Years later, Dad told me that he regretted the fact that they hadn’t fitted the piano-garage into their lives, although I can’t imagine how they could have found a space for it. The fact remained that my mother played the piano on her nerves, and her technique always lagged behind what she could comfortably do. In her time she played many difficult pieces, such as Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto, Stravinsky’s Capriccio, and of course the big staples like Beethoven’s Fifth Concerto, The Emperor. And she’d always leave off practising until the last minute. Midnight on the night before, she’d still be thumping that awkward passage in the last movement. I once came out on to the landing from my room above the piano room and shouted, ‘If you aren’t ready now, you never will be,’ whereupon a dreadful silence fell upon the house.
As a child I’d listen to her practising the same passage endlessly until her fingers went to the right places by themselves. Over the years it took a strange hold on me. As I lay on my bed upstairs reading a book, she’d go back and do those ten bars again and my eyes would go back and read those two sentences again. It was maddening. A book and a piece of music became intertwined into a mishmash of repetitions and stumbles. Words on the printed page acquired the emphasis of musical phrasing, a certain book would become associated with a particular composer. What I read and what I heard became one.
Stephen arrived in New York for his second trip to America early in April 1949. He discovered that many of Mary McCarthy’s friends were bitterly complaining about her account of them in her novel The Oasis, which had recently been published in Horizon. He wondered: Is New York any less parochial than London? ‘It is not surprising that people should be annoyed, but the feeling that the story somehow undermines the security of the characters described in it, is rather astonishing.’
The Cold War was a leading topic in the newspapers. It was becoming increasingly necessary to choose: Them or Us? Stephen looked down from his bedroom window at the streets of Manhattan and wondered, do we really have to become pro-American? What does this country have to offer? ‘The cars as fertile as weeds; the anxiety of all the things in the shops to be bought. The creation of standards whose only nature is an ostentatiousness, which excludes people who do not share these. The anxious suspicious over-generosity of Americans.’
My father is taking up the cause of the rest of the world against the United States. I think his experiences in UNESCO might have affected him. The idea that even this institution had to become pro-American was hard to accept.
A few days later, away in the South, Stephen noticed a newspaper report analysing a recent conference that had been held at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York. This Peace Offensive organized by the communists had been dramatically challenged by a group of liberals and ex-Trotsky intellectuals, including several of Stephen’s friends. Mary McCarthy had been present, bringing an umbrella with which to defend herself against the Stalinists. Stephen read the story incredulously. Communism, the cause of peace? Nonsense! Nevertheless communism was still a ‘cause’, even if it entailed, in every country where it gained power, the loss of liberty for all except a few leaders at the top. ‘America is not a “cause” in the same way. It is just America, with the American way of life and a rooted opposition to un-American ways, and tremendous waste, and a radio and a press and a movie industry, not to mention political parties, which advertise a commercialisation which is an insult to every race and class of people not directly involved in American ideas and interests.’
The fact that Americans insisted that their culture was superior to all others was agonizing to those non-Americans who had to chose between the USA and communism. ‘America judges others by her values, her interests, which prevent her from either understanding or being understood.’ The United States couldn’t grasp that its culture might be unattractive to other nations. ‘Not to see that the Voice of this America can never speak to the world – in fact, that it is only by learning the voice of the world of striving peoples that America can ever speak to the world, is a fatality which rots even America itself.’
This isn’t anti-Americanism. It’s exasperation with the choice of ‘Them or Us’, and a plea on behalf of many cultures that would prefer to choose neither. But to choose neither was not an option; and if the choice had to be made, of course it would have to be in favour of the United States.
Stephen was in the process of completing two important texts. The first was World within World, which he finished on a ranch in Taos, New Mexico, where D. H. Lawrence once lived. The second was his essay for The God That Failed, a compendium of memories written by key participants in the events of the Thirties, once communists, now repentant, some bitterly so. It was an influential book, made more powerful by the fact that most of its authors had not taken up the cause of the United States after they’d lost faith in communism. Indeed, my father’s contribution includes this: ‘Capitalism as we see it today in America, the greatest capitalist country, seems to offer no alternative to war, exploitation and the destruction of the world’s resources.’ If only communism worked, he wrote, it might provide an alternative to ‘a mass of automatic economic contradictions’. My father’s ‘ambivalence’ meant that he faithfully supported the United States while feeling ineradicable doubts about what that country stood for.
My mother and I weren’t with him on this trip. We spent the summer of 1949 in Portofino, on the Ligurian coast of Italy. I was four years old and I remember my feelings at the time. I can even remember my father not being there, as a kind of latency, the state of expecting him to turn up, shared between Mum and me.
There’s a photo of me aged four, fishing in the bay. My hat is large and floppy. My swimsuit is baggy. I remember the look of the water. Even when the day was calm and there was no wind the sea was never still. It lay a few feet below the edge of the port in glowing lenses beneath which tendrils endlessly traced the letter ess. At the beach, a sea urchin abandoned in my knee five long legs waving at the different points of the compass, patiently blundering through each other without tangling. They thought they were still in their carapace and were walking away from me – but what clever legs to do that by themselves.
I remember a race back from the beach, round the promontory and into the bay. I’ve done my best to raise it to the level of a trauma, but my life on the whole has been free of anything traumatic, so it remains just an instance of my mother behaving competitively. She had a strong competitive streak: the pursuit not of the thing itself but of the victory that winning represented.
The other participant was Alison Hooper, like Mum aged under thirty, both in cast-iron swimsuits made of some shiny material. There we were among the towels and trowels of the beach on the promontory, and Mum suddenly leaped up saying ‘Race you home.’ Whereupon Alison too sprang up, grabbed her towel and basket and started up the steps cut into the rock, of which there were rumoured to be a thousand. She took them two at a time and her calves flicked sideways as she ran.
Mum grabbed me, dropped me in the front of the rubber dinghy and started paddling. She shone with the gleeful sheen of early motherhood. Beautiful, with a child and a husband and a career, she was in the stage when the young mother says, Life, throw me a problem! There’s nothing I can’t solve!
As we set off in the rubber dinghy, our world withdrew to just her and me, the surroundings nothing but a pretty backdrop to our shared ambition, which was to paddle around the cliff and reach the edge of the quay first. So we paddled, she behind me steering and myself in front doing the best I could, with a little spade, not scooping the water but trying to hit it, except this element gave no resistance but took my hand in a brief flurry of bubbles.
Evidently we weren’t going fast enough, for at a certain moment, round the edge of the rocks and with Portofino in sight, she said, ‘Come on! You’ve