Playing the game A. N. Wilson

A MAN OF CONTRADICTIONS: A LIFE OF A. L. ROWSE by Richard 011ard Allen Lane, £20, pp. 367

There was an artless, if spirited article recently in one of the popular papers with some such headline as 'WHY I LOVE A DONNISH FEUDI!!', A. L Rowse appeared to have inspired our young woman's pen (a Girton grad, I guessed), though her views of Oxford seemed largely to have been inspired by watching Inspector Morse on telly.

It is true that Rowse was a man of pas- sionate likes and dislikes, but he was never exactly your archetypical don (if such a fig- ure exists). The first, obvious thing to say about this Fellow of All Souls, who wrote ten marvellous books, 20 which were rather more slapdash, and in addition churned out some absolute tosh, is that for many of his 90-odd years of life he was not in Oxford at all.

As Richard 011ard, the biographer of Pepys, records in this punctilious and sensi- ble life, Rowse from the early 1950s to the 1970s was a figure not on the British but on the American scene. He was regarded very seriously by the Americans, taken up by high society in Washington. 'His friendship with Caspar Weinberger . . . opened many doors. Nixon gave a small dinner for him at his house in New York, Jacqueline Onassis an even more intimate lunch to which only two other guests were invited.' And so on.

The Morse characters, the jealous dons at home who found Rowse tiresome, read- ing that sentence, would say 'only two guests could stand the idea of having lunch with him'. But that would be completely to misunderstand Rowse. He was an Ameri- can star. They loved him, he loved them. 'He kept up', says 011ard, 'with the Aldrich- es, the Bruces and the Annenbergs whom he had known in their days at the London embassy.'

Rowse was far from being a bogus figure but he was a play-actor and he gave to audiences what he thought they would enjoy. In the case of America, he very largely got this right, both in his prepared- ness to make his deep learning available to a wide general audience and to 'play up' some of the prejudices which he had per- haps only in an incipient form before American stardom got going.

So, though he was one of the most famous 'Oxford dons' in the world, you weren't very likely to meet him in Oxford for at least three-quarters of the year, unless, like me, you were lucky enough to be taken up by him. He felt sore at not hav- ing been asked to be the history don at Christ Church, his old college. He minded not being asked to lecture in the history faculty — and he was a brilliant lecturer. He was passed over for the wardenship of All Souls and for the various history Chairs.

Yawn, yawn. 011ard takes us through these various disappointments and he is admirably fair about them, seeing them, as Rowse did himself in his saner moments, as liberating him for his work as a writer and as a figure on a wider scene than the uni- versity parish pump.

But the life of being an American star is lonely:

Oh, God! Here I am in London airport once more [September 1965] on the conveyor-belt to America, which I won't be off until back here at the end of March. What a fool I have been, uprooting myself from Oxford, where I like being best, from my rooms, august and lovable; and from Trenarren [his house in Cornwall] where I have never felt happier or more fulfilled than this summer.

He was past 60 when he wrote these words. His obsession with earning enough to keep himself as the gentleman he wasn't kept him on that treadmill. When it all got too much, in the late Seventies and early Eighties, he asked me if I would like to 'inherit' his position as a sort of honorary research don at Lynchberg, Virginia. Part of me was very tempted. What a different life mine would have been had I said yes!

He was endlessly kind to me. To say I liked him is far too weak a word: I loved him. 011ard is good at capturing the pas- sionate nature of Rowse's friendships. There were the all but love-affairs with aca- demics such as Bruce Macfarlane and Richard Pares and the obsessive love for Adam von Trott, that complicated man with whom Rowse fell deeply in love, and whose life and death coloured AL's totally absurd views of Germany and the Ger- mans.

He was queer, but it is worth saying, which 011ard doesn't make clear, that he was celibate. His only sexual experience, he once told me, was with a policeman in Lon- don. It was an incident which took place during the Blitz.

There were many quieter friendships. Rowse, for all his loud denunciations of the Idiot People, the Bloody Germans or, more generally, the Bloody Humans, who some- times caused him such mental torment, was a great lover of people. The friendship of his fellow-Cornishmen Raleigh Trevelyan and David Treffry brought him enormous

comfort and intellectual stimulation towards the end of his life.

There is a good passage where 011ard quotes from that great book, Tudor Corn- wall. Rowse is talking with rapt sympathy of the miracle plays and 011ard comments:

The minute accuracy of the scholarship is illuminated, dazzlingly, by the profound imaginative sympathy. Rowse has forgotten that he is an agnostic, a Marxist, a brilliant young fellow of All Souls whose literary and intellectual powers have been unfairly neglected .... He had forgotten himself.

Another way of seeing this would be to say that Rowse was more truly a Cornish High Churchman (without faith) than he was ever a Marxist. He was an embodiment of the saying that an artist can entertain two opposite points of view without inwardly collapsing. 'I look into my heart', he writes in a revealing note, 'and what do I see? A socialist. I look into my head and what do I see? A fascist.'

If this admirable book disappoints, this is not Ollard's fault. The disappointment is in the extracts from Rowse's diaries. Knowing that Rowse kept diaries all his life (he read some of them aloud to me and very enter- taining they seem in retrospect) I had expected Ollard's book to be a feast of quotations. I thought it would match my favourite book — David Newsome's On the Edge of Paradise, which is the life of A. C. Benson seen through the pages of his voluminous journals. But it would seem as if the best bits of Rowse's diaries had already been used up by the master himself in such books as A Man of the Thirties. By wittily choosing Richard 011ard as his biog- rapher, Rowse clearly wanted to hint that he saw himself as the Pepys de noire epoque. The quotations given here suggest that this was one of those areas (alas, not few) where Rowse was deluding himself.