George Gale on the muddled Critic of the old staggers

I would not have thought it possible to be moved almost to tears by a biography of Kingsley Martin, but such was the condition to which C. H. Rolph's account* of the man who edited the New Statesman from 1930 to 1960 reduced me. I never met him, and had I done so he would certainly have irritated me and I would probably have disliked him. Frequently wrong and always muddle-headed himself, he seems to have been the cause of much wrong-headedness and more muddle in others. This biography itself is very muddled in parts; it is at times irritatingly reticent; it would have been much better had its author accepted a sterner chronological discipline instead of choosing the easier method of writing a series of studies of aspects of his subject's life, arranged in a roughly chronological sequence. But the book succeeds, at the end, in overwhelming the sum of its defects in a way that its subject never did.

Kingsley Martin died in Egypt, while staying with Apa Pant, then Indian Ambassador. The woman with whom he had lived for many years, Dorothy Woodman, wrote to the woman he had, apparently, loved for even longer, and who is called here Verity,' this extraordinary letter:

We did not have secrets. I've loved others, and always we were frank; and several times the three of us have had moments of such harmony that could only come of complete trust and frankness. For me, there is only one shadow, and I've often wanted to say it but never had the chance. Perhaps women can't communicate, though I think we could have done. The shadow is your sorrow. I have felt it, I feel it, and I shall always have the kind of love for you that I felt when we met years ago. But my life is to wander now in fields where you have never wandered. Kingsley has been reborn in me — any Buddhist understands this extraordinary phenomenon. I am a pagan. I do not believe in any supernatural existence. I gave Kingsley's body to Arab doctors, as I would have given it to Israeli, Mexican, Negro or American doctors, tor medical research as he and I wanted. But he is with me all the time, and I have a blissful new release of energy to do his work as well as my own as well as I can. This phenomenon I believe to be the result of months of agony which I did not share with anyone. And then I found strength in myself, and he was here with me.

I do not mourn him. He would not have been able to speak properly, nor to walk, nor to write. He dreaded helplessness above all. One day he asked me where it would be less difficult to find his body . . . He was feeling very ill, dreading another stroke . . . and clearly meant to end life himself if he were made helpless. Great courage, great common sense; and how true to his humanism . . . You were Cambridge to him, and he never ceased to look back with anguish and love on those days . . . We had no secrets, though details were of no importance and not even discussed. Nor should they be .

Sometimes, especially on the Downs, we used to say to each other " How can we have found such happiness?" And after 32 years that happiness was still miraculously extending every day, though Kingsley was a very, very sick man. Life was a

great struggle for him for the past live years . • . You and I are lucky to have loved him.

Yours always, Dorothy.

This is, in many ways, a repugnant document, which Rolph calls "poignantly revealing." We are not told who 'Verity' is, but unless, as seems unlikely, she went in for the kind of eastern mumbo-jumbo which allowed Dorothy Woodman to proclaim " Kingsley has been reborn in me," she presumably must have been pained by the brutal " I gave Kingsley's body to Arab doctors " and offended by the proprietorial cosiness envisaged in "Sometimes, especially on the Downs, we used to say to each others How can we have found such happiness?'" That, as the New Yorker used to have it, is a quote we doubt anybody ever quoted. The letter suggests that Kingsley Martin might also, with "great courage, great common sense" and "true to his humanism " have killed himself. This, too, is a sentimentality. He may well have talked about suicide; but he was, Rolph makes clear, much too frightened of death to have committed it. Someone "true to his humanism "

who is genuinely intending to kill himself does not enquire of someone he apparently loves, " where it would be less difficult to find his body." This is the querulous request of someone wanting sympathy and using moral blackmail to obtain it. Likewise, the letter from Dorothy Woodman to ' Verity ' is the letter of someone, when it is all over and done with, who is staking out her claim.

These closing details moved me. The brilliant young amateur actor was hamming it up, right to the end. Women, protesting . their disinterested love, squabbled over him. Arab doctors cut up the corpse " for medical

research." Rolph has painted us a very human portrait, which conveys how it was not only possible but fairly easy to love a man whom, known only by his works and general repute, it would be natural to dislike and to despise. Thus Colin Welch, reviewing this book in the Sunday Telegraph, and pointing out many of Kingsley Martin's failings, writes "I have painted an unattractive picture of an attractive man " and, having quoted Rolph's sad conclusion, "I wish he had not gone away," adds," I wish that too."

Kingsley Martin chose John Freeman to succeed him as editor of the New Statesman in much the same way that Clement Attlee saw to it that Gaitskell was his successor: At tlee was far more determined to keep Morri son out than to get Gaitskell in, and Kingsley Martin, likewise, refused to allow Dick Cross man to succeed him. John Freeman has re viewed this book in the New Statesman and in its way his favourable review of the book is most damning of its subject: "there will certainly be some readers who find Mr Rolph's gentle and dispassionate advocacy in sufficient to exonerate his subject from the charge of a quite unacceptable level of double-think" — about, in this reference, the Spanish Civil War. Freeman writes of Mar tin's "ambiguous attitude towards CND in ' the 'fifties—passionate, but at the same time oddly anxious and uncommitted." But Freeman himself is ambiguous about his pre decessor: " His inner moral certainties were absolute . . . But always he was afflicted with intellectual doubt." The combined attributes of moral certainty and intellectual doubt are those of a fool and a hypocrite. " Practically every political judgement he formed," John Freeman writes of Kingsley Martin, " and every public attitude he struck was paid for in an agony of indecision;" and that indecision had its practical use for his subordinates: "Moreover, if you cared, as most of us did, where the New Statesman stood on any particular issue, it was worth fighting for your view until the very last moment of editorial indecision. Thus journalists as varied and sometimes incompatible in their views as, say, Richard Crossman, G. D. H. Cole, Leonard Woolf, Norman MacKenzie, Alexander Werth, Vicky, V. S. Pritchett, T. C. Worsley, Paul Johnson and John Morgan could work together over long periods, not always be it said without friction, but at least in the knowledge that the editorial mind was up for grabs." Kingsley Martin seems to have been much better at inspiring affection than loyalty or respect.

There is a good deal of excessive solemnity in the way the Left discusses, indeed dissects and anatomises, itself. The Left produces men who are figures of fun rather than funny men. This, at least, is how they publicly present themselves. But Kingsley Martin, despite his great journalistic success and despite, too, the humbug of much that he wrote and did, had a life containing failures, disappointments and tragedies. It is these which seem to me to give stature to this book, and to the man, rather than his ostensible triumphs; and indeed Rolph provides us, possibly unwittingly, with better grounds for understanding Martin's weaknesses than his strengths.

He went up to Cambridge after the first world war, during which he had bravely served as a conscientious objector with the Friends' Ambulance Unit. He took a good degree in history, was elected by his college, Magdalene, into a bye-fellowship and then went to Princeton for a year. Already he had acquired an influential acquaintanceship. He almost got a full Fellowship at King's; later, he believed he might have got one at Peterhouse. He hoped to be given a university lectureship which would enable him to preach on, and found a school in, political science. He fell madly in love with 'Verity ' and enjoyed some blissful months of happiness. But everything fell through. 'Verity ' married

someone else.-Instead of Cambridge he got a job at the London School of Economics, and instead of " Verity " he married, with tragic consequence, Olga Walters. Rolph's account of the marriage — which soon collapsed in practice but which endured in fact until 1964, when Olga Martin, half cracked, living in a cottage stinking with cats, rotten and wet, with the plumbing out of order because of her fear that to get a plumber might cause "the authorities" to put her away, was knocked down on the road at night and killed — is very well told. Olga paid her bills, again because she feared that if she did not the authorities would intervene. " And to the utter astonishment of Kingsley, who had paid her £350 a year for 24 years, she died worth £24,000." Olga was. his burden; 'Verity' remained his love; Dorothy Woodman was his support; other women passed through; and Cambridge, or at least the academic life, remained his dream.

How, then, did this young man, son of a Unitarian preacher, become a journalist? And what was the nature and measure and cause of his success when, in a way, the rest of his life was all wrong? It is in seeking the answers to these and similar questions that we get least help from his biographer. He tells us how, C. P. Scott "totally unexpectedly" wrote Kingsley Martin in 1927 a letter offering him a job as a leader-writer on the Manchester Guardian at £1000 a year, at a time when Beveridge, at the London School of Economics, was passing him over for promotion from assistant lecturer to full lecturer and thereby denying him an increase in salary from £250 to £350 a year. What on earth induced Scott to offer the young lecturer so much; and to agree that he serve a ninemonths' year at £800 if he liked? It is not made clear. What is clear, however, is that Kingsley Martin was a failure at Manchester; and that he was being eased out when, three years later, at Maynard Keynes's behest, he was offered the editorship of the newly amalgamated New Statesman arid Nation which, within four or five years or so, he had turned into that weekly compendium of views familiarly known to its intimate rea,ders as the old staggers and naggers. The affectionate nickname was apt enough, except that, like all such pet names, it disguised the worst errors by treating them as quirk!" little lapses.

This is not the occasion to rehearse in detail the very severe journalistic charges that must be laid against Kingsley Martin. He had scant regard for truth, his fickle judgment was notoriously wrong over Munich, for twenty years (if not more) his editorship was marred by a wilful refusal fully to recognise and acknowledge the evil nature of the Stalinist regime, and throughout he was far too easily influenced by communists, fellow-travellers and those whose skins were not white. His editorship was marred also by a disinclination to acknowledge the great part played in the New Statesman's success by its 'back end,' or literary. and arts section. In, post-war Cambridge, for instance, it was usual to read the weeklies; and the comparative success of the New Statesman, in my own experience, was usually attributed to its • back end,'-which sold the paper in spite of, rather than together with, its dotty front. Also, as editor he was loth to give his colleagues due credit; and, so it seems from Rolph's book, he never accepted the contribution made by John Roberts in the management of the company.

Nevertheless, we are left with the fact that Kingsley Martin's editorship of the New Statesman was one of the most successful editorships Seen in this country in this century. There was obviously a sense in which Kingsley Martin's attitudes corresponded very closely with a considerable section of the English intelligentsia and would-be intelligentsia who thought that there was a great deal wrong with the system as they found it, who thought it was morally superior to be left-wing, who hated what they called ' fascism ' and -who loved, or were prepared to turn a blind eye on, what they called 'communism.', who, had lost their Christian faith (but, oddly, not their Jewish faith) but who still wanted a nice simple set of moral precepts with which to categorise (and casti gate) the world around them. Kingsley Mar tin's 'influence' was to supply these people each week with a ready-made set of attitudes with which to agree or disagree for the next seven days; they, in turn, supplied him with affection, and the kind of readership which had about it something of a club and something of a great big fairly happy family.

Easily his best journalism was in his weekly London Diary, by 'Critic.' It was an odd pseudonym, for there was nothing very critical in his approach to the issues of the day. In one sense, his influence was certainly malign. He did not — because he could not or would not — realise that the evils of German Nazism were the same evils as those of Stalin's Russia; instead, he thought and argued, and cheated and lied and edited — that, although there were things wrong in Russia, as far as communism and socialism were concerned the ends could justify almost all the means. He played a great part in sustaining that muddle which still persists among those of 'left wing' persuasion, that the tyrannies, of 'the left' are somehow different from, and better than, the tyrannies of 'the right.' I do not believe for one moment that he created that muddle. The muddle existed before him. It was a muddle desired, for many reasons, by many men. Kingsley Martin gave that muddle a kind of respectability and its most characteristic utterance.

Why then is this biography, muddled itself, so moving? It is a monument to human frailty. It is a work of piety and affection.a is also the honest description of a dishonest subject, and more, the very humane account of a very human fellow, who got very many public things and a great deal of his private life wrong, but who had the gifts of survival and of courage and the journalistic knack of writing what it pleased his audience to read. I wish I had known him, and thanks to Rolph feel that in a way I now do.