Portraits and Miniatures(110)
What impression of her life and her qualities does the book leave? The latter are manifold, but pride of place, the book convinces me, must be given to prodigious energy behind a calm exterior. Elizabeth Harman, as she was born in 1906, was the daughter of a Harley Street eye-specialist who married the daughter of Joseph Chamberlain’s younger brother. She never knew the founder of Chamberlain family fame, who was struck down by an incapacitating stroke a few weeks before her birth, but during her formative years first Austen and then Neville Chamberlain were major Conservative figures. She was not only impervious to their political influence but also to the social nexus of the Birmingham ‘cousinage’. The only significant twitch upon the thread was about 1955 when she thought of writing a life of her great-uncle. But there were difficulties about the papers, and eventually only a tiny wing (Jameson’s Raid) of the planned mansion was constructed. For the rest she was soon as socially upmarket of the Chamberlain connection as she was politically to its left.
Nor do I have the impression that her own parental home was a decisive influence upon her life. She did not rebel against it, but she fluttered away from it with all decent speed. Her principal destination was Oxford. She arrived there as a scholar of Lady Margaret Hall in the autumn of 1926, and proceeded to have a success which was the more remarkable because she broke away from her contemporaries rather than epitomized them. During their first three or four decades of life the Oxford women’s colleges had been substantially a blue-stocking world of their own, mostly filled with earnest young women reading English Literature or Modern Languages and mingling only marginally in the male activities of the University. Girls for Commem. Balls and other activities were much more likely to come from London than from St Hugh’s or St Hilda’s.
Elizabeth Harman changed all that. She became a welcomed invader of almost every field of male Oxford life. She even changed her subject to assist her penetration, deserting the safe Eng. Lit. in which she had achieved her scholarship for the more dangerous but masculine Lit. Hum. Her success was on a wide front: amorous (although chastely so, she is at pains to assure us); social (she was on close terms with almost everyone in the University who subsequently gained fame, and dined if not at Blenheim at least at the George Restaurant twice a week); journalistic (she wrote fluently and was one of the first women to be accorded the accolade of being an ‘Isis Idol’); and, up to a point, academic. To her great disappointment she obtained only a second class, which was a considerable achievement after her late start on the classics. However, she received forty-eight letters of condolence on missing a first, which must surely be a record.
What faults can be found? The galaxy of names does occasionally become almost oppressive. And there is a small deficiency of critical judgement. Every goose turns out to be if not himself a full swan at least closely related to a particularly resplendent one. Even their Headington family doctor was Graham Greene’s elder brother. Yet this is a dilemma for any autobiographer or diarist. It is difficult to make the bricks of interest without the straw of fame.
Frank Longford as a writer has been even more prolific than his wife, and his eclecticism has been almost limitless. The full extent of this I realized only when looking at the ‘books by the same author’ list in one of his recent publications. Normally one’s eye goes over such a list with hardly a flicker. But not on this occasion. It was a revelation. The full variety is an almost breathtaking tribute to sustained energy and dauntless self-confidence. The list is long (twenty-two books, one for every thirteen months since he resigned from ministerial office and began to write intensively at the age of sixty-two), but its composition is by a wide margin still more striking than its size.
Who else could have produced Humility in 1969, Eamon de Valera in 1970, The Grain of Wheat (a volume of autobiography), Abraham Lincoln, and Jesus Christ all in 1974, Kennedy in 1976, Saint Francis of Assisi in 1978, Nixon in 1980, Ulster in 1981, and Pope John Paul II in 1982? That year he supplemented his papal biography with Diary of a Year (his own) and then swept on through Eleven at No. 10 (1984), studies of the Prime Ministers he had known, exactly the same number as did Gladstone, as it happens, One Man’s Faith (also 1984), The Search for Peace (1985), The Bishops (1986), Saints (1987), to a gentle tribute to the Peers entitled A History of the House of Lords (1988), which can be regarded as completing a spiritual and temporal trilogy.
How does the quality of Lord Longford’s work stand up to these prodigious tests to which he subjects his stamina? There is inevitably an element of Dr Johnson’s famous comparison between women preaching and dogs ‘walking on their hinder legs’ about it. It could hardly be otherwise. The result is neither meticulous scholarship (it would not be appropriate, for instance, to compare his House of Lords book with Enoch Powell’s The House of Lords in the Middle Ages), nor a particularly polished pattern of writing. Subjects are often unceremoniously hauled in by the scruff of their necks and the simple device of beginning the sentence ‘Incidentally …’