Before he’d even set out for Germany, Stephen had hoped that he and Curtius might found a European magazine together. This plan had to be abandoned as a result of the quarrel. The idea, however, unexpectedly reappeared in a request from Information Services Control, one of the government bodies supervising Germany, to provide a blueprint for such a magazine. It was just the opening that Stephen had been waiting for.
STEPHEN’S TWO VISITS to Germany had been preceded by several trips to France on behalf of the British Council. He had no idea what he was doing at these conferences, other than offering a supportive English presence. He occupied ‘a role which I could not seriously be expected to fill but for which the audience accepted me as a token’. Vagueness, I think, formed part of his credentials. When he tried to check up on his duties, he was told by the Director of the British Council in Paris that he wasn’t expected to do anything specific. Indeed, one day he wandered off and spent the afternoon with Picasso.
His connection with French cultural life owed much to his experiences during the Spanish Civil War, where he’d made friends with a number of French intellectuals who were also supporters of the Republic: André Malraux, Louis Aragon, among many others. He could renew his friendship with them at these conferences, though these were so crammed with intelligent people he felt it was ‘impossible for anyone to do justice to anyone else’.
The problems of France were very different from those of Germany. In France, four years of occupation had left a feeling of disgust at the devious skills that everyone had had to learn in order to survive. The ‘civic virtues’ of the British were praised, meaning that in England goods were not distributed according to the rough rules of the black market. Of those he met, the communists seemed the least self-punitive about the war. A myth was being circulated that the communist partisans had liberated France by themselves, with no thanks due to Britain or the United States. Communism was far from over. It was the movement of the future, not the past. It was useless for Stephen to argue that, everywhere, communism had produced regimes governed by force from above. He was told condescendingly that French communism would be different.
Before sending Information Services Control the outline for a magazine they’d asked for, Stephen forwarded a draft to Eliot. In three single-spaced pages and thirteen numbered points, he suggests that it should concentrate on Germany’s position within Europe. The consensus at the conferences he’d attended was that Germany must be reunited with Europe as soon as possible. He was also worried that France had come under German influence during the occupation. ‘Germany has sown the seed of Nazi thought in the countries which are now victorious.’ An international magazine would create a new sense of European identity, he argued.
Eliot, who’d had many years experience as the editor of the Criterion, wrote a dry reply agreeing with points 3, 4, 5 and 6, though he questioned points 1 and 2. But the real questions were: 1. Who would pay for such a magazine? 2. Who would write for it? 3. Who would read it? There’s a touch of irony in numbering such obvious questions. I assume that Eliot was teasing the thirteen numbered sections of Stephen’s rambling proposal. It was hard to imagine that any Germans would be prepared to pay for such a magazine in their present position, continued Eliot. ‘The important thing is to get it into the hands of the right people, not to get it into the hands of a great many people.’ He thought one might reasonably hope for a readership of perhaps eight hundred. (If this seems low, the circulation of Eliot’s Criterion had been no higher.)
Stephen had already tackled the question of payment in the last paragraph of his proposal: ‘The British Government, above all others, should encourage this scheme, because it is to the British that the continent looks more than to any other nation.’
His book on Germany, European Witness, came out in October 1946. Curtius saw that Stephen had not removed him from the text as he’d promised to do. He wrote Stephen a formal letter ending their friendship, with a copy to Eliot.
Even before this, my father had given up the idea of founding a magazine based in England and Germany. He’d suddenly become convinced that it should be published between England and France. He’d even found a young man in Paris who he felt could be his co-editor. Could he bring him to see Eliot? This project never materialized, but given his many contacts in Paris and his interest in the regeneration of European cultural life, Julian Huxley offered Stephen a job at the newly founded UNESCO, the cultural organization of the United Nations.
Huxley, the first head of UNESCO, was an old friend of Stephen’s. Natasha remembered when Stephen had introduced her to him. They’d had tea in Julian’s apartment overlooking the London Zoo, of which he was the Director. He’d scared her, because in making light conversation she mentioned that she’d seen an interesting bird in the countryside recently and he’d tried to pin her down as to exactly what kind of bird it was. ‘It had blue wings’ wasn’t good enough.
UNESCO’s main function was to promote international understanding via cultural exchanges. Defining culture, however, went against the American grain. President Roosevelt’s plan to support painters and writers in the early Thirties had been bitterly opposed – not surprisingly, as the Artists’ Congress and the Writers’ Union quickly became communist front organizations. The American decision to participate in UNESCO was taken reluctantly, to forestall the possibility that it, too, might become a massive communist front.
The American representatives to UNESCO quickly formed doubts about Huxley. He was an atheist, which was unacceptable to most Congressmen. He also brushed away their hints that some of the people he was hiring were communists. A key moment occurred when Huxley obliged UNESCO to come to the rescue of Pablo Neruda, who as a communist was being harassed by the Chilean government. (Did Stephen encourage Julian? He’d known Neruda since the Spanish Civil War.) The cause of protecting intellectual freedom was impeccable, but the Neruda case was noted by the Americans as another black mark against Huxley, who was eventually forced to resign.
My father worked for UNESCO from the end of 1946 until March 1947. It required frequent trips to Paris from London. I haven’t been able to trace much about his experiences at this time, but I note that somewhere along the way, his interest in Germany faded.
In the spring of 1947, my parents left England for a trip abroad in just each other’s company. It was the first time Natasha had ever been to France.
At a party in Paris, Natasha saw her husband across a crowded room talking to an elegant young man. She asked the person next to her who this man was. The reply: ‘Don’t you know? That’s Stephen’s new lover.’
My mother stood up, and promptly fainted.
It was a terrible moment.
She’d misinterpreted the long conversation at Wittersham which had ended, ‘There is only us.’ Stephen had not put the past behind him, nor had fatherhood given him a new, deeper idea of marriage. He loved her – of that, she was confident. But whatever view he held of marriage, it wasn’t hers; and now she was faced with the existence of a dark area of their shared life which she could never reach.
After a few days in Paris they continued by train to Italy.
The country was a mess and the black market flourished. Dollars and pounds were exchanged for lire at far above the official rate. One day in a hotel near Verona they needed the local currency, and my mother sent my father out to buy some – but not at the bank, she said, pointing down into the street from the window of her hotel. There, see? That man on the