7 SEPTEMBER 1991, Page 28

Smiler with a knife

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

MENUHIN: A FAMILY PORTRAIT by Tony Palmer

Faber & Faber, £15.99, pp. 207

CONVERSATIONS WITH MENUHIN by David Dubai

Heinemann, £13.99, pp. 192

Great artists, Hans Keller once said, have always been less and done more than the public wishes to believe. This public appetite is fed by publishers and television producers: who wants to bother with the work when you can read or watch the man? Mr Palmer's disingenuously named 'family portrait' is a book-of-the-show, a television programme of some months ago which caused a good deal of ill-feeling; the book itself was passed like a hot potato from one publisher to another, and you can see why.

Its themes are the decay of Menuhin's talent, and the bitter tensions and rivalries within his family; its technique is a perfect- ly simple one, based on the recent discov- ery that people will talk about absolutely anything.

Menuhin has spent his life dominated by women, above all by his mother Marutha, still as formidable as ever in her 90s, then by his second, present wife Diana. In his turn he has dominated and repressed his own children: both his sister and his sons speak openly and not very lovingly (or lovably) about their brother and father. But the unpleasant taste the book leaves is not so much from Zamira's and Jeremy's grumbles. 'They fuck you up, your mum and dad', but then we all knew that. It is one thing for Mr Palmer to hack into the dense Freudian undergrowth of someone else's family life. What is unbearable is the knowing and, as he thinks, sensitive look he wears. It doesn't work. This is our Tony, after all, the man who once specu- lated (in The Spectator) as to whether the then unmarried Princess Anne, 'has ever had it'. He is not the man to speculate equally on 'the tragedy of Yehudi's life' (which he ascribes with wonderful pro- fundity to 'the extent to which he has been unable to reconcile myth and reality'). One would prefer a straightforward hatchet-job to this compassionate camouflage, this willingness to wound but not quite to strike: I am sure that amid this mayhem Yehudi did his best, that he tried to play the role of attentive and loving father . . . not that I am doubting the complete sincerity with which Yehudi threw himself into his task! . . It would be a mistake, perhaps, to argue that Yehudi was so traumatised by his childhood that he was scarred for life.

'Perhaps' is perfect.

The trouble is that Yehudi Menuhin is what terrorists call a soft target. For one thing, as Mr Palmer knows perfectly well, although he is world famous and held in wide and genuine affection, Menuhin's musical reputation is not high and has been in decline for decades. This gives the portraitist further scope for speculation not only about the violinist's technical inade- quacies but as to why, 'in his innermost self, he has never regained that sublime innocence and trust in his playing that carried him to such astonishing heights of artistry when he was young'.

It has to be said also that Menuhin asks for this sort of treatment by having all too willingly become a public personality, an is' rather than a 'does'. His opinions are freely expressed on any possible subject, and are often visible. Mr Dubai is, apparently, a concert pianist and broadcas- ter, a sometime disc-jockey on a New York classical radio station. His Conversations with Menuhin is a small comic masterpiece. From the first page there is no doubting who's boss. After Menuhin gives a nine- word reply to a question about Bach and

religion, Mr Dubai follows it up with an unanswerable 45-word supplementary.

Before long you wonder, in Miss Joan Collins' famous words, whom is kidding whom — or whom is interviewing whom. The self-effacing interviewer is anyway an endangered species, but Lynne Barber herself could take lessons from this man:

Dubai: The big composer for conductors to-day is Mahler — Menuhin: I know

Dubai: In every Mahler work, you can hear the word itself — Tristan — Tristan lurking in the score. Mahler is repulsive — I love him — but he can nauseate me, my sensibility is insulted, I am manipulated.

Menuhin: Of course. . .

But when Menuhin does get a word in, the result makes you long for another interruption. Vaughan Williams

is quintessentially English. He is deeply English. Deeply aware of his roots-

. Being a very intuitive people the En- glish are not a philosophical people, they are not a mystical people. Surely they are a very musical people, especially the Scottish. Very musical, very romantic at hearf.

If you didn't know who was speaking, you might suppose that they had had spent a long evening together in the pub. When Mr Dubal starts up again 'Is this what we have from the democratisation of the world — and all that man has suffered — he is imprisoned by the addiction of rock'n'roll day and night?' most people would finish their drink and remember they had a train to catch. Nor are Menuhin's musical in- sights here going to enter many common- place books: 'I can never listen to the Winterreise without tears. That sense of total giving . . . I just adore Carmen — it appeals to the nomad and gipsy in our heart.' Doesn't it just. By means of none to selective quotation it would be easy enough to portray Menu- hin as at best an amiable booby. Quite apart from what he has done in the past, he is more than that. Underneath the non- sense, there is a noble personality, whose political or social opinions are not always fatuous. Mr Palmer retells the story of Menuhin's support for Furtwangler after the war, when his having stayed in Ger- many under Hitler led to a boycott from what Mr Palmer very incautiously calls 'the Jewish lobby in Chicago and the Jewish mafia, which controlled musical life in New York'. The indifference of this man — not 'a' Jew, but 'Yehudi', 'the Jew' — to any kind of nationalism, is admirable: 'It's long past the moment when we could single the Germans out as the only horrible people. Look what Stalin did. Look what China has done, Vietnam, look what the Israelis are now doing'. Maybe this is more to the point than Zamira's saying how much she loathed the Yoga with which her life in Gstaad began each day; and it may be that. on this occasion and with this man, the public instinct is right, and that Yehudi Menuhin will be remembered for what he has been as much as for what he has done.