BOOKS
In praise of Bea
Colin Welch
MARRIAGE AND MORALS AMONG THE VICTORIANS AND OTHER ESSAYS by Gertrude Himmelfarb
Faber & Faber, £15.95
have an interest to declare. I have I known the author for more than 30 years. She was then, as she is now, Mrs Irving Kristol. He was then editor of the indis- pensable Encounter. This was financed by the CIA, but in a manner so indirect that the upright Irving couldn't possibly have known about it or been influenced by it, though mean-minded slanderers have not scrupled to suggest otherwise. To know Bea Kristol (I have never heard her called Gertrude) is to love her, as all agree. All? Perhaps a few humbugs and freaks who were felled by one of her deftly-timed and devastating Brooklyn one-liners, delivered with curled lip and flashing dark eye, may have remembered her with respect rather than affection when they came to in Casualty. But love and respect were the norm, and have remained my sentiments precisely, even though 'mountains divide us, and the waste of the seas'.
I explained my dilemma to the literary editor. He agreed that nothing could be worse than a reviewer loyally trying to find something nice to say about a friend's ghastly production. We thus settled that, if Bea's Victorian essays proved ghastly, I was to return them at once, nothing said, and review something else. So I would have done, but in my heart I knew I wouldn't have to. Why? Because I knew that all the qualities which make her so loved and respected as a person also inform and permeate her writings. You don't have to know her, only to read her, to find yourself in the presence alike of a good cool analytical head and a good warm loyal heart, two precious attributes not always or often found together. Other qualities lift Bea right out of the common herd of intellectuals on the one hand and on the other good wives and mothers. To take the latter first, how many wives and mothers can have read so much, thought so much, written so much and taught so much (she is a 'distinguished Professor', no less at the City University of New York), without any trace of Mrs Jellyby's neglect of hearth and home? Bea's love of her family, her interest in her children's doings, friends, prospects and achievements are so manifest, unaffected and consuming that you'd never guess she was an intellectual at all. In Bea's tlorrioboola-Gha dwell the shades of _Bentham, Goodwin, the Carlyles, George '.„h. ot, Dickens himself, nearly all the great Iasfascinating the Webbs and a host of the cinating or notorious departed. Michael uakeshott happily lives there still. You will meet them all in these pages. She has written memorable books about Darwin, John Stuart Mill and Acton. But her children are proof that her stays in Bor- rioboola were never at the expense of their upbringing and welfare. Among intellectuals, on the other hand, she stands out from the herd by reason of an exceptional and quite old-fashioned absence of arrogance and humbug, an unusual respect for common sense and normality, for natural feelings, convention- al morality and tradition, even for un- reasoning prejudice, which sometimes necessarily has to guide our minds, which are too small, feeble and preoccupied to reason everything out for themselves. Many clever people show how clever they are by deriding some or all of these things. Cleverer still, Bea stumps valiantly to their defence, finding wisdom and prudence where others find only stupidity. In her fine second essay, 'A Genealogy of Mor- als: From Clapham to Bloomsbury', she quotes Virginia Woolf to the effect that ordinary people were bound, as they al- ways had been, by the habits and customs devised for 'timid natures who dare not allow their souls free play'. But artists and writers could not be so circumscribed: they have to be free to follow 'the vast variety and turmoil of human impulses'. They had `But gay is the author.' to be not ordinary people but autonomous, to be under no obligation to others, to live not for others but for themselves. To Bea as materfamilias such arrogant rodomon- tade comes as boloney to the slicer. It is perhaps the precise opposite of the rules by which she strives to live and which she inculcates in others. With withering scorn she notes Virginia Woolf's cruelty to ser- vants. She has not only what Lionel Trill- ing called 'moral imagination' but also moral taste.
Bea has also a simple, unfashionable, unsophisticated and unfailing respect for greatness, for what makes the great great, even if or when they are, seen from below, occasionally ridiculous. In his Eminent Victorians, Lytton Strachey sniggeringly notes that Thomas Arnold's legs were `shorter than they should have been', marks the open bible next to the open brandy bottle on General Gordon's desk, lists peculiar names (`St Bega, St Adam- nan, St Gundleus, St Guthlake, Brother Drithehu') to mock not only Newman's Lives of the Saints but the very idea of sainthood. Bea is shocked, not because such details are untrue but because they are used to obscure or diminish what made the eminent Victorians eminent.
Bea's capacity to be shocked, undimmed by modish omni-tolerance, is of course the obverse of her capacity for reverence. It leads her for a moment into a strange alliance. She quotes D. H. Lawrence foam- ing against the Cambridge-Bloomsbury group, the 'hard core' (or 'soft core'?) of which was the Stephens, Clive Bell, Keynes, Lytton Strachey, Duncan Grant, Desmond McCarthy, Roger Fry and later Leonard Woolf, with E. M. Forster, James Strachey, R. C. Trevelyan and others as fellow-travellers. 'To hear these young people talk', Lawrence exploded, 'fills me with black fury . . . There is never for one second any outgoing of feeling and no reverence, not a crumb or grain of rever- ence.' Bea implicitly concedes that this outburst may 'have seemed churlish and priggish', but does she miss whatever irony may lie in what Lawrence actually revered? Lectures about reverence come oddly from a man who abased himself before his own blood and genitals.
But Bea's capacity to be shocked also gives her insight, causing her to mark well and connect many phenomena which more sophisticated commentators have ignored or distorted or deliberately suppressed. Writing about the `Bloomsberries', she finds it 'ironic that people who prided themselves on their honesty and candour, especially in regard to their much-vaunted `personal affections', — in contrast, as they thought, to Victorian hypocrisy and duplic- ity — should have succeeded for so long in concealing the truth about their affections.' Trilling was blind to it; Roy Harrod de- liberately suppressed it; so did Leonard Woolf and James Strachey. As late as 1968, when the cat was coming out of the bag, Quentin Bell, in a book about Bloomsbury, suppressed a good deal that he knew, pompously explaining that it was a book about ideas and that he has not `inclined to act as Clio's chambermaid, to sniff into commodes or under beds, to open love letters or to scrutinise diaries.' What rot this seems to Bea, 'in the case of people who made an art form of letters and diaries and who were . . not at all averse to sniffing into commodes and under beds.'
The cat which Holroyd and Skidelsky produced from the bag was not homosex- uality itself — too commonplace to have been suppressed — but 'the compulsive and promiscuous nature of that homosex- uality.' If Bea takes seriously the 'Higher Sodomy' (their own phrase) of the Blooms- berries, their androgyny, their near-incest, their polymorphous promiscuity, it is be- cause they themselves took it seriously as a higher form of morality.
Keynes mischievously analysed The Eco- nomic Consequences of the Peace, doing for Lloyd George, Clemenceau and Wilson more or less what Lytton Strachey had done for Manning, Arnold and Gordon. The Higher Sodomy may also have had economic consequences, as Bea notes. `There is a discernible affinity between the Bloomsbury ethos, which put a premium on immediate and present satisfactions, and Keynesian economics, which is based entirely on the short run'. 'In the long run we are all dead', said Keynes, not a remark acceptable to any mother. Keynes's denun- ciations of thrift and savings as parts of an age-old Puritan fallacy surely spring from the same 'childless vision', Schumpeter's `delicate' phrase.
If Bea is shocked by Keynes's bath- house amours (lucky there was no Aids then), she is certainly not the sort of lady who faints away at the sight of an undraped piano leg. A mordant humour reveals and preserves her firm sense of proportion. Her warm heart and broad sympathies make her the reverse of censorious. She does not hate sin so much as to hate sinners and, especially in those with good princi- ples, like her adored George Eliot, she understands and pardons all.
Nor is she prurient, shocked only or even principally by sexual aberrations. Unlike the old News of the World, she is genuinely concerned about the effect of private on public conduct. In an essay in Victorian Minds (Weidenfeld, 1968), she sensationally revealed the horrors which lay behind the 'practical sagacity', of the `modest Utopian' Bentham, in whose Uto- pia 'the greatest happiness of the greatest number' would have been balanced by the greatest misery of the (relatively) few. In the present volume she has another memorable bash at this loathsome or part- loathsome savant. She reveals his vast plans not only to incarcerate in his Panopti- con all criminals and to exploit them for personal profit (his own), but also to get his hands on all the poor, unfortunate and property-less, and their children, amount- ing to about a million souls out of an English population then of about nine millions, and to enslave them, again for personal profit, in most cases for life, without hope of remission. It is obviously Bentham's shameless greed and heartless cruelty which shocks Bea here, as does also to a lesser extent the way in which his disciples have ignored or glossed over what he clamoured for, ignoring its central place in his thought and consequent polluting effect. No element of sexuality is here involved: or is it? It does not take any great insight into sexual perversion to suspect that Bentham's gags, masks, dungeons and mania for 'inspection' (all his prisons were to have visiting galleries for those drawn thither by 'curiosity' or the hope of 'amuse- ment') may have had other causes than a morbid concern for security.
Bentham's mad frugality and ferocious determination to extract the maximum profit from all his victims have their blackly comic aspects, as Bea I'm sure is well aware. 'Not the motion of a finger, not a step, not a wink, not a whisper' but could be turned to profit. The bed-ridden could inspect, the blind knit or spin; even the insane could work, under close supervi- sion. A large number of infants could be rocked together in a single crib by the `slight exertion of a feeble hand', or aired together in a single carriage drawn by an ass or older child. No meat — Hindus manage without it — not even bread. Not less blackly comic is Bentham's abiding rage at the frustration of all his schemes for `crucibles for men'. The vengeful spite of George III — bless him! — is paranoically held to blame: but for him all the paupers and prisoners of England would 'long ago have been under my [Bentham's] manage- ment'.
I don't think Bentham would have fared better had Bea been on the throne. In an otherwise sympathetic essay on Michael Oakeshott, she gently chides him for pro- viding 'no means for distinguishing be- tween good and bad, let alone for cultivat- ing a disposition to do good rather than bad.' So we must look elsewhere for guidance. We must 'invoke mind, princi- ple, belief, religion or whatever else may be required to sustain civilisation.' Bea keeps these guiding stars ceaselessly in view. To Bentham they are as deadly as garlic to a vampire. They have led her unscathed through all the perils of her intellectual Borrioboola-Gha and brought her repeatedly safe home, with precious gifts for the family and for all of us.
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