Alistair Forbes
Since, many pre-Hype-Hype-Huirrah years ago, Cyril Connolly farmed out his pile of Booker Prize jury fodder to me for pre- liminary testing (the only plum I managed to pull out was not really digestible but it went on, with Cyril's reluctant support, to win), I've been a bit allergic to post-war novels in the English language, though I became almost chauvinistically proud of Julian Barnes's recent brilliant perform- ance in fluent French on Bernard Pivot's nulli secundus 90-minute weekly literary programme, now well into its second triumphant decade, on the A2 Channel from Paris, and simply miles ahead of anything on offer on US or UK television. However, I great enjoyed that tour de force The Golden Gate (even if its Califor- nian characters, human and animal, did not entirely captivate me) which its young Indian author Vikram Seth called his (300 page, umpteen stanzaed, Pushkin- rhyming-metred) 'homage' to 'Pushkin's masterpiece/ In Johnston's luminous trans- lation/ Eugene Onegin-like champagne/ It's effervescence stirs my brain', a translation I am proud to have been one of the very first to hail — in these very pages — when it first appeared nearly a decade ago. My dear friend of 40 years, the diplomat-poet Charlie Johnston, died suddenly earlier this year but he has left his fans a second book of Collected Poems (Bodley Head) now in the shops. At little more than half his age Fate's computer capriciously chose to wipe out Shiva Naipaul at the summit of his incorruptible and idiosyncratic powers and the height of family happiness. Read-
ing his Unfinished Journey (Hamish Hamil- ton) and re-reading his earlier work I was more than ever sorry never to have known this remarkable writer and evidently good man. I like to make a point of disagreeing with some if by no means all of the provocative views of Bron Waugh and I emphatically differ from the opinion he once expressed to me that 'All Russians without exception are shits', so I take pleasure in welcoming the re-issue in paperback (Sphere) of the enthralling autobiography of that most memorable of operatic Tatianas, Galina (Vishnevskaya), who proves herself a force of nature as well as of art, and incidentally a dabber hand with a pen even than Pushkin's one-letter heroine. Not all British public servants are duds or Soviet agents and the last William Portland — 90 next June with all his very superior wits and wit about him — has served three Windsor sovereigns even more devotedly than the first, the Bentinck best Amsterdamer friend and namesake of Orange, served the Stadthouder King who displaced that ass James II. I admired the short biography Intelligence Chief Extraor- dinary (P. Howarth, Bodley Head) of this long-lived duke as much as I do its subject, whose refusal to become post-war head of Britain's spy services on the grounds that it was 'a soul-rotting job' must be regretted if well understood. Zigeunerbaron Weiden- feld's books are usually conspicious for their poor editing and proof-reading. I found Princess Michael's agreeable bou- quet of royal brides an exception in this respect but she tells me modestly that the credit must be shared by her word- processor and her husband. As for the rest, no doubt she learned at her high-well-born Szapary mama's knee the wisdom of another Hungarian aristo lady, lately recal- led to me by a friend, 'To borrow from one book may be plagarism; to borrow from several is Research.' Certainly few books are as quotable (with or without attribu- tion) as those of Daphne Bennett who is not only persona grata at Windsor Castle but also the author of a fine study of its first Cobourg occupant Prince Albert, which I highly recommend as both more readable, more enjoyable and more scholarly than that of Robert Rhodes James, at present highly under fire for his rather sycophantic biography of poor Anthony Eden.
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