Loudoun Road was crammed full of art, and my father looked at what he owned constantly and thoughtfully. His taste, however, was mainly British. He’d followed the early progress of several painters who’d gone on to have solid careers: Henry Moore, John Piper, John Craxton, Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach; and in the Sixties, David Hockney and Ron Kitaj. What he said about them showed great shrewdness, of a kind that could never be used in a presentation of these artists, because these thoughts came from the inside. Of Auerbach he said: ‘It’s refugee art, isn’t it? Frank will never get out of bombed Berlin.’ Of Henry Moore: ‘It’s such a shame the Arts Council gave Henry all that bronze. He’s much better when he carves stone, because it puts up a bit of a resistance.’ (This implies that Dad understood the role of the Arts Council in making Moore into an official artist.) Of Bacon: ‘I can see what Francis means when he says that abstract art risks becoming “decorative”, and that figurative art risks becoming “illustration”. But making decoration and illustration into opposites can only mean something to Francis himself.’
‘It’s such a relief that Francis has turned out to be a success,’ he said when Bacon was taken up by the Marlborough Gallery. ‘Because he’d make a truly terrible failure.’ This was an extremely loaded observation. My father endowed the concepts of success and failure with almost mystical qualities.
All these remarks, made as we stood in front of the works of painters before they became famous, were treasured by me and added to a small cache of things I thought about constantly. And yet in spite of this, Chapel Street knocked me out in a way that Loudoun Road never did.
At Loudoun Road, there was a sunken fosse outside the dining room, and ferns grew out of the cracks of the stonework and the atmosphere was dense, as much as could be seen through the iron bars to keep out the burglars. Ferns, and in the spring white flowers that nodded like tender bells, utterly Victorian, the fluttering spirits of so many dead babies. Chapel Street instead was scrubbed oak, not polished mahogany with Mum in the background worrying about the scratches. Chapel Street was light and airy, and on top of the physical beauty of the house, there was life-style, and the two were separable, leaving the beauty like a powerful bass line underneath the daily squabbles of a female environment. Her house offered the perfection of its taste without worrying about whether or not Mougouch was a serious person. The one serious element was the collection of Cahiers d’Art that Gorky had accumulated with such difficulty in New York in the Thirties, and many of the illustrations in these books had paint marks round them, and some had quick neat sketches in the margins, so that these were lessons, wordless and persistent, the example of dedication in poverty, even though all around us shimmered the one word that in Loudoun Road was always conspicuously absent: Money.
Most of all, Gorky’s paintings. When I first saw them I had no idea what they were, but I knew they were about something. They were abstract, but they were not ‘decoration’, in the way that Francis meant it. They were lively and ambitious, and they came from an exceedingly remote place. Those canvases by Gorky added a weight that shattered all comparisons between Loudoun Road and Chapel Street. Mougouch was frivolous, so my mother thought. Well, maybe she was and maybe she wasn’t. But those paintings were to me as serious and challenging as an unexplored continent.
‘But what does Mougouch DO?’ my mother shouted at me. I tried to explain how beautiful Chapel Street was. In my innocence, I wanted to make Mougouch sound attractive so that Mum would like her. But we were in the Jaguar driving too fast. (Driving that car brought out her demonic side.) ‘Nonsense!’ After a couple more traffic lights I told her that she was rapidly approaching the point when I’d have to tell her she was intruding. ‘In that case we’re rapidly approaching the point where I have to tell you you’re a bloody fool.’
Tentatively, I reported this back to Mougouch. She sympathized, at least to the extent that she had no wish to turn my mother into an enemy. ‘You should have told her that I bring up four daughters. That’s quite enough!’ She thought about it some more, took a few steps up and down. ‘No, that’s the wrong answer. Come to think of it, it’s the wrong question! Tell your mother I do nothing, but it doesn’t matter. In a hundred years nobody will care two hoots about any of us.’
For some reason this last remark stuck in my mind. It was undoubtedly true of Mougouch. Nobody I’ve ever met has lived more beautifully in the present tense. Society was everything for her. If nobody else was around, she’d dazzle the maid. (I once heard her say to the maid, ‘Don’t crawl away, you modest little thing, I want to give you some money.’) For Mougouch, the past existed as a series of reminiscences, of which she was usually the centre. If she entered into the world of Diderot and Grimm – one summer was spent on whether there was a plot involving these two – somehow their gossip was today’s. My father thought instead in terms of the centuries. He imagined that Byron and Wordsworth were colleagues working in other rooms; but the concept of the ‘truly great’ meant seeing himself as a third person acting within history, and this seemed to me crazy. Mougouch’s view connected frivolity with immediacy. I loved her idea that only the present tense is real.
Mougouch and her four children were bound together in existences that were both immediate (what are we doing right now?) and also tremendously long-haul. Till death do us part. But Mougouch didn’t care about the usual problems. School? Exams? Insurance? Chapel Street floated by indifferently. There was nothing to stop Mougouch pulling up those tent-pegs and moving on. The world was full of people she could charm. Italy’s fun to live in, too. And Spain.
Mum, seeing the frivolity of all this, would have liked to dismiss Mougouch as a social climber of a particularly American kind: a Henry James heroine, perhaps. I’m sure she tried, but there were several difficulties with this interpretation. To begin with, Mougouch had turned down Michael Astor because she’d found him, and that Bruern Abbey of his, boring. This suggested that gold-digging was not a priority. Secondly, Mougouch’s own background was sufficiently assured for her to sweep aside questions of status. There was even a real Henry James connection, come to think of it, proved by a first edition of a book by William James, Henry’s brother, dedicated to Mougouch’s great-aunt Marion Hosmer. It lived in the front hall on a shelf next to Max Ernst’s Une Semaine de bonté.
Mougouch told me that when Henry James visited her great-aunt Marion, he found it so difficult to talk to her, he just sat there and drank nineteen cups of tea.
She resembled the heroines of Henry James and Edith Wharton in one respect. In fiction of the Edwardian period, the American woman who sets out to conquer England is at first fascinated. She longs to penetrate the mysteries of social behaviour, not just in terms of rank but also in terms of books read, grand houses visited, poems quoted, languages spoken. But there always comes a time – in fiction and in life – when a gale of irritation sweeps through the truly American heroine. She remembers she’s a child of the Revolution. With a wilful gesture she shakes off the fusty cobwebs of our windswept isle.
Many of my mother’s oldest friends were gathering at Chapel Street, fascinated by the immediacy of her days. It was not a plot. It was life-style. But Mum continued to view Mougouch’s conquest of London with the deepest suspicion.
Mougouch herself was flattered by my mother’s sense of rivalry, which she took as a compliment to her gifts. She couldn’t resist playing up to the idea that I was in love with her, not with Maro – my just punishment for having raved about Mougouch’s virtues. She was always prepared to occupy centre stage, and in this case a deliciously wicked role had been conjured up for her by Natasha Spender. ‘You can’t have him this weekend,’ she’d tell Mum, ‘I need him for a dinner on Saturday night.’ She wasn’t above saying this, even when Maro and I hadn’t been invited to the said dinner party. My poor mother brooded for decades over social slights such as this.
Back at Liddell’s, I volunteered to paint the study I shared with my Canadian room-mat
e. The housemaster Stephen Lushington had been pleading for years for someone to take on this chore, and he’d been dropping hints that I, with my Slade experience, would be the perfect man for the job. I chose a very small paintbrush, so that what usually would have taken me two hours took two weeks. I also said I’d have to sleep out, because the smell of paint would be bad for my tender lungs. I told him that the nearest house I knew was in Chapel Street, less than half an hour away. OK, he said.
After an afternoon painting a couple of square feet, I’d walk twenty minutes up Queen Victoria Street, buy a bag of chestnuts for sixpence outside Victoria Station and anemones (the cheapest flowers) for a shilling, walk another two hundred yards to Mougouch’s front door. It would open. I’d go upstairs and hand her the flowers and she’d say ‘Oh, thank you, dear.’ A cup of tea and perhaps cinnamon toast in the kitchen and gossip (in Italian) with Franca, the maid. Then Maro and I would sneak downstairs for an hour of love before supper. And more love again afterwards. I don’t know where Prep fitted in to the existence of this decadent schoolboy, and sometimes it was an effort to get up in time for prayers in Westminster Abbey next morning at nine.
My mother was furious. She may even have thought of phoning Mr Lushington to complain. He was a nephew of Susan Lushington of Ockham Hall where she’d retreated in 1940, so she felt he was part of an extended family. If she had, he would have told her with Sufic brevity, ‘He’s painting my walls.’ He knew about Maro already, because she’d come to Liddell’s unexpectedly one afternoon bearing a chocolate cake for tea, tied up in white cardboard and dangling from a bow. She’d worn an olive-green suede skirt of her mother’s and an original Emilio Pucci shirt and an American Indian turquoise necklace. Liddell’s was just coming out of lunch and the boys reeled at the sight of her. A woman! Help! They drew back in two lines on either side, through which she marched without hesitation. ‘Who was THAT?’ Mr Lushington asked. ‘Oh Sir, don’t you know?’ So our affair had his tacit approval.
Early in May 1962, Dad invited Maro and me to a poetry reading by the young Russian poet Yevgeni Yevtushenko, some of whose poems had recently been published in Encounter. We sat in the front row. Yevtushenko’s style of recitation was very passionate and he came forward on stage to communicate as directly as possible: the Mayakovsky in-your-face mode. Thus Maro received on the tip of her nose a small bubble of ‘poetic spit’, as she called it.
After he’d finished, there were questions. This part of the performance rapidly turned sour. Yevtushenko was challenged by several Russians in the audience; and he hesitated. He only recovered later when we all went out to supper at the Café Royal. I remember that for dessert Yevtushenko pointed to a big red jelly wobbling on the trolley of sweets. The colour of my ideology, he said.
‘He’s a car salesman,’ said Maro in the tube going home. ‘He has a wide face and bright blue eyes. Anything he says will be believable for a bit.’
Would Yevtushenko have been familiar with Encounter? It’s unlikely. It was banned from distribution in Russia. Copies may have appeared in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs or the KGB or any other bureaucracy that employed foreign experts, but in the nature of things these bureaucrats would not have spoken to writers.
In conversation with Isaiah and others, my father said that Yevtushenko’s position was a difficult one. Isaiah – I hope I’m remembering this correctly – called him ‘an operator’. The remark wasn’t necessarily critical, although Berlin held a low view of his talents as a poet. He wrote to Stephen, ‘as a man of letters Ye. does not exist it seems to me’, and my father would have accepted this estimation as Isaiah spoke Russian and he didn’t. For all that, Yevtushenko was an interesting phenomenon. The background of these discussions was the constant attempt of Stephen and Isaiah to understand how Russian writers lived their impossible lives. The mere fact that Yevtushenko was in London was hopeful, and the compromises he’d had to make in order to get there, insofar as they were understood, were forgivable.
One of the compromises would have been to file a report for the KGB. Everyone who left Russia was obliged to do so. Care needed to be taken so as not to write anything substantial. Nobody knew if these reports would ever be read. Whereas in the West, writers may have been given a surreptitious push now and again, in Russia, a wrong word could send someone to jail.
From the British point of view, communication was improving, but February 1956, Khrushchev’s speech denouncing the crimes of Stalin, to October 1962, when this phase of East–West relations withered as a result of the Cuban Missile Crisis, is more than six years. That’s too long. Improvement in the cultural world took place too slowly, and it was always vulnerable to confrontations taking place in the world of ‘real’ politics.
On 21 May 1962, Maro and I left the Slade early to go to the opening of the first one-man show in London of the American painter Larry Rivers. He’d been teaching at the Slade for almost a term, where Maro had met him. We walked in, and the first thing we saw was a painting about 70 × 50cm, showing an amateurish copy of a packet of Camel cigarettes. We looked at it for perhaps fifteen seconds, then I turned around and asked for a drink. It seemed the best way of avoiding any negative comments. But I was still at school, Maro was at the Slade, and we were juveniles who shouldn’t be pretending to be grown-ups.
Behind us stood my parents looking like thunder, Larry Rivers himself and Bill Coldstream. Before anything worse could happen, Bill said, ‘We’ll go to a pub,’ and led us away. Bill knew everything about the Spenders. He’d been married to Nancy, my cousin Philip’s mother, before she’d married Michael, Stephen’s elder brother. He was one of Wystan’s oldest friends and he was an even closer friend of Louis MacNeice. I can’t remember what happened at the pub, but we’d been shaken by the grim parental faces and, in an avuncular way, he did his best to lighten our anxiety.
Next day, my father wrote a reproving letter, not to me but to Maro.
I want you to consider whether it is really right or fair to Matthew’s school and parents that you and he should behave on his school work days in the way you were doing yesterday … If it gets back to the school that you & he spend time when he should be either at the Slade or at school floating round London saying you want drinks, not only will his privileges be taken away, but his housemaster will be made to feel that he has been foolish trusting Matthew … We don’t want to do anything to interfere with Matthew & you in your relationship but this is not to do with that, but with rather public behaviour which is embarrassing.
The situation was confused. Maro was being taught by Larry Rivers and she had every reason to come to his opening. If I happened to be present, it was incidental, drinks or no drinks. But I detected my mother’s anger in all this. When he said, We don’t want to interfere with your relationship, he/she meant exactly the opposite. I didn’t know about my father’s theory of having no will of his own and always doing what his friends told him to do, but I did think: Why is Dad such a weakling?
With Larry Rivers himself, things turned out OK. At that point I’d become the head of a literary society at school, so I could invite people to speak to the pupils. I apologized and invited him to Westminster. He came ten days later, playing a tenor saxophone. Behind him was Gregory Corso. Their performance was intended to shock, and it succeeded. The last straw was when our religious instructor asked Corso what it was like to be a poet in the United States. He replied, ‘That’s a really creepy question,’ and stomped out, followed by Rivers tootling his sax. I could see by their backs that they’d had a good time. They went down the stairwell laughing, and the portrait busts within their marble ruffs did their best to look offended.
That summer, Maro and I went back to John Craxton’s house in Chania.
Opposite us lived Kyria Sultana, Craxton’s charlady. My first introduction to Maro’s view of life took place when we went through Sultana’s small wooden door into a walled courtyard filled with old olive oil tins painted blue, filled with herbs and flowers. Her ch
ickens lived on the flat-topped roof of her bungalow where they roosted in boxes or shat on the old and cracked cement. Inside, a vaulted ceiling shielded a long plant that grew from a hole in the floor, bottom left, and curled round and round the room to leave for the open air, top right. It was beautiful. All you had to do to acquire such an object was plant it and wait.
Kyria Sultana served her family, the hopeless but ambitious young nephew and the failing grandparents. Her husband was a customs official but, incontinent and half blind, he wandered among the pots as we sat there chatting and peed in a corner near a verbena, of which she was particularly proud. Kyria Sultana and Maro shared the same archaic convictions. Each and every one of us in life goes through the same trajectory. Through the centuries, the cards are equal. Only some have better luck than others, that’s all: some individuals have better luck, some cities, some nations.
She was thrilled to hear that Maro was Armenian. They shared those Turkish centuries in the background. Crete only broke free in 1905 – which at the time was living memory. She and Maro laughed at the harshness of experience and I felt that a whole other room had been opened in my life, without famous names, without success, without careers or social stratifications.
My first attempt to enter their world involved washing the sheets. I put them in a marble tank in the basement of Craxton’s house and stamped on them in bare feet, in my knickers, while Maro said ‘Hut, hut,’ like an Arab herdsman encouraging his camels. Kyria Sultana stood beside her holding a broom, an ecstatic smile on her face.
A House in St John's Wood Page 27
