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These letters were never intended for publication. Indeed, when asked late in the correspondence whether he would want them returned, Hugh Trevor-Roper even contemplated burning them. For apart from being wonderfully wise and witty, they are vicious about Oxford colleagues, and at least one of them contained such a heinous libel (of the royal physician attending George VI, see panel below) that it might have cost Trevor-Roper dear if it had fallen into the wrong hands. Although their context is Oxford university life, they afford an invaluable and entertaining insight into our national intellectual life in the 1950s.
Bernard Berenson was an intellectual and social celebrity. An American-born, Lithuanian Jew, whose parents had immigrated to Boston but who himself had gravitated towards European civilisation, he had become a ground-breaking art critic, but had also sullied his reputation in some quarters by deriving a substantial income from certificating works of art for dealers selling to wealthy Americans (he made $80,000 in 1909 alone). Nonetheless, he was considered a sage, to whose homes in Italy numerous intellectual and social figures made pilgrimage.
Trevor-Roper (who was given an introduction to Berenson by the latter’s sister-in-law Alys Russell, Bertrand Russell’s ex-wife) had read his way out of a gloomy, conventional childhood. He was a research fellow at Oxford in 1940 when he published his first book, Archbishop Laud, aged 26; he spent the war in intelligence and wrote a definitive report on Hitler’s fate, which formed the basis of a bestselling book, The Last Days of Hitler; and during the 1950s he emerged as a scourge of mediocre Oxford dons, a prolific book reviewer and essayist, mainly for this paper and the New Statesman, and the dynamic force in English historiography.
Trevor-Roper visited BB, as he called him, and Nicky Mariano (Berenson’s female secretary and permanent companion after the death of his wife) a dozen times — either at I Tatti, his villa outside Florence, or at Casa al Dono, his mountain retreat at Vallombrosa. He wrote to BB and Nicky (who would read his letters aloud to her increasingly frail charge) from 1948 to 1959. For seven of those years he wrote to them more than half a dozen times, often at a fair length. Beset with the travails of old age, BB could manage only short replies offering snippets of gossip or recommending books and eagerly inviting further correspondence.
Trevor-Roper’s assessment of the letters of David Hume, the 18th-century Scottish philosopher and historian (“so genial and gay as well as full of ideas!”) could stand as an assessment of his own letters. His judgments of people, places and institutions betray a pinpoint perceptiveness. Visiting Iraq in 1957, he found it “efficient, energetic, prosperous, complacent: a Levantine Switzerland”. The Observer, then the favourite paper of the chattering classes, is skewered as “that declining organ of Germanic Wykehamist apocalyptic socialism”, while the tribe of English Roman Catholics is tellingly vignetted as “that bristling defensive phalanx of sensitive conformists” (he shared a suspicion of the Catholic Church with BB). The economic historian Arnold Toynbee, a great sacred cow of those times, is dismissed as “the Apostle of the Half-Baked”, and Arthur Koestler and Franz Borkenau as “professional ex-communist boulevardiers”, while a splendidly malicious put-down of CS Lewis is too elaborate to be quoted here.
Although a political Conservative, Trevor-Roper was no kneejerk reactionary. He was much more European in outlook than most of his contemporaries. He was appalled by the “highly farcical witch-hunt against homosexuality” that followed upon the arrest of John Gielgud for importuning a man in a Chelsea lavatory in 1953. During the Suez crisis, he found himself alienated by both the Eden government and the anti-imperialist left, despising Nasser as a petty dictator, condemning Eden for having kowtowed to the Americans and abandoned the canal, yet scorning the fascistic world of lower-middle-class Conservatives who blindly endorsed Eden’s policy come what may. University life is a constant struggle between the Party of Light and the Party of Darkness. In between are the Jellies, “distinguished by their complete absence of views”. Trevor-Roper may never have completed his proposed magnum opus, a history of the English civil war (or English Great Rebellion, as he preferred to call it), though at least he wrote historical essays, unlike those dons who only taught: “We now have, in this university, seven professors of history only one of whom has ever written so much as a book on a historical subject, and two of whom have never even committed so much as a single antiquarian review.”
Naturally, he saw his own appointment in 1957 (by prime minister Harold Macmillan) to the Regius professorship of modern history as a triumph for the Party of Light. “Can it be that the rule of virtuous, left-wing, nonconformist Wykehamist (or adoptive Wykehamist) nonentities is at last coming to an end?” he writes to BB in June 1957. The Mice — those dull, obscure and unproductive history dons, who detest “Gaiety” and “Life” — were trounced, and his appointment antagonised both the English left and the European right, thus investing it (for him) with added piquancy.
In the Oxford of the 1950s, Trevor-Roper’s approach to his subject was a bracing hyperborean gust of Reason, hostile alike to Marxists, mystics and antiquarian bores. On the one hand, he explains to BB, there were narrative historians who eschewed analysis entirely; on the other there were Marxists, whose analysis was misguided, and Namierites (after Lewis Namier), who only applied their analysis to unrevolutionary periods. “Social analysis must, to be effective, be fitted into a narrative form,” he insists. For that reason he was an admirer of the Annales school of French historians, whose interdisciplinary approach to total history (interhistoire) he enthusiastically endorsed. Since “pure farce” is a more important element in history than economic determinism, he believed, Gibbonian irony is a more reliable tool for a historian than Marxist earnestness. What is more, in Trevor-Roper, as these letters drenched in irony attest, history had discovered a profound analyst who was also a consummate stylist, in the best sense of that word.
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websites:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Trevor-Roper,_Baron_Dacre_of_Glanton
Biography of Trevor-Roper
KILL OR CURE?
The libel Trevor-Roper was so worried about concerned John Weir. “I have gathered,” he wrote in January 1952, “that (George VI) will die and that he will have been killed by Sir John Weir, his domestic surgeon . . . who refused to pay any attention to the first symptoms and carried the king off to Balmoral . . . where he undertook to cure him with a diet of herbs. I am further told that it was only a counter-manoeuvre by the household . . . which led to the king being diagnosed at all. Hence the sudden rush to London and belated operation which he has so far miraculously survived.” The king eventually died in February.
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