The triumph of tape over experience
Lucy Hughes-Hallett
MORE OF A CERTAIN AGE by Nairn Attallah Quartet, £15, pp. 345
aim Attallah, I deduce from this collection of interviews, is very interested in Winston Churchill, God, the royal family and adultery. Other items on his personal agenda include the Establishment (what, or rather who, is it?), upper-class feuding and the power of the press.
This is the second volume to be published of his interviews with old or oldish people. The elderly make good subjects. They have seen and done more than the rest of us and, having already made it or failed to do so, they tend to be less cagey in their responses and less conventional in their self-images than the up-and-coming. Not that they necessarily acquire the kind of emotional and intellec- tual maturity one likes to hope might be the compensation for physical decay. Attallah does his odd assortment of over- sixties the honour of recording their opinions on this, that and the other thing (especially those things named above, with a particular emphasis on adultery) as though they had all the wisdom traditional- ly ascribed to the elders of the tribe. Judging by the poor use they make of his courtesy, none of those interviewed, brilliant though several of them are, are truly sage.
The format is apparently artless (the work of editing being invisible) — ques- tions and answers printed straight. It has considerable drawbacks. There is no place for comment, which is fine, but nor is there the opportunity for coherent narrative. I don't believe I will be the only one of Attallah's readers unable to call to mind what Lord Lambton said about Lord Hartwell's wife in 1980, and without that knowledge Hartwell's reply is of little inter- est. The medium virtually obliges the sub- jects to boast — this volume is raucous with the sound of self-blown trumpets — and it gives them far too much space to indulge in self-important pronouncements about Winston Churchill and so forth. Sir Charles Forte, one of the most entertaining (though not one of the most likable) inter- viewees has the literary judgment to ignore Attallah's question 'What were your feel- ings when you were interned?' and simply relate what happened. All too many of the others do obediently describe their feel- ings, at length.
What an interview of this kind does give us, and it's a benefit which outweighs all the awkwardnesses of the form, is the sub- ject's voice. Nearly everyone in this book has already written an autobiography, but future historians may well find these inter- views, variously circumspect, bad-tempered or self-glorifying as they are, more directly revealing.
P. D. James and Sir Bernard Lovell acquit themselves best, both being articu- late, thoughtful and self-confident enough to steer the conversation without appearing defensive. Lovell, the man of science, is, interestingly, far more eloquent on the the subject of God, or, as he puts it, the 'cos- mic ethic', than Kathleen Raine, poet of infinite mysteries, who goes on at length but unpersuasively about the 'inexhaustible marvel of being'.
The best interviewees do not, of course, make the best copy. Rather the reverse. There is a wicked pleasure to be had from reading Patricia Highsmith's staunch refusal to tell Attallah anything of any interest. Julian Amery and Woodrow Wyatt, equally self-important, equally impatient of Attallah's carefully prepared and diplomatically formulated questions, are rivettingly self-revealing. Amery's brother was hanged for treason in 1945. The hangman reported that he met his death with remarkable courage. Did know- ing that make the pain all the harder to bear? asks Attallah. 'No, I think it was appropriate. He was an Amery.'
Laurens van der Post loses his temper. 'I shouldn't even have to respond to these remarks'. Abruptly the purveyor of timeless wisdom begins to look like a man patheti- cally dependent on his disciples' flattery.
I don't know anybody who's ever called me a charlatan, certainly nobody who knows me would ever call me that . . . Who are these idiots? I can't cope with this. . .
This is good knockabout stuff. But the haunting and memorable revelations are those that are made willingly: Hartwell's admission that, though he loved his wife, he is actually glad that she died before he lost the Telegraph, 'She would have been shocked'; Lady Longford describing the sadness of writing her own memoirs and feeling with sudden acuteness that 'these happy times really were past'. These tiny, vivid glimpses of a person's real nature and experience make up for the windiness of much of the text.
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