Fits and starts
NIGEL NICOLSON
The Youngest Son Ivor Montagu (Lawrence and Wishart 63s) It takes some courage to end the first vol- ume of your autobiography at the age of twenty-three. The author, one feels, must be either very famous or very arrogant. Ivor Montagu is neither. He simply enjoys telling well what he remember-s well. But the disad- vantage of Mr Montagu's total recall is that he has turned his book into a shapeless scenario with a cast of a thousand. The hero is submerged by the extras. Characters assume enormous importance for a page, never to reappear.
The childhood-and-youth section of any autobiography is aptsto be the most rambling because of its many false starts. I searched the 1967 Who's Who for an indication of how this mangled beginning sorted itself out, but under Montagu, Hon. Ivor, there is sur- prisingly no entry. Surprisingly, because (to quote the blurb) he has been a zoologist, a journalist, a film director, an active Com- munist, assistant editor of the Daily Worker, Chairman of the International Table Tennis Federation for forty years, and was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize. All these activities are foreshadowed in the present volume. He knew what sort of person he was, but not what sort of life he wanted to lead. He was extremely sociable in the least wasteful way, and very precocious. Wells, meeting him when he was aged only fifteen, was able to say without affectation, '1 am so pleased to meet you. I have heard so much about you.' Shaw became a real friend soon after. Later, so did Haldane. When he was thirteen, Ivor was invited by Jellicoe, quite seriously, to lecture about his special brand of war game to the Naval Staff College, and turned it down only because he fancied himself a socialist 'and decided I was against war'.
If the book has a core, this is it. He re- belled against his upper-class Jewish back- ground. His father, the second Lord Sway- tilling, a Forsyte-type banker, never talked to him much, and when he did, it was usually to disapprove. of whatever his son happened to be doing and of the company he chose. So Ivor kept things pretty dark From his family, particularly his growing a%ersion to the selfishness of great wealth. He went to Russia when he was twenty-one, on a zoological expedition to the Caucasus. and returned more impressed by the mice than by the men. He was on his way to becoming a Communist, but delayed the final plunge for another ten years.
This book it:-,a,,Tked cake more than a plum cake. It critrnbles better than it cuts. One grows to like Ivor Montagu for his honesty, his courage and his modesty. Speak- ing of his chess-playing he says, 'When I play badly I lose at the beginning; when I play well I lose at the end. I am afraid I have never had the industry for study of openings'. This may turn out to have been true of his whole career. He had luck, as when he was awarded a First at Cambridge because the examiners thought that they had lost his papers, when he had skipped the whole exam. (Can this really be true?) He also had good fortune, which is some- thing different, in marrying a secretary, Eileen Hellstern, who for forty subsequent years was 'at once the admiration and
terror' of all her friends and is known to him and to everyone else as Hell—`a good name, easy to say, easy to remember'. But he also had overflowing good nature nd energy. He quotes Shaw's remark, 'a gentle- man is one who puts more into the Common stock than he takes out'. Ivor Montagu has done this, out of political conviction and a dread of waste. I hope that he will continue his story, but not quite so volubly.
Previous page
