Skull and Bones, the Porcellian and the Literary Society
PAUL JOHNSON
Beneath the upper crust of AngloSaxon society lies the club system. It is not as important as its members think, or as sinister as excitable but ignorant journalists suppose. But sometimes it matters. The French have nothing like it. There is the gratin, of course, largely defined by the Almanach de Gotha, and what they call cenacles (after the Last Supper). These are, or were, mainly literary, When I lived in Paris half a century ago, the salons still flourished. They cannot have been particularly exclusive, since I went to three of them, but with decreasing regularity since my appetite for consuming sweet vermouth and sticky biscuits was limited. You were not elected, simply introduced; and thereafter you could go as you pleased.
The transatlantic system is quite different, being based on malice and exclusion. You vote, and as a rule you vote not so much for as against (it is like the Papac-y). The principle was once explained to me by a don at Trinity, Cambridge: 'When my colleagues file into dinner in Hall, they ponder earnestly not whom they should sit next to but whom they should not sit next to.' It is the same with Garrick Club elections: members vote not so much to admit as to exclude, including the entire female sex. The Americans carried the principle with them quite early in their history, for Harvard was founded in 1636 and Yale in 1701, Indeed the Iv.%,,, League clubs came to be much more important than anything in the Oxbridge structure, since you ate and lodged in them as opposed to living with the common herd; to some extent they took the place of the collegiate system. Failing to get into a top club, marginal in Oxbridge, is thus of some importance, and leads folk to ask why. Here we come to the point: President Bush, Howard Dean and Senator Kerry were all at Yale at roughly the same time. George W. (like his father) and Keny were both elected to its top club, the Skull and Bones. But Dean was not. Because he never tried. Well, he would say that, wouldn't he?
To be 'tapped for Bones' was, and perhaps still is, the grandest honour Yale offered its men. Only 15 made it each year. Tap Day' was an event. The elected man was told, 'Skull and Bones. Go to your room.' There he would wait in delight and fear until a delegation escorted him to the club premises, 'the Tomb' or '322'. It had peculiar rituals. Members never spoke of it or even admitted they belonged. Averell Harriman had three wives without mentioning the word Bones to any of them. Not belonging to the top club hurt. George Keiman, who invented the American Cold War ideolog, knew what it was like to be in the freezer. At Princeton he failed to get into the hy, at the summit, and made do with the Key and Seal; then, when his money ran out, he had to resign even that and was forced to eat, as he put it, 'among the non-club pariahs' in Upperclass Commons. At Yale, Dean Acheson and Cole Porter both failed Bones and had to be content with the pis alter, the Scroll and Key.
The most pain-wracked victim of the club was F.D. Roosevelt, At Harvard, you first had to get elected to a 'preliminary' club, like the Hasty Pudding, then a 'waiting club'. The top 'final club' was the Porcellian, founded in 1791, whose mascot was a china pig. FDR passed the first two tests but was rejected by 'the Pore' (one hostile vote would do it). His father was an honorary member; his cousin Theodore Roosevelt, then president, belonged, and FDR counted on the fact that five members were at school with him at Groton, the American Eton. Nothing availed. What made the failure worse was that, unlike Bones, the Pore did not judge performance, As Lord Melbourne said of the Order of the Garter, 'Thank God, there is no damned merit about it.' Paul Nitze once noted, 'The Club prided itself on not being based on merit in any way.' As with Top' at Eton, what mattered was a combination of money, blood and, above all, charm. Given what he had going for him, FDR's failure was devastating. 'the bitterest blow of my life' he said later. It may explain the venom with which, as President, he savaged the ruling elite. For the Porc, like other top clubs, remained exclusive even in later life, When FDR attended the wedding of his cousin TR's daughter, in 1906, all the members of the Pore present, led by TR himself gathered, as was their custom, in a special room to sing Porky songs and tell club jokes; the door was slammed in FDR's face.
If exclusion leaves scars, so, I suspect, does membership. Both Bush and Kerry are, naturally, secretive about what went on at the Bones, especially at the twice-weekly evening discussions, which sound like group-therapy sessions to me. Do these still go on when Bones meets? There is a smaller but sinister club at Cambridge, the Apostles, confined to 12 undergraduate members, but active in later life, chiefly as a freemasonry to get members jobs or prevent them from losing them. Apostles goes back to 1820 and used psychoanalytic techniques on each other long before Freud was born. Tennyson didn't like it and resigned. These techniques were later refined by the Bloomsberries — some of whom were members — and called 'the method', used chiefly on outsiders to make them unhappy. The Apostles make great play with their secrecy to inspire fear and impress the gullible.
One supposedly secret group which has recently blown its cover is the Literary Society. It claims to have been founded in 1807 by Wordsworth, but Robert Woof, director of the Wordsworth Trust, who knows more about the poet than anyone else alive (or indeed dead, except old Wordy himself), says there is no evidence for the assertion. It is a dining club which meets — yes, you've guessed it! — at the Garrick. My old mentor, John Raymond, said, 'Not worth belonging to. It elects grandees but they never turn up.' But then he said the same about the Pilgrims, the Club, and The Other Club. Recently the Literary Society has been in turmoil over the decision of its President, Sir Michael Howard, to replace himself by personally appointing Lord Armstrong to the chair. I became aware of the turmoil this caused when we gave our annual New Year kedgeree lunch to some West Country friends. Peregrine Worsthorne, not a Westerner but very much a pillar of the Lit. Soc., happened to be staying with us. Hearing that not only Lord Armstrong but Sir Raymond Carr were among the guests, he incited the latter to have the matter out with his lordship. Carr, who has been among my favourite characters for more than half a century, possesses a powerful type of voice, which I call the Academic Shout, useful for making oneself heard above the hubbub of High Table. Since the death of the terrifying John Cooper, the Shout has been almost extinct, though Raymond until recently used it on the hunting field. He used it again on this occasion, belabouring the quivering lord: 'How dare you become chairman of the Literary Society when you have never written a book in your life?' The affair continues to reverberate and has since reached the public prints. In the Independent, someone calling himself the Chief Reporter wrote that though L,ord Armstrong has never published a book, he has made 'a lasting contribution to the English language . . . it was he who said he had been "economical with the truth" '. Actually, the phrase is a quotation from Edmund Burke, and if you read the passage in full you realise that Burke (and presumably Armstrong) was commending the practice, since with truth, as with other commodities, economy is a virtue. Tell that to the BBC, eh?
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