BOOKS

Study of a history man

Bevis Hillier

ARNOLD J. TOYNBEE: A LIFE by William H. McNeill

OUP, £16.95, pp.346

Amold Toynbee was a `macrohisto- rian': he had what his American bio- grapher calls an 'overview'. A thousand years were but as yesterday in Toynbee's sight. The centuries jostled each other, richocheted and spun into their appointed holes in the great pin-ball machine of his world view. He dealt with civilisations, not with the traditional units of history, nation- states. He tried to work out what the different civilisations had in common. Like most people who look for answers, he found one: a cyclical system of develop- ment and decline. The idea does not strike one as especially profound. (James Laver read the same kind of thing into the rise and fall of women's hemlines — as his Times obituary said, he found 'sermons in stoles'.) But the theory was dressed up with a dazzling range of reference from Toynbee's encyclopaedic reading of his- tory, and was garnished with the juiciest metaphors.

Toynbee's world view did not enable him to analyse effectively what was hap- pening in his own time, or to predict what would happen next. Hitler, in February 1936, as a propaganda move to soften up Europe for his reoccupation of the west bank of the Rhine, granted him a two-hour interview. Toynbee was canny enough not to rush into print with his impressions, but in a confidential memorandum to Anthony Eden, the foreign secretary, and Stanley Baldwin, the prime minister, he suggested that 'Hitler was quite sincere' in telling him that 'the fundamental principle of National Socialism was to build a Reich on an exclusively national basis — reuniting the whole German nation, but not including anyone else.' And in 1944 Toynbee wrote to his father-in-law, Gilbert Murray: 'I have no doubt at all that the world is going to be united politically, and war abolished — at any rate for several centuries within the next 25 years.' Toynbee 'con- tinued to think. . . that abolition of war was the critical, overriding challenge con- fronting Western civilisation.'

This was a yearning natural and common in the generation whose contemporaries had been mown down in World War I; but surely Toynbee's gruelling study of history (or just one reading of Hobbes's Leviathan) should have milled out of him Such starry-eyed utopianism. A book now riding high among the non-fiction bestsell- ers in America is Robert Fulghum's All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kinder- garten (Villard Books). One of the first things you learn in kindergarten is that nature is red in tooth and claw; but Toynbee seems never to have learnt it, in all his vasty scavengings of time.

The author of this biography, William McNeill — professor of history emeritus at the University of Chicago — is also a macrohistorian. He has written A World History, The Shape of European History and The Rise of the West, of which the New York Times Book Review said: 'This is not only the most learned and the most intelli- gent, it is also the most stimulating and fascinating book that has ever set out to recount and explain the whole history of mankind.' Arnold Toynbee read, thought and wrote far more than he actually lived; so his biographer needs to be a macrohisto- rian, just as Isaac Newton's needs to be a mathematician or scientist. McNeill is qualified to catch Toynbee out when the great man manipulates the evidence to make it fit into one of his grand schemes. He does not spare him a scourging: A few awkward anomalies, like the sudden emergence of the Ummayad califate in the seventh century AD - a universal state without any obvious pre-existing civilisation for it to unite — provoked Toynbee into making rather implausible assertions to save his system. Thus he declared that the Arab conquerors, inspired by Mohammed's newly minted revelation, were 'unconscious and unintended champions' of a 'Syriac' civilisa- tion that had gone underground a thousand years before at the time of Alexander's conquest. No one before Toynbee had con- ceived of a Syriac civilisation, and it seems safe to assume that he invented the entire concept in order to be able to treat the Ummayad califate as a universal state with a civilisation of its own.

But equally, McNeill is qualified to appraise Toynbee's achievement, his `powerful and entrancing vision of the human condition'. With all that Toynbee may have owed to Oswald Spengler and F.J. Teggart, McNeill considers that A Study of History 'expanded the range of historical consciousness beyond anything conceived by historians before him'.

I do not think you would find anyone more fit than McNeill to write Toynbee's life. The question is, whether he has allowed himself enough time. He tells us that he undertook the task in 1986 at the invitation of Toynbee's sole surviving son, Lawrence. Given that six months usually elapse between typescript and publication, McNeill must have dispatched his task in just over two years — three at the outside. One cannot help suspecting that there has been an indecent scramble to hit the centenary of Toynbee's birth this year, in a sort of biographical Beat the Clock. McNeill has certainly had his nose deep in the Toynbee papers at the Bodleian Lib- rary, but in some other ways he seems to have scamped his research.

McNeill suffers from a common mis- apprehension of historians, that primary sources (letters, diaries) are the only ones that matter. He mentions, but there is little sign that he has read, a book of the first importance for the insights it gives into Toynbee's life: Comparing Notes: A Dia- logue across a Generation by Arnold and Philip Toynbee (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1963 — McNeill gives the publisher as `Nicholson & Weidenfeld'). Arnold Toyn- bee's family always took second place to his writing, and no great love was lost between him and his second son Philip, best known as an Observer book critic. In a memoir written after Toynbee's death (and quoted by McNeill) Philip remembered him without affection:

My two brothers and I attracted his attention largely as nuisances. How clearly, even today, I can see his head poking out of the window of his study, his face a mask of nervous irritation, as he sternly reproved us for making too much noise.

In the 1930s, more to spite his mother than his father, Philip became a commun- ist; his elder brother Tony made a more tragic bid for attention by committing suicide. Hitler's pact with Stalin cured Philip of his communism, and by 1963 he was on good enough terms with his father to collaborate with him on the Comparing Notes book. The value of the book, to a biographer, is that Arnold Toynbee is not given the time, as in his volumes of reminiscences, to attitudinise and present himself to best advantage: he is put on the spot by a far from wholly sympathetic interrogator.

Comparing Notes gets one as near as one can get to what Toynbee thought about religion: he was a sort of Age of Reason deist. He is grilled on sexual morals, cruelty, envy and lust for possessions. Then there are fragments of pure auto- biography, as when Philip asks him whether he is a puritan with a belief that suffering is ennobling. Toynbee replies: My Uncle Harry had a great influence on me in this. I must have told you the story of my standing by his sofa and his saying to me: we weren't brought into the world to be happy. And I thought: I am only three; it's rather early to be told this. I didn't dispute that it was so, but I felt I might have been left till I was four or five before being told. So I suppose the puritan attitude did get into me. Also, I do believe in this business about striving and effort, and suffering being the price of achievement and so on.

Comparing Notes further shows that Toynbee thought he had become a histo- rian through his mother's being one; that he was put off Shakespeare at Winchester by having to read all his plays in one term for an examination, but fell in love with Goethe; that the Dreyfus case caused a stir at Winchester; that as a prefect he beat a boy, and regretted it CI think I'd always be very bad at handling power'); and that after his intensive classical education he felt more at home in the ancient Greek world than his own (`Our own native language became alien to us'). The book also reveals more than McNeill's about Toynbee's Balliol friendship with Lewis Namier. Toynbee was able to 'discover England' through Namier's foreign eyes; and he recalled for his son the incredulity with which he and his friends received Namier's first scenting of the Great War:

During the Balkan wars, it must have been in 1912, I think, Namier went home to Eastern Galicia and came back at the end of the vacation. He told us that the Austrian Army was mobilised on his father's estate and the Russian Army just across the frontier . . . so things looked pretty serious. We just roared with laughter at this, and thought: what a fantastic part of the world old Bernstein (as he then was) comes from! He, of course, was completely baffled by our not taking it seriously. We didn't see that it had anything to do with us, though, within four years from then, half of us had been killed in Flanders.

So one cannot say of McNeill's book what he says of D.0 Somervell's abridg- ment of Toynbee's magnum opus: 'His art lay in what he omitted.' But we should not underestimate what McNeill has been able to achieve in his two to three years of research. The main facts of Toynbee's life are clearly set out. He was born near Paddington Station in 1889 of a shabby- genteel family, struggling to keep up middle-class appearances, which in those days required nannies and cooks. His father, Harry, a charity worker, went into a mental hospital in 1909, never to emerge. After Winchester and Balliol, where he was a prize-winning loner, Toynbee be- came a Balliol tutor. Later he took a series of public and semi-public posts; but all of them, always, were subsidiary to his grand ambition, conceived almost in childhood, of writing a history of humanity.

He escaped service in World War I through having contracted dysentery by drinking from a contaminated stream in the Peloponnese in 1912. McNeill implies that Toynbee could have served if he had wanted to; and he is perceptive about the recurrent guilt Toynbee felt about having chickened out. In fact, he is good and fair on Toynbee's psychology throughout. It is not the kind of life-story that could be turned into a successful film; though Toyn- bee did make a pass at the mediaevalist Eileen Power on a trip to Manchuria and northern China in 1929: a professor quoted by McNeill described her as having 'a Meryl Streep kind of startling good looks° with 'a LSE mind'. And Toynbee's wife Rosalind eventually left him (to his desola- tion) and lived with a Dominican. Toynbee divorced her and married his research assistant. McNeill astutely shows how what was happening in Toynbee's life affected what went into his volumes — and this expose must undermine confidence in the `eternal veracity' of the Study.

Everything in Toynbee's life was sub- ordinated to what Rosalind Toynbee dis- missively called 'the nonsense book'. It follows that interest in this biography will be proportionate to how highly the Study is regarded. The zenith of Toynbee's reputa- tion as a world guru was in 1947, when Henry Luce gave him the cover of Time magazine. The nadir came ten years later when Hugh Trevor-Roper made him the object of brilliant raillery in Encounter. Some believe Toynbee's reputation will never recover from the assault. McNeill himself, from his lofty perch as Toynbee's natural successor, thinks that future histor- ians will 'treat him as a minor figure'. But wait . . . the Japanese are amassing hoards of Toynbee papers in Tokyo — the mad- dening Japanese who would not give McNeill access, as they have not yet prepared a Japanese index. And anyone who thinks that Toynbee is down and out should mark what Sir Moses Finley says in The Use and Abuse of History (1975): It is a fiction fondly believed to be true by English historians that neither Spengler nor Toynbee has been taken seriously by profes- sionals. Although this is possibly correct in England, it is not the case elsewhere. In the first 18 volumes (1950-67) of Saeculum, sub-titled Jahrbuch far Universalgeschichte, there are seven articles about Toynbee, six about Goethe . . . four on Marx, two each on Engels, Huizinga, Jaspers and Mommsen, no more than one about anyone else.