The images that Uncle Helmuth saw in those smart-set periodicals traitorously smuggled into his four-room household were, at worst, the listing sails of an oceangoing regatta and, mounted like medallions in the sky overhead, the not very informative portraits of the ship owners in breezy skipper’s caps, white turtlenecks, and stylish navy-blue blazers; racetrack bleachers crowded with ladies in flimsy frocks and enormous heron-feather hats, and gentlemen in gray toppers and polished leather binocular cases hanging sprucely from narrow straps on their chests; or else a snapshot series of men and women standing in the same cataleptic convulsion, the right leg twisted and the knee turned in, the left knee bent, toes pointed inward, the arms yanked over the right shoulder, head stretched to the left, eyes peering down toward the feet at a small white ball that is to be struck by a golf club that is swung against the backdrop of a cascading weeping-willow branch; or else a saber-legged grouplet of four, each man wearing spurred boots and a cork helmet that casts a shadow like a mask over his suntanned face, in the sportily gloved left hand the grip of a casually shouldered polo stick, and in the right a silver cup—Messrs. Bully Olivera, Putzi Cottolenghi-Strazza, Bruce Spencer-Fox, and Jean de Fegonzac (grandson of the beauty-loving vicomtesse)—and below, perhaps, a close-up of Sir Agop Garabetian, who donated the cup and whose monocle, in his Arabian Nights face with its twirling black beard, flashes sheer benevolence toward all mankind.

Such photographic documentation preceded detailed descriptions of the subsequent soirées, with exhaustive lists of names. But when it came to precise particulars of the ladies’ toilettes and jewels, the reporting was taken over by draftsmen who knew how to render the essential better than any writers or photographers. Now, it may be astonishing to realize how much (thanks to a perceptiveness that should be of interest to novelists) can be deduced from even the meagerest external signs of a human being’s condition, yet such vision-restricting peeps into the world of “the beautiful people” could not possibly have permitted the insights that empowered Uncle Helmuth to snort, “They are to blame for everything! They have all mankind on their consciences! People like us have to drudge for them!”

Or: “It’s for them that people like us had to risk our necks for four years! . . . Bu-u-u-t”—his voice trembling in the bombast of indignation, giving the ominously drawled vowel a wavy, swinging staccato—“bu-u-u-t, if the whole business starts up again, then it will go against them!”

24

There is no denying that now, in February 1940, it looks as if Uncle Helmuth will turn out to be right. Of course, at first blush, such a positioning of fronts is not clear-cut. One has to see the situation with John’s eyes, too: agreeing on this point, as on so many, with Uncle Ferdinand, he regarded the First World War as a class war and views the Second as merely and certainly an intensified continuation of the First, with a more decisive focus on the true goal.