Scribble, Scribble, Scribble

by Simon Schama

  But I had run through this anatomy of a personality before, hadn’t I? It was John’s account of Macaulay.

  The best thing I know on the problems of biography is Richard Holmes’s Footsteps. Its premise is the inescapable glissade between biography and autobiography. Are there any biographers who never ask themselves why they have chosen their subjects; whether, indeed, their subjects have not in some disconcerting sense chosen them? Why indeed, you might ask yourselves, have the contributors to this very volume adopted their own particular historical doppelgängers?

  Among the many virtues of Holmes’s book is that it makes these conundrums explicit. Its confessional voice, tracking Robert Louis Stevenson through the Cévennes (albeit without donkey), Shelley in Lerici, Mary Wollstonecraft and Gerard de Nerval in Paris, is made tolerable by Holmes’s own acute self-consciousness of the naivety of these pursuits. In one of the most powerful passages of the book, the denial of total identification is suggested to him by the belated discovery of the very bridge over which Stevenson had crossed the Allier River to reach the little country town of Langogne. It was visible but unattainable, ‘crumbling and covered with ivy’. The biographer’s efforts to overtake the footsteps of his subject would always be thwarted by such obstacles. The best that could be expected was ‘to produce the living effect while remaining true to the dead fact . . . You stood at the end of the broken bridge and looked across carefully, objectively into the unattainable past on the other side. You brought it alive, brought it back, by other sorts of skills and crafts and sensible magic.’

  Yet part of that ‘sensible magic’, Holmes concludes at the end of his Stevenson essay, is the willingness to experience a ‘haunting’ of the kind he himself went through in 1964 in the Cévennes. This means not only approaching the life of the subject as closely as possible, but actually inventing a continuous dialogue between biographer and subject; a sustained conversation with the writer ‘talking back’ to his alter ego. Such a process necessarily involves identification and projection for, Holmes says with disconcerting candour, ‘If you are not in love with them you will not follow them – not very far, anyway.’ And, to be sure, those biographies designed from beginning to end as combat most often end as a vehicle for the author, rather than an exposure of the life, or else simply co-opt their subject as endorsements for the author’s favourite cause. No one could ever accuse Richard Holmes of that kind of literary hijacking. But his claim that the biographer should become a virtual literary twin of the subject, distinct yet extremely closely related, is of a piece with the attempt to recover the contingencies that shape a life, not to see it from its birth as somehow predestined to follow a particular path. Only if the subject can be disentombed from his obituary can the unpredictable turns, which John often reminded his readers could somehow be the crucial determinants of a life, be given their real due.

  Holmes knows, of course, that this close engagement can never be the whole story. For if the biographer must pursue identification for his story to have inner truth and conviction, he must also disengage if it is to have coherence and understanding. This is especially true of historical biography where authors are inescapably caught in a notoriously tight hermeneutic circle. For while their subject’s career is necessarily, and to some degree, the product of his culture and society, it may well, during his own lifetime, have decisively shaped the character of that culture.

  So whom had I met on that Oxford autumn day in 1976: the biographer or the biographee? Was my own imagination still so imprinted with his image of Macaulay that I was now fancying it perpetuated in the person of the historian’s historian? Had John Clive’s own life been so leased out to Macaulay to create his book that it had been returned to him decisively altered by the encounter? Or was it just that this was a literary marriage made on Parnassus, the perfect fit, a miraculous transfer of intelligence and sympathy from one Cambridge to the other?

  How close were those natural affinities? In the Clapham Sect little Tom had been celebrated as an extraordinary prodigy, composing Latin poems and assuming a precociously grave manner. To Lady Waldegrave’s solicitous enquiry after he had had hot coffee spilled over him by her maid, he replied, ‘Thank you, Madam, the agony has somewhat abated.’ The instantaneous completeness of his memory was found startling; his quickfire speech almost an excited gabble; his appetite for learning apparently insatiable. Yet his natural exuberance gave his father, Zachary, cause for concern that it might lead him into acts of abomination like reading novels. Hence the energies of the boy were contained within a high stockade of grim Evangelical righteousness.

  The little boy with the fair hair and chubby cheeks who hung on the least sign of affection from his mother Selina, and gloried in the performance of parlour recitations, was first entrusted to the zealous Hannah More for the right mixture of godliness and good learning. Then, at twelve, he was packed off to an austerely correct Evangelical boarding school at Little Shelford, near Cambridge, where he suffered agonies of homesickness and discovered that not all Wilberforces, especially not the small thug-like representative at Reverend Preston’s School, were paragons of Christian piety. To letters that John Clive describes as ‘blotted with tears’ Zachary responded with cold consolation. ‘He did not find any comfort in Zachary’s reminder that Christ had left His father for thirty years and had encountered many troubles yet faced them cheerfully.’

  In the Berlin of the 1920s and ’30s, Hans Kleyff grew up in almost the opposite atmosphere of patriotic assimilation: Biedermeyer furniture; Küchen, Kinder und Kultur. Where Macaulay’s cultural performances were in essence always dramatic and rhetorical, in the kind of house typified by the Kleyffs the highest expression of Bildung would necessarily have been musical. (The first prize that John won was for music and both he and his brother Geoffrey were accomplished performers.) While Zachary Macaulay’s exacting and fervent faith coloured his entire public life, and was a creed drummed relentlessly into the head of his son, Bruno Kleyff’s relaxed Judaism barely intruded at all into the social rituals of his metropolitan, professional world. Synagogue, John often recalled, was principally the occasion for his father to sport the Iron Cross he had received for his service in the First World War. And that belief in the civilised compatibility of German culture and Jewish origins remained obstinately in place (as it did for so many of that community), even as the monstrous savagery of National Socialism began to proclaim it a biological impossibility. So where Zachary and Selina Macaulay chose to embrace the moral identity of Outsiders, saints walking upright among the sinners of the slave-holding empire, the Kleyffs were turned into fugitives only by the most violent horrors the century had to offer.

  For John it was the Fatherland, not the father, that stripped him of the familiar assurances of a bourgeois childhood. Though he would experience the harrowing ordeal of his father’s arrest, it was a boyish humiliation that brought home to him the true nature of the punishing barbarism of the Third Reich. For inevitably, the Nuremberg laws caught up with the traditions of the Gymnasium and John, along with other Jewish boys, was forbidden to go on the annual boat outing on the Spree. Wounded by the ostracism, burning with tears, John always remembered that day as the beginning of exile.

  Did his family’s experience at the hands of the Nazis make John warm to the Whig whose maiden speech in the House of Commons was an appeal to remove the bar against Jewish Members of Parliament? In fact, Macaulay took the subject further by writing an eloquent and influential essay in the Edinburgh Review against ‘the Civil Disabilities of the Jews’. Yet John’s treatment of the whole topic is tantalisingly and uncharacteristically sketchy. And given his extraordinary critical penetration of almost every other aspect of the young Macaulay’s life, it is also strangely incurious. The speech and the essay may well, as he claims, show ‘at their best [the author’s] commonsense’, but whether they also ‘get to the root of the matter’ is more debatable. For although Macaulay characteristically punctures the most fatuous prejudice
s against the Jews, and especially those that implied their unassimilability in English society, he is not without decided prejudices of his own. He does not, for example, follow the lead of the French revolutionary legislators who argued for emancipation on the grounds that its consequence would be to dissolve the separateness of the Jews within the political nation. (Indeed it may be to Macaulay’s credit that he baulked at this patronising liberalism.) But he argued instead that since the Jews had so much property and economic power it was inexpedient to deny them the political influence that went with them. Of course this ‘interest group’ reform Whiggism was of a piece with his view on extending representation to incorporate industrial constituencies, and he may well have felt about the burghers of Leeds whom he would represent as he did about the Goldsmids and the Rothschilds. But then again, possibly not.

  In any case there is one revealing piece of evidence about Macaulay’s real attitudes towards the Jews, in the form of a letter written to his sister Hannah at virtually the same time (the summer of 1831) that he was writing his essay for the Edinburgh Review. It describes a costume party given by a wealthy Jew to which Macaulay went in ordinary dinner dress, and it shows the young lion of Whig society at his worst, sniggering in corners with the likes of Strutt and Romilly at the ridiculous parvenus got up as Turks and Persians. Occasionally the patricians would take time off from condescension to ogle the ‘Israelitish women’ like the ‘angel of a Jewess in a Highland plaid’. And even when he got to bed that night, Macaulay writes to Hannah, it ‘was some time before I could get to sleep. The sound of fiddles was in mine ears and gaudy dresses and black hair and Jewish noses were fluctuating up and down before mine eyes.’

  For some reason John Clive’s account omits this incident entirely, even though George Otto Trevelyan’s Life and Letters includes the letter and though it had exactly the kind of brilliant historical colour that he splashed over the pages of his biography. Indeed when he was reminded of the letter by a friend and colleague, John’s first instinct was to express scepticism about whether any such letter or any such event existed. Could it have been that his own feeling for London and Oxford as tolerant worlds, where the ‘Whig grandees’ of his own time mixed on easy terms with the inner circle of German Jewish intellectuals who made up the core of John’s favourite Stammtisch, softened the edges of Anglo-Jewish history?

  Certainly John looked back on his asylum in England as a crucial moment in the trajectory of his whole life, even though he seldom talked about its details. His family lived in Buxton, the old spa town of the Derbyshire Peaks near Matlock (that Macaulay knew very well), and where other German Jews had settled, sometimes under a kind of official surveillance, designated, however absurdly given their circumstances, as ‘enemy aliens’. John went to school at Buxton and at some point in these years Hans Leo Kleyff turned into John Leonard Clive, his grandly imperial name some protection at least from the predictable misfortunes of being a Jewish refugee with a German accent in an English public school. Was it at this time that he fell in love with English (rather than British) culture, with its patterns of speech and the sounds of its voices, with the stuttering horsiness and the plummy gentility that he loved to mimic later on?

  In any event Buxton was not, for John Clive, what Cambridge was for Macaulay: the place where a fresh social and intellectual identity was established against the grain of his family background. Periods of real hardship followed in New York, where at one point the Clives made ends meet by stapling teabag tags, possibly the only manual craft that John ever mastered. The gutsy vitality of New York, even in wartime, encouraged another side of his personality: earthy, pleasure-seeking and flamboyant. To the pianist who played (and sang in a husky baritone) Schubert lieder, and who could pound out choruses of the Victorian hymns, was now added the ivory-tickler of Cole Porter and Gershwin standards. In our house ‘’S Wonderful’ or ‘You’re the Top’ got the full cabaret treatment while a large pastrami on rye waited on top of the upright.

  By an amazing quirk of fate, the institution that really had the same formative impact on John as Cambridge had for Macaulay, was the US Army, or rather the not especially typical research unit of the OSS assigned to analyse German politics and strategy for military intelligence. That unit, as Barry Katz’s fine book has shown, was staffed with historians, many of whom were to remain John’s closest friends and, in other crucial respects, his intellectual mentors and peers: Felix Gilbert, Carl Schorske, Stuart Hughes and Franklin Ford. At the University of North Carolina, as a student on a special scholarship, he had mostly read English literature. But in the OSS he was brought directly into the company of a whole group of distinguished and brilliant historians in the making. It was, moreover, a group that deployed their analytical and critical faculties for an incontrovertible political good. The fact that a crucial inner core were all, like John, refugees from the great German-Jewish culture obliterated by the Nazis only added to their solidarity. It also reinforced an urgent Thucydidean sense that history could speak directly and decisively to the most powerful crises of the human condition.

  Thucydides also remained Macaulay’s ideal historian: analytically concentrated, critically sharp; unapologetic about history as the origins of the contemporary; unsurpassed as a narrative craftsman and rhetorician. At the age of twenty-eight (roughly the age graduate students now complete their doctorates) Macaulay was cocksure enough to announce just what history was, what was wrong with its modern practice; and to prescribe how it might be improved. That improvement would, in his view, be essentially literary since history was ‘a debatable land. It lies on the confines of two distinct territories. It is under the jurisdiction of two hostile powers . . . Instead of being equally shared between its two rulers Reason and the Imagination it falls alternately under the sole and absolute dominion of each.’ (Later the same year in his essay on Hallam, Macaulay would characterise the division of history as one part poetry, one part philosophy, or in yet another formulation of the same idea, as part map-making, part landscape-painting.)

  John shared exactly Macaulay’s notion that ‘History in its state of ideal perfection’ should be both poetical and philosophical. But he did not always have Macaulay’s ebullient confidence that the reconciliation of those two sensibilities could be accomplished, osmotically, by a Scottian immersion in the texture of sources. Though it is hard to think of any historical biography which more brilliantly accomplished this synthesis of literary craft and historical analysis than his Macaulay, the union of skills did not come effortlessly. When he enrolled in David Owen’s seminar in British history as a first-year graduate student at Harvard in 1946, he thought he might work on Disraeli’s novels (a subject which would, I think, have been a perfect choice). But the professor, whose work had principally been in the field of local government and Victorian philanthropy and whose temper was, by turns, mordantly sardonic and austerely remote, rapidly disabused him. The young Clive was instead set to work on the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 since that, as he himself explained in a Foreword to a posthumously published book of Owen’s, was a way to ‘get you into parliamentary papers’. Seeing his student immediately crestfallen, Owen urged him to ‘Cheer up, you’ll be reading the London Times as well.’

  In the same essay John expresses gratitude to Owen for emphasising the historian’s necessary engagement with institutional and political sources. But though he plunged into research for both his major books with the most painstaking thoroughness, he sometimes felt it more duty than pleasure, especially when compared with the speculative and playful qualities of free historical writing that came to him with such grace and brilliance. Even in his first book, Scotch Reviewers (1957), that deals with the early history of the Edinburgh Review, it is the passages that sketch the personality of its great editor, the pint-sized and pugnacious Francis Jeffreys, that dart from the printed page.

  So however conscientious he wanted to be in respect of mastering the most intricate historical circumstances – and in Ma
caulay’s political heyday in the 1830s and ’40s, they were to a layman phenomenally complicated – it was always likely that the power of John’s biography would be that of a gripping human history. He was also fortunate, as he was the first to admit, that in G. O. Trevelyan’s famous Life and Letters he had a wonderful springboard from which to launch his own enquiry. As a nephew of Macaulay and a Victorian Eminence in his own right, Trevelyan discreetly circumnavigated some of the most delicate aspects of his uncle’s life. But in many places he is surprisingly forthright about his uncle’s mercurial personality. Indeed Trevelyan’s declared purpose in writing his book was to show that the Statesman and Historian conventionally accused of righteous self-satisfaction, both with himself and with his Times, was in fact a man of the most exacting and often self-mortifying passions.

  There were, however, certain moments in Macaulay’s life from which Trevelyan not only averted his own gaze, but directly informed the reader he would pass on to more seemly and edifying matters. Together with the superlative and exhaustive job of editing Macaulay’s papers done by Thomas Pinney, this left John in a perfect position from which to revisit the storms and stresses of the career. Where Trevelyan had presented Macaulay’s turbulent emotional life as a darkened background to his public life, John made it the clavis interpretandi. Above all it was to be a family history, as those closing words about Zachary suggest, and one written with all the engagement, compassion and insight of one of the great Mitteleuropa sagas of bourgeois dynasties: Mann, Fontane, Schnitzler and Zweig, as it were, come to visit the Clapham Sect.

  And Sigmund Freud too, of course. Not that John’s reading of Macaulay’s relationships with his mother, father and sisters is in any sense mechanically Freudian. But given his gathering revolt against Zachary’s moral authoritarianism, his adoring devotion to his mother Selina and above all his disturbingly inflamed love for his sisters, the central drama of the book could not help but be acutely psychological.