Wielding his clubs

P. N. Furbank

THE USE OF MEMORY by Tom Burns Sheed & Ward, £19.95, pp. 202 It is the practice now for obituaries to come signed, and to that degree to be a little more personal. The autobiography of Tom Burns, Catholic publisher and, from 1967 to 1982 editor of the Tablet, has the air of being one of these obituary notices by a kind friend. It is the kind of book which seems to be all walls. Here and there there is a grille or aperture through which one is allowed to peer, glimpsing high doings and the sight of notable backs, but in a moment or two they are lost to sight.

The author is the great-nephew of the publisher James Burns who, having followed his friend John Henry Newman into the Catholic fold, established — with the help of the copyright in Newman's Loss and Gain — the famous Catholic imprint of Burns and Oates. He was born, the son of a prosperous banker, in Chile, in the year of the great earthquake, and educated in England, first at Wimbledon College, a Jesuit institution, and then at Stonyhurst. At the latter, the orchidaceous Father D'Arcy, an inspiring teacher, introduced him to the poetry of Hopkins and spent rewarding hours with him and a school friend over a smuggled copy of Joyce's Ulysses.

Burns avoided Oxbridge, landing up as a footloose intellectual in Paris. It was, in his words, 'the springtime of a Catholic revival, a resurrection from the killing-fields of Flanders', and he quickly found his way into the neo-Thomist circle of Jacques Maritain. Back in London, he found his way into publishing, joining the newly- formed firm of Sheed & Ward, and through his work he made the acquain- tance of leading Catholic luminaries such as Belloc, Chesterton, Ronald Knox and Eric Gill. He had joined an elder brother in Chelsea and led a busy party-going and night-club-attending existence; but at week- ends, unknown to his friends, he was appearing on soap-boxes on behalf of the Catholic Evidence Guild. It was, religiously Speaking, a cliquey existence, and when he Was introduced to John Betjeman, his greeting was: 'You're the first Protestant I've met!'

In 1928 he launched a review entitled Order. What a whiff of Criterion and After Strange Gods the name gives off! But in fact the journal abjured Criterion-style elitism: We cannot insist too strongly [ran its first editorial] on the necessity of not regarding Order as the work of illumines; we fail if our point of view is regarded as abnormal. Con- tributors to this journal should not be profes- sional scribblers, but people kept busy by routine life, constantly in touch with the triv- ial, compelled to muster their thoughts and set them down on paper at odd moments, for preference in buses and trains where the only works of reference are the plain faces of their fellow passengers.

The review had a handsome cover-design by David Jones, depicting a unicorn pranc- ing in an enclosed garden, 'to cleanse the water', and it ran to four numbers — which one has noticed is a natural life-span of a certain kind of journal and need not be interpreted as failure. I don't think we quite gather, though, how its plain-man- and-woman-readership was meant to differ from that of Belloc or Chesterton, or what exactly brought the review to a stop. A door is heard to slam here.

I thought that I had reached the limit of my perception at various points. I was not afraid to go further. 'Ten thousand difficulties do not make one doubt', as Newman said, but they do sometimes call for deeper investiga- tion and there was little time for that with the increasing demands of publishing.

A rising publisher in the Thirties, Burns had a rumpus with Sheed and joined Long- mans, also becoming business adviser to the Tablet. He crossed the Atlantic many times in search of new Catholic authors, a great find being Thomas Merton, and he made some minor contacts with Spain. In 1938, though never a wholehearted Franco- ite, he drove an ambulance, donated by English Catholics, for the Nationalist forces; and in the following year he was despatched to Spain by the Ministry of Information, to report on Catholic opinion about the war. The ambassador, Sir Samuel Hoare (whom he came to detest), appoint- ed him his press attaché, and he moved about confidently 'from the Ritz to the rastro [flea market]', dropping hints and pulling strings, in the useful cause of keep- ing Spain out of the war. After the war Burns & Oates made him their managing director; and in 1967 he was appointed editor of the Tablet. This was marked by another rumpus, involving the outgoing editor, Douglas Woodruff. According to Burns, Woodruff, who had been doing the job for 30 years, nursed a vision of the Church as 'a complete society, Vatican based, with all the answers for an unheeding world'. He was blistering on the subject of Vatican II. A questionnaire, moreover, revealed that the average age of the Tablet's subscribers was over 70. It was, in Burns' view, a case for a new broom; and one of his first actions as editor was to pub- lish a leaked copy of the papal commis-

sion's report on birth-control. It proved 'a bombshell'.

These are the outsides of a story which we would be interested to hear, but we are not asked to penetrate beyond the outsides. There is much about dining-clubs and exclusive societies. The grand step forward in Burns' career in Madrid, he tells us, was to be admitted to a tertulia: 'a self-consti- tuted, self-perpetuating group of men of shared views and interests, whether politi- cal or professorial', such as would meet regularly in a café or tavern for compan- ionable talk. In his tertulia he met eminent scholars and sculptors, famous bullfighters and bullfighting critics. He had struck a rich vein of the essential Spain — the permanent pals — distinct from the polarised passions of the Civil War.

What they said and did and felt in the tertulia, however, we are not invited to hear. One has a little the feeling with this book of being fobbed off with the memen- toes, the flotsam and jetsam, of a social life one did not share. One is regaled with humorous menus, ingenious Christmas cards, and a description of the Old Burgun- dian tie,

a splendid object with broad bands of claret and burgundy colours and a thinner line of champagne colour between them;

also unrevealing anecdotes, like how, at a Wiseman Club dinner, 'Billy' Clonmore (later the Earl of Wicklow) singed his fore- lock over a match-standard and passed a rude word round the table. The personal is at a discount, judgments on friends usually not extending much beyond 'He was a Wykehamist with a passion for the classics as well as the finer points of sherry.' Occa- sionally, though, these judgments can be pretty rasping. I bristled at the one on W. H. Auden: It was good to renew an old friendship and I visited him in his Greenwich Village base- ment where all his temporal needs were sup- plied by a young Filipino catamite cook.

This, one feels, is the sort of friendship one could do without.

As a substitute for human intimacy we get much about 'the Latin temperament', the 'obstinacy and honesty' of the Aragonese, the 'innate courtesy' of the 'ordinary madrdeno', and so on. (`The Basques are among my favourite people.' 'Something seems to have cracked in the German psyche.') It is a way of interpreting the human scene, in terms of who you belong to, which has close connection with the 'club' mentality, and against this men- tality it is always right to sling one's little pebble. In somewhat similar fashion, the quality Burns tends to appeal to in praising works of literature is 'timelessness' — meaning, as it were, the 'club' of the great. Thus we hear, of G. K. Chesterton:

His writing, as light and dextrous and time- less as a coracle, still rises the tide, the swell and storm of human cogitation and behaviour.

This of a writer, much as one loves him, more hopelessly and impenitently locked into a time (the post-Wilde Nineties) than almost any one can think of.