in a much-quoted sentence, “Mother was far too far gone on one of her own concoctions.”

  Harold himself might have stepped straight out of a novel by Ronald Firbank. His upper body swayed and teetered as if the balls of his feet were unbalancing him or he were altogether unaccustomed to walking. Half-closed brown eyes had a gleam of mockery in them, though it was impossible to decide whether this was directed at himself or at you. A permanent twist of a smile and exceptional shiny baldness gave his head the air of a helmet, or in another image, a giant puffball. In a measured sibilant voice, sounding like a foreigner who has learned the English language a bit too perfectly, he might resort to long-lost idiom, for instance saying of someone, “He gives me the pip,” or flattering an overweight lady that she was “light as thistle-down.” When he told the well-worn story of Brian Howard accosting an exhausted officer returning in 1940 from the collapse in France with the words, “Dun-kerkie didn’t work-ie,” he was almost singing rather than speaking. A producer in New York once proposed that I interview Harold for the sake of preserving this vocabulary and the extraordinary register of his voice. Harold refused on the grounds that the film’s hidden intention was to laugh at him.

  I had the impression that in China he had felt himself to be a free spirit, which was why Norman Douglas, another original, had advised him to leave “the frowzy and fidgety little hole called Europe.” In the Thirties, my parents-in-law, Harold and Nancy Caccia, had been at the British Embassy in Peking and could describe how at some cultural event this other Harold had once sat on a platform, struck a pose with hand on brow and recited a poem including the line, “I smack the wax hermaphrodite with lilies white and cool.” Occasionally he made remarks obscurely implying that in China he had encountered romance. “No, I shall not be visiting Positano,” he once said to me, “I might be filled with youthful lust.” When Selina Hastings was researching her biography of Nancy Mitford, he had provided her with some material. In the draft she sent him was some remark about Harold “and his bugger friends.” Infuriated, he threatened to sue unless this was cut out, saying, “What do these young women know about my private life?”