AS I WAS SAYING
Those of us without enemies don't deserve friends
PEREGRINE WORSTHORNE
A... lovely man who went through life without making any enemies.' This is how a preparatory school contemporary of mine, recently deceased, was eulogised in the school's annual report to its old alumni. As it happens, I do not remember him as a lovely boy, but rather as an arse-licking creep. Of course this doesn't mean that he did not later grow into a lovely man. Never having known him as an adult I am in no position to tell. But if he went through life without making any enemies, this does not sound as if he had been all that different in adult life from how I remember him at school — i.e. a creep and an arse-licker. For no man of any quality can go through life without making enemies. Most certain- ly Jesus Christ, whose birthday anniversary we have just been celebrating, made ene- mies, as our vicar in his midnight mass Christmas sermon, somewhat inappropri- ately, saw fit to remind us. Don't forget, he said, that the life of Jesus, which began in the crib, ended on the cross.
For it is quite impossible to do good or tell the truth without making enemies. Indeed it is roughly true to say that the greater the man, the more enemies he is certain to have made. That is why I was a bit worried at first about the exceptional lack of malice in most of the obituaries of the great philosopher, Isaiah Berlin. How can he have dominated the humanities at Oxford throughout the entire length of the Cold War without earning the vengeful enmity of all those Marxist fellow travellers in high places there whose real sympathies lay with the other side? By the breadth of his understanding and the sweetness of his character, one might say, or by following the precept of Frank Longford, echoing the words of Our Lord, to hate the sin but love the sinner. Up to a point, yes. But I have never been entirely convinced by that argument. In my experience when people truly hate the sin, they do also hate the sin- ner and find it impossible to disguise their hatred. Certainly this was true in the case of Nazi sympathisers during and after the second world war. Nobody's sweetness of character or breadth of understanding extended so far as to embrace them, and I doubt whether Sir Isaiah's patronage would have been extended to historians or literary critics of a fascist persuasion to the same degree as it did to those of a Marxist persuasion. Eric Hobsbawn, the great Marxist historian, is a case in point. In spite of having been, and still being, an apologist for the Soviet Union, he is social- ly acceptable on the London scene in a way the Nazi apologist, David Irving, could never be. And even the traitors Burgess, Blunt and Maclean, who spied for the Soviet Union, have never suffered the obloquy reserved for John Amery and Lord Haw-Haw who worked for Nazi Ger- many.
Or does it all come down to a question of manners, of there being more ways of con- veying disapproval or even contempt than outward rudeness or ostentatious ostracism? I would like to think so. For the most part I act on this precept, hiding my hatreds behind a veil of politeness, as did 18th-century gentlemen who challenged each other to a duel with the flourish of a hand, and a bow, accompanied by the hol- low 'your servant, sir'. Indeed it can be argued that cold courtesies are far more wounding than the most heated insults. While conceding all this, I still know in my heart that my real motive for not calling a spade a spade is almost always self- indulgent moral cowardice, a hatred of scenes and rows, a desire for a quiet life, even, I regret to say, a shameful attraction to the company of monsters. A green enthusiast friend of mine, finding himself in a lift with the chairman of Fisons, seized the opportunity to tear a strip off the poor man about the evil of pesticides. Those who have the courage to defend their con- victions to that degree seldom receive uni- versally glowing obituaries. Certainly my old and dear friend Mel Lasky, for exam- ple, the editor of Encounter who fought the Cold War tooth and nail from the begin- ning, no holds barred, showing no mercy to the fellow travellers, when his time comes won't be that unfortunate.
As it happens, my concern that none of the obituarists had honoured Sir Isaiah by putting the boot in proved, to my great relief, unfounded. For A.N. Wilson, at the last moment, performed this necessary last rite in the Evening Standard. Thank heav- ens for A.N. Wilson. He can always be relied upon, bless him, to step in where angels fear to tread.
Ac, cording to a Mr Warren Hoge, chief of the New York Times bureau in London, christening a child Beauregard in America — which the Texan Jerry Hall has just done — is `kinda like someone in Britain calling their son Peregrine'. Not quite. I would like Mr Hoge to know that the first child born after the pilgrim fathers disembarked from the Mayflower was christened Peregrine. In other words, the first white American was a Peregrine, and a name good enough for the pilgrim fathers ought to be good enough even for the New York Times.
Not that Mr Hoge is alone among his fel- low countrymen in finding something a bit un-American about my name. Even Gener- al Eisenhower did. I discovered this when travelling as a reporter on his campaign train in the 1952 presidential election. From time to time the candidate would wonder through the dining car, stopping for a word with any correspondent whose face he recognised or his aides thought he would be well advised to recognise. Quite by chance, I was dining next to Eric Sevareid, the famous CBS correspondent who, after enjoying his own little chat with the candidate, very politely and kindly thought it proper to introduce his young British colleague with whom he was sharing a meal. Peregrine Worsthorne proved too much of a mouthful and the General asked me to spell the names out. This I did, help- fully explaining that the first born off the Mayflower had also been christened Pere- grine. After pondering this for a moment his face broke into the famous Ike smile and he said, 'See here, son, I have to tell you that your goddam first name sure never caught on.'
Having your prostate seen to surgically is not the horrid experience which I had long dreaded — not, at any rate, if the gland is free of cancer as mine mercifully turned out to be. Even so, the operation involves a catheter being pushed up the penis, the prospect of which, as I say, is enough to daunt even the bravest male, not to mention someone cowardly like myself who flinches at the thought of having a tooth pulled out. In the event, however, reality turned out to be much less unpleas- ant than the imagination had led one to expect, and even the removal of the catheter a few days later, which is done by nurses without the benefit of anaesthetic, did not hurt too much. May these glad tid- ings help fellow sufferers to have rather a better new year than the one they were fearing.
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