When I had reached Italy and had learned of my father’s release from prison I had felt it vital that I should make my home with him after the war. But then, after I had been taken prisoner by the Germans and escaped, I felt that this in a sense was my liberation from my father; but also, strangely, that I was now able to express my gratitude to him — for having given me my taste and love for ideas; also given me, perhaps by appreciating my outpourings, the confidence to be free of him. A few days after my experience at Montenero I had written him a letter in which I referred obliquely to the incident, then ended with a declaration so extravagantly sentimental that perhaps it could only be a farewell to what I was getting away from –
I had been wandering like Shaw’s Caesar ‘seeking the lost regions whence I came from which my birth into this world exiled me’. It is true that I have found many islands — immortal islands with the greatest friends that a man ever had — but I was always without home within the ocean of this spirit-world until one day I went to Holloway to visit a stranger — and then I knew that I had found the lost regions’; that my home was always where it had been destined to be, and that I was not alone among the waters of eternity. And now I do not believe that I can ever be entirely unhappy again: destiny has taken us thus far; it cannot be that such great promise is not to be fulfilled.
Such a feeling of gratitude can perhaps be instilled by parental approval? But what on earth its fulfilment might be will have to wait till the end of this story.
In these war years I could hardly remember my father as the person that I had indeed only caught glimpses of when I was a child — the ranting, belligerent, political figure in his black shirt or uniform; marching and strutting and roaring on platforms and on the tops of vans; what on earth was it that had got into him (rather, than, it seemed, what had he got into)? For the most part he had kept us children away from his politics. And then, in his letters to me from Holloway, he was so calm, patient, considerate. (I have published a selection of his letters to me in the second volume of my biography of him, Beyond the Pale.) There is one passage however that comes to my mind now when I look at the paradoxes of my father’s personal life and his politics. This was when we had been discussing the nature of what might be understood as ‘beyond good and evil’ when one was considering the horrors and yet the apparent necessity of war. He had written –
We are therefore driven back towards a conception of suffering — of all the phenomena that are shortly called evil in the experience of man — as fulfilling some creative purpose in the design of existence: back in fact to the Faustian Riddle, usually stated with the utmost complexity but for once with curious crudity in the Prologue in Heaven [in Goethe’s Faust] when the Lord says to Mephistopheles — The activity of man can all too lightly slumber; therefore I give him a companion who stimulates and works and must, as Devil, create.’ Faust is meant to cover the whole panorama of human experience; but I believe this to be, on the whole, the main thesis of its innumerable profundities.
And indeed, from my father’s inveterate cheerfulness in the calamitous failures and destruction of his politics — in his evident serenity even in prison — it does seem to me that he sometimes saw himself (as indeed others saw him) as a sort of pantomime black devil who felt he had some God-given Mephistophelean role in putting over attitudes and points of view that were not otherwise being considered; alternative proposals to an all-too-easy traditional reliance on war; other forms of discipline and endeavour. And it also perhaps explains why my father could almost always laugh — at least with me — at the ridiculousness of much of worldly goings-on, even his own; and who would wish his biography to be written after his death by someone who had known and loved him not for his politics but for what had been the wit and liveliness of his seeing his Mephistophelean role.
He hated war. His proposals to prevent it had involved, it is true, trying to turn the country into a sort of harmonious Boy Scout camp run by an impossibly benign elite. He at times even seemed to understand that this was not possible (indeed the so-called elite became very quickly malignant), though he thought it had to be tried. He used to tell the story of a conversation he had once had with Lord Beaverbrook, to whom he had said — ‘You are lucky in England to have got me as a fascist leader; you might have got someone far worse!’
6
When I got back to the battalion they still had not moved, and it was now the first week in May; time was running out for the big push if there was to be any chance of it reaching the northern plain before winter. However, we were now told that it had been decided to attack direct across the Rapido river to the south and thus bypass the monastery and the town; and that the enemy’s powers of observation from these would be blocked out by smoke shells. One wondered why this had not been thought of before.
We still had to wait while planes flew overhead and there was a huge artillery bombardment from guns just behind us such as there must have been, I imagined, in the First World War. Waiting with us were tanks with devices to clear mines and to bridge ditches; but the Engineers had first to go ahead to build a bridge that would carry tanks across the river. But the Germans were now returning the artillery fire, in particular on the Engineers who, while they were working, could have little protection. So bridges kept on being damaged before completion — and the waiting and shelling went on. This was the beginning of my first experience of large-scale warfare with tanks and planes and heavy artillery, and it was mind-numbing, like a tidal wave or the heart of a thunderstorm. One could not know what was happening because one’s senses were cut off: there was too much noise to hear, too much violence in the air to look. One just found what shelter one could — in ditches and by hedgerows — and then stayed within oneself until the cataclysm might pass. Accounts of war are usually told from the point of view of senior officers who have made the plans and issued the orders and then try to contact one another to find out what is happening. But they have little chance of knowing this until the storm subsides, the tidal wave has retreated; then they can observe what pieces of flotsam have been washed up here, what units of men or equipment have been carried by the hurricane and landed there. And reports can be written about what plan has succeeded in the face of what determined opposition. There will be not much about what has failed. But some order will be made out of what has been a vast display of anarchy. It is the anarchy, however, that remains in the mind of an individual involved. His concern will have been to endure.
I do not know how long we waited behind the river — a single day or two — one tried to close one’s mind as one closed one’s eyes and ears. There came a new noise into the tumult: a ghastly wailing in the air like the cries of a celestial creature being flogged. This noise came from a German weapon that we had not come across before — a Nebelwerfer, a large-calibre multi-barrelled mortar, the noise of which when fired was said to have been specially designed to strike alarm and dismay into the hearts of the enemy. And then one could anxiously try to trace the trajectory to see where a bomb would land.