THE EXPOSURE OF Encounter as a weapon of the CIA caused my father a great deal of anguish, especially in the United States, where both in public and in private he had to face some very direct questions. At Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, where he’d been invited to speak to the English Department, a student got up and asked him how he felt about the Encounter scandal. His reply was emotional and confused. The student was the daughter of Mike Josselson, but she did not feel like introducing herself afterwards to ask for a clearer answer.
It would have been the perfect moment for him to give up politics and retreat into a life of writing poetry and books and book reviews. His wife’s fantasy. As it was, within a year he’d taken up a cause that in its way was even more important than Encounter.
On 12 January 1968, The Times in London and Le Monde in Paris published a letter from the Russian scientist Pavel Litvinov, asking for help on behalf of two dissidents who’d just received heavy sentences in Moscow. My father instantly telephoned Isaiah Berlin, saying that an appeal such as this could not be ignored. A telegram signed by as many distinguished people as possible must be sent to Moscow before the weekend was over.
Among those who responded immediately were Freddie Ayer and Stuart Hampshire. If over one weekend Stephen was able to raise such support with just a few telephone calls, it was because a wide sympathy existed among his friends for what he’d just been through. Freddie and Stuart might even have had a twinge of guilty conscience. They’d been called in to advise how MI5 could be reorganized after the defection of Burgess and Maclean – Dad told me this in a typically indiscreet moment – so they must have known about Encounter’s financing and the ghostly presence of British Intelligence.
On the Monday morning, the telegram was duly sent, with a copy published in a newspaper. A few weeks later Litvinov replied by sending a long letter to Spender in which he proposed the formation of an international committee to defend the freedom of expression of all writers everywhere, not just in the Soviet Union, but across the world, as a matter of principle.
This was a big step forward from the kind of non-governmental connection that for several years Stephen had been trying to establish between Britain and Russia. In the background, many things were changing. Samizdat literature was being circulated, communications between Russia and the outside world had improved, the Russian government was increasingly unsure how it should deal with its dissidents. Repression was still the natural response, but the bad publicity it provoked worldwide was hardly creditable to the cause of Soviet freedom.
Following the letter he’d received from Litvinov, Spender was able to set in motion the creation of Writers and Scholars International and the magazine Index on Censorship, whose first issue appeared in 1972. Whereas Encounter had had a tiny circulation in Russia, Index went on to create a strong impact. It was circulated as samizdat to a much wider audience and it helped Russian writers to feel they had contact with an audience abroad.
At this point all my objections to my father’s political involvement give way to admiration. He may have been ambivalent and evasive and a whole host of other adjectives signifying hard to pin down. He was always sure of his integrity, even when what he’d actually done seemed equivocal to everyone else. In relation to myself and my wife and my eventual family, he was bored – I think that’s the simplest explanation – because we insisted on living far from the centres of cultural power. But beneath all the charm of his manners, which never ceased to be courteous and non-confrontational, he was persistent. He was always, and in subtle ways, a man of action.
Initially, my father had tried to raise money in order to found a new magazine that would drive Encounter out of business. Revenge, through literature. Several times he had to endure the obvious joke, ‘To be called Under the Counter, eh?’ My father would give a polite laugh, but my mother always rose to this heavily: ‘On the contrary, it should be called Over the Counter, as it’s Encounter which is suspect.’
He decided to bring out an advertisement asking for support for this new idea: a declaration signed by his friends. This had come to nothing. Although they initially said yes, they mysteriously changed their minds. I think Julian Huxley was one. Another was Henry Moore, who telephoned a week after he’d agreed to lend his name, saying, ‘Stephen, I’ve been nobbled.’ My father understood. He didn’t ask for an explanation and he didn’t hold it against Moore. In fact he liked Henry’s frankness so much he turned it into a funny after-dinner story. And it was obvious to him who’d done the nobbling: Kenneth Clark, who besides being a strong supporter of Moore, was also a key member of the Establishment.
My father’s new magazine never materialized, and then his energies were taken up by Index on Censorship, on behalf of which he made several trips to America to raise funds. The Ford Foundation was helpful, but there were frequent and recurring difficulties with the State Department, which was worried that Index would come to the rescue of anti-American writers imprisoned in South America.
In 1974 I was in Paris, where I was holding my first one-man show of paintings in a tiny gallery on the Île Saint-Louis. My father appeared and was supportive; and then he took me off to have lunch with Mary McCarthy.
We met at her flat. At some point during the usual introductory conversation she said, with reference to his recent fund-raising activities on behalf of Index, ‘Stephen, tell me what’s been happening about your new magazine.’ Before he could reply, she turned to me and, so that he didn’t see, she gave me a grossly exaggerated wink. I was stunned. It wasn’t a wink that said, ‘He’s got a tough job ahead of him.’ It was a wink that said, ‘Poor sap! He hasn’t a hope in Hell!’
Mary McCarthy’s relationship with power was particularly clear-headed. She knew every single permutation of leftand right-wingery, both in the United States and in Europe. She also had a deep understanding of how governments and bureaucracies respond to pressure from outside. There was something about her tough childhood that had made her highly observant without becoming cynical. She’d obviously heard a thing or two about Index and she knew it was never going to receive the support of the State Department or any other government institution. Meanwhile my poor father continued to explain in all innocence how curious it was that he could only get so far with the American authorities, and then suddenly everything would collapse.
On 1 February 1968, coming back from Holloway to Percy Street on the 29 bus, I saw on the floor a crumpled newspaper with a photo of one man shooting another man in the head. The photographer had managed to click his camera at the very moment when the killer was squeezing the trigger.
I picked it up and smoothed it out. We were in Vietnam. The horrific thing was that neither the killer nor his victim seemed monsters. The victim looked like the usual untidy student, the man with a gun seemed to be an intellectual. It was the predicament that was awful, not the people involved. Which made it worse. Why should we have anything to do with two citizens of a remote country murdering each other?
Up until that moment, Maro and I hadn’t taken part in any political protests. My only feeling about Vietnam was that it was bad for Americans. Half a million young men had been given guns and told to shoot Vietnamese soldiers indistinguishable from the peasants they were supposed to save. According to Mao’s book on guerrilla tactics, which I’d read, the guerrillas were allowed to hide behind the peasants, and the Americans would shoot the unfortunate non-combatants and feel horrible about it afterwards. It wasn’t too hard to imagine this happening. It would surely drive the American soldiers insane with guilt.
In retrospect, it seems peculiar to have taken part in a protest against the Vietnam War out of sympathy for the United States, but at least it was an idea. Those gulags inside the Arctic Circle where they sent unruly intellectuals had frozen my communist sympathies, and I had no opinions as to whether the regime in Vietnam was good or bad. With regard to Chairman Mao’s China, Mog Empson had taken us out of earshot of Hetta one afternoon and told us that there were large areas in the western districts where something very bad had happened, though nobody could say what. It’s odd that so much of that country is completely invisible, he said cheerfully.
Talking about Vietnam with my father, however, toughened my position. His view of the war was even feebler than mine. A worried look would come over his face and he’d hedge: ‘Well, I think the position of the Americans is very difficult.’
Our conversations became increasingly polarized. Was he for or against the American intervention in Vietnam? Surely he couldn’t be in favour? This made him lose his temper. ‘Either one knows something—’ he shouted; then he hesitated, not knowing how to get out of this sentence: ‘or else one doesn’t have the right to speak.’
I took this very badly. He was denying my right to hold an opinion. The US Air Force was by this time bombing civilians in Hanoi. Was this something I was too dumb to know? Or were we supposed just to look at the ceiling and say how worrying it all was?
His views altered after he’d resigned from Encounter. In a letter to Nikos, he wrote: ‘I am beginning to feel an immense relief at having left Encounter: as though being there was like some inhibition in my life which prevented me thinking freely about certain things, like Vietnam.’ It’s an honest admission, but it’s also frightening. He’s saying that while he was editor of Encounter he could not allow himself to deviate from supporting the United States government. Which in turn implies that he knew more about Encounter’s politics than he ever admitted to me; or perhaps even to himself.
On 28 March 1968, Maro and I joined the big protest in front of the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square. This was an important turning-point in the so-called revolution of 1968, as it showed that a wide and potentially chaotic gap separated the government from the governed.
We arrived at the march with three little girls in tow: Maro’s half-sisters Antonia and Susannah, plus Lucy Warner, the daughter of Barbara Hutchinson and Rex Warner. We greeted friends who stood on the pavement. Mogador Empson said hello but he told us cautiously he’d prefer not to join the march.
Lucy took up the slogan ‘Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh’, which she robustly sang with the best of them. The other two joined in. Ho Chi Minh was the pale, almost saintly leader of the Vietnamese liberation movement. It was impossible to have any suspicions about a face as beautiful as his. But I ticked her off. We have no idea who Ho Chi Minh is, or what the communists are doing in Vietnam, or anything about China, or anything else in South-East Asia. We are here to say that we think that the war in Vietnam is a bad idea, and it’s especially bad for America. The girls went right on singing ‘Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh,’ with cheerful rosy expressions on their faces.
We approached Grosvenor Square. In front of us marched a group of disciplined German students. They put their left arms round their neighbour’s waist, raised their right arms to the shoulder of the man in front, and suddenly we were no longer walking with human beings so much as following a truck made of men. They didn’t make any noise, but they knew what they were doing. We stuck to this group. Maro took one side of our girls, I took the other.
Five minutes later I found myself pressed against a young policeman, who’d locked arms with other policemen along the base of North Audley Street, barring our way into the square. A very English conversation took place. ‘I want you to know, officer, that there’s nothing personal in my squashing against you like this.’ The policeman said that he quite understood, sir. I said I was worried about my girls (they were squealing with delight at being squashed); and he said perhaps I should have left them at home. I said, ‘I had no idea that things were going to turn out as rough as this.’ The policeman said, ‘No, sir. Nor did we.’
Then he said: ‘I think we are going to break.’ And break they did, letting this flush of excited humanity flow its sudden way into the big bare square opposite the American Embassy.
We caught up with the German contingent. They were still in one hard pack and they were about to attack the horses of the police. They had prepared a plan. Word went round that they were throwing ball-bearings under the hooves of the horses. This sounded bad, so I hustled my group over to one side. The protest began to lack the usual light-hearted quality of Brits showing displeasure with their government.
Then a horse went down. It screamed as it fell. A perceptible gasp went through all of us. It was magnificent and frightening, the animal so obviously not a part of our predicament, yet frightened and hurt.
Afterwards things turned nasty. From the violence at the front, it was obvious that both sides had lost control. We wandered off, secretly hoping that the German contingent would get clobbered. If any of us Brits were arrested, hopefully they’d be released by the magistrates in the morning with nothing worse than a reprimand.
We left England to go and live in Italy about a fortnight after the Grosvenor Square march. There was something hysterical about it. We sent forward via the train service of Passenger Luggage Advance three ancestral trunks full of stretchers, paint rags, a used bar of soap with some good still in it – all the necessities for a new life off the map of responsibility.
When I broke the news to Mum she said, ‘But you can’t leave England now. What about Granny’s flat?’
That winter, I’d painted a portrait of Granny, who still lived at the top of the house in Rothwell Street where my mother had lived as an adolescent. At the end of the morning I’d absent-mindedly thrown my turpentine into the fire, thinking this was the easiest way of getting rid of it. A great black cloud rose up and moved along the ceiling in a wave, reached the far wall, tipped over and rolled back. Scars of soot were left on the walls and dust lay everywhere.
It was a bizarre way for Mum to tell me that I couldn’t leave England, but I took her at her word. ‘I’ll paint it,’ I told her. ‘I’ll paint Granny’s flat. I admit it, I fucked up her walls.’ So, with only one day to go before taking that train, I turned up at 13 Rothwell Street with a suitcase full of rollers in one hand and a gallon of white in the other. I pressed the doorbell and waited.
There was no distant tinkle. Granny was deaf. Her bell was a flashing light, and it was only luck if she ever noticed it.
I put down my equipment, leaned on the bell and lit a cigarette. I gave that bell one whole cigarette and stared up at Primrose Hill. Immense sycamores unfurled their first tender leaves and the grass was darkening on the bare hill where the anti-aircraft guns had been mounted in the years before I was born. Below the hill, I heard the sound of animals yearning for each other in the zoo. I pressed and pressed Granny’s bell, and still there was no answer.
Goodbye, Primrose Hill, goodbye, the shelf of books on guerrilla warfare written by Chairman Mao, and St Bernard of Clairvaux on monasticism, and the beautifully wrong-headed Gaetano Salvemini. Goodbye, the sandy-haired ghost of Percy Street and the bent pillars of Loudoun Road. Goodbye to my other selves: the Foreign Office mandarin, the art historian, the crabby keeper of Japanese prints.
I felt that if I abandoned the things I didn’t want, I could start afresh. I knew I was throwing away a helluva lot of privileges, but I felt these were just pinned on to my backside, like the tail on the donkey at a children’s party. What was left over may not have amounted to much, but it would at least provide a kernel of simplicity.
The night before we left, we happened to run into Eduardo Paolozzi. We told him we were leaving England and he nodded. To leave the city and pursue wisdom in the countryside, he said, was one of the options artists could take. ‘But let me give you a bit of advice,’ he added. ‘You will find that the world won’t beat a path to your door. If anyone does, if anyone finds their way to you and offers either of you a show or a commission, whatever it is, say yes. Otherwise living just the two of you in a bucolic retreat will send you mad.’
When we reached Italy we stayed for a fortnight in a villa above Florence. Mougouch and Maro knew it well, as they’d lived in this beautiful corner of the city for several years before coming to London ten years earlier. They could chat to the pessimistic gardener Ugo about old roses and the diseases of cypress trees.
I went to bed. I needed to brood on Eduardo’s last-minute advice. I accepted the underlying message: in this world, you have to compete or else go insane. But when it came to making works of art, what was the competition? Or playing a piece of music or writing a poem? Where lay the connection between preoccupations so interiorized and the voracious needs of the city?
I do not remember reaching any conclusions at that time, but thereafter I accepted Eduardo’s advice as a talisman: always say yes to those who beat a path to your door. It’s remained ‘house rule number one’ from that day to this. If it has meant agreeing to mount exhibitions in impossible places with impossible people, so be it!
I stayed in bed for ten days. From time to time my wife or my mother-in-law would come in and look at me without comment. They thought I was scared – and they were right. Moving to Italy was no big deal for them. They had no nation, no fixed abode – no ‘’Tis-of-Thee’ as Maro put it, perhaps too light-heartedly. I was abandoning everything I possessed, except what I’d created with them. The effort was like wrestling with an illness, but I knew I’d never go back.
My father and one of my cabbages at the time of Saskia’s birth.