Victimised
J. Enoch Powell
Eminent Edwardlans Piers Brendon (Seeker £6.95) All collective biography is a difficult enterprise. A biography demands concentrated attention to an individual, and this concentration is hardly possible if the individual is intended to be presented as one of a group or collection. A book of 250 pagps which has room for one character to be displayed With plenty of its own words is confined and cramped for four biographies.
The enterprise is more difficult still if the collective biographies are intended to convey the character of an era: I do not deny that a whole library of biographies of eminent English men and women born within ten years on either side of 1830 could add 1.1P to a genuine .impression of what Victorian England distinctively was; but, quite apart from the question whether any era can be characterized by only four biographies, What MIN 'the Edwardian era'? Can the Peculiarities of a decade Edward VII did not reign so long be conveyed at all by biography? The lifespans of the tour subjects in Eminent Edward/ens are as follows: Northcliffe 1865-1922; Balfour 1848-1930; Mrs Pankhurst 1858-1928; Baden-Powell 1857-1941. The latest born of these, Northcliffe., was 35 before Queen Victoria died, and it happens that he is the one whose qualifying achievement, the creation of the Daily Mail, took place in the Previous century. Balfour's premiership, the suffragette movement and Scooting for Boys admittedly all belong to the first decade of the 20th century; but in what sense does that make Balfour, Mrs Pankhurst and Baden-Powell all 'Edwardians'? But there is worse. Dr Brendan has not even given us four biographies. Determined to out-Lytton Strachey, he has instead comPosed four exercises in sustained invective and sneering denigration. It is one thing to depict a person 'warts and all'; but there is no merit in painting a series of warts and calling the result a portrait of Oliver Cromwell. The warts are real; their existence may have affected the rest of the man, but, except in a biography of a monster, it is the rest which matters. The subject of any biography, whether the author was sympathetic, unsympathetic or (as can happen) neutral, will end by leaving with each reader an impression of that personality with its weaknesses and its flaws; but that is not Dr Brendon's method. From birth to death he is on hand trying to make sure that his readers detest or despise the character as much as he does himself. The result is as , boring as it is unconvincing, with the only possible merit that it may encourage those who are interested at all to get hold of a real biography to discover what the bias and malevolence of this one have concealed.
Dr Brendon's style is that affected by sixth-form essayists and novice speakers in the Oxford Union when trying to be specially clever. 'The flesh was willing but the spirit was bleak' is an epigram on Balfour's bachelordom. The Cambridge group 'The Souls' found Burke's Peerage more absorbing than Burke's Reflections.' (In fact they didn't.) 'The gentlemen cared more about solecisms than souls; the ladies were not much less interested in parasols'. 'Their culture . . was a chic adjunct to the life of fashion, to be ranked somewhere between discreet adultery and immaculate spats'.
Anyone who is as reckless as that with language in the pursuit of cheap effect will not be very careful about facts. Balfour 'could not solve the Irish problem for the simple reason that he never understood what the Irish problem was'. That cannot be right; else why did nobody else solve it either? It was scarcely an accident that the public announcement of the Balfour Declaration was made on the same day as that of the Bolshevik coup d'etat in Petrograd'. Yes, it was; there was no collusion whatsoever. The [Balfour .1 Declaration [on Palestine lwas -a trumpet call from Sinai", the echoes of which reached to the uttermost parts of the earth; but amid the euphoria it was forgotten that Balfour's trumpet had never been known to give a certain sound'. And what would have been different if that had not been 'forgotten"?
No absurdity deters Dr Brendon from denigrating his victims. Mrs Pankhurst's children 'learn't to live plainly. They ate milk puddings and wore blue serge knickers. The regime may have taken its toll on the delicate son, who died of diphtheria in 1888'. Why has the medical profession not discovered that milk pudding or blue serge knickers or the combination of the two predisposes to diphtheria, that widespread childhood scourge of the period? The biographer's nonsense betrays his malevolence. He ascribes the opposition to votes for women partly to fear of 'what indescribable indecencies might take place' if men and women 'should meet inside a polling-booth. Mrs Pankhurst was not deceived. It did not require a Freud to see the ballot-box, with its suggestive orifice, as a symbol of man's sovereign promiscuity'. No, it required Dr Brendon's warped as well as biassed inventiveness. When Mrs Pankhurst on the outbreak of war in 1914 ended her suffragette campaign to support the war effort, 'sexual chauvinism submitted to the paramount claims of racial jingoism.' John Redmond is lucky to have escaped the author's biographical attentions; otherwise there is no knowing what enormities he would have been accused of for susupending the Home Rule campaign.
The victims' deathbeds are not safe. Baden-Powell 'did not enter a second childhood he had never left his first'. For Balfour 'the rigidity of death replaced the frigidity of life'. As for Northcliffe, 'though the Wassermann test for syphilis was by no means infallible, it was the only examination he ever passed': and it was 'the news Of a daughter's illegitimate baby' by an Italian Socialist which 'brought down Mrs Pankhurst's exquisitely coiffured silver hairs with sorrow to the grave'.
1 hope Dr Brendon will write no more biography of this style and that, if he does, neither Seeker & Warburg nor anybody else will publish it.
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