BOOKS
0 Wasp, where was thy sting?
Alastair Forbes
I'VE SEEN THE BEST OF IT By a peculiar irony, this book arrives from across the Atlantic on the morrow of the sad, early death of a far more distin- guished and admirable Anglophone jour- nalist, Peter Jenkins, who was by no means over-eulogised last week in the paper he had longest served as one 'who has left a lasting influence on the way we look at the history of our times'. Twenty years ago, Jenkins, writing with characteristic pre- science from the capital of the United States, the city where Joe Alsop died after having spent most of his life there, reflect- ed that
There is something almost ominous in the fact that the ghettoes are not in flames . . . It is as if an iron hand is holding down the lid of a giant pressure cooker. For the injustices and inequalities, the squalor, corruption and primitive barbarisms which exist within this great, rich land seem sure to convulse it again before long.
I n the 500 or so pages of Joe Alsop's Mdmoires d'Outretombe (as told to one Adam Platt whose name I am tempted to Anglicise as Flat) there are some 35 indexed references to Washington DC but not one of them so much as hints at the curious anomaly of a capital where a small minority, consisting of an almost exclusive- ly white Government and legislature with their pullulating parasites and lobbyists, allow the agonies of its Afro-American majority, underfunded, underhoused, underschooled, to be swept under the Fed- eral carpet, away from the attentions of vote-seeking Presidential politicos. Although, thanks to the bravely hand-held video cameras of a few courageous media folk of both sexes, these problems are beginning to impinge on the world, it seems that, according to Professor Ken Galbraith, who is not always wrong, the majority of US voters are only going to pull the bedclothes of 'Contentment' closer over their heads while the telly drones and flickers and even explodes away.
For Joe Alsop there is plenty of Wash- ington social highlife but not even a smidgin of sociology. Still, it is interesting to read that when, after a jumpstart in jour- nalism set off by his canny Connecticut mother's word in the ear of Mrs Ogden Reid of the old New York Herald Tribune, Joe Alsop could rent a nice house in nowa- days supersmart Georgetown's Dumbarton Avenue for $125 a month plus $25 a week for a Filipino manservant to cook, clean, wash, iron and wait at table, and like every- one else in the neighbourhood, still partly black, never bother to lock any doors, front or back. In these nostalgically backward looks at a privileged childhood, boyhood and youth, I was disappointed to find noth- ing, other than a blurred snapshot of him as by far the fattest member of that ridicu- lous Harvard Wasp club, the Porcellian, even to hint at his later heroic, hospitalised sacrifice of his huge surplus obesity, its written description richly rewarded by one of those once popular Rockwell Kent cov- ered weeklies, any more than I could come across so much as a word about his more or less romantic Greyhound Bus tour of his native land with the late and still lamented Judy Montagu, daughter of Asquith's Venetia Stanley, of whom there was even talk of his marrying, 'confirmed bachelor' as he was by probably genetic inclination all his life, despite a brief later marriage to an old friend's widow.
Seven years before his death, after a positive Mississippi of well-paid syndicated verbal incontinence, writer's block belated- ly hit him and his Maurice Bowra-like boom modulated to pianissimo, he took to reminiscing aloud from chair and bed. By `You wait ages for one — then several come at once!' far the most enjoyable chapter in this book, already published a year or two ago in the New York Review of Books (must reading, especially for all those who need reminders that of its regular contributors how much more discerning and perceptive a critic and how much better a writer of English is Berlin-born Lady Annan than her Prince- among-Provosts-historian husband) is that entitled 'My World', in which he recounts his own experience of the tail-end of three centuries of the 'Wasp Ascendancy'. His highly readable account is not even spoilt by his getting wrong, in the way all journal- ists seem always to do whichever side of the Atlantic or Channel they happen to be writing, at least two stories. One concerns `the Boston family divided into three clans', which was the Forbeses of my own China Trade paternal family, and the other con- cerns the Winthrops, all of whom (except, it would seem, my own only quite well-off mother who lazily allowed herself the luxu- ry of 15 conceptions and 11 live and still surviving children) were not only the direct but also the very rich descendants of that uxorious and armigerous Suffolk squireen so much admired by Alistair Cooke, the Founder and First Governor of Mas- sachusetts, whose aspiration about his Commonwealth — 'We go to build a city set on a hill' — has by now become a rather down-at-heel cliché. Perhaps because she had been a wallflower in the days before air conditioning, when in the summer most of the British embassy moved from Washington up to Boston's North Shore and the younger members played polo with the Myopia and swam in the bracing waters at the exclusive Singing Beach Club, my homely Maiden Aunt Miss Clara Winthrop (to use the American adjective for the physiognomy of my beau- tiful mother's only sister) absolutely refused my request that she should obtain temporary membership for Clarissa Eden, then having to hang about hot sticky Boston, whose brilliant doctors were trying to repair her Brit-bungled husband, saying that London politicians' wives, however well-born, would be the thin end of a 'Red- coats are coming' wedge. Joe Alsop, who was the biggest snob I ever knew and liked, claims he had 'the ingrained view that Americans who talk about native aristocracy have something very wrong about them'. So much for another snob, poor Henry James, who wrote of the harmless, untitled aristocracy of New England'. Joe's jolly Auntie Bye he unconvincingly claims to have been James's friend Edith Wharton's model for Lily Bart, but it is the short shrift he gives to New England's flourishing literary and cul- tural life, recently epitomised by that admirable human antidote to the philistin- ism of his neighbours, the late Bill Coolidge, that I most find fault with. Why, one of my cousins was such a literary snob that he left his parents out of Who's Who altogether (though he had a distinguished career as an Ambassador, Governor-Gen- eral and United Fruit Company Robber Baron) and simply put 'Grandson of Ralph Waldo Emerson', and I rather think he was one of Louisa May Alcott's Eight Cousins — all Forbeses, with its tales of summer holidays on Naushon Island near Martha's Vineyard, at one time restricted to Forbe- ses and Emersons, today full of 'summer people' from all over.
Though younger than Joe, I was brought up to call a lot of the grown-ups I met Cousin This or That, whether they were American or French, however weakened by time might be the blood or marriage link. (Some of them, of course, were no relation at all, merely familiar friends. I often hear myself addressed as 'Uncle Ali' by such, though I must admit that I was momentari- ly perplexed, when pushing my grand- daughter in her pram some years ago through a crowded Amsterdam street, to hear a scream of 'Uncle Ali!' followed by a warm embrace from a jolly girl I did not immediately identify as one of the many Australian au pairs who had once worked for a favourite French niece). Mrs Franklin Delano Roosevelt was always 'Cousin Eleanor' to Joe and her President husband was 'Cousin Franklin' to the half-Delano cousin who was my beloved girlfriend for happy years of my youth (and one of my dearest friends all her life) and who had been given a coming-out dance in the White House where a few years later I was invited to 'Sit yourself down, Cousin Alas- tair' by FDR and told more about my late Forbes grandparents than I had ever heard from my father, before getting down to pol- itics. Coming one day on Joe displaying to Tony Lambton's wife an old photograph of his aunt's wedding group, showing Franklin and Eleanor as fiancés in the back row, I heard him asked who the best man was. 'I really don't know', he replied, but I inter- jected, 'But I do, it's my father', at which Joe crossly closed the book. The happiest I ever saw him was the day Lord Salisbury asked him to call him `Bobbety'.
Wrong, as he freely admits, about Truman, he was kind enough to praise what I had written about him and the para- dox that the 'special relationship' was safer under him than under FDR. But when, after I had been staying with Jack Kennedy, then a fresh young Congressman, I told Joe he might well prove Presidential timber he loudly laughed me to scorn say- ing it proved my Limey-educated ignorance of American politics. But he is right in this book to look back with pride at some of the remarkable 'Wise Men' who were in Wash- ington at this time, some, like Jack McCloy, much older than himself and some, like Chip Bohlen, his contemporaries. He was right to reserve a special place for Bob Lovett, and righter still to reserve an even more special place for George Catlett Mar- shall, that most honourable of all Ameri- cans. He was equally right to describe Averell Harriman, whom he nicknamed `the old crocodile', as 'one of the most self- absorbed and coldly ambitious men in gov- ernment,' as well as the richest and shiftiest, to say nothing of the quickest to shift. He could hardly fail to admire Dean Acheson, who was nevertheless not, as Paul Johnson has written, an 'assured aristo', but one of `Nature's gentlemen' (like John Major), who was candid enough to point out, to shrill London screams, that Britta- nia's postwar dress was skimpier than a Bikini. Only Georges Marchais and Julie Burchill still claim to believe that Ameri- cans started the Cold War, when in fact it was their fecklessly rapid disarmament and demobilisation that led Stalin into the temptation to swallow the remnant of Europe he had not won with blood and guile in war. Joe was at Harvard to hear Marshall's famous speech but failed to understand either its words or significance. I, who had been presciently warned by my old friend Leonard Miall of the BBC, took in its every word on the shortwave with the excitement of a European given hope. Joe often magisterially missed the point. I recall dining with him and Raymond Aron in 1958 in Paris when a revolution was pending and marvelling at his stupidity. No wonder Jean Monnet thought little of him.
That is not to say that his brain was not a remarkable contrivance. In seven months' Japanese internment in Hong Kong he studied The Analects of Confucius, learned 4,000 Chinese characters, of which he could write 3,000, though he forgot them all quickly through lack of practice. He couldn't drive a car and the only reference
to music in his book is a mention of Virgil Thomson as a fellow-journalist. He couldn't fire a gun but his bloodthirstyness affected his judgment of world strategy. His almost orgasmic excitements at the statistics of body counts in Vietnam made emetic reading. He had met a lot of Asians, but he did not seem to see how his own country's long-term Pacific interest could acceptably be served. There was far too much of Teddy Roosevelt in him far too many years after Teddy Roosevelt. He was completely at sea in the Middle East and as unrealistic about its peoples as Anthony Eden.
However, the Jack Kennedy whom he had so uproariously dismissed to me a dozen years before was to become the real love of his life. This love surpassed that of either journalism or women. Even Mr Platt has to admit that Joe
had supported JFK's run for the White House in a way that crossed the usual bounds of journalistic propriety, much worse than Peter Jenkins and the SDP. I found his smug account of Jack's use of his Dad's greenbacks to blow poor Hubert Humphrey out of the water in West Virginia disingenuous going on for repul- sive.
Despite Joe's memorably loud laugh, there are not many jokes in the book, though I was glad to be reminded of his brave and delightful brother Stew's 'Power preserves and absolute power preserves absolutely', about Stalin, Adenauer, Salazar and Co. I cannot agree with Kay Graham that he was either an 'astute ana- lyst' or 'an inspired phrasemaker', and Chicago's Studs Terkel seems to me to have got the hang of his country much bet- ter. But the book is full of fascinating titbits for any student of the half-century of Joe Alsop's time as a Washington figure on the edge of the power that gives such kicks to those elected to wield it.
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