Gabriele Annan

In 1972 a 26-year-old American schizophrenic, Anthony Baekeland, killed his mother Barbara with a kitchen knife. They had been sleeping together. It was her idea: she thought it would cure his homosexuality. An earlier cure by means of a French girl had not been completely successful; Tony’s father, Brooks Baekeland, had gone off with the girl he married after Barbara’s death. This occurred in Cadogan Square, so Tony was sent to Broadmoor. Eight years later he was released, extradited, and sent to live with his maternal grandmother in New York. He stabbed her with a kitchen knife. She survived and he was sent to the penitentiary on Rikers Island, where he killed himself by putting his head in a plastic bag. By this time it was 1981.

At the beginning of The Ledge between the Streams, the fourth volume of his autobiography, Ved Mehta has got to 1942. Many of his readers will already know that he is a blind Indian writer living in New York, and that he was born in the Punjab in 1934, the son of an ‘England-returned’ doctor in the government medical service. Dr Mehta (Daddyji) was a true ‘babu’: he ‘admired everything British’. Born a poor village boy (though of the warrior caste, one rung below the Brahmins), he had raised himself to the middle-class through education. He and his family were mobile, not so much upwardly, because that is not the Indian way, but forwardly into a Westernised way of life. They sat on the symbolic ledge of the title between the two streams of tradition and progress, one slow and deep, the other clear, cold and fast.

Imagine a mixture of Maurice Chevalier (Gallic charm), Max Miller (the Cheeky Chappie), and Don Juan, with a boastful list of sexual conquests on which contesse, baronesse, marchesine, principesse line up with famous literary and theatrical ladies as well as top professionals in another field. The man is also a racing driver, yachtsman, avant-garde theatre and film producer, poet, translator of Elizabethan verse and Christopher Fry, and the inventor of the windscreen-wiper, starlight electric bulbs and château bottling, not to speak of his being a Rothschild. He owns Château Mouton Rothschild, which he raised to the rank of a premier cru by means of hard work and a craftily fought campaign against the other five who wanted to keep him out. He also established a wine museum at Mouton, not the usual mouldering old presses and dusty glass cases full of corks and tasters, but a beautiful pleasure dome filled with works of art connected with wine.

Ivy Litvinov was the English wife of Maxim Litvinov, Soviet Commissar for Foreign Affairs in the Thirties and Stalin’s Ambassador to Washington after the war. John Carswell is the son of Catherine Carswell, who was Ivy’s best friend until she followed her husband to Russia in 1920. In 1959, after Catherine and Litvinov were dead, Ivy got permission to visit her native land and turned up on John Carswell’s doorstep. He sounds irritated with this cumbersome human legacy, but it is nothing to his irritation with Ivy for not having made more of her opportunities in the way he would have wished – for turning her back on them, in fact. ‘She was not identified with the adventure of her life,’ he says crossly. ‘History was in an ironical mood when it provided Ivy with an itching pen and a keen eye and sent her to observe from a vantage-point some of the most extraordinary phases through which the human race has passed, and then muffled her with a passion for English literature and the primacy of her own feelings.’ All the more credit to him, then, for producing, with elegant economy, a vivid impression of this bizarre and remarkable lady. Perhaps it is his running quarrel with her that gives his book its momentum.–

Giovanni Battista Meneghini died exactly two years ago aged 85. He had been a deserted husband for 12 years and a widower for four. With the help of Enzo Allegri, a journalist on the staff of the Italian weekly Gente, he completed 16 chapters of the present book, and Gente published them in instalments. The remaining chapters were concocted from tapes and other material by Allegri after Meneghini’s death.