Showing His Age
Mini Teaser: Noel Annan, Our Age: Portrait of a Generation (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1990).
Noel Annan, Our Age: Portrait of a Generation (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1990). 470 pp., L20.
Arthur Balfour is quoted as saying of Winston Churchill's World Crisis that Winston had written an autobiography and called it a history of the world. In Our Age: Portrait of a Generation, Lord Annan has written an autobiography and called it a history of his age. His subject concerns the most influential British thinkers, writers, dons, and civil servants, born around the same time as himself (1916). That is, those who, between 1945 and Mrs. Thatcher's election in 1979, secured positions from which they could run the country. Either that, or they influenced and cowed the politicians who were supposed to be running it.
Until Annan began to see some good in Mrs. Thatcher, their beliefs, tastes, and prejudices were his. This is because he was one of them. He uses the term "Our Age" throughout. Our Age did this, Our Age thought that. He means the few hundred people like himself, at the summit, and the few hundred thousand lower down, perhaps solely consisting of the readers of what John Osborne's Jimmy Porter called the "posh" Sunday newspapers, who approved of what the summiteers were doing. Lord Annan is too modest to say it, but his autobiography really is a history of his age--or rather, of the people who ended up in charge of his age. It is like a history of postwar America consisting only of the thoughts and actions of the most vocal people living inside the Beltway and on the island of Manhattan.
The book is therefore the opposite of the history-writing in which Our Age--which hereafter I shall refer to as His Age--supposes itself to believe. The book is about people--famous people at that. Yet one of the endless series of fads which influenced His Age was the French annales school of historiography. Its ideas are the subject of one of Annan's many skillful precis. In that school, famous people do not seem to be important at all. History is instead about large numbers of unfamous people whose lives are ruled, not by the famous, but by anonymous forces. What happened would have happened anyway. Mercifully, and if Annan is anything to go by, the people comprising His Age turn out to be like most of the rest of us. Whatever school of historiography they may embrace for public consumption, they think famous people are important and interesting. They enjoy a good gossip, particularly about other people's sex lives. Not that the sex lives are always like those of most other people. Of Lowes Dickinson, the Cambridge Hellenist and advocate of a more rational international order, Annan tells us: "Dickinson's private papers, edited in 1973 by Denis Proctor, the last of his loves, give a moving account of the frustration and anguish of unrequited love, all the more difficult to satisfy physically as he found sexual satisfaction only through being trampled on." We are meant to think: poor chap! We are certainly not meant to think that Dickinson's inability to find requited love was because his demands were a little unreasonable. Annan's Age was sophisticated about these matters.
But, then, Annan himself seems to have been born sophisticated, or was educated that way. From an upper-middle-class London family, he was sent not to one of the traditionalist public--that is, private--schools such as Eton or Harrow, but to Stowe, which was private but not traditionalist. Stowe had a famously "enlightened" headmaster, Roxburgh, whose biography Annan was to write. Roxburgh rejected the team games and heartiness of the rival establishments. He thought it his duty to "civilize" his charges rather than toughen them or make them into empire builders. He succeeded in the case of Annan, who must be one of the most civilized men--without the quotation marks and with no pejorative overtones intended--ever to administer universities and sit on committees (the two great activities of Annan's later life). But for every Annan, the school must have turned out many a know-all and sneerer at the tastes of the bourgeoisie. If you are told by your headmaster that you are being made civilized, the likelihood is that you will grow up thinking that the rest of your fellow citizens are barbarians who need to be civilized too.
This is the problem about Annan, or rather Annan in relation to His Age: the man is so much better than His Age. He is at all the good parties in London, Oxford, and Cambridge, as are plenty of His Age. But the extra expansiveness of his manner suggests that he really wants to know what the other person is thinking across the canape[acu]s and champagne. He booms, but he also listens. This willingness to listen to opposing views, unusual among the magnificoes of British social administration, is in a way his weakness. As we shall see, he is not sure that His Age got it right after all. He thinks there was some good in Mrs. Thatcher's onslaught on it. For that reason, his book is regarded by some of London-Oxbridge's more bigoted liberals as having about it an element of the Quisling.
From Stowe, the young Annan read history at King's College, Cambridge, and studied law for a short time. Then the war came and he was drafted into intelligence. In a passage in Our Age explaining how it came about that several communist spies, such as Kim Philby, could be employed by British intelligence, he explains: "The truth was that in the hectic days after war was declared there was not much time to vet anyone--certainly not in 1940. I myself was compulsorily commissioned into the Intelligence Corps because I had admitted to knowing some French and German. A civilian friend of my father's, who advised Kenneth Strong, the colonel at the head of the German section of intelligence in the War Office, on railway capacities in Europe recommended me to him as someone suitable to monitor German troop movements. No more bizarre recommendation could have been made, but all through the army in 1940 the ignorant were being told to learn. No one vetted me and within a week I was piecing together the reports of agents in the Balkans and the early stutterings of Ultra. [Anthony] Blunt was indeed rejected but in the confusion of 1940 got into MI5."
Actually, Annan reached the heart of British wartime power: the War Cabinet Office. After the war, he spent a year in Germany with the British Control Commission. The proximity of the Russians made him one of the earliest liberal Cold Warriors. He retained an interest in Germany, eventually acquiring a German wife. He might have noticed that in the decade between 1945 and 1955, West Germany recovered more quickly than Britain, even though it had adopted an economic system rejected by His Age--the free market. His own country, meanwhile, had adopted the Welfare State which His Age had prescribed without taking the precaution of producing the wealth to pay for it. But it was a long time--not until Mrs. Thatcher--before anyone of His Age began to display any confidence in capitalism or lack of confidence in the Welfare State.
From Germany, he returned to King's and spent the next twenty years there. The history of ideas was his subject. No one in Britain this century had been so good at linking the ideas to the people who held them. In Leslie Stephen: His Thought and Character in Relation to His Time, he wrote the life of Virginia Woolf's father. But it is much more than that. On a smaller scale, this book, together with a later essay on the Victorian intellectual aristocracy, do for Victorian times what Our Age does for Annan's own.
King's was the college of John Maynard Keynes and E.M. Forster, and the postwar Annan--having the requisite charm and advanced views--became part of late Bloomsbury. He was also popular in his college. In 1956, though not yet forty, he was elected to provost when the previous incumbent died suddenly. Thus he joined the administrative wing of His Age. Unlike most progressive scholars, he was good at running things and a master committee man. In the early 1960s he thought that the ruling Conservative Party were old-fashioned Tories, that the country was riddled by class consciousness, that the universities should teach more science, and that there was much sexual repression. (For some inexplicable reason, such is the nature of political packages, the sort of people who thought the country did not spend enough on scientific education also tended to think that it should reform the laws on homosexuality, abortion, and theatrical censorship.) Annan's were the views of elite educational administrators. The Northern, classless, meritocrat Harold Wilson played on such feelings--except those concerning sexual liberation, in which he had no interest--in order to receive the endorsement of Annan's Age as the candidate of the advanced and the educated, an endorsement which did not long survive Wilson's accession to power.
Annan was thought to be dependably Labour, as at the time he was. After Wilson brought the party back to power in 1964, it having been thirteen years in opposition, Annan received a peerage. Soon he became one of what in Britain are known as "the great and the good"--the liberal-minded, formerly the conservative-minded, who fill committees, chair inquiries, and serve on the boards of artistic institutions such as the State opera companies and the National Gallery. In other words, the Establishment.
Before Wilson, the Great and the Good and the Establishment had been Whiggish-Conservative or at least traditionalist. The term "the Establishment," as we know it, was invented, or at least popularized, by the British journalist Henry Fairlie in the mid-1950s, when Annan's Age was not yet in charge. Shorn of its nuances, Fairlie's argument was that stuffy traditionalists got all the best jobs, such as prime minister, archbishop of Canterbury, governor of the Bank of England, director general of the BBC, and editor of The Times (which in the mid-1950s could still plausibly be regarded as the Establishment's notice board). According to Fairlie, they protected one another and those who thought like them, and were--in some vague way--responsible for the country's decline. Wilson's Labour Party exploited this tale. When he was eventually given the chance to form a government, Wilson changed little in the way of the economy. He simply continued the interventionism of Harold Macmillan in the last phase of the Conservatives' thirteen years. But, unwittingly, Wilson did change the Establishment. His electoral victories in 1964 and 1966 meant that there was now a Commons majority for abolition of capital punishment, legalization of homosexuality, easier abortion, and easier divorce. These policies became associated, in the Conservative mind, with Roy Jenkins--the first home secretary in history to be an admired figure in the London salons. The Whiggish wing of the old Establishment had long supported such causes, but were restrained by the Tory wing and by the Conservative majority in the Commons.
The Wilson government also presided over more egalitarianism in state schooling and the near-hegemony of progressive teaching methods--pupils being encouraged to "express themselves" rather than learn by rote. Add to all this the 1960s "youth culture" and we can see that it would have been difficult for any Establishment of the middle-aged and elderly to retain much mystery or grandeur. Shorn of its influence over both the classroom and the bedroom, the old Establishment found itself presiding over nothing established. Different kinds of people therefore became archbishops of Canterbury and chairmen of committees. The new Establishment was anxious to make it clear that it was not at all stuffy, that it thought "youth" had much to teach it, rather than the other way around. The Times' music critic wrote an article reverentially analyzing the Beatles' harmonic structure. Another critic said they were the greatest song writers since Schubert. The Times was worried about whether the anti-drug abuse laws were being too harshly enforced in a case involving Mr. Mick Jagger (he was acquitted).
The Bloomsbury or the Higher Academic Bohemia of the previous day--the world in which Annan had been brought up--became the Establishment of the new day. We can be sure that Annan knew this was going on, that his hour--and that of his friends--had come. For he is quite a student of Establishments: "Our Age was preternaturally critical of...the Establishment--the network of people and institutions with power and influence who rule the country....The Establishment is always keen to move things along a little, make small adjustments to the way things are run, but opposes major change. It has strong links, some would say is identical with the bien pensants who regard themselves as the guardians of morality and manners."
As Annan reached his prime, the bien pensants changed the morality and manners. So the Establishment changed too. Naturally, he was in the thick of it. This apotheosis is the bigger theme of his book. But always he remembers that it was a matter of people. If you are no annalist, he has chosen the only readable method. G.M. Trevelyan was mocked, especially by the annalists, for describing his Social History of England as "history with the politics left out." But it seems a fair enough description of social history. Otherwise, one type of historiography must always be subsumed in another. Everything becomes part of everything else, and distinctions are lost. Annan's is history with the anonymous forces left out. Naturally, many of the influential people of His Age thought that they were the embodiment of anonymous social forces. But all the time Annan shows that a certain view or taste prevailed because of the force of a certain personality: a Keynes, a Cyril Connolly, a Bertrand Russell, and in the end a Margaret Thatcher, who tried to overthrow much of what His Age had done, and partly succeeded.
Annan's thinkers were not acting in a vacuum. Their thoughts, in one generation, were the actions of the politicians and civil servants in the next. A well-known passage by Keynes, one of the heroes of His Age, has been proved right, not least as it applied to the influence of Keynes himself: "The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believed themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences are usually the slaves of some defunct economist." Annan may only have written about the thinkers, and the doers they influenced. But the effect of their actions on the rest of us in Britain can be traced to them far more easily than it can to any anonymous social force. Never was a country so governed by the ideas of some defunct economists and political philosophers, except the Soviet Union. Annan has written a work of the higher gossip about the people who propagated those ideas, but it is also the best history yet written of the Britain from Attlee to Thatcher.
The story he tells, perhaps without always realizing that he is telling it, is of how the advanced thoughts of, say, a Bloomsbury country house weekend in the 1920s--about work, sex, politics, life--first scandalized the people running the country and were eventually encouraged to spread to every public housing estate, so that the upholders of the traditional "repressive" order are now in the minority, and are more repressed than repressing. Admittedly, Annan does not see it this way. He thinks that, on the whole, it is good that the average proletarian Briton of today has views which are quite like those of Virginia Woolf or E.M. Forster--on sex and on the social order, if not on literature. But Annan is fair. Constantly, he admits what His Age thought was a good idea in theory--such as egalitarianism in education--proved not so good in practice.
He mentions, for example, the "new towns" built in the countryside to liberate people from the slums. At first, all the great and the good, accustomed as they were to assuming that they had the right to plan other people's lives, assumed that they were a good idea. Of one of these towns, Milton Keynes--halfway between London and Birmingham--Annan writes that, as the years passed, it was "criticized not for its understanding but for its neglect of how people lived....People complained that cosiness has vanished. The drab street in an old town with its pub and corner shop in which families gossiped was superior to the town based on research that showed how people were likely to live. The revolt against planning began."
One of his last chapters is called "Our Vision of Life Rejected." It is a reference to Mrs. Thatcher. She arrived, and rejected His Age. "It was she who led the hissing as Our Age made its exit from the stage." Furthermore, "Our Age believed in government by discussion. Out of discussion came a policy, a policy which was further modified by more discussion. Bargains and trade-offs were not considered signs of weakness, they were considered sensible compromises. If agreement could not be reached, the dissenters must not be alienated. Margaret Thatcher thought this nonsense...."
Inevitably, "the educated classes were dismayed that she rejected their interpretation of politics." But the reader senses that Annan knows that someone such as she had to come along in the end. He even defends her over the Falklands when the rest of His Age was raging against her:
Sensible men in 1982 knew that Galtieri and the other thugs were no reincarnation of Hitler any more than Nasser had been. But sensible men often neglect something that cannot be measured which is of immense importance to any country in peace as well as in war. National morale. De Gaulle restored France's morale after Algeria: that decent, sensible, uncorrupt politician, Mendes-France, could not have done so. No statesman was ever more criticized by intellectuals than Adenauer: yet by refusing to do what sensible men thought right--to grovel in repentance for the bestialities committed by his countrymen during the war--he won a settlement first with the West and then with the Soviet Union. Even more galling for sensible men was the sight of Ronald Reagan, a man with the slimmest of pretensions to statesmanship, rallying the United States when Americans were shaken by the debacle of Vietnam, the shame of Nixon's resignation and the humiliations inflicted by Carter's moralistic foreign policy.
For that passage alone, he has probably by now been expelled from His Age. But, on almost his last page, he asks whether Mrs. Thatcher really turned the country round. (His book was published just before her fall.) "Margaret Thatcher was even more the prisoner of her ideology than the socialists she despised," he decides. Actually, she was the prisoner of politics--of such things as her longevity and the number of enemies so embattled a figure was bound to make, and also of the return of inflation, which was a denial of her ideology.
With the accession of John Major, whose entire life has been passed in Annan's Age, we now have a return to a consensus. But it is not the one which Mrs. Thatcher challenged. Like most British politicians of all parties, Mr. Major is a Jenko-Thatcherite. He agrees with Mrs. Thatcher that the state should have as little to do as possible with the economy, and with Roy Jenkins that the state should have as little to do as possible with morals. There are dangers in that consensus, as in the old. Adam Smith did not think that freedom in economics would best work without its being accompanied by a suitable morality. Otherwise, before the Wealth of Nations, he would not have written his Theory of Moral Sentiments.
Half of what Annan's Age believed--the directed economy--remains rejected by Major's Age, thanks to Mrs. Thatcher. But the young Annan, his friends and mentors, also dreamt of an undirected morality. To paraphrase Khrushchev, Annan's Age said we will Bloomsbury you. And it has.
Frank Johnson is deputy comment editor and columnist of the London Sunday Telegraph.
Essay Types: Book Review