The Fatal Englishman: Three Short Lives

  So here I am, working in Paris. There is, especially under the present regime, a great deal of rather silly and chauvinistic panache – Gardes Républicaines on every staircase, huge invitations for the slightest function, and more unnecessary bits of paper with photographs on them than I have ever seen. But the police are on the whole friendly and even cynical about all this (provided you do what they say … otherwise they just hit you), and the natives, though pretty arrogant, and speaking French in an intimidating sort of way…are on the whole better disposed than their rulers.

  For the last three weeks I’ve been working like a black, because my boss [Frank Giles] chose this time to take his holiday, quite regardless of the fact that the French were all coming back from theirs, and everything was starting to liven up … Otherwise my life has been full of people passing through on the way south, fugitive sex, and then the Gare de Lyon the next morning; followed by the same people coming through a couple of weeks later on the way north, horribly brown (I’m beginning to feel positively green after looking at all my friends), spending a night telling me all about the sex they’ve been having in the meantime, and then the Gare St Lazare the next morning …

  Had an extraordinary lunch with Nancy Mitford the other day; I was rather tired and preoccupied, and in one of my most savage Angry Young Man moods, so did not take at all kindly to sipping a single glass of Dubonnet for twenty-five minutes while she and three other queens analysed in minute detail the seating plan for the General [de Gaulle] ‘s dinner for Lord Gladwin.

  I live a very quiet life, if only because if one lives and works on the Right Bank there is no real reason ever to go to the Left Bank, and vice versa.

  This is a peculiar, in fact a ridiculous and self-destructive, attitude for him to have taken. The Left Bank of Paris was between two of its great periods. The heyday of Sartre and de Beauvoir was over; the Left had split and crumbled over the Soviet invasion of Hungary; Existentialism, which had had such a bearing on the way Wolfenden saw himself, had also passed its fashionable high point. But while it paused to gather itself for the revolutionary activities of 1968 the Left Bank was still a place of genuine intellectual excitement as well as of conversation, posing and drink: it is hard to think of anywhere that should have appealed more to Jeremy Wolfenden. But he was not interested. He worked long hours in the office, which was in the rue Halévy, beside the Opera, then went back to his flat to drink. David Murray, the former Rhodes scholar from Oxford, was living in Paris at the time and used to force Wolfenden out to a play or a film in the evening, but this only postponed the drinking. Wolfenden did not speak particularly good French and showed little interest in the place or the culture; nor was he journalistically stretched. Murray, who had known Wolfenden well at Oxford, believed that he was depressed.

  He was right. In January 1961 Wolfenden wrote: ‘For the last week or so I have been suffering from an emotion which is difficult to describe – a sort of cross between regret for lost youth, sheer sentimentality, and a sort of jealousy of those who are not suffering from this. It all started in the [Café] Flore a few days ago, seeing a couple of American boys pretty obviously in love with each other, and has built up into a sort of feeling that if I had gone to different places or different people at different times, I would not now be in the position I am … I do more and more often feel that the way I live, both administratively and sexually, cuts me off from people more than it need, and leads to a sort of formalized life which is the last kind of thing I want to lead.’

  Perhaps this black epiphany in a famous Left Bank café was what persuaded him to cross the Seine no more. In Paris he was separated from his friends, and, to some extent, from his audience. They were beginning to get married: Sally Hinchliff married Owen Humphreys; Godfrey Hodgson, Michael Sissons and other friends from Oxford were engaged. Hodgson, a fellow-Yorkshireman, had known Wolfenden as a child; he had gone as a scholar to Winchester and thence to Oxford. Although Wolfenden, somewhat to Hodgson’s disappointment, refused to engage in intellectual competition, he was aware of Hodgson’s life and early achievements as a journalist. There had been a lull after graduation when many people found reasons to prolong their stay in Oxford (research; or ‘research’ as Wolfenden called it) while those that came to London continued to live a student-Bohemian life. But by 1960 they had begun to find jobs, spouses, ways of living; and Wolfenden, in his stuffy Right Bank apartment, was no longer at the centre of their admiring world. He had the congratulatory first, and the All Souls fellowship, but so what? Residence in college ‘would mean that I never had any sex except with John Sparrow [warden of All Souls] which would be a grim prospect.’

  He had done everything he could do, and he had done it with vigour and unfailing style. Now in Paris there seemed to be a question of ‘What now? What is it all for?’ and a sense that for the first time he was starting to lose the thread.

  The Daily Telegraph’s man in Paris was the genial Ronnie Payne. He was immediately charmed by Wolfenden and thought him a first-rate reporter. However, Wolfenden’s drinking excited comment, even in this milieu. At the Standard correspondent Sam White’s Christmas party in 1960 the police were called after complaints from the concierge about ‘tapage nocturne’, particularly the crash caused by a pot of flowers falling off the balcony.

  Whatever inner doubts he may have been feeling, Wolfenden’s journalistic performance was impressive, and soon attracted the interest of the Daily Telegraph, then edited by Colin Coote. The identity of the editor was not in fact that important to Telegraph foreign correspondents since he had no say in the news operation, home or abroad. By a curious Telegraph tradition, the editor ran only the comment and leader section of the paper, while all news came under a Managing Editor who reported direct to the paper’s proprietor, Lord Hartwell.

  Ronnie Payne received a call from the Managing Editor, a man called S.R. (Roy, but known as ‘Pop’) Pawley. He asked Payne if he would sound out Wolfenden about the possibility of his going to Moscow for the Telegraph. The conversation went like this:

  PAYNE: Certainly. He’s very good journalist. But… Moscow. You do realise, don’t you, that he’s an active and busy homosexual and, well, as is well-known, horrid things tend to happen to such people in Moscow.

  PAWLEY: Are you sure? Isn’t he Sir John Wolfenden’s son? Didn’t his father write the Report?

  PAYNE: Yes, that’s right. Perhaps that’s why Jeremy is. I don’t know. I’m just telling you.

  PAWLEY: Well, anyway, Lord Hartwell’s very keen for him to go there. But… well, I’m told he drinks a bit.

  PAYNE: Do you know any foreign correspondent who doesn’t?

  PAWLEY: I see what you mean. Anyway, go and sound him out, will you?

  Payne met Wolfenden at the Crillon for drinks, something that was not difficult to arrange. Payne put the Moscow idea to Wolfenden, who was thrilled. ‘God, yes, I’d love to. But aren’t there … you know, objections?’ Payne told him what Pawley had said: Lord Hartwell was very enthusiastic. Wolfenden said he would think it over and let Payne know after Christmas. He duly contacted Payne and said, Yes, he was very interested.

  Shortly afterwards Pawley again telephoned Payne and said that Wolfenden had been in touch. ‘The odd thing was,’ Pawley said, ‘he sounded as though he had been drinking.’ Payne did not wish to stand further in the path of a fellow-journalist’s career and made no comment. The decision in London had been more or less taken. ‘Anyway,’ Pawley concluded, ‘Lord Hartwell’s very keen.’

  And so the disastrous appointment was apparently made because no one wished to displease or disabuse the Telegraph’s proprietor. The History of The Times (‘Struggles in War and Peace, 1939-66’) recorded: ‘Jeremy Wolfenden who was in Paris after being in the foreign news room… in 1960 joined the Daily Telegraph, partly because the Telegraph was ready to send him to Moscow; he had long hoped The Times would send him there.’

  There is a more conspiratorial explanation of how and why the Telegraph hir
ed Wolfenden, though it would not have been clear to him at the time.

  Meanwhile, on various return trips to Oxford, Wolfenden had been conducting a new sort of romance: with a woman. One of his tutors at Magdalen, Frank Burchardt, had a daughter called Susie, who was an undergraduate when Wolfenden was at All Souls. Wolfenden paid court to her in Somerville, though in his distinctive way: on one occasion he arrived in her room awash with ouzo and collapsed on the bed. The Burchardts were European, but Susie had been brought up in the United States: she combined a serious intellectual background with a New World exuberance. She danced tirelessly and sang at parties; she was what Eileen Wolfenden called a ‘fizzer’.

  Susie Burchardt was initially drawn to Jeremy Wolfenden, like everyone else, because he was a fountain of brilliant amusement. But, having grown up in the sarcastic, destructive world of postwar academia, she particularly valued the fact that Wolfenden did not use his wit to put people down: it was not just his own voice that he wanted to hear; he would draw people out and listen to them.

  She represented to him the possibility of order and a family life and she was good company into the bargain: the ‘Wolfenden paradox’ found its most acute expression yet. Her friends told her she was being ridiculous, that Jeremy was a confirmed homosexual who could never be happy in a conventional marriage. But it was not quite a conventional marriage that she had in mind. It turned out that Wolfenden was not wholly homosexual, and in any case she was prepared to be open-minded about his predilections if she felt the relationship gave them both enough in other ways.

  The thought of Moscow kept him going in Paris. ‘It will be nice to be back in Moscow again,’ he wrote, ‘even if I have to work seriously this time: taxis with their checkered sides, the smell of diesel exhaust, the chandeliers and the ambiguous telephone numbers, Russian cigarettes and the barley-sugar on top of St Basil’s.’ From the NUS visit he knew where all the pick-up places were; he told David Murray that he fully expected to be caught and blackmailed within the first two weeks. The prospect didn’t seem to worry him. His employers also appeared unconcerned. Perhaps Roy Pawley had disbelieved Ronnie Payne when he told him Wolfenden was busily homosexual, but the belief in Fleet Street was that Pawley was briefed by the SIS. Wolfenden’s own arrangement with them appeared to contain no specific brief at this stage; everyone seemed happy to let events take their natural course.

  He left London on 11 April, a beautiful spring day. There was a single ragged cloud visible from the window of the plane; the sky and the sea seemed otherwise clear reflections of each other. Then came the caviar and the vodka, as much as he could drink. He woke up in deep cloud, bumping over pine forests and unmelted snow. The taxi from the airport drove through a heavy snowstorm to deposit him at the Ukraina hotel, a skyscraper of the most uncompromising Stalinist design. He had a single room, number 865, with bathroom. At the end of the corridor sat an old crone who noted his movements with the all-seeing gaze of the Paris concierge but with more sinister intent. From the instant he arrived in Moscow, he was under pressure, and for the rest of his life the cloud never truly lifted.

  Wolfenden, mercifully for the rest of the world’s traffic, had not learned to drive a car. To escape from the atmosphere of the Ukraina hotel he depended therefore on the Reuters correspondent John Miller for lifts; if Miller was busy Wolfenden faced a long wait for a taxi, shuffling around in the bitter cold. For some reason he would not wear the full Russian hat that protected the ears, but only an Astrakhan cap on the side of his head.

  What they could do as reporters was limited. Although censorship had officially been lifted, it was understood that newspaper correspondents would impose a degree of self-regulation. They were not allowed to report on crime, food shortages or Khrushchev’s difficulties. Many organisations, including the BBC, were refused a correspondent; and even when a paper was allowed to send someone, the authorities were choosy about who it was. The obvious man for the job at the Telegraph was David Floyd, its Communist affairs expert, who had been in Russia during the war; but he was refused a visa. He may have been viewed as too implacable a cold warrior, while Wolfenden was thought more biddable: Yuri Krutikov had made his report on the students five years earlier.

  The whole of the British press corps (at this stage only the Telegraph, Mail, Express and Observer) relied on Reuters. They had radio and television; they were supplied with a wire from Tass, the Soviet news agency. They also had – a wondrous thing in stone-age Moscow – a teleprinter, that had come to them through ‘Lease-Lend’, the American system of patronage to its wartime allies. Every morning Wolfenden would take a taxi to Reuters headquarters where he would be given the file of the latest developments. His early morning visits were interrupted by a period of asylum in the lavatory where he could be heard coughing and retching his way clear of the previous night’s excesses. The journalists gave each other code names: when the florid Martin Page arrived to take over the Express office he became Mr Pink; the self-effacing Mark Frankland of the Observer was Mr Grey; but right from the start the bilious Wolfenden was Mr Green.

  On a typical day the correspondents met at the Reuters office, took the file, then went home to rewrite the stories in their own way, though they agreed the angle among themselves and put no great effort into giving the story an individual spin. A system of open and intense collaboration developed on the basis of a feeling that in this implacable place the journalists must survive together or not at all.

  The press was prohibited from talking to Soviet citizens; all questions had to be put in writing and sent to the Foreign Ministry press department, which frequently didn’t bother to reply. Even going to interview the Bolshoi Ballet posed a tense bureaucratic problem. Reporters could not travel more than 25 miles from Moscow without permission, which was usually refused. Trips to Leningrad were encouraged, though the press saw it chiefly as a lunching opportunity: they could be back in Moscow by four – two o’clock London time – and at least have had a change of scene.

  Although the conditions in which the journalists worked were dismal, there were some interesting stories to report. Russian-speaking correspondents like Wolfenden and Mark Frankland were able to supplement their news agency diet by cultivating semi-official and official intellectuals and – much more cautiously – ordinary people. Change was in the air. The Gulag had been opened; there were grounds for a modest optimism. Khrushchev himself was a perpetual drama. He never gave press conferences, but he could be seen at some of the receptions the Western press attended and was, if in the mood, approachable. In September 1962 he declared that any aggression towards Cuba by the United States would lead to nuclear war. On 22 October President Kennedy revealed that Russia had missile sites in Cuba and imposed an arms blockade on the island. Since the huge American arms build-up under Kennedy and the aborted invasion at the Bay of Pigs the Russians had had some reason to be nervous. For a week the two men gazed into each other’s eyes. Kennedy seemed to know more than his opposite number; he knew not only about Cuba, and had the photographs to prove it: he seemed to have information about the likely outcome of any large conflict. On 28 October Khrushchev blinked: he promised that the Russian missile sites in Cuba would be dismantled; Kennedy in response lifted both the blockade and the threat of invasion.

  In Moscow the Western press asked Khrushchev at a Christmas party whether he would be the president of their club. He agreed, and was presented with a tie. A few weeks later it was pointed out to him that it was normal in such circumstances for the president occasionally to wear the tie. ‘I will wear it,’ Khrushchev replied, ‘at my next press conference.’

  In the week of the Cuban missile crisis a 38-year-old Admiralty clerk called John Vassall was jailed in London for eighteen years for spying for the Soviet Union. While on a previous posting to the British Embassy in Moscow, Vassall had been set up by the KGB in a homosexual trap. He was photographed in compromising circumstances, then blackmailed. This was a routine piece of work for the Second Chief Direc
torate, the internal security service, which was the Soviet equivalent of MI5. What was unusual about Vassall was that the KGB was able to continue its hold on him when he returned to London; this appeared to have been achieved by annually paying him the equivalent of his Civil Service salary of £700.

  The espionage aspect of the Cold War was at its height. The British Embassy in Moscow had not only its regular SIS officer in diplomatic guise; in the wake of the Vassall case, Ml 5 was also an active presence, trying to create tighter security against Soviet penetration. Much of this was mechanical: both sides liked to entrap citizens of the enemy and enjoyed the embarrassment it caused. However, the Vassall case showed that from such mundane manoeuvres real results could occasionally spring.

  Although Wolfenden, like the other correspondents, relied on Reuters for his daily stories, he made some headway on his own. His most notable contact was with Guy Burgess, by then near the end of his life. The KGB had provided Burgess with a guitar-playing boyfriend and a pleasant flat near Novodevichy monastery where, in blue silk pyjamas from Fortnum and Mason, he was drinking himself to death on Armenian brandy. Wolfenden was the only person who appeared to have a real rapport with Burgess. Sometimes the old traitor would come to the Ukraina hotel where Wolfenden had now been moved to the Siberia of the twenty-seventh floor, with no fire escapes but a mass of bugging equipment. The two would put on their Old Etonian ties and get drunk together. When Burgess decided to give a full interview about his feelings for England and about his life, it was Wolfenden he summoned to his flat. Wolfenden asked John Miller of Reuters to go with him and his great exclusive thus went round the world as an agency story on the Reuter wire. He may have asked Miller just because he needed a lift, but he may also have been anxious about intelligence repercussions: he was not sure how friendly he was supposed to be with Burgess.