Conundrum, p.7
Conundrum, page 7
In the morning the child had gone.
EIGHT
THREE EMPLOYERS · “ANYBODY FROM THE GUARDIAN” · HALF A COLUMN · AMONG THE EGYPTIANS · ABHORRENCE
I was a writer. Full as I was of more recondite certainties, I had always been sure of that too. I never for a moment doubted my vocation, except when I briefly pined for a more immediate audience, envying musicians their cadenzas, actors their applause. I spent some ten years in journalism, mostly as a foreign correspondent, and worked for three disparate institutions: the Arab News Agency, in Cairo, The Times of London, the Manchester Guardian. I would be a hypocrite to pretend I did not enjoy those years. No life could have been more interesting. For a full decade I had a grandstand view of the world’s great events, and I was constantly astonished, like Neville Cardus before me, that I was actually being paid for the privilege.
But through it all, unknown certainly to my employers and I assume to my colleagues too, I was tormented by my own ambivalences, and since those were the crucial years of my early thirties, when I was in theory approaching the prime of my manhood, I think it curious to recall my attitudes towards the establishments I worked for—the only three employers, as it happens, that I have had in life.
I was least comfortable with the Guardian. This surprises people. If there was one organ in the land which seemed to enshrine the principles generally considered feminine, it was that prodigy of liberalism: pacific, humanist, compassionate, with a motherly eye on underdogs everywhere and a housewifely down-to-earth good sense about everyday affairs. The Guardian was kind to nearly everyone, and kindest of all to me, for it let me go more or less where I liked, and seldom cut a word or changed an adjective. Yet I was never at ease with it. There was, I thought, something pallid or drab about its corporate image, something which made me feel exhibitionist and escapist, romantically gallivanting around the world while better men than I were slaving over progressive editorials at home.
I have a disconcerting feeling now that I disliked it because it was like working for a woman rather than a man. I resented the paper’s stance of suffering superiority, like a martyred mother of ungrateful children, and did not like being tarred with its earnest, consumer-association, playgroup brush. “Of course we know you’re on our side,” a young Jordanian dissident once observed to me, pausing from his task of being rude to the British, “because you work for the Manchester Guardian,” and I squirmed habitually in railway trains, on meeting lifelong and devoted readers of “our paper,” to discover just who my audience was. “Anybody from the Guardian is a friend of ours,” fulsome American voices used to greet me on the doorsteps of academic houses, and the very phrase I came to know as the promise of a ghastly evening. The elements I craved were fire, salt, laughter: the Guardian’s specialties were fairness, modesty, and rational assessment. I liked a touch of swank; the Guardian shied from it like a horse from a phantom. I was all muddle, conceit, and panache, the Guardian all unselfish logic and restraint. I leaned towards the mystic, the Guardian had its roots in northern nonconformism, not a faith that appealed to me.
The Guardian man who daunted me most was the paper’s immensely knowledgeable and universally respected correspondent in Paris. Though I never heard evil spoken of him by a living soul, still we were antipathetic from the start. “How marvelous it must be,” I once remarked to him by way of small talk, apropos of his great height, “to be able to command every room you enter!” “I do not want,” he replied in his most reproving liberal style, “to command anything at all”—an unfortunate response, though he could not know it, to one whose ideals of manhood had been molded by military patterns, and who liked a man to be in charge of things.
Two of my least comfortable memories of the journalistic life concern this disconcerting colleague. The first is the evening when, having at immense pains, by the exertion of his matchless web of contacts, and with an utterly selfless devotion to the task, arranged for me an otherwise totally unobtainable seat on an aircraft into Algiers, then in the first throes of a military rebellion, he discovered that I had missed the flight owing to having dined too long with friends at Maxim’s. The second was worse still. On another assignment to North Africa I found myself obliged to dictate a long dispatch home over the telephone via Paris; and the only person available to take my message down was the Paris Correspondent himself, the doyen of British observers in France if not in Europe. My blood froze when I heard it, and one of my notions of Hell remains an eternal dictation of hasty, overromantic, and underinformed dispatches about French colonial affairs to the Paris Correspondent of the Guardian. How callow my judgments seemed dropped word by word (he had no shorthand) and often repeated (the line was terrible) into that cold meticulous ear! How shamefully inadequate was my command of the French language, how frivolous my approach to European history, how extravagant were my adjectives—those that, seeing them approaching preposterously purple up my typescript, I did not hastily jettison before they reached me! “Is that all?” he said with a sigh when at last I came to the end of it, and I felt like a blue-nosed comic concluding an engagement booked in awful error in the lecture hall of the Royal Society.
But I must not be ungrateful. The Guardian treated me proud, first to last, and though I might not much like the composite Guardian reader, still it was invaluable to discover that in every country there were cells of liberals who regarded the paper as holy writ, and who saw in it (as I realized with mixed feelings) all that was best in Britain. After five years with the paper, as a matter of fact, I sometimes began to feel, in moments of especial frailty, symptoms of nonconformist decency, modesty, and restraint within myself.
No such dangers threatened me at The Times. The Times was very grand in those days, very British, and very masculine. Few women worked for it, none at all in the foreign news departments, and I felt as I had felt in the 9th Lancers the fascination of being a licensed intruder. I never worked for the Guardian in England, but I did spend some months at Printing House Square, the home of The Times ever since its foundation in 1785, and I remember it less as a newspaper office than as a sort of cabal.
The Times then was a newspaper like no other in the world, an institutionalized anomaly, a national fact of life standing somewhere, perhaps, between the BBC and the Lord Chamberlain’s Office, with detectable undertones of the College of Arms (Arundel Herald Extraordinary was actually a member of the staff, and leaving the office in his dignified gray pin-stripe would be seen half an hour later attending some chivalric function dressed up like a playing-card). Even in those last years of the British Empire foreigners still took The Times to be an organ of the British Government, and respected—or disrespected—its edicts accordingly. Within Britain people accepted it as the private instrument of a ruling class still cohesive and definable. The Times liked to call itself “A Newspaper for Gentlemen, Written by Gentlemen,” and the more elderly members of its staff were fluent in snobbish stories about it—“Tell the reporters to wait, Smithers, and show up the gentleman from The Times.” Though its original reputation had been built upon journalism of the most ferociously competitive kind, by my day it did not consider itself exactly a newspaper at all, but as something entirely and entertainingly sui generis—The Times, in short.
Printing House Square seemed to me worthy of its tenants. The main part of the office, looking over Queen Victoria Street towards the river, had been designed by a Victorian proprietor of the paper, and built by his own laborers with stone from his own estates. Sir Nikolaus Pevsner considered the best one could read in it was “a certain stodgy staying-power,” but I thought it was fine. I used to go to it by tube, and emerging every day from the gloom of Blackfriars Station, I would step into the daylight and see The Times there before me like an earnest of permanence—shabby, proud, and self-amused, like postwar London itself, with the Union Jack and its own house flag serene upon its rooftops, and the dowagerlike Rolls-Royce of its editor, leaning slightly upon its rear wheels as it might rest the weight of its buttocks upon a parasol, awaiting orders at the door.
Behind the main block was the eighteenth-century building known as the Private House—a pleasant small town house, appended to the office proper, in which those members of the editorial staff who would now be called “executives” could read their proofs in an armchair, or take their dinner between editions. This was a place that vastly pleased me, in just the same way that men’s clubs in London were later to give me an exotic secret satisfaction. There was a butler, I think. There were certainly aproned waitresses. There was a snuffbox with a picture of St. Petersburg upon it. The rooms were leathery and not very well lit, and sometimes eminent guests turned up to dine—politicians, generals, or American columnists who knew everything. I liked the urbane flavor of The Times, and I shared its sense of humor.
But if the Guardian was too wet for my taste, The Times could be too ruthless, and the episode that most affected me at Printing House Square was an affair of sensibilities. I was being groomed for a foreign correspondent’s job, and part of my apprenticeship was to serve as an assistant to the Foreign News Editor, Ralph Deakin. Deakin was already a folk-figure of Printing House Square, having been there since the world began, and it was he who, in his customary address of welcome to new recruits, habitually quoted the example of Frank Riley, a young and brilliant reporter, an Oxford man too, who had been murdered by the soldiers of Feng Yuhsiang at Chengchow in 1927—“but,” as Deakin used to say with proud solemnity, “he had his just reward—half a column of obituary in The Times, and he was still in his thirties.”
Deakin was aging, and the progress of The Times, though I would hardly call it headlong, was fast leaving him behind. Week by week I noticed not merely a faltering in the old gentleman himself, but a progressive disregard of his views. People did not listen to him. Decisions were taken without his knowledge. He clearly sensed it too, and was distressed. For what seem to have been hours at a time, talking in an infinitely slow grating voice that was, I admit, among the heavier of my burdens, he would disclose to me his anxieties or more often his resentments—for he was not rich in the milk of human kindness himself, and could be malicious. I did my best to cheer him up, for I was very sorry for him, but it was becoming apparent to both of us that he was losing place, and the last straw came when, well before his due time for retirement, he was asked to go.
The consequences had a profound and permanent effect upon me, and helped to sour me, I think now, against such close-knit societies of male traditionalism. I know only Deakin’s side of the dispute, but he told me that after forty years of almost fanatical service to the paper, he had been told to leave almost at once. He had begged them, he told me, to allow him to sit out the last few months, or perhaps, following an old Times precedent, to appoint him to some comfortable sinecure, like a correspondentship in Switzerland.
But they refused him everything, he said. He grew increasingly talkative, bitter, and confused, our tête-à-têtes lasted longer every day, and finally, one evening in the winter of 1952, he gave me a letter. If anything should happen to him, he said, buttoning his thick black overcoat, straightening his Homburg, and removing his walking stick from its stand behind the desk, I was to give it to the higher authorities of The Times; and gently chewing—for he generally seemed to have in his mouth, when not a cigar, some kind of lubricant lozenge, perhaps to keep his voice going—he nodded at me in his usual way, said good night with his habitual icy trace of a smile, and went home to kill himself with sleeping pills.
What was I to do? I had thought of refusing the letter, but sensed that I was almost the only confidant he had in the world, and hadn’t the heart. I had tried in my ineffectual way to sustain him—but denied as I was my instinctive impulse to take the poor old man in my arms and cherish him, I failed I fear to show him how much I cared, and I am sorry for it to this day. The foreign editor, seeing me later that evening, sensed that I had undergone some cruel experience: “You look as though you’ve seen a ghost,” he said, and perhaps with his Scottish vision he was right. The Times, however, rose easily above its remorse. When the news of Deakin’s death reached the office next day, I duly handed in the letter; but it was never mentioned at the inquest, which was reported at length in the Daily Telegraph, but scarcely at all in our own columns.
The verdict was, as The Times doubtless wished it, one of accidental death; but after all, Ralph Deakin did get fourteen column inches of obituary.
No, the job that really suited me best was the one with the Arab News Agency, for that curious organization really had no corporate image at all, but was a loose confederation of mavericks. I came to it impetuously. Leaving the Army, and finding myself with a year to spare before Oxford could have me back, I conceived the idea of Doing Something for the Arabs, for whose cause in Palestine I had developed an earnest sympathy. I looked up the word “Arab” in the London telephone book, and discovered there the address of this promising concern, which seemed to offer me the dual chance of a journalistic experience and a worthy cause. I rang them up at once, and presently they sent me to Cairo.
I had first seen the coast of Egypt in the company of Otto, approaching Port Said late at night on our troopship from Italy, and as we sailed towards the distant lights he had said to me, “Ah! Do you smell it? That’s the smell of Egypt! That’s n-n-nectar!” The very source of that smell, or its vortex, was the Immobilia Building in Sharia Sherif Pasha, Cairo, where the Arab News Agency had its head office. There it was overpowering. Its basis was, I now think, inadequately refined petrol, but to this foundation were added many subtle extras: dust, of course, and dirt, and animals, and a touch of jasmine, that rose of Egypt, and grilled mutton, and cooking oil, and new concrete, and laid upon it all like grated cheese upon a rich soup, the sealing smell of sunshine.
Groping through this fragrance, all around the Immobilia Building, were the noises of Cairo, which in those days were a harsh blend of the modern and the medieval. The cars hooted, the buses roared, the trams clanked overloaded around their precarious loops, but one heard too the cries of the street peddlers, musically echoing in the side streets, and the resonant call of the muezzin, not yet coarsened by electronics, the clopping of donkeys and the flip-flop of camels, and even sometimes the gentle chanting of the blind sages still employed by rich men, in that long-discredited Egypt, perpetually to recite the Koran at their doorsteps.
In the very middle of it all, topographically as politically, worked the journalists of the Arab News Agency, up on the first floor. Our job was to collect news from all over the Arab world, and then to disseminate it among Arabic newspapers, radio stations, and magazines from Syria to South Arabia. The agency was British-owned, and employed a handful of Britons in its Cairo office, but it liked to keep up Arab appearances, for discretion’s sake, and did everything bilingually.
I was happy there. The rank-and-file Britons with the agency were in effect poor whites. We were honorary Levantines. Our motives for being there were distinctly mixed, and while some of us had come out from England just for the interest of the job, others had gravitated there through complex permutations of war, love, and error, and had Greek wives at Heliopolis, or undisclosed commitments in Bulaq. For myself I lived chiefly in a no man’s land between expatriate and indigene. My friends were mostly in the office, some Egyptian, some British, and we were none of us rich. We were boulevardiers, but of a modest rank, frequenting the shabbier of the downtown pavement cafés, where the lesser Egyptian bourgeoisie played interminable games of dominoes, or laboriously mouthed to themselves the headlines of Al Ahram—shabby places with marble-topped tables and dirty glass partitions, where the coffee was as thick as porridge, and the water tumblers were a perpetual dingy gray. There we would sit and talk in the early evening, when the long siesta was nearly over, and a momentary stillness lay on the capital, until we heard the rattle of the heavy steel shutters being raised one by one from the shopfronts, and it was time for us to saunter back to Immobilia, climb the wide, dark, pompous steps to the first floor, and start work on the evening bulletin.
This was never boring. The news was full of drama. The war in Palestine was at its height, affairs within Egypt were rich in intrigue, menace, and corruption, and our correspondents in the remoter Arab parts flooded us with piquant intelligence—marvelous cameos of desert crime, court conspiracy, religious polemic, or family feud. Besides, we did our work in a spirit of Bohemian release. Occasionally, it is true, the noise of a riot outside, or the scream of the sirens that marked the passage of King Farouk towards the Mohammed Ali Club, brought the realities of Cairo more than professionally close; but generally, once we were inside our dim-lit, crowded, and untidy rooms, we would forget the truth about ourselves, forget the shabby villa off the airport road, forget the impending misery of the midnight tram, forget the scuffed shoes and the stained tarboosh, forget the swarming children and the skinny black-veiled wife, forget our lost hopes of a career in the law, or the Ministry of the Interior, forget that we were indigent Egyptian effendim or struggling Levantines, forget even our sexual ambiguities, and lose ourselves in that strange little world of our own upstairs.
It is oddly true that there in the heart of Muslim Cairo, women were more naturally accepted in the office than they would have been at the Guardian, let alone Printing House Square. The girl telephone operators shared the simple office jokes as easily and agreeably as they shared the roast pigeon, brought in by the office boy wrapped in copy paper from the street stalls outside; and as for me, I sensed in Cairo for the first time a curious acceptance or absorption which was to bind me for many years to the Muslim countries of the East, and play, when the time came, a decisive part in my small destiny.
Such were my only employers. By the time I resigned from the last of them, in 1961, I felt myself to be so isolated in my quandary that I could not bear to work in company or at behest, and set off on my own path professionally as I had so long trodden it in my private life; for by then I found the figure I cut in the world, however innocuous it seemed to others, abhorrent to myself.
