Notes & asides.

* From a spy in London, we have a copy of a toast at an anniversary dinner. The speaker is Daniel Johnson, the eldest son of Paul and Marigold Johnson, whose 50th wedding anniversary was being celebrated. Paul Johnson, many of whose essays we are proud to have published in National Review, is routinely acknowedged here, by a shrewd and learned son, as the "preeminent English man of letters of his generation." And Marigold Johnson is uniquely endowed to have raised such a son, by such a father. The editors of National Review extend their congratulations to an eminent family.

--WFB

Ladies and gentlemen:

A few weeks ago, with her usual impeccable timing, my mother rang up just as we sat down for dinner. The good news, she told me, was that they had decided there would be only one speech at this party. The bad news was that I was to make it. Why? "Because you are the only one of the children who was, as it were, present." Well, she should know. The wedding was in March 1957. Six months later, I was born--not, as Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote to Bernard Berenson at the time, in a Scottish recusant castle but at home in their flat in Lennox Gardens. My wife tells me I've been turning up to social occasions too early ever since.

My imminent arrival apart, what can my mother have been thinking of, marrying this wild young left-wing journalist, recently returned from adventures in Paris about which he later wrote a racy novel? After all, Marigold was the daughter of an eminent physician who was consulted by three prime ministers. She had inherited her father's brains and her actress mother's beauty, becoming head girl at Benenden and narrowly missing a First in English at Oxford, before commencing a promising career in publishing. Some of her friends must have wondered what she saw in the man to whom even then so many people objected. Suddenly she found herself having to put up Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament marchers on her sofas, put up with journalists and politicians in her kitchen--some of them even more irascible and intemperate than her husband--and occasionally entertain such terrifying guests as Jimmy Goldsmith or Rupert Murdoch. All this while bringing up four children with so little money that when in 1960 they moved to Iver, they had no car, no central heating, and no household appliances, and family holidays were taken in Blackpool or Bognor.

But put up with all this she did, and much more besides. In fact, our mother not only married a troublemaker but has spent her whole life looking for trouble. Take religion. Marigold gave up her deeply held Anglican faith to become a Roman Catholic, which instantly placed her beyond the pale for much of English society at the time. Leonard Woolf thought my father's Catholicism automatically excluded him from consideration as editor of the New Statesman, but that did not stop him getting the job. My mother, on the other hand, had to confront prejudice of a much subtler kind, at every level. Yet she managed to adapt to and raise her children in her new faith, despite my father's tendency in those early days to demonstrate his independence of thought by, for example, insisting that his third son be baptized Oliver--not after the Blessed Oliver Plunkett, but, to the dismay of Father Crawford, our parish priest, after Oliver Cromwell. No wonder my mother did the church flowers for twenty years.

Within six years of their wedding day, Marigold found herself with four extremely demanding children and one dog, not to mention a husband who expected her to be his spellchecker, amanuensis, domestic goddess, social secretary, and chauffeuse. It was our good fortune that she decided to put her own career on hold until we were all at school. In later years she held down several highly demanding jobs with--as I think her sometime employers here present will testify--unqualified success. This wasn't easy, caught as she was between bosses as eccentric as Frank Longford, Frank Field, and Tony Benn, and a husband who managed in the course of making himself the preeminent English man of letters of his generation to make an enemy of just about every other English man of letters alive--present company excepted--and a few dead ones for good measure. In October 1975 she stood for Parliament in the Labour interest at Beaconsfield, gaining a much better result than the candidate two elections later, in 1983, the then unknown Tony Blair. But within a couple of years, my father had left the Labour party amid ripples of publicity that reached as far as Israel, where I was then working on a kibbutz. So that was the end of Marigold's political career.

If I haven't said much in praise of my father yet, that is in part because it almost seems superfluous. Almost but--don't worry, Daddy--not quite. You have not been the easiest of fathers, but you have been the best. Everybody here--and among you are some of the most productive writers alive--is in awe of a creativity that is titanic, volcanic, cosmic in scope. On my wall at home is an old print of the French Encyclopedists. The original Encyclopedie ran to 17 volumes of text, some 20 million words, and required the combined efforts over twenty years of all the greatest savants in France: Voltaire, Rousseau, d'Alembert, Diderot, Condillac, d'Holbach, and so on. Yet in the breadth and depth of his erudition, in the wit and wisdom of his judgment, in quantity and quality, my father 's oeuvre far exceeds the Encyclopedie. He has been a one-man civilization. Unlike the Encyclopedists, moreover, who sought to ecraser Judeo-Christian morality and prepared the ground for the French Revolution, my father has usually been right. If Freud was, as Auden said, "a whole climate of opinion," Paul Johnson has been the climatologist of opinion. Ahead of his time, he diagnosed all the pathologies of the 20th century and delved into history to find the evidence. But along with an irresistible moral imperative, he has been driven by another equally powerful aim: to delight, infuriate, and entertain. When he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America's highest civilian honor, President Bush joked that he had read all of Daddy's books. Remember, too, that the greater part of his output has never been collected in book form--not yet. I daresay that, apart from the author himself, only one person on earth has read every one of the tens of millions of words that he has written--and she has corrected a large percentage of them.

None of these words, indeed, would have been written without a wife who was something even rarer than a great man of letters--a saint. It is perhaps a failing of the Church that until the last Pope it had never adequately recognized the sanctity of married women. The Virgin Mary was the exception that proves the rule--she was, after all, immaculate. But there are countless women who, though not immaculate, are invisible saints, and Marigold is surely one of them. My father often describes himself as a sinner--and which of us would dare to disagree with him? When it came to sanctity, his mother--Nana--was a hard act to follow, so he was inordinately fortunate to find a wife who could correct more than just his spelling. Actually, I doubt if it was mere good fortune. They are still incapable of driving a single mile together without my father invoking the Almighty in a manner that proves yet again just how providential their marriage was and, half a century on, still is.

One of the many friends who could not be here wrote a letter from which I should like to quote: "The point about marriage is not that it can ever be without its 'ups and downs,' but that the commitment of two people to each other and their love for each other sees them through it all. You are two of the kindest and most generous people I have met. You have raised a wonderful and talented family. You can be very proud, and I am proud to know you. God bless you both." Let us drink a toast to Paul and Marigold, to their children and grandchildren, their wider family and friends, and to this exceptionally golden anniversary.