David Pryce-Jones - Signatures: Literary Encounters of a Lifetime

SIGNATURES

SIGNATURES

Literary Encounters of a Lifetime

DAVID PRYCE-JONES

Copyright 2020 by David Pryce-Jones

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FIRST AMERICAN EDITION
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Pryce-Jones, David, 1936 author.

Title: Signatures: literary encounters of a lifetime / David Pryce-Jones.

Other titles: Literary encounters of a lifetime

Description: New York: Encounter Books, 2020. | Includes index. | Summary:

Identifiers: LCCN 2019043396 (print) | LCCN 2019043397 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781641770903 (cloth) | ISBN 9781641770910 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Pryce-Jones, David, 1936 | Pryce-Jones, David, 1936Friends
and associates. | Authors20th centuryBiography. |
Intellectuals20th centuryBiography. | Literature, Modern20th century. | History, Modern20th century. | Civilization, Modern20th century.

Classification: LCC PR6066.R88 Z46 2020 (print) |
LCC PR 6066.R88 (ebook) | DDC 828/.91409dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019043396

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019043397

CONTENTS

For Alan

19082000

WITH LASTING AFFECTION

DIC NOBIS MARIA QUID VIDISTI IN VIA

PREFACE

T HE CONVENTION IS that if you happen to meet authors and have just bought or acquired a book of theirs, you ask them to sign it. Particularly stuffy authors might refuse but in most cases they feel flattered and duly inscribe your name and theirs on the title page or the flyleaf of the book in question. If the mood is right, they may add with best wishes or something of the sort. At a superficial level, of course, such signatures are only the equivalent of an autograph album. Theres more to it than that, however. Added value perhaps, but association certainly. The human race lives by the stories we tell ourselves about our identity and our purposes, and that signature helps to make the authors story part of the readers story.

Signatures is autobiographical in the sense that Im looking at the story I tell myself about how I have come to be who I am. The story that my parents told of themselves is of course the point of departure. They had started their married life in Meidling, a district of Vienna, in a house built by Gustav Springer, a successful magnate and grandfather of my mother Poppy. By the time I was born in Meidling in 1936, my father Alan Pryce-Jones had published five books. Some who stood round my cradle said, David, thats a lovely Welsh name, and others said, David, thats a lovely Jewish name. Alan liked to say that my first spoken word was Gorki, as though I were already picking up on Russian writers.

My generation in Europe had to deal with the fact that the whole continent had first almost gone Nazi and then almost gone Soviet Communist. By 1940, the Gestapo had expropriated Meidling, and Austria was occupied enemy territory. Nothing was ever again going to be what it had been. A good many of the authors who signed a book of theirs for me are survivors from the Age of Dictators, and I wanted to know what theyd been through and how theyd survived.

After the war, Alan became editor of the Times Literary Supplement, and in one or two rooms of the house books piled up on the floor waiting to be read. Authors sent him their books for review, quite often writing something relevant and revealing on the title page. He introduced me to people I would never have met otherwise and by now these signed copies seem to me like tickets of admission to the select company attempting to make sense of this world.

SIGNATURES

MAHMUD ABU SHILBAYAH

La salaam

ARABIC, NOT DATED

A FTER THE SIX DAY WAR of June 1967 was over, I spent a lot of A time on the West Bank and in Gaza. For the previous twenty years, British Palestine had been divided between Israel, Egypt and Jordan. Now that the parts were re-united under Israeli jurisdiction, my assumption was that the moment was bound to have come for a treaty settling the relationship between Israelis and the Arabs. Moshe Dayan, the Minister of Defence, announced that he was waiting for a telephone call. Flippant though it was, the remark reveals the value system that has been operating for a long time throughout the Western world to give political reality to the conclusions of the battlefield. Victor and vanquished decide how to conduct themselves, the one reacting to the propositions of the other in a process akin to bargaining that is strictly rational and inclining to democracy. Dayans telephone did not ring because Arabs have a value system that is not just different but totally incompatible, and it too has been in operation a long time. The high and mighty as well as the poor and humble have to gain honor and avoid shame because these values determine what people will think of them. Defeat at the hands of Jews is a shame so absolute that only military success is able to wipe it away. What is at issue here is status, something personal and irrational, not open to measurement or bargaining, and inclining to dictatorship.

Arabs of course have ways of making peace. Harold Ingrams, a British official in the days of empire, describes in his memoir Arabia and the Isles his career of treaty-making between warring Arab tribes, a process so delicate and personal that it might well last several generations. Those involved have to be men of experience and authority, ceaselessly attentive to the imperatives of shame and honor for victors and vanquished alike. If they were to conduct themselves according to the Israeli value system, they would have become self-declared losers, disgraced by the shame of it and immediately rejected by their people.

The 1967 war had left the inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza pretty much in a state of shock. Fearing the worst, more than a hundred thousand of them had fled their homes and were refugees in Jordan. Some houses had been wantonly destroyed in the small town of Qalqilya, but otherwise the war had been almost a formality and there was nothing to fear. It was safe to go anywhere and to talk to anyone.