Signatures Read online

  His style on paper was at least as mannered as his speech. The images in his poems are forced, the words strained and sometimes outlandish. Within a few pages of The Indian Ass, his first book of poems, for instance, among many words that dissipate all sense are vavicel, bakkaris, lappered morphews, ruin-glooms. No other English writer could have written “Narcissus to His Sponge” (from This Chaos, 1930) a poem that begins “This golden sponge, like porous apricot” [porous?] and concludes with the unsurpassable couplet, “Mark this humble square of soap, O poet and abandon hope.”

  In his view, he had played his part in an aesthetic movement along with the likes of Gertrude Stein, Nancy Cunard, Caresse and Harry Crosby, Countee Cullen and Thornton Wilder. World events have long since overtaken the interwar years and driven the fun of it into oblivion. Published in 1928, Harold’s novel Humdrum was once a high-water mark of the period, only to become, he confesses, “a book which makes me blush.” Reviewing More Memoirs of an Aesthete, I risked a phrase about how yesterday’s literary experiments become today’s hardened arteries. For a long time afterwards he quoted it back to me, with that sly ambiguous smile.

  La Pietra imposed the obligations of a great house, a way of life that Harold was determined to live up to. Whatever the weather, he wore a suit with a waistcoat, and I never saw him without a tie. He became a living legend. Tourists would ring up asking which restaurants in Florence he recommended. He held lunch parties in a dining room whose collection of statues, one of them reputedly a Donatello, had the appeal of a museum. John Calmann, my Oxford contemporary and a publisher then negotiating the reprint of Harold’s book about the later Medicis, told me that on a visit he had counted no less than eighteen knives and forks, glasses, plates and whatnots, laid at the place on the table where that evening Harold was dining by himself. Violet Trefusis, a grey eminence in Florentine society, one day asked why the statues in the garden were encased in what looked like plastic nappies. A feline Harold took her up, explaining in detail that their private parts were being refigured by experts in Sweden familiar with the proper proportions of gentlemen.

  Joan Haslip wrote biographies for the general reader and entertained friends in her house in Bellosguardo as extravagantly as she would have done before the war. A typically feline throwaway of Harold’s was, “Joan’s books are so fresh because every subject comes fresh to her.” When in old age she ran out of money, Harold in an equally typical gesture gave her a picture by Foujita, which she sold for eighteen thousand pounds.

  Escorting a very famous film star around the house, Harold spotted that she was a kleptomaniac, slipping whatever she could into her handbag. “And now, my dear,” he said inimitably at the conclusion of the tour, “we shall restore the missing trinkets.” Every summer, Princess Margaret invited herself to stay. The state bedroom was on the first floor with a Vasari hanging over the bed. A demanding guest, she once said as she was leaving that Harold would now dance and sing for joy. “Oh no, ma’am,” he answered, “much too tired.” After dining with Anne-Sophie and Michael Grant near Lucca, I was driving Harold home on a minor road with nobody and nothing in sight when the engine suddenly cut out and the car came to a stop. Histrionically he said, “Shall I whistle and clap my hands?”

  I had only to push in the choke, the flooded engine started, and we drove back in the misty night.

  SIDNEY ALEXANDER

  Marc Chagall

  1988

  UNWILLING TO RETURN to her native Vienna after the war, my grandmother, née Mitzi Springer, settled instead in a farm-house that previous owners had beautified into a villa on the hilltop in Florence known historically as Pian dei Giullari. She died in December 1978. Her heirs, of whom I was one, had generally agreed to sell up. We met there on a day whose silence and sunlight promised perpetual enchantment, and unanimously we took the contrary decision to stay.

  Sidney and Frances Alexander were among the first friends we made in Florence. Good hosts and good guests, they lived near the Porta Romana. Large and bulky, Sidney dominated any room, delighting in telling stories with laughter in them. Having served in the war with the American army in Italy, he had stayed in the country ever since, another in the throng of gifted expatriates who have treated Italian literature, music and art as their own. As a side-line and for a fee, he played the flute at weddings. He gave me a copy of his biography of Marc Chagall, recently published at the time. Frances later made it plain that they were both hurt because I then failed to respond to the book. This was partly thoughtlessness and partly because I found something bogus about Chagall’s folksiness. They forgave my thoughtlessness.

  Sidney was the author of several definitive books about Michelangelo, and one day he took Clarissa and me on a guided tour of the great man’s works in Florence. As he spoke in front of statues and tombs, passers-by gathered around to listen to the impromptu seminar. The secret of Michelangelo’s greatness, according to Sidney, is that he treated Yes and No as complementary rather than opposites, and he quoted the poem that makes the point. Outside the Accademia he delivered a parting shot, “Modern art is the definition of bogus.” In due course he sent me his translations of Guicciardini, the sixteenth-century historian who feared that the Ottoman Turks would invade Italy, and The Complete Odes and Satires of Horace. I took my time to write an appreciation of the last admirable book – too much time, as it turned out. Frances let me know that my letter arrived a day or two after Sidney had died.

  SVETLANA ALLILUYEVA

  Twenty Letters to a Friend

  1967

  SVETLANA KNEW VERY WELL that she would always be an object of curiosity. What could it be like to be the daughter of Stalin, a world-historical figure who had sent untold millions to their death, including her mother and then her husband? Her defection to the West was a political sensation. In the Eighties and Nineties, she made do in England without family, without home and without money. Some of those in the circles in which I moved got to know her and did what they could for her. Linda and Laurence Kelly, both of them writers with an interest in Russia in its tsarist and its Soviet form, may have begun by feeling pity for her, but this became genuine friendship. Svetlana had been living in an old peoples’ home in London before moving to Abbeyfield Home at St Ives in Cornwall, a modern equivalent of the workhouse. When she paid a visit to the Kellys in London, they invited Clarissa and me to meet her. Entering the room, she looked at us with suspicion. There was something secretive but militant about her. She wasn’t her father’s child for nothing.

  Cornwall, Svetlana said with feeling and in her idiomatic English, was the Grand Duchy of Baboons. She was glad to be about to leave the baboons and return to the United States, to Wisconsin, in order to be close to her daughter Olga. However, she regretted that she had not had occasion to go to Wales. Olga had married someone born there. On the spur of the moment, Clarissa offered to show her the country. She refused point-blank. Clarissa had read Svetlana’s description of Stalin’s death and asked a question about it. “I don’t speak about my father” was the angry rejoinder.

  Svetlana knew nothing about Clarissa and me except what the Kellys could tell her. Laurence said, “You’ve really blown it,” but a few weeks later Svetlana decided to stay with us in Wales after all. It was an adventure. I think the three of us were equally surprised to have made a rendezvous at four o’clock one afternoon in the Swan Hotel at Hay-on-Wye. We were late collecting her. In the car, I told her not to expect too high a standard of comfort at Pentwyn, our farmhouse on the edge of Eppynt, which is unspoilt moorland stretching into the distance. She asked, “Does it have running water?” She did not draw curtains; she liked cold bedrooms and warm bathrooms. In the morning she stayed in her room writing, coming down only at lunchtime. After the meal I made sure to write up as closely as possible everything she’d said; her direct speech is quoted from my diary.

  Why was I interested in Russia, she wanted to know. The country was gloomy and defeated. Boris Yeltsin, then in the Kremlin, wa
s “a drunken peasant applying a few Communist managerial skills.” The Russians now swarming in the West seemed to her “rats and mice leaving a sinking ship.” She praised Nikita Khrushchev “for the way he tried to eliminate the KGB but in fact they pulled themselves together and eliminated him.” His son-in-law’s memoirs make no mention of the Twentieth Congress speech and she didn’t read any book based on Soviet archives.

  She had heard of the suicide of the author Jerzy Kosi´nski and thought that if he – and her own mother – could do it, so could she. She went to London Bridge but was wearing a tight skirt that she was hoisting when a red-faced man, perhaps a priest, stopped her and said, “Oh you godless people.” The police escorted her home. She came to believe that her mother was sending her a message.

  Her mother had decided to divorce Stalin but there had been no arrangements for the children, and so in spite of herself Svetlana reached the permanent black hole of her emotions. Stalin was a monster but she couldn’t help loving him and couldn’t help talking about him either. He “wasn’t the sort of man who’d have parted with his daughter.” In her childhood, he’d come hurrying down the Kremlin corridors at the end of a hard day’s work, calling for his little princess and making sure she was doing her homework. He insisted that she learn languages. She quoted Lorca and Heine: “Fünfundzwanzig Professoren, Vaterland, du bist verloren.”

  Those around her father gave him bad advice, she maintained, but it was his personal belief that Hitler would keep his word. Nobody else in Russia trusted Hitler. “When the Nazis invaded on June 22, my father shut himself away for three days. Not till July

  2 could he bring himself to talk to the nation on the radio. With my own ears I heard him say afterwards that Russia and Germany ought to stick together as nobody could resist that combination. He always admired the Germans.”

  Suddenly here she was saying that as her father lay dying, a halfblind old nurse broke an ampoule of glucose into a spoon and was putting some of the glass shards into Stalin’s mouth. “Voroshilov took the nurse’s arm in horror. Then they insisted on x-raying his lungs when they should have kept him prone. It was chaotic. The only one who kept his head was Beria. Well, he was more cunning than my father. He used to tell him what he wanted, and my father listened, he didn’t stop him, he was powerless.” (Not an adjective that comes to mind for Stalin. Throughout, she talked of him as small, insecure and nervous about his health; his ears hurt in an aeroplane and he didn’t like flying.) What a brute Beria had been, she repeated. Marshal Zhukov had been the instrument for destroying him. She had a friend, General Vishnievsky, who afterwards came and told her, “Imagine, Beria who was so pitiless to others knelt on the floor and pleaded for his life. But they took him out into the yard quickly and shot him.” It was the last week of October, with frost on the ground and mist in the Wye valley. We drove to the tiny village of Rhulen to show Svetlana something of Wales. An early Christian church stands on a pre-historic stone circle, and she sat in one of the church pews as if to pray but a mood overtook her. Perhaps she did not like Clarissa taking a photograph of her; she complained that she felt a “heaviness”; she sneezed, and we rushed her home.

  Once we were back, she picked up my copy of her book Twenty Letters to a Friend and annotated a great many pages. On the flyleaf she stuck a photograph of her mother wearing an expression of suffering worthy of a medieval Russian icon. The inscription reads, “To David with admiration from Svetlana Alliluyeva,” and she added, signing with her married name, “P.S. Forgive my notes and corrections but those were necessary – L. Peters.”

  She then read my novel The Afternoon Sun, saying that “she didn’t think she could be interested in Vienna [the setting] only to find that the writing was ‘condensed’ and that gave a sense of order.” My diary further records that Svetlana and Clarissa spent a morning “making a chicken soup, with fresh coriander, a Turkish recipe with a name something like chitzima.” Also that we had invited our neighbors Hugo and Felicity Philipps to dinner in spite of – or because of – the fact that his grandfather Lord Milford had been the first and only Communist peer in the House of Lords. Svetlana crept out of the room without a word. Coming down to breakfast the next day, she apologized that she had been too tired to bid goodbye to the guests.

  A two-hour drive after nightfall and we said goodbye to her in the Bristol central bus station, seeing her off to Cornwall. One final entry in my diary: “She’s a dumpy, grumpy, feisty old thing, attendrissante, a natural victim coming up for more and not sure how or why things have turned out so that she is standing in a queue of anorakclad Baboons on their way to Plymouth and Penzance. ‘C’est une Babooness,’ she nods towards the girl behind the counter and then at a child kicking her hold-all. What percentage of the world is Baboon? I asked. ‘Seventy five.’ She smiles and it’s warm but at the centre of those blue eyes of hers are black pinpricks, little lasers.”

  Postscript. Spring Green, Wisconsin, offered Svetlana the company of Olga, welfare benefits, a sympathetic public library and a settled routine until she died. Her pastime was writing letters. Loopy, scrawling handwriting covered untidy sheets of A4 paper made untidier still by marginal comment, interjections, cross-references and second thoughts in or out of context. I never managed to find out the truth or falsehood of her complaints. In her telling of it, lawyers and trusts had deprived her of the money her books had earned; publishers had rejected four autobiographical manuscripts; George Kennan and a slew of American officials had let her down. The tone swung between resignation and rage. She put pressure on me to write to a Swiss lawyer by the name of Peter Hefter to ask where her copyrights now rested and whether they would revert to Olga. At least my letter would make his day unpleasant, she concluded. Mr. Hefter, sounding weary, replied that the necessary explanations had already been done.

  Linda Kelly had much the same correspondence; we used to compare notes and planned at one time to make a book out of our boxfuls. Linda gave me several of her books with inscriptions, notably Holland House, where radicals with or without private fortunes habitually met and spread each other’s ideas in what looks like an early nineteenth-century prototype of the BBC. Laurence inscribed for me Diplomacy and Murder in Tehran, his biography of Griboyedov whose dramatic death at the hands of the Persian mob caused an international crisis of a kind that has become all too familiar. He finally summed up the whole tragedy of Svetlana in the two words of the Latin tag, damnosa hereditas.

  KINGSLEY AMIS

  The Folks That Live on the Hill

  1990

  TAKING A LEAD from pundits and polls, the public pretty much expected Harold Wilson to defeat Edward Heath in the general election of 1970. I had a contract to write for the Daily Telegraph Colour Magazine, and so I was invited to the party that Michael Berry, then the owner of the Telegraph, made a point of hosting after every election, from the moment the voting closed until the last constituencies declared. The party was in the ballroom of the Savoy Hotel. At the far end of the room, various larger-than-life Snows and Dimblebys dominated a giant television screen. Among those at the table with me was Ken Tynan, elegant in a white tuxedo with a bright red tie and in his buttonhole a matching red carnation. There could be no mistaking his allegiance or his expectation. I had imagined that Ken had to be clever but not very nice, only to discover that he was not at all clever but quite nice, if mostly to those celebrating the political orthodoxies of the hour. Borrowing from Rossini, I took to thinking of him as un barbier’ di qualità.

  Also at that table was Kingsley Amis. The novelist David Lodge had given me (and signed too) a reprint of an essay he had published in the Critical Quarterly arguing that Amis might go in for comedy but nonetheless had a “sardonic sense of literary tradition,” and therefore was in the company of Henry James and James Joyce, no less. At the same time, he could make a crack like “Change means worse.” The results of the voting began to trickle in and suddenly it became apparent that the Conservatives were making gains and mig
ht well win. Tynan looked very stony and Kingsley stood up on his chair and then on the table, whereupon he danced a sort of fandango and shouted, “Show the shaggers!” and “Five more years outside barbed wire!”

  The opening lines of a poem written to mark a milestone birthday seem true to Kingsley’s perception of himself: “Fifty today, old lad? / Well, that’s not doing so bad:/ All those years without / Being really buggered about.” A private dinner party at which we were guests, and so were Kingsley and his then wife Elizabeth Jane Howard, yielded a similar outburst of his core personality. The lady on his right said that she had just finished reading his new novel and didn’t think it was as good as his previous novels. Sitting at a round table with a glass top, we all could see Kingsley’s knuckles whitening as he clenched his fists, and then he barked at the top of his voice, “Fuck you!”

  On another occasion, at dinner in our house, Kingsley lectured on the importance of not joining the Common Market. My diary notes him saying: “We don’t want anything to do with those people. The French are bastards, the Germans are bastards, most of the Italians are too. Two and a half bastards want to get hold of us. As for the little countries, Belgium ‘is just a little sod.’ He’s in thrall to the monosyllables, yet I caught him on the BBC saying what a pleasure it had been to discover the music of Albinoni.”

  Another diary entry, dated February 1964, describes Kingsley coming to the office of the Spectator to organize a letter of protest to the Times. (I was then the literary editor, David Watt the foreign affairs correspondent and Joan the telephone operator.) “Flitting from room to room, he borrows a pound off David Watt, off Joan, off the managing director, the fatuous Mr Elliott. ‘I’ve got a girl downstairs, a bit tight, who I’m screwing. … At about two thirty he wants to take the boys out to lunch. He is wearing a green fake-Austrian leather jacket with silver buttons and a red leather tie. ‘Rather natty.’ The boys are David Watt and myself. The girl downstairs is Elizabeth Jane Howard. We go to the Greek restaurant on Whitfield Street. Amis drinks most of a bottle of retsina and then another of Greek brandy. We leave, pulling him out, at four. ‘What’s the hurry?’ he blurts. He insists on paying from a roll of fivers. In the street he asks us if we know how arctic explorers shit. ‘It’s been bothering me for a long time.’ He explains how they have reversible trousers, take them on and off in layers. Incoherent and laughing at himself: ‘The turd is frozen hard, you see.’”