Time at War (17 page)

I remained in the army working at Hounslow for another year. During this time I did not in fact feel that I had much responsibility. It was still ordained that I should travel on the Underground out and back each day. In the evenings, among those with whom I behaved irresponsibly it could be accepted that I was still involved in some hangover from the war.

At weekends I would go to stay with my father, who was now out of politics as well as house arrest and was leading the life of a country gentleman in Wiltshire. When I had first arrived home, landing off the troopship at Liverpool, I had gone straight to my sister Vivien who was still with her friends Rosalind and Rosie in a flat off Knightsbridge. Then, late that night we had driven down to my father and Diana, who were waiting up to welcome
me with cups of tea and snacks. There was so much that might be talked about that I at least could hardly talk at all; I wondered if I would ever be able to talk about the war. This was my family and had been my home; but it did not seem, however my war ended, that I would be able to settle here again.

When I was working in Hounslow and went to stay with my father at weekends, we chatted easily enough about our shared philosophical and literary interests; but our conversation did not have the same intensity as our letters had had in war. I remained perhaps closer to my sister Vivien, who set up her own establishment in the country with our brother Micky and our old nanny. When Mervyn Davies came home shortly after me, I introduced him to Vivien and hoped they might form some relationship, but, I suppose inevitably, nothing came of this. When Mervyn got out of the army he resumed his studies in law, on his way to becoming a QC and then a judge. We still see each other at intervals to have lunch.

My friends in the Far East wrote that they were having a fine time running a local radio station through which they could broadcast their poetry. And they were sharing a mistress. Affectations of homosexuality seemed to be being blown away by peace.

I discovered that there was a way by which I could get out of the army earlier than I had expected. Shortly before I had joined up in 1942, I had taken a scholarship exam for Balliol College, Oxford; I had done little work for this knowing that I would be going off to war. But Balliol had said I had done well enough for them to keep a place for
me if later I wanted it. And now it seemed that if I chose to take up this offer I could be demobilised by October 1946 rather than almost a year later. This I did. I wanted to read philosophy – to continue in a more disciplined manner my efforts to understand, among other things, why humans seemed to be at home in war, but refused to acknowledge this and thus were unable to deal with it.

When I got to Oxford, however, I was told that this was not what philosophy was about. The ancient Greek tragedians, yes, had been interested in such questions, but they came under the heading of Classics. The Existentialists? Nietzsche? They did not ‘do' these at Oxford. What did they do? Descartes, Hume, Kant: Epistemology, the Theory of Knowledge: what do we mean when we say that we ‘know? But was not this what Nietzsche was on about? Was it? But I had always felt that I would have to work things out for myself.

I stayed at Oxford for just the year I would otherwise have been in the army. Then I left to write my first novel. If academic study insisted on dealing with only the bones of theory, then surely it was up to novels to portray the flesh of life. Also, I left Oxford to marry Rosemary, my eventually chosen rose from the rosebud garden of girls.

I had first noticed Rosemary at one of the innumerable fashionable dances in London. It seemed she had noticed me. But we had been wary: if one pounced conventionally, surely any quarry worth catching would have to try to get away? So how, in fact, when it came to it,
did
one pick and choose? One waited for some sign, some singularity, some jungle test like that of a smell?

I bumped into Rosemary again some months later in a coffee bar in Oxford. I said, ‘Do you remember me?' She said, ‘Yes.' said, ‘Good.' She said, ‘I thought you were that murderer.' There was a murderer on the loose at the time who was said to chop up women and dissolve them in the bath. I thought – Well this indeed is a singular signal that one can hardly explain; but might it be what is required?

I took her out to dinner. She hardly spoke. I rattled on. After a time I said, ‘What are you thinking She said, That I could send you mad in a fortnight.' I said, ‘Why wait a fortnight?' I went out to where my car was parked and I gave her the keys. I lay down in the road where she could run over me. She said she did not know how to drive. I got up to show her. Then we drove back to her lodging. By the end of the evening I think we both thought we might marry.

The next weekend I suggested we go in my car for a drive in the country. She asked if we could visit her old grandmother who lived in Hertfordshire. I said – Of course. I had the impression that Rosemary's family must be hard up, for in spite of her presence at London dances she appeared to have no money for bus fares and to possess no smart clothes. On Sunday we drove through country lanes and eventually came to the gates and lodge of a drive leading to what must be a large country house. An old lady came out from the lodge to open the gates. I wondered – This is her grandmother? The old lady waved us on. We drove through what seemed to be endless acres of parkland and came to a long low house like a battleship. We went in through a back door and along stone passages where all life
seemed to have stopped; then through a baize door to a small sitting room, outside which Rosemary asked me to wait for a moment. Then when I went in there was a very old lady in a wheelchair who, when her granddaughter had introduced me, said, ‘And I was such a friend of your grandfather's!'

I still had no idea who this lady could be who had been a friend of my grandfather George Curzon. (I managed a bit later to glimpse an envelope lying on a desk addressed to ‘Lady Desborough'.) She asked Rosemary if I would like to see what she referred to as ‘the paintings'. She gave Rosemary a huge old-fashioned key and we went down a central corridor of tattered grandeur and into a long high picture gallery where, when Rosemary had opened a creaking shutter, there appeared – through cobwebs – a Van Dyck? An Italian Renaissance Holy Family? A huge portrait of a soldier on a horse that could be – surely not! – a Rembrandt? (Rosemary said – ‘Yes, they say it is.') I thought it important that I should not appear to be bowled over by all this. Why should it not be as natural as anything else? But it seemed more likely than ever that we would marry.

*

So this was peace. But there still seems to me, sixty years later, to be a problem of how to write about war. From the complexities of peace you can produce an artwork. From the simplicities of war – can you portray in one breath both heroism and horror?

People are not supposed to write about their successful exploits in war: this is considered to be bad form. And
about the exploits of others – well, this is easier to write when they are dead. There is a whiff of immature triumphalism in stories about successful killing – unless one has paid the price of being killed oneself. Good stories were able to be written about the First World War because then the whole absurdity could be seen as just horror, a senseless disaster. But the Second World War had not been like this – had it? It was held to be just and right. And yet there were the horrors, the disasters. There are very few good accounts of the fighting in the Second World War – one of them, as I have mentioned, is Raleigh Trevelyan's
The Fortress
about the landing at Anzio. A good story about the Second World War has to comprise a way of writing about the horror and the rightness, the misery and the satisfaction, the evil and the good, all in one. Not a problem for epistemology? No?

Perhaps more a problem for religion. The old Greeks had gods – and so did Nietzsche, although he exclaimed that his god was dead. (I later suggested in a novel that such a god might better be seen as a successful train robber retired to the Argentine.) Anyway, not much of a task here, it is true, for logical or verifiable thinking. But then what should be the style? What about my own candidate for Good Fairy: that which goes on at the heart of matter? Here, one is told, things can both be and not be at the same time; an observer affects that which is observed; reality is a function of the experimental condition. So why should not this be the style in which one might float in the deep end of peace? A lifetime's effort indeed! Or would one rather drown?

Humans seem at home in war; they do not feel at home in peace. This cannot be said often enough. So long as it is denied – so long as it is thought that peace is prevented by the actions of certain misfits – then humans cannot learn. There are few novels written about how to live in peace; they are held to be boring. People prefer to read about, and indeed many to experience, the senseless excitement of the simulation of war; the dicing with destruction and the risk of being dead. But if this is the condition on which evolution has depended and which has brought us to where we are, then it hardly makes sense to object – unless, that is, it is seen that evolution has also brought us to an awareness that this condition has become too dangerous and might be surmounted: one can be conscious, that is, of existence on another level.

Evolution has depended on carnage: some species have to be destroyed so that others survive. On the way, however, there have also evolved alliances, dependences, symbioses by which some species may help each other to survive, even if at the cost of others. It seems that humans have evolved an ability to be aware of this, even if they do not seem able to stop being at war within and among themselves. They see they have their animal nature; and, somewhat at odds with this, their human nature which sees the possibility of something different. But they do not seem to have evolved a strategy by which to be at ease with this – except perhaps through religion or the creation of works of art. In the course of evolution, that is, they have experienced an order beyond that of animal or even human nature – an order which seems to be outside evolution
because it sees how evolution can be assessed and even reorganised. This order seems to manifest itself as infinite, eternal. Humans have called it the supernatural or spiritual; and it can naturally, of course, be said not to exist. But it seems to have arisen from a tendency of humans to try to make sense of their situation – that of being confined in an evolutionary process and yet also experiencing that a part of them is free of this, and even at times can influence it. They may attempt this by art; or perhaps try to do it by seeing their situation as funny.

Even in formal war there had seemed to be some spiritual ordering as well as orders coming down through chains of command – how else did I stay alive? You get on with things as best you can – but then what does ‘best' involve? You keep your eyes and ears open; you learn the limitations of orders; you become aware of an ability within yourself to know what further is required. And then, when necessary, you are ready to jump in at a deep end. But I have told my story.

My last letter to my friend Timmy before he went out to Burma still hoping, perhaps, to ‘prove' himself in war, was –

I feel that you were right in your decision to issue Burmawards. Not, however, for the reason you give. Life in battle is the most futile thing in the world, for it is the only futility about which one is forced to care desperately. And for this reason it is the most unreal thing in the world. Indeed, its most potent effect upon me was to suggest that there was no reality in anything;
that all was the wild imagination of an aimless mind. I now think nothing; I am too weary to wonder about the unreality of reality; I have reached the stage where everything must be accepted or rejected without inquiry. All that I have learned of men is that they are composed of such a mixture of perfidy and nobility as I cannot hope to unravel; and all I have learned of life is that there is nothing more to be known about it save that which is observable at the end of one's nose.

But then I had come home – to the garden of fallen angels; to the chance of a lifetime's learning about the paradoxes of peace?

Rosemary and I married: we got away from our families for a time by going to live on a small hill farm in North Wales – me to run the farm and to write my first novel; Rosemary to paint. Writers and painters should have one foot on the earth, should they not, as well as their heads in the clouds? But then children arrived; and we had no piped water, and in winter the stream that ran past the house froze, and roads became blocked. So after a few years Rosemary's mother suggested that for our family's sake she should hand over to us her commodious house in Sussex, which was now too big for her, and this seemed an offer we could not refuse. This story and others that follow I have told in my autobiography
Efforts at Truth.

My friend Anthony, after a year or two in the wilderness of peace, announced that he was intending to become an Anglican monk. Then a few years later my other great friend, Timmy, went to train to be a priest; and I myself
was struggling to learn to be a Christian. All this was a consequence of our coming across, in turn, a holy man, Father Raynes (I have told this story more than once); but it was also, it seems to me now, of our having, in our formative years, put everything up to question even if in our fanciful style, of our having treated nothing as sacrosanct except that one should be ready, when the time seems to have come, to jump in at a deep end. We needed for a time to put our trust in orders that might seem to come from above; then, later, I at least (and this was what I became convinced Christ and Christianity were saying) believed that whatever was necessary could be known less through commands from outside than from a faculty for being aware of an ordering that grew within oneself.

About my relationship with my father – I stayed on good terms with him so long as he remained a gentleman farmer. But by 1948 he was being enticed back into politics and I did not see so much of him; and anyway, Rosemary and I had married and were escaping to North Wales. Then, at the end of the 1950s he was standing as a parliamentary candidate for North Kensington, hoping apparently to attract the anti-black vote, and I became determined to have a decisively antagonistic confrontation with him. I managed this; and in the course of it he said he would never speak to me again. This situation lasted for several years. Then at the end of his life when he had Parkinson's disease and was finally out of politics, I became close to him again. He was, as he had been in prison, resigned and benign, and trying to look back on what had gone wrong in his life and what might have gone right.
We talked in our old freewheeling style; and just a week before he died he announced that he wished me to have all his papers so that I could write his story. He knew how much I had disapproved of his politics; he also knew I would try to tell the truth as I saw it because that had been our style.