Mr. Toynbee Replies
The Spectator from time to time invites authors to reply to criticisms of their work. Mr. Philip Toynbee here reviews the reviews of his latest book Friends Apart, published by MacGibbon and Kee.
I AM sensitive to reviews of my books, partly because I like praise and dislike blame and partly because a hostile re- view implies a sad failure of intended communication. My book, Friends A part, has been appreciatively reviewed by many critics, but very few of them have treated it in the terms which I had expected. My last two published books had been in- cautious novels which evoked, as I had anticipated, violent and contrary reactions. I imagined that this memoir would prove inoffensive; and the kind of review which I had rather irritably expected was a warm congratulation on having written, at last, in a straightforward and intelligible way. Two such back- handed compliments were, in fact, paid (let me assure their authors that my regeneration is only temporary), but most of the reviews were very different in tone and emphasis. What I wanted to do was to present these two friends of mine as lucidly as I could; and I wanted to do this because I believed that they were interesting and revealing individuals, not only as products of their time and place but also as the epitomes of certain perennial extremes of human nature. The particular form which these lives took was, indeed, due to the time and place in which my friends were born, the class which produced them and the kind of schools they went to. And, as I wrote in the epilogue to my book, an easier time might have enabled them to live more rewarding, or at least more ' success- ful ' lives. But Esmond was the eternal swashbuckler, eternally iconoclastic, Jasper the eternally fastidious arbiter of taste and Judgement; and it,was in these terms. that I hoped they would reveal themselves. .
As I was writing the book it was of course the technique of the expository narrative which preoccupied me—how to weave these two dissimilar lives together by the medium of my 00 life. And the other great problem was the problem of tone how to avoid being too brittle or too sentimental, too adulatorY or too off-hand.
There were very few reviewers who replied to me in these terms. Mr. John Rosselli did so, most kindly and intelligentlY (it is difficult not to equate these two adverbs) in the Manchestet Guardian, and so did Mr. Lehmann on the BBC. Mr. Quell' nell in the Daily Mail, Mr. Hopkinson in the London Magazine, and a reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement. But most reviewers (even the most appreciative) chose to treat Friends Apart as a defence of a particular group of people living at particular time. Yet when I had thought about that period an° its moods they had seemed almost as remote from our present hopes and fears as the old passions of Yorkists and Lancas' trians. What I had intended to do was not to engage in super' annuated polemics, but to describe the individuals and the period as vividly and as truthfully as I could. So it Was with real astonishment that I saw so many faded old rosettes being dragged out of drawers and reaffixed in lapels. It seen that the Thirties are still a battleground. Many critical reactions, in fact, were scarcely literary ones at all. It was typical that Mr. Trevor Roper should devote two long columns of the Sunday Times to abusing my friends, myself and the period I was writing about, adding a mere three sentences of flattering comment on the book's literary qualities; Mr. Trevor Roper was annoyed because my friends and I, revolted against that English upper class which had produce us. On the other hand, Mr. Pritchett„ in the New Statesman, seemed to be annoyed with us for springing from such a class in the first place. He had many generous and appreciativie things to say, but he continually harped on the unreality ane uninterestingness of the 'idle' and 'privileged' classes. Ate the characters in Saint-Simon unreal. ? Are the characters in Proust uninteresting? What vast areas of past and present Literature must be laid waste by such a judgement as this We had, as Mr. Pritchett wrote, a parish pump' background; but who has not ? Each of us, after all, has only one back ground, and it can surely be made real or unreal, significant or unrevealing, by the way in which we write about it. In the Spectator Mr. John Wain wrote a delightfully appre: ciative and delightfully long review of the book, but his angle of approach was not very different from Mr. Pritchett's. Mr. Wain's case it was less the social than the tempora setting of Friends Apart which preoccupied him. But I was not, as he supposed, writing about a whole generation of young men, even at Oxford. I was writing about particular people, their ideas and the way they lived. Nor has Mr. Wain under" stood that odd Beaumont Street' group of which I did writ' Far from being dilettantes who would not take their academie work seriously, I made it plain that most of them got first' class degrees and that all who survived the war have been outstandingly successful in their different professions. Mrci Wain is dismayed that these young men should have share , something of Bloomsbury's earlier spirit of fervent emotional integrity. "Had nothing," he asks, "been happening in the meanwhile ? " But surely that particular spirit belongs to II° particular time; it is, and it should be, a constantly recurring endeavour among people of all ages ? Once again it was question of trying to reveal the permanent through a tempo°, medium. But Mr. Wain's warm review, like all those whieR, have been written by people younger than myself, shows tha' he had enjoyed and appreciated this book. vier Unfortunately for me several of my reviewers were and sourer: they preferred Mr. Trevor Roper's approaok though they discarded his superfluous afterthought of coal" mendation. Mr. Jocelyn Brooke, in Time and Tide, WaS Su bemused by the vapours of political passion that he even wr°t,e; elegantly, about left-wing writers who "wangled cushy for themselves." Had he forgotten, as his fingers thungle". out Mr. Waugh's old gibes, that he was reviewing a book about two young men who were killed in the war ? This reviewer also suggested, in a menacing Wisconsin accent, that I may still be a Communist, in spite of my claim to have left that party before the war. This suspicion was more discreetly echoed by a reviewer in the Times Educational Supplement who reproached me for showing insufficient shame at my political past. The Daily Worker, on the other hand, decided that few of the people I wrote about had ever been real 'Communists at all; and this (write it down, Mr. Brooke 1) seems to me to be a more sensible attitude than the other one. Most of us were romantic revolutionaries, whose flowering period should have been 1848 rather than 1938. We were ' sincere ' in that 'poverty, fascism and the threat of war distressed and even engulfed us. But in the attempts which some of us made (though these included neither Jasper Ridley nor Esmond Romilly) to glory in the tough dishonesties of the Party Line, we were still playing at gangs or pirates.
The final right-wing assault on Friends Apart took the form of a parody of the book by the editor of Punch. I could not help feeling that this useful piece of publicity contained many of my own jokes which had passed, alas, unnoticed under that eagle eye. But Mr. Muggeridge may, of course, be right in thinking it funnier to go to Cambridge than to Oxford, and to steal trousers than to steal top-hats.
It is tiresome to be diverted on to a field which I never intended to tread, but something, I suppose, must be said in answer to all this resurrected Since 1938 I have not been directly concerned with politics, and my present political position is of very little importance to anyone. For the record, however, I am a strong supporter of the uncompleted Social revolution which began in 1945, and a strong opponent of the Communist Party. As for the past, I think that I made a mistake in being a Communist, but not that I committed a crime. I am very glad indeed. that I wasn't a Con.servative at the time of the depressed areas and of that party's fatuous flirtation with the Nazis. Most of the Left were wrong about Russia in the Thirties, and most of the Right were wrong about Germany. I believe, with Mr. Churchill, that the second of these two mistakes was far less excusable than the other and, at that time, far more dangerous.
If I am called on to mount a soapbox, that is the one for me. But I would again point out that 1 wrote my book from no such angry elevation. I wrote it, as I thought, in tribute to my lively friends and in amused sympathy for a way of life which still seems to me to have been a rich and exciting one. I am grateful to Mr. Annan and the other critics who share my attitude.
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