The Nonconformist conscience

TABLE TALK DENIS BROGAN

A few weeks ago, I bought Kingsley Martin's life of Harold Laski. I had thought that I had read it when it came out, but I hadn't and I found it very good indeed. I had planned to write to Kingsley to tell him so and to suggest one or two minor emendations. Alas, as so often happens, I let the opportunity slip, the more un- forgivable since I knew he had been seriously ill. And to have failed in a minor courtesy to- wards him was especially a ground foi remorse, since he was a man of the most spontaneous generosity, never anxious to score when he could well have done so. Few writers of my time can have had more friends who thought most of what they wrote was nonsense but admired and even loved the man who wrote it. As Mr Bernard Levin has pointed out, Kingsley Martin had no hate in him and it was only in his old age that he came to realise that the gains of the Enlightenment had been largely illusory But while some of the apostles of the Enlightenment,, even the noblest of them like Diderot, knowingly pulled their punches in favour of such ambiguous allies as Frederick the Great and Catherine the Great, with Kings- ley Martin it was with anguish that he departed from his own standards by suppressing incon- venient truths. It was so painful to him to do so that he never excited in my breast the ad- noyance that Laski often did and, in their later days, Shaw and the Webbs, Geoffrey Dawson and, at times, C. P. Scott.

For Kingsley was not merely a child of the Nonconformist conscience, he embodied it. And he was too intelligent and too honest not to

know that he often put himself into an impos- sible position, knowing the better and too often

palliating the worse. He was a victim of his age. A pacifist to the marrow of his bones, he had yet to support a great war. As far as a war could be supported the Second World War was one that Kingsley could support, but with what interior anguish! Perhaps he and others like him deserved Keynes's famous reproof that if.; it weren't for Colonel Blimp we'd all be con- quered, but on moral questions I'd much rather have had Kingsley's judgment than Keynes's. And not merely on moral questions. It was, I think, a misfortune that Kingsley had to deal with Keynes as a proprietor. Keynes was cleverer than Kingsley but he was also very often sillier.

I remember being horrified at the New States- man leader on the unopposed reoccupation of the Rhineland in March 1936. I wrote a brief but violent letter of protest ending (as I .re- member it), 'this means war.' I got at once a moving letter from Kingsley. He entirely agreed with me; h.:. had written a leader in that sense which Keynes had killed and replaced by one of his own. I didn't censure him—and the folly of Keynes didn't surprise me.

Unlike his great friend Harold Laski, Kings- ley though vain was not a snob. He was no name-dropper and did not think better of his enemies when they became ministers. Nor would he let great left figures get away with out-

rageously inconsistent conduct. Thus in his last visit to India, he told Nehru how wrong he was about Kashmir. No doubt he made too many

hasty trips and picked up and issued quick and sometimes silly judgments, but his travel notes (politics apart) showed one of the best sides of his literary talents.

I say this the more willingly since I never liked the diary he wrote as 'Critic'. I have a strong dislike of rural sages. I strongly suspect

that some of the rural philosophers were sup- plied by an equivalent of Hollywood's Central Casting Agency. Kingsley was a city Man and as much a real country dweller as Horace. But as an editor, he was in a first class—of one member. He was not as tough-minded or as consistent as Clifford Sharp had been, but quite apart from the immediate crisis which led to Sharp's departure, Sharp could never have

made the New Statesman what it was, the

mirror image of the left. His ablest collabora- tors like Dick Crossman and, much earlier.

George Schwarz, might try to infiltrate their ideas and sometimes a leader was a 'conglo- merate' in which it was possible to read Martin in one line and Crossman in the next, all re- vised by that sagacious and indispensable man, John Roberts, the printer. But it was Kingsley's paper.

That was why so many people who dis- believed everything (well nearly everything) that Kingsley wrote and a lot of what he stood for, read it, wrote for it and wrote letters to it. (I have done all three.) And I remember best a short and friendly letter running like this. 'Of course I'll print your attack. But I took the liberty of tampering with your text. You have given a fourth declension noun a second de- clension genitive plural. I thought you wouldn't mind my grammatical emendation.' Other tditors would gladly let me display my illiteracy and score with a 'sic'. In the same way, Kings- ley reviewed a political tract of mine Is Inno- cence Enough? which was largely an attack on the New Statesman (and on the Left Book Club nonsense of Guilty Men). It was a most friendly, candid and illuminating review. 1 was not dismissed as a fascist beast etc.

One of the obituaries I read asserts that it was the Webbs who chose Kingsley for editor- ship. Kingsley told me at the time, that the final vote was cast, in fact, by Arnold Bennett, who invited Kingsley to a private dinner in the Savoy, gave him a meal he wouldn't have got from the Webbs and then decided that Kingsley would do.

Arnold Bennett was right. It is true that many people began with the literary pages and moved on reluctantly to the letters (read and possibly answered), then read the leader or didn't read the leader. But an editor is an editor is an editor is an editor. If his literary or city or theatrical pages are bad he is basically to blame; if they are good he is part owner of the credit. And in this sense Kingsley Martin was a great editor.

The rise of the New Statesman is an answer. And it won't do simply to account for this

by saying, as Charles ll did of the success as a preacher of the Vicar of Harrow-on-the-Hill, 'His nonsense suits their nonsense.'

And Kingsley's heart was so often in the right place that his head often was too. And, as he never forgot, he was by origin an his- torian and didn't often fall into 'as everybody knows' nonsense. Of course, 'in spite of all

temptation, he remained an Englishman' and that meant that he misunderstood foreigners (he understood the Irish better than he did the Scots). Deeply marked by his experiences as a conscientious objector in the First World War and angered by what seemed to him the naivety —and worse—of the young Americans he had met at Princeton, he never knew much about Americans (much less than Laski did) and didn't like them much. (In return many didn't like him; his name at Princeton was, for long, mud.) And he never knew what Germans were up to. I think he did know what the Russian Communists were up to to a certain degree, but that he never knew what the Soviet government was up to. (Palmerston would have seen more clearly.) - Although he came to see how much more complex and how much more cursed by original sin the world was than he had believed when he first took over the New Statesman and al- though, like most people of his and my age, he ceased to believe in automatic progress or perhaps in progress, he was if a man with a grievance (as Keynes said) usually a man with a creditable grievance. And if I remember some outbursts of moral indignation, they ■ ere mostly justified. But I remember him more as a basically optimistic and even cheerful man. Never hav- ing put as much faith in the Labour party as Harold Laski did, he never suffered the same sense of betrayal. That is why his pamphlet on the Abdication crisis of Edward VIII is so much more worth reading than Laski's con- stitutional propriety. After he left Great Turn- stile, it was common for many of Kingsley's old friends to quote the remark of Master William Hepworth Thompson of Trinity when he had listened to the inaugural lecture of Sir John Seeley as Regius Professor of Modern History, in succession to the author of The Water Babies. `I did not think we should miss poor Kingsley so soon.' Many, many men and women must be saying and thinking that now, for that theatrically handsome man with the warm voice was an important part of the lives of many. Kingsley Martin, as a man and in- stitution, was part of their memories of more hopeful times.