Forgotten Voices of the Second World War by Max Arthur

An appropriate choice for Remembrance Sunday, I think.

Forgotten Voices of the Second World War by Max Arthur

This book is something of a sequel to Max Arthur’s Forgotten Voices of the Great War, and both books have a similar backstory. Arthur went to the Imperial War Museum’s Sound Archive, a repository for recorded interviews, broadcasts, speeches, and sounds that capture in audio format the experience of wartime. Soldiers and civilians alike had their stories recorded by interviewers and kept by the IWM, and for this book Arthur went deep into the archives and pulled together a truly remarkable collection of narratives that present World War II from an eyewitness perspective.

The selections are short, most under a page long and some only a few sentences in length. The majority of the snippets come from British people (and of those, mainly men), though voices from other nations are scattered through the book to provide a little contrast or alternate colour. But naturally, each story is different, and it’s truly fascinating to hear an Australian soldier talk about what it was like in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, or read what an evacuated schoolgirl felt when she boarded the train and left her parents behind in London shortly before the Blitz. These personal stories bring the war to life in a way that a book of purely military, social, or political history couldn’t duplicate.

Reading this book does make me wonder what Arthur had to leave out, though, whether for reasons of space or other reasons. The selections in a book are on the whole very Anglo-centric, which is hardly surprising considering the source of the material and the book’s target audience. And the story of the war is certainly told through the British perspective, leaving out much of the war in Russia, China, and the South Pacific in order to focus on the fall of Singapore and the battles for control of Burma and Egypt and other colonial areas invaded by the Axis powers. But there’s enough of a narrative thread to make the book a fascinating work of ‘living history’, even though I hardly dare to think that a quarter of those interviewed in these pages are still alive today to read this book. If ‘living history’ or World War II history interest you, you’d be well-placed to enjoy the fruits of Arthur’s extensive work.

In the Heat of the Kitchen by Bernard Donoughue

Gearing up for another set of book reviews for the month of November. I may be able to post some more recently written ones very soon, once I sort through a few older ones that I haven’t yet had a chance to go back and edit.

In the Heat of the Kitchen by Bernard Donoughue

Bernard (now Lord) Donoughue served as a political advisor for Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan from 1974 to 1979, and in that time he was in a perfect position to observe the workings of government and the ways in which individual personalities clashed over different issues. It’s something of a shame that this book doesn’t exactly do justice to either Labour Party history or Labour Party gossip.

Admittedly, it is an autobiography, and as such it is not meant to be a purely academic analysis of the author’s time in politics and public life. But the autobiographical sections veer sharply toward the mawkish, with a tendency to harp on about his own beliefs and political prejudices, and it is more than a little tiresome to be jerked out of what promises to be an interesting narrative by snide little side commentaries that are wholly unnecessary. A good (or bad) example of the narrative problems:

Of the half a dozen books in which I have been involved, Herbert Morrison: Portrait of a Politician is the one of which I am most proud. Morrison had of course been a great political figure during my childhood, one of my earliest heroes….But he was not a wholly attractive personality and his reputation dimmed after his defeat in 1965. Fortunately, interest in him revived somewhat in the early glow of achievement of his grandson Peter Mandelson, and the book achieved a reprint in 2001 with a fascinating foreword by Peter. But its sales were never great. Since it contains little ‘psychobabble’ or speculation about Morrison’s (undoubtedly thin) sex life, it might anyway be unsuited to the modern literary market.

(You need to imagine my raised eyebrow here.)

One of the more detailed chapters in Donoughue’s book relates how thoroughly Harold Wilson was cowed by his personal secretary Marcia Williams (later Lady Falkender). Although the tales that Donoughue tells are worthy of note in terms of understanding the power dynamics inside Number 10, the overall effect is to turn Marcia Williams into some sort of malicious, predatory she-demon and Harold Wilson into Richard Bucket from Keeping Up Appearances. Donoughue’s negative perspective is understandable, considering that Marcia Williams absolutely could not stand the fact that he was able to take a political policy line independent of hers and attempted to limit her influence over Wilson. But Donoughue unfortunately doesn’t make enough of an attempt to look back on events with a more detached eye, something that would have improved the quality of the writing and the substance of the text.

In the Heat of the Kitchen generally wavers between readable and unreadable, though I was able to plough through it and reach some sort of muddled understanding of Donoughue’s perspective on the high politics and various intrigues that characterised the Labour governments of the 1970s. I haven’t yet had a chance to read his Downing Street Diary, but I do wonder if that book will be even more tainted by the personal prejudices of its author. It’s rather a shame, really — for someone who had quite a few interesting political ideas and helped at least two prime ministers reach a better understanding of key policy issues, Donoughue does not really convey a good sense of his overall intelligence and scope of political awareness in this autobiography.

Chance Witness: An Outsider’s Life in Politics by Matthew Parris

Another quasi-politician’s memoirs? Don’t worry — I’ll run out of them one of these days.

Chance Witness: An Outsider’s Life in Politics by Matthew Parris

The subtitle of Chance Witness is a very good indication of former MP and newspaper columnist Matthew Parris’s approach to his autobiography. He never claims to be one of the in-crowd in the political circles in which he moved for a time. Most of the time, he claims, it was only through chance that he ended up where he was — for example, he attributes his selection as a Conservative MP in the 1980s primarily to the fact that he once leapt into the freezing waters of Thames to save a drowning dog. (It apparently swung the vote of the selection committee, which was wavering only slightly in his favour.) Yet a fair number of key events in his life weren’t entirely left to chance…unless you consider that there was an element of chance in the fact that at a fairly young age he realised he was homosexual.

The trouble with most autobiographies I’ve read usually revolves around the fact that quite a lot of people simply haven’t led lives which really lend themselves to the kind of prolonged navel-gazing that autobiographies demand. More often than not, what starts out interesting and full of vivid detail can often devolve into a virtual laundry list of ‘people I have known’ and ‘places I have been’ and ‘what it all means to me’. Or conversely, an autobiography which becomes quite fascinating in the later chapters devoted to adulthood requires a long and arduous slog through page after page of the author’s reminiscences of memorable bowel movements from his/her childhood. (Or something along those lines.) But as far as autobiographies go, Chance Witness generally doesn’t suffer much from the occasional tedious bits that tend to pepper the pages of similar stories. Put it down to Parris’s long stint as parliamentary sketch writer for the Times, a job that requires the writer to be succinct and clever with words and ruthless about fitting as much information as possible into a restricted space. If anything, there are places where the narrative seems to have been cut short, though in such a way that the marks of the authorial scissors aren’t readily apparent.

Chance Witness has much to recommend it, not least of which is Parris’s thought-provoking account of his time as a MP in the 1980s, when his sexuality wasn’t so much an open secret as it was a carefully-circumvented predicament. He talks quite frankly about his experiences ‘cruising’ on Clapham Common in the days before London’s gay community truly existed, including a horrific account of a incident where he was savagely beaten by two men while crossing the Common one evening…and the shame he felt when he lied to the police and to the press about where and why he was attacked. Yet Parris manages to strike a decent balance when discussing his sexual orientation in relation to his life: he doesn’t try to pretend that it has overshadowed or affected everything he’s ever done. Chance Witness is quite interesting to read almost for that reason alone, even if there’s much else to recommend it.

Things Can Only Get Better by John O’Farrell

A political book that isn’t based around the life and times of a particular politician? Now there’s a change in my reading habits.

Things Can Only Get Better by John O’Farrell

Things Can Only Get Better is subtitled ‘Eighteen Miserable Years in the Life of a Labour Supporter’, so you get three guesses as to which 18 years he was talking about (and the first two have already been cut from the budget to reduce the number of civil servants administrating them). O’Farrell was one of the writers for Spitting Image, the satirical sketch show of the scary-looking puppets, and this book is the story of his work for the Labour Party in south London during the years when Margaret Thatcher and John Major were in power.

O’Farrell was very active in local Labour politics in Battersea and in the neighbouring areas in the 1970s and 1980s, and the back cover of the book describes it as the ‘confessions of someone who has been actively involved in helping the Labour party lose elections at every level’. Reading Things Can Only Get Better is indeed very much like reading a confession…though more often it’s a denunciation of the people and events that seemed to conspire to keep Labour out of office for so long. (Not surprisingly, O’Farrell doesn’t exactly stress the fact that in some ways, one of those ‘conspirators’ was the Labour party itself). Granted, he does get in a few good lines along the way, as in his opinion of the Falkland Islands:

It just wasn’t fair. Why did Margaret Thatcher have to go to war against a fascist dictatorship? Why couldn’t we have a straightforward goodies and baddies war, where Margaret Thatcher was the baddie and the People’s Democratic Socialist Republic of Narnia were the goodies?

Good for a chuckle, at least. But to have to read pages and pages where the main message is one of ‘Death to Thatcher, death to the Tories’ rapidly gets tiresome, and eventually off-putting. O’Farrell takes potshots at anyone whom he seems to think helped keep Labour out of office — there’s a rather savage attack on David Owen and the SDP; O’Farrell essentially calls them all traitors and backstabbers for jumping ship when Labour seemed to be sinking beneath the waves. I’m far from being a Thatcherite myself, but I honestly don’t buy the theory that for two decades Labour was unjustly crushed under the Iron Lady’s heels, or that the Liberals and the SDP and the Monster Raving Looney Party were in league with the Tories in a grand plot to keep the left out of office, or — and this sort of thing really turns my stomach — that British voters were just too stupid/greedy/lazy to really understand what a menace the Conservatives were to the country. Sorry, John, but even I know that that’s not the way to convince anyone that you’re on the people’s side.

As the personal story of a grassroots political activist and a man who genuinely wanted to make things better for the people of the area he lived in, Things Can Only Get Better is an entertaining book. But it’s not always easy to wade through the knee-deep anti-Thatcher polemic to get to the story, or even to the funny bits. Even so, I did find the book a welcome change from the more official sorts of biographies.

In Confidence by Anatoly Dobrynin

Politicians’ memoirs usually aren’t the easiest books to carry around and read. They’re often only available in heavy and bulky hardback editions, and they tend to require a more consistent focus than some other history books — not the sort of thing you can put down and pick up again at random. But occasionally there are memoirs that I’d be more than willing to lug around, and today’s review happens to focus on one of them.

In Confidence by Anatoly Dobrynin

Anatoly Dobrynin, born in 1919, served as Soviet ambassador to the United States from 1962 to 1986 — which I believe makes him the longest-serving ambassador in Russian history. In those twenty-four years, he went through the Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon (and Kissinger), Ford (and Kissinger), Carter, and Reagan administrations…and on the other side, the Krushchev, Brezhnev (and Kosygin), Andropov, Chernenko, and Gorbachev years. Ambassador Dobrynin outlasted any number of lesser diplomats, and his unbroken record of service and his status as an outsider makes him an interesting choice to report on the history of US/Soviet relations during the tempestuous years of the Cold War.

And report he does. At nearly 700 pages long, In Confidence covers Dobrynin’s entire career. He began, interestingly enough, as an engineer who had never considered himself to be a political person. He was selected for the diplomatic corps during World War II almost against his will, and spent a good deal of time studying American history and working in Moscow before he was sent to the embassy in Washington DC as a foreign affairs attache in the early 1950s. By 1962, he had risen to become ambassador, and his long career as the Soviet government’s representative in America began.

Dobrynin’s memoirs are probably not a good starting point for anyone who isn’t at least familiar with basic Cold War history, particularly the Ford and Carter years where American foreign policy tended to be muddled and contradictory. But there is a wealth of information about how Soviet leaders viewed their American counterparts, much of which comes from Dobrynin’s firsthand experiences and conversations; he spoke fairly fluent English, so on many occasions he was the only translator during talks between Soviet and American higher-ups. Dobrynin’s impressions of different political figures and their attitudes toward US/Soviet relations are rather fascinating — he’s not kind to Jimmy Carter or Gerald Ford, for example, and even though he does seem to respect Henry Kissinger’s attempts at detente he quietly slams Kissinger for being inconsistent on how detente was put into practice. One remarkable passage that sticks out in my memory was Dobrynin’s account of Richard Nixon’s final days in office before the resignation…and how Leonid Brezhnev sent Nixon a personal message of support, saying that even though he did not fully understand the nature of the domestic political problems that Nixon was facing, he believed that Nixon’s attempts to improve US/Soviet relations were what his country would truly remember from his presidency. I actually got a little choked up at that part — the thought that possibly the only kind words Nixon had during his final days as President came from the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union appeals to my sense of bittersweet irony. And Dobrynin manages to capture this incident and many more without being too quick to blame one side or the other for the policy failures and setbacks.

In Confidence, like many political memoirs worth reading, is not the kind of book that can be read straight through in one sitting. But it’s a refreshing perspective on a strange and often nerve-wracking era in history, and Dobrynin is articulate and possessed of a dry wit that crackles through the pages and makes his anecdotes all the more intriguing.

A Life at the Centre by Roy Jenkins

Closing out the last day of this year’s Lib Dem conference with an appropriate political memoir.

A Life at the Centre by Roy Jenkins

Roy Jenkins (1920-2003) spent a long and varied career in British and European politics. During his time as a Home Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer under Harold Wilson’s governments, he was the embodiment of Britain in Europe, an advocate of British entry to the EU at a time when the Labour Party seemed generally determined to stick its fingers in its ears and sing very loudly to itself to drown out any thought of possibly joining the European Community. His support of Europe was ‘rewarded’ (I use quotation marks here only because some might consider it a rather dubious reward) by the invitation he received to become a European Commissioner in 1976 — right at a time when it seemed fairly certain that he no longer had any chance of becoming leader of the Labour Party and thereby a potential candidate for prime minister. He served as President of the European Commission during his time in Brussels. But in the late 1970s, he and three other renegade Labour MPs got together and created the Social Democratic Party (SDP), a reaction against both the rise of Thatcherism and the increasingly militant left-wing stance of the Labour Party. Roy Jenkins ended his political career as the leader of the Liberal Democrats (the combined SDP and Liberal Party) in the House of Lords, and wrote several massive biographies about dominating figures in British political history: Churchill, Gladstone, and Asquith, to name a few. In A Life at the Centre, Jenkins switches from political biography to political autobiography as he looks back on his origins, his opinions, and his political career.

A Life at the Centre is not immune to the autobiography’s tendency to drag and meander in sections, particularly at the beginning. Probably the best reason to read this memoir is for the parts where Jenkins discusses (not without a hint of bitterness, I might add) just how divisive a subject the European question was to the Labour Party. Granted, the squabbling over Europe really had its roots in inner-party divisions that had existed inside Labour since the early 1950s, and many commentators have suggested that Harold Wilson’s resignation in 1976 was timed to coincide with a period when Jenkins’ Europeanist stance made him an unacceptable choice for the party rank and file. (It’s a time-honoured tradition with Labour leaders, apparently, if the Clement Attlee-Herbert Morrison example and the more recent Tony Blair-Gordon Brown relations are considered.) But Jenkins resists the temptation to turn to vitriol, both over Europe and over the tensions that marked the uneasy Alliance between the SDP and the Liberals in the 1980s. In an autobiography, that’s worthy of note.

A comprehensive biography of Roy Jenkins hasn’t yet been published. There’s a 1983 biography that has obviously been overtaken by events, and Giles Radice’s Friends and Rivals: Crosland, Jenkins, and Healey does quite a bit to fill in the gaps but only focuses on the connections between its three title subjects. Until someone brings out a biography that tackles both the Jenkins papers and the papers in the National Archives (which are now available through the end of Jenkins’ time in the Labour Party), A Life at the Centre is possibly the best choice for anyone interested in looking at a history of Roy Jenkins’ life and for a notable perspective on the social democratic tradition in postwar British political history.

Writing Home and Untold Stories by Alan Bennett

It seems that the playwright and author Alan Bennett has a new novella out: The Uncommon Reader. So before I purchase it, I thought I’d post my reviews of two of his collected prose writings. In a forthcoming review, I’ll post my review of his play (and now film) The History Boys.

Writing Home by Alan Bennett

The writings and reminiscences in Writing Home form a fairly motley collection. The book includes his diaries (which are not so much ‘diaries’ as they are collected thoughts and musings) from the mid-1980s through the 1990s, prefaces to printed editions of his plays (including The Madness of George III and An Englishman Abroad), and various reviews and other writings collected for the first time. One of the most interesting selections in this collection is ‘The Lady in the Van’, a short story based on the life of an somewhat unbalanced elderly lady who lived in a van parked opposite Bennett’s house in Camden Town. But all in all, Writing Home is a book of observations, some of which reflect on the past and some of which dwell on the present…but all of which are a treat to read.

Bennett’s eye for the absurd and his love of the English language make Writing Home a fine book to have in those moments when you’re looking for something to read that’s light and yet satisfying. It isn’t the sort of book that you’d rave about to all of your friends and try to convince complete strangers to buy; it’s the sort of book that you keep with you and pick up occasionally, flipping through it and reading a selection or two before putting it down and puttering off to do something else. Like the other books in this set of reviews, I don’t recommend reading through it all at once. It’s meant to be read in small chunks, and then re-read in different chunks. Or at least, that’s how I found that the book read best.

Untold Stories by Alan Bennett

In Untold Stories, Bennett has pulled together another selection of writings and speeches that pick up where Writing Home left off — the materials in this book cover the years from around 1995 to 2004. Some of the untold stories in the book come from Bennett’s past and family life. There’s a quiet, sympathetic pen-portrait of his extended family, weaving in stories of a grandfather whose suicide was hushed up by his children, and his mother’s sisters and their lives in and out of the dingy Leeds community where they (and he) grew up. He writes about his mother’s struggles with depression and later with dementia, and the patient care and concern that his usually undemonstrative father showed in those dark times. Some of the other stories are about himself as a young man, uncertain of nearly everything including his sexuality and his religious faith. Included in Untold Stories are the diary selections that were printed every year in the London Review of Books, his reflections on the past year. And also included in the book is a lengthy account of his experience undergoing treatment for bowel cancer, which was diagnosed in 1997 and which until now he has been reluctant to discuss.

Not all of the stories in the book are so intimately personal. There is an interesting account of the writing and production of The History Boys, his most recent play (which I had the good fortune to see at the National Theatre, and which was made into an excellent film). There are a number of amusing anecdotes featuring the actors he has known and worked with, including Dame Thora Hird, Sir Alec Guinness, and Dame Maggie Smith. Untold Stories is a pleasing blend of Bennett’s personal and professional life, all written about with the same deft touch and careful feel for language that makes his writing a delight to read.