Born to blush unseen
Caroline Moorehead
The Exile: A Life of Ivy Litvinov John Carswell (Faber & Faber £10.95)
The condition of exile is seldom a con- tented one; the memoirs of those forced to live away from their own settings are most often testimonies of lonelinesss and boredom. Ivy Litvinov, the subject of John Carswell's biography, was an exile almost from birth — in the house of a stepfather she loathed, in her husband's revolutionary Russia, and towards the end of her life in a country no longer really her own. Yet she brought to the condition a spirit of con- trariness that defied pity. It may be that, to blossom in exile, you cannot manage without eccentricity, vanity and determina- tion: certainly, Ivy possessed those three.
She was born Ivy Low, the eldest child of an incisive Indian army daughter and a hard-working Fabian intellectual. The death of her much loved father, when she was just five, and her mother's rapid remar- riage to an expert in mediaeval illuminated manuscripts, provided Ivy with a first taste of exile. Thereafter, though growing up in a world of literature that pleased her, meeting Scott, Dickens and Trollope, she decided to make trouble. 'You're different', a scathing fellow pupil told her at the boarding school in Tynemouth to which she had been con- signed. Ivy felt different, and remained so.
London, in the early years of this cen- tury, and in particular the reading room of the British Museum, was a gathering place for Russian emigres, among them a friend of Lenin's called Maxim Maximovich Lit- vinov, a scholar and committed Bolshevik revolutionary. Enjoyably, John Carswell makes much of this particular world of the exiles, centred around the figure of Chicerin, `a febrile, well-born insomniac', later, after Trotsky, second Commissar for Foreign Affairs. The characters are exotic and there are many of them: occasionally it is like being drawn into a room full of strangers, in which literary lions are holding court, and being introduced to people whose names you don't quite hear.
It was probably at the house of her aunt Edith Eder that Ivy, by now the youthful author of a first novel called Growing Pains, was introduced to Litvinov. Soon they were meeting for tea in the Express Dairy in Hampstead and bicycling around the home counties. In February 1916 they married.
It was not, by any standards, a promising match. Ivy was 25, 'untidy, unpunctual, talkative and defiant', enormously energetic and prone to be censorious; photographs show a dumpy young woman with full hips and a quizzical, somewhat cross expression. Litvinov was 39, stout, abrupt, shabby, his pockets stuffed with maps and newspapers, `exact, and punc- tillious, disciplined and taciturn'. Of their differences, Ivy wrote that that they 'made heavy weather for our frail barque'. She called him `the Slav'; he called her `Gypsy'.Astonishingly, the marriage was to survive.
Events in Russia brought Litvinov to pro- minence, first as Soviet Plenipotentiary in Britain and later, recalled to Moscow as ad- viser to Checherin, by now Foreign Minister. In 1922, Ivy, with their children Misha and Tanya — a third baby had died at birth — joined him. She found Moscow confused and uncomfortable, but exciting, at least until she discovered that Russian ladies were more anxious to discuss hemlines than literature. As Litvinov, for all his humaneness, improbable supporter of Stalin, rose in the Soviet hierarchy, Ivy persisted in preferring Jane Austen to the men of power she met, and concentrated ever more on her own interests: her children, her translations, her lovers (she referred to her liaisons, with men as well as women, as `woodnotes wild') and introduc-
ing C.K. Ogden's Basic English to the Rus- sians. She could, as her letters show, be both funny and malicious, describing, for instance, Lord Hugh Cecil, British delegate to Geneva as a `sawkey old crocodile'. Hostess to Arnold Bennett, friend of Alex- andra Kollontai, she spent her time reading Winnie the Pooh, and hero-worshipping D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce and Henry Green.
Was it because Litvinov was so `unclub- bable' and Ivy so odd that they survived? Certainly they appeared prime candidates for Stalin's camps, as one after another of Litvinov's protégés were shot or imprison- ned. As it was, he was simply removed from office, and apart from a brief return to favour as Soviet Ambassador to the United States — Ivy greatly enjoyed being Am- bassadress — he spent the remaining years of his life in ever smaller flats in the com- pany of his children and grandchildren. Carswell attributes his survival to the fact that in the eyes of the Kremlin, he was con- sidered the embodiment of certain values admired in the West — disarmament, resistance to fascism and collective security — and as such could not be sacrificed. As he died, he said to Ivy, 'Englishwoman, go home'.
It was some years before Krushchev allowed her to do so, and she spent the time wandering around Russia, minutely observ- ing people with a care and closeness she had never brought to the Party Leaders, and writing short stories for the New Yorker that gave her some measure of the literary fame she craved. In her 82nd year, 'snow white hair cascading on to her shoulders' she came back to England and after a brief literary flurry in London settled in Hove, working and reworking her Shorter- biography as she nicknamed the life publishers repeatedly asked her for.
Ivy Litvinov was not always a likable or easy woman, but as John Carswell so sym- pathetically shows in this highly enjoyable book, she was generous, loving and very brave. He had the great advantage of know- ing her: a close friend of his mother's, to whom she wrote constantly, she became to him a 'kind of domineering, eccentric, self- appointed great aunt in Hove'. Some of the book is based on those letters.
She was a curious figure: living through remarkable times, she managed nonetheless to remain almost untouched by them, a per- manent bystander, more intrigued by details of the ordinary and by her own pas- sion to write, than in the extraordinary events to which she was witness. She had no political interests at all; the worst horrors of Stalinism, though it removed friends and frequently threatened her life, seemed to be happening at a great distance. As Carswell puts it, she was 'a fakir crossing the hot coals unburned', For his life of Ivy, Carswell had wonder- ful material and exceptional people to draw on; he uses both sparingly, never swamping his subject. As with the best books, the reader is left with a feeling of having visited a new place and with a longing for more.
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