Latest Readings (6 page)

But the really serious fault in Powell’s masterpiece is the absence of Americans. In those volumes set in the years between the wars, this absence is already glaring: Mrs. Simpson is allowed to make a fleeting, nameless appearance, but really the rich women of America had for a long time been making inroads into British high society. And in wartime, in Powell’s nostalgically remembered London full of foreign uniforms, the absence of American uniforms threatens to turn the whole thing into a fantasy. The shift of power in the direction of the Americans was, after all,
a talking point even at the time. Powell’s disinclination to even mention it gives the effect of a protective mechanism, a consolation for loss. Powell had a firm understanding of politics: he knew that things would never be the same again. Perhaps he wrote the whole majestic sequence in order to palliate his regret. Like the ruins of an abbey, there is something forlorn about its beauty, an air of desolation that make you glad you have paid the visit, but just as glad not to be staying long. Even its laughter tastes of salt tears.

Though Powell sometimes piled on the subtlety to the point of flirting with the evanescent, he made every other writer purporting to deal with the sweep of British society look crass. This especially applied to C. P. Snow. Snow’s novels about the corridors of power (the completed sequence of eleven volumes was called
Strangers and Brothers
) got their grip on the public in the 1950s, a decade before Powell’s voice became the established tone in which to talk about the Establishment. (Significantly, the word “Establishment,” with its overtones of time-tested authority, came into wide use only as Britain’s role as an international administrative system was wound up.) When I was still a student at Sydney University in the late 1950s, to know
about Snow’s novels was a mark of sophistication. I tried to read them then, and found them so traumatically boring that I can’t see myself giving them another try even now. (Part Two: A Decision Is Taken. Chapter One: The Lighting of a Cigarette. It’s all like that.) Snow’s narrator, Lewis Eliot, talks with the infallibly misplaced emphasis of Powell’s Widmerpool. Snow never quite realized that his own pomp and success added up to a comic turn. He was like a walking illustration by Osbert Lancaster, whose name, to me, is still very much alive. All this being said, however, I have noticed that the Penguin volumes of Snow’s novels keep cropping up in clusters on Hugh’s bookstall. I can just see the moment—though I slightly dread it—when I start assembling a set. But even if they turn out to be more substantial than I once thought, I doubt that those Snow novels that have the academic cloisters for an ambience will be up to the mark later set by David Lodge and Malcolm Bradbury, or even by Tom Sharpe. The academic novel is a genre, and a genre needs to be entertaining. Did Snow ever really entertain anyone? Well, I suppose Sir Walter Scott did, and he wasn’t very funny either.

Treasuring Osbert Lancaster

I HAVE ALWAYS
thought Osbert Lancaster’s little book
Drayneflete Revealed
to be one of the great British comic achievements. Usually, anywhere I lived, I had two copies, one to read and one to give away. Lately I have once again read it through, and marveled as if Lancaster still breathed and had only just now thought of recording Drayneflete’s history.

The point of Drayneflete’s history is that it isn’t up to much. In Roman times it started off as a crossroads of secondary importance and since then, steadily throughout the centuries, one architectural excrescence after another has been added to its agglomeration of mediocrity. These various historical stages and changes of style are recorded in Lancaster’s wonderfully conceived illustrations, one of them per chapter, so that each chapter works like a long caption. But the capital joke of the narration is that every
step in this long saga of vandalism is presented as if by a spokesman for the current town council, scraping with quiet desperation for any trace of historic interest. The book has the effect of a PR brochure that doesn’t know how implausible it is when claiming status and dignity for the kind of progress which is really the gradual destruction of all value. When a hideous new cinema gets built, it is quietly hailed as a brilliant example of the modern style.

What happens to the town happens also to the inhabitants. A few families come down through the centuries. By the twentieth century, the family that forms the center of local society is called de Vere-Tipple. The eldest son, Guillaume de Vere-Tipple, is a poet. In the 1930s, to mark his solidarity with the working class, he calls himself Bill Tipple. He writes a poem about the Spanish Civil War, called “Crack-up in Barcelona.” I can confidently recommend it as being a parodic masterpiece in the class of Max Beerbohm. Back in Sydney in the late 1950s, all the would-be writers in my circle were familiar with it, and my late friend Robert Hughes could actually recite the whole thing from memory, without a mistake. I can still see Hughes relishing the last lines about Maxi, the poet’s
friend, “knocked off the tram by a fascist conductor / who misinterpreted a casual glance.”

What Lancaster was saying, when he invented the de Vere-Tipples, was essentially what Thomas Mann was saying when he invented the Buddenbrooks: a grand family forfeits its power when its younger generation gets more interested in the arts than in business. But Lancaster treated the theme in a small space, glancingly. In his prose as in his graphics, compression and suggestion were his best tricks. (He did stage sets that could suggest whole eras, and they were all done as simple painted flats, with no machinery: a triumph of stylistic accuracy.) In command of encyclopedic knowledge of the history of the arts and the applied arts, he could weave a texture out of nothing but allusions to what he knew. In that way his writings remind you of Patrick Leigh Fermor, whose key book
A Time of Gifts
I have just bought off the stall for my elder daughter. I might borrow it from her when she has finished it and read it yet again: the paragraphs evoking his first walk in the Wachau valley of the Danube are like poems. But although I possess all of Lancaster’s books, including two copies of the marvelous
Home Sweet Homes
, I had for some reason never read his slim volume of reminiscence
about the years between the wars,
With an Eye to the Future
. Now that I am at last reading it, I don’t want it to end. Here are all the originals for the people in Betjeman, Evelyn Waugh, Nancy Mitford, and Anthony Powell. Here are the stately homes, the London flats, the evening clothes, the cars, the drinks. In the wonderful illustrations, sometimes bled out to a full page, you can see the teeming population of marginal cultural figures mentioned in the text: that fat-faced gourmand must be Cyril Connolly, and that exquisite young man with the snooty profile must be Brian Howard, the almost entirely poisonous aesthete who later went on to write one of my favorite poems, “Gone to Report.”

As I read, I can feel it all slipping away into time as I am myself. Probably all this stuff—this last stretch of a privileged social history—will never again come back into favor. Perhaps we loved reading about it out there in the colonies only because we, the colonized, were even more reluctant than the imperialists to let go of a dying empire. John Carey, the cleverest of all critics in a generation of clever critics, has always hated that whole self-consciously arty era, to the point of arguing that it wasn’t artistic at all. He thought that all good things were in the grip of a
lucky elite, and needed to be prized loose. He was probably right. Certainly the whole cozy shebang is hard to explain to Americans, who live in a proclaimed democracy, and not in a stratified society whose top layer gives up its advantages as slowly as it can. But even Carey was obliged, when picking out his fifty most enjoyable books of the twentieth century, to admit that Waugh’s
Decline and Fall
was one of them. It’s one of the good things about the study of literature: taste trumps prejudice. I feel the same way about Osbert Lancaster’s lineup of slim volumes: I ought to disapprove, but I can’t leave them alone.

American Power

I FIRST BOUGHT
and read David Halberstam’s
The Powers That Be
in Washington, in 1980. On assignment from the
Observer
, and faced with such daunting tasks as interviewing Zbigniew Brzezinski, I needed books that would explain the American political system to me as concisely as possible. In his knowledgeable analysis of how the power structure of the media related to the power structure of the nation—the newspapers were still instrumental in those days, but television was already becoming a preponderant element—Halberstam helped to form my taste for reading about American politics. Reading the book again now, I am usefully reminded that the sainthood of William Paley was questionable. Contrary to legend, it wasn’t the CBS news programmes, with Ed Murrow to the fore, that undid McCarthy; and Paley not only ensured that Murrow was kept on a taut leash, he eventually got rid of him altogether.
Paley’s supposedly ethical empire turned stupid in order to expand: an edemic declension that he encouraged, having deduced, correctly, that in America his prestige would be enhanced the more power he took. All this was laid out well by Halberstam, and it still reads like essential news. Unfortunately, one is also once again reminded that Halberstam, so diligent in his research, was hopelessly careless at the level of constructing a sentence. It wasn’t as if he couldn’t write at all: he could, but only a breath at a time. Clauses were botched together with no thought for grammatical continuity. Today, his scrappy paragraphs look so clumsy that I wonder why, at the time, I wasn’t put off American political writing altogether.

But others wrote better, and anyway the subject was too rich to leave alone. About power in the media, Ken Auletta has written a whole string of thrilling books about which conglomerate merged with which, and dozens of books such as Timothy Crouse’s
The Boys on the Bus
bring you the very smell of the political reporters crammed onto the zoo plane and behaving more and more badly as they slog away at translating press handouts into printable copy. As for power in Washington, by now there are enough essential books to keep you going forever, or anyway to make
you redefine the word “essential.” I went on to read all the many books about Washington by Elizabeth Drew, and at least one book—
The Wise Men
, by Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas—opened up for me the huge subject of how American politics affected the whole world, and vice versa. Essentially such books were journalism, but they were also proof that journalism is the first draft of formal history. And sometimes, of course, it was the journalists, not the professors, who wrote the formal history that counted: William Shirer’s
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
might have begun as a report by a journalist on the spot, but as a history of its subject it was never been equaled, nor is it likely to be.

Reading about American politics was as thrilling, and almost as much fun, as reading about Hollywood. Even today I usually read the latest book by Bob Woodward as soon as it comes out, even though I find him a pedestrian writer, and his book about John Belushi,
Wired
, was so misleading—he treated the crack-up of a comedian as if it were the fall of a president—that it made me suspect the emotional veracity (not the veracity: he checks his facts until they weep with boredom) of everything Woodward has written since. Nor is Woodward fully at home when
writing about the American Establishment, even though he has long been a co-opted member of it. British students of American political writing would prefer to believe that in America there is much less emphasis on social background. In fact there is at least as much. It not only helps us if we know exactly what the words mean when we are told that the young George W. Bush was tapped for Skull and Bones; it also helps us if we know that part of Nixon’s paranoia about the Kennedy family had an understandable basis in social resentment. He thought that JFK had been born to the purple, and that the patriarch of the family, old Joe Kennedy, was the kind of man against whom it was wise to get your retaliation in first. He was quite right about that.

Sally Bedell Smith’s
Grace and Power
, a chronicle of the JFK White House, is an example of the Higher Gossip: always a suspect genre, because we tend to enjoy it too much. I bought the book new, from Heffer’s in Trinity Street: an act of extravagance justifiable because I thought it would make a good birthday present for my younger daughter, who has an uncanny ability to race through a factual book and retain every fact in it, thereby steadily replenishing herself in the role of a walking encyclopedia
available for consultation to the entire family. The book, she reported, was an ace effort. I borrowed it back from her and soon found that she was right. Sally Bedell Smith has Kitty Kelley’s gift for getting at the real story behind the glamour, but she does a better job of bringing everything to the level of historic significance, instead of lowering it to the level of triviality. JFK’s compulsive womanizing is not scamped: indeed it is the central subject. (In a real book about his presidency, the central subject would be his politics, but this is a book about the man himself, whom Bedell Smith insists, correctly in my opinion, on locating within the pattern of his private behavior.) But if JFK emerges as a satyr, his wife Jackie does not emerge as a patsy. This is one of the best accounts I have read of her formidable stature. Usually any written portrait of her, especially if the work of a woman, makes her out as a fashion plate, even when the high levels of her taste and knowledge are conceded. Bedell makes the taste and knowledge the center of her story. She was the perfect consort for JFK in his imperial role. He knew it, but he betrayed her anyway. It wasn’t just that he couldn’t help it; he didn’t want to help it, even for a moment.

The press knew but said nothing, just as they had
known about FDR’s paralysis but never mentioned it. In later times—which can be said to have started the moment after JFK was shot—his behavior would have got him either fired, or, more probably, never elected. Bill Clinton got into a Watergate-sized scandal over an adulterous episode that ranked nowhere beside JFK’s least frolic. But JFK didn’t just have the advantage of living in an era when the administration was still able to control the twenty-four-hour news cycle: most of his women were of a classy background and thus not susceptible to being hired by the press to spill the beans. That being said, however, there was nothing upmarket about Judith Campbell, the mistress he shared with the mobster Sam Giancana. Not much further in the future, such an alliance would have dished him.