13uchaneer
John Keegan
Something Ventured C. M. Woodhouse (Granada £12.95) 'The Greek government declared neutral- . ity. My parents (Lord and Lady Tem ington) telegraphed, begging me to stay (at the British School in Athens). For several weeks I tried to obey them, looking desperately for something to do. I made a Pilgrimage to Delphi, but the oracle was Silent, All the time I knew I had to go home and enlist. "Do you want to get killed?" a Pacifist friend in the British Council asked Me. No: but I could not do nothing. Others found jobs here and there: in the Press Of- fice of the Legation, in the British Council, mother Balkan capitals. I was alone, and of military age'.
Thus, give or take a page, the opening of C. M. Woodhouse's entrancing autobio- graphy. 'Beginnings and endings are what Chiefly interest me', he says. And, with a beginning like that, who can resist plunging further in? The style is crisp, epigrammatic, allusive, the mood at once Attic and Romantic, the subject matter a many- layered honey-cake, like the sweetmeats of his beloved Greece, of reflection, thought and action. He had come to the British School — Winchester, New College and a First in Greatspehind him — to prepare for 'an agreeable life lecturing on Plato and Aristotle'. The war breaks out (it is 1939 — but, given background and Weltan- schauung, it could as well be 1914) and the Fellowship at All Souls suddenly fades into unimportance. The need is to fight, not so much for country as for the vision and ideals of the tiny caste in which he has been brought up — the caste of the classical up- per sixth at Eton or Winchester to which scholarly brilliance is but the means to real achievement in life. And what is that? Cer- tainly not the palms of the conventional upper-middle class career — the permanent secretaryship, the colonial governor's plumes. `To be an official has never been attractive to me', he reveals. For he is not middle-class. He is aristocratic, and in the oldest sense, believing in the rule of the best, as long as it is exercised with courage, discretion and altruism.
So public competition is distasteful. He is, for a while after the war, a diplomat, though by invitation not examination. He is even, if we read him aright, head of what John Le Carre calls the `muscle' side of MI 6. He is thrice a Member of Parliament, entirely appropriately for Oxford, and twice a junior minister. Politics, though, — or at least the politics of a Britain in decline — holds little allure. In a manner entirely alien to that of most political biographies, which this emphatically is not, he reviews his achievements in the House and Whitehall and recalls only how little he did and how bad he was at it. 'The National Cycling Proficiency Scheme, parking meters, prisoners' footwear, rodenticides, street bookmaking offences, Sunday Obser- vance, wirelesses for the Suffolk and Ipswich fire services'; he marvels in retrospect at the range of subjects to which he gave authoritative answers at Question Time and takes a gloomy pleasure in the amnesia which has descended over all of them. Even on his writing about politics he sets a low value; recalling a contribution to a book called The Conservative Opportuni- ty, he reveals, with the sort of satisfaction that would have brought a glow to the heart of Eeyore, that `it was the only chapter which was not even mentioned in any of the reviews.'
And yet Monty Woodhouse is a.gifted and many-sided writer, whose books have brought delight to his readership. He was writing all the time he was the many other things he has been — Director-General of Chatham House, Director of Education and Training for the CBI — and while he was turning down the things he did not want to be, Fellow of New College includ- ed. Why so little of his literary achievements, among all the others he dismisses or makes light of? Why so little of almost all of his life, which a Fitzroy Maclean or a Bernard Fergusson would have turned into an odyssey?
It is not the man, but the times. Born 50 years earlier, he would have been a Sandy Arbuthnot, 'the first white man to ride through the Yemen, [who] hobnobbed with Albanian bandits, got involved in Turkish politics and with Turkish gipsies, was in In- dia "keeping an eye on Central Asia", was in Persia, got to know Gandhi, studied hyp- notism in the East' and, as Greenmantle, did as much as anyone to win the First World War. Those times, when a career of brilliant amateurism opened before the high-minded and high-born, ended in his infancy. All manhood could offer him were a few short years as a warrior chief in oc- cupied Greece. But what years! Not everyone is a colonel at 26, dealing out gold sovereigns by the fistful to buy intelligence or loyalty, supping poison unawares at a traitor's table and living to tell the tale, counselling prime ministers and kings-in- exile, accepting the surrender of an enemy army and bringing it under his command, and all the while sporting the sort of beard which would have left Winchester dumb- struck. The friends of his youth are the descendants of the klephts and phanariots who welcomed the Philhellenes to Greece in
the 1820s, he himself a 'lover of liberty' condemned to return to a greyer world.
Yet he is a Buchanesque figure: not so much a Sandy Arbuthnot as a Vernon Milburne. Who today reads The Dancing Floor? Probably not the author, whose taste is for more astringent things. And yet the mood of that almost forgotten book is uncannily akin to that of the passages — in which Something Ventured comes alive as nowhere else — where he recalls the smell of goat and scent of danger in the moun- tains of Roumeli. Vernon Milburne is an Englishman who has everything and takes pleasure in nothing — not his birth, his wealth, his good looks, his Oxford mile, his Craven and Hertford, his command of a battalion. Certainly not love, for his emo- tions are possessed by the foreknowledge of a supreme ordeal which is yet to come. He confronts it ultimately among the demon- haunted islanders of remote and lawless Plakos, whose English chatelaine he plucks from the flames they have set to her Philhellene ancestor's castle. Colonel Woodhouse, like Colonel Milburne, finds a bride during his Greek adventures, an English countess with whom he falls in love at first sight. We do not learn if Vernon and Kore live happily ever after, but Monty and Davina clearly do. That explains a lot.
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