Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life

both do their own cooking and housework without them and stay ladies. She took it for granted that a married woman must put her interests second to those of husband and children, and was shocked and irritated by her sister Mimi who refused to do so. Not that this made her a particularly successful mother, but then, as my sister and I agreed many years later when comparing notes about our youth, none of the several people who were or acted as our parents was fitted for the job by talent or training. None was very good at it, nor was there any reason why one would expect them to have been. Their parents had not been either. She did not plunge headlong into the new ways of the world, though she eventually followed them. She did not cut her hair until 1924 or 1925, and was disappointed when nobody seemed to notice that she had.

Life in Vienna made few concessions to one who (in her album ‘confession’) claimed that her idea of happiness was ‘to look into a glowing fireplace, having no further wishes’ and who claimed that her favourite book was Andersen’s Fairy Tales. I do not think she was an efficient or enthusiastic housewife or much of a manager, although she seems to have enjoyed dressmaking and even the endless adaptation and adjustment of old clothes to new uses or growing children, which tight budgets made necessary. There were times when she went on strike against the constant unceasing struggle to make ends meet. ‘I just went into town and into the Cafe, and thought ‘‘apres moi’’ …’ she wrote one day when the laundry was due to return, there was not enough money in the house to pay for it, and the two friends to whom she had run to borrow it from were not in. Or she might simply decide to go to the movies alone to forget. Or else, increasingly, she buried herself in her writing, which had at least the material justification that it brought in money. Or in the handful of close friendships (including the one with her younger sister) from which, as time went on, she almost certainly received her main moral support. And who, in turn, relied on her friendship, loved and admired her.

Curiously enough, she was not a great reader of contemporary literature. In the mid-twenties, asked by her convalescent sister for books to read, she said she had read hardly anything lately other than Shakespeare, and had not been in a bookshop for ages.

When did she begin to think of herself as a writer, a far less common occupation for women in central Europe at that time than it would have been on the already heavily feminized scene of British fiction? When did she choose the pen-name of ‘Nelly Holden’? By 1924 she had already sent manuscripts to Rikola-Verlag and written, or at least drafted, a novel – presumably the one based on her own experiences about a young girl in Alexandria which was published by Rikola as Elisabeth Chrissanthis in 1926. Another novel was written by the time my father died, but, to her dismay, the publisher was unenthusiastic, urged rewriting and in the end it was never published. Conceivably it might have been, if my mother had been able to go on working. The manuscript does not seem to have survived. There is no way of telling how seriously she took the short stories she wrote for the magazine market. On the other hand, she clearly took great and legitimate pride in the professionalism and literary quality of her translations.

How good a writer was she? I read her novel only many years later. When young I kept away from it, I don’t know why. She wrote seriously with style in an elegant, lyrical, harmonious and carefully considered German, which was perhaps natural for a young Viennese intellectual who had once been a faithful attender at the recitals of the great Karl Kraus, but I cannot honestly claim that she looked like a writer of the first class. She also wrote poems which have disappeared. When I read them as a teenager, I shocked my aunt Gretl by telling her I did not think highly of them, believing even then that one should not delude oneself even about the people or things one cared about most in life.

These are the reconstructions of an old man, who still tries to be guided by this principle in his professional and private passions. And in any case all this is quite irrelevant to my relations with the person who has had the most profound influence on my life. I am now old enough to be the grandfather of a woman who died at the age of thirty-six, and yet, it would seem absurd if somewhere across the Styx we were to meet and I would see her or treat her as a young woman. She would still be my mother. I would expect her to ask me what I had done with my life, and to tell her that I had managed to realize at least some of her hopes for me, that I had accepted at least some of the signs of public recognition because I believed they would have pleased her. And I think I would be no more honest or dishonest than Sir Isaiah Berlin who used to excuse taking his knighthood by saying that he had only done it to give pleasure to his mother. I have no doubt at all that the measurable proof that the boy she had made such efforts to turn into a proper Englishman had in the end become an accepted member of the official British cultural establishment would have given her greater happiness than anything in the last ten years of her short life.

I think her influence on me was above all moral, though in the days of her illness I was also moved by the desire not to hurt her or go against her wishes. I took notice of her even when she criticized my behaviour. I took her seriously. I think it was her honesty as well as her pride that carried conviction. She had no religious faith and no interest in being Jewish as such, although, to please her mother, she had gone through a religious marriage ceremony as well as a secular one. Yet, as I have already recalled, she gave me the lasting foundation for my own sense of being a Jew, to the irritation or puzzlement of those who cannot believe that a mere negative can be a sufficient basis for identity. She probably postponed my political commitment by suggesting that even very bright boys might need time for reflection and intellectual growth, just as she taught me that there were great writers who could be understood only when one got older. And, since she always levelled with me, she made me believe her.

Not that, even leaving age aside, we were on the same intellectual wavelength. Her enthusiasm for Pan- Europe, a somewhat conservative movement for a single European polity (but excluding Russia) propagated by an Austrian aristocrat, Count Coudenhove-Kalergi, never infected me. It was the one excursion of a liberal but basically non-political mind into the realm of politics. On the other hand she was frankly bored by the writings of her friend Grete Szana’s husband, the peripatetic Alexander Szana, in which he reported on his politico-social travels to Russia (highly critical), to North Africa, and elsewhere. I listened to him avidly, no doubt encouraged by his generous gifts of the cosmopolitan stamps arriving in his newspaper office. Thanks to these memories I was later to choose to go to North Africa, when Cambridge offered me an undergraduate travel grant in 1938. I obviously derive my admiration for Karl Kraus from her, but her insistence on making me listen to a full performance of Saint-Saens’s Samson and Delilah on our grandparents’ radio – I don’t think we had one ourselves – put me off classical music for several years.

I still remember sitting by her bedside in the hospital, both of us listening to one another, as I prepared for growing up and she for death. She wanted to live. ‘I wish I could believe it,’ she told me, pointing to Mary Baker Eddy’s Christian Science Scriptures, which a visitor had left her. ‘Perhaps if I had that faith, it might do more for me than the doctors have done so far,’ I remember her saying, ‘but I can’t believe it.’ But shortly before her death she imagined she was getting better, she might even be cured. I am told this is always a reliable sign that the end is close at hand.

In retrospect the years between my parents’ deaths appear a period of tragedy, trauma, loss and insecurity, which was bound to leave deep traces on the lives of two children who passed through it. This is certainly true, and it is clear that my sister took many years to recover from the loss of her father followed by an uncomprehending childhood and a resentful youth of constant disruption and emotional insecurity. I have no doubt at all that I must also bear the emotional scars of those sombre years somewhere on me. And yet I do not think I was conscious of them as such. That may be the illusion of someone who, like a computer, has a ‘trash’ facility for deleting unpleasant or unacceptable data, but one from which others may be able to recover them. However, I do not believe that this is the only explanation why, though not particularly happy, I did not experience these years as specially distressing. Perhaps the realities of the situation passed me by because I lived most of the time at some remove from the real world – not so much in a world of dreams, but of curiosity, enquiry, solitary reading, observation, comparison and experimentation – this was the only time in my life when I built myself a radio set