Portraits and Miniatures(119)
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 rendered 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.
From this account of Servan-Schreiber’s first twenty-one years certain reflections flow. First, he cannot see a drama without imagining himself at the centre of it. He even writes about Roosevelt’s death as though he personally brought the news from Warm Springs to the White House. Second, America made a tremendous impact upon him. When he was offered a choice of there or England as a training ground he says almost as a manifesto rather than a bare statement of fact: ‘J’ai choisi les Etats-Unis.’ And he was long subsequently, and particularly during the Kennedy years, the man who tried to bring the clean-cut vigour of the New Frontier into the stale corridors of the Palais Bourbon. This had the effect of directing his Anglo-Saxon interest almost entirely away from Britain. When he was a BBC listener he had an uncritical admiration for Churchill, of whose determination to sink the Bismarck he writes a somewhat imaginative account, but thereafter shifts his gaze westward to where he thought the land was bright, and does not I think mention another Englishman in his remaining 340 pages.