Macmillan remembered.

MACMILLAN REMEMBERED

WHEN FIRST INVITED to write theofficial life of Harold Macmillan, I was, quite simply, dumbfounded. I had never done a biography, and felt I had no particular qualifications for this one. But, where most biographers have to work posthumously, the opportunity to write the life of a great contemporary--while, at the same time, having access to a remarkable living memory--was unique, and not lightly to be refused. Only one major condition was imposed, by the subject: The book was not to appear in his lifetime, a condition designed to rid us both of all inhibitions.

It was agreed that we should "goand look at each other.' So, on a mellow October day in 1978, we strolled round and round the Birch Grove gardens, laid out by Harold Macmillan's redoubtable American mother, Nellie. Then rising 85, immensely spry--although walking (because of his First World War wounds) with what a former colleague described as his "soft-shoe shuffle'--he seemed almost as diffident as I was. I remember confessing that I wasn't even sure I was a good Tory, and he stopped and put his hand on my arm: "Nor was I, dear boy!' After that icebreaker, we went into the house and there began seven of the most rewarding (though testing) years of my life. I like to think that perhaps my visits contributed something to the rather lonely life of an ex-PM who had long outlived his contemporaries and--in many ways--his world: a world that spanned Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee and the nuclear age.

We would work--often three daysat a stretch--recording on tape the life of "this strange, very buttoned-up person,' as he liked to describe himself; probing into the many corners left uncovered by his own copious but impersonal six-volume Memoirs--Suez, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Profumo, but most of all his own life. Despite the showman exterior, acquired over the years, he was by nature private and deeply relucatant to talk about anything bordering on the personal. He once claimed that one of the principal aims of his Memoirs had been "to keep myself out of it.' I told him he had done a good job; my hardest task was always to drag him out of his own corner, to winkle the ever wily politician out of the protective shell. To neighbors he would introduce me as "a cross between Boswell and Torquemada.'

The best was the "table talk,' atmeals, or late in the evening. He was the total owl, and could keep any audience up till two in the morning with random marginalia, witty anecdotes on contemporaries, and acute commentaries on the day's happenings interlaced with the great sweeps of historical analogy. He was, I suppose, the greatest survivor of the great conversationalists of a bygone era.

Out of curiosity, I once listed sometwo dozen topics of conversation covered in the course of an evening. They included: The origin of the Guards' tall bearskins--should these have been worn instead of steel helmets in World War I, given that riflemen always aim high? Hardy versus Kipling as stylists. The Victorian Empire-builders and sexual repression. Lord Nuffield and British Leyland. Decadence in Hellenistic literature. The collapse of the First Roman Republic. The anopheles mosquito in sixth-century Italy. The explicitness of sex in the modern novel --Vanity Fair (a great favorite) versus Lady Chatterley: Would Jude the Obscure be considered shocking now? Contemporary Latin pronunciation at Oxford ("The way I was taught,' he would say, "always made me think the Romans spoke Latin with an English account, and were rather serious people; now, with this new pronunciation, you suddenly realize they were all just excitable Italians'). Problems of publishing in Nigeria, and copyright in the USSR. The Church and the new "Ayatollah' (as he liked to call him) of Canterbury. Reminiscences of old London ("Did you know that M. and Co.'s present office sits on the site whence Essex launched his revolt against Elizabeth I?'). And finally, with much hilarity and numerous examples, the difference between a "cad' and a "bounder': "In war,' as he explained it, "a bounder is a chap who goes to the front, wins the VC, then seduces his colonel's wife; but a cad seduces his colonel's wife, and never goes to the front. Women can be cads though, curiously enough, I don't think ever bounders--have you ever known a female bounder?'

BUILT IN THE 1920s, when publishingprospered, Birch Grove--five hundred feet up in the Sussex woods--was a great barrack of a house, of which much seemed to be kitchen. Beyond the innate sadness of an empty home that once rang with the voices of children, long since grown up and gone, it never struck me as a happy place. It was full of ghosts. Back in the vast kitchen areas there were the old-fashioned bells, still marked "Mrs. Macmillan' (his mother); "Mr. Arthur' (brother); "Mr. Harold'; "Lady Dorothy's sitting room'; "Master Maurice, day nursery.' There were the memorabilia of visits of the great, all long dead: of Churchill, de Gaulle, Kennedy, Nkrumah. In the library, there was the rocking chair that had been bought specially for JFK during his stay just five months before the assassination.

On the wall of the tiny sitting/diningroom in which we often talked-- Macmillan's famous "fortress'--were prints of Bad Godesberg (although he was never really able to bring himself to like the Germans, at whose hands he had received the five wounds whose scars he bore), presented respectively by Adenauer and Willy Brandt. Lunch consisted--winter or summer-- of cold ham, undressed salad, and cheese; with an occasional special treat of "plum pie just for you, dear boy, as you never get enough to eat here!'

THE FRUGALITY of his life alwaysstruck me as being incongruous for an ex-Prime Minister, as well as an affluent publisher. Yet he obviously felt it in keeping with the spartan background of the family; added to an exaggerated conviction of personal impoverishment not untypical of his age--"rags to riches, and back again, in four generations, that'll be our story.'

Comment on his famous contemporarieswould be marvelously vivid, often acid, but almost always coming down on the side of charity. When I once asked why he kept out of his published Memoris (greatly to their loss, and in marked contrast with later political diarists) the more barbed remarks of the unpublished diaries he kept (e.g., when referring to one of his senior ministers: "I can't decide whether D---- is morose or just plain dull'), he would reply that such remarks made in the irritation of the moment never represented a considered view. And he would add as an afterthought, "Also, I wasn't a publisher for nothing: Libel's expensive!'

Although they were temperamentallypoles apart and had a certain mutual antipathy dating back to the Thirties, he was always outwardly loyal about Anthony Eden--perhaps excessively so--over the explosive issue of Suez. But--in private--it was clear he thought Eden should never have been PM: "Charming, good company, a marvelous negotiator--would have made a perfect head of the Foreign Office--but never contributed any ideas . . . Winston thought Anthony would wreck it, that's basically why he held on so long.' Of Harold Wilson, he would remark jocularly (and not without a certain respect) that "no PM had got away with so much since Walpole!' Yet I never heard him say many harsh words about his old adversary. Wilson was a "kind man,' brought down "by third-rate people.' Macmillan admired his virtuosity in the House, though "he used too many epigrams . . . like listening to Bob Hope.'

In contrast, he despised the incorruptibleGaitskell as being politically inept. "Whenever a big wound developed in the Labour Party, Gaitskell-- most obligingly--would go and put a tourniquet below it.' Back in June 1979 he told me he had offered Mrs. Thatcher what turned out to be prophetic advice: "Leave the Right and the Left of the Labour Party to fight it out.' When the SDP hove into sight, I asked him teasingly if he wasn't going to join, insofar as it seemed exactly the kind of "Center Party' he had been advocating in the Thirties. "Certainly not,' he snorted. "It's just the same old Labour Party of 1945--same old Socialist principles, even the same old faces!'

A certain raffishness appealed to oneside of his character more than the solider virtues. Adenauer and Diefenbaker he considered "bores' (the most damning word in his vocabulary); he found the Presbyterian moralizing of Dulles tedious, while--despite his early enthusiasm for the New Deal--he mistrusted Roosevelt from their first meeting at Casablanca in 1943.

For Kennedy--as is well known--hedeveloped a deep personal affection, and with him re-established the "Special Relationship' on a level that has never existed before or since, not even in the halcyon days of Churchill and Roosevelt. This was perhaps in part a testimony to his unique talent at bridging the generation gap, which I had so often experienced with him. Yet he was not beyond excoriating JFK for "spending half his time thinking about adultery, the other half about secondhand ideas passed on by his advisors.'

Though his enthusiasm for her policieswaned as unemployment soared, he held Margaret Thatcher in high personal regard. He had, of course, been flattered that, before her election, she should come frequently to consult him and that afterward (unknown to the press) he would be invited to Chequers for quiet weekends a trois. (During the Falklands war of 1982, she also quizzed her 88-year-old predecessor on how to set up a War Cabinet --and took the advice he gave her.) There was, too, the affinity in the origins of the grocer's daughter and the crofter's grandson. He admired her capacity for hard work, while expressing fears that she would overdo it and "blow up,' and it worried him that there was "no relaxation at Chequers --no books, you know.' In general he referred to her as "that intelligent and courageous young woman,' and it was this last quality--something he had plenty of himself--that was to him perhaps the most important in a person.

Churchill, of course, he regardedwith total devotion and affection, going back to their first association in the Twenties, but tinged also with a certain detached amusement. One of his favorite Churchill anecdotes was at the expense of Mountbatten (for whom he had ambivalent feelings: respect for his professionalism, dislike of his showmanship): At a lunch given for Churchill in his dotage, Mountbatten had held forth through all three courses, while the ex-PM sat slumped in evident displeasure; then, as the guests left, Churchill said repeatedly, in a highly audible voice, "Who ish that fellow? Should I know him?' with a broad wink to Macmillan.

COURAGE, WHICH Macmillan somuch admired in others, in him on occasions amounted almost to recklessness. It remains a mystery why he was never awarded at least one decoration in the First War; in the Second World War, in 1943, aged fifty, he pressed to be dropped with an airborne division north of Rome--a daring operation that, had it been carried out, would almost certainly have ended as a pre-run of Arnhem, and just as disastrously. The following year, he positively reveled in being besieged in the British Embassy in Athens, under fire from Communist insurgents.

A few days after the murder ofMountbatten, I made one of my visits to Birch Grove. On the table by his armchair was a new white bell button: "Don't touch it, dear boy, I'm only to ring after I've been blown up, and then the police will come in ten minutes-- isn't that thoughtful of them?' The police had also asked him to give up his ritualistic postprandial snooze in an isolated summer house, but one sunny day he insisted on going out to it. Waving aside my remonstrances, he said with a mischievous chuckle, "If you hear a big bang, that'll mean you can public your book!'

Reading was one of his chief solaceswhen in office: "Peace, peace within yourself,' he once remarked, "that you can only get from books.' He was almost certainly the best-read British prime minister in living memory. As an instinctive Whig, he was addicted to Trollope, and during the Suez crisis --so he confided to me--he had reread the whole of George Eliot: "It was the only thing that kept me from going barmy . . . I didn't mention this in the Memoirs, because I felt readers might have thought the chancellor should have been better employed.' After I had grilled him for three days on end over Suez (during which I discovered how much more central, and controversial, his role had been than the records have hitherto revealed), he remarked with relief, "Now I'm going back to David Copperfield!' Even more than Copperfield, Anna Karenina was a favorite that he re-read almost yearly; yet old delights never closed his mind to new experiences. After his first trip to China ("as a publisher, not an ex-PM') in 1979, he told me, almost bubbling over with excitement, that adventures of the trip were nearly eclipsed by discovery of a "new novel.' It turned out to be For Whom the Bell Tolls; "quite wonderful, like one of Scott's early novels . . . I can't think why I never read it before.'

Like his father and uncle beforehim, he also maintained an active interest in the publishing of "M. and Co.,' making weekly visits to the Little Essex Street office right to the end of his life. He loved reminiscing about the great authors whom he had published in the past and their idiosyncrasies --Hardy, Kipling, Yeats, Sean O'Casey--and in his eighties he took to traveling indefatigably "on company business': Nigeria, India, Hong Kong, and China in the late Seventies; the U.S.A. in 1980.

At the Great Wall he had shownsigns of flagging, and his hosts thoughtfully offered him a wheelchair; he enjoyed relating how he had completely stumped the Chinese interpreter with the indignant reply: "I'd much rather have a brandy and soda.' Visiting America the following year to promote the new edition of Grove's Musical Dictionary (at 850 a set), he managed a lunch and dinner speaking engagement almost every day for ten days with an occasional television appearance in between. His performances brought forth ecstatic comment in the New York and Washington press, grown unaccustomed to the mandarin style of statecraft. When he spoke to a distinguished gathering at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, I was able to act as his host; he telephoned nervously to inquire beforehand, "Will all those eggheads be friendly to me?' and seemed genuinely surprised when he brought the house down.

Of all his interests in retirement,none gave him greater pleasure than his chancellorship of Oxford, for which he had entered the lists in a hotly disputed election in 1960 while he was still Prime Minister, much in the condottiere spirit that had prompted him to volunteer to drop behind Rome in 1943. Indeed probably no other chancellor took so great an interest, or knew so much about Oxford's most parochial affairs. At Birch Grove the files on Oxford filled a whole cabinet; there were few university occasions he would miss, and he made a point of gracing the least "smart' colleges and the more obscure institutions.

He left a strong imprint on theuniversity, but there were also more things he would have liked to see changed: "My final ambition, I'd like to have a go at moving finals to February--so as to enjoy May. Much more civilized. And I'd like Oxbridge to return to the classical tradition, leaving science to a later, technical school . . .' When, in 1981, some Oxford Young Turks suggested it might be time for the 87-year-old chancellor to retire, he riposted, "I told them I'd only give way to a wiser and older man!'

ONE OF THE least-known episodesin his life, and one about which he was always most reticent, was his near conversion to Roman Catholicism at the beginning of World War I. His great friend and mentor, Ronald Knox, did "pope,' but Macmillan jibbed at the last fence. (On the ironies of fate, he once speculated to me: "If things had been otherwise, I suppose it not impossible that Ronnie might have become Prime Minister --and I should have been Monsignor Macmillan!')

Nevertheless, the influence of Knoxwas considerable, and throughout his life, as a devout churchgoer, he leaned toward Anglo-Catholicism rather than to the Church of Scotland into which the Macmillans had been born. One of the outstanding characteristics of Harold Macmillan was his spiritual fortitude, in which was perhaps combined elements of both sects. In the last years, he ate hardly enough to keep alive, and his body became so frail that survival seemed a constant, miraculous triumph of mind over matter. He struggled victorious through serious illnesses; in 1981 he was stricken with a bad attack of shingles, which can carry off younger and tougher men. It was, he said, more painful than his pelvis wound on the Somme. But somehow it was faith that brought him through--as it did through all the adversities of old age, the pain of old wounds, the loss of a wife, of family and colleagues, the loneliness. When in New York in 1980, he remarked to William F. Buckley Jr., "If you don't believe in God, all you have to believe in is decency . . . decency is very good. Better decent than indecent. But I don't think it's enough.' He fundamentally believed in both God and decency.