One hundred years ago, Claud Cockburn was in his third year at Oxford. He would grow up to become a merry and piratical left-wing journalist, a horsefly on England’s body politic. For now, he was merely the most charming person many people had ever met. Friends and family competed to introduce him to well-known bores, knowing he could draw out anyone.
At Oxford, Cockburn’s hard-drinking social circle included his cousin Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, with whom he intrepidly traveled when they were 19. Cockburn (pronounced KO-burn) edited Oxford’s student magazine The Isis. He was a bookish young man on the make. After his graduation, he drifted into journalism.
He was a star correspondent for The Times of London in Berlin, where he picked up inklings of Germany’s drift into fascism, and then in America, where he arrived in time to witness the stock market crash of 1929 and the early years of the Great Depression.
His antifascist and anticapitalist politics, informed by his experiences, drifted left and then hard left. He joined the Communist Party. When he resigned from The Times, the paper’s editor wrote to him: “Rather bad luck that you of all people should have gone red on us.”
In his deft and fond new book “Believe Nothing Until It Is Officially Denied: Claud Cockburn and the Rise of Guerrilla Journalism,” Cockburn’s son, the journalist Patrick Cockburn, notes that his father demonstrated “how those in authority can be challenged and harassed by a determined and skillful journalist, even one almost entirely without resources.”
Cockburn met his moment in 1933, when he founded a weekly newsletter in London called The Week. He was its sole writer. He printed it, crudely, on a mimeograph machine.
Though The Week’s circulation was small, its influence was not. Cockburn became one of the most important polemical journalists of his time. His was an original sensibility.
His Oxford and social connections provided him with good tipsters, and he was a slashing stylist. He routinely broke stories that made the establishment’s eyes poke out like a shrimp’s. The United Kingdom’s security agency, MI5, began to monitor his activities.
Cockburn’s greatest coup was to report, week after week in the early and mid-1930s, on the threat Hitler posed to Europe. This was long before the British government and media woke up to it. Cockburn gleefully exposed Germany’s appeasers in the U.K., including members of the Astor family.
It’s remarkable that this is the first biography of Cockburn (1904-81). His life was dense with incident. He fought (poorly) in the Spanish Civil War. In Weimar Germany he met and fell in love with Jean Ross, who was the inspiration for the character Sally Bowles in Christopher Isherwood’s fiction, and later for the singer in the musical “Cabaret.”
They were partners for six years and had a child. Ross was a vastly more serious person than Isherwood and “Cabaret” let on. She helped Cockburn run The Week and she accompanied him to Spain, where she was a war reporter for The Daily Express. After they separated, she never had another full-time partner because, she said, “nobody else could be as much fun as Claud.”
In later life Cockburn wrote, under a pseudonym, the novel “Beat the Devil” (1951), which became a John Huston film starring Humphrey Bogart. He also wrote several autobiographies; these have not lost their sparkle.
At times this biography is perhaps too fond. It skimps on coverage of Cockburn’s critics, including George Orwell, who thought Cockburn’s reporting from Spain (under the pseudonym “Frank Pitcairn”) was sloppy and in thrall to Stalin’s handlers. Cockburn also admitted to writing about a battle that never happened. Better a gorgeous lie, he appeared to have thought, than a dull truth.
Patrick Cockburn does argue, convincingly, that his father’s politics were more subtle than they sometimes seemed.
I also wish this book had gone deeper into Cockburn’s aristocratic background and into the media dynasty he spawned. All three of his sons became journalists, and his grandchildren include the actress Olivia Wilde. His father was a well-traveled British diplomat; Claud spent portions of his childhood in Peking and Budapest. His paternal great-grandfather was the Scottish judge and biographer Lord Cockburn.
Cockburn had fine manners and an Oxford accent, but he wore both lightly. Clive James wrote about the young E.E. Cummings that he “was as hot against materialist society as only a poet living on a trust fund can be.” It’s tempting to say something similar about Cockburn, but no trust fund is in evidence — even if, in the background of this book, you can hear the crisp tearing open of invitations.
He was always skimping, living like a bohemian and getting by with a little help from his friends. (He could tap people like Nancy Cunard, the shipping heiress.) Patrick Cockburn writes, “Claud could survive on limited food or a comfortable place to sleep, but he could not willingly do without alcohol and cigarettes, considering it perfectly natural that he should spend his last pennies on them.”
To friends who worried about his lack of resources, Cockburn replied, “Don’t you understand that a glider doesn’t need a bloody engine?” An air of gaiety surrounded him.
It’s to Patrick Cockburn’s credit that he doesn’t try too hard to elevate the incidents of Claud’s life into destiny. He lets his father’s history happen on the page. Claud was an imperfect man, but his intensities and animations, and his habit of independent thought, make him well worth meeting here.
You can imagine Claud saying, as does Ishmael in “Moby-Dick,” that curiosity got “the better of my breeding.”
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