Ways of Escape

  His human wisdom was always greater than his film wisdom. The fifties were for me a period of great happiness and great torment – manic depression reached its height in that decade, and I remember there was one more than usually suicidal suggestion – I forget what – which I had put up to a Sunday newspaper. He spoke to me on the telephone. ‘My dear boy, this is so foolish what you plan. Come with me to Antibes. You are bored. All right. We will go on the Elsewhere.’ How he penetrated my life. It was he who had taken me for the first time to Monte Carlo, and so it was that my character Brown in The Comedians was born in that city. I knew Antibes first with him, and now it seems possible that I shall end my days there.

  Was it on that voyage in the Elsewhere, with two American couples as a fine cover, that he confided to me how he had obtained for both of us a currency allowance of some size from British Intelligence because we were going to photograph the length of the Yugoslav coastline? He was back playing with lenses as he hadn’t played for years – not since The Six Wives of Henry VIII and Rembrandt. He had helped the Secret Service during the war and he had a childlike delight now in spying all down the Adriatic coast without the knowledge of his American guests who, I think, would not have been prepared for that kind of holiday.

  This was his mischievous side. Like Dreuther in the Hôtel de Paris, he liked to play an old sailor in a T-shirt and a battered yachting cap with a white stubble on his chin. One night in Naples, in a waterfront bar frequented by GIS, he persuaded the barman and the American soldiers standing around that Coca-Cola rendered men impotent – my word would have carried no weight with them, nor a film producer’s, but from this old seadog who had learnt his wisdom ‘on the seven seas’ …

  A sad wisdom it was too: I remember him saying to me, ‘When my friends and I were young in Hungary, we all dreamed of being poets. And what did we become? We became politicians and advertisement men and film producers.’

  3

  I was flying from Warsaw to Brussels in an Aeroflot plane. The ancient editor-in-chief of L’Humanité was also leaving Warsaw: they put flowers on him as you put flowers on a tomb. The smooth managerial types stood around and kissed the nicotine-yellow cheeks, and then they shovelled him on board the plane. One pushed from behind, another tugged from in front, another took the hat off his long white locks, another caught his flowers: the Communist editor-in-chief went aboard. It was 1956. Stalin was dead, but in Poland Stalinism still survived.

  The passenger who sat beside me was young with a grey puffy face, and, when he took off his hat, I saw he had a shaven skull: he too had been seen off, and by his country’s representative, who had succeeded after seven years in fishing him out of a Polish prison where he was serving fifteen years for espionage. He wouldn’t talk, for another of his countrymen still lay in the same jail, but he ate, how he ate. There was more thick bread than anything else in our meal, but his tray was empty before I had eaten more than one sandwich, so he cleared my tray as well and emptied my briefcase of all the biscuits and chocolates and sandwiches with which kind friends in Poland had stuffed it. The night before he had eaten two kilogrammes of sausage, he told me, but he hadn’t been able to sleep a wink in the comfortable Embassy bed.

  Monsieur Cachin, the editor, dozed in his seat out of touch with the problems of L’Humanité, and I couldn’t help smiling when I thought of all the readers who have asked me why I sometimes write thrillers, as though a writer chooses his subject instead of the subject choosing him. Our whole planet since the war has swung into the fog-belt of melodrama, and, perhaps, if one doesn’t ask questions, one can escape the knowledge of the route we are on. A venerable old man with long white hair and long white moustaches says goodbye to his warm-hearted friends, who present him with flowers, and after life’s fitful fever he sleeps well: a young man, as young men should, has a healthy appetite. The world is still the world our fathers knew.

  It might even have been possible to so regard Poland. In Warsaw the Old Town had risen like a phoenix: when I stood in the main square I found it almost impossible to believe that a few years past there had been nothing there but a heap of rubble. Every house had been faithfully reconstructed: each bit of moulding was exactly as it had been.

  At first I was inclined to praise the poetic sense of the Communist Government. Hitler had said Warsaw was to be erased, and here it stood again: the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century houses, the little apotheke, the old café. Faced with an eliminated town and the terrible problems of housing one would have expected a Communist government to rear great tenement flats with perhaps another Palace of Art and Culture, nearly (but not quite, for the Poles have taste) as hideous as the gift palace from Moscow that shoots up its useless tiers like a gangster’s wedding-cake in the centre of the city. Poetic, imaginative, a little ‘reactionary’, how charming to be able to praise a Communist government for these qualities.

  But then a doubt niggled at the brain. The Old Town was destroyed in the insurrection of 1944, one of the bravest and foolhardiest episodes in all Polish history, when men armed with homemade grenades and a few pistols held out for two months against a German army already on the spot, seeing their city destroyed house by house rather than surrender, while the Russian generals halted their advance to allow Hitler time to eliminate these men and women who had wanted to liberate themselves. Officially the insurrection never took place, there is no record of it – so I was told – in the Museum of War, and soon there will not even be any broken bricks to show that the Old Town had once been destroyed. We know how Trotsky has been excluded from the history of the Revolution. Perhaps history has to be rewritten architecturally, too.

  A blinkered traveller can certainly find much that seems unchanged. The wide grey windy square of Cracow with its stone market colonnade full of toys and gay peasants’ clothes and the apple-women sitting in black shawls by the piles of bright apples: in Czestochowa the trumpets wail as the silver curtain descends at the last Mass over the most convincing portrait ever painted of Our Lady, with the Swedish lance-thrust in her cheek – ‘Help of the half-defeated’ Belloc wrote: the old streets of Lublin: the little fifteenth-century wooden church at Dembo with the relics of Sobieski in a vestry hardly larger than a confessional box: the humour and lightheartedness of Warsaw (let us give the Communist Government the credit for being the source of so much humour; it was they who prevented for some while the publication of the dogma of the Assumption because they thought the date of the feast – which had been celebrated since the ninth century – was somehow connected with the defeat of the Russians by Pilsudski after the First World War).

  In the countryside there are still native craftsmen carving wooden saints and Stations of the Cross as though Byzantium had not fallen to the Turks: at a wedding in snowy Zakopane the carriages wait, the drivers in the tight trousers of the Tatra mountains, while the Inviters to the Feast ride to and fro in their bright jackets, and the bride is drawn from the church by two men and the bridegroom by two girls who hold his arms, and the singing begins as the carriages wheel away.

  The traditional storytellers still fix you with an Ancient Mariner’s eye, and little touches of modernity only give life to the old fables. When we picked our way through the freezing mud of one village an old man told me his tale of how he had visited the United States, where a Mr Frick possessed two piles of gold and silver so large it would have taken twelve men to shift them. A friend of the storyteller had been invited to go and see the piles, but when he got there, Mr Frick commanded him to add twenty-five dollars in gold and twenty-five dollars in silver to each pile. Oh, he had been properly caught, his friend had been. But when the old man was invited to see the piles, he got the better of Mr Frick, telling him, through his interpreter, ‘If there were seven million fools in the world, you could climb to heaven on your piles of gold and silver.’

  In the same way it would have been possible to pass through Poland, as it was possible for many tourists to pass through Mexico in the 1930s, and see n
o sign of tension between Church and State. But the State has learned wisdom since the experience of Mexico, and here in Poland, where the Church really represented the country, the Communist had to tread with care. The Church represented the nation against Russia in the days of the Tsar, it represented the nation against Hitler, and now it represents the nation, in the eyes of the nation, far more than the group of men who rule it in the interests of Russia.

  Even the workers in Nowa Huta, the industrial city built out of nothing in three years on the plain outside Cracow, filled the churches – not always for religious motives, but as a little gesture of independence where the opportunities for independence were few. Nevertheless the number of communicants (and a man will not go to Communion as a political act) had grown enormously. It is only since the Revolution that the Pole, I believe, has changed his habit of only communicating on certain major feast days.

  But in 1956 when you turned the stone the position was not so happy.

  The old independent Catholic Press was dead. Tygodnik Powszechny, a Catholic weekly, whose circulation ran into six figures, was closed down because the editor refused to prejudge one of those clerical trials in which the Government unwisely indulged before it realised the strength of Catholic feeling. For some months there ceased to be a Catholic Press, but this, too, did not suit the Government, who needed the façade of religious toleration. Tygodnik was started again, though no member of the old staff consented to work for it, and it was put into the hands of the Pax movement. It was Pax who had invited me to visit Poland as their guest – a guest, I’m afraid, who bit the hand that fed him.

  The Pax movement is perhaps the most ambiguous feature of Polish life and it still goes on though its founder, Boleslaw Piasecki, is dead. In 1956 he was still very much alive. Before the war he had been a nationalist and anti-Semite; during the war he was a partisan leader who fought with great courage against both the Germans and the Russians (he lost his first wife in the Warsaw insurrection). He was captured by the Russians and was condemned to death. However, he was spared and taken to Moscow, whence to the astonishment of the Poles he returned to Warsaw with permission to start the Pax publishing firm and the Pax movement which formed a keystone of the so-called Clerical Lay Catholic National Front Activists.

  Pax in those days (I don’t know how it is today) was a cadre consisting of only about 350 members, all laymen, and round that cadre, which reminded one a little of the Communist Party, there were a great many fellow-travellers – many of genuine sincerity – including several thousand priests. Their ostensible aim was to support the social and economic changes in Poland – many of which were both necessary and admirable – and to prove, as it were, the ‘progressiveness’ of Catholicism.

  They were allowed to publish a certain number of books from the West and one can give a great deal of praise to this activity, though the Catechism which has been printed in hundreds of thousands contains phrases of political significance unknown to our ‘penny’ version.

  The opponents of Pax (who were the vast majority of Catholics in Poland) claimed that the movement was Russian-inspired and was a clever attempt to divide the Church. One uses the past tense; for, if that was the intention of the Pax leaders, they dismally failed. Pax had very little importance in the Catholic life of Poland. Conventions were held: a Vicar-General appeared once on a platform, priests with humourless and uneasy faces helped to fill the big halls in Cracow and Warsaw: visiting Viet Minh priests (as the Eastern custom is) clapped delightedly their own speeches, and Piasecki orated on the subject of the aggressive Atlantic Powers in true Marxist terms. But the Church went on without them, and congregations preferred to go for Mass or confession to the churches which were served by a priest who was not an Activist.

  It is easy for us to condemn them. We have no Auschwitz to remember. A girl of Pax who entertained me to dinner had a prison number tattooed upon her arm. A visitor to my hotel room pointed at the ceiling with a smile and suggested that on such a beautiful day we should take a walk. The Swedish Ambassador, an interesting and cultured man, had a fancy after our lunches together for walks in the park, for only in the park could we talk freely. The British Ambassador took a different line. I was astonished by the freedom of his speech between four walls. He explained that technicians came every four weeks to check them. He spoke, I reported later in London, like the madame of a brothel who assures the client that her girls are safe because they are ‘inspected’ by a doctor once a week.

  The crucial question which I found no followers of Pax ready to answer with directness or simplicity was: ‘Where is your point of resistance? At what point will you warn the Government that if they go further you will cease your collaboration and close down your presses? You exist. Therefore you must be of value. Therefore you have the possibility of blackmail.’

  My relations with Mr Piasecki were ambiguous. I was met on arrival by a distinguished novelist who immediately I got off the plane hustled me away from Warsaw, to Cracow, Katowice, Czestochowa. During our travels he told me that I had been invited to Lublin’s Catholic university on a certain day. He warned me that when we returned to Warsaw and I met the head of Pax, Piasecki would ask me to alter the date of my visit so that he could accompany me to Lublin. ‘This you must refuse,’ he said. ‘The only date possible for you is the one arranged.’

  Sure enough when I visited the Pax office Piasecki, after he had ordered two half-pint glasses of brandy for us (it was eleven in the morning) suggested that he would like to visit Lublin with me, but the date … The date was the only one I could manage, I told him.

  The explanation came when I arrived at Lublin. The English department of the University had the right every year to present a play in English. It was usually a play of Shakespeare and performed in costume in the great hall of the University. This year they had chosen to perform Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, so costumes were forbidden and the great hall not available. In the small room at their disposal there was little space for an audience. The actors were more numerous than the watchers. What the authorities had not realised was the effectiveness of this play, at this moment in time, in modern dress, and the way the words of the chorus struck home. ‘Where is our Archbishop?’ The Archbishop of Poland, of course, was under house arrest. In the crowded little cloakroom after the performance a girl’s hand pushed a letter into my pocket. It was addressed to her fiancé in England.

  I returned for a last meeting one evening with Mr Piasecki in the elegant house he had all to himself on the outskirts of Warsaw. How few people in those days still possessed a house. An old lady – an Englishwoman who had spent the war years in Poland – had been summoned as an interpreter. She looked a little scared as we sat and drank our apéritifs – half-pint glasses of neat whisky this time instead of brandy – and she only spoke when she was spoken to and that was rarely because with the excellent wine over dinner we got on well enough in French. After dinner she was dismissed and we sat till one in the morning over the wine. No wonder I remember little of what we talked about, but I think from his uncertain steps when he led me to his car, Mr Piasecki would have remembered even less. I had been advised in England to carry with me a bottle of olive oil and always to take a spoonful before I went out of an evening, but I found I could manage quite well without.

  Sitting in the plane next day, beside the hungry ex-prisoner wolfing the thick Polish sandwiches, I was glad I had refused to carry with me the tape recorder too big to fit into anything smaller than an overcoat pocket which had been pressed on me in England, and no one had noticed me passing the gold watch at the turn of the staircase.

  Chapter Eight

  1

  It was in the fifties that I began to write plays which were produced. Like the Mau Mau and the wars in Malaya and Vietnam, the theatre offered me novelty, an escape from the everyday.

  When a novelist has produced a play for the first time in middle age, it is natural to assume he has come rather late to the theatre. I feel
certain I would have regarded with suspicion the publication of a Terence Rattigan first novel, if there had ever been one. To put up with the disappointments and the difficulties, the false starts and false curtains, the stubborn intransigence of a method which depends for communication on dialogue alone, an apprentice needs to have a passion for his work, but can we believe in a passion which has only declared itself at the eleventh hour?

  So this is an apology for a latecomer to the theatre – but I am a latecomer, I want to add, only to actual production. My life as a writer is littered with discarded plays, as it is littered with discarded novels. I cannot count the number of plays which preceded The Living Room. I do know, however, that the first to be accepted, though not produced, was written at the age of sixteen. I have described that disappointing affair in A Sort of Life. Not for nearly twenty years did I seriously attempt another play.

  My first attempt, a comedy based on one of the frequent kidnapping incidents which took place in Japanese-occupied Manchuria before the last war, never reached the second act. I was pleased enough with the first: the scene a draughty railway station on the Manchurian border: the characters a Japanese officer always busy at his typewriter, a correspondent of the Daily Mail, a paper which had embarrassed the authorities by offering a large reward for the return of the kidnapped (there were no currency problems in those happy old-world days), the British Consul, a Chinese go-between, the anxious husband, and last the kidnapped couple – the wife and a young employee who had been taken by the bandits while riding at a local race-club. The husband’s anxiety was less for his wife’s safety than for his own marital security, since the victims, according to the Press, had been bound together by the wrists for the last fortnight, night and day. I liked my first act. There seemed to me a freshness and authenticity in the setting, the action marched, but alas! when I came to time it, the first act only lasted for eighteen minutes and a half. It was to be a play in two acts, and the second act was to be a little shorter than the first … I abandoned the play with reluctance.