Confection
Jonathan Keates
Mr Home Pronounced Hume William Douglas-Home (Collins £6:95) Each of us now cherishes his favourite symptom of national decline, ready to advance it at the earliest possible moment in tedious `Whither England?' debates. My own is the markedly steep rise, during the last. ten years, of commercial appeals to naked and unabashed snobbery. Setting aside more seriously corrosive effects, we need only look at English publishing, extensively pervaded by greed and triviality, to find tuft-hunting in the rudest imaginable health. Comment on the royal familyin this respect is superfluous: a scrawled 'Charles' or 'Philip' under forewords to books on wildlife or conservation carries an aura of semi-divinity scarcely known since the days of Edward the Confessor, and the biographical forays of `Helen Cathcart' (a man apparently) maintain a bullish market. For the rest, a coronet or a courtesy title guarantee interest and security, in the widest sense of both terms, to reader and publisher alike.
A case in point is the present work. 'The Douglas-rHome Brothers Write Successful Books. That's Why Collins Arc Publishing Two More', says the promotional handout, with that disarming frankness so typical of the trade. Henry Douglas-Home, appropriately modest, has already written a book about watching birds, and now here comes Alec with,, some reflections on shooting them. The thud of dead game and the twitchings of moribund salmon provide an ostinato accompaniment to William's lively, capably-written and .inconsequential account of well-deserved success as our finest contemporary boulevard dramatist.
In fairness to Willy it must be said that at least one interesting thing happened to him. In 1944 he was sentenced to a year's imprisonment with hard labour for refusing to attack Le Havre, having objected, reasonably enough, that the civilian population was unprotected (12,000 were killed in the subsequent bombardment). These memoirs, alas, skate with incredible rapidity over the whole episode, and beyond assessing the reactions of friends and recounting the details of a search for somebody's ex-dentist in the exercise yard, he has nothing of any moment to say on the subject.
All too harrowing, maybe? In this case, a simple irrelevance. A more pronounced example of le style c'est Phomme would be hard to find, and those who enjoy the meringue-textured charm of 'The Chiltern Hundreds and Lloyd George Knew My Father will understand why Willy does not choose to dwell upon the incident. He would much rather we knew about his mildly eccentric father, given to audibly haranguing the Deity, about his mother, gently castigating him for `vulgarity' in his plays, or about his horse Goblin winning the 4.00 at Newmarket.
Among the humdrum contentments of life as the cadet of a. Border earl his dramaturgical capers poke out rather incongruously, like the addition of a Chinese pavilion to a Queen Anne rectory. He, has an engaging ability to accept failure, and continues to trust in the worth of such monstrous flops as Rolls Hyphen Royce and the appalling Aunt Edwina, a play about a colonel who changes sex, apparently conceived ( Lord knows why) as an attempt to trump the Fifties' Angries at their, own game. Such blandly entertained convictions have finally beaten the ern ics to their tents and the Douglas-Home oeuvre, has now become a kind of histrionic Eastbourne for theatrical knights and dames to figure comfortably in.
All this, including vignettes of Celia Johnson bolting punctiliously to the country at the end of her six-month contracts, and Wilfred Hyde-White embarrassed for an opening line ( 'My poached egg') in The Relucumt Debutante, is pleasingly handled, and Willy, master of dialogue, throws in plenty of oratia recta. The creator of such anodyne confectionery is neither more nor less than a conventionally happy and suc cessful man, who has noted down an enjoyable record of his various pleasures. The fact that as life history Mr Home Pronounced Hume possesses not the slightest trace of distinction, either in style or in outline, is unlikely to distress any of his public. It has emboldened me to 'award myself a dukedom, order a large coronet with strawberry leaves on it, and sit down to write my autobiography.
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