Gabriele Annan

Gregor von Rezzori was born on his mother’s estate in Bukovina in 1914. Bukovina was Austrian in those days, Romanian after the First World War, and Russian after the second. The Rezzoris were minor Austrian gentry administering the outposts of empire, more like the British in India than like the magnates who entertained Patrick Leigh-Fermor when he passed through the Balkans. There was Italian blood on the father’s side and Romanian-Greek and Irish on the mother’s. Rezzori is very much concerned with blood and racial inheritance in all his books. The concern itself appears to be an inheritance: his father was steeped in late 19th-century Greater German ideology. He was also unquestioningly anti-semitic. Rezzori deplores such attitudes: but he can never leave them alone – they are an ingredient in the fuel he runs on.’

This biography is sad and bad. Bad like a bad pre-war Hollywood movie – monumentally, heroically implausible. But its badness is also its greatest asset: the style and attitude transport one to the time and place where most of the action is set. Everything that happens is drama, every conversation is script. Antoni Gronowicz, now dead, claims that he met Garbo in Paderewski’s house on Lake Geneva in 1938 when she was 35 and he was 22. They went for a moonlight walk and Garbo seduced him. Gronowicz immediately conceived the idea of writing a book about her. She was against the idea and forbade him to take notes in her presence, let alone use a recorder. But he lured her into intimate conversations which continued over the years, and he would write down everything she said the moment he was alone. By the end of the Fifties he had enough notes to begin pressurising her about a biography. Her reaction was in full make-up: ‘I will deny that I talked with you, I will deny that I know you, I will deny that I have even heard of you.’ And he replied: ‘If you imagine that you will always be great, I am warning you now that you will gradually sink below the horizon of remembrance and be gone for ever.’’

This is Richard Evans’s second book on McEnroe. The Struwwelpeter of tennis is now 31 and No 4 in the international ratings. The first book, McEnroe: A Rage for Perfection, came out eight years ago when McEnroe was 23 and rated No 1. The new book belongs to the genre of defensive biography. It is as though Oliver had written a life of Roland: the wise, steady friend standing up for the brilliant, wayward hero. The comparison may sound pretentious, but then Evans compares McEnroe to Coriolanus and Julius Caesar, with quotations from Shakespeare and from Peter Levi on Shakespeare. He uses adjectives like ‘pavonine’, and describes McEnroe’s style as pointilliste – rather a good idea, except that it leads to an analysis of pointillism: ‘tiny jabs of colour executed with the deft touch of a true artist’.

The history of psychoanalysis is full of skeletons. This particular one has tumbled out of its cupboard several times before but is none the worse for that. It is still an enjoyable read, whatever else it may be, and every bit as much of an atmospheric period piece as Gwen Raverat’s famous reminiscences of more or less the same time – even if no two atmospheres could be more different than draughty Cambridge and richly-upholstered Vienna on either side of the turn of the century.’

In England, Adam von Trott has always been the best-known of the plotters against Hitler who were shot or hanged after the abortive coup of 20 July 1944 – better even than Claus von Stauffenberg who carried the bomb in his briefcase to the Führer’s headquarters in East Prussia and detonated it. This is because from 1931 to 1933 Trott was a Rhodes Scholar at Balliol College and made a tremendous impression on his contemporaries and seniors at Oxford. He made friends with men and women who were to become, or beginning to be, what the Germans call prominente. Among them were Richard Crossman, A.L. Rowse, Maurice Bowra, Isaiah Berlin, David Astor and the journalist Shiela Grant Duff, who, in 1982, published a book about their relationship, and followed it up with a volume of their correspondence. At opposite ends of the political spectrum he impressed Lord Lothian and won the affection of Sir Stafford Cripps. Trott was intelligent, aristocratic, idealistic, thoughtful, funny, beautiful, and devastatingly charming: a male Zuleika Dobson. Undergraduates and dons of both sexes were bewitched by him and never shook off the spell. No one who had ever known him at all could escape haunting by his heroic and gruesome death. The familiar photograph of him listening to the judge pronouncing the death sentence has become a tragic icon. It can be seen again in MacDonogh’s book, and on this page.’