Some Lives
YOUNG John Reith wanted to make a mark on the world. He particularly wanted to wear spurs; to walk up the aisle of his father's church in Glasgow, wearing them. In Wearing Spurs (Hut- chinson, 30s.), Lord Reith tells how, in 1914, he went to France as a Transport Officer, and how he fought till a wound sent him home. Lord Reith is a mit son of the Manse, that sometime fount of spiritual and social authority. Perhaps his spurs were for lacerating the devil, rowelling the idle and ungodly, even for driving himself on. This record is all of war, well and excitingly told. Lord Reith was a good officer; it is easy to imagine his subordinates giving him their trust, their love. To his superiors, however, he must often have looked like six foot six of conscious rectitude, armed with spikes.
Born into the Nair community of Travancore State at the end of the last century, K. P. S. Menon has done much public service for India, both in the old ICS and, since independence, as Foreign Secretary and, finally, Ambassador to Moscow. In his latest book, Many Worlds (O.U.P., 28s.), he looks back over a life which has seen more social and political change than most, back to the `matrilineal' society of his childhood in what is now Kerala. From happy beginnings, Mr Menon went out, armed with his own sharp humour and talent for calm appraisal, to deal with British officials, princes, frontier tribesmen, and the stupefactions of Madame Chiang Kai-shek. He will be remem- bered as the man who gave the Indian Foreign Service its shape, and perhaps as one of those Indians who had the wit to accept the best the British had to offer, and to improve on it. To be a Livonian nobleman of means; to be handsome, well-educated and a skilled musician; to join, at nineteen, the Russian cavalry in time for the battle of Borodino; to survive many battles and to chase Napoleon all the way to Paris; to wander back in triumph, through Germany and Poland, to a hero's welcome at home; and, finally, to be almost irresistible to women: this is the kind of spoiling by circum- stance which might make the least imaginative wistful. Time's clumsy and random revenges have burned Fickel Castle, obliterated Livonia, sharply diverted destiny for the young man's descen- dants. Arms and the Woman : The Diaries of Baron Boris Uxkull 1812-1819 (Seeker and Warburg, 42s.) has been edited by his great- great-great-nephew, and beautifully translated by Joel Carmichael. This would be a book of outstanding interest for the description of Kutuzov's campaign alone—Boris Uxkull would agree with Tolstoy about Kutuzov—and for the picture of life as lived by a junior officer of the Russian army in 1812. But there is much more. The young man is charming, full of spirit and sympathy, passionately interested in the intellectual movements of his day, widely read in several languages. His amours seem some- thing brighter than the drab `having sex' of our contemporaries. Yet the delicious Helene, whose story occupies the book's second part, could not quite hold him. He was engaged twelve times `until his thirteenth fiancée forced him to marry her.' He died in 1870, having seen all the best of the nineteenth century and enjoyed every minute of it.
In Two Under the Indian Sun (Macmillan, 25s.), Rumer and Jon Godden have written a joint story of childhood at Narayanganj, on the
Ganges delta. Their father was agent of the com- pany which ran the shallow-draft steamers down from Calcutta, up to Assam. Collaborations do not always succeed; this one does. The joining of two minds, two memories, two life-stories rarely shows a seam. As a study of gifted children in a far-away world of love and glamour, a world from which to be wrenched back to an alien England was the first great pain in life; as a study, too, of the making of writers, and as a footnote to empire, an un- stressed commentary on what India really meant to some English people, Two Under the Indian Sun must be rated very highly indeed.
The River Bank, by F. D. Ommaney (Long- mans, 30s.), is, in a way, a sequel to The House in the Park. When that delightful (if not very comfortable) grace-and-favour residence had to be given up, the Ommaney family moved to Kent. It was thought that young Ommaney should be put to commerce as soon as possible. Commerce was not a success. In the end, his feeling for science was recognised and he set out to get a biology degree at the Royal College of Science. Mr Ommaney has a literary per- sonality entirely his own. It is not only that his observation is so sharp, his selection of incident so sure, but that a kind of pervading stoicism, an absolute refusal to doll-up reality, to let off cheap fireworks, makes him at once restful and invigorating to read. A sense of apartness, here candidly discussed, explains the title: `As Somerset Maugham says, I have stood all my life on the bank and watched the river of life flow past. . .
There was something strong, courageous, beneath the in de siecle twitter of Reginald Turner, mostly remembered for having stuck
by Oscar Wilde literally to the end (fie was present at his death, with R. B. Ross), but in his day famous as a wit. In Reggie (W. H. Allen, 42s.), Professor Stanley Weintraub brings warmth and considerable erudition to the story of this peripheral but indispensable figure. Although 'Reggie' lived long enough to be lampooned by Lawrence, to know many literary figures still 'in' to this day, it is to the earlier age, of Oscar and Bosie and dinners at the Café Royal, that he really belongs. At the time of Edward VIII's abdication, Reggie said: 'On ne Baldwin pas avec l'amour!' It was the nastiest kind of irony that this great talker should have to die of cancer of the tongue.
WILLIAM BUCHAN
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