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Chapter Four

A Peak in Darien

As soon as I knew how to read, I delighted in reading. I still have the copy of H. G. Wells’ Outline of History which Anne bound in a canvas jacket in 1934. It is a chunky book, of some six hundred pages. I may never have finished it, but I waded through several hundred pages. My first fascination was with the dinosaurs, but I was also interested in history as such. Before reading Wells, I had read Our Island Story, which was very imperialist, and Dickens’ Child’s History of England, which was very Protestant. I responded to his account of the Reformation by becoming equally partisan on the Catholic side. It was the Catholic martyrs I cared about; Bloody Mary became Good Queen Mary. King Henry VIII I abominated, as I still do. For Queen Elizabeth I, I had mixed feelings.

Literature forms the architecture of the mind. Shakespeare came first, even before I could read. In the winter of 1931, my mother was reading Macbeth with my sisters. We were in the nursery at Cholwell, with a fire in the little Victorian stove. I was three and a half years old, and had not yet learned how to read.

To my sisters’ irritation, my mother insisted that I should join in the reading. She would read a line, and I would repeat it after her. My sisters felt that this procedure caused undue delay, and that Lady Macbeth was too substantial a part to be given to a three-year-old; they would then have been nine and ten years old.

I can remember moments of the reading. Most vividly, I remember the scene in Macduff’s castle, when Macbeth sends his murderers to kill Lady Macduff and their son. I was young enough to identify with the son. When the murderer calls his father a traitor, the boy has the splendid line: ‘Thou ly’st, thou shag-hair’d villain’. I liked that, and I admired the courage of his last words: ‘He has kill’d me, mother; run away, I pray you’.

However, most of the lines I remember from that first reading come from my own part, that is from Lady Macbeth herself. My sisters thought it comic when I repeated the lines:

I have given suck; and know

How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me:

I would, while it was smiling in my face,

Have pluck’d my nipple from his boneless gums,

And dash’d the brains out, had I so sworn, as you

Have done in this.

I had to ask what the words ‘I have given suck’ meant, and remember my mother explaining to me about breastfeeding, a practice I had only abandoned some three years before.

In this speech, Lady Macbeth is spurring her husband on to the murder of the old King, Duncan. Macbeth interjects ‘If we should fail’ and receives the reply:

We fail.

But screw your courage to the sticking-place,

And we’ll not fail.

This led to a discussion of Lady Macbeth’s response. How did she say ‘We fail’? Was it scornfully, as though failure was impossible, or was it fatalistically, as a consequence to be faced? In 1915 as a young actress in Margaret Anglin’s company, my mother had discussed this point with old English actors in the cast. Beatrice herself was still a junior; Margaret Anglin was playing Lady Macbeth; Tyrone Power Senior was playing Macbeth; Tyrone Power Junior was being dandled on Beatrice’s knee, as his father learned his lines. Tyrone Power Senior always found it difficult to remember his lines, but, like his son, he was a fine figure of a man, in the old Irish style.

The English actors in the cast opted for the fatalistic reading ‘We fail’, which should be said with a falling tone in a matter-of-fact way. That, they had been told by old actors of their youth, was how Sarah Siddons had pronounced it, and she was the greatest Lady Macbeth the English stage could remember. So I played the line in the Sarah Siddons tradition. My sisters were much better than I was in the role of the witches, and danced gleefully around the nursery table.

I was particularly close to my mother because when the slump came, in 1930, my parents decided that they couldn’t afford a nanny, so my mother completely took over looking after me. I was two. I spent a great deal of time with her, the two of us mostly just conversing with each other. It fell to my sisters – Elizabeth was seven years older than me and Anne six years older – to get me up and dress me which was a chore they got very bored with. I had one lovely month when my American granny, Granny Warren, came over and stayed. She was in fact dying of cancer – although she kept her illness from us all. She took over the job of dressing me in the morning and I would rush along to her bedroom and she would talk to me about her childhood in the America of the 1860s.

My mother was a hugely entertaining person to be with. She had a perfect voice, a sense of timing and a sense of occasion. She had the temperament of a star, but not of a star who made excessive claims for herself. She had wit and intelligence and energy and I remember her saying she couldn’t understand people being bored because she’d never been bored in her life.

As an actress my mother had considerable dress sense and awareness. She dressed in the smart, understated American style of the 1930s which was made fashionable in Britain by Mrs Simpson. She didn’t spend a great deal of money on her clothes. When she got married she’d been given an allowance for her clothes, by her father, in American Trading Company preference shares. But, about a year later, the American Trading Company – under a callow new proprietor – lost most of its money and stopped paying even preference dividends. My mother felt that she had had money to buy clothes in the past but that she didn’t any more. She was well dressed but thrifty.

My mother still went out on the English countryside routine of ‘making calls’. The rules still really came from the carriage days: you knew the people living in the big house of their village within a seven-mile radius and you called on them – you called on houses rather than people. Therefore you had a secondary acquaintance with people who weren’t in a seven-mile radius of your house but were in a seven-mile radius of a house on which you called. The calls were made in the afternoon and occasionally I was taken as a child with my mother to call. My mother had been fascinated by and had mastered the whole etiquette of calls and how Somerset ladies spoke to each other. She observed, as an actress, how old Lady Waldegrave used to talk. If you were visiting Lady Waldegrave, she would say, as the hostess, ‘How kind of you to come.’ And you would reply, ‘How kind of you to ask me.’ Beatrice discovered that she could play the Somerset ladies role better than the Somerset ladies themselves.

We were to read Shakespeare again as a family during the war. I remember that we read the English history plays, which seemed to have most to say about the dire circumstances of 1940 and 1941. Shakespeare always teaches the Churchillian doctrine: ‘In victory magnanimity, in defeat, defiance’. We read Richard II, which contains the great patriotic speech ‘This Sceptered Isle’ of old John of Gaunt, ‘time honoured Lancaster’. We also read King John, a much underrated play. I read the part of the Bastard, which also has a great patriotic speech, well suited to the worst days of the Second World War:

This England never did, nor never shall

Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror,

But when it first did help to wound itself.

Now these her princes are come home again,

Come the three corners of the world in arms,

And we shall shock them: Nought shall make us rue,

If England to itself do rest but true.

In 1943 and 1944, my mother took me to see John Gielgud, first in Macbeth and then in Hamlet. London was covered by the blackout, and the plays started early, so that the audiences could get home in safety. Gielgud was not, by his own high standards, a particularly memorable Macbeth; he lacked the physical characteristics for the part.

Gielgud’s Hamlet was another matter. No single actor can capture all the aspects of Hamlet’s personality. No doubt Gielgud overemphasized the intellectual and sensitive Hamlet, at the expense of the active young Prince, but his was the most moving Hamlet I have seen.

It was Shakespeare who framed my mind, in terms of my vision of the world, before my experience of adult life had set in. He gave me a sense of the drama of life, and its poetry; he gave me a sense of the variety of personality and of the range from good to evil. I was fond of the wise old men, of Cardinal Wolsey, of Polonius. Indeed, my critics might think that I have made a living out of playing Polonius on the public stage; I am particularly aware of his inability to see what a comic character he was making of himself.

I did not see Hamlet as a role model, or Julius Caesar, or any of the English kings. I knew already that I was not destined to play Romeo. It was, rather, the great speeches which gave me my picture of the world. The ancient Greeks were brought up in the same way on Homer. I do not suppose many of them thought they would grow up to be a second Achilles; it was the total effect of the poetry that gave them access to a Homeric consciousness.

In wartime, one needs to turn to great literature. Shakespeare gave that, and he also gave expression to a patriotism which makes other patriotic verse sound like a penny whistle. In peacetime, one needs to understand the world as Shakespeare sees it with affection but without illusion, with caution but without timidity, with realism as well as idealism, with humility as well as ambition, with a certain melancholy. I certainly took my politics from Shakespeare. I have never doubted that he was the leading genius of the English nation. He taught me to think, to feel, to understand and to place myself as appropriately as I might in the drama of life. Like him my politics have been rooted in the human need for order and harmony. Like him I hope for the best but fear the worst. Like him I have a Catholic nostalgia for a lost past: ‘Bare ruin’d choirs where once the sweet birds sang’.

It was in the first winter of the war, in January 1939, that I came across the next book which changed my life. I had caught a bad dose of influenza. The local doctor prescribed the new sulfa drug, M & B 693, which was later to be replaced by penicillin. I had to stay in my bedroom for two or three weeks. We still had a young housemaid, though she soon vanished, and I remember her coming in early in the morning to lay and light the bedroom fire, a luxury which lasted in English country houses down to – but seldom beyond – the outbreak of the Second World War.

As I was recovering, I wanted to find a book to read, so I went down to the Cholwell library. There I found a set of James Boswell’s Life of Johnson, which had been published by the Oxford University Press in the 1820s. I could only find the first three out of the four volumes.

I lay in bed for the next ten days, entranced and delighted by Boswell. Here the romantic lines of Keats really come close to it; Boswell’s Life of Johnson had on me the effect that Chapman’s Homer had on him:

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

When a new planet swims into his ken;

Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes

He star’d at the Pacific – and all his men

Look’d at each other with a wild surmise –

Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

There were many things I found attractive about Boswell’s Life. I immediately came to share his hero-worship of Samuel Johnson:

To write the life of him who excelled all mankind in writing the lives of others, and who, whether we consider his extraordinary endorsements, or his various works, has been equalled by few in any age, is an arduous, and may be reckoned in me a presumptuous task.

I slipped easily into the notion that I was reading the life of a congenial, great man.

Johnson is also a moralist; which is a dangerous thing to be, because it is hard to make moral judgements without becoming something of a prig and a hypocrite. To Boswell, himself constantly in a state of moral torment and doubt, it was the confidence of Johnson’s morality which was most attractive. I do not think that was so in my case; no doubt I have myself been too self-confident in making moral judgements. I felt that Johnson was right to consider moral issues as essential to life. At ten I wanted to learn how to make sound moral judgements, and I wanted to know how to write good English prose. I thought Johnson could help me to learn both those things.

I respected but did not really share Johnson’s Toryism. Decades later, as I was told, Michael Hartwell, then the proprietor of the Daily Telegraph, was discussing with Bill Deedes his possible successor as Editor. I had recently given up the editor-ship of The Times, and my name was mentioned. ‘He’s not our kind of Tory,’ said Michael, and that closed the issue. I never have been a Daily Telegraph Tory, and I did not find myself a Samuel Johnson Tory either. He was a near Jacobite, King and Country, traditional Tory, although he was liberal in his views of the great social issues of race and poverty, and not an imperialist. I have always been a John Locke, Declaration of Independence, Peelite, even Pittite, type of Tory, and Johnson would have sniffed me out as a closet Whig.

It was not only Johnson’s mind and personality which attracted me, but the book itself, and above all the eighteenth century. I do not believe in reincarnation, but that is the best way to describe the impact that Boswell’s Life of Johnson had on me. I felt that I was re-entering a world to which I belonged, a world which was more real to me, and certainly more attractive, than the mid twentieth century. I felt that what had happened since Johnson’s death in 1784 was a prolonged decline of civilization, the industrial revolution, ugly architecture, the slums, the heavy Victorian age, the great European wars of Napoleon, the Kaiser and Hitler. I yearned for the age of harmony before the fall. It took me half a lifetime to get used to the modern age, and I have never become particularly fond of it.

In reading Boswell, I was able to slip into the garden of the eighteenth century and regain a lost paradise. I enjoyed everything about that century, the houses, the furniture, the landscape, the paintings, the music, the literature, the letters, the politics, the people. Although this perception of the eighteenth century as a golden age has gradually eroded, it still remains quite vivid. In the years when our own family was growing up, Gillian and I lived in two fine eighteenth-century houses, Ston Easton Park in Somerset – a beautiful extravagance – and Smith Square in London. Now we live in an early twentieth-century flat in London and a late fifteenth-century house in Somerset. I delight in both of them; the eighteenth-century nostalgia has eased. But it is still the period from 1714, the death of Queen Anne, to 1789, the year of the French Revolution, which is my true homeland in history and literature.

I never suffered from Johnson’s extreme fear of death, but I did feel sympathetic to his congenital melancholy. I also admired the energy he put into friendship. The passage I best remember from my first reading of Boswell’s Life is the one in which he helped a nearly destitute Oliver Goldsmith; this account is in Johnson’s own words:

I received one morning a message from poor Goldsmith, that he was in great distress, and as it was not in his power to come to me, begging that I would come to him as soon as possible. I sent him a guinea, and promised to come to him directly. I accordingly went as soon as I was dressed, and found that his landlady had arrested him for his rent, at which he was in a violent passion. I perceived that he had already changed my guinea, and had got a bottle of Madeira and a glass before him. I put the cork into the bottle, desired he would be calm, and began to talk to him of the means by which he might be extricated. He then told me that he had a novel ready for the press, which he produced to me. I looked into it, and saw its merit, told the landlady I should soon return, and having gone to a bookseller, sold it for sixty pounds. I brought Goldsmith the money, and he discharged his rent, not without rating his landlady in a high tone for having used him so ill.

The novel was The Vicar of Wakefield; £60 would probably have had the purchasing power of £5000 in modern money.

That summer I was in the senior form of the junior section of the Clifton Preparatory School, a form taught by Captain Read. With war imminent, it was a time of heightened emotional tension, a time when everyone’s imagination was stretched. Read was a quiet man, a good schoolmaster, who was a veteran of the First World War. I now suspect that he may have been one of those good officers who never wholly recovered from their war experience; he did not speak of it to us.

Captain Read set us an essay on ‘a building we had visited during the holidays’. I wrote about the little Catholic church at East Harptree, and described, in rather sentimental terms, how it had been built by poor Irish labourers in the nineteenth century. Captain Read recognized that this was an unusual piece of writing for a ten-year-old boy, gave it a top mark, perhaps even ten out of ten, and praised it to the class as exceptionally well written.

This encouragement was very important to me. Before that I had no idea I had any special talent for writing. I knew that I was reasonably bright by the standard of the school; I usually came third in class placings, behind my contemporaries Pym and Foster, who contended for the top position. Captain Read told me I had a special talent for writing essays, and I believed him. I have been writing them ever since.

It was through my fascination with Johnson that I came to read the poets of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. My favourite book, one of the favourite books of my lifetime, became Johnson’s Lives of the Poets. My mother bought for me a calf-bound set of the 1779 first edition of Johnson’s Poets, with the works of the poets from Cowley to Lyttleton in fifty-six volumes, two volumes of index, and twelve volumes of the Lives. This was a fourteenth-birthday present, bought from George’s of Bristol; it still has their price marked in it, of £6 15s. The first owner had been an eighteenth-century clergyman, Francis Mills, who was born in 1759. He may have bought the first volumes when he was twenty, and lived through to die in 1851 in his ninety-second year. I hope these little books gave him the lifetime’s happiness they have given me.

Johnson’s Poets covers the period from the 1620s to the 1760s. The minor poets of this period include Rochester, the libidinous Earl; Addison, one of the most delightful of English essayists; Gay, who wrote The Beggar’s Opera; the saintly Isaac Watts, one of the best English hymn writers, and Gray, who wrote the Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. When I suffered from adolescent depression at Charterhouse, I found Gray’s Elegy, the mirror of my mood, a great comfort.

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,

The lowing herd winds slowly o’er the lea,

The Ploughman homeward plods his weary way,

And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

In Johnson’s collection, there are four major literary voices, those of Milton, Dryden, Swift and Pope; of those Swift is a great satirist rather than a great poet. Dryden is indeed a great poet, free-flowing with fire and energy, but I never found him a particularly interesting writer despite the intellectual quality of his criticism. The two great poets whom I have come back to again and again, who, after Shakespeare, have done most to shape my mind, are Milton and Pope. Milton came rather the earlier of the two; I can remember first hearing Lycidas read in a form room at Clifton.

Lycidas was written in memory of Edward King, a young Cambridge poet who shared Milton’s idealism and died in 1637. One can imagine a young Cambridge poet of the 1930s writing such an elegy about one of his contemporaries, who might have died fighting Franco. It is a poem of the left, which foreshadows a dark future; I was reading it in just such an historic context:

The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed,

But swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw,

Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread;

Besides what the grim wolf with privy paw

Daily devours apace and nothing said;

But that two-handed engine at the door

Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more.

These lines from Lycidas gave me the true thrill of great poetry then, and they still do now. When written, they were indeed prophetic of the civil war that was about to break upon England. The executions they prefigure, which may already have been foreshadowed in Milton’s mind, were those of the men, such as Laud and Strafford, whom he regarded as having failed to feed ‘the hungry sheep’; the young poets in the 1930s regarded Neville Chamberlain and the appeasers in much the same way. King Charles I himself, on 30 January 1649, was executed by the axe, that ‘two-handed engine at the door’.

I enjoyed the poetry of public affairs; I was already storing up phrases and the rhythm of sentences which I felt I could use. If I sought to learn the use of irony and antithesis from Johnson, a line like ‘Daily devours apace and nothing said’, with its dying fall, became part of the inner rhythm of my early attempts at English prose.

No doubt John Milton is a greater poet than Alexander Pope; he is indeed second only to Shakespeare in the canon of English poets. But in learning how to read, which I was doing with the definite intention of learning how to write, ‘elective affinities’, to use Goethe’s congenial phrase, go for as much as poetic merit. I learned most from the poets whose personalities I liked best. I admire Milton; I love Pope.

Although our ability to classify poets by political temperament has often been denied, it seems to me that it is sometimes quite obvious. Alexander Pope loved Horace, a natural conservative among Roman poets. Pope took the view ‘whate’er is best administered is best’ – not a radical view of politics, he admired the Augustan ideal and detested what he saw as the contagious vulgarity of Grub Street. Milton was a man of the left, a radical progressive, a supporter of Cromwell, a hardline servant of the revolutionary government. Had he been a young Frenchman in the early 1790s, he would have been a Jacobin; if a young Russian in 1917, he would have been a Bolshevik.

I knew perfectly well at the age of ten that my own political temperament belonged to the conservative type, that I had no political sympathy at all with Milton’s radical progressive point of view. I had read about Cromwell in my early history books and saw him as an enemy. The poet who was to have the strongest influence on me was bound to be one who shared the temperament of rational conservatism. I found such a poet in Alexander Pope. He has been the friendly guide to my literary life.

His critics have said that Pope is not a poet at all, but, in effect, a brilliant prose writer, using verse as his medium for expressing what they would regard as merely prosaic thoughts. He is indeed an unusual poet; he was a cripple, marked by the effects of a tubercular disease of the spine in childhood. He was some inches short of five foot in height. Such an experience has its impact on the development of personality. As with blindness, certain aspects of life are cut off, but other aspects are intensified. Language, and the control of language, became his resource, into which he focused an astonishing energy.

In no poet does one feel to the same degree that each line has been packed with an intensity of meaning, so that phrase after phrase comes to the reader primed to explode, not as a sparkler or grenade, but with a nuclear energy. I do not know if I appreciated this when I first read Pope; Shakespeare and Blake are great poets who are highly accessible to children; Pope is a poet of argument, and the arguments are often mature in character. Later I was to realize that Pope’s arguments compress whole books into a couplet or two. Take these opening lines in the second book of The Essay on Man:

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;

The proper study of mankind is Man.

Plac’d on this isthmus of a middle state,

A being darkly wise, and rudely great:

With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side,

With too much weakness for the Stoic’s pride,

He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest;

In doubt to deem himself a God, or Beast.

Each couplet is a tablet of stone. Although both are great poems, the preference between Lycidas and The Essay on Man is inevitably a temperamental one; it is the choice between the radical’s sense of destiny and a conservatism tempered with scepticism. I was already seeing the world through Pope’s eyes rather than Milton’s. For me Milton might be the greater poet, but Pope was far more sympathetic.

The virtues of the best prose include clarity, energy, rhythm, strength and concentration of meaning. No word should be wasted; words should have colour as well as logical coherence. These are the lessons of Pope; everyone who aspires to write good English prose, and particularly journalists, who have to write too much of it, too fast, should read Pope, not occasionally but regularly. In any case such a habit is a great, and reliable, pleasure. If one has the right temperament for it.