Was it Strachey himself who was most responsible for the change? He was certainly contemptuous of the prevailing style, tried to miniaturize it as much as any Japanese woman ever did to constrict the size of her feet, and believed that in achieving this by a preference for aphorism over fact he could make each small picture into an iconoclastic work of art. In a sense he was as sterile as he was brilliant. He had remarkably few imitators. And, with a short pause for breath, the bland multi-volume portraits resumed their sway. Clustered around 1932, the year of Strachey’s death, were Ronaldshay’s Curzon, Spender and Cyril Asquith’s Asquith, and Mrs Dugdale’s Balfour, all of them in the strict tradition of the genre.
Yet Strachey had shot a destructive arrow into the established school, the poison of which spread slowly but surely. Eventually, when assisted by the wartime and post-war paper shortage, it did so fatally. In the 1940s and early 1950s the tombstones got much smaller (G. M. Young’s Stanley Baldwin, Keith Feiling’s Neville Chamberlain, even Harold Nicolson’s George V managed to do it in single not over-gross volumes). And when later a taste for books of 300,000 words and more was re-imported from America, where there has been a foolish trend to value biographies, as though they were fat cattle, by dead weight on the hoof, they were of a very different format and content. Simultaneous multi-volume publication was out and a mixture of scandalous revelation and psychological analysis was in.
Far less, therefore, than in the case not merely of fiction but of most other literary forms, do unchanging standards apply to political biography. I consequently think it best to confine my choice to the ‘moderns’ - mostly post-1945 with only a brief glance back to illustrate the change of habit.
First, J. L. Garvin’s Joseph Chamberlain as a good illustration of the tradition: spacious, sympathetic, even adulatory, but well written by a professional (much better than by a relation, which was only too frequent at that period), with even a touch of pace. The only trouble was that he never finished it and left the last two volumes (of five) to be done by Julian Amery over twenty years later.
Next, in view of what I have said about Strachey, Eminent Victorians must be included. None of the four subjects were politicians, of course, but they all, soldier, headmaster, worldly prelate, lady with the lamp, were sufficiently wily public figures to qualify for inclusion in the category. From the 1930s I chose Churchill’s Great Contemporaries. It wears remarkably well. The style is a bit florid, and he is much better on British politicians than on either foreigners or Bernard Shaw and T. E. Lawrence. The essays on Asquith, Balfour and Curzon each contain phrases that are as illuminating as they are memorable.
Moving on into the 1950s, I regard Philip Magnus’s Gladstone as a very good book, in no way definitive, but the work of a sensitive architect pulling together into a compact shape what had become a house almost submerged in a sprawl of outbuildings. Although substantially longer, Blake’s Disraeli deserves to be put in the same category, even though he had far less sympathy with Disraeli as a character that Magnus did with Gladstone.
John Grigg’s magnus opus opened in 1973 with the promise of being the long missing (but not for want of other people trying) great biography of Lloyd George. Now twenty years later he is showing signs of emulating Garvin on Chamberlain (or, from across the Atlantic, Schlesinger on Roosevelt) and leaving us stranded half-way across the river, three fine arches of the bridge built but not much early prospect of reaching dry land. He has been particularly good on what one would expect to elude him most; the socio-topographical background of Lloyd George’s North Wales life.
I end with two books which, although not in the least malevolently written, have greatly enhanced the reputations of the authors while putting their subjects through all the (fortunately posthumous) rigours of having their portrait painted in the style of Sutherland. John Campbell’s F. E. Smith (1983) and Ben Pimlott’s Hugh Dalton (also 1983, although supplemented by two volumes of his diaries in 1985 and 1986), are both memorable and definitive. They skilfully extract the treasures and seal up the tombs, probably never to be opened again.
The Maxim Gun of the English Language
This essay is based on a combination of a speech at an OUP lunch for the publication of the new edition of the Oxford English Dictionary and of an article in the Independent Magazine.
A Hundred and ten years ago James Murray started serious work on the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. It was part of a great late-Victorian wave of collating information in a much more systematic way than had hitherto been done. Leslie Stephen began producing the Dictionary of National Biography in 1888. Who’s Who first appeared in something approaching its modern form in 1897.