ANOTHER VOICE
Farewell to Shirley, a teacher and a friend
CHARLES MOORE
Many Spectator regulars will have read occasional articles by Shirley Letwin, who died last week. Some will have read her dis- tinguished books. What they may not have realised was the extent to which she con- tributed to the writings of others. Countless articles, here and elsewhere, by Peregrine Worsthorne, Colin Welch, Ferdinand Mount, Noel Malcolm, me and many more, began their life or altered their course because of, or arose out of a disagreement with, or were inspired by Shirley. On a far higher plane, the same process was at work: Michael Oakeshott's chef d'oeuvre, On Human Conduct, is dedicated to her.
I first met Shirley through my friendship with her son Oliver when we were small boys at Eton. It would be hard to think of a less typical Eton mother. Her expensive clothes had no touch of English careless- ness or understatement. The shape of her head, emphasised by the large amount of dark hair tied back, was ancient Egyptian. And her manner was challenging. Instead of contriving a means of getting her son's friends to go off and play, she would engage them directly in verbal combat. 'I hear you're a Liberal,' I imagine, though do not precisely remember, her saying to me, `How do you defend that?' Once I repeated idly the then conventional view that Shirley Williams was a very sensible woman. 'What do you mean by "sensible"?' she asked mercilessly. I did not mean much. Gradual- ly I came to understand which of the two Shirleys talked more sense.
Like Shirley's conversational style, the house in Regent's Park where she and Bill then lived worked on the assumption that all those present were grown-up. Breakfast was not hastily grabbed, and childish food, such as cereal, never appeared. It was served as if in a hotel. The butter was pre- sented in beautiful whorls. Huge amounts of egg and bacon and sausage and some- times even kidney appeared, and we sat and ate as much as we could in the calm, light dining-room, beside a grand piano. There was a Portuguese cook, and an atmo- sphere of elegance and order.
For a teenager such an atmosphere could have been intimidating, but in fact it was flattering. It told one that one was accepted in a sophisticated world. 'We've got to hurry back home now,' said Oliver one evening after a film or something. Ilayek's coming to supper.' Who's Hayek?"0h, you know, The Road to Serfdom.' I didn't know, but that made my welcome in the presence of the great man no less warm. Much as she liked the charming and bril- liant, Shirley never lionised anyone. There was no guest of honour and no fuss. Great philosophers and her son's schoolfriends dined on terms of equality. People I met for the first time at Shirley's and Bill's table include Hayek and Oakeshott, Sybille Bed- ford, Peter Vansittart, Keith Joseph, Mel Lasky, Daniel Bell, Kingsley Amis, Frank Johnson, Maurice Cowling, John Gross, Peregrine Worsthorne, Ken Minoguc, Ferdy Mount, Moyra Fraser and Elie Kedourie. How collectively patient they were, and how much that prevailing kind- ness was due to Bill and Shirley. It was out of that same friendly interest that Shirley introduced me to Colin Welch, and so got me my first job in journalism.
The mixture of such generosity with argumentativeness was part of a series of apparent contradictions in Shirley's charac- ter and mind. She was an American Jewess and never tried for a moment to pretend she was not, yet she fell in love with Eng- land. She loathed the accusatory ethos and intellectual crudity of left-wing thought, yet she was capable of demonising enemies with a vehemence worthy of a Marxist polemicist. Her writing was notable for its extreme scrupulousness over fact and argu- ment, yet her conversation could be wild in both departments. Her mind was as sharp as any I have known, yet her capacity for minor confusion was remarkable, as she was the first to acknowledge, laughing. It was useful to remember, for example, that when she was talking about Judi Dench she probably meant Vanessa Redgrave, and vice versa. In her relations with her close friends and family, she combined a readi- ness to tell them why they were wrong with an absolute respect for their independence.
Shirley had no sense of geography or physical direction, so that she found it diffi- cult to walk from, say, Trinity Great Court to the Wren Library without getting lost. Her understanding of society or of litera- ture sometimes seemed similar. She did not always know the connections between peo- ple or recognise the cadences and echoes that link words. But this saved her from snobbery and aestheticism and an obses- sion with style. You did not look for unex- pected by-ways in her conversation. What she offered was the high road to clarity. It is astonishing how rare this is. Even very clever people are generally not very clear, sometimes actually congratulating them- selves on their exhibition of Keats's 'nega- tive capability'. For Shirley, this would never do. As a disciple of Oakeshott, she was not reductive, but she did want to know what you meant by what you said. Under her cross-examination, one's lack of mean- ing became apparent. It was a shaming but profitable experience. Whenever, sitting down to write a column, I felt the fog of mental confusion descend, I used to ring Shirley to try to ascertain what, if anything, I might be trying to say. The mists always cleared.
I have indicated why knowing Shirley was such an educative experience; I have not said enough about why it was such a happy one. It was something to do with her courage. She acted against the odds. I used to assume, for example, that she and Bill were rich, but it was seldom, if ever, so. In their different manners, Bill quietly practi- cal and Shirley more demonstratively per- fectionist, they were determined to live in a certain way, and they always contrived it somehow. When the end of their lease forc- ed them to move to the wrong side of Regent's Park, they faithfully recreated the atmosphere of Kent Terrace in Camden Town, almost as if nothing had happened.
Hers was not just a material generositY, but one of spirit. Shirley was happy to give, and never expected to receive. However strenuous her conversation, she was never demanding of her friends. It was character- istic of her, as she spent more than a year dying of cancer, that she would barely acknowledge to us that she was suffering at all. However great her cultural pessimism and her anger at things done or said badly, her optimism of spirit never failed. Her conservatism was of the robust sort which fears the worst and then meets it cheerfullY when it comes.
What I found most touching was the improbability of her life. Why did this exot- ic woman come here and befriend us. What did she see in our grey country? How did someone so tempestuous sustain a mar- vellous marriage for 50 years, and how was someone so apparently fierce so really kind? The attraction of opposites had much to do with it. The bravery and imagination of a true intellectual had even more. It was such a surprise to be loved by Shirley that the most unexpected people found their' selves loving her in return.
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