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This is an interview I conducted with Sir Stuart Hampshire many years ago when I knew I would start an online magazine. I wanted our readers to learn about all kinds of things. Consider this Couture of and for the mind. Stuart Hampshire was one of the twentieth century's most prominent philosophers. He was a dear friend of mine, he thought Coco Chanel was probably a Nazi sympathiser but he loved to see women dressed well. He died in 2004, a hero and an icon in the United Kingdom. This won't get many likes on Facebook but it will be read all over the world when I put in on my Google page, and for that I am grateful.

Stuart Hampshire

Stuart Hampshire has lived many lives. He's been a spy-catcher, a

code cracker, a literary critic, and a philosopher. He has been at Oxford for

many years. Talking with this dashing man is like taking a dream journey into

the most formidable times of our century. I confess, I have been captivated

by Stuart Hampshire for many years and waver in my regard for him somewhere

between adoration and awe. He is one of the sexiest men I have ever known.

Stuart Hampshire - April 2, 1999

Claridge's Hotel, London

by Christine Suppes

Christine: What are the broad, main changes in philosophy during the course

of your career?

Stuart: Well, when I first studied philosophy at Balliol College, Oxford, my

tutors were absolute idealists, influenced by Hegel, but my closest friends,

two of them were Marxists. And I had been deeply impressed by logical

positivism as that was represented by the magazine, Erkenntnis, and the

Vienna Circle. So we had very little contact with our tutors, who approached

philosophy from a point of view which we regarded as absurd and

superstitious. That period, immediately pre-war, I started to teach

philosophy in 1936, so there were three years before the war and I

disappeared into the army in 1940, and in that period I was concerned with

seeing how far so-called logical positivism, represented by Carnap in the

Vienna Circle, was sustainable and defensible and how far it wasn't. Now that

set of interests has largely disappeared, I would say, in the late fifties,

sixties, seventies. The subject broadened once again into a severely

constricted one. I speak really of Oxford, Cornell, Harvard and certain

universities which thought themselves, with some justification, superior to

others. What I say wouldn't apply to every university in America, obviously,

but in that particular group of departments, people who are in contact with

each other, the scope of philosophy has been widened once again. It's typical

that before the war, ethics and moral philosophy were thought a subject too

loose and too unstructured and too irrational to be properly treated by

philosophers. It was regarded as an inferior subject of study, though, of

course, it continued in all universities. That is no longer true. I would say

that the most talented philosophers now, in the last ten to fifteen years,

have had something to say about moral philosophy or political philosophy. I'm

thinking of Jack Rawls, Bernard Williams, even Donald Davidson and many

others who regard this subject as serious and capable of exact argument and

worth prolonged study. So there's been a big change in the broadening of

philosophy as I studied it and as I cared about it from before the war.

There's one change. The other change is it used to be thought that

philosophers didn't need to know anything of a positive kind, for example a

study of history or of science or in law. But now, I think, most of the

philosophers that I take seriously, would think that you can't make a useful

contribution to philosophy unless there's some positive knowledge or detailed

knowledge which you really possess and feel at ease with. That is really a

big change. The idea of the philosopher as above the study of fact has

entirely disappeared. And the best philosophers are, in fact, very skilled in

something, might be law, might be in history, might be biology, might be

physics. So that's a big change.

Christine: Do you think there's been an increase in social equality in the

last fifty years in Britain and the U.S. and at Oxford, as well?

Stuart: Yes, I'll take the easiest one first. I certainly think there's been

an increase in social equality in Oxford, meaning by that, the undergraduate

body. I think social distinctions were very oppressive and visible in the

time I was an undergraduate, which is 1933-1936. There was a big division

between the undergraduates who paid for themselves who came from public

schools and those who didn't come from public schools. All that has been

evened out and largely abolished. When I was Warden of Wadham I was

astonished by the degree to which social distinctions were not only not

oppressive to people, they were positively exiled, forced out. It was thought

unacceptable to draw any attention to social differences. That's the period

from '70 to '84. It was a huge difference. In England, it's rather more

complex because economic differences have not evened out as much as everybody

expected they would be. But social differences, to some degree, have --- the

customs, the mores of the upper classes--- been far less solemnly observed

than they used to be. The concept of who's a gentleman and who isn't is not

of any interest, or if it is of any interest, it's not paraded in public as a

question of interest. So, in a certain sense, social differences have been

evened out. There are very few places where people feel intimidated for

social reasons. On the other hand, the economic differences are gigantic. The

difference between the really rich, the seriously rich and the great mass of

the population has not been greatly diminished. It's been diminished, but not

greatly or sensationally, and much less than you might have expected by the

operation of all economic laws. In America, I don't really know enough.

Although I've often visited America, even for quite long periods, I haven't

really entered into much American life outside that of the intelligentsia and

academics, of course. So I don't really know. I suspect that, in an

uninteresting way, the snobbish American is largely on the defensive, and is

much less complacent than when I went there in 1945-46, the first time. But I

can't back that up with personal experience or statistics. So perhaps I won't

speak about that.

Christine: What do you think about Tony Blair's minimum wage?

Stuart Hampshire [continued]

Stuart: Well, a minimum wage ought to exist and I don't believe all the

propaganda about it, ruined firms and diminished employment. I think he's

fixed it a bit too low. But he can push it up if he can afford to and when he

can afford to. I think that's the minimum we can do. It shocks me that a

government that bears the name Labour, does so little for redistribution,

given the extreme inequalities of wealth in England and the dominance of

poverty in many parts of England. He's the son of a successful lawyer and he

went to a good fee-paying school, and I think he has too little experience,

except as a politician, of the harshness of life, particularly for women who

are living below the poverty line, whom I'm now told, as regards children,

that is 20% of the population. That is a staggering figure, and worse than

any other country in northwestern Europe. You have to go down to Greece, or

Naples, or certain parts of Spain to get anything like that. It's very bad.

Christine: Tony Blair has got a lot of popularity in the United States,

perhaps more popularity in the United States than any Prime Minister since

Churchill, so could you comment?

Stuart: Yes. Well he believes in something which he calls "modernizing"

England. It isn't quite clear what the content of that is, but it's certainly

something that would appeal to Americans, who in general view England as

being beknightedly attached to old customs, old processes, particularly

industrial processes, with some truth, of course, and old methods of

government. And hence, he rings a bell particularly with right-wing democrats

who wish, like him, to break the association of the democratic party with

high taxation and somehow, to produce a more just society without taxation,

which I would hold is virtually impossible. It is only by taxation that you

can redistribute income. So there's a natural affinity. Also he never speaks

the language of class war which is particularly disliked in America. And he

exhibits no hostility even to big business of the dominating international

kind. And I think he feels no hostility. It does not interest him. What

interests him is this, to me, amorphous thing called "modernization", which

means using up-to-date methods in every sphere. I think I understand how

Americans would like that.

Christine: A lot of Americans didn't know much about Tony Blair until the

death of Diana, when Tony Blair came on the scene (this is the average

American) and basically started calling the shots about her funeral and what

was going to happen and how the Queen was so disabled. He came off very well,

and Americans loved that.

Stuart: Yes, he did come off very well. It really was a case of, one could

see, sort of what he meant by modernisation. (Laughing) The Royal Family, if

anything, was a proper subject for modernisation. I think that was, so to

speak, a sentimental trap but it showed real political flair. It was utterly

unexpected and an amazing spectacle. Nobody yet has sufficiently analysed

what happened that day. It was absolutely amazing. I suppose I was a

perfectly competent observer of events, but I would never have predicted that

the whole of London would turn out on the streets to see a funeral cortège go

past.

Christine: But you and I have talked many times about how beautiful she was

and how adored she was and how we adored her. We spoke about it many times,

so I can't believe that you..

Stuart: I was astonished. No, it's just a phenomenon which applies to film

stars. There are people, who when photographed, look marvellous and other

people don't. She did look marvellous. She was a dream for photographers.

Photography goes everywhere now because of television and if you have it, if

you have that magical property that she had, I mean somebody whose natural

companion, Mr. Fayed, who was killed with her, was hardly an immensely

inspiring character. So it's a photograph. But why people should be so, at

this moment, sensitive to that? It may be Blair, who's very middle class

(very middle class, everything about him--- he talks just like a school

prefect in my school, who would talk about how we must all pull together to

win for the house mention. That's the sort of tone of voice.) But he

obviously has a perception of this which is something to do with his age, a

natural political flair. He's a brilliant politician. He happens not to share

my beliefs but there's no doubt he is a very brilliant politician. And I

think he's also a good negotiator. That doesn't always go with it.

Christine: What is your point of view about the Clinton scandal?

Stuart: Well, I thought it was a rather disgraceful attempt of the Republican

Party to redress the polls. They found that he had this amazing following. It

is amazing how few people resigned, almost nobody resigned, even though he'd

gone through these zigzags in policy and I thought that it had the

disagreeable air of trying to get the latent Puritanism in America as an

effective political force. But it failed, completely failed, which shows that

the extreme right wing which certainly was true of several of the people who.

I was in California at the time and I watched a lot of it, and of course, I

was with people who were fanatically pro-Clinton, for the most part, but even

allowing for their bias, several of them, the people from the House, had

connections with extreme right-wing groups. And I thought it was deeply

anti-democratic and it very badly failed. I wish it had failed more. I mean

obviously he's compulsive on that subject, but he has a capacity to

understand the rejected people in America, who like him even though he's

pursuing rather dishonest policies, rather right-wing policies often. But he

obviously likes and gets on with black people, which is important. He was

brought up with them and understands them and likes them. He likes film

stars, he likes women who look tart-y or whatever you call it..

Christine: He doesn't care much for scientists, you know.

Stuart: He has the tastes that much of the electorate share. And I think

that's a good thing if you have a democracy. You want to control it before it

gets out of hand.

Christine: I think it's always interesting when Tony Blair gets together with

Clinton. They seem similar to me, in a way. How do you feel about that?

Stuart: Yes, similar in that they both are acutely conscious of polls and

what people think and vote. They're determined to get votes. Blair could have

done all sorts of things with that gigantic majority which he didn't expect

to have in the election. But he didn't. He hates to lose any votes,

particularly to lose some middle-class person. Instead of saying as the Labor

Party has always said before, "Oh well, they're middle-class people.

Naturally they don't like us. No great loss about that." And go ahead. He

never does that. He rushes to the widest division to try to cover it up.

Christine: So, do you, in fact, think that Tony Blair took some lessons from

Clinton?

Stuart: No. I don't think so, really. I think he might have technically over

the election---how you cope with damaging stories that pop up unexpectedly,

that sort of thing. I think the whole situation is so different. I mean,

Blair has never had to do a U-turn like Clinton.

Christine: Let's change the focus. I would like to ask you what do you think

about this new emphasis on Shakespeare and cinema? This broad sweep of

Shakespeare, Shakespeare in Love and Elizabeth, these movies that have come

out and young people want to read about Shakespeare again?

Stuart: I think that's bound to bubble up from time to time. I thought the

film was rather good. Not quite as good as people say, but it was good, I

thought. Didn't you? It's odd about the public's attitude about Shakespeare

because it often doesn't pay much. I mean whether you get a big crowd or not.

In the old days, actually when I was a schoolboy, there used to be traveling

Shakespeare companies which went around to villages and people turned out.

Christine: Well, Stuart, I've just been to the Imperial War Museum with my

son, Michael, and I'm all hopped up on World War II. I was wondering why you

might think that they might start the new exhibit, I think it was called,

From the Bomb to the Beatles, the period just following WWII, this wonderful

movie with Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard..

Stuart: Oh! Brief Encounter.

Christine: Tell me something, Stuart, do you see that as a kind of leitmotif

of mid-century England?

Stuart: Yes, in a way. It was a very clever film. It captured the extreme

darkness of London, in this juncture in the country.

Christine: Pre-WWII, were you in dark mood or was everything bright for you?

Stuart: No, not at all bright. I was in North London suburb most of the time,

and we were a unit, essentially devoted to counter-espionage, against spies.

Against German spies. And the Germans were very bad at spying so we, rather

early on, solved that problem.

Christine: Let me just back up. Why are the Germans bad at spying?

Stuart: Deep question. I think people who are really good at spying are

always people who are militarily weak, or in a weak position for some reason

or another. For example, the Israelis had, at one time, I doubt they have

now, but at one time had a very, very good intelligence service. So did the

Poles. The Poles have spent all their lives since the eighteenth century

between the Russians and the Germans. And they could only live by

intelligence. The Germans are not naturally, don't have the qualities of mind

that go with it, a certain kind of disloyalty. I think in order to do any

good either at espionage or counter-espionage you have to have a natural

understanding of disloyalty and obliquity and two-facedness and so forth. And

the Germans don't.

Christine: And you're saying the British do?

Stuart: Yes. By comparison with the Germans. Yes. For example, during the war

we ran a brilliantly successful, which may even have altered the course of

the war, the war in the West---I'm not talking about the Japanese, but in the

West--- deception campaign. One of the chief purposes of espionage is to

deceive the enemy of your intentions.

Christine: Stuart, what exactly was your role in this?

Stuart: Well, I was in a unit which dealt with certain texts. There were four

of us. It wasn't a very large unit. Four dons, four university persons in a

small room.

Christine: Where was this room?

Stuart: Barnet.

Christine: Where's that?

Stuart: North London. And we were part of the MI6, the British Secret

Service. And we were concerned with technical sources and the exploitation of

those for intelligence purposes. That's what we did for four and a half

years. And that made, not us, not our little unit, because we were one of a

quite widespread thing, persuade the Germans when we landed in Europe that we

were going to land somewhere else, and we succeeded in doing that.

Christine: During this time, Stuart, what was your life like? Were you having

great romantic love affairs while you were doing all this secret work?

Stuart: Well, the person I was going to marry, we happened not to be married

at that time--- we lived together. Later in Chicago, we got married, long

after the war.

Christine: Very interesting.

Stuart: Not to the wider public. We had a slightly uneasy relation to the

institution of marriage and seemed it might be at its minimum in the city of

Chicago. And so it proved.

Christine: But you stayed married until her death, didn't you?

Stuart: Yes.

Christine: And she was a lovely woman. What is her name and can you tell me a

little bit about her?

Stuart Hampshire [continued]

Stuart: She was English. She was the daughter of an explorer who went to the

South Pole with Shackleton and was stuck there along with all the expedition.

While he was there, he vowed, being a strange and superstitious man, that if

he got home he'd convert to the Catholic Church, which he did. At any rate,

he was very eccentric, a profoundly eccentric man, rather heroic. For

example, he jumped off Tower Bridge and Inns of Court to demonstrate that

people who came down in a parachute wouldn't get crushed when they hit the

ground, because the RAF hated parachutes. And he tried to get them to use

them in the First World War and they said it would cause defeatism. They

thought it was sort of unsporting, really. They said they would be defeated

if they went up in these things. And he had a mistress, with whom he lived in

Japan. He was very eccentric and his daughter, I'm afraid, was very much in

love with him. He was obviously a remarkable character. I never met him. I

wrote his obituary for the Times, and so on, but I never met him. And he

persuaded the RAF. So he did lots of useful things but nobody could bear him.

He was one of those troublesome, active, difficult men. I mean you weren't

allowed, in those days, if you were an officer in a good regiment, to carry

parcels. So he hung his parcels on his buttons. He was that kind of man.

Christine: And your wife, was she crippled by her love for him? Could she

love other men?

Stuart: No, no. She behaved very badly to him. They behaved very badly to

each other. Because he did marry his Japanese mistress and she wouldn't write

to him. She thought that was terrible.

Christine: What did she do? How was her mother and his wife?

Stuart: Her mother she loved, but unfortunately she became alcoholic. And

therefore when Renée was about twelve or thirteen, she was trying to stop her

mother from drinking and going into pubs to get her out. Then she went on,

which women of her class did, to a finishing school in Paris and there, came

over a weekend, a brilliant young philosopher, who was at Eton at that time,

for a year, whom she married.

Christine: Stuart, you have known so many people in your life that we have

come to admire so greatly in the United States. I know you've mentioned

Elizabeth Bowen and Virginia Woolf. Can you speak about these women writers?

You seem to have a particular sensitivity to women writers.

Stuart: I don't think particularly. With regard to American writers, the

writers I've known best are mostly poets. I've known very well indeed,

e.e.cummings, who was a close friend for three of four years. I knew Allen

Tate, someone I knew very well and looked after for a period. Cal Lowell, I

knew very well. Not his wife, not so well. She wrote a most wild piece about

Monica Lewinsky in the New York Review of Books. Marianne Moore, I knew, not

very well, but I caused her to have an honorary degree at Princeton. A

marvellous writer, I think. I don't think, the best women writers, I never

knew. I never knew Flannery O'Connor or any of the best southern writers who

were women.

Christine: Eudora Welty?

Stuart: No, I didn't.

Christine: A lovely woman.

Stuart: Elizabeth Bowen was a personal friend. She loved Eudora and used to

stay with her. But I never met her. So I didn't really know women writers. I

did in England, of course, a great many. Rosamond Lehman, I knew very well.

Christine: I do like the writing of Rosamond Lehman.

Stuart: You like her?

Christine: I like her writing.

Stuart: She was a very intelligent woman, but I didn't really like her

writing.

Christine: I was in my early twenties---the right time to read her. Was she

gay?

Stuart: Not at all. Her first husband was Runciman. And that wasn't a great

success. then she ran away with Wogan Philips, who was a Communist later,

extreme left wing. He was a Peer. It was an unusual thing in the House of

Lords and Commons, but not unusual in England. Then she fell in love, when I

was there, a famous episode in Bowen Court in Ireland, when I and somebody

called Con O'Neill went to stay with Elizabeth Bowen who lived in a very

beautiful house in Ireland. And there was a colleague of mine at All Souls

called Goronwy Rees, who arrived --- we had been there for three or four days

with various English intelligentsia staying in this Irish house--- and

Goronwy Rees who was very, very attractive and brilliant and unstable,

arrived and on the first night it was obvious that disaster was looming. It

was clear that Rosamond and Goronwy were flirting. And Elizabeth would not

like this. And the worst happened---a big explosion. They started to make

love and they remained together for about ten years after that, Goronwy and

Rosamond. And Elizabeth wrote a book which was immensely popular, probably

her most popular book, called The Death of the Heart. That was about Goronwy.

I was present when it started. She was very insulted. She was very insulted,

is all you can say, by Goronwy picking up Rosamond in her house.

Christine: Definitely not gay. She just had a couple of statements that I

took when I was a young woman, twenty-two, twenty-three, when I read her

books, which led me to believe she had some kind of knowledge.

Stuart Hampshire [continued]

Stuart: Oh yes! Certainly! Well for example, Rosamond was a great friend of

Stephen Tennant. Stephen Tennant was a very, very far out, in fact the

farthest out I've ever seen, homosexual. He was gay. He came from a very rich

family. He had a very beautiful house in Wiltshire. To look at, he was

fantastic. He was just fantastic. He was neither one sex nor the other. He

travelled around America with his mother who was called Lady Glenconner, one

of the famous beauties of our time. Anyway, Rosamond used to go stay with

him. She was very good with him and they all loved her. She was remarkably

beautiful. Also she came from a very clever Jewish family with a lot of money

and she was unprejudiced. So what you say is true. Cecil Beaton, for example,

liked her.

Christine: Well, that's an example. Virginia Woolf, I have to touch on that.

Stuart: I didn't really know her. You know, I met her, but I didn't know her.

I was not, nor was I an intimate acquaintance. Later on, after the war, I

knew Leonard, her husband, and liked him. Although I belonged to a Bloomsbury

group, called the Cranium Club, which meets even now, four times a year, there

were no women, you can imagine in those days. They came later. There was

prejudice about women. I lived in lodgings with someone called Benedict

Nicholson, whose mother had a love affair with Virginia and hence I knew a

lot about her. She was always mentioned in the house, but I happened not to

be there when she came. Actually she only came once, I think.

Christine: I know that, until recently, you took an annual holiday at

Portofino with Isaiah Berlin.

Stuart: Yes. I always did. That's true. I missed a few years since the war.

One was when my daughter, Sophie, was born and I was in Boston. Then about

two years when I was ill, I think. But otherwise I went every year.

Originally we all stayed in a little pension on the road just by the beach.

Then his wife, who was very well to do built a house on top of the hill. It's

one of those protected areas in Italy where you have to bribe everyone to put

up a house at all. But they did put one up.

Christine: I guess you were constantly discussing issues of the time with

Isaiah Berlin.

Stuart: Not only with him but also his American friends. At least the upper

reaches of American life, I've lost my knowledge. It largely came through

Isaiah and generally speaking I don't hear much about it any more. There was

a fascinating ambassador in Moscow, Chip Bohlen. And this very saturnine man

who knew more about the Bolsheviks than anybody I'd ever met. I've forgotten

his name. He was an ambassador. Tommy Thompson.

Christine: This was an American?

Stuart: Anyway, a lot of these people came and we had fun, I must say.

Christine: Did you know any of these English spies who worked for the

Russians?

Stuart: Yes, all of them.

Christine: That's what I thought. Can you speak about it a little bit?

Stuart: Yes. Actually you would like the story of Kim Philby. He was probably

the second most successful spy in the modern world.

Christine: And who was the first?

Stuart: Sorge. But I never met him. He was in the Far East. He operated for

the Russians and the Germans and Germany. He was number one. But Kim was very

nearly number one. He very nearly became head of the British Secret Service

while being a colonel in the KGB.

Christine: That's quite a feat. How did you know Kim Philby?

Stuart: I worked in the office which reported to him. We were in the same

équipe.

Christine: How much older was he than you?

Stuart Hampshire [continued]

Stuart: Two or three years--- he went to Westminster and Christinet

Church---two or three years, maybe three, not much more.

Christine: Was he sort of charming?

Stuart: Yes. He certainly was. His father was a famous figure, of course,

Saint John Philby, who always lived as an Arab. He became an Arab and he was

always dressed in Arab garb and he lived in Arabia. He was an upper-class

Englishman who went native with the Arabs. A number went, up to a point, but

he went rather further than most. And his son, Kim, shared his contempt for

the English upper classes.

Christine: Was Philby's father taken on as an upper-class Arab?

Stuart: Yes. He was. He did some work for the British in Arabia in 1918 in

the First World War. I never met him, couldn't have. I think he was dead by

the time I first knew Kim. It was 1941, I think. But Kim Philby had an

ordinary career, went to Cambridge, converted to communism in Cambridge, went

to Vienna at the time of the Dollfuss, when they were shooting up, when the

Vaterlandische front were shooting up the worker's flats. He married a

communist named Mitzi to get her into England. And then he was told to turn

himself into a mole, which he did, by getting onto the Times and being

assigned to Franco, the Times correspondent to Franco. Not only that, he was

decorated by Franco. At the same time he joined the Anglo-German Fellowship

which was a well-known right wing group, always in protective colouring for

the coming war. Then he got himself into this immediate pre-war recruiting,

into MI-6, in a section which was dominated by people who were used to

locking up Indians. I mean those old colonial people and they wanted

somebody, I guess, who had a slightly larger view of the world. So they got

Kim from the Times. And there he was in position when the War started. When I

came in, which was early '42, he was much the most intelligent person there,

and we could pass information to him and get it distributed to the right

people. Spies always want to prevent their information from being given to

anyone, because it would compromise the source, obviously. But Kim was very

good, he dealt with it and I got on with him.

Christine: Yes, I would imagine. How did you feel when it all came out?

Stuart: Ah! I have a rather boastful story. I haven't boasted so far.

Christine: No, you haven't boasted at all. I'm trying to get you to boast a

little bit more.

Stuart: I formed a view that the SS, the SD, the Sicherheitsdienst, the Nazi

Party would take over German Intelligence Service. I formed this view that

they were going to take it over because the German Army Intelligence Service

was pretty inept. And, also, it was very disloyal because the head of it was

a Greek, or a man of Greek origin, called Canaris who made up his mind, in

the course of '42 and '43, that the Germans were losing the war and the Nazis

knew this, they always knew that sort of thing. So, I thought the

Sicherheitsdienst would take over the Alswehr which was the name of the

military intelligence service. And I wrote a paper to say this. Our papers

were being distributed to the War Office, the Admiralty and the Cabinet

Office and so on. It's true I couldn't prove it, but I said, "I can't prove

it but this is my hunch." And, of course, it did in fact, come about. Kim

said, "You're an intelligence officer, you can't write things about

tendencies. You have to have evidence." And I thought, "Now why did Kim, ---I

remember it so well--- now why did Kim care? (Of course what he said was in a

sense true.) But I said, "Well then I'll add something saying it's all

speculative and it's not an intelligence report. Whatever you want, I'll

add." He was absolutely firm that it couldn't be distributed. If I wanted to

show it to his officers, okay, that's fine. And I came back to Barnet, I can

see it now, and I walked up and down. There's a colleague sitting there,

Charles Stuart, dead now, and I said, "There's something wrong with Kim,

something deeply wrong. Why should he, why did he give a damn? I mean, you

know how he always pretends he doesn't mind, just an old hack intelligence

officer. It doesn't make sense. Such a clever man can't be a complete cynic

and then suddenly blow up on an isolated issue like this." But, then there

comes the decisive thing. If you've been brought up in a very fortunate

section of society, you have a permanent conventionality of mind built in

somewhere. The idea that Kim, this admired figure we all thought was so

wonderful, could be a spy. As sheer conventionality of mind, I said to

Charles, "There's something wrong with Kim, I'll go on thinking." Then the

next thing that happened in our relation, (I went on seeing him) he had this

kind of pose of the old, Simenon cynic and so forth and he had friends like

David Footman, who perhaps was also a Soviet agent. He was an MI-6 agent in

central Europe at one time. We never know. At any rate, I then went with him

to interview Kaltenbrunner. Did you know that he had a long affair with

Chanel?

Christine: Yes, I did actually know.

Stuart: I've had a lot of people come to me and ask me about Chanel. Would I

be on television and talk about it.

Stuart: But let me finish with Kim. The next thing I did was to go out to the

I.G. Farben building in Germany before VE-Day, but shortly before, and I

stayed with Kim. And the other person there was Peter Ustinov's father, who

was called Klop Ustinov (actually a nickname). And he was a formidable

fellow.

Christine: Was he fat?

Stuart Hampshire [continued]

Stuart: A bit, yes. He married Nadia Benois. Anyway, I knew him a bit because

they lived up King's Road and I used to go and see them occasionally. There

the three of us were and this barely sort of cynical talk between Klop and

Kim. And again I thought, "It's not plausible, really." You can't imagine

that anyone could be as successful as that. It really was marvellously done.

One of the very keen keys to his success was his relation with a famous

woman, in the MI-6 library files. He could always get in at any time at night

which nobody else could do.

Christine: How do you think about it now?

Stuart: I think we ought to have been cleverer and that just shows how

conventional we are.

Christine: You use this expression "sheer conventionality of mind".

Stuart: Yes, what I mean is you don't like to imagine, in that trade you

ought to explore everything. So that's the story of the spy. He loved the

idea of making fools of people. He was very, very attractive too, with lots

and lots of different women. And one could see why. He had a charming

stammer. You would have liked him. He was good company, drank too much. That

was his weakness. And yes, Anthony. He was a more concealed figure. He was

very bullied by Guy Burgess while at Cambridge that he couldn't be an agent.

Guy could shoot his line and take you in. You didn't really know what he was

saying, but he did it rather well. I remember once when I foolishly told that

man, the spy catcher man, that he tried to recruit me. I shouldn't have told

him that. I didn't realise what he was doing until later. He was a good

talker and he knew how to flatter. Anyone was engaged at all in the

interrogation.

Christine: Do you feel that you had a naïve period, like in 1940 or something

like that?

Stuart: No, I never inclined to say that. I have this great friend who is

still alive in Santa Cruz. He was a straight communist in my day, as an

undergraduate, but he wasn't a mole I don't think. Well, he tried to be. He

went to Chicago on a commonwealth and he tried to recruit. He was a communist

for many years, but he fell out over the Wallace campaign, interestingly. He

found the whole Wallace campaign really shocking and it suddenly occurred to

him that we all want to change the world but we can't change the world in

this way. Then he gave up and he came to see me when I was lecturing at a Phi

Beta Kappa lecture in Rochester. He'd given it all up. He was interested in

Reich and Freud. He was a wonderful, top classical scholar.

Christine: What's his name?

Stuart: Nobby Brown. He wrote a famous book called, (he was sort of a friend

of Norman Mailer) Life Against Death. It was kind of the bible of the

hippies---rather surprising for a bible of the hippies. He lives in Santa

Cruz.

Christine: So he was a colleague of yours?

Stuart: He was an undergraduate from my time, who was a senior of the class

before. I didn't do classics at the end. I switched to history. I couldn't

bear to write Greek verses. So anyway, we were great friends. And then he

disappeared. And we weren't allowed to write to him obviously. Get him into

trouble. Party jokes about Lenin wouldn't do.

Christine: So, Stuart, you have remained kind of a larger-than-life figure in

this country and I think there is in you this kind of patriotism and irony

and all the kinds of good qualities that make up a larger-than-life

character. I still pick up magazines every now and again and see Stuart

Hampshire says you should read this. And now what's in the offing? You have a

book coming out.

Stuart: That's right. And I haven't the design for another book at the

moment. And I am at the age when writing books is somewhat fatalistic. If I'm

asked to do something..I follow Max Beerbohm in saying that sometimes when he

was younger he was like a hired car which people could use, but he gradually

became a taxi.

Christine: You've become a taxi?

Stuart: If anyone asks me to do something, if I can't think of a reason why

not, I'll do it. But I don't think of myself as reserved for special

journeys.

Christine: In your life, as you look back on it, fabulous life.

Stuart: I've had luck, yes. Interesting places, interesting times.

Stuart Hampshire [continued]

Christine: You've also had this wonderful combination of being incredibly

handsome and incredibly sexy.

Stuart: I've never thought that, until recently, if at all.

Christine: Incredibly handsome and incredibly gifted with friendships,

combining that with intellect.

Stuart: I had some very odd friends, unusual friends, a better way of putting

it. For example Joe Ackerley, who wrote some marvellous books, Victor

Rothschild, who behaved in a very extraordinary way and did some interesting

things, Isaiah.

Christine: All these people are wonderful. It's great thinking about them,

very gifted and wonderful people. But I can't help wonder what they thought

about when they were talking with you.

Stuart: It's rather odd that, you know. When people die, a lot of you keep

their letters. From time to time--- I leaned quite recently, for example,

that Elizabeth and Isaiah had a nickname for me which I never knew.

Christine: Which was?

Stuart: In a moment I'll get it. The gazelle. Very extraordinary. I never

knew.

Christine: Yes. You are kind of like a gazelle.

Stuart: Odd that two people could have referred to you and never tell you

that they did it, these two, Isaiah and Elizabeth.

Christine: Did you know the author called Elizabeth Taylor?

Stuart: No, never.

Christine: I loved her book.

Stuart: Never knew her. She's dead, I think. There are some very good woman

writers now in England, I think. Penelope Fitzgerald is very good. There are

several of them. There are a lot of very gifted writers, in fact, going

around. And, a man who just died, I admired very much, Brian Moore. Very good

writer.

Christine: Yes, an Irish writer. I thought he was very good. He wrote novels

of his time. It was almost as though he were writing with the bullets going

over his head.

Stuart: He wrote an extraordinary love story about a doctor.

Christine: That was called The Doctor's Wife. It was extraordinary.

Stuart: An amazing effort of reconstructing a woman's sexual feelings. It

can't be easy.

Christine: He had some help, I'm sure. And that's perhaps the most

extraordinary thing about him. That's what I always thought.

Stuart: What?

Christine: That he had a relation with a woman who was able to.

Stuart: To tell him how to describe it, yes.

Editor's note: And here, the tape ran out.

Little Missy Chronicles

Wednesday 30 December 2015

Sunday 27 December 2015

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