Four lives
MICHAEL WHARTON
A.P.H.: His Life and Times Sir Alan Herbert (Heinemann 63s) My Commonplace Book Mary Stocks (Peter Davies 55s) Whatever Happened to Tom Mix Ted Willis (Cassell 42s)
The Trumpet in the Hall Bernard Fergusson (Collins 45s)
It takes, as the saying is, all sorts to make a world. Here are the autobiographies of four strikingly different people. None of them has produced an autobiographical masterpiece. But all have played their part in great events, and all, not always consciously, illustrate some of the tendencies of their time.
Sir Alan Herbert, oldest of the four (born in 1890), is also by far the best known. His book fizzes along with an enormous sense of enjoyment, celebrating an exceptionally full and satisfactory life. As humorist and writer of plays and musicals he has given pleasure to vast numbers of people. As MP and fighter for good causes he has used another side of his great energies to admirable effect. He is, above all, an extremely English figure, an all-round man, English in his sound Tory commonsense and dislike of progressive jargon and fashionable humbug; English, too, in a certain bonhomous, clubman's philistinism, sometimes (though not always) a very useful quality; English with an old- style Englishness which now seems to be fading out for ever.
In quite a different way, Mary Stocks is also an extremely English figure. Born a year after Sir Alan into a prosperous, middle-class radical family, she joyfully inherited the purest tradition of Victorian reformism. She duly became a Socialist,. campaigned for women's suffrage, adult education and many another such cause; took her place with the `statutory women' who appeared like a stage army on one government committee after another; became principal of a women's col- lege; an inveterate broadcaster in the days when the Bac was still the BBC; and finally a Life Peeress.
Her chronicle of a life of public service, supported by private happiness (she says at the outset that since her childhood 'I have suffered no major frustrations') has one striking characteristic: a total absence of self-doubt. 'We knew we were right', she writes of herself and her fellow progressives as they campaign against what seems to them entrenched stupidity or ill-will in some such cause as 'family planning' or in the affair of Suez. But were they so monotonously right as they imagined? And if, as now seems clear, they were quite as often wrong, what will future generations of English people have to say about their strange complacency?
A fellow-Socialist (and fellow member of the House of Lords) but of a very different and, some may think, much less appealing kind, is Ted Willis, known to all or most as the creator of Dixon of Dock Green. Born in 1918, Willis describes in much sentimental detail a working class childhood in North London and his graduation to Socialist Youth organisation, humanism, Left-wing theatre promotion, anti-Fascism and the Popular Front. culminating in his enlistment at the outbreak of war and prompt discharge for appearing in uniform at a Communist- sponsored convention.
His book ends with a reflective look back at the 'thirties, and here Willis plays to perfection what Wyndham Lewis called the 'Left-wing simpleton'. Even now he does not seem to see that in the name of some vague utopia of human brotherhood he was merely contributing his own little bit of English mischief towards a mighty cause : the ex- pansion of the Soviet Empire and the retreat of his own country.
Bernard Fergusson's book (the best piece of writing of the four) comes from a life as different as can be. Scottish gentleman, Eto- nian, Tory, romantic, professional soldier, Fergusson served his country in its wars for twenty-eight years, notably under the ex- traordinary Wingate in the Chindit cam- paigns in Burma, and in the pathetic farce of Suez, leaving the Army in 1958 with regret and undiminished love for that now threatened institution. From his book emerges a picture of a brave, modest, humorous, intelligent and likeable man.
Four contrasting lives: two Socialist, two Tory. Which of the four will prove to have most deeply experienced and best un- derstood his time: the gifted entertainer and all-rounder; the earnest social worker; the proletarian Leftist; the Etonian soldier? Though (or because) he represents the kind of people a whole generation of Left-wing publicists and giggling television verbalisers have taught us to regard simply as figures of fim, it may well be the soldier who has the last laugh in that respect—or would, if it were a laughing matter.
The two Socialist autobiographies, in their different ways, both exude an appalling com- placency; they show an appalling blindness to what has really been going on in the world in the terrible century they have lived in. Believing that they understand the way the world is going, interpreting it unfailingly ac- cording to their orthodox progressivist ideas, they seem to have understood almost nothing.
This is not entirely due to their English insularity, striking though this may be. The two Tory writers are equally insular in their way and superficially narrower in their outlook. But in fact they are less so. It is the Socialists who are bigoted and hidebound, for all their assumption of enlightenment. The Tories, uninvolved with great ideas of future humanity, can attend to what is under their noses and are thus much better abje to understand what is going on in the world beyond.
Previous page
