Those were the days when international pressure against Israel was increasing, though one wondered when it hadn’t been. Anti-Zionism was (and still is) the fashionable thing, whether or not it is a country always in peril from surrounding neighbours. I went with Stephen Spender to Paris to protest about Israel having been voted off the UNESCO cultural organisation. Spender and I spoke our views, then had an excellent meal together in the Eiffel Tower restaurant.
A year later I went to a conference in Brussels dealing with the plight of Jewish ‘prisoners of conscience’ in the Soviet Union, and spoke at that too. Golda Meir was there, and I forget what we said to each other, but not much because she was so busy, our introduction little more than a handshake. A further conference in Paris took place a little before Israel was voted back into the UNESCO organisation.
Some of all this must have filtered through to Valentina Ivasheva in Moscow, because in talking to a British academic (who reported back) she remarked that I was nothing more than ‘a Zionist agent’. Such flattery was repeated in a Hungarian magazine, and perhaps others, though that was the only one I knew about, pointed out to me by a Hungarian who worked for the BBC.
I recalled another comment of Ivasheva’s about Pamela Hansford Johnson in Russia with CP Snow. She had written in one of her novels that when they were in Moscow there were ‘bugs’ in their room. Valentina was outraged on reading this, saying that there were no such insects in Soviet hotels. What Pamela had meant, of course, was that the room was bugged, that it had concealed microphones to hear the conversation of the guests.
Another anecdote was about John Wain and John Braine. The first John was invited into the latter John’s room for a drink, but Wain told Braine to keep his voice down and be careful what he said because the place was bugged. Big, bluff, outspoken Yorkshireman John Braine was having nothing of this, and on asking where they were went over to the nearest picture, behind which the mike was no doubt concealed, and bellowed: ‘If you’re listening to us you know what you can do, don’t you? You don’t? Well let me tell you. You can FUCK OFF!’ He then strolled back to John Wain and said: ‘We’ll be all right now. We can just say what we like.’
It was easy to see why Valentina was disappointed, even offended, by my activities but, perhaps strangely enough in those years, countries of the Soviet Bloc occasionally invited me to their parties and receptions. Ruth and I were even awarded — shall I say? — a week in the German Democratic Republic, memorable because I met Günther Klotz. His translation of The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner was reputedly so good that it became the only German version used.
We talked a long time in his flat, and he told us that, having himself come from a ‘bourgeois’ family he’d had much prejudice to fight. People were nurtured and given all the best jobs if they came from the ‘proletariat’, no matter what their intelligence or eligibility. That was disgraceful and stupid, I said. ‘Any country which abandons merit and relies blindly on “class” will in the long term be doomed.’
After the unification of Germany I received a large royalty cheque for the many copies of my books sold while the German Democratic Republic existed. None had been cut or censored either, so I can say thank you very much, for it’s more than I can say for Russia and other East European countries.
The Hungarians and Czechs printed one or two of my stories in magazines, and I was asked by the Bulgarian cultural attaché to translate work by their national poet Hirsto Botev (1848–76), which I did. More surprising was when my novel A Start in Life was serialised in Foreign Literature Magazine in Moscow, and I received a certain amount of money for that. Perhaps I wasn’t so much out of favour after all.
Still, I wondered what had been done to it. My novel Key to the Door, published in the early 1960s, came out in an edition of two million copies, which would have earned me a tidy sum had the Soviet publishers abided by the Berne Convention. Cuts, however, had reduced the original 500 pages by a third, and I found out why when Adelheid Fandry, a young woman from Hamburg University, came to see me. She had made the translation from English into Russian the subject of her thesis, so gave an interesting breakdown on what had been inadmissible in the. Soviet Union — nothing very surprising.
I continued to meet Russian writers in London. With Ruth Fainlight, Ted Hughes and others, I went to Yevtushenko’s performance at the Commonwealth Institute in 1979, and he all but mesmerised the full hall by his dramatic recitation. In some ways it was outlandishly hectoring, even had a sort of bullying tone, well developed I supposed after so many appearances in front of Russian audiences, who traditionally liked that sort of thing. On my first trip to the USSR I had bought a record of readings by Mayakovsky and Yesenin reading in the same mode.
Unlike British poets Yevtushenko knew his work so well he had no need to look at a text, everything going into the impressive delivery.
We went to a restaurant for supper, and on our way in he detached himself from, the others and, embracing me in the Russian fashion said, close to my ear: ‘Keep it up, about the Jews.’
I couldn’t understand the necessity for secrecy, though did not expect him to bawl it out either. But his tone was as if wanting me to know that we were in the same underground club together, and that it was inadvisable to let anyone hear his exhortation, which might get one of us — though him most likely — into difficulties.
In the restaurant he endeared himself to everyone, even those not of the party, with his uninhibited behaviour, generously ordering champagne and handing it around.
On 28 May 1981 George telephoned me from his hotel in London, and we made arrangements to meet, though not for lunch. I was surprised he hadn’t been told to give me a wide berth, though even if he had it wouldn’t have worried him. In any case I had already been to several gatherings at the flat of the Russian cultural attaché and his wife, and had been invited to celebrate the anniversary of the Revolution at the Soviet Embassy. During that party someone said you must meet the Lord Mayor of Nottingham, and I thought why not? There he was, with all the glittering tin of regalia on his chest as I put out a hand to shake. Maybe I’d had a few by then, though to my regret only wine was served, but he drew back on hearing my name, and wouldn’t greet me. I suppose he thought my books had given his city a bad name.
We saw George only twice, for he was a busy man. He came to dinner with us and the film maker Mira Hammermesh, and then we took him to a reading at Bernard Stone’s bookshop. He was eleven years older, and a little more corpulent, as became the director of a large Soviet publishing house that had sent him on business to a London that didn’t have the same atmosphere of doom as before.
I was glad to see a renewed and confident man of substance who had made something of himself after the disaster of 1969. He was happy to be in England again, having a genuine love for the country which never left him.
The only mention of Kuznetsov was when he chided me for remarks I’d made at a certain dinner, when I should have kept my mouth shut, which were taken up by a journalist and published in a local paper.
The friendship resumed its old intensity on talking about our marathon motor trip, one of the good times of his life, as it had been of mine. We were much older, and though there couldn’t have been the same sense of intimacy as before, it was to rekindle when we met again in Moscow for the last time, after the fall of the Soviet Union.