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.
28
GUILELESS AND YET OBSESSED
MY FATHER CAME out twice in order to persuade us to return.
He was present at the birth of our first child, Saskia, in Florence in 1970. Next day, he and I went to the Uffizi together because I wanted to look at paintings of babies. He was amused to be rushing from one painted baby to another ignoring all other aspects of Renaissance art; and he wrote a ‘diary’ poem about it the next day. I thought all these babies were hideous. None was as beautiful as ours. In fact they looked like lunatic dwarves, not babies. Then, as we drank a cup of coffee at Rivoire’s, my father said that all the same, babies or no babies, Maro and I shouldn’t allow ourselves to become cut off. I couldn’t just grow cabbages. To punish him, back in the countryside near Siena where we now lived, I took a photo of him clutching one of my cabbages, which for some reason that year were spectacular. He saw the joke and laughed.
A few months later my father told me that Auden would soon be coming to Florence and he wanted to speak to us.
We learned that Wystan’s first words as he got off the plane at the airport in Pisa were, ‘When am I to meet the Spenders?’ We heard this over the telephone and looked at each other like two soldiers who’d been told of an unscheduled inspection by the general. It will be OK, we said nervously. We’d spent the previous fortnight painting the entire house and making it perfect, for although Auden lived in a mess himself, he liked families that led clean and cosy lives.
Before lunch, I took him down to my studio and showed him a huge painting on which I was working: a life-size copy of The Battle of San Romano by Paolo Uccello. After one brief look he said, ‘That’s great fun.’ I wasn’t sure if I wanted it to be ‘fun’, but at least the comment was positive.
We presented our new baby and he glanced at her. ‘I’ve always got on well with babies,’ he said. ‘I was pleased to see the other day in someone’s letters that I was known to be good with babies. That was nice.’
‘Do you think she looks like me?’
‘No,’ he said decisively. ‘Babies only look like other babies. The question of looks is much exaggerated. You don’t look at all like your father, for instance. Your nose is completely different.’
This raised one of his favourite themes: if you’d happened to be present at the moment when your parents decided to marry and you’d had a vote in the matter, would you have voted yes or no? I thought about this for a moment and said, ‘No’. ‘Exactly,’ said Wystan. ‘And thereby you are denying your own existence.’ He looked triumphant.
‘Can’t I have been the product of some other couple?’ I suggested. He wouldn’t accept this. ‘You are the product of your father and mother and nobody else.’
I felt uneasy. Was this one of his abstract theories, or was he referring to Stephen and Natasha? I’d just voted no: did he want me to disapprove of my parents’ relationship? I didn’t disapprove, but I’d often wondered if they might not have been happier with two other people. Wystan picked up on my anxiety. He put a hand on my arm. ‘Your parents love you very much,’ he said. I realised that Auden was just as much on duty as we were, trying to live up to his role as a mender of fences.
Towards the end of lunch he talked about a recent meeting of scientists he’d attended in Sweden, organized by the Nobel Committee. Auden always held a great respect for scientists, whom he treated with a deference he rarely gave to his fellow authors. In his speech at Stockholm he said that he was extremely worried about the state of the world. ‘I told them that I thought that we have been placed here for a purpose, and we are neglecting that purpose. I’m glad to say that most of the scientists agreed with me, even those who said they were atheists.’
‘A purpose given to us by God?’ I asked doubtfully.
‘Yes. We have a duty towards the molecules, and we are neglecting that duty.’
This was Auden at his most peremptory. He did not care if what he said sounded strange.
‘I’m sorry Wystan, but I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘Do you mean that the molecules which are in the marble of a sculpture by Michelangelo are happier and better molecules than the ones that are still in the marble up in the quarry?’
He shut his eyes and smiled ecstatically. ‘Yes,’ he said.
Mougouch was very supportive of our withdrawn existence. She taught us how to hold our daughter and chat to her, for initially we looked at this wee thing with dumb respect. So that was one baby. And two years later, when Maro was heavily pregnant with our second daughter, Mougouch took us out on a picnic which opened a new door in our lives.
I’d accompanied my village band in a march through the gloomy Tuscan town of San Gimignano. Though it was 1972 the revolution of 1968 was still current, and we clarinettists had been drowned out by students yelling that they had a right to receive university degrees without taking exams. An hour later, sitting among olive trees, we ate our boiled eggs and admired the towers from a distance. ‘When I die,’ Mougouch said, ‘I expect to be remembered for a few picnics. The rest doesn’t matter.�
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Then she started talking about Arshile Gorky’s relationship with Willem de Kooning. Without Bill, she said, Gorky would have been left behind. He was too delicate, too non-political, too ‘foreign’ for those New York critics, who were desperately looking for an American hero. They’d found him in Jackson Pollock, she said. Gorky couldn’t stand Pollock. They’d very nearly had a fight, once, right there on the sidewalk near Union Square. Friends had had to intervene and separate them.
She was now giving us something more than those glamorous stories of which she was always the epicentre. Here was turmoil, here was intrigue, here lay the edge where politics and creativity overlapped. This was my world. I recognized its frontiers. I had to make an effort and build upon what I already knew.
‘Tackle your Parent-Complex Year’ took over most of 1975.
It’s not that Maro or I felt we were any more neurotic than the average bus-driver who, as long as he can drive from A to B, is doing all right. It wasn’t complexes we felt we suffered from but lack of information.
It started with a trip during which my father and I went alone to Venice. ‘If this turns out to be a failure,’ he said first thing when we met, ‘we can always blame our wives.’ This pre-empted any thoughts I may have had of reproaching him.
Dad kept a journal, but it’s mainly full of his thoughts about art. Like so much in his journals, he wrote down his observations half thinking about their eventual publication. He seldom discussed personal matters in his diaries and on this highly charged occasion, the key conversation isn’t even mentioned.
A House in St John's Wood Page 38
