Some Lives
SUCCESS is often the theme, most often the reason of biographies. In autobiography it is pleasantest to see a man succeed at being himself. John Verney in A Dinner of Herbs (Collins, 25s.) brings the maturing artist and writer, the actual soldier on Special Operations, into clear detail, and catches our sympathetic attention im- mediately. His modesty is impeccable, his can- dour unforced, his eye acute, his heart enough (but not too much) in evidence. The story is told between wartime Italy and a visit to the Abruzzi (scene of so much privation on the run from a POW camp) twenty years later: a kind of brbad-and-butter visit of thanks and affection
to those who helped him then, of piety to the scene where a vision was received. A beauti- fully organised book; a worthy successor to Going to the Wars.
American innocence, the very real presence of the Dream, the paramountcy of New England in thought and morality, the belief in a funda- mental and extensible go,,dness in man—all these were essential to The Worlds of Robert E. Sherwood described by John Mason Brown (Hamish Hamilton, 50s.). Born an upper-class New Englander, schooled at Milton and Harvard, he volunteered in 1916, was wounded and gassed on the Somme, and returned to face the exhilarating America of the 'twenties with a first-hand dislike of war. Early efforts in author- ship led to playwriting and a success which turned, by the end of the 'thirties, to triumph. It would be easy now to dismiss Idiot's Delight as a naive approach to the putrefying European psychosis of the time (1936)—but its effect in England and America was great. Sherwood was helping America crack her way out of a shell of isolation and indifference to Europe. With this play, and the later Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1939), he was doing his job of 'delegate-at-large for the American conscience.' Mr John Mason Brown's biography is lively and affectionate, and his final conspectus of Sherwood's life and work, just and wise.
From the next three books the sweet smell of success breathes headily. In Member for Mexico (Cassell, 36s.) Desmond Young (bio- grapher of Rommel) charts the rise of the for- tunes of the Pearson family, in the career of the first Viscount Cowdray. Mr Young writes well, tells his story economically and with care for technical details. Weetman Pearson, who took his family construction firm in Bradford to the utmost in international engineering, made his great fortune through vision, courage, scrupu- lousness and care for others. Success—particu- larly success as the result of high endeavour, cracking hard work, stern principle and expert practice—is not popular at present. Only a fool, nevertheless, could grudge the first Lord Cowdray (called 'The Member for Mexico' because, although sitting for Colchester, he was so much away in that 'other place) the success which he wanted, enjoyed and surely deserved.
'No Roosevelt ever died a martyr to some great cause, and none was ever shot in a quar- rel over a trollop.' Success, perhaps because of a.certain ability to keep out of trouble, at least in its early years, and a continuing relish for the quiet rewards of virtuous trading, attended this Dutch-American family almost from the moment of its arrival in America in 1640. Allen Churchill in The Roosevelts (Muller, 35s.) tells the story of the family which, for the sixty years until Franklin D. Roosevelt's death in 1945, held so commanding a position in American life. `To be boy eternal' seems to have been a part of the American dream. (`You must always remember,' said Cecil Spring Rice of Teddy Roosevelt, 'that the President is about six.') FDR carried his boyish laugh, his fondness for practical jokes, almost to Yalta; but he also took his country's future on himself, yet being at the last prisoher of some fallacies about Europe inherent in America's very foundation.
In The Mountbattens, by Alden Hatch (W. H. Allen, 50s.), the smell of success is almost over- powering. Because of something over-partisan in the writing, because the famous spell of Lord Mountbatten (`Dickie) has manifestly en- thralled the author, the least critical might long for a hint of ordinary failure, for some proof
that life at the top might not always be all gas and Garters. One turns sympathetically to the gentle, sailorly Prince Louis of Battenberg, Lord M's father, whose wholly worthy career came crashing in 1914 through the efforts of a newspaper called The Globe. Mr Hatch has written biographies of Wilson, Roosevelt, Eisen- hower. He knows the field of high politics, par- ticularly in wartime. He admits the Mount- batten rashness, vanity, pushfulness, lack of humour about self. He also makes real the courage, the humanity, the devotion to duty which nobody need deny.
And so to classical biography, elegant, astrin- gent, restorative, in Dr Parr: A Portrait of the Whig Dr Jonhson, by Warren Derry (O.U.P., 55s.). Parr, down the years, has had many friends; but the nickname quoted in this book's title has hindered a clear view of the man whom Sydney Smith called 'By far the most learned man of the day.' He was not often as amusing as Johnson, perhaps because he was more im- passioned. He cared deeply about penal reform, hated corporal punishment, dared to believe that the death penalty would one day be abolished, was tolerant in religion, and favoured Catholic emancipation. Mr Derry's pellucid biography settles Parr into a place of his own, where his great scholarship, his charity, his emotional in- temperance, his love of his church and people, shine brightly in their own right. We can only be grateful for this skilful portrait of the kindly, choleric Parr, blackmailing the local gentry for contributions to his church, conducting May Day celebrations of huge gaiety, loving the world and longing to change it, but always allow- ing his charity to begin at home.
WILLIAM BUCHAN
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