C.H. Sisson

Anyone confused by the goings-on in the Church of England in the last few years might turn with relief to the biography of a prelate born in 1863, who retired from his diocese of Durham in 1938 to spend the marginal years of old age brooding over a long career, and made his final exit in 1947. Retrospect of an Unimportant Life is what Henson called the memoir over which he spent so much time in those years, and no man in his right mind is likely to claim much more for himself at an age when all ambitions should have receded. There was a flicker of what might have been a glorious sunset, in 1940, when Churchill recalled Henson to a canonry at Westminster, but when he arrived at the Abbey it was to find ‘that he could hardly read the lessons properly, even with a magnifying glass as well as spectacles; that his sermons were to tiny congregations and in the blackened church he could hardly see his notes.’ Before the end of the month he had resigned, ‘realising that it was time to go back to his quiet corner and wait for the release of death.’

There is something to be said for the view that the subject of a biography should be dead. Death does not guarantee the truth, nor the disinterestedness of the biographer, but life surely puts some additional difficulties in his way. Certain kinds of evidence will be wilfully denied him, certain other kinds may be offered too profusely or inaccurately. The exact nature of these difficulties will vary with the biographer and with the subject. Why is a particular biography written? Is the pop star or the footballer being promoted by an advertising man or denigrated by a rival or his agent? Is the author anxious merely to sell a lot of copies of his book? Is he seriously concerned about football or pop music, and if so from what point of view? Why, if he is, does he think that a book on the player’s life will help? All these questions, or appropriate equivalents, arise in the case of a biography of a reigning monarch. The market is there – several markets indeed, and the name of Lady Longford is an indication that we are concerned with the upper end. She is not Crawfie – not so well informed on some matters perhaps, but better informed on many more. Moreover, she has come to us with the guarantees afforded by a biography of Queen Victoria, as well as a row of other studies from Jameson’s Raid to Eminent Victorian Women. She has met the Queen ‘on many occasions over the last thirty years’, so has a closer view than one who has merely been among the rabble at Garden Parties or has had to be content with what is to be seen on television. She is the daughter of a Harley Street surgeon and married to an earl, which gives a certain range of social perspectives, and both she and her husband have been active in public life, which no doubt gives others. She is a Roman Catholic, which has a number of consequences for her view of the monarchy.–

‘Very occasionally it is worth noticing a bad book at some length’ – we have it on Evelyn Waugh’s own authority – ‘if only to give reputable publishers a reminder that they must not be insolent in what they try and put over on a public already stupefied by literary overproduction.’ The present case is not quite of the kind Waugh had in mind. After all, his own production ended nearly twenty years ago, and included some quite readable if not profoundly illuminating novels, and what we have here is a reprint of his journalism, a collection which is ‘complete’, the editor says, ‘in the sense that it is as comprehensive as the realities of publishing allow, and in that it seeks to include within one set of covers everything that any serious reader of Waugh might hope to find … everything notably funny, elegant, beautiful, profound or self-revealing, and everything that seems to define Waugh’s own aims.’ The ‘overproduction’ could in the nature of the case not be stopped, at this time of day, even by the least ‘insolent’ publisher; if there is a charge against Methuen it could only be of over-publication. For surely nobody really needs 650 pages of this stuff?–

Was Hugh MacDiarmid a great poet? Was he, as John MacQueen asserts in his Foreword to Catherine Kerrigan’s study, one of ‘the three greatest poets to use English in the 20th century’, the other two being Yeats and Eliot? One can understand MacQueen putting the matter that way, but perhaps it is not the most helpful way when the reputations of Eliot and Yeats are shaking down, in the ordinary process of time, following their immense acclaim. Perhaps there is too much talk of ‘great’ poets altogether, so far as the 20th century is concerned. If there is a useful critical question to be answered about MacDiarmid at this stage, it is perhaps not so much how great he was but what sort of poet he was.