Autumn in Oxford: A Novel
Page 37
Liz picked up the second clipping. It was the “Court Circular” from the Times, dated 11 January. Among the list of events at Buckingham Palace, one sentence was underlined.
Tuesday:
The Queen received Sir Roger Hollis, KBE, CB, on the occasion of his retirement from the Home Office.
Liz smiled. “It would be nice to be able to go back. But I wonder if we should?”
Tom was surprised. “I thought you’d be delighted. We can go back to Oxford, put the kids in the Dragon School again, and live happily ever after.”
“Well, this does free us of anxiety about the Russians. But what about MI5 and the FBI?”
“I suspect the old boy network will still want to protect Roger Hollis even after he’s been sacked. But they certainly wouldn’t let him harm us if we turn up in England. That would only attract the sort of attention no one in the establishment wants.” Tom stopped for a minute. “As for the FBI, I think I can put something into the hands of that very same establishment to protect us. Now that Isaiah Berlin has the ear of Jack Kennedy, it wouldn’t be too hard to send a message J. Edgar Hoover might not welcome. Then there is the master of Trinity, or Alice’s friend, Victor Mishcon. The threat of a word in the ear of Michael Foot should be enough to keep the Americans at bay.”
“Look, Tom, I don’t mind becoming Elizabeth Spencer again, or even Elizabeth Wrought.” She reached over to cover his hand. “But I am not sure I want to spend my declining years in England. Not when I can live in the South of France.”
Tom smiled. “Well, perhaps we can do both.”
AFTERWORD: DRAMATIS PERSONAE
Many of the characters that figure in or are mentioned in this narrative were real people. The details of their lives and the chronologies of actual events in which they participated have been generally adhered to. None of them is any longer alive.
Bayard Rustin was an important peace activist who introduced Martin Luther King Jr. to nonviolence. He was an early gay rights advocate and principal organizer of the 1963 March on Washington. Thurgood Marshall, who won the Brown v. Board of Education US Supreme Court case that ended de jure (but not de facto) segregation in the US public school system in 1954, later became an associate justice of the Supreme Court. He was strongly opposed to allowing former members of the US Communist Party to participate in the civil rights movement. John Hope Franklin, historian of the African-American experience, was the first black Harvard history PhD and first black chair of a major American university history department—Brooklyn College, in 1956. Subsequently he was chair at the University of Chicago and from 1982 James B. Duke professor at Duke University. In 1995, Franklin was awarded the US Presidential Medal of Freedom. The US Navy declined his services as a clerk-typist when he volunteered during the Second World War. Instead, they offered to make him a mess steward. Mordecai Wyatt Johnson was president of Howard University from 1926 to 1960.
Julius Rosenberg, Morton Sobell, and David Greenglass all communicated information about the design of the first nuclear weapons to Alexandr Semyonovich Feklisov when the latter was a Soviet diplomatic officer in the United States during and immediately after the Second World War. None of their information was needed by the Soviet atomic scientists to develop their first nuclear weapon. Rosenberg and his wife were both executed in 1953 by the US government, leaving two children who at first could find no one to take them in. Decades after her execution, allegations of Ethel Rosenberg’s innocence were substantiated by Greenglass. He admitted implicating her in his testimony to protect his wife, the probable real accomplice. Feklisov later worked in the United Kingdom, to which the espionage agents Lona and Morris Cohen moved after escaping the United States and spending some years in Russia. In Britain they changed their names to Kroger and operated until apprehended in 1961. The Krogers were exchanged for a British agent in 1969.
The lyricist/composer who wrote Strange Fruit, Abel Meeropol, published it originally in New Masses in 1937, then arranged it for Billie Holiday to sing at Café Society in 1939. Meeropol and his wife adopted the children of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in the 1950s.
In the late 1930s, City College of New York was a hotbed of future Soviet agents, African-American writers, and later, civil rights activists. It was also the breeding ground for a whole generation of New York intellectuals who started off on the extreme left, some even to the left of the Communist Party. Most of them moved steadily to the centre and then to the right by the end of their lives. This group includes Daniel Bell, Seymour Martin Lipset, Irving Howe, and William Kristol, the last two of whom have minor roles here.
In 1942 Omar Bradley was the first commander of the Eighty-Second Airborne Division at Camp Claiborne, Louisiana. Like some of his superiors, including Dwight D. Eisenhower, he publicly opposed integrating the US Army immediately before President Truman ordered it in 1948. The Twenty-Eighth Division fought in the Hürtgen Forest during November 1944 under the command of General Norman Cota, who was the first to sanction and employ black combat infantry the next month during the Battle of the Bulge. David Y. Hurwitz was a major and second-in-command of G-2, Intelligence, of the Twenty-Eighth Division in the period before the Hürtgen Forest battles.
Orville Faubus had a distinguished record in the Third Army in Europe. Before the war he was student body president at Commonwealth College, a school committed to organizing farm labour and associated with the US Communist Party. As governor of Arkansas, he defied the federal government and closed the Little Rock schools to prevent their integration. Vito Anthony Marcantonio was the representative from East Harlem in the US Congress between 1934 and 1950. Frequently reelected as an American Labor Party candidate, he was sympathetic to the political line of the US Communist Party but never a member. Marcantonio was a persistent advocate of the rights of his mainly African-American constituents.
Richard Hoftstadter was a professor at Columbia University, a well-known American historian and author of The Paranoid Style in American Politics. Like many other intellectuals, he was a member of the Young Communist League and the Communist Party before resigning in consequence of Stalin’s nonaggression pact with Hitler.
Sir David Lindsey Keir was a historian and master of an Oxford college (not Trinity) in the late ’50s. Sir Isaiah Berlin, originally from Riga, Latvia, and fluent in Russian, was a fellow of All Souls College, as well as Chichle Professor of Political Philosophy. Berlin had extensive experience in British government, especially the Foreign Office, during the Second World War. He served in the United States and became acquainted with some of the “Cambridge” spies, certainly Guy Burgess, probably Donald McLean, and possibly Kim Philby, all of whom were posted to the Washington embassy at the same time as Berlin was in the United States. However, there is no reason to suppose that Bayard Rustin knew Guy Burgess during or after the war.
Michael Foot was a member of Parliament from 1945 to 1955 and again from 1976 to 1992. He was leader of the Labour Party during part of the Thatcher years. He had been an important figure in Fleet Street from the late ’30s onward, and during the 1950s edited the left-wing Labour Party newspaper, the Tribune.
Victor Mishcon was a distinguished solicitor, chair of the London County Council, and Labour life peer. He sat on the Wolfenden Commission that recommended decriminalizing homosexuality and acted for Princess Diana in her divorce case against Prince Charles.
R. Taylor Cole was the OSS chief of station in Stockholm, Sweden, during the Second World War and later provost of Duke University. Allen Dulles was the director of the CIA in 1951. Sir Roger Hollis headed MI5, British counterintelligence, for almost a decade until his retirement in 1965, and was dogged by accusations of being a Soviet double agent throughout that period and afterwards.
J. Edgar Hoover’s sexual orientation has been a matter of common knowledge for a long time.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo © 2016 James Wallace
Alex Rosenberg is the author of the novel The Girl from Krakow. He has lived in
Britain and has taught at Oxford, where he made the acquaintance of some of the historical figures that play roles in Autumn in Oxford. Rosenberg is the R. Taylor Cole Professor of Philosophy at Duke University in North Carolina.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
CONTENTS
PART I
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
PART II
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
PART III
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
PART IV
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
PART V
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
PART VI
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
AFTERWORD: DRAMATIS PERSONAE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR