Thirtyish
Stephen Koss
A Man of the Thirties At Rowse (Weldenfeld £7.95) Munich: The Price of Peace Telford Taylor (Hodder £13.95) The 1930s, if not quite so low and dishonest a decade as Auden tagged it, nevertheless seems to have brought out the worst in everyone and, strangely enough, continues to do so."A.L. Rowse, though he would be loath to recognise it, is no exception. As Cornish as a pasty and much more crusty, he has retired — or retreated — to Trenarren to play Thersites among the piskies. The seas that surge outside his study window are as nothing compared to the storms that rage within.
Almost as old as the century, Dr Rowse is identified by his publisher as 'the author of A Cornish Childhood', memorable for its sensitivity and lyricism. The present instalment of misanthropic musings, which might well have been called 'A Cornish Dotage', is difficult to accept as a sequel. Cured of duodenal ulcer, Rowse has been left consumed by spleen. Perspective and artistry alike fail him, and he cannot make even a pretence to detachment.
The product of a working-class background, Rowse won a scholarship to Oxford, served a stint at the LSE, took up an All Souls fellowship, and, losing any vestige of false modesty, 'became a leading authority on the Elizabethan Age'. As all the world knows, his prolific writings have included a platonic assignation with Shakespeare's Dark Lady: 'she was waiting for me'. All the while, he was indelibly stamped as A Man of the Thirties and, more specifically, a man of his thirties. By his reckoning, those were the years when his countrymen, heedless of his warnings, lost the will and capacity for national greatness. Then, too, he forfeited his own chances for fulfilment of another sort.
In a rambling way, this book covers much the same ground as an earlier study. All Souls and Appeasement, its publication delayed until 1961. For that treatise, a variation on the 'guilty men' thesis, Rowse quarried various nuggets as well as a good deal of dross from the diaries he has kept throughout his life. Despite its idiosyncrasies, it offered a sustained interpretation that proved especially popular across the Atlantic, where the author commands a considerable following and where he intends his archives ultimately to repose, In America, its title was abridged to Appeasement, presumably because the natives might have mistaken All Souls for an ecclesiastical institution. Truth to tell, Rowse himself has often run the same risk.
Having issued that indictment of prewar British foreign policy and its formulators. why the compulsion to return to the subject? Still sufficiently haunted to dream of Hitler, Rowse will obviously seize any excuse to rail against the 'contemptible society ithatlexists today, visibly breaking apart', Which he traces to the 1930s. Moreover, he had scores to settle with those like Richard Crossman, who vouched for Hitlers sincerity and later spared polite wirds (wrenched from context) for Mosley. Possibly renewed contacts with Wystan Auden, who spent his last years at All Souls ('Sooner or later, everybody turned up at All Souls'), fanned the embers of resentment and regret: recalling his own visit to Red Berlin, Rowse describes picture galleries and politics as 'the kind of thing that occupied my mind . . . instead of having a good time with "Mr Norris" or the boys'. A h,la recherche du temps perdu!
Too late for him to qualify as a beneficiary, there has developed a permissiveness that encourages Rowse to discuss his 'understanding without words' with Adam von Trott, a 'true aristocrat' with 'ravishing good looks'. Expressing priggish disap proval of Isherwood, 'coming back again to his own vomit', Rowse reveals little save his self-repressions and frustrations. 'Adam was dominantly heterosexual, as I was not', and their moment of greatest physical intimacy occurred on a bus from Dresden to Bastei, when 'Adam's long arm extended along the back of my seat'. But their emotional inter-dependency was intense, as recorded in countless letters, maddeningly undated and quaintly addresses to 'AL.' Rowse states categorically that his comprehension of the German menace was 'entirely owing to my relationship with Adam', whose eyes were a window on the tormented German soul and whose corres pondence unwittingly betrayed 'the cloven foot of Hegelianism'. One is moved to wonder whether, if Chamberlain had been similarly infatuated, war might have been averted.
Bevin, for one, required no romantic assistance in discerning Germany's intentions; alone among the Labour politicians of the period, he is exempt from Rowse's strictures. So, too, is Churchill, a strange idol for an intellectual of the Left. But Rowse would have us believe that his youthful Marxism was more akin to Churchillianism than to communism: always devoted to the Empire, he was an opponent of Indian nationalism and, of all things, a champion of Edward VIII. More than anything, he detested 'congealed Nonconformist Liberalism' as personified by Isaac Foot and his sons. 'I preferred Tories any day, particu larly High Church Anglicans with a sense of the arts.' What were the china-clay workers of St Austell, who adopted him as their Labour candidate, to make of that? Small wonder that, as he confesses, 'people have always complained that they find it difficult to understand me'.
Garbling certain facts and ignoring others, Rowse does not trouble himself to disentangle the elections he fought triVialises his cogent appeal for a Lib-Lab pact, and neglects to mention his collusion with Lloyd George in 1935. Along with the personal documents at his disposal, he ought to have had another look at his previous pronouncements. 'Of one thing I am certain', he declaims: 'not one of the Left intellectuals could republish what they wrote in the Thirties without revealing what idiotic judgments they made about events.'• That is a cheap shot, coming from someone who admits, 193 pages later, his unwillingness to see a reprinting of Politics and the Younger Generation.
A more conscientious attempt to appraise the men and disputes that led to war has been undertaken by Telford Taylor. an American who is best known as chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg war criminals' trials. It would be tautological to praise this lengthy account of international politics as judicious. Yet it is comprehensive without losing focus and openminded without stinting opinions. Based on extensive research, it inevitably makes reference to Appeasement by 'Alfred Lesley Rowse' (no matter that the middle name is misspelled), whose analysis is tellingly disputed.
A reconstruction of the Munich conference, which Taylor regards as the denouement and not the climax of the drama, prefaces an incisive survey of interwar diplomacy. It culminates in a duel between Hitler and Chamberlain, the former oblivious to any Hegelian dialectic and the latter staunchly supported by military authorities, parliamentary colleagues, Dominion statesmen, and public opinion. Chamberlain was occasionally 'stubborn and graceless', but 'he acted for the men and women of Britain as he divined their wishes, and at the time he read them aright'. It is precisely this point that so enrages Rowse, who repeatedly sputters 'What price democracy?' Telford Taylor does not underestimate that price, but never doubts that it was well worth paying.
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