BOOKS

The private happiness of Claud

Patrick Marnham

FIGURE OF EIGHT by Patricia Cockburn

Chatto £10.95

BEAT THE DEVIL by Claud Cockburn

Hogarth Press £3.95

BALLANTYNE'S FOLLY by Claud Cockburn

Hogarth Press £3.95

In her autobiography, Figure of Eight, Patricia Cockburn recalls a scene in Mon- tenegro after the last war. With her hus- band, Claud, she was visiting a remote and impoverished region which had suffered heavily under the Germans. Noticing that the mules were not in use, she discovered that all the local blacksmiths had been killed. So, while Claud interviewed the local dignitaries on behalf of the Daily Worker, his wife organised a military work- ing party to collect scrap iron, build a forge, lash a mule and then watch her shoe the beast, an operation she had never performed before. It is in such stories, with their strange mixture of the values and experience of Moscow and Anglo-Ireland, that much of the charm and interest of this book lies.

Patricia Cockburn's early life was spent in County Cork. Her father, Major John Arbuthnot, had been both the original Beachcomber' of the Daily Express and an officer in the Scots Guards. She describes her family background with exemplary and sometimes unconscious candour. The snobbery of the Anglo-Irish is quickly established, as is the poverty of the sur- rounding Irish — known to her chiefly as servants. The fact that this eccentric, alien and frequently insensitive tribe has flourished in that island — usually pre- sented as yet further cause for self- congratulation by the Anglo-Irish — says a great deal for the decency of the natives, although when the relationship does go wrong, it does so thoroughly. Her earliest memories are punctuated by rumours of gunfire and explosions as yet another great house was put to the torch.

The author's grandmother, Lady Blake, was reputed (and seeing her photograph in the book one can believe it) to have the evil eye. The gardener would crawl be- neath the library window in order to avoid the gorgon glance. Mrs Cockburn con- tinued this family tradition by observing, at the age of eight, the murder in Eaton Square of Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson. Then, at the age of 14, she unwittingly assisted in a second murder. She helped a very old lady in Corsica to carry a large axe up a long staircase. Next morning she learned that the old dear had -hit her husband on the head with the axe and killed him. It was a crime passionel. No- body could understand how such an old person had managed to get the axe up the stairs.

Back from Corsica, ordinary life arranged itself into a round of hunting and dances, very much in that order. Her description of her own Presentation is memorable; the line of stationary limousines in the Mall, the good-natured crowds peering at the beautiful girl through the windows of the car, the heat causing the buttered sandwiches to soak into her father's bearskin helmet, finally her brother arriving to feed them buns through the car window while the crowd egged him on. She married a wealthy man, Arthur Byron, and set out on a world tour. Recalling one incident she is characteristi- cally forthright on the subject of leopard skin coats. While she was travelling through the West African rain forest she was constantly asked by the villagers to shoot the leopards which were preying on them. Remembering these pathetic requests, I can never really sympathise with those conserva- tionists who wish to ban the sale of leopard skins. It seems to me to be one more example of the arrogant lack of understand- ing that the rich section of the world has for the poor one. . . We managed to shoot four leopards and dried the skins in the sun, and when we returned to England I had them tanned and made into a coat. I wore it with pride.

It is only in chapter 16 that the chief character in her life enters, her second husband, Claud, and his arrival is much to the benefit of the story. Although she had led an adventurous life, it was only with this marriage that it became an unusual one. When they met, in 1939, Cockburn was notorious as the editor of The Week, a disturbingly well-informed political scandal sheet; he was also a loyal member of the communist party. Patricia's parents cut off her allowance and severed communica- tions with their daughter. Her friends warned her that Claud had a roving eye and was not to be trusted. The combina- tion was obviously irresistible, but it was also a happy one for their devoted mar- riage lasted until his death, 42 years later. She writes of her love for Claud briefly, but it is. a love story written by an author who has no intention of dwelling on her strongest feelings. Nor does the last part of her book turn into a life of Claud. It is an interesting account but not a full one; one would have liked to have read more about the war, for instance, when Claud may have been fortunate to have escaped in- ternment. In the event it was to be the post-war world which was more difficult for the Cockburns, for it was then that Claud decided that he was no longer a communist, an intellectual crisis which led to a financial crisis, only to be resolved by moving back to County Cork and the eventual writing of a fine novel.

Beat the Devil is an outstanding book; with his autobiography it is perhaps Claud Cockburn's best work. It has always been better known as a John Huston-Humphrey Bogart film, and it is no slur to say that it is an outstandingly cinematic novel. Reading it, and having seen the film only once years ago, I found myself recalling not just the faces of the actors but their expressions, so closely did Huston stick to his author's inspiration. There are several memorable characters, particularly the tiny, menacing figure of Major Ross, one of the great villains of post-war fiction — the golf club bore from Tring, Herts, gone seriously wrong.

The plot of Beat the Devil concerns a group of disreputable business associates out to make a killing in Africa by bribing colonial officials. Their boat breaks down on the voyage out and they are stranded in an obscure French Mediterranean port. As the delay grows, the tension among the frustrated passengers starts to mount, and these characters in this situation come wonderfully alive. The dialogue, the life of this book, is full of one-liners, many of which went straight into the film, where, as Alexander Cockburn points out in his engaging introduction, they were wrongly attributed to Truman Capote. In fact they are all by Cockburn. 'Tell him I'm trying on Africa for size and take it if it fits.'

"Peace," said Dannreuther "is the con- tinuation of war by other means".' Some of them come complete with stage directions.

He wants to work out the problem of sin'. `Sin?' said Petersen, breathing hard through his nose.

'Why yes, Mr Petersen,' said Gwendolen, sipping Vermouth. 'Sin'.

One of the themes in the book — a theme one imagines very close to the heart of its author, the ex-communist cut off from Moscow gold and buried alive in County Cork — is that of idealism turned sour. Dannreuther was once spoken of as the T.E. Lawrence of India'; instead he became 'the man who gave up'. He doesn't give up this time, with equally disastrous results. This was Cockburn's first novel and a remarkable achievement on those grounds alone. In Chapter 6, when the character of the mad Major is developed, there is a brilliant manipulation of the point of view. So, we see the lovers set out for the villa in the hills, and we see the Major tracking them, getting closer, a man in pursuit of valuable secrets and, as we know, armed with a knife which he enjoys using, but also — as we do not, until then, know — an outraged and impassioned voyeur. Then, by dexterous reference to the Major's subsequent report, we see not only the lovers and the Major looking down on them, but the scene through the Major's hot, little eyes.

There was the sound of the stream tumbling down the dam, and thousands of insects on the move. . . Major Ross loosened his laces and then with stealthy care got down to a prone position with his legs and feet at ease and his eyes doing the work. . From this position he saw the two below turn together and go into the cave. . and that was the last the] heard at that time. . . 'Not a bloody squeak' reported the Major bitterly after- wards. May have been screaming the place down for all I know. The bitch. Half an hour of it'

Above all, Beat the Devil has the one essential quality which tips it over the line dividing political thrillers from true novels; the private, unimportant concerns of its characters are as exciting as the twists and public events of its plot. We want to know Why sympathetic, recognisable men and Women like Dannreuther, Gwendolen and Maria take such a curiously cool attitude to Infidelity, and when the love goes wrong We believe in the pain. It is just as well that the book has this extra quality because, judged simply as a thriller, it is finally a disappointment. There is, unfortunately, no long-awaited climax in Africa. The plot comes to a rather abrupt halt. The ending hints strongly at a sequel but the sequel was never written. It would be interesting to know why not, and whether the author's loss of interest had anything to do with the success of the subsequent film.

Certainly the struggle to bring up three children in County Cork would have been eased by a few more best sellers or film contracts, as the last chapters of Figure of Eight make clear. Two of the children contracted polio. Claud himself got TB and then cancer. When his writing failed to satisfy the demands of the tax-inspector Patricia Cockburn's skills, first as a horse breeder then as a shell painter, were put to work. Ballantyne's Folly, a later Cockburn novel, first published in 1970, is much preoccupied with the activities of tax in- spectors. Re-reading it after 15 years, it does not seem the equal of the earlier book; there is, for a start, very little dialogue. It reads at times like Wode- house, with politics and sex thrown in, at times like a parable of the fate of an impoverished philanthropist. Its characters are from a different mould, fantastic, almost fabulous, amusing representations rather than living people. Only Ballantyne himself, the convivial, idealistic hotel keeper seems familiar. No one who knew the author will need to look far for his original.

In his introduction to Ballantyne's Folly Andrew Cockburn writes, 'I mourn once again the fact that my father is no longer here to show me and everyone else how to laugh at human events while treating them seriously for all that.' But for his readers this collection does bring Claud Cockburn very much back to life. He was a man of captivating charm, high intelligence and many jokes who generally managed to raise his company to a level where he could enjoy himself too. His intellectual certainty must have taken a knock when he aban- doned communism, but he remained a guide and an inspiration to those who knew him nonetheless. And his life, as this collection shows, illustrates a paradox. For it is an extraordinary thing that a man who could be wrong about so many important issues, from the proper division between propaganda and journalism to the accepta- bility of the Nazi-Soviet pact, could still teach people the right way to live. He honoured a precept of Juvenal's, `Just for the sake of living, don't lose the reasons for living.' For him that motto became a recipe for public failure and private happiness, but he knew the high value of such a bargain. He was never wrong about that.