by Roy Jenkins
Even so, the book is not at all bad politically until it comes to the last hundred pages, when for some inexplicable reason (unless it be the dead hand of Ulster) it goes to pieces. It then becomes inaccurate (a whole constitutional theory is created upon Barbara Castle’s attempt to reform industrial relations in 1967, a year in which she was still Minister of Transport, and even the month of the European referendum is wrongly stated), without sense of proportion (there are pages on an allegedly plot-sustaining academic interview given by some obscure official in the Northern Ireland Office), inconsequential, and cloying. ‘Look upon him. Learn from him. You will not see his like again,’ as the concluding passage of the book is the language of monuments, not of rational biography of someone who happily is still alive.
Three-quarters of the book, however, is much better than this. It is very well written in a measured yet gripping tone with a perfectly acceptable degree of partisanship which avoids both shrillness and the need to decry the hero’s opponents. Occasionally a fairly breathtaking statement is slipped in, as when he says that there have been only two occasions when politicians have spoken with a full moral authority this century: the first was Churchill in 1940 and the second was Powell in 1970, this second authority stemming, as far as I can follow the argument, from the popular response to the Birmingham ‘River Tiber foaming with much blood’ speech in 1968. This is odd, for while there are some things in this book and outside it that have made me think more highly of Enoch Powell than I did twenty years ago, that speech still seems to me a tawdry affair, stuffed with cheap sentiment and demagogic intent.
Yet, as Powell has always been such a contradictory figure, that has not been incompatible with fastidious scholarship and noble actions. The meticulousness of his scholarship, the range of his knowledge, and the (maybe somewhat mechanical) quality of his linguistic skill all leave me gasping with a mixture of admiration and intimidation. So do his self-sufficiency and harsh self-discipline. When Powell went to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1930 he worked, mostly shut up in his rooms, from 5.30 in the morning until 9.30 at night, and refused an invitation to dine from the Master’s wife on the ground that he was too busy. He took an hour off for a walk each day, but did it unvaryingly to the station and back because that was the right distance.
In personal relations I find him as unpredictable as did Lady Thomson of Trinity (for it was the great J. J. Thomson, the discoverer of the electron and the presiding genius who made the Cavendish Laboratory the world centre of experimental physics, who was then Master). I assume Powell has mostly deeply disapproved of me. But when I published a rather light biographical essay on Baldwin, he wrote a review that was not only very friendly but also the most perceptive of what I was trying to do. Equally at the Cambridge Union in 1984, after I had been ill for a couple of months, he suddenly launched into a public tribute that was way beyond the call of politeness. I was rather moved and thought it an appropriate peg on which to improve relations, for we had previously stalked past each other without acknowledgement in the corridors of the House of Commons. On the next occasion I made to speak. He stalked even more rigidly than usual.
Andrei Sakharov
This is based on a 1990 Observer review of Sakharov’s Memoirs (Hutchinson).
I Met Sakharov only once, in June 1989, six months before his death. He came to the Oxford Encaenia to receive an honorary degree. I did not alas sit next to him at the luncheon. I did, however, drive him home in the evening, but by then he had become too tired to manage much English and we did not have an interpreter. I regretted at the time that I did not have more talk with him. Now, having read his Memoirs, I do so a great deal more. Although inelegantly constructed and sometimes written like a catalogue, parts of this massive autobiography give Sakharov a greater vividness for me than either his fame or his presence did fifteen months ago.
The early part of the book, broadly the first eighteen chapters (out of fifty), which takes us through the first four decades of his life in the Russia of Stalin and Khrushchev, is the best. This was all before the death of his first wife and his second marriage to the formidable but adored Elena Bonner, before any significant break between him and the Soviet establishment, and before his world fame as a dissident and protector of dissidents. It is essentially the story of Sakharov’s childhood and education as a core product of the liberal intelligentsia which somehow persisted, sometimes hazardously but also often patriotically and respectfully, in Stalinist Russia, and then of his crucial and undismayed contribution to the making of the Soviet H-bomb.
Sakharov came of a background as intellectually rarefied and well educated as Keynes or a member of the great Cambridge scientific cousinage. There is indeed a remarkable symmetry between the relationship of his intellect to that of his father, a physicist and talented amateur pianist who was the author of a successful scientific text book, and that of Maynard Keynes with his father, John Neville Keynes, who was Registrary of the University of Cambridge and nearly became Professor of Political Economy at Oxford. Sakharov had a less physically urbane early life than did Keynes (Russia in 1941-5 in particular was a rougher place than Edwardian Cambridge) but he was just as immersed in Pushkin and Tolstoy as Keynes came to be in Bloomsbury.
Sakharov then spent twenty years (from 1948-68) making thermonuclear weapons. During this period he had few doubts about the work. At first he might have wished to assist Soviet nuclear superiority. In 1953, when Stalin died, he wrote: ‘I am under the influence of a great man’s death. I am thinking of his humanity.’ Then he developed a more sophisticated theory of nuclear balance. He believed in MAD (mutual assured destruction) and very sensibly became an opponent of anything that made it more difficult to achieve, from anti-ballistic missiles to SDI. But it was on the nuclear test issue that he began his break with the military-industrial complex, which perhaps even more in the Soviet Union than in America melded seamlessly into political power.
For some time Sakharov made his protests on a very privileged network. He had been admitted to the Academy of Sciences, membership of which was highly restricted and which conferred specific and desirable benefits, at the exceptionally young age of thirty-three. He was three times decorated as a Hero of the Soviet Union, which must surely have been at least the equivalent of an OM, if not of a KG as well. And when he wanted to complain he often did it direct to Beria, Malenkov or Khrushchev, sometimes just by ringing them up.
It is indeed the case that while refuseniks or dissidents had to take terrible risks they were also, if grand enough, able to avail themselves of a surprisingly high proportion of the privileges of a plural society. Thus Sakharov for a long time after his suspension from ‘the installation’ (the equivalent of Harwell or Aldermaston) was able as an academician to summon a car and driver from the official pool. He was also able even when attending trials as a gesture of support for the defendant to flash his Hero of Socialist Labour card (until it was taken away from him in 1980) and get a priority seat on aeroplanes. And even during his occasionally persecuted exile in Gorky from 1980 to 1986 his wife was for the most part allowed to go by train to Moscow and hold press conferences.
One form that the persecution took was the purloining on two occasions of part of the manuscript of his memoirs. He had twice to reconstruct them from memory. That makes it the more remarkable that the first part is the better, for it was presumably that part that was twice stolen. No doubt his memory unassisted by notes was better for his early years. But there is also the indisputable fact that most sections touching the Elena Bonner years are written more defensively, more flatly, more dutifully. In the mid-eighties in particular she was subjected by the Soviet propaganda machine to calumnies in which she was portrayed as a fiendish puppet mistress. I discount that, but it is nevertheless the fact that she was not good for the liveliness of Sakharov’s literary style - her own writing on the Gorky years was, I believe, much better.
This book ends with Sakharov’s release from the Gorky exile. For six an
d a half years he had been deprived of a telephone but late one evening one was suddenly installed in his apartment there. He was warned to expect a call the next morning. When it came through it was Gorbachev himself who told him that he was free to return to Moscow and ‘go back to his patriotic work’. Most people would have dissolved in a mixture of deference and gratitude. Instead Sakharov began to argue about other detainees and eventually hung up on Gorbachev in a huff.
That unselfish self-righteousness is no doubt what made him a great man. His was the voice that could not keep quiet. It was the more remarkable because he was always at least half a supporter of a reformed Soviet system, who disapproved of Solzhenitsyn’s flip into a detached blanket hostility. Sakharov nearly killed himself by hunger strikes to get his step-daughter-in-law permission to go and live in Massachusetts. It was the last thing he would have wanted for himself.
Herbert Samuel
An Observer review of a ‘political life’ of Samuel by Bernard Wasserstein, published in 1992 (OUP).
Herbert Samuel was an able and diligent man of high public spirit who lived for a very long time, occupied a wide variety of public positions between 1905 and 1955, although not the ones he most coveted, was a slight disappointment in most of them, often made false judgements, most notably over Hitler, which was surprising for a leading member of the old Anglo-Jewish community, yet accumulated over the decades a considerable reputation for sagacity and integrity. He was made an OM at eighty-eight, a rare honour for any non-Prime Ministerial politician, and he died at ninety-two. ‘He was vewy nearly a great man,’ said Bobbety (5th Marquis of) Salisbury, who had as much difficulty with his ‘r’s as do one or two other politicians.
Samuel published his own discreet Memoirs in 1945, and in 1957 John Bowle, a schoolmaster who had had an adventurous career at both Westminster and Eton, wrote a friendly ‘living’ biography. This was an odd matching of writer and subject, for Samuel, who was intensely puritanical on anything to do with sex, which made his two brief tenures of the Home Office Liberal with only a capital ‘L,’ was a dedicated scourge of homosexuals.
Despite these publications there was a gap waiting to be filled and Professor Wasserstein, who is British by upbringing but is now Dean of Arts and Sciences at Brandeis University, does so definitively. He is fully aware of the plodding and unspontaneous aspects of Samuel, and indeed draws devastating attention to the limitations this set to his friendships and his popularity. Yet, although thoroughly comprehending the boring side of Samuel, Wasserstein never himself seems to be bored by it. If he were an undisciplined writer this might have been a recipe for disaster, but as he is the reverse and has managed to fit the whole ninety-two years into a neat 170,000 words, it works out very well.
In addition, Professor Wasserstein, while not a pedantic writer, is an extremely accurate one. Almost his only solecism, let alone significant error of fact, is inserting two or three redundant hyphens in Lady Violet Bonham Carter. This latter tiny mistake has, however, a certain symbolic quality, for during the first half of his career Samuel probably admired the father of Violet Asquith (as she was then) more than anyone else, yet was totally excluded from his intimate circle, whereas his first cousin, the more worldly Edwin Montagu, in spite of going on to commit the double apostasy of marrying Venetia Stanley and serving under Lloyd George, was very much part of it. In correspondence with that lady Asquith habitually referred to Montagu as ‘the Assyrian’ and to Samuel as ‘the infant Samuel’. Both were mocking, but there was no doubt which was the more dismissive.
Nor did Asquith greatly admire Samuel’s public ability. In a Cabinet order of quality that he drew up for private amusement in 1915 he placed him eleventh out of the sixteen he categorized, with below him only a ‘tail’ of five equal lasts between whom he could not be bothered to differentiate. But this was nothing compared with the dislike Samuel aroused in Lloyd George (which it must be said was mutual, although ingested by Samuel and extruded by Lloyd George). With almost schoolboy petulance (at the age of seventy-five) Lloyd George referred to him as ‘the politician he hated most’, and this was not the anger of a moment or provoked by Samuel’s pro-Munich stance, for six years earlier he had spoken in a public speech of ‘the flaccid oleaginous Whiggery of Samuel’, and four years before that he had written of him as ‘underhanded and grasping’.
There was obviously some special irritant quality about a Liberal politician who was so coolly treated by Asquith when he was in his forties and so excoriated by Lloyd George when he was in his sixties. Yet he did not really deserve either treatment. Lloyd George’s strictures in particular were very wide of the mark. Samuel was not ‘underhanded’, but naïve and over-trusting, although often insensitive to his audience or his interlocutor. He would not have dreamt of behaving as Lloyd George did with the manipulation of his notorious private political fund. Nor was he grasping. He never sought personal fortune (he had quite a lot of money to begin with, but that is by no means necessarily a prophylactic against greed, and it began to run thin during World War II), and he was the one minister involved in the Marconi scandal (because he was Postmaster-General; the others were Lloyd George himself, Lord Reading and the Master of Elibank) whose behaviour was spotless. His weakness was that he liked high public appointments, but, with one possible exception (when he was not successful), there is no evidence that he behaved badly in order to get them. The trouble was more that he behaved with technical efficiency but unimaginative insensitivity when he had got them. The possible exception was that his fruitless desire in the late 1930s to be a very elderly Viceroy of India may have predisposed him towards Neville Chamberlain and Munich.
Nor was Samuel really a Whig, oleaginous or otherwise, in so far as that prismatic political description, giving out different lights in different directions, has any precise meaning. Certainly it is impossible to imagine any public figure of this century who was less like Charles James Fox. Economically he was more a Cobdenite, although with a strong social reform overlay and also a non-Cobdenite attachment to imperial causes. He was close to the Webbs as a young man and remained in some sort of contact with them throughout their lives. Wasserstein, rather dismissing Samuel’s wife, thought that Beatrice Webb was the woman who understood him best. What is certain is that he was the one person whose high seriousness even she found excessive. And her late (1939) judgement on him was ‘good but mediocre, devoid of distinction, except perhaps in industry, kindliness and sanity’. While they do not make for excitement, they were not a bad trio of qualities.
Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber
This is based on a 1991 European review of the first volume of M. Servan-Schreiber’s memoirs, Passions (Fixot).
Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, now approaching seventy, has been for me an immanent but personally unknown figure near the centre of the French stage for most of the one and a half decades of the Fourth Republic and the three and a half decades of the Fifth. He has operated at the junction between journalism and politics, striking the attitudes of a ‘Young Turk’, and giving them conviction by appearing always to have the energy, style and certainties of a young man. Just as some people have gone through decades without appearing to change much - Jean Monnet and William Rees-Mogg are two disparate examples - because they were born middle-aged, so Servan-Schreiber has accomplished the more difficult feat of being perpetually a rather young thirty-five.
Growing old is therefore probably a more disagreeable experience for him than for most. However, this does not show in his writing, which retains all the virtues of vigour and some of the faults of immaturity. Sometimes he reminds me of the later Hemingway. Virility is important, but at least it is not measured in the consumption of dry Martinis. Servan-Schreiber is not a reflective writer. ‘A la une’ (on page one) is a favourite phrase of his, and it seems to me that he still sees life very much in ‘à la une’ terms. Events and relationships are epitomized in snatches of conversation, which over a gap of forty years or more are always rende
red in the most precise and dramatic of direct speech, with Servan-Schreiber himself present at a remarkable number of the turning points of recent history, and often delivering the punchline himself.
Even allowing for some ‘esprit de l’escalier’, however, the first forty years of Servan-Schreiber’s life, which is all that is chronicled in this first volume of memoirs, were fairly remarkable. He was the son of a well-known editor of the economic daily Les Echos, who was himself the son of a former private secretary to Bismarck, who had renounced Prussianism and emigrated to Paris on the eve of the Franco-Prussian war, and of a mother who was certainly more beautiful, with looks more spirited, and whom he describes as ‘la femme de ma vie’. At the age of thirteen he had an eyeball-to-eyeball encounter with Hitler (because he had not given the Nazi salute) on a bridge in Munich, and at the age of sixteen he and his father accompanied the French government so closely on their flight from Paris to Tours to Bordeaux that he gives the impression of being on bedroom-visiting terms with Paul Reynaud and Madame de Portes.
After a couple of years under Vichy in Grenoble, studying for his entrance to the Ecole Polytechnic, being seduced or ‘initiated’ as he prefers to put it by his thirty-five-year-old landlady and listening to the BBC, he departs via Spain to join the Free French in North Africa and to be sent to train as a fighter pilot in Alabama. Passing through Washington on his way to the Southern base, he picked up the pieces from an historic row between de Gaulle and General Marshall. He qualified too late for combat in the air, but he manages to invest his training period with more drama than most people could get out of several campaigns. It culminated with his being offered a captaincy and the command of two squadrons in the American Air Force and immediate US citizenship. He refused ‘pour la France’ but with a sense of self-sacrifice as strong as the emotion of disappointment with which he says the offering colonel received his reply.
