One feature of these stories, especially those written in the 1920s when JB was a thoroughly assimilated Establishment figure – and on the surface a very conventional one, climbing his way, hand over hand, up the pole to worldly success – was how unconventional they can be. A number of tales in The Runagates Club run counter to the world’s expectations and expose the fears in every secure person’s breast.
In 1932 life imitated art when JB met Rudyard Kipling at a luncheon of The Club, and the talk turned to the rhythms and assonances of the King James Bible and how it was that such a wonderful style was the product of compilers who were theologians and linguists, not writers. JB raised the intriguing possibility that they might have consulted William Shakespeare or Ben Jonson, and Kipling leant across the table and asked JB whether he could use the idea ‘much as he might have asked for his fellow-member’s portion of gooseberry fool, should Buchan not happen to want it himself’.16 The result was one of Kipling’s last short stories, ‘Proofs of Holy Writ’.
JB’s next full-length novel, The Courts of the Morning, came out in 1929 and was dedicated to Ferris Greenslet, with a poem about the similar delights of fishing on each side of the Atlantic. Hannay has only a walk-on part in this novel, while Leithen appears not at all. This is Sandy’s show, the man who grew more and more like T. E. Lawrence as the books went on; the guerrilla insurrection that he leads in a fictional South American republic, called Olifa, might well have appealed to Lawrence. As James Buchan has pointed out, Olifa is the Arabic word for ‘friendship’, the working title for the book was Far Arabia, and the landscape of desert and coast looks like the northern Hijaz, the scene of some of Lawrence’s military exploits during the Great War. The Courts of the Morning is a complex tale about loyalties, intervention, mercenaries, moral equivocation and unlikely redemption and, pleasingly, the women – Barbara Dasent, who eventually marries Sandy Arbuthnot, and Janet Raden, now Lady Roylance – have just as much courage and mental strength as the men.
This story doesn’t really work, the topography as well as the politics and military tactics* being too complicated and long-winded to be truly engaging, although there are some memorable scenes in it, such as the description of the Poisonous Valley into which the hapless Archie Roylance crash-lands his aeroplane.
The year 1929 turned out to be a difficult one for JB. A general election was held at the end of May, under the shadow of rapidly increasing unemployment, and the Conservatives, who campaigned on the slogan ‘Safety First’ – which JB thoroughly disliked – lost more than 150 seats and had to give way to Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour Party, in a hung parliament. JB kept his seat but lost 10,000 votes. He also lost a number of Parliamentary colleagues, in particular Harold Macmillan, although he got back in two years later.
Although JB had no electioneering of his own to do, he spoke for others, travelling long miles, especially in Scotland, during the election campaign. The upshot was that he had to take to his bed for much of the summer and autumn, only going out publicly once to give an address on Mary, Queen of Scots, in Peterborough Cathedral in late July. He scarcely appeared in the House of Commons at all that year and, when his contract with Thomas Nelson and Sons ran out in November, he did not renew it, thus breaking a connection that had lasted for nearly twenty-three years.
Thanks to his capacity to write when ill, however, he spent his time at Elsfield composing a contemporary ‘comedy’, which appeared the following summer. This was Castle Gay, a title that only became ambiguous long after his death.
In this comedic, tongue-in-cheek thriller, Dickson McCunn has a minor role, for he is outshone by two of the Gorbals Die-Hards, Jaikie Galt and Dougal Crombie, whom he had more or less adopted, and who are now young men. They have done him proud; indeed, the book begins with a stirring account of Jaikie scoring a try for Scotland in a rugby international. This is a tale about an unctuous newspaper proprietor, Thomas Carlyle Craw – a mixture, JB said, of Lord Rothermere and Robertson Nicoll – who, despite a keenness to ruin other people’s privacy, obsessively guards his own. He is kidnapped by students for a rag and, during a week of enforced tramping in the Lowlands and an encounter with disreputable Central European republicans, he learns something about himself and humanity. It is salutary to note that this book (as with the short story, ‘The Last Crusade’, included in The Runagates Club collection) shows that JB perfectly understood the concept of ‘fake news’. This novel also contains the beginnings of a touching love story between a scion of a played-out Highland aristocratic family and Jaikie, one of the most appealing and well-realised of JB’s creations, which continues in The House of the Four Winds. This is a liaison that a 1920s readership may not have been expecting, but it is true to JB’s beliefs in the efficacy of private charity and the inherent greatness of all humanity.
To make up the shortfall in income, when he left Nelson’s, JB began to write well-paid celebrity columns for The Graphic (not unlike those for The Spectator in tone and range), as well as the rather more down-to-earth Daily Express. He also wrote the Atticus political gossip column in The Sunday Times, where he could utilise his knowledge as a House of Commons insider. In the early 1930s he achieved an income of about £9,000 a year.
By the turn of the decade his children had grown up to be the not unusual mixture of anxiety and pride to their parents. Alice was taught well by governesses at home, before being sent, aged about sixteen, to a small, cosy ‘finishing school’ in a suburb of Paris, to learn some domestic practicalities as well as French culture. On her return, she submitted to more than one London Season, when her parents took a house in Westminster for six weeks in the early summer, so that they could play host at parties, and escort her to dances. After that, she petitioned her parents to allow her to train to be an actress and, despite her Scottish grandmother’s forthright protestations (in some quarters, acting for women was thought to be almost tantamount to prostitution), and the disapproval of the stout phalanx of Stuart-Wortley aunts, she got her way. Alice wrote years later: ‘My mother with sublime moral courage faced the drawn-down upper lips and raised eyebrows of her relations … found me respectable lodgings in London … and paid my first term’s fees at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.’17 Although JB never much enjoyed the theatre, claiming that plays sent him to sleep, he was punctilious in attending her performances, and thought her a very gifted speaker of Shakespearean verse. She also published a novel in 1931, and wrote a short play about Guy Fawkes, which won first prize in the Oxford Drama Festival and was produced at Elsfield, with JB acting the part of Sir Thomas Tresham and Alice the Countess of Hatfield. She won a national poetry recitation prize. However, she suffered, periodically, from a similar aimlessness to that which had beset her mother in youth.
Meanwhile, Eton was turning out to be a mixed blessing for the boys. They had been happy enough at the Dragon School in Oxford but the move, aged thirteen, to the most famous public school in England proved a challenge for them. Johnnie was always happier at home, fishing or flying his falcons – although he was consoled by being allowed to keep a kestrel in the school laboratory – but he generally behaved himself. He gained a place at Brasenose College, and ‘went up’ in the autumn of 1930. He spent much of his time there rowing for his college. While at Oxford he flew peregrine falcons and then acquired a goshawk, called Jezebel, who was, according to his father, his soul’s delight. He spent one summer vacation on a scientific expedition to the recently evacuated (and now permanently uninhabited) island of St Kilda beyond the Outer Hebrides and another working as a deckhand on a Hull fishing trawler.
Alastair and William were even less enamoured of Eton than Johnnie and had a habit of bumping up against authority, and were beaten for it. Alastair was, in adolescence, a rebel, while William became unhappy and stopped studying. Their tribulations prompted expressions of affectionate exasperation from their father, but whether he really saw their predicament clearly is uncertain, since his imagination, strange to say, occasionally faile
d him. Three of his four children were at times wayward and awkward, not entirely impressed by Border and Presbyterian values and, with the exception of Alastair, less capable of the swift and hard work that came so easily to JB, nor the sturdy self-discipline that made it possible. But a source of their difficulties (if that is not too strong a word) was JB’s own celebrity. A man whose most ordinary goings out and comings in were frequently cause for a column inch or two in The Times was not like other fathers. So the intense pride that his children felt in him was sometimes overlaid by acute frustration. William, in particular, squinted in the glare of his father’s magnificence, since he wanted to be a writer, the pre-eminent field in which his father laboured. In fact, his father always encouraged him to write, praised his poetry and was later to tell Alice that he thought the boy ‘the literary genius of the family’.18 William often felt the lack of his father’s presence. He wrote later about the difficult or remote fathers of his schoolfriends: ‘By comparison my own father seemed a different kind of being: cleverer, swifter-moving, more humorous, and infinitely more approachable – when, that is, he was there to approach.’19
Things improved for William in his last year at school, when he found the energy to produce, with a friend, an ephemeral magazine entitled Masquerade, in the process of which he learned something about publicity, marketing and publishing, which served him well in adult life. Even here, his father was hovering, anxious to help him, in this case unhelpfully. JB produced a short story for Masquerade, which he later expanded into the novel The Island of Sheep, but he asked his contemporaries to write pieces as well. These included J. M. Barrie, Henry Newbolt, Father Ronald Knox, Harold Nicolson and Noël Coward; with the exception of the last named, what a collection of embarrassing dinosaurs they must have seemed to a couple of eighteen-year-olds.
In Oxford University term time, the Buchans reserved Sunday afternoons for entertaining undergraduates to tea. These young people were friends of Johnnie’s, or the offspring of their friends, or students whom JB had met in one of the undergraduate clubs of which he was a patron or president, such as the Oxford Exploration Club. Wilfred Thesiger was one of these. Janet Adam Smith, the daughter of the Principal of Aberdeen University, George Adam Smith,* first met JB, whose biography she would one day write, at one of these tea parties:
This was perhaps the characteristic Elsfield occasion, and to the Buchans an unpredictable one, for anything from one to thirty might turn up – ‘the Amalekites’* the family called these invaders. There would probably be guests staying at the Manor – Violet Markham, or the Amerys, or the Robert Cecils – who would give the undergraduates a fresher view of the world of politics or government than would be found in the North Oxford drawing-rooms they visited. Not that there was any talking-down by the seniors: in the conversation round the large tea-table, which was often general, everyone was encouraged to talk (as in the Buchan home in Glasgow) and everyone was listened to – at least by the host, if not by his own contemporaries. It was not quite the talk of Oxford; cleverness cut less ice here, speakers had to be ready to back up their views with facts.20
It sounds rather alarming, but indeed the hosts were so kindly that many a shy ‘undergrad’ retained for their entire lives a happy picture of Elsfield Manor and its occupants in the 1920s and early 1930s.
Susie enjoyed these afternoons greatly, since she could talk (or, more happily, listen) about books, politics or genealogies with a small group of clever, polite young people, who did not hide their admiration for her husband. JB recalled in his reminiscences that ‘there was a legend in the family that wherever one went on the globe one would meet somebody who had been to Elsfield. These guests were of every type – Blues, hunting men, scholars, Union orators, economists, poets – and of every creed from Jacobitism to communism.’21
A. L. Rowse, a Socialist, found a calm welcome at Elsfield. He reminisced rather sadly after JB’s death about the latter’s ‘extraordinary catholicism of sympathy … In fact, I believe it was a special recommendation with him that one was on the other side … With one young neophyte of the Left, ardent, impatient, fanatical, touchy, he was patience and courtesy itself.’22 The Buchans retained their interest in, and affection for, Rowse, looking in on his Labour Party headquarters at Falmouth, while holidaying in Cornwall, to wish him luck during his election campaign in 1931.
The story of the friendship between T. E. Lawrence and JB, which developed in the Elsfield years, bears retelling, since this maverick figure – romantic, quixotic, tortured, sensitive, prickly, conflicted, masochistic, brilliant – was very important to JB. He said about Lawrence, uniquely, that he could have followed him over the edge of the world. JB had succeeded in reconciling the antithetical sides of his own nature, but he understood and could not condemn the fissure in Lawrence’s: the ‘eternal war between what might be called the Desert and the Sown – on the one side art and books and friends and leisure and a modest cosiness; on the other action, leadership, the austerity of space’.23 He was perfectly aware that Lawrence was ‘an agonist, a self-tormentor, who ran to meet suffering halfway. This was due, I think, partly to a twist of puritanism, partly to the fact that, as he often confessed, pain stimulated his mind; but it was abnormal and unwholesome.’24
The two men met about half a dozen times a year when the Buchans were at Elsfield; Lawrence would arrive, usually unannounced and often on a Brough Superior motorbicycle, and disappear as quickly as he came. Conversation with him was an intense pleasure to JB, since they had much in common, talking about anything from the works of C. E. Doughty to The Odyssey to ideas on Empire. Lawrence knew more about the history and technique of war than any general JB had ever met:
If you were once admitted to his intimacy you became one of his family, and he of yours; he used you and expected to be used by you; he gave of himself with the liberality of a good child. There was always much of the child in him. He spoke and wrote to children as a coeval. He had a delightful impishness. Even when he was miserable and suffering he could rejoice in a comic situation, and he found many in the ranks of the R.A.F. and the Tank Corps. What better comedy than for a fine scholar to be examined as to his literacy by the ordinary education officer?25
JB reckoned that T. E. Lawrence wrote the best letters of anyone he had known, apart from Raymond Asquith, but he also said that Lawrence was a great writer who never quite wrote a great book. He considered The Seven Pillars of Wisdom to be ‘a shapeless book [that] lacks the compulsion of the best narrative’,26 something, of course, about which he knew a great deal.
In May 1925, Lawrence had asked JB, on the spur of the moment when they met in the street, if the latter could help get him back into the RAF, since he didn’t care so much about the Army. (He had had a six months’ stint in the Air Force in 1922 under the pseudonym of Aircraftsman Ross, but his true identity had been discovered and the resulting publicity had not pleased his superiors.) He told JB in a follow-up letter, which he signed ‘T E Shaw’, ‘The difference between Army and Air is that between earth and air: no less.’ He wanted to be in the ranks, rather than be an officer, ‘for I’m afraid of being loose or independent. The rails and rules and necessary subordination are so many comforts.’ He ended the letter by apologising for the bother to JB, ‘but the business is vital to me: if you can help straighten it out, the profit to me will far outweigh, in my eyes, any inconvenience to which you put yourself!’27
JB, whose friends knew he could be relied upon, swiftly and without parade, to do what he could to help, wrote a long and eloquent letter to Stanley Baldwin; he, in turn, petitioned Sir Hugh Trenchard, Chief of the Air Staff. In early July, Trenchard performed a volte-face, sending for Lawrence and telling him that he was suitable as an RAF recruit. This prompted a heartfelt letter of thanks from Lawrence to JB: ‘The immediate effect of this news was to put me lazily and smoothly asleep, and asleep I’ve been ever since. It’s like a sudden port, after a voyage out of all reckoning.’ He had been hoping for it for so
many years ‘as the only way of getting across middle age’. Lawrence finished by asking JB to tell his children ‘that the bike (Boanerges is his name) did 108 m[iles] an hour with me on Wednesday afternoon. [I]; think the news of my transfer had gone to its heads: (cylinder heads, of course).’28
In 1928 he wrote from Waziristan to say that he had managed to extend his service in the RAF for another seven years until 1935. ‘I wanted you to know that I am making the best use I can of the gift you let Mr Baldwin into giving me in 1925.’29
Back in England in 1931, Lawrence wrote in answer to JB’s suggestion that he write a life of Alexander the Great, that he thought it unlikely he would ever write anything of his own again. ‘You have in me a contented being, and no literature rises out of contentment.’ But he knew he must leave the service in 1935, ‘and after that I shall feel very lost’.30 The next month he wrote to acknowledge JB’s request that he might dedicate Julius Caesar to him.* ‘A kindness, you call it! What you should have written is … I was wondering whether to do you a great honour? I might perhaps dedicate my little monograph on Julius Caesar to you, and wonder if you are worth it?’*
Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps Page 35
