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ODYSSEY OF A LIBERAL – MEMOIRS
By Freda Utley
Chapter I
AS THE
In my early teens, at boarding school in
Although I never heard of James Russell Lowell until I came to
Right forever on the scaffold,
Wrong forever on the throne . . .
Anatole
Dieu vancu deviendra Satan; et Satan vanqueur deviendra Dieu.*
God conquered will become Satan; and Satan victorious become God.
Men are men and there is no innate virtue in the oppressed. On the contrary, as Bertrand Russell pointed out long ago when underdog changes places with upper dog he proves to be more ruthless because he has learned, while underneath, to scratch harder in the battle for survival.
Since, either instinctively or by reason of the sense of proportion which is the essence of the classical concept of beauty, I have tended all my life to throw my weight on the weaker side of the scales of power, perhaps I was not so wrong when I carved SOPHROSUNE on my pencil box when I was 14 or 15 years old.
Unfortunately in my personal life and behavior I have paid little heed to Goethe’s dictum that the essence of wisdom is to know when to stop. By expressing my views too sharply, or by carrying my arguments to a ruthlessly logical conclusion, I have failed to influence as many people as I might have done had I been more temperate or restrained and less combative. I have alienated some friends and lost potential allies by turning my back upon those, who by their refusal to go all the way with me in a battle against odds, seemed to me to be cowards unwilling to stand up and be counted when they were in reality only displaying greater political sagacity than myself. Yet despite my all or nothing attitude in the heat of controversy, I have found myself unable to remain long in the company of extremists on any side.
One’s character, no doubt, is one’s fate. But no one knows the extent to which character is determined by heredity or by environment. Nor is it until late in life that one can dimly perceive how the influences of childhood and youth have shaped one’s destiny, and continue to determine one’s philosophy and behavior until the curtain falls.
These influences in my case were liberal, socialist and free-thinking, strongly colored by the poetry of revolt and liberty and legends, stories and romances of heroism and adventure upon which I fed in childhood; not without a tincture of Gallic realism, but basically English. I was conditioned by the empirical attitude of mind inculcated in me by my father; and my upbringing , despite the absence of religious instruction, was anchored to the basic tenets of the Puritanism which produced the first English radicals in the 17th century, the Pilgrim Fathers who emigrated to New England, and the Nonconformists who founded the British Labor Party two hundred years later.
The environment which shaped me was in many respects different from that of others of my generation but I am a product of the heyday of the liberal era, reared in its faith in infinite progress through freedom from superstition and by means of the scientific discoveries and their technical application which were expected to make man master of his fate. I am, or was, a child of the age of reason – of that new age of faith when it was believed that freed from “the shambles of faith and of fear” a vista of infinite progress would open to mankind.
Thus I was imbued at an early age with a consuming desire for the emancipation of mankind, or for justice, which is perhaps the moral reflection of the desire for harmony and beauty. I believed, thanks to my rationalist upbringing, that mankind requires only freedom from superstition or from the bonds of established religion to acquire the knowledge which, together with release from a narrow regard for material self interest, could lead to heaven on earth. The libertarian values implanted in my mind which have consciously or unconsciously motivated me all my life, were to cause me to recoil in horror from the Soviet dictatorship when I came intimately to know it. It was a passion for the emancipation of mankind, not the blueprint of a planned society nor any mystical yearning to merge myself in a fellowship absolving me of personal responsibility, which both led me into the Communist fold, and caused me to leave it as soon as I learned that it meant submission to the most total tyranny which mankind has ever experienced.
Many of my contemporaries and those who came after me were to follow the Red Star because of an unhappy childhood, or frustrations of one kind of another, or failure to make a place for themselves in the competitive capitalist world. But I came to Communism via Greek history, French Revolutionary literature, and the English nineteenth century poets of freedom – not in revolt against a strict “bourgeois” upbringing, nor on account of failure to make a place for myself in the “capitalist” world, but profoundly influenced by a happy childhood, a socialist father and a continental education. I am perhaps proof of Arnold Toynbee’s contention that Communism is a “Western heresy.”
When I came to study ancient history my heroes were Pericles, the Gracchi, and Julius aesar. From an early age I could recite long passages from Shelley, Swinburne and Keats extolling man’s external striving for freedom, beauty and justice. Swinburne’s love poems I rejected as incomprehensible aberratins from the glorification of freedom and the denunciation of tyranny and superstition which I loved. I thrilled to such lines as:
Pride have all men in their fathers that were free before them,
In the warriors that begat us freeborn pride have we;
But the fathers of their spirit, how may men adore them;
With what rapture praise who bade our souls be free.
Sons of
Most of all, we, nurtured where the North wind holds his reign.
Children all we sea-folk of the Salaminian seamen,
Sons of they that beat back
Swinburne
Today I realize that I ought not to have been so unprepared to learn the facts of political life as might seem from my account of the influences of my childhood and youth.
Like a discordant note or muted theme in the first movement of a symphony, there were other early influences in my life which should have prepared me for the disappointments and disillusionment which awaited me, not only in Soviet Russia but in later years in the Free World. In childhood and youth I have imbibed not only classical and romantic literature and the poems of Shelley and Swinburne, Matthew Arnold, and other poets who sang of freedom and inspired belief in the coming of a Golden Age when men would be freed from the chains of superstition and fear. I was also well acquainted with the writings of Shaw and Anatole France, read and enjoyed Voltaire’s “Candide” and “Zadig” and was to win a prize at school for an essay on Machiavelli.
If heredity also molds character I must take some account of the combative and
adventurous spirit of my Viking freebooter ancestors, who settled in
Many of the Utley’s had gone
a’roving in their time which accounts for the fact that there are far more of them in
I
knew from my father who, while at college in
My mother, who came from Lancashire where the Celtic strain is strong, was a woman of charm and wit as well as beautiful, and may be partly responsible for the romantic streak in our characters which led my brother to voyage from England to the South Seas in a small sailing boat, while I sought a false Holy Grail in Communist Russia.
In my brother
Writing to our mother from
…Freda’s letter to me was in tone and spirit very sweet. We neither of
us seem to have found our new world. Moral – do not read your
children romantic tales in their infancy. However hard-boiled they may
become afterwards, the original taint remains. Tell Free to teach Jon
to lisp the Maxims of La Rochefoucauld as his first primary. Freda at
eleven and I at fourteen learned them too late.
The Songs the Syrens sang for us were not the same.
I became a “political animal,” travelling ever Left in search of the
ideal society which never was, or probably can be, on land or sea.
Today I find myself wanting to write about my brother before recording my own
story. Perhaps because I now begin to
understand that
Both of us were reared in the liberal philosophy of our time and were subject to
the same childhood influences. But whereas I
was to follow Marx and Lenin’s teachings,
Our lives perhaps exemplify the split in the liberal personality between the
extremes of anarchy and statism.
In a later chapter, I shall have more to tell concerning my brother’s life and
death. Here I only quote, with wonder at
There is a sort of lethal factor in us Utleys which inhabits success. Both
my father who was, and my sister who is, much cleverer than I am,
always missed it. You see they, who could have got it easily, never quite
believed in it. I, who would find its attainment much more difficult,
believed in it rather less.
Unlike my brother, I was ambitious. Although I was never able to surmount the “lethal factor” in the Utleys which inhibits us from paying the required price for success, I longed for it. And time was when thanks to my having acquired inordinate confidence in my abilities, thanks to my easy academic successes at school and college, I imagined I would be one of the “movers and shakers” of the world. My faith in human reason, inculcated in me by my upbringing, combined with what Bertrand Russell called my incurable political romanticism, impelled me to continue to believe, even when my views were most unpopular, that if only I would write well enough, I could convince the world of the truth as I saw it.
No doubt one gets what one wants most in life if one tries hard enough, but one cannot have everything. The cost of freedom comes high and one cannot expect to enjoy it, least of all in the world of letters, if one desires fame or security more. Of course, one always goes on hoping to enjoy both. There have been times when I railed against my fate and considered myself ill-used because the world failed to award me fame, fortune or influence and I found myself reviled for expressing my deepest confictions regardless of the consequences. On such occasion Edith Hamilton, who died in her 94th year in full possession of her faculties, gently reproved me for feeling sorry for myself following the failure of my 1949 book, The High Cost of Vengeance,* to win a wide circulation. “My dear Freda,” she said, “don’t expect the material rewards of unrighteousness while engaged in the pursuit of truth.” Nevertheless I often did, continuing to yearn for the success which I occasionally glimpsed but never quite achieved. Even when one of my books was a success I went off on another quest.
· Henry Regnery Co., Chicago, 1949.
Like my father, I did not “stick to one last,” as they express it in
Thus, I was destined to become a Communist when it was most unpopular to be one,
and an anti-Communist during the years when its false promises were generally believed by
Western “liberals.” Too fast, too
soon. The way to success as I have painfully
learned, is not to learn too much too soon. It
pays to be wrong when everyone else is deluded and woe betide all Cassandras, or anyone
else who learns and speaks truth before the public is prepared to listen. The best reputations are gained by those who change
their opinions just before the
I might have a man’s mind – which was the compliment I most relished – but I could always be accused by my opponents or detractors of being too emotional, as perhaps I am, because I am a woman. And in the struggle for existence in which I was to be engaged at an early age, I had to shoulder the financial responsibilities of a man while also meeting the domestic demands of a woman.
Whether or not I ever deserved the following tribute paid me by Pearl Buck in her review of my 1940, The Dream We Lost,** her words are apposite to the struggle all women who strive to overcome the initial disadvantage of not being born men.
This is one of the richest books I have ever read. It is a strongly
unassailable indictment of Russian Communism. It is a strongly
dramatic story and one interesting enough to make a major novel, the
story of a brilliant mind, rigorously truthful in its working, though born
unhappily in the body of a woman. For even in the best parts of the
world a first rate mind is still hampered if it happens to belong to a
woman. Nevertheless, this mind was born, and it is to its honor that
Freda Utley has simply borne with the disadvantages of being a woman
without allowing them to influence her thinking (Asia, October, 1940)
** The John Day Co., 1940.
Chapter 2
BEGINNINGS
My father, studying for the bar while earning his living as a journalist, had
somehow persuaded the authorities to let him continue living in the
Son of a
My father had secured his first journalistic assignment when he presented himself at the office of the Morning Leader, the leading Liberal newspaper of the time, and was told to sit down and write an editorial on some political topic of the day. Having done this with ease, he was accepted as an editorial writer.
When the Morning Leader subsequently merged with the Evening Star, he became assistant editor and music critic of the Star and Morning Leader. George Bernard Shaw was its drama critic but, according to my mother’s recollection, their friendship began while my father was financial editor of Frank Harris’ Saturday Review, a journal that helped make Shaw famous as one of its contributors.
Many years after his death, while doing research for my M.S. thesis at the
G.B.S. and
my father were both contributors to Annie Besant’s publication, Our Corner, and were friends of Charles Bradlaugh
the famous free-thinking M.P. who directed the Hall of Science school on Fleet Street. Here, when he first came to
In his
teens he had spoken from the same platform as Friedrich Engels in
During my infancy and early childhood my parents had gone through some bad times, as for instance when my father started his own liberal weekly magazine only to have it fold on account of the Boer War; and later, when, after having written the first “Motoring Handbook” published in England, he was compelled before publication to sell the valuable copyright of his future best seller in order to meet a note at the bank he had guaranteed for T.W.H. Crossland, a friend who, like some other well known literary figures, lacked the bourgeois virtue of paying their debts.
Following, or in consequence of these setbacks or disasters, my father turned his talents to financial journalism and business investment advice and started making so much money that my earliest recollections are of life in a big house in Hampstead with servants and governesses, first at 67 Finchley Road and later at 33 St. Johns Wood Park. (Queer that now in my 70’s I can still remember the addresses of the houses in which we lived when I was less than ten years old! It is a curious fact that as the shades of the coming night of one’s life deepen one retains a better memory of details of the distant past than of more recent events.)
The Utley’s would have become really rich had my father’s partner, a man called Hannay, been ready to go all out to back my father’s conviction that a rubber boom was coming thanks to the invention of the motor car. It was Hannay who supplied the capital for their joint venture in publishing a financial newsletter and investing other peoples money in what is today called a mutual fund but was then frowned on as a “bucket shop.”
Notwithstanding the ease with which my father seems to have made money once he set his mind to it, and the affluence which surrounded my childhood as I remember it, I was reared in the socialist beliefs which were to shape my life. A life which was also to be powerfully influenced by the impression made upon me in youth by the tender, passionate and enduring love of my father and mother for one another. Despite the Bohemian world in which I was to take my place in my 20’s, I sought to find the same rare and true love which is:
…a durable fire,
In the mind ever burning,
Never sick, never dead, never cold.
From itself never turning…*
_________
· Anonymous 16th Century poem included in the “Oxford Book of English Verse.”
My parents had first met and fallen in love then they were 17 and my father was brought visiting to my grandfather’s house by Edward Aveling, Karl Marx’s son-in-law and translator. In old age my mother was to recall with pride that Dr. Aveling had introduced my father that first evening as “the most brilliant boy and coming man he knew.”
The course of my parents true and life-long love had not run smooth, and they were not married until many years later, mainly because of my grandfather’s opposition but also, I surmise, on account of my father’s roving, adventurous temperament which led him to spend several years wandering abroad.
My mother’s father, Joseph E. Williamson, a prosperous Lancashire manufacturer, was a free-thinker and a republican who was proud to tell that his wife’s mother had hidden the famous Chartist leader, Fergus O’Connor, under her bed while pretending to be sick when the police were searching for him. He liked to entertain the prominent or promising radical political “intelligentsia” of his time, but he was far from inclined to believe in the equality of the sexes and was also opposed to any of his daughters (he had seven) marrying an impecunious young man. He had refused to let my mother continue her education to become a doctor, as she passionately desired, and had instead set her to boiling jam in his factory to put such nonsensical ideas out of her head.
After my father came courting following their first meeting, my grandfather ordered my gentle, obedient Williamson grandmother never to leave them alone. They surmounted the obstacle of her presence by my father giving her Ouida’s romantic novels to read. These so absorbed her that she paid no attention as they sat together in the parlor of my grandfather’s mansion, The Grande, in the Manchester suburb of Stratford, whose gloomy interior I came to know well when I was in my teens.
I narrowly escaped being
named “Cigarette” by my mother after the heroine of Ouida’s famous book Under two Flags** about the French Foreign Legion
in North Africa, this being one of the novels which so absorbed my grandmother as to leave
my teenage future parents free from her chaperonage. Maybe
also because my mother was an inveterate smoker, as I, alas, was also to become after I
went to live in
Among my precious possessions today is a three volume edition of The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley published in 1881, given to my mother by my father “on her 18th birthday, October 1883.”*** Below the inscription “To Emily Williamson by W.H.U.” penned in beautiful script in India Ink, my father wrote:
A vous mes pensees
Pensees aussi a moi.
** Stein & Day, N.Y., 1966.
*** John Slark,
Michael Rossetti. Dedicated to Edward John Trelawny, Who loved Shelley, Traced out his corpse, and Snatched from the fire the heart of hearts, This Edition of the imperishable poems is by permission most respectfully dedicated.”
Determined to pursue her vocation if only in the secondary role of a nurse, mother
eventually ran away to
Subsequently he had wandered all over the Balkans, learning to speak Turkish as
well as Greek and earning his living in diverse ways, mainly as a free lance journalist. His adventures in
My mother was exceptionally attractive – indeed, quite beautiful to judge from
her photographs and she had many suitors. But
she waited for my father in the confident belief that he would eventually come back to her
from his roaming abroad. All of which sounds
like a 19th century romance but is true.
They loved each other passionately and cherished one another all their
lives, in poverty as in prosperity, in sickness and in health, until parted by death. During my father’s last long illness prior to
his death in 1918, she nursed him devotedly in conditions of extreme poverty in a two-room
cottage in
She was all woman – more concerned with human relations than with ideas; passionate and charming, unselfish but demanding, jealously possessive in her love for both my father and my brother, but also ready to make any sacrifice for them without complaint.
We could not have been more different. Not
only was I never beautiful, I scorned to be feminine.
I wished I were a boy and have always felt most flattered when told I have a
man’s mind. Nevertheless, it was no doubt
mainly due to my mother’s influence that I was to reject second best substitutes for
love. I waited long to find my own true love
because I dreamed of the perfect union which my mother and father enjoyed. I could not accept any substitute for the rare love
of my parents which had illumined my childhood. Puritan
or romantic, or a combination of both, I was to reject the easy fly-by-night liaisons of
my contemporaries in the Bohemian world in which I took my place in
My father’s love for my mother was as constant as her’s for him. They were lovers in every sense of the word in
middle age as in youth. I possess none of the
letters she wrote him, but have several which he wrote to her both in their years of
prosperity before the 1914 war, and during the disastrous years which followed before he
died, destitute in
Other passages in my father’s letters recall the dimly remembered days of my
childhood and early teens when, incredible as it now seems, we lived in such comfort that
two servants did not suffice. “I am
putting an advertisement in the Globe for a man and wife,” he writes, “because,
My Dear Mother and Grandmother,
Queer to think of you as the latter, for I see you more as the Mother I
remember, carousing with Lockoff and Madame von Klockner at Arosa,
or drinking Chartreuse – French, pre-expulsion of the monks – at Ken
Court, Christmas, 1912. Those days when we were young and rich, when
property was so secure that people laid down wine cellars and the ‘lower
orders knew their places’. Little did you think that twenty-two years
later you
would be grandmother to a little revolutionary in
is a pity Dada cannot see the joke, it would have stirred his sense of
irony. Well, dear, you have had a life; but really, on the whole, it must
have been good. I don’t think that at the age of sixty-nine I will be having
a little revolutionary grandchild, in what capital shall I suggest? - say,
Even in her old age in
Dear Emmie:
Just a little note to say I hope you are feeling well and spreading your
radiant personality over
I’ve missed you, those minxish eyes of yours, that fine clear English
speech, and your infectious laugh, lovely as the song of wind in gentle
spring.
Other friends in
In my late teens I came to know my Williamson grandfather as a tall, handsome
patriarch who bullied the two of his daughters who had not married but had devoted their
lives to looking after their parents. He had
cut off my mother without even the proverbial shilling when she married my father. But years afterwards when my father was prosperous
and we lived a
Following my father’s death in January 1918, my grandfather was to cut off even the pittance he had allowed my mother during the last year of my father’s illness, leaving me to support her while my brother was fighting in Mesopotamia.
I remember my mother’s mother as a small, shrunken old lady with scanty white
hair covered by a lace cap, clear blue eyes, a delicately tinted complexion and a
tremulous smile, her hands folded in her lap as she sat in our garden at
My Utley grandmother, whom I knew only from her portrait, must have been a forceful
and ambitious woman. She had done everything
possible to help my father surmount the handicap of poverty to secure an education. She had succeeded in spurring my Utley grandfather
into raising himself from the status of contented blacksmith in
She had failed to make him a successful inn-keeper and had died comparatively young, leaving her husband to become my father’s pensioner; but she must have had the satisfaction of knowing that her talented and energetic son would fulfill her ambitions. I imagine that it is from her that I inherited the drive, as also other unfeminine qualities and defects that have both helped and hurt me during the course of my life.
My father’s father, although poor and improvident, was a most happy man, loved my his wife and son. He may have been a financial burden and a failure but he contributed to their lives, love and gaiety and enjoyment of music and art.
He remains in my childhood memories as a hale and hearty, rosy cheeked and whitehaired, cheerful old man. His main interest in life had always been playing the violin and painting pictures of no artistic value, which no doubt afforded him the pleasure of satisfying his creative impulses.
He was so robust and healthy that he had never taken to his bed in illness until he
died in his 80’s in full possession of his faculties.
No doubt, I have owed to him and our
My Utley grandfather gave me a violin when I was a child and insisted that I should learn to play it, and he also endeavored to teach me to draw and paint. Although I was never really musical I tried hard and was most happy when chosen in my teens to play in the school orchestra at my English boarding school.
I also tried my hand at painting and wrote romantic plays which my brother and our
friends acted, rigged out in homemade costumes. These
plays of mine usually had tragic endings, as did the one we performed while staying at the
Hotel Grison at Arosa in Switzerland, in which all the main characters ended up dead on
the stage. I was furious when
As I write, memories revive of days when my imagination and interests were unconfined by experience or too great preoccupation with politics. When, although I already had a “social conscience” awakened by my father’s teachings, I could indulge my romantic imagination and enjoy all the wonder of the world.
Somewhere along the line of my ancestry or environment, I acquired a Puritan streak
which made me take life all too seriously, in contrast to my brother who enjoyed all the
pleasures and joys life offered, but who could also laugh in the face of danger of
adversity.
As I dimly remember, my father explained his agnostic philosophy in simple terms by saying that if told there was a tiger on the roof he would go up and find out. But no one could verify the existence of a God in heaven.
I wrote stories or fairy tales from an early age and can recollect the main outline of one whose hero was called Cass. Maybe I derived his name from the French verb casser – to break – for my story started by telling how his mother and father, realizing that their children, if they lived, would surely sin and go to hell, killed them all in infancy. But baby Cass, having willfully knocked over and smashed his cup of milk, thus already committing a sin, was permitted to live. This is all I remember of Cass’s story. A psychologist could no doubt find all sorts of interesting explanations for my remembering even this much.
It was perhaps because he wanted to save me from premature preoccupation with sin and death and religion that my father gave me Fitzgerald’s translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam to read. I was so enthralled by the lyrical beauty of Fitzgerald’s rendering of the Persian poet’s verses that, when eleven years old, I learnt them by heart – nor have I ever forgotten them entirely. Like the poems of Shelley and Swinburne which enchanted me later, I can still recite verse upon verse of the Rubaiyat from memory.
Recently I became acquainted with Omar Abou Riche, a famous modern Arab poet who
was
As I learnt only then from Omar Abou Riche, it was Swinburne, my favorite poet, who acquainted Fitzgerald with the works of the great Omar and induced him to give the Western world knowledge of the Rubaiyat in verses as immortal as the original Persian text.
Perhaps it is no accident but kismet – the Arab word for fate – which, by bringing me recently in contact with new friends from the ancient but reborn Middle East, has helped to revive memories of my childhood and youth when the Greco-Roman heritage we share with the Arabs colored and inspired my imagination.
Since he died before my twentieth birthday and long before I learned the facts of political life through experience, I do not know whether it was disillusionment or his love for my mother and desire to give her and their children a good life, which caused my father to devote his talents to making money soon after I was born. But it is clear to me from my memories of him and from the fragmented record of his life, which is all I possess, that like William Morris he was in revolt as much against the sordid ugliness of industrial civilization as against the iniquities of the “Capitalist System” of his time.
He loved music and poetry and beautiful things; was a connoisseur of wines; spoke
several foreign languages fluently; loved to swim and sail, and enjoyed driving fast cars
although this made my mother very nervous. In
general, he had a great zest for living, and revelled in the athletic, as well as the
intellectual pleasures of life. My earliest
recollection of him is of a slim, trim man of medium height with broad shoulders, fine
soft golden hair brushed back from a high wide forehead; clear flue eyes behind
gold-rimmed pince-nez glasses perched on an aquiline nose above a reddish drooping
moustache partially concealing a full lipped smiling mouth with prominent front teeth. And my happiest memories are of summer holidays in
I cannot remember ever having now known how to swim and read, but can recall being
forbidden by my mother to read in bed, lest I “ruin my eyes” – an
injunction which I cannot have paid much attention to because I have a distinct memory of
lying in bed, early in the morning, reading a “told To The Children” illustrated
version of Lamb’s Tales of Shakespeare.
Among the illustrations I can still dimly see Rosalind and Touchstone in the
Apart from shortsightedness my eyes have never troubled me. Mother used to insist that I take off my glasses in company in order to look pretty. She also insisted on putting my straight hair in curl papers at night. I remember an evening when she reproached me for having caused a quarrel between her and my father – a most unusual occurrence – because I had appealed to him to stop her forcing me to endure this discomfort. Also my father telling me in an endeavor to use his influence to support my mother: “Il faut souffirir pour etre belle,” and myself in tears in a tantrum yelling “I don’t want to be beautiful,” which of course was not true. But my reaction to my mother’s emphasis on my handicaps: shortsightedness and straight hair, as against her perfect sight and lovely naturally curly hair was, of course, to pretend that I was not interested in my appearance. At that early time perhaps I really did not care, being far more concerned in keeping up with my brother in sports and studies in spite of being a girl and younger.
From our home at
My dear Boy,
May this, your eighteenth birthday, be a happy one, not because of
anything material that may come to you upon it, but because you feel that
you are making progress toward the responsibilities of manhood, because
you feel your own powers developing within you, because your inward
vision is embracing a wider view of the two worlds, the one which is inside
and the one which is outside yourself. You are practically a man already,
though for me always my dear boy, and I am happy to see you developing
your own personality and being yourself. Whatever may come to you in
the future, whether it be of good or ill, this is the greatest of all, to be
yourself and no copy of anyone else at all times under all conditions. But
for one’s own satisfaction it is necessary that the self you are shall be such
a self as you can be
proud of yourself to yourself, not to other people. “Il
faut cultiver son jardin” is the French phrase. The garden to be proud of
is the garden that produces beautiful flowers, abundance of fruit, a
sufficiency of humble necessary vegetables (without which you won’t be
able to cultivate your garden) and the fewest possible weeds. Alas! There
is no garden quite free from weeds. The mistake is to take them for
beautiful flowers and it is a mistake quite easy to make both for young and
old. It is also a good exercise in philosophy, ethic and aesthetic, to examine
what is a weed, what a beautiful flower and what a choice fruit.
I have very confidence in you, dear boy, and in your future. I won’t
say to you: “think high thoughts,” but rather: “Think deep and wide
thoughts and to clean deeds.” Cleanliness is far above Godliness.
So long, old man. I shall be glad to see you at home again. It seems
a very long time since you went away.
Chapter 3
CONTINENTAL INTERLUDE
My brother’s and my upbringing was unusual; mine in particular, since as a
child I attended the same boy’s school as
When I was nine years old my father, who had contracted tuberculosis, was ordered
to
Rapallo, Santa Margharita and Sestri Levanti, Genoa and Milan, Pisa and Livorno, Lupano, Como and Lake Maggiore; driving by carriage and walking long stretches over the Simplon Pass from Domesdossela, whose hotel had, I thought, the unique name “Run to the Post” (courir a la Poste) but actually must have been Couriers of the Mail.
Bright unforgotten distant years of my most happy childhood spent in some of the
loveliest places in the world, giving
We attended no schools but were taught for an hour or two a day in winder by an old
German-Swiss tutor in Arosa. Our father
spending his days on a chaise longue on the veranda was always there to answer our
questions and impart knowledge which we could never have obtained from a formal education. We read books and we listened and learned from the
talks and discussions of our parents with friends and acquaintances from many lands in the
cosmopolitan atmosphere in which my multilingual internationally minded father fitted so
well. Since we were never repressed but only
taught good
Unforgettable among my father’s friends in Arosa were Herr Lockhoff, a jovial
Dutch artist and the dainty fair and smiling Baroness von Klockner from Dresden, who
herself resembled one of that city’s famous porcelain statuettes. Lockhoff whose tuberculosis was incurable was to
die soon after we returned to
In late summer
I cannot have made much, if any, contribution as “crew” to our triumphs, far out as I see myself leaning in an old photo as we rushed around the most dangerous corner of the course; or by energetically throwing my slight weight backward and forward to help accelerate speed on the straight. It was probably due to my brother’s insistence that I was permitted to participate in these races which actually filled me with a dread I never admitted to Temple, whose belief that anything he could do, I could do, too, spurred me on.
Writing to me a quarter of a century later from the Fiji Islands to congratulate me on the birth of my son in Moscow, Temple recalled my “winning that ice-axe for me” at Champex, where I had outraced the Swiss girls who competed in the two mile race around the Lake.
When my father was sufficiently cured to return to
So, when eleven and a half years old, I became a pupil at La Combe, Rolle on the
The first summer of our separation from our parents I spent three weeks with
So long ago and far away and yet so well remembered, the two years I spent at school in French Switzerland were one of the happiest periods of my life.
At first I was the only English girl at La Combe and later one of two. I was also the youngest. The majority of the pupils were German girls in
their middle or late teens “finishing” their education by studying the French
language, literature and culture. The
atmosphere was not unlike that of my home environment; studious, tolerant, kindly and with
equal emphasis on study and physical fitness. We
skated in winter, swam and rowed on the
Sport at La Combe was regarded as a pleasure, not a duty, and study – really
hard study – was expected of us all ensured mainly by pride in achievement. Most of the girls came from middle-class German
Rheinland and
The headmistress of La Combe, Mademoiselle Marthe Dedie, was a cousin of Monsieur Henri Carnal, the headmaster of my brother's school, and everyone expected them to marry. A handsome woman, I remember her best for the marvel of her long, lustrous and luxuriant black hair which reached almost to her feet and which she braided in thick coils in a crown on top of her head. Perhaps she was too strong-minded and independent for Monsieur Henri who was himself as handsome as a movie star and eventually married an American heiress.
The Chateau de Rosey in later years was to become a favorite school for gilded youth from all over the world, including the present Shah of Iran and other royal personages, besides sons of wealthy American families. In my day it had only one American pupil, a youth of about seventeen whose name I have forgotten, but whom I remembered because of the various troubles he got me into. He took me riding in his newly acquired automobile and promptly ran us into a stone wall. On another occasion he so outraged me by kissing me that I seized his best Panama hat and doused it in the fountain in the Chateau de Rosey courtyard. Once he induced me by the bribe of a carton of Nestle’s Swiss chocolate bars to carry a note from him to one of the girls at my school.
This shameful episode is the more inexcusable because, when
This incident is one of the most painful recollections of my childhood because of the feeling of guilt it gave me for long afterwards. I realized that I had betrayed the trust reposed in me by Mademoiselle Marthe who, because my brother was there, permitted me, unlike the other girls at La Combe, to visit the Chateau de Rosey whenever I wished.
My favorite among
A decade and a half after our school days in Rolle, I was tempted to marry Jimmy
because I was very fond of him and he was well-to-do, while I by that time was exceedingly
poor.
La Combe today, although still a more modest establishment than the Chateau de
Rosey, has likewise become a fashionable modern school, as I found when I briefly
revisited it in 1953 when driving through
There is the same tinkling of pianos in practice rooms; the same calm, studious atmosphere; the same lovely gardens shaded by ancient trees; the same flagstoned terrace in front of the main building where we sat in late afternoon embroidering or stitching as we listened to reading aloud of French classic literature. And, no doubt, there is the same curriculum demanding the same conscientious study and endeavor as in the days of my childhood, when we walked up and down in the early morning in the open air learning our grammar lessons from Larousse or memorizing French prose pieces, before classes began.
I can still recite the opening passage of the piece by Alphonse Daudet which begins: “Les chevres de Monsieur Seguin s’en allez tous dans la montagne,” telling the tale of the beautiful little white goat who, despite the love and care lavished on her, was eventually gobbled up by a wolf because like Monsieur Seguin’s other goats she would not stay in his lush pastures but sought adventure in the mountains.
So unchanging, widespread and influential are the disciplines of French education and the patterns of French culture that, in Algeria in September 1963, driving in the countryside where goats abound and conversing with my young Arab Moslem chauffeur, I started to quote the above passage and found that he, too, had learned by heart the same Daudet story about Monsieur Seguin’s beloved little white goat!
Our places in school each week were determined by the “Dictee” which started classes. By my second year I was often at the top, and always near the head of the class, being able to take French dictation almost without spelling mistakes.