The Atlantic and Its Enemies (60 page)

The warders became friendly. ‘Mész haza,’ they said - you’ll go home. One had served in a Slovak outfit in Italy at the end of the war, and spoke at bit of Italian, which I vaguely could manage: ‘piove’, in the exercise yard, where we went every day for half an hour, balancing on an isosceles triangle of half-thawed ice, and if you stood on one end, the other, thirty yards up, rose. Then it was back to the cell, warders clicking their keys, to warn each other that a prisoner was coming. The food was some sort of stew, pushed through a flap. Later on, one of the judges asked me, why did you never complain about the food, and I said, not to his enlightenment, have you ever lived in a Cambridge college? I was not wasting my time, and the British went into action. The Consul-General in Prague, Ramsay Melhuish, turned up with several hundred untipped State Express, which I shared with Kornel, who, Slovak nationalist that he was, said that they were inferior to his own Lipa brand, the tobacco of which was so carelessly packed that the whole thing caught fire and was therefore easier to smoke. Melhuish also gave me all the works of Bertrand Russell when, in alimony mode, he wrote books called ‘Power’, ‘Being’,
etc.
We used to talk about the lectures of A. J. P. Taylor in the governor’s office, and he was very kind to my mother, whom he put up in the Thun Palace in Prague. She was, I am afraid, difficult, and he was wonderful. She came: there was nothing to be said but the prison governor took the point. At a certain point, in my cell, I heard the clumping of boots. It was the governor. He said something like: Wir chaben einen Brief bekommen von Leuten die heissen Hodder und Stoughton und besonders von einem gewissen Herrn Sissons. Sie wollen, dass Sie einen Vertrag unterzeichnen, wonach Sie auf Ihre Rechte bezüglich des Buches über das zwanzigste Jahrhundert verzichten, wemgegenüber sie bereit sind, Ihnen einen nach Belieben jeglichen Buchvertrag mit demselben Entgegengesomething zu unterbreiten willig seien.

No more E. H. Carr in the Palais Harrach: instead, I said I would write a book about the eastern front in the First World War, signed the contract, and ten years later, wrote it.

It came to a trial. Neither the Czechoslovak nor the Hungarian KGB could work it out. Was I some kind of deep agent? Three months went by. I had a defence lawyer, Edgar Prisender, who turned out to be an enormously interesting man. He was the grandson of a Habsburg major-general, was, somewhere along the line, Jewish, and sprang from a family of Hungarian landowners in Slovakia. His French was near perfect (I gave him Proust, though that would not have been his cup of tea) and he had acquired decent English as well. He kept me going with vitamins - kohlrabi, a vegetable that I had not known - and came every week. I was all right, not wasting my time, but Jan Wilson had a far harder experience. She had been banged up with a gypsy prostitute, and had no language at all in common; she had stopped menstruating, and she did not have the support from family that I had. We met in Sydney much later, where she ran a market garden; never a word of reproach. I went to Australia in 1978, and would have stayed, except that it is so very far away. Jan, who was without friends and family, and did not speak the languages, behaved like a brick.

The trial was interesting. There was nothing much in the world news at the time, and they piled in. In the spectators’ box were an RAF war widow, and a woman who had lost her family in Auschwitz, Andrea’s mother. The interpreter - it all had to go through English, Slovak and Hungarian - was also from Auschwitz: he told me he had come out weighing 60 pounds. The judges had been fixed in advance by Edgar Prisender. They would trap the old Stalinist public prosecutor into making a fool of himself. They did. He was stupid enough to demand the maximum sentence against me and Jan, who were obvious innocents, and the minimum against the principals, Andrea and Tibor. Even then, they got six months - nothing, in terms of that system (an old Austrian woman had got nine years in Pardubice a few weeks before). Jan and I got a month, and were expelled from the country on 8 June. The Czechs - not the Slovaks - were absurdly bureaucratic, and when I wanted to take my baby son, in 1983, to see his godmother were vindictive. It needed an intervention by the Foreign Office for me to be put into a Helsinki basket.

The upshot, and the meaning, of that trial was that the public prosecutor was made to look foolish, and was got rid of. The Slovak judges rose in the land. So did Edgar Prisender. We had got on very well indeed, and I went to see a wonderful Hungarian cousin of his in Vienna afterwards, who told me, come 1968, that Edgar had been named Czechoslovak ambassador to the USA in August 1968, just before the Soviet invasion. Edgar denies this. But he escaped in 1968 and became an international patent lawyer for Ciba-Geigy in Basle. They should have made him president of Slovakia, as a prelude to the country’s rejoining Hungary in a confederation. Andrea and Tibor had a different fate. The affair had obviously been embarrassing and ridiculous. The Czechs meanly made both of them serve the other few weeks of their sentences in Pakrac prison in Prague. Then they were expelled, and I met Andrea as she came over. Tibor was received with flowers and apologies by the Hungarian secret police at Komárom. Then the Austrian government went into action, and Tibor was shoved over the border at Hegyeshalom without a passport. They got married. Then they approached the SS
Herr Generaldirektor
and got nowhere. However, there were the Karman paintings, deposited in the Fascist Bank of Croatia, and a deal was done: a villa on the Dalmatian coast, in return for the de Hoochs (were they even genuine?). What happened? I have taught a prime minister of Hungary, and the brother of one of his cabinet ministers took me into Transylvania when Romania collapsed. The Slovak interior minister arranged for me to visit my old cell, number 283, in 1992, and I marched up the prison steps remembering those lines,
Wenn ich einmal soll scheiden, so scheid’ Du nicht von mir.
I was very near tears. I still do not know what it was about: central Europe. But I did my stuff for the growth of Slovakia, and that has turned out quite well.

20

Reaction

Afghanistan was another gigantic dwarf, like Greece: a place, not very significant in itself, where geography and the local complications combined to make it important on a world scale. The Soviet invasion prompted a Western, particularly British and American, reaction, but that had in any case been building up, for quite different reasons, for some time. A wise observer had said, at the time of the Hungarian uprising in 1956, that the system was going to go on and on until an explosion happened in Moscow itself, which duly happened. But the origins of this went back to a change that had come about with Henry Kissinger, in the middle of the seventies.

In November 1975 the ‘capitalists’, leaders of the half-dozen advanced industrial countries, had met at Rambouillet, outside Paris, at the behest of the French president, Giscard d’Estaing. They stared gloomily into the fireside as they, as expected, chatted. Helmut Schmidt wondered if democracy would survive: in this period, Portugal had almost passed under Communism, and Italy was very unstable. New York was going bankrupt, and Saigon had fallen not long before. Henry Kissinger vowed that his purpose on earth was to break the OPEC cartel that was making so much of the trouble, but the inflation associated with OPEC went on. It was worst in England, at 24 per cent in 1975 (and altogether not far from 100 per cent between 1971 and 1975) and in 1976, of all extraordinary signs of failure, the IMF was called in, extracting a Letter of Intent in return for the organizing of support for the pound. Every country had some degree of inflation at this time, but the Germans and the French kept it well below British figures. How? Was it greater discipline as regards petrol use? Or moderate, responsible behaviour on the part of the trade unions? Or better management of the credit and money supply by the Bundesbank, using interest rates and bond prices to stop too much spending with borrowed money? Or European financial collaboration, which, certainly, Schmidt and Giscard greatly wanted?

These subjects came up on the Rambouillet agenda of the ‘G7’, as they were to be called. By now, ideas of radical change were in the air: otherwise, the Western world would be in thrall to the Arabs, and the Soviet Union, with its vast oil revenues, would predominate. A declaration promising exchange rate stability and restored trade was made; beyond that - a sign of what was to come - the International Monetary Fund was invoked, and at last given a true world role. This was the start of the celebrated formula, the ‘Washington Consensus’, in effect shaped by the USA. It amounted to a recognition that the post-war order, with reference in effect to John Maynard Keynes and Bretton Woods in 1944, had failed. There must be liberalization.

The problem of inflation was worldwide, but it was worst in the Atlantic countries. The USA, after the Nixon crash, was in poor shape and needed the formula itself, as the dollar went down. Newly emerging Far Eastern countries, especially Japan, were making American exports uncompetitive; great heavy industrial regions turned into ‘rust belt’ country, historic places such as Baltimore or Philadelphia becoming wastelands. In the USA and in England, blundering efforts were made even by supposedly right-wing regimes to control wages, but to make this acceptable to trade unions, prices were also controlled, and, with reference to the unions’ supposed interest in equality, ‘the rich’ were to be taxed heavily. In practice, this meant tax rates of 80 per cent at a none-too-high level, and on ‘unearned income’,
i.e.
people’s savings, 98 per cent. The argument behind this was that inflation was caused by excessive wage demands from trade union leaders who had become spoiled and greedy; they might give up their bad habits provided that the middle classes were taxed so hard that equality would prevail. However, the trade unionists themselves then found that they were being taxed at higher levels: there was even a danger that people who were receiving welfare payments would pay tax at 40 per cent. Improvement did not follow, and in any case the unions could always say, and this was the right thing to say, that their problem was not greed, that prices were rising, that their wage demands were defensive. ‘Corporatism’, English-style, was no more successful than the preposterous ‘Planning’ had been before it. Alternative thoughts were then thought.

There was another argument altogether as to why inflation rose, and it was advanced under the name ‘monetarism’. In 1970 Milton Friedman, an American economist (who had had experience of Cambridge but not in the charmed circle of King’s College: he had stayed at Gonville and Caius, where the leading light was the Budapest-Jewish Peter Bauer), gave a lecture in London to the effect that the British economists were ‘naïve, unsophisticated’ - more so even than the Americans of the 1930s. He noticed later on that ‘the present situation cannot last. It will either degenerate into hyper-inflation and radical change, or institutions will adjust to a situation of chronic inflation; or governments will adopt policies that will produce a low rate of inflation and less government intervention into the fixing of prices.’ There was, said Friedman, an alternative course: to control the supply of money. Inflation was at the source of the whole problem, and that could be stopped if governments stopped producing the paper money (most of that consisting of figures printed in bank accounts) that caused it.

The argument was not really new. Economists had argued as to the role of money for a long time, and in the nineteenth century there had been differences as to whether the supply of money and credit just reflected the demand for it, or whether it shaped that demand. The brightest brains of Europe, the British in the lead, had addressed such questions, and they could only be answered with a good grasp of mathematics, logic and history. In late-nineteenth-century Cambridge, Economics had even arisen out of Moral Sciences, the working name for Philosophy. However, along with moral questions, there were technical ones. What was money? In the nineteenth century the question almost answered itself because money was based on gold, which of course had a value. True, there was not very much gold, but a piece of nobly printed paper could be taken to the bank and changed back, if need be, into so many ounces of gold. Of course that did not happen, because gold was heavy and could be stolen, and if governments were trusted, then their paper was as good as metal - especially in England, where the gold reserve was actually quite small, less than Russia’s. However, there were limits to the amount of paper that could be printed in these circumstances, and that limited bank credits. People who needed them sometimes wanted to have a wider basis for money (in the USA there were demands from farmers for silver to be used as well as gold). Keynes in the 1920s and still more in the 1930s had wanted governments to abandon these standards, on the grounds that gold was ‘a barbarous relic’, that a properly managed paper money would expand credit, stimulate the economy and cause employment to happen. His critics said that a paper money of this sort would mean a rise in prices, the inflation that did indeed occur in the seventies. Friedman was returning to the older ideas of monetary stability: the seventies were to bear out such wisdoms.

At the time these ideas were not at all fashionable. As David Smith says, to be a monetarist in the 1960s was ‘like having an unfortunate but embarrassing affliction which people were too polite to mention’. The grand establishment at King’s, Cambridge, basked in the sunlight of Keynes, and disdained monetarists, who were on the whole of a lower order. They seemed to be backwoodsmen, offering the grim formulae that had made the thirties such a black decade in the minds of the Keynesians, who sneered. As Keynes’s biographer, Robert Skidelsky, has demonstrated, there was even a sexual aspect to this. Keynes broke the rules, did so in a very sophisticated way, and was never held to account for it, even though other homosexuals, including the inventor of the computer and cracker of the German codes in the war, Alan Turing (also of King’s, but not as grand as Keynes), were harried to death because of it. Old E. M. Forster and George ‘Dadie’ Rylands, characteristic of the twenties, lived on and on, into a world where
Death in Venice
became museum piece Edwardian, and witnessed a radical change: Antonio Gramsci came to King’s, which adopted the causes of 1968, discovered women, and went in for positive discrimination of various sorts. It did not flourish, eventually going bankrupt, bringing down Cambridge Economics with it: within a generation, no foreigner bothered with it, and even very few English graduate students took its doctorates. The then Provost, Noel Annan, wrote memoirs,
Our Age
(1990), explaining why this course had been adopted, and of course not just at radical King’s alone, but widely across the old institutions, such as the BBC. He recognized the mistake, but the Cambridge economists of that era were part of ‘our age’, and they high-hatted little Friedman, happily married, quite Jewish, and very American. One of the best monetarists, Alan Walters, not of grand social origins, and initially interested in the economics of another British disaster area, transport, was turned down when he wanted support for research in a monetarist direction in the 1960s: the money supply was dismissed as unimportant.