AUTUMN BOOKS

Mr. Standfast

By SIMON RAVEN

9TIKE world,' proclaimed Lord Birkenhead in

I 1923, 'continues to offer glittering prizes to those who have stout hearts and sharp swords.' This remark has incurred much disapproval, the reasons for which elude me; for it is only an exuberant way of saying that clever boys who work hard may (with luck) be richly rewarded. John Buchan of all people, as a son of the manse who ended his life on a viceregal throne, must have appreciated this simple truth; and yet Janet Adam Smith assures us, on page 305 of her admirable new biography*, that Buchan was mistrustful of such attitudes, was 'wary of Birken- head offering his "glittering prizes" to the young,' the strong implication being that his own exclu- sive aim was service and not emolument.

The truth is, however, that Buchan had a robust interest in both, and even Miss Adam Smith, in whom her subject brings out a tendency towards pietas, does not really trouble to conceal the fact. In his heart Buchan relished his rewards, above all perhaps his peerage, as 'a symbol of success in his public life, the counterpart of a First in Greats . . .' The race had been well run and it was only fitting that the laurel wreath, to say nothing of the purse, should be bestowed to the sound of trumpets. And not the trumpets on the other side; the triumphs were of this world and so the applause should be. An entirely reasonable position, one would have thought. Then why be so coy about it? Why the elusive talk of accepting a coronet to 'revive Mother'? Why this 'wariness' of Birkenhead's candid assessment? To mention sharp swords, even figuratively, might not be in the very best of taste, but Buchan himself, like all parvenus, had a strong right arm and heaven knows he had used it.

Is there, then, a whiff of hypocrisy here? One thinks of all that bustling in the world, always advertised for the worthiest of motives, always, somehow, requited with such pleasing and tan- gible rewards. From the earliest days they came Pouring in, all, as it were, accompanied by Unsolicited guarantees of moral rectitude and self-abnegation : the friendship of Gilbert Murray, the scholarship from Glasgow to Brase- nose, the Newdigate Prize with a poem (how apt) On 'The Pilgrim Fathers,' speedy social accept- ance by undergraduates of the best possible families and unstained characters, recognition, While still at Oxford, as a novelist and literary critic. True, rejection by All Souls was an un- expected blow; but the wound closed soon ,,enuugh, soothed by letters of praises from

k-umo Lang, aneled by the praises of St. Loe Strachey of the Spectator (a connection with whhich journal Buchan maintained for the rest of

(.,!s life) and an appointment as deputy editor in tache...,s

y place during the summer of 1901.

Thence hence with Milner to South Africa to rehabili- tate the Boers : 'It has been a hideous grind for ,everybody, but 1 think we are the better for Baying gone through it.' NO doubt we were: for one of us at least was ..,71 tipped as the coming young man, had decided that literature should take second place, J.011hi BucHAN : A BIOGRAPHY. ( R upe at Hart- “V Ls 63s.)

as no more than a profitable hobby, to a public career, and was heading hard, via important dinner tables, for a partnership in Thomas Nelson and Son, for parliamentary candidature (though not as yet for a seat), for an eminently suitable marriage, for an impressive post in Intelligence in the war that was soon to break over Europe, and for a deputy chairmanship of Reuter's a few years after it. Already it was a story of success —and of integrity unbreached. In fact, the only thing lacking in the story is the least hint of scandal to give it a little spice; for Buchan, since 1912 an Elder of St. Columba's in Pont Street, was still, let the great world do what it might, the chaste, dour, prudish, parsimonious, starry- eyed and credulous child of the Kirk who had left Scotland for Oxford in 1895. He walked unscathed in the House of Mammon having his innocence for armour; and if he accepted the gifts of the inhabitants, he appeared to do so because they were offered out of bewildered deference to his virtue and it would therefore have been impolite, perhaps even subversive of popular morality, to refuse.

How easy it would be (as many people have found) to go on poking fun at Buchan, his smugness, his cult of the open air, his do-gooding and his self-deception--and also at his devout biographer, with her wholesome approval, her earnest chronicle of endeavour, and her glum evasions when anything nasty needs to be said. How easy it would be to dismiss Buchan as the conventional Scottish careerist who finished up in proconsular pomp and the odour of reaction. to dismiss Miss Adam Smith's careful account as the dull and massive monument to a man whose virtues were probably counterfeit and in any case irrelevant to our time and our needs. Yet to do so would not only be to cheat a good man of his meed but to ignore a fascinating study in cultural ambiguity : for the first Lord Tweeds- muir, in one important respect which we have yet to mention, was a very odd fish indeed.

But before we look into that, let us pay a proper tribute to both Buchan and biographer. While Miss Adam Smith is at her best when she writes of landscapes or places—of the Border country, of late-nineteenth-century Glasgow, of an Oxford without women where it was always early even- ing—she also has a gift for conveying human qualities, not just in the literary terms of pane- gyric, but as living realities which rise from her page; and it is impossible not to respond with warmth to the John Buchan whom she evokes. He coveted success; but he certainly worked for it, without ostentation or complaint, in a way which would have killed many other men and in the end probably killed him. Nor was it only success for which he laboured : his sense of duty, to family, to country, to humanity, was unresting--if all the more effective for being tempered by common sense. Certainly, Buchan was a prude and a prig: he was also a gay, loyal and sensitive friend who encouraged others to draw heavily on his time, his income and his strength. He was a stout colleague, aci informed and humorous leader, an honest and ungrudging lieutenant. He gave value for money; he could he hard but he was straight. He had great courage;

for although he suffered most of his life from a cruel illness, he never allowed it to defer hi; purposes and, more significant still, he never took it out on those around him. He had heart, he had bottom, he had spunk. He was a man of constancy : Mr. Standfast.

All this Miss 'Adam Smith summons up for us, most notably perhaps in a personal passage in which Buchan's generosity to herself is recalled with a generosity to match. But it is Buchan's books which make for the most intriguing (if not the best written) sections of her biography; and it is through these that we can now approach that most bizarre and entertaining of all Buchan's characteristics---his obsessive love-hate of the Devil.

A. L. Rowse, in Times, Persons. Placest (originally published in 1951 as The English Past), concludes that it was as a professional historian (`but a professional who could write: there is the difference') that Buchan produced his 'most lasting work.' I suspect that Miss Adam Smith would endorse this judgment; but what obviously fascinates her much more is the body of Buchan's thrillers and the serious theme which lurks in them—a theme which we can sum up in one word as 'threat.' At first sight this notion may seem ordinary enough. After all, every thriller poses a 'threat'—a subversion of property, life, society-,– and we don't take it very seriously. It is a mere convention of the genre, and there is no reason, we might say, to suppose that Buchan transcended it—Buchan, who only claimed to write 'romance where the incidents defy the probabilities and march just inside borders of the possible.' Noth- ing out of the way here. Moreover, since even the best disposed of Buchan's critics allow that his characters are thin and unconvincing (except in their professional skills), what possible excuse can there be for serious consideration of the `threat' that hangs over them?

Yet the fact remains that such diverse men as T. E. Lawrence and Clement Attlee have been very impressed by Buchan's 'threat,' and if one looks carefully one sees why. Miss Adam Smith quotes two passages from The, Power-House.

Now I saw how thin is the protection of civilisation. An accident and a bogus ambulance —a false charge and a bogus arrest—there were a dozen ways of spiriting me out of this gay, bustling world . .

'You think that a wall as solid as the earth separates civilisation from barbarism. 1 tell you the division is a thread, a sheet of glass. A touch here, a push there, and you bring back the reign of Saturn.' [Italics mine.] Behind the thin partition, on the other side of the 'sheet of glass' and clearly visible to Buchan, are the forces of chaos and Evil. Not just spies or criminals or madmen, but the real thing with a capital E. Residual Calvinism gave strength to Buchan's vision, while a classical education lent an additional and highly personal insight : the trouble was that this Evil was often beautiful, damned but genuinely beautiful, and therefore insidiously attractive even to solid citizens like John Buchan. Not only are some of his villains conceived in the heroic style of Lucifer (Prester John, The Courts of the Morning), but the cause which they serve is often that of the old, enchanting gods, and the apparatus through which they work is the pagan appeal to the instincts and passions of the flesh, primeval, naked, accursed . . . and natural. (See The Dancing Floor and Witch Wood.)

In short, Buchan, who had been noted by Dr. Bussell at Oxford for 'a particular interest in the

f Macmillan, 30s. survival of pre-Christian cults,' was always un- comfortably and yet deliciously aware of what he calls, in The Watcher by the Threshold, 'the intangible mystery of culture on the verge of savagery.' Nothing, nobody, was safe. Mr. Stand- fast might have his feet firmly planted, but they were planted in a thin crust of earth beneath which the superb and forbidden beauties of evil were forever waiting—through which, indeed, they hourly escaped at once to ennoble and to defile the world above. Small wonder there was need for order, for precision, for work and more work, for perennial wariness : the beloved enemy was all about him.

At the end of his life, after five years as a much loved and respected Governor-General of Canada, Lord Tweedsmuir wrote his\ last novel, Sick Her River. The hero, like Tweedsmuir himself, is facing death, and reflects that now 'His Castles had been tumbled down. Pleasant things they had been, even if made of paste- board; in his heart he had always known that they were paste-board.' Is this the Christian, born in the Free Kirk, who reflects on the triviality of earthly rewards now that he is going to the last and highest reward of all? Or is it the Mani- chxan, who knows that all his careful achieve- ments are worthless because of the evil by which he himself has been so beguiled and which will mock and destroy his work when he is gone? 'Vanity of vanities' : the sentiment is pagan as well as Christian. Perhaps it was the pagan in Buchan, and not the po-faced Elder, who was so suspicious of Birkenhead's 'glittering prizes' even while he fought so long and so bravely to win _ them.