STEPHEN’S TWO VISITS to Germany had been preceded by several trips to France on behalf of the British Council. He had no idea what he was doing at these conferences, other than offering a supportive English presence. He occupied ‘a role which I could not seriously be expected to fill but for which the audience accepted me as a token’. Vagueness, I think, formed part of his credentials. When he tried to check up on his duties, he was told by the Director of the British Council in Paris that he wasn’t expected to do anything specific. Indeed, one day he wandered off and spent the afternoon with Picasso.
His connection with French cultural life owed much to his experiences during the Spanish Civil War, where he’d made friends with a number of French intellectuals who were also supporters of the Republic: André Malraux, Louis Aragon, among many others. He could renew his friendship with them at these conferences, though these were so crammed with intelligent people he felt it was ‘impossible for anyone to do justice to anyone else’.
The problems of France were very different from those of Germany. In France, four years of occupation had left a feeling of disgust at the devious skills that everyone had had to learn in order to survive. The ‘civic virtues’ of the British were praised, meaning that in England goods were not distributed according to the rough rules of the black market. Of those he met, the communists seemed the least self-punitive about the war. A myth was being circulated that the communist partisans had liberated France by themselves, with no thanks due to Britain or the United States. Communism was far from over. It was the movement of the future, not the past. It was useless for Stephen to argue that, everywhere, communism had produced regimes governed by force from above. He was told condescendingly that French communism would be different.
Before sending Information Services Control the outline for a magazine they’d asked for, Stephen forwarded a draft to Eliot. In three single-spaced pages and thirteen numbered points, he suggests that it should concentrate on Germany’s position within Europe. The consensus at the conferences he’d attended was that Germany must be reunited with Europe as soon as possible. He was also worried that France had come under German influence during the occupation. ‘Germany has sown the seed of Nazi thought in the countries which are now victorious.’ An international magazine would create a new sense of European identity, he argued.
Eliot, who’d had many years experience as the editor of the Criterion, wrote a dry reply agreeing with points 3, 4, 5 and 6, though he questioned points 1 and 2. But the real questions were: 1. Who would pay for such a magazine? 2. Who would write for it? 3. Who would read it? There’s a touch of irony in numbering such obvious questions. I assume that Eliot was teasing the thirteen numbered sections of Stephen’s rambling proposal. It was hard to imagine that any Germans would be prepared to pay for such a magazine in their present position, continued Eliot. ‘The important thing is to get it into the hands of the right people, not to get it into the hands of a great many people.’ He thought one might reasonably hope for a readership of perhaps eight hundred. (If this seems low, the circulation of Eliot’s Criterion had been no higher.)
Stephen had already tackled the question of payment in the last paragraph of his proposal: ‘The British Government, above all others, should encourage this scheme, because it is to the British that the continent looks more than to any other nation.’
His book on Germany, European Witness, came out in October 1946. Curtius saw that Stephen had not removed him from the text as he’d promised to do. He wrote Stephen a formal letter ending their friendship, with a copy to Eliot.
Even before this, my father had given up the idea of founding a magazine based in England and Germany. He’d suddenly become convinced that it should be published between England and France. He’d even found a young man in Paris who he felt could be his co-editor. Could he bring him to see Eliot? This project never materialized, but given his many contacts in Paris and his interest in the regeneration of European cultural life, Julian Huxley offered Stephen a job at the newly founded UNESCO, the cultural organization of the United Nations.
Huxley, the first head of UNESCO, was an old friend of Stephen’s. Natasha remembered when Stephen had introduced her to him. They’d had tea in Julian’s apartment overlooking the London Zoo, of which he was the Director. He’d scared her, because in making light conversation she mentioned that she’d seen an interesting bird in the countryside recently and he’d tried to pin her down as to exactly what kind of bird it was. ‘It had blue wings’ wasn’t good enough.
UNESCO’s main function was to promote international understanding via cultural exchanges. Defining culture, however, went against the American grain. President Roosevelt’s plan to support painters and writers in the early Thirties had been bitterly opposed – not surprisingly, as the Artists’ Congress and the Writers’ Union quickly became communist front organizations. The American decision to participate in UNESCO was taken reluctantly, to forestall the possibility that it, too, might become a massive communist front.
The American representatives to UNESCO quickly formed doubts about Huxley. He was an atheist, which was unacceptable to most Congressmen. He also brushed away their hints that some of the people he was hiring were communists. A key moment occurred when Huxley obliged UNESCO to come to the rescue of Pablo Neruda, who as a communist was being harassed by the Chilean government. (Did Stephen encourage Julian? He’d known Neruda since the Spanish Civil War.) The cause of protecting intellectual freedom was impeccable, but the Neruda case was noted by the Americans as another black mark against Huxley, who was eventually forced to resign.
My father worked for UNESCO from the end of 1946 until March 1947. It required frequent trips to Paris from London. I haven’t been able to trace much about his experiences at this time, but I note that somewhere along the way, his interest in Germany faded.
In the spring of 1947, my parents left England for a trip abroad in just each other’s company. It was the first time Natasha had ever been to France.
At a party in Paris, Natasha saw her husband across a crowded room talking to an elegant young man. She asked the person next to her who this man was. The reply: ‘Don’t you know? That’s Stephen’s new lover.’
My mother stood up, and promptly fainted.
It was a terrible moment.
She’d misinterpreted the long conversation at Wittersham which had ended, ‘There is only us.’ Stephen had not put the past behind him, nor had fatherhood given him a new, deeper idea of marriage. He loved her – of that, she was confident. But whatever view he held of marriage, it wasn’t hers; and now she was faced with the existence of a dark area of their shared life which she could never reach.
After a few days in Paris they continued by train to Italy.
The country was a mess and the black market flourished. Dollars and pounds were exchanged for lire at far above the official rate. One day in a hotel near Verona they needed the local currency, and my mother sent my father out to buy some – but not at the bank, she said, pointing down into the street from the window of her hotel. There, see? That man on the corner.
My father went out, came back, and they took a train to the next step of their journey. Once they’d settled into their carriage, my mother asked him how much he’d managed to get for his pounds. My father said he hadn’t changed his money with the man on the corner, as she’d told him. He’d gone to the bank like everybody else.
Thereupon occurred a scene so wild that my father never forgot it. He told me the story at least twice. He was still upset about it forty years later. The scene ended, in one version, ‘and she fainted dead away’ – which seemed to me a lame end to a story he’d told with such obvious distress. But the other version ended, ‘and she tried to throw herself out of the train’.
My father was terrified by this incident. It revealed to him an unpredictable area of her soul, and he had no idea how deep it reached. His mother had died when he was a boy and he always felt guilty about it, and as a result there was something about unhappiness in a woman that sent him into such a panic he was unable to think clearly. Or so I believe.
But, if it comes to that, my mother’s emotions in this incident are also hard to understand. She may have been furious because he’d disobeyed her. Control was important to her. Or perhaps the incident derived from her chronic anxiety about money. But it came so soon after having fainted in Paris at the thought that Stephen still had lovers, I think some obscure form of self-punishment must have come into it.
Back in London, without telling his wife, Stephen discussed the problem with Anna Freud. Although my mother had taken lessons on childcare at Anna Freud’s school until she’d become pregnant with me, she had not been analysed by her. Anna Freud gave my father her private impression. Natasha would probably benefit from analysis, but she was held together by such an immense effort of will, it might be dangerous to probe too deeply. There was a risk of damaging whatever made her function without discovering anything that could take its place.
It’s unusual for psychiatrists to give off-the-cuff diagnoses of this kind – and here we are talking about the daughter of Sigmund Freud! Her message may have been: Natasha’s predicament is certainly grave, but the best person to deal with it is you, Stephen. But my father interpreted it differently. He decided that his wife was held together in such a state of tension that an attempt to deal with any part of it would make the whole pack of cards collapse.
My parents, taken by a street photographer in Verona close to the time when my mother threatened to throw herself out of a train.
Whenever my father talked to me about my mother’s character, it was entirely about her predicament as seen in this light. He never thought about how she saw him, nor did he consider that her moments of wildness might be a reaction to something he’d done. He had difficulty in understanding her feelings. They were hers, and she was responsible for them. This was true not just of his relationship with his wife, it has to be said. His entire effort was dedicated to understanding his own emotions, and those of other people were always mysterious to him.
As soon as I was old enough to form opinions on their relationship, he’d try to convince me that sometimes Mum had fallen victim to her emotions, and he and I should form an alliance to provide her with support. I resisted this desire to join a conspiracy. I thought we were missing two things: my mother’s point of view, and an explanation why her outbursts made him panic.
My mother’s feelings were revealed only after her death, hidden away in a diary written during a particularly stressful moment in her life, when my father fell in love with a young American ornithologist called Bryan Obst. Bitterly, she wondered why she’d accepted this predicament all her married life. Her harshest entries were written late at night, but in the morning she found her angry emotions had vanished. Her waking self was devoted to the image that their marriage was strong. Natasha at three in the morning was an entirely different person from Natasha at breakfast. She asked herself: Are the late-night entries the faithful ones, or those I write during the day?
I never questioned her daylight self, as it were, nor would she have accepted any form of criticism from me. Keeping up appearances in front of her children was a vital part of her sense of duty. She could complain to others now and again, especially to other women, but never to me. And, because appearances and therefore courage were involved, I knew that if I’d ever tried to find out what she really felt about my father’s continued relationships with men, it would have been a far more destructive act coming from me than if she’d been challenged by a stranger.
For more about this tense period of their lives, we have to fall back on a short story my father started at that time.
In ‘The Fool and the Princess’, a man who wants to become a writer comes back from a tour of duty in Germany where he’s fallen in love with a Displaced Person. There’s no love affair, and he returns home to his wife. She of course guesses that something has happened. She’s frightened. ‘I suppose you’ve never been really happy with me,’ she says miserably. I hear my mother’s voice very clearly in this phrase. Such was her investment in her marriage, and such was her deep-seated lack of confidence, that she was prepared to blame herself for the fact that he’d fallen for somebody else.
He protests that he loves her. She suffers. They try to return to normality, but it’s hard. ‘The very existence of the deeper level where everything was forgiven, mind and body fused, made them more impatient on the level where everything was wearisome, mechanical and unforgivable. Yet they could not live always on the deeper level, of dreams, tears, acceptance and finality.’ I read this as meaning: since deep down we are in agreement with each other, why can’t we avoid these time-consuming confrontations? ‘We’ being Stephen and Natasha, not the characters in the story.
The narrator knows he’s in the wrong, but he feels that his unconsummated relationship with the offstage ‘Princess’ has been good for him. ‘He made an effort to shake off once more this self-satisfaction which parodied a change which he felt really an improvement in himself, parodied even his love.’ He is guiltily aware that he can only understand how this situation is affecting him, and that although he loves his wife, her emotions are to him incomprehensible.
Left alone in the empty bedroom after one of these fights, he groans. ‘Yet although it seemed to him that he was suffering, his suffering lacked purity. It proved to him that he was sensitive. All the purity was hers, hers moving downstairs, hers moving out into the darkness, hers if perhaps, she drowned herself in some river.’
The idea that the heroine of the story might throw herself into the Thames is, to me, a memory of the occasion when my mother had tried to throw herself out of the train.
Over the early summer of 1947, Stephen met the head of Sarah Lawrence College in upstate New York, who invited him to come and teach there for a semester. Thus he made his first visit to the United States.
My mother was preparing for a Promenade Concert at the Albert Hall, so Stephen travelled first. The day before he left, there was a major row. My father was still anxious about it next morning. From his cabin on the Queen Mary, he wrote his wife a long, self-reproving letter.
‘What makes separation so bad is anxiety, regrets, feeling that one has not made enough of the time together, fears about what the other is up to, and so on. So let’s both make up our minds that we are completely and utterly together, and then these few weeks can be spent in thinking about each other and feeling each other’s presence.’ This was one of my father’s strangest fixations: that love thrived on absence, during which it could reach a more immediate level by the power of thought; and this imagined reality was more powerful than the physical reality of an actual person’s presence. ‘My anxiety about you is that you don’t feel sure of me. But now there is no reason whatever for you not to be sure of me. You have your prom and your BBC concerts, I have my work, but you will soon be with me.’ What does the word ‘now’ in this passage signify? That the row involved his recent Parisian lover, and that Stephen had promised ‘now’ to put this part of his life behind him?
‘The root trouble with me is that I am self-willed, I am a rebel, I do not want to submit to god or to man, I do not want to be good. I still have some way to go before this can be changed, and I think the thing most likely to change it will be my book Autobiography and Truth which will really be about the subjects we were discussing yesterday.’ He’s referring to the book that later became World within World. ‘My own idea that being good is being tame is childish and absurd. But sometimes seeing that one’s attitudes are childish is not a cure of them, especially when temptations & excitement are involved.’
She was planning to become baptized; and that was good. ‘I am sure that would be a great happiness to you. I also think that our Catholic friends are right in thinking that you are in a state of grace and that I am not.’ She should ‘go on and be Christian, if that is your fulfilment. In any case, I am sure it will not come between us.’ I don’t know if Mum went through with her conversion, but I don’t think so. Perhaps she wanted to balance her relationship with Stephen with something else, then found that it wouldn’t carry any weight with him, so she let it go.
He continues: ‘It is so brave of you to play in the proms and to study the Bible and to pursue all your spiritual adventures.’ There’s something so vague about this, it’s almost insulting. He corrects himself:
I think of you all the time, in fact for me our marriage is a religion and I shall try to be a better observer of that religion than I have been because I realize now that appearances are very important as well as realities. For even when our relationship is authentic one has to make a great effort of creation and imagination the whole time to prevent its authenticity from being cheapened and thrown into apparent doubt.
He’d told his grandmother that to write about contemporary life was almost a religion to him, and now it’s the institution of marriage that has religious connotations. Yet my father was fundamentally atheist. It’s either an attempt to create a bridge with a certain aspect of his grandmother’s temperament, or my mother’s; or else it’s a dramatic statement regarding his own commitment to her as a belief, a quest.
‘But all I can say is that I love you, love you, love you, more than ever before, though I have always loved you, and if I have caused you to doubt it at moments I am very sorry and I ought not to have done so. I shall be living with you in my thoughts all this time when we are separated. In future let us do all we can to avoid long separations, though, of course, we cannot make absolute rules.’