DIARY
If Lady Antonia Fraser wants to set up a socialist philosophy group, that seems quite all right by me, and the hoary old smear about some of the members being `Bollinger Bolsheviks', which critics on the Right have been trotting out, is just plain boring. However, what is a bit off, to my mind, is her choosing to locate this new socialist group in the self-same house and self-same drawing room in which her late husband Hugh Fraser — whom she left after many years of marriage — had conceived the Conservative Philosophy Group. Indeed, she even pointed out this fact — you are sitting on the same sofas, etc — to the assembled socialist philo- sophers, who included her present husband Harold Pinter, John Mortimer, Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan and others, not all of whom found the reminiscence as tasteful as did their entrancing hostess. I well realise that socialists do not feel an obliga- tion to respect the past to the same degree as do Tories. But surely such flagrant — or should one say fragrant? — infidelity to Hugh's memory (which many of us cher- ish) is going a bit too far. As it happened, the evening did not exactly go with a swing, since the paper delivered by Anthony Howard was not so much philosophical as down to earth. He explained in persuasive and authoritative detail just why the Labour Party has not a chance in hell of winning the next election, ending with a stirring admonition to the assembled scribes — whose chairman for the evening was John Mortimer — not to take any further fat fees from Rupert Murdoch. Altogether, I am happy to say, our Tory Philosophy Group, which meets in the house of Jonathan Aitken, is a much more civilised affair.
Paul Johnson deserves great credit for taking on all Arianna Stassinopoulos's critics single-handed. The critics say that Arianna has missed the point of Picasso by concentrating on the awfulness of the man rather than on the glories of his art. But this is entirely to miss another, much more Important point which is that Picasso, like Sartre, Brecht and several others, be- longed to a 20th-century pantheon of deities whose moral influence extended far beyond their particular creative fields. They were, if you like, the 20th-century equivalents of the 'eminent Victorians' whom Lytton Strachey debunked so devas- tatingly in his famous book of that title, and it seems to me that Arianna is quite as justified in pointing out that the great Peace-loving, brotherhood of man, New Jerusalem Picasso was in reality a sadistic, woman-hating cheat and liar, as Strachey Was justified in pointing out that the bible-thumping hero of Khartoum, Gener- PEREGRINE WORSTHORNE al Gordon, was a drunkard. Of course Picasso was a great artist, just as Sartre was a great philosopher and Brecht a great playwright. But all three of them were also propagandists for communism and for a time played a crucial and very nearly cataclysmic part in making people believe that communism stood for a morally super- ior way of life. Now along comes Arianna to demonstrate that Picasso was a personal monster, capable of atrocious cruelty and life-long selfish aggressiveness. This does not diminish his art. But it does, one hopes, diminish his posthumous influence as a symbol of a higher civilisation. Paul Johnson himself has written a book doing the same kind of demolition job on some of the other left-wing deities, Bertrand Rus- sell, Victor Gollancz, etc, extracts from which will soon be published in the Sunday Telegraph. The trouble with Lytton Strachey was that he made up a lot of his damaging material. If Arianna's critics had found fault with her on that score they might have a case. But not one has and I very much doubt whether they will be any more successful in doing so in respect of Paul Johnson. For whereas the eminent Victorians were not monsters, Picasso, Brecht, Sartre, etc, most undoubtedly were, and the evidence for this is irrefut- able.
Arianna's book also received a rotten, stinking press in New York. But that has not stopped her being one of New York's great social lionesses, much sought after by every fashionable hostess. Not so in Lon- don. At George Weidenfeld's party for her last week famous names could be counted on the fingers of one hand. (It usually takes a computer.) I think the difference is this.
`Hi! Pull up a stool.' In New York social success has very little to do with anything as humdrum as damned merit. Bad reviews, if there are enough of them, are as much a passport to the top of the town as good ones. To be talked and written about is all, that matters, and condemnation by the right people is quite as valuable as praise. Here Society with a capital S still makes some effort to sort out the sheep from the goats and will keep away if it thinks the guest of honour a complete charlatan. In the case of Arianna they have got it largely wrong. I met her first years ago when she was President of the Cambridge Union and invited me down to speak in a debate. Being the sweet girl she is, she also invited to the pre-debate dinner a junior member of her own col- lege, Girton, called Dominique Wor- sthorne, whom she assumed, rightly, to be my daughter. To her surprise she received a sharp note from my daughter saying that she could not come and was in any case only 'a very distant relation'. When I remonstrated with my daughter, she ex- plained that being publicly associated with a notorious reactionary like me would be the ruin of her social life. I quite under- stood and approved of such a sensible precaution. But Arianna, being Greek, thought such behaviour shockingly unfilial. My daughter also did not even bother to reply to an invitation from Rab Butler to drinks in the Master's Lodge at Cambridge on the grounds that Rab was inviting her for my sake rather than hers. Most periods in the past make me feel nostalgic. But not the 1960s.
A. J. Ayer was very ill last month and apparently actually died for a few minutes. When asked what he found on the other side the distinguished old atheist replied that there was nothing there, as he had always expected. Nor is Freddy prepared to accept the possibility that his death was of too short a duration to have allowed him to make a thorough exploration. Indeed, he got quite cross when his step-daughter Horatia referred to him as having been dead for four minutes. 'Not four, ten,' he insisted, as positively logical as ever.
Most admonitions or exhortations ask too much and one feels pretty gloomy about being able to live up to the chal- lenge. But here is one from Hazlitt that I feel confident about being able to follow to the letter. 'A man should stand in awe of his prejudices, as of aged parents and monitors. They may in the end prove wiser than he.'
Peregrine Worsthorne is editor of the Sun- day Telegraph.
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