BRIEF LIVES

Published by Hutchinson 2010

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Copyright © Paul Johnson 2010

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To Marigold, whose life with me has been very far from brief

By the same author

The Civilization of Ancient Egypt
A History of Christianity
A History of the Jews
A History of the English People
A History of the American People
A New History of Art
Modern Times
The Birth of the Modern: World Society 1815–1830
Elizabeth I: A Study in Power and Intellect
Edward III
Pope John XXIII
Pope John Paul
Napoleon
George Washington
The Renaissance
Churchill

THE ART OF WRITING LIVES

We all like to hear about famous men and women. The more particular and personal the information, the better. That is why, instead of putting together an autobiography, mainly about myself, I have chosen to produce these sketches, varying greatly in length according to the material I possess, of the remarkable people I have known during a long life, which has brought me at times near the centres of power, and has often enabled me to see at close quarters those who form public opinion, shape taste and set trends, or simply add to the gaiety of existence.

Biography is a very ancient art, one of the oldest, indeed, which probably had its origins in the funeral dirge, and was prescriptive. I don’t, of course, mean the word itself, which comes from the Latin dirige, and is taken from the Old Testament psalms, Dirige, Domine, Deus meus, in conspectu tuo viam meam: ‘Direct, O Lord, my God, my way in thy sight’. Long before Latin, or even Greek, became a written language, dirges, recited by poets, accompanied the bodies of the dead to their last resting places. The dirge survived in some societies, such as the west of Ireland, until the nineteenth century. But it had meantime reached written form, probably first in ancient Egypt, where stelae inscribed in primitive hieroglyphs go back to the fourth millennium BC. By that time the dirge had already taken the form of the funeral oration in the case of prominent men and women. That is an art form in itself, practised by Demosthenes, Pericles and Cicero, and reaching its apogee in the funeral sermons of John Donne, Dean of St Paul’s, in the early seventeenth century. We all know Antonio’s provocative tribute to Caesar, which Shakespeare gives us in his play, and there was a time when I could recite it in full. I have since practised the modern form of the art, which is the tribute to a departed friend given at the public ‘celebrations’ of his or her life, which have now taken the place of requiems in church funerals.

The earliest biographies date from the first century AD and emerge almost simultaneously in Hebrew, Greek and Latin. Actually, the four lives of Jesus Christ, which we call the Gospels, were first composed for verbal transmission, in Aramaic, the language which Jesus and his disciples spoke, but quickly reached written form in Greek. The father of Greek biography, Plutarch (c. AD 50–120), also had a religious background since he spent the latter part of his life as a priest at Delphi. Of his 227 known works, fifty-six biographies have survived, including twenty-three pairs of ‘parallel lives’, which he compiled to bring out the psychology of famous subjects. These Lives remained popular for two millennia, and as late as the 1880s Professor Jowett, Master of Balliol College, Oxford, was recommending them to young people to be read ‘over and over again’, alongside Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe. Plutarch’s Latin equivalent and contemporary Suetonius was much read too, until the twentieth century, not least because, though lacking analytical perception, he had a taste for scandalous gossip which makes up a good part of his most famous work, The Twelve Caesars.

In the ancient literature there are good biographical sketches provided by historians, notably Herodotus and Thucydides in Greek, and Tacitus in Latin, the latter also providing a full biography of his father-in-law, Agricola. Thus there were plenty of models for medieval writers, from the Venerable Bede in the early eighth century, to sixteenth-century authors who had one foot in the medieval world and the other in the Renaissance – I am thinking, in England, of Thomas More, who gave us a remarkable Life of Richard III, which Shakespeare found useful, and Francis Bacon, who did the same for Henry VII, the first a demonisation, the second a hagiography.

This brings us to the seventeenth century, and to two outstanding compilers of multiple biographies. The first, Thomas Fuller, was an irenic clergyman who did his best to compose the differences between the crown and parliament, and was made a chaplain to Charles II after his restoration. His History of the Worthies of England was published in 1662, the year after his death. It has been a favourite of mine since my youth.

Far more delectable, however, is the volume compiled from the scattered notes of his younger contemporary John Aubrey (1626–97). He was not a systematic writer, and made a mess of his financial and emotional life, but he was a great digger into ancient documents and monuments, and showed skill in tapping the memories of people who had known the personages of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He had an eye for the fascinating detail and a superb choice of words. He sums people up with memorable brevity. Thus, of the hyperactive Sir Walter Ralegh, he writes: ‘He was no slug.’ And Charles Chester, who never stopped talking, he epitomised by ‘He made a noise like a drum in a room.’ His lives vary enormously in length: the great philosopher Thomas Hobbes who, like Aubrey, came from Wiltshire, and was a friend for many years, gets thousands of words; others, such as Shakespeare, only a few sentences, though nonetheless of great interest and value. The work put together from his jottings is known as Brief Lives and to some extent is a model for this volume. I would happily have refrained from pinching the title, particularly as it has already been used by one or two modern writers of biographical essays. But, despite much cogitation, I have been unable to come up with a better.

One of Aubrey’s merits was his persistent efforts not just to record what people did but what they thought. He loved psychology. So do many clever people. The attempt to enter into the minds of famous men and women had its roots in autobiography, and in particular two works from late antiquity, the Meditations (as it is generally known) of Marcus Aurelius, written in the second century AD, and the Confession of St Augustine, which dates from the early fifth century. Both had immense influence, over a long period, on the practice of describing states of mind, and the skill with which it is done. Aubrey was familiar with both these noble works, and made excellent use of them. He also had an admirable liking for listening carefully to, memorising and recording direct speech. Nothing brings a historical person to life more vividly than his ejaculations – William II (Rufus) being a prime example. Thus, on being informed of the death of the Pope: ‘God rot him! Who cares a damn for that?’ Or, when his chamberlain brought him a three-shilling pair of shoes: ‘Three shillings? You son of a whore, since when has the king worn such a cheap pair. Go and bring me a pair worth a silver mark!’

James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson is the first, and exemplary, modern biography because it includes a large number of Johnson’s sayings, which Boswell recorded verbatim in his diaries, often written the same evening after a session with the great man, and usually within a few days. I have tried to do the same in these vignettes, sometimes using as a source my own diaries. Whenever possible, I have used direct, rather than indirect, speech. I have also tried to convey verbal mannerisms, accents, and facial expressions while talking. J. B. Priestley, for instance, used to screw his face up into the most extraordinary grimaces when making a forceful conversational point. We also like to know about people’s personal possessions. An inventory, made ten days after the death of King Edward I, records that his baggage contained fifty-nine gold rings, which he liked to give to visitors, especially pretty ladies, a pair of table knives with crystal handles, a gold cup given to him by his second young wife, Margaret, and a chest of relics, including an arm of St David, milk from the Virgin Mary and a thorn from Christ’s crown. One of the relics, a saint’s tooth, was specifically recorded as efficacious in warding off thunderstorms.

Clothes are another biographical detail of importance. One of my favourite volumes is Essays in Biography by J. M. Keynes, who besides being a notable economist was a writer of distinction, capable of what Cyril Asquith called ‘limpid, satanic fluency’. As a Treasury representative he had a privileged position during the negotiations over the Treaty of Versailles, and his portraits of the leaders of the Allies are memorable. Thus he pictured Clemenceau: ‘At the Council of Four he wore a square-tailed coat of very good, thick black broadcloth, and on his hands, which were never uncovered, grey suede gloves. His boots were of thick black leather, very good, but of a country style, and sometimes fastened in front, curiously, by a buckle instead of laces.’ Keynes also had a gift for biographical metaphysics. His portrait of Lloyd George begins, ‘How can I convey to the reader, who does not know him, any first impressions of this extraordinary figure of our time, this siren, this goat-footed bard, this half-human visitor to our age from the hag-ridden magic and enchanted woods of Celtic antiquity?’ It continues: ‘Mr Lloyd George is rooted in nothing; he is void and without content; he lives and feeds on his immediate surroundings; he is an instrument and a player at the same time which plays on the company and plays on them too; he is a prism which collects light and distorts it and is most brilliant if the light comes from many quarters at once; a vampire and a medium in one.’

I am very interested, as is right, in the intellect of the people I describe. But I make a distinction between rationality and what I call intuition. Princess Diana, in my conversations with her, and my observations of her in action with people of all kinds, struck me as the most intuitive person I have ever met, with an almost uncanny gift for striking up a relationship with a person the moment they met. Her intellect was commonplace – ‘Thick as two planks’ was the way she described herself – but her intuition was of the genius class, and the secret of her success. Yet it is clear there are different kinds of intuition. Hers was primitive, untutored, almost animal-like, a psychological apparatus of great power but adjusted entirely to work on the personal level, incapable of dealing with anything abstract. Keynes, in the volume I have described, gives a remarkable portrait of Isaac Newton in which he shows him to possess an intuition as powerful as Diana’s, but of a different kind, capable of solving the most difficult scientific and philosophical problems:

His peculiar gift was the power of holding continuously in his mind a purely mental problem until he had seen straight through it. I fancy his pre-eminence is due to his muscles of intuition being the strongest and most enduring with which a man has ever been gifted . . . I believe that Newton could hold a problem in his mind for hours and days and weeks until it surrendered to him its secret. Then being a supreme mathematical technician he could dress it up, how you will, for purposes of exposition, but it was his intuition which was pre-eminently extraordinary.

The use of the word ‘muscles’ in this context is worth noting. They can also be important, actually or metaphorically, in a sexual context. Take the case of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor. At the time of the Abdication in 1936, people often asked, ‘What is her hold over the King?’ Evelyn Waugh would reply: ‘Oriental tricks, old man, Oriental tricks.’ What he meant was a muscular practice known as ‘the Baltimore clinch’. For historical reasons connected with the China trade, many people from Baltimore had Oriental blood, and Wallis Simpson was one of them. And many Baltimore ladies possessed or acquired Chinese accomplishments in the bedroom. Here, then, was another instance of muscular intuition, though of a radically different kind. I find it illuminating, and of great interest. As Dr Johnson said, ‘I like a little secret history.’

Writing the lives of people called to high office and the centre of great events has always attracted me, fascinated as I am by the interaction between brains and politics. My one full-scale biography, of Queen Elizabeth I, had as its subtitle ‘A Study in Power and Intellect’. It is a fact that very clever people seldom make good rulers, whereas men and women of moderate intelligence often occupy the highest executive positions with great distinction. Among the many short biographies I have written, two gave me particular satisfaction, on Napoleon and Washington. They were near-contemporaries, living in a revolutionary age, and both were military commanders who became statesmen. Napoleon was a man of astonishing brilliance, whose life ended in failure, and whose example has been disastrous to subsequent generations of power-seekers. Washington was a plodder whom many thought obtuse, but his career in war and in peace was one of almost unqualified success: the constitution he interpreted and the republic he fought for and founded have lasted for a quarter of a millennium, in unrivalled prosperity and benevolence. The moral character of a ruler is more important, in the end, than other qualities, essential though they may be to initial success.

But in judging people’s performance, one should beware of generalisations. I have written four volumes of biographical essays, grouping together those I have categorised as intellectuals, creators, heroes and humorists, making a total of nearly sixty men and women. I loved doing these books, for human beings are infinitely worth studying if one has a curious mind, especially those who develop outstanding gifts, and the many peculiarities which go along with them. I now present for the reader some 250 sketches of people I have come across during more than sixty years as a writer, editor, historian, broadcaster and lecturer, all over the world. Some are mere glimpses, others attempts to pluck out the mystery. I have been obliged to exclude a number of interesting people who are still living, and I present my findings more for diversion and amusement than for edification. I simply raise the curtain on the human comedy I have witnessed, and present what I have seen, and heard, and learned, often in whispers and asides.

Paul Johnson

BRIEF LIVES

Konrad Adenauer (1876–1967) held a press conference I attended in Bonn in 1956. He was by far the greatest German statesman of modern times, for the Reich he created was more durable than Bismarck’s and Hitler’s and practised peace, not war. It also made the Germans really rich for the first time. He was a citizen of Cologne, and looked it, through and through – tall like the cathedral, knobbly and indented, well-dressed, elegant, clean-shaven, high cheekbones, huge ears, strong hair which took a long time to go grey, let alone white. He was very fond of champagne, and usually had a glass in or near his hand. He said he drank German champagne, but he liked French, too. His house, at the foot of the Drachenfels, opposite Bonn, was surrounded by vineyards, except for his garden leading down to the Rhine. There were sixty steps from the road up to his front door. He told me: ‘Germany is a big country and there are a lot of Germans. They are hard-working and productive, clever and purposeful. It is a matter of opinion whether Germany should be united or not. She should certainly not be united and centralised, because then she becomes too powerful and is tempted to dominate Europe. So the answer is a federal Germany, and preferably a federal Germany within a federal Europe.’

That was true in the fifties, but today the German birth rate is so low there is a danger of a human vacuum at the heart of Europe. And the federal Europe, whose foundation Adenauer did much to lay, is secular and, if anything, anti-Christian. This would have broken his old heart.

Salvador Allende (1908–73), killed in the Pinochet takeover – though whether by his own hand, or by his Communist ‘supporters’, or by the army is unclear – was a nice man, who looked rather like a lecturer at the London School of Economics. I met him in Santiago some years before he became president. He took me to the races, and warned me not to bet on the last race, as he thought there was something fishy about the set-up. Sure enough, the winning horse was ‘pulled’ and there was a minor riot. He took me to a sumptuous tea in the Senate, of which he was a member. He told me: ‘I shall never, I think, be president. The right-wing vote is too big. But they might possibly split, and then I will slip in between them.’ That is exactly what happened. He was elected on a minority vote. But once he was in office, the far left took over, he was too weak to control them, and the result was a revolution, a counter-revolution, and his death.

Kingsley Amis (1922–95) was not a great or even a major novelist, but was an influential literary figure for thirty years. With Lucky Jim, he not only wrote a superb comic novel but also invented a new kind of writing (like Hemingway), combining the demotic with a brilliantly ironic and pseudo-academic insistence on correct syntax. Nobody had thought of this before, and nobody since has been able to exploit it so ingeniously for comic effect. He often failed to do it himself in his later novels. Kingsley Amis could not have done this without being a teacher of English, at which he was very thorough and knowledgeable. Like Waugh, he was devoted to words and their meaning. He always had by him the Concise OED (he thought the Shorter in two volumes too long, and the Pocket too short), and ransacked it daily. He told me he got through a copy every three years, when it fell to bits and he bought another.

Amis wrote only two other novels of any merit, Ending Up and The Old Devils, though of the rest some have brilliant passages. But he kept up a great literary act which was the delight of his friends. No other writer except Waugh generated more gossip and stories. He was the greatest living mimic, Jeremy Thorpe alone excepted. In some ways he was better than Thorpe for, like Kipling, he saw machines as fictional characters and did the noises they made in an anthropomorphic fantasy style. The best of all was his imitation of trying to start up an antique Renault four-ton lorry in Belgium during the Ardennes offensive of 1944–5. This was an amazing performance, and took it out of Amis. He needed a lot of persuasion to do it – I used triple Scotches as bribes. He could also do to perfection the twonnnggg noise made by the door to the kitchen of the pension in M. Hulot’s Holiday. Eccentric gearboxes, the way an Old Etonian Cabinet Minister clears his throat before speaking at the Dispatch Box, pre-war steam engines, the begging yelping of the King Charles spaniel of his second wife, French telephone operators and their equipment, American radio ads, Stuka 87s diving, and lavatory noises in an old-fashioned Italian hotel were other items I remember. Amis’s set pieces included a virtuoso Lord David Cecil, distinguishing carefully between Cecil lecturing, Cecil in a tutorial and Cecil at a sherry party. Then there was a cruel double act, Mary McCarthy and Edmund Wilson, both drunk after giving a party, quarrelling about taking out the rubbish, ending in threats, thumps, squeals, groans and bumps. Ernest Bevin embracing Diana Cooper in the British Embassy lift, a Cabinet meeting in Leopoldville, c. 1960, White’s Bar conversations, sometimes contrasted with Brendan Behan in the Oyster Bar, Dublin – noisy, that – Henry Kissinger arguing about Vietnam with Richard Nixon, George Brown trying to kiss Princess Margaret, and the Queen holding an investiture, especially if Noel Annan, Leavis or Empson were recipients. He loved to do a peculiarly silly Bishop of Durham discussing progressive theology and President Kennedy seducing a hat-check girl. Ken Tynan’s stutter during an S&M session, LBJ on how underlings should ‘Kiss my ass’, and Khrushchev hammering with his shoe at the UN were other prize titbits. But, properly rewarded, he would try anything. He was at his best when George Gale was there to detonate him with rasping ejaculations, and I put in a few ideas: we made a happy trio.

Amis’s private life tended to become public and was much talked about. He was a negligent parent. When he left Hilly for Elizabeth Jane Howard, she was horrified to discover how their three children were being brought up. She rescued Martin, the cleverest of them, and saw that he got some schooling. They had a big house, Lemmons, at Barnet, with a six-acre garden which Jane made a paradise. Kingsley did a deal with Sanderson, the wallpaper firm, to redecorate the house and advertise their wares – ‘Very Kingsley Amis, Very Sanderson’ – and he was also, at this time, doing a column about restaurants, whiskys, wines, etc. There were crates of wine and spirits all over the ground floor. For a time Amis was perhaps the best-known literary figure in the country and got a knighthood plus other marks of celebrity. He and Jane entertained a lot, and we often stayed at Lemmons. But life there was precarious. Amis was not a normal man. He had countless phobias, some of them really serious. He never flew. He did not like trains much. He was afraid of the dark, and might scream horribly if left alone. Drink augmented these terrors, yet he never made any serious effort to give it up. On the contrary, it steadily increased as an element in his life until it dominated his existence, though it never stopped him working. There were very few days in his entire adult life when he did not spend the morning at the typewriter. But he was often a bit tight when writing. As an experienced editor, used to handling copy from the bohemians, I could usually detect anything written even slightly under the influence. One of Amis’s novels, Jake’s Thing, struck me as largely so composed. Amis began to hate Lemmons because it was too far from the nearest pub for him to walk there. Jane had to make elaborate taxi arrangements. That dictated his move to Flask Walk, Hampstead, and even before the move he told me exactly how many steps it was from the pub. I knew then that the end of the marriage with Jane was near. Apart from the drink, he had developed an increasing phobia about women. He began to hate them and their ways (especially upper-middle-class ways) increasingly. Soon after they set up in Flask Walk, Jane left for good. Amis found it too difficult to live alone – he was often so drunk that he climbed up to bed on his hands and knees – and moved out. When the books which had filled a bookcase occupying an entire wall were removed, the wall fell down, to the dismay of the people who had bought the house.

Amis’s last phase began when he did a deal with Hilly, who had married as her third husband a landless Scotch peer called Lord Kilmarnock (a second marriage to the weird Cambridge don Shackleton Bailey, an expert on Tibetan and obscure Latin poets, did not last long). This fellow tried to set up a business in Spain, but it failed, and when they came back to England they were penniless. Amis bought a house in Primrose Hill. He lived in the middle storey, and the Kilmarnocks had the top and ground floors. They both agreed, in return for free accommodation, to look after Amis, she as cook-housekeeper, he as butler-handyman. Amis worked in the morning, had a long session at the Garrick, came back and often worked a bit more, then went to the pub. The system functioned reasonably well, though Hilly found looking after him increasingly tiring and needed an annual holiday, at which time Amis went to stay with the Old Devils in Swansea. On one such vacation, he fell down, backwards, cracked his nut and died after a short illness. The month before, he had had his last tête-à-tête lunch with me. I have a full record of it in my diary. Among other things we discussed the precise daily duties of a butler, and whether Lord Kilmarnock was performing them satisfactorily.

We attended his simple funeral, held a few days after, which was perfectly suitable – not many there, but nice prayers and hymns. The elaborate memorial service arranged by Martin Amis at St Martin-in-the-Fields was a travesty. His father’s closest friends, like George Gale and Philip Larkin, were mostly dead. The only one left was Bob Conquest. He lived in California at Stanford University. He told me he would willingly have come, but he was not asked to speak so assumed he was not wanted and did not come. The speakers were all left-wing cronies of Martin’s, whose friendship with Amis was not as close as they claimed. Some were more interested in using the opportunity of the crowded church and media coverage to do some self-advertisement than in paying a proper tribute to the old boy. As I said afterwards, outside the church, to anyone listening, ‘This is the worst case of body-snatching since Burke and Hare.’

Those interested in Amis should also beware of the official biography. A life was written by one of Amis’s Garrick Club cronies, who knew him well. It is undistinguished but faithful. Martin Amis commissioned an American, called Zachary Leader, to do a thorough job. He produced a thousand pages, well researched and including a lot of information new to me. But it was done under the close supervision of Amis Jr, and contains a mass of stuff about him and his friends which pad out the book horribly. There are many errors of fact and nuance, due to Leader’s ignorance of Amis, his generation’s England, and those times, now long ago, when the old boy was in his prime. So a real life remains to be written, and probably now never will be.

Much better, and more valuable, is Leader’s excellent edition of Amis’s Letters. This reveals him as, at times, a superb letter-writer. Unfortunately, Amis, being incorrigibly selfish and self-centred, failed to keep most of the letters written to him; in particular, he kept only four from his most constant and interesting correspondent, Philip Larkin. He, by contrast, being a librarian, kept all of Amis’s, which are fascinating. If Amis had been conscientious, this correspondence would have formed the finest of the twentieth century. As it is, there are only one or two minor masterpieces, especially Amis’s sardonic letter to Henry Fairlie, upbraiding him for seducing Hilly.

Oh, how I miss Amis! And George Gale! If I could suddenly have them both back, forming one of the joyful trios, how happy I would be!

Noel Annan (1916–2000) was clever, but sacrificed a life of scholarship for one of academic and public careerism, collecting many glittering prizes but ending up dissatisfied. At the beginning of his life he wrote a promising biography of Leslie Stephen. At the end of his life he wrote it again. In between – nothing. His other writing was scrappy gossip. I used to see him at the Porchester Baths, swimming furiously up and down, half submerged, wearing a snorkel. He pretended he was a Second World War U-boat commander, and would say, half aloud, ‘British Cruiser, NNW, bearing Six! Prepare forward torpedoes!’ ‘Ja, mein Kommandant!’ etc. The other interesting thing about him was that, when he was angry or excited, steam would rise from his enormous pink bald head.

Clement Attlee, Earl Attlee (1883–1967) was by no means as mild as he sometimes seemed. He could be snappish. In 1965, after the Wilson government had been in office for a year, I asked him to write an article for the New Statesman giving his view about how well the Labour government was doing. He wrote to me saying, ‘Your suggestion is most improper. You are obviously trying to make trouble and I will not be a party to it.’ Usually, however, he tried to avoid arguments by being non-committal. His wife was very fierce and bossy. When Attlee was ill and in hospital, Marigold had the next room. The nurses were terrified of Mrs Attlee and dreaded her visits. So, she thought, did Attlee. He never drove a car and, except when he had a government driver, she was always his chauffeur. She was known to the police as ‘the worst driver in the Home Counties’.

When the Labour government was formed in 1964, Douglas Jay was made President of the Board of Trade. His driver, Longfellow, had driven Attlee when he was PM; Jay asked Longfellow: ‘What was Mr Attlee like to drive?’ ‘Very nice gentleman, sir. Never talked. Each day he would say, “Good morning, Longfellow.” And in the evening he would say, “Good night, Longfellow.” Nothing else. Except once. We were driving to Chequers on a Friday evening, dusk like, and a car overtaking us nearly put us into the ditch. Mr Attlee was rattled, and he said, “Who was that bloody fool?” I said, “That was Mrs Attlee, Prime Minister!” So he said, “Best say no more about it.”’

After his retirement, Attlee gave the Godkin Lectures at Harvard. His theme was the end of the Empire, and the subsequent book was called From Empire to Commonwealth. It was, characteristically, a slim volume. I was asked to interview him about it on the books programme of ABC TV at Teddington. We only had about three minutes but I prepared twenty questions, knowing he always replied briefly. I had been trained never to ask questions to which the answer was ‘yes’ or ‘no’, but to ask ‘how’ or ‘what’ questions. But that did not do for Attlee. If he didn’t wish to answer a question, he simply said: ‘What’s your next question?’ He did this two or three times; very disconcerting. So we got through most of the questions on my list. Afterwards, I asked Attlee if he would sign my copy of his book. ‘Oh no, you don’t want my signature. It has no value. I am a person of no significance now.’ ‘Yes, Lord Attlee, I do want your signature. Please do as I ask.’ ‘Oh, very well.’ He took the book away, and stood in a corner with it, writing for what seemed a very long time. Then he came back and handed me the book, shut. As there were others talking to us, I didn’t like to look until I was alone. But I might have guessed. All he wrote was: ‘Attlee’.

I gave him a lift back to central London in my studio car. He, with characteristic modesty, had not asked for one. We got on to the subject of the sing-songs politicians used to have up to the 1920s, or thereabouts, after dinner. He said, ‘There were a lot of topical songs about events in those days. None now.’ ‘Sing one.’ ‘Oh, very well.’ He sang several, about the Boer War, in a small but tuneful voice. As we got into London, I asked him where he wanted to be dropped. ‘Army and Navy Stores. Going off to India next week. Must get kitted up.’ The last I saw of him he was striding purposefully through the swing doors, to a small salute from the commissionaire.

W. H. Auden (1907–73) I know about mainly from stories told me by Spender, who hero-worshipped him. When I met him I was so fascinated by the lines on his face I did not listen to what he said. Similar networks of lines on Lord Kitchener’s face were described by the political journalist, Harry Massingham, as ‘like a map of the Polish Railway System’. Auden’s were even more intricate, the furrows deeper. The only question was: did Auden have more lines on his face than Leonard Woolf? All these corrugations were caused by excessive smoking.

A. J. Ayer (1910–89), as a young philosopher, published a book, Language, Truth and Logic, in the thirties, which made him famous. But he never thereafter did anything else of note. He just became more famous, and seduced young women. In 1947 I was talking to Gilbert Ryle, our philosophy tutor, standing at the railings of Magdalen Deer Park, when a spritely figure pranced rapidly across the close-cut lawns in front of New Buildings, and then vanished into the Cloisters. ‘Know who that was?’ asked Ryle. ‘No.’ ‘Freddie Ayer.’ Pause. ‘Might have been a great philosopher. Ruined by sex. As of today, let that be a warning to you.’ But at that stage of my life I would have happily taken the risk of ruin by having a great deal more sex than I was getting.

Later, in 1953, I was in London, arranging an article on Great Living Philosophers for Réalités, the French magazine I worked on. Freddie then had a chair at London University and lived in a smart mews flat. I rang the bell. To my surprise, no professor opened the door but a voluptuous young woman, in trousers. Confused, I said: ‘Am I addressing Mrs Freddie Ayer?’ She said: ‘I wish you were.’

When I got to know Freddie, in the 1960s, he struck me as essentially frivolous, not willing, for instance, to have a serious discussion about God, in whom (he said) he emphatically did not believe, but happy to spend hours playing parlour games at which he was brilliant. His wife, Dee Wells, was much more intelligent, as well as wonderfully witty, and could give many striking examples of Freddie’s incompetence and stupidity. He was often at Tom Stoppard’s house in Iver Heath, and supplied material for the leading character in Jumpers. Later he had a near-death experience, and came to believe there might be a God, and an afterlife, after all. But when I talked to him about this possibility, he showed himself confused, and in articles he wrote on the subject was no clearer. I said to Dee: ‘What’s the matter with Freddie?’ ‘Oh, the usual problem – lack of brain-power.’

One thing I did admire about Freddie. He papered the front hall of his house with the honorary degrees he had received from universities. The elaborate black penmanship and bright red seals made a delightful decorative scheme.

Lauren Bacall (b. 1924) was born in New York and as a teenager became a movie addict. She got a job as an usherette to be close to her passion. That is how she secured tiny roles in Hollywood, subsequently becoming a star and making twenty-six movies. The one that made her was The Big Sleep, from the novel written by Raymond Chandler, when she met and married Humphrey Bogart (1945), the love of her life. She was often in London, and sometimes came to the summer parties we had in the garden. She was a beautiful woman, who read poetry and prose well, in her fine, deep voice. Not at all actressy, let alone film-starry; a lady, rather. She told me: ‘One great thing in life is always to give people, visually, a little bit less than they want of you.’

James Baldwin (1924–87), black American novelist, author of The Fire Next Time and other controversial works. I met him at a big party in the London Savoy. He complained to me about what he called ‘rabid discrimination’ and the persecution of him in particular. I gathered it was worse in Britain than in his own country. He was an interesting physical specimen. He was black but he also seemed, as it were, pale, as though sickening for something. He looked weak, wasted, thin. His features seemed too big for his face or head. His eyes in particular were enormous. I would have felt sorry for him, had he not gone on, and on, whining. Finally I said: ‘Look, Mr Baldwin, I know how you have suffered. Why do I know? Because if, like me, you were born in England red-haired, left-handed and a Roman Catholic, there is nothing you do not know about discrimination.’ This set off another bout of caterwauling. So I left him to his woes.

Thomas Balogh (1905–85) was fundamentally a good man. I liked him, though most people did not and some hated him. When I joined the staff of the New Statesman in 1955, he was the paper’s economic correspondent, and one of my tasks was to turn his articles into English. This was no easy job but I worked hard at it, did it well, and he was duly grateful. He came from a well-to-do Budapest Jewish family (his father head of public transport, his mother daughter of a professor) and went to the famous city Gymnasium, ‘the Eton of Hungarian Youth’. In 1928 he got a two-year research job at Harvard, then went into banking, in Paris, Berlin and Washington, before coming to England. He knew what he was talking about. Keynes, who published his first article in English in the Economic Review, said: ‘Thomas tells me more about the economic situation in the world in an afternoon than I can learn in London in a week.’ Balogh got British citizenship in 1938 and the next year joined Balliol, to which he remained connected nearly all his life. He was both hated and loved at Balliol. Indeed, wherever he went and in whatever circles he moved – academic, political, social – he aroused strong feelings. ‘Nobody is neutral about Thomas,’ said Hugh Dalton, who also said: ‘I would like to kick his bloody Hungarian arse.’

Tommy’s interest in statistics brought him into close contact with Harold Wilson, who was primarily a statistician rather than an economist, and when Wilson formed his government in 1964 Tommy became economic adviser to the Cabinet office. He devised all kinds of mad statistical projections for Labour’s first year in office – they made my hair stand on end – and he also had a major hand in devising the strategy for ‘creative tension’ in the Cabinet with the Exchequer balanced by a Ministry of Economic Affairs, under George Brown, of all crazy people. This fundamental error was one reason why the Wilson government was doomed from the start. And, of course, with Balogh a prominent member of Wilson’s Kitchen Cabinet, rowing with Marcia Falkender and Colonel Wigg, both of whom loathed him for different reasons as well as hating each other, there was bound to be trouble. Looking back on it, it amazes me there was not more. Gerald Kaufman, my political correspondent when I first took over the New Statesman, whom I persuaded to accept Wilson’s invitation to join his private office, used to provide me with hilarious accounts of the rows. Both Balogh and Wigg had loud voices, and used them generously, and their bassos profundos were punctuated by Marcia’s indignant squeaks and squawks. And if the Secretary of State for Economic Affairs tottered in on a tipsy foray, there was ‘Brown murder’, as Balogh put it. One of the delights of listening to his tirades was his torturing of the English language and his extraordinary skill in getting the wrong end of the metaphorical stick. He it was – and I know because I heard him say it – who came out with the splendid piece of invective (directed at Dick Crossman and à propos of statute law, I think): ‘You think I know fuck nothing, but in fact I know fuck all!’

Balogh was a kind man. He knew I had a growing family and not much money, and that I loved the Lake District. So he lent me, rent-free, the Balliol-owned cottage he leased, overlooking Buttermere, for holidays. This was the most magically placed house I have ever had the privilege of occupying. He later lent us the house owned by his wife, near Loweswater. Of course he was grateful for all the help I gave him with his articles. I also, I must say, gave him a lot of advice about not making more enemies than was absolutely necessary – I was fond of him, in an exasperated way. But I slowly reached the conclusion that his judgement on economics and politics was hopeless.

Unlike Kaldor, Balogh was a good-looking man, tall and impressive. He could appear dignified too, so long as he kept his mouth shut. He had a high colour, and doubtless high blood pressure. When roused, angry and vociferating, as with Noel Annan the steam used to rise from his bald head in the most alarming manner. I often wanted to get the two of them together, and see who could raise more steam. But they hated each other too much for that. Being good-looking and a talker, Balogh caught the eye of Pam Berry, who had him to her lunches. She had a soft spot for him, and loved filling him up with rich food and strong drink. Two days before his sudden death from apoplexy, he had come to one of our big Sunday lunches where he did himself well. When I heard of his death I blamed myself for not restraining his appetite. Then Pam told me he had lunched with her on the Monday ‘and gorged, darling, simply gorged’. So I felt less responsible. Anyway, as Pam said: ‘Not a bad way to go.’

Natalie Barney (1876–1972) still ran her weekly salon in the rue Jacob when I lived in Paris in the early fifties. She went back to France before the First World War. A notorious lesbian, she had entertained Gide, Proust, Gertrude Stein, Hemingway, Anatole France, André Siegfried, André Maurois – the lot. She told me: ‘I am pre-Proust, you know.’ You went into a big room, dimly lit from stained-glass windows. There was a big table in the middle, sparsely provided with sticky biscuits and glasses of sweet vermouth to drink – not exactly Babylonian luxury. You sat on chairs round the periphery of the table, or went out into the little garden at the back, with white-painted cast-iron chairs and benches, and a melancholy statue or two. Once you had been properly introduced, you could come every week – it was always on the same day, about 5 p.m. – Tuesday, I think. I once saw Cocteau there, and once François Mauriac. He came, albeit a Catholic, because he was left-wing. Paul Claudel would not come because it was atheist and sinful in atmosphere. But I never heard anything indecorous said there. It struck me as dull, though in a Parisian way, of course.

David Basnett (1924–89) was General Secretary of the General and Municipal Workers’ Union (GMWU). He was typical of the union officials who brought Britain to its knees in the 1970s and tried to set up a trades union state ruled by themselves. Not that Basnett was an extremist like Arthur Scargill. He was what the media called a ‘leading moderate’. I got to know him well as I sat on the Royal Commission on the Press, which Harold Wilson set up to spite the newspapers and which was a notable waste of (our, or at any rate my) time and public money. I found him slippery, mendacious and quite untrustworthy. In that he was quite typical of the union bosses I met (usually on TV interviews or debates) during the 1960s and 1970s. They felt that the interests of ‘the workers’ (whom they claimed to speak for) were so overwhelming morally that a few lies and exaggerations were entirely permissible. In due course he retired and was given a peerage. What for? A good question. Bosses of important unions were always offered peerages in those days. Some, like Jack Jones, turned them down. Basnett was delighted with his and loved to be called ‘My Lord’ and referred to as ‘His Lordship’. His DNB notice says he ‘derived considerable satisfaction from his contributions to the House of Lords’. He was a self-satisfied man altogether.

Donald Baverstock (1924–95). The most brilliant TV producer I ever came across. He made Tonight the best regular programme ever on British TV. He would put two chairs almost touching, sit you in one, take the other himself, and grill you, nose to nose. Somehow, this worked. I found him horrible but was fascinated by his skill and method. He was married to a daughter of Enid Blyton, with plenty of money. The world appeared at his feet. But the Goddess of TV success is notoriously fickle. The endless strain of producing a topical TV newsmagazine five nights a week took its toll, he became a drunk and disappeared without trace in Yorkshire.

The Beatles were the subject of my most successful article in the New Statesman, 1955–64, before I became its editor. I wrote it when they first made the headlines and were praised by a Conservative Cabinet Minister for ‘representing all that is best in the youth of modern Britain’. My piece was called ‘The Menace of Beatleism’ and dealt with the coming downfall of high culture and its replacement by populist pandemonium. We had more than a thousand letters, the most I have ever received as a result of an article. Two-thirds were against me, but the remaining one-third was notably better written and argued. I got a number of death threats, too. I don’t repent one word of what I wrote half a century ago. Indeed, I underestimated the menace.

The Duke of Beaufort (1900–84) invited me to the annual lunch of the Masters of Foxhounds in 1959. His name was Henry and he was the 10th Duke but everyone called him Master. He was an Etonian, often beaten for ‘pride and obstinacy’. ‘I still have scars on my arse,’ he told me (I didn’t believe him but other OEs say it’s possible). When he passed out of Sandhurst into the Horse Guards he was given ‘equestrian leave’ to hunt two days a week in the season. ‘Well, of course I took three, but if you are to take hunting seriously it ought to be four.’ He told me: ‘I was called Master or Little Master as a boy because my father gave me a pack of hounds when I was twelve.’ Hunting was his ‘trade’, as he called it. ‘I know a bit about it. That is, I know a hell of a lot about it. It’s the only thing I know. You may think I’m a stupid, wasteful fellow, but running a pack of hounds provides work and gives pleasure to a lot of people, as well as the hounds who, let’s face it, are more important than people. Well, nicer, anyway.’ ‘Why are they nicer, Duke?’ ‘Because hounds are al-al-al-altruistic. Whereas the people who hunt have mixed motives, often bad ones.’ He ran his pack for nearly fifty years, a record.

The Master married into the Royal Family. When war came in 1939 he invited the widowed Queen Mary to take refuge at Badminton, his vast house in Gloucestershire. ‘She told me she had cut her staff to the bone. But when she arrived she brought fifty-three people with her, in a long convoy of Daimlers. It stretched like in that play – Macbeth, was it? – “to the crack of doom”. I couldn’t believe my eyes. My family had to move out of the house. She was very determined. Once dug in, she set about the ivy – she hated ivy – tearing it down from the house and the park walls. She had everybody at it – her own servants, ours, the estate staff and the soldiers who guarded her. When I came back from leave it was all gone. I rather liked the ivy. But at least she didn’t steal our furniture.’ ‘How do you mean, Duke?’ ‘Well, she had this trick of saying, “You have our permission to present us with that”, pointing to a pretty object. And you had to hand it over. But she didn’t do that to us – wartime, you know. Anyway, the best things had been put away.’ After his death the anti-blood-sports people tried to dig up his body, but they did themselves nothing but harm. As Trollope used to say, ‘Let sleeping dukes lie is a good motto’.

Lord Beaverbrook