Efforts at Truth
NICHOLAS MOSLEY
Efforts at Truth
Contents
Foreword
Part I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Part II
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Part III
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Part IV
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
A Note on the Author
Foreword
There is debate from time to time about which form of writing can tell more of ‘truth’ – biography/autobiography or fiction. The argument goes – in biography/autobiography no one ever does quite tell the truth; either about themselves, out of embarrassment and shame, or about others, because here too some awkwardnesses inevitably remain hidden. So novelists, with their freedom to say what they like, might seem to have an advantage: but in what sense can it be said that fiction tells the truth? Fiction makes things up – including, to be sure, things shameful and embarrassing: but might not this be an indulgence, rather than an effort at truth? In much modern fiction there is indeed an overwhelming emphasis on human inadequacy and shame: but it is as if like this novelists are over-compensating for what cannot be told directly about their own lives and those of others.
The situation has thus arisen in which there is an almost complete split between the attitudes of biography/autobiography and those of fiction. On the one hand there are the stories of worldly achievement and self-justification (or, if a biography is hostile, of error that is reprehensible); on the other hand there are the stories of human helplessness and despair, in which it is suggestions of responsibility that seem taboo. In neither case is there much effort to bring these attitudes together, to form what might be closer to truth.
It is this split that makes much of modern literature seem superficial. Human experience in fact – as everyone knows who pauses to reflect upon his or her life – consists of an interplay between shame and justification, achievement and helplessness, darkness and light. A vision of liveliness depends on seeing a pattern between and around opposites; not within the vacuum of a split Without such a vision life cannot be understood and thus can hardly be dealt with: what indeed can flourish except vainglory and despair?
The loss of such understanding is perhaps due to the loss of a sense of a framework within which human dramas are played out. It was in religion that there was once a recognition of a larger world in relation to which human affairs formed patterns; a belief that human shame and degradation, if acknowledged, could still be put to good effect. And indeed it was felt that there could be little valid human achievement unless it was interwoven with a sense of human inadequacy. But religious attitudes have largely disappeared from the Western world – as indeed have concepts of truth worked out in the form of stories.
For much of my working life I have been a novelist: I have also written biographies. My novels have sometimes seemed unfashionable in that they have suggested patterns, however ungraspable, beyond helplessness and despair; my biographies have been criticised for saying things which, however accurate, it was felt should not be said. I wondered if there was a way in which the attitudes of novel-writing and autobiography might be brought together: a way of saying – Look, this is a story about myself; I at least have come to hope that there are patterns beyond self-justification and shame.
I had the idea that by looking back at my past novels I might have a chance of writing autobiography that was not just to do with special pleading. Most of my early novels were, however obliquely, to do with myself; and indeed, they were in part to do with helplessness and shame. But then, in the light of these manifestations, could not my life be looked at? And in so for as my novels were increasingly to do with the recognition of overriding patterns, could not the validity of these be looked at too? There might indeed be some self-justification here! But at least, in the form of a story, readers might judge this for themselves.
There is a modern literary theory that the interpretation a critic gives to an author’s work may be more authentic than the author’s own: a critic has a chance to see an author’s hidden presuppositions. But it seemed to me that in looking back at my novels I might have a chance of seeing my own presuppositions – and at the same time indeed be helped to look at the life they arose from. And by recognising the interplay between the novels and the life, each might be illumined.
There is a sense in which novels are smokescreens put up to try to deal with the near-desperate pains of reality: there is a sense in which they are not-quite-so-desperate efforts to break through the smokescreens that seem to be put up by reality itself. In either case a novel seems ‘true’ if a to-and-fro has occurred between looking at experience and looking at the means of expressing this: also if some learning seems to have resulted from the efforts between and within each.
I have called this volume Efforts at Truth because, it seems to me, truth is a matter not of certainty but of endeavour – to see the partnership between learning and life, between experience and what is made of life, to see that one never gets to the end of unveiling smokescreens and presuppositions but it is in this attempt that there is a validity in being human. And literature is not only a to-and-fro between experience and expression, it is a to-and-fro between writers and readers who either will or will not have their own recognitions. In the matter of truth and smokescreens we are all in a fog; messages come to us like hooting over waves. In the end we are either on the rocks or we are not – the result of both nothing and everything to do with our own efforts.
Part I
Chapter 1
In the two books of biography/autobiography that I wrote about my father, Oswald Mosley, and my early life in relation to my father – Rules of the Game and Beyond the Pale – the story ended in 1947 when my father went back into politics and I, aged twenty-four, married and set off for a new life. Up to this time I had been a member of my family, of schools, of the war-time army; I had been at a university briefly and then had needed to get away. At Oxford I had met my future wife Rosemary, who was just eighteen: she too had wanted to get away. (I have told something of Rosemary’s family background in my biography Julian Grenfell.)
Regarding my own family – my father had been leader of the British Union of Fascists in the 1930s and had been imprisoned as a security risk during the war. After his release, and my return from the fighting in Italy, I had been close to him for two years. Both Rosemary and myself had felt ourselves under the shadows of powerful families. But now we were free.
I wanted to be a writer: she, a painter. We married: then caught a plane to the West Indies. There for a time at least we would have the chance and the space to do as we liked. We did not have to worry too much about money. I had an income from a trust made by the family of my mother, who had died when I was nine.
For a honeymoon we stayed in Jamaica. Then we plane-hopped down the Caribbean and found a tiny island called Pigeon Island just off the coast of St Lucia. Here there was an English lady called Mrs Snowball who lived in a house made of bamboo; she was the only resident on the island because local people thought the place was haunted and would not stay there at night. Mrs Snowball used to say that she did in fact hold conversations with the ghost of Admiral Romney who in the eighteenth century had built a fort on top of the hill. She let Rosemary and me stay in a bamboo hut down by the beach. From here Rosemary went out to paint each day and I embarked on my first novel. I had bought a typewriter in Jamaica and it seemed proper that I should teach myself to type at the same time as learning how to write a novel. Two tiny frogs came to watch me each day from the rim of my washbasin. Rosemary went up to the ruined fort on top of the hill beneath which, on the ocean side, the dark sea heaved and blew like a whale.
In the evenings the fishermen would sometimes linger and there would be drumming and dancing on Mrs Snowball’s verandah. Then in the mornings there would be the white coral sand and multi-coloured fishes beneath our window in the lagoon. Rosemary was like a mermaid with her long fair hair as if spun from water and light. It was as if we were in some Garden of Eden.
So what was it that I was writing?
Sometimes at night we would listen to Mrs Snowball’s cracked radio and would hear news of the renewal of enmity between America and Russia; of the threat of a new world war. And now there was the Bomb!
I knew of the madness of the outside world: had I not been in the war?
My first novel was called Spaces of the Dark. This is its story:
A young man, Paul, comes home from the war. He appears to carry with him some great guilt. He goes to visit the family of his greatest friend who had been with him in the war and had been killed. At the home of this friend Paul meets for the first time his friend’s sister. They fall in love. But there is a barrier between them to do with Paul’s guilt.
There is another woman whom Paul feels he must go and see, who is someone with whom his great friend, John, had fallen in love just before he had gone off to war. Paul now seems to fall in love wit
h this woman, Sarah, too – or is it just that he is obsessed with anyone to do with his friend? To Sarah at least he tells his secret – which was that it was he himself who had killed his friend John: and this was not by one of the accidents that sometimes happen in war, it was as it were deliberately because John had lost his nerve and was planning to give orders to retreat in a situation in which to do this would not only have been disobeying orders but would have been endangering the lives of men for whom they were responsible. (Both Paul and John were junior officers.) And so Paul, as the only means of stopping John, had shot him. The particular situation was thus in a sense saved; and as far as anyone else knew it could have been one of the enemy who had shot John. But Paul is left with his great and secret guilt: and how can he now tell this secret to, or indeed honourably love, this sister whose brother he has killed and who now loves him?
But he tells Sarah, and she tries to give him some sort of comfort or absolution: she even protects him with some violence against a friend who might betray his secret. But if Sarah and Paul are to love – would this not be at the cost of the sacrifice of not only the brother, but now of the sister too who loves Paul?
Paul feels himself in a situation (I had placed him in this situation) in which there seems to be no way out except by his own sacrifice – even his own death. How can one live in a world in which it seems to have been both correct and yet unendurable to have killed one’s great friend? And then to love and not to be able to love both this friend’s sister and his loved-one. At the end of the story Paul and the sister are out riding in a fog; they come to a road and the sister’s horse shies; she falls with the horse on top of her and she breaks her leg. Paul, to prevent the traffic running over her, goes up the road and holds his arms out in the fog and a lorry runs over him and kills him. The sister survives – together with the impression that both her brother and Paul have been heroes. Sarah is left alone with the secret.
This is what I wrote in my Garden of Eden in the West Indies with my beautiful wife; watching the hummingbirds hovering in front of flowers, the dark sea spouting, the rumours of the renewal of wars.
It is just conceivable that an incident such as this shooting of one’s best friend might happen in the turmoil of war, though it is unlikely that this would be the outcome of a conscious moral decision. But nothing remotely like this had happened to me in the war, though I had in fact been in a battle like the one into which I had put John and Paul in my book. In the real-life situation my great friend of the time had been very brave; and in fact the officers concerned in the incident had been decorated. So what was I doing writing such a story of despair?
I did not ask myself this at the time. It seemed a necessary and accepted presupposition that all true novels of war should be ones of despair.
This was a smokescreen? an effort to break through?
But through to what?
Most front-line soldiers in war feel little personal hostility to front-line soldiers on the other side; hostility is directed towards politicians and soldiers at the base. So perhaps the killing of a front-line enemy might be like the killing of a friend. And so there is guilt; but also the impression that such action has been necessary. And so in just this confusion there is likely to be despair.
I myself, as an infantry platoon commander in Italy, had not been aware directly of killing an enemy: but I had shot at people, had wounded people; certainly one or two might have died. Amongst my own men for whom I was responsible I had not, again, been aware of any actual deaths: but so many wounded! so many carried away on stretchers! Could there be anything, even in the business of what might be heroics, beyond despair?
In my own case there had also been the particular predicament that I had been in two minds anyway about the justification for this war. My father had been imprisoned for advocating that Britain should stay out of the Second World War: he had said – Let Germany and Russia fight each other and let the British Empire remain intact. (This was what Hitler indeed sometimes seemed to advocate.) In theory I had been half in agreement with my father: in practice – what? I had joined the army partly because this was what society had required of me; but also I had had a gut-level feeling about the propriety of this war. Certainly, however, there was confusion here! The requirement to kill an enemy, so like a friend, might even in such circumstances be like a requirement to kill a part of oneself.
I had had another great friend (not the one who was with me in battle) with whom I had travelled in a troopship out to Africa and then to Italy: this friend and I had been very cynical about people who went blithely off to war: our attitudes had been like those of the early stages of the relationship between Paul and John that I had described in my book. Paul and John had talked of ‘going through the motions of war’; of ‘watching it with our hands in our pockets as we did the last year at school’. My friend and I thought we might remain somewhat aloof from, if not quite turn away from, what Paul called ‘this weary blunder of a world gone mad’: we might make jokes about war in the intervals from it: like this we might stay sane. We imagined we knew all about the projections and masochism of soldiers – the need for ordeal, for a cause to be ready to the for, to make up for the insufficiencies of ordinary lives. And then in fact my friend was comparatively harmlessly injured when his sergeant trod on one of their own mines (and from hospital wrote me a poem which contained the memorable lines, ‘What else more fitting can the masochist give/Than have his buttocks punctured like a sieve?’). And I harboured the idea that the best thing to happen to me might be to get myself taken prisoner; and then in prison camp I might get on with the sane business of planning my first novel.
Then in the event this came close to being precisely my experience of war! On a frozen mountain-top in central Italy, in the winter of 1943–4, I myself, and the men I had only a day or two before been put in charge of, were in fact taken prisoner in an unexpected German raid (I have described this incident in Beyond the Pale). But I knew overwhelmingly that I had to try to get away: what were my cynical schoolboy ideas in the face of such a gut-level feeling of rage? And I did almost immediately manage to get away – with the help of the man coming after me to shoot me himself being shot by my battle-companion friend – an amazing shot, some two hundred yards – but I had at least made the move to get away. So perhaps what I was trying to say in Spaces of the Dark was – To stay sane in war you have to learn to pay it the most desperate respects; but there is still the matter of luck; and it may still be that part of you has to die. And this may involve some sort of despair.
Here is how my hero Paul in Spaces of the Dark described how his attitude to war had had to change:
War is too big a thing to think about from the outside when you are in it – you have got to accept it on its own terms, like the world, and not attempt to value it by some personal idea. To us it was a killing dying silliness but then the world was silly too, and we were part of it, the silly world, the dying people of Europe killing themselves and us killing them too – and we accepted it, the whole of it, and what thereby it entailed – you’ve got to fight so you might as well fight prettily, you’ve got to the so you might as well the prettily, you’ve only got yourselves to think about because the big thing beyond you is entirely unthinkable so you might as well think yourselves pretty – that was all it was – and pride of course too; pride of the right kind, pride in pity, pride in pretty things.
Sitting above my beach of white coral sand I struggled to come to terms with such memories and ideas: what on earth was this life in which one is required to love and to be ready to kill; in which it might be parts of oneself, as well as friends or enemies, that had to die? Stretched between the demands of duty, of conscience, and of self-preservation, are not humans on some rack? Is it surprising that they sing sad songs in their predicament?
Perhaps all heartfelt ‘fiction’ is an effort to deal with contradictions that otherwise seem unmanageable – the demands of societies at loggerheads with each other and within themselves, the struggles with and against such demands by individuals who are yet dependent on society. Traditionally fiction has dealt with these matters through tragedy or farce: there is resolution through the destruction of an individual, or in the laughter occasioned by his floundering to stay alive. Spaces of the Dark has moments of banal and lugubrious farce – the writing lapsing occasionally into the humour of an English public school. But perhaps inevitably my first novel tended mainly to an operatic style of tragedy – this was what had been considered ‘literary’ by my English public school. This is what I had been provided with by a classical education – stories of the sacrifice of heroes, the killing of enemies and friends. And was it not indeed by such a style of rhetoric that I had seen my father lifting audiences to their feet – ‘We shall win, or we shall return upon our shields!’? What chance had I of standing out from such love-and-death romanticising; of escaping from the literary style under the aura of which young men had traditionally gone off to war.