Our Age; English Intellectuals Between the Wars: A Group Portrait.

LIONEL TRILLING once wrote a review of George Santayana's letters entitled "That Smile of Parmenides Made Me Think." The drama of Our Age by Noel Annan-now a life peer, Lord Annan-resides in the tension between the essential smugness of the book and its haunting sense of that smile of Parmenides. Were we, the "Our" of the title, the best and brightest of the Oxbridge and LSE graduates, who went to university after World War I, served in World War II, and rose to power with the Labor governments, who imposed our moral and aesthetic tastes upon English culture... were we fundamentally wrong?

Thus a late chapter is entitled "Was Our Age Responsible for England's Decline?" Here the term "Our Age" becomes a metonymy for what amounts to an orthodoxy, the set of attitudes that dominated the young men and a few women who became the British establishment. Annan is never quite explicit on the point, but he seems to remain confident that whatever part they played in Britain's undoing, those attitudes were nevertheless admirable and right.

Noel Annan is a personage. From a series of posts at King's College, Cambridge, and finally London University, he has moved with ease between the academy and the world of public policy. He has sat on innumerable boards and committees, and has acted as a trustee for the British Museum and as director of the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden. He has the ability to summarize ideas lucidly, even fairly complex ones, as in his first important book, a biography of the Victorian man of letters Sir Leslie Stephen (father of Virginia Woolf).

What should have been the opening sentences of this book actually appear on page 215: "In the late Forties Our Age began to move into positions of authority and influence. Rab Butler was re-educating the Conservative Party, and in his research group were the ministers in future Conservative governments." What Annan means by "re-educating" here means moving the Conservative Party toward the British socialist consensus.

That consensus was not only political, and Annan is valuable in recalling what it was rejecting-namely, the Victorian idea of the Gentleman, felt, as in the title of his second chapter, to be "The Insufferable Ideal."

The ideal that Our Age was taught to admire when they were children was the ideal of the English gentleman. . . . It went back to the eighteenth century. Wellington embodied it, Waterloo exhibited it. According to this code an Englishman should be guided by an overpowering sense of civic duty and diligence. Every man's first duty should be to the country of his birth and the institutions in which he served. Loyalty to institutions came before loyalty to people. Individuals should sacrifice their careers, their family, and certainly their personal happiness or whims, to the regiment, the college, the school, the services, the ministry, the profession, or the firm. . . . At Waterloo, officers courted danger to encourage their men in much the same way as naval officers at Trafalgar strolled up and down the quarterdeck regardless of sharpshooters or grapeshot.

It is one of the ironies of Our Age that Lord Annan is most certainly a Gentleman, has served his university, has done his duty in the army, has served on all of those committees, seems to know absolutely everyone and refers to them by school and university nicknames, writes a very clubby prose, and indeed for his gentlemanly services was made a life peer. Yet he holds to the post-Victorian attitudes of Our Age, the orthodoxy that undermined the Gentleman.

Reading of his life one wonders if the Victorian ideal of the Gentleman might itself have been fatally flawed. Was it, in Conradian terms, "hollow at the core"? The famous 1920s Columbia professor John Erskine thought it might be. In his essay "The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent" he pointed out that the male heroes of English literature, whether one considers Chaucer, Shakespeare, Fielding or later writers, are good-but not smart. The villains are smart.

Annan does not quite formulate it this way, but Our Age's impatience with the Gentleman surely had to do with the feeling that the idea made too little of intelligence and too much of "playing the game." Annan persuasively adduces other reasons for the rejection of the Victorian ethos: World War I, which led to widespread pacifism; and the Modernist movement in thought and in the arts, at the core of which was alienation from, rejection of, society. Pacifism was an understandable reaction to the slaughters on the Western Front, where the Gentlemen led troops into action while kicking a soccer ball. Modernism was a stylistic revolution that valued experiment, novelty, and mockery. It represented an enormously powerful movement of sensibility, and a very complex one. There was also, what Annan is too polite to put this bluntly, the revolution of the libido or the id, which surely had to do more with the new motor cars than with Freud: no more chaperones and porch swings.

No one can read this book and dislike Lord Annan, but without knowing it, or perhaps half-knowing it, he has entirely demonstrated the limitations of the people he includes in Our Age. "When [Michael] Oakeshott left Cambridge for [Harold] Laski's chair at LSE, Laski's students were appalled. They listened with horror to his inaugural lecture, which told them that their hopes of a better world were false and their guides wiseacres." Yes, they were appalled and listened with horror. They were orthodox. However, Oakeshott was among the most important English political philosophers of his time. Also, he was right, as were other dissenters from Our Age such as Evelyn Waugh, T. S. Eliot, and Malcolm Muggeridge. Laski predicted that socialism would produce "a better world." As Burke once asked about Bolingbroke,

Who now reads Laski?

The members of Our Age who walk through Annan's pages have no precise analogue in the United States, and one question this book raises is, Why not? In England, there is the Oxbridge connection, as in America there is the Ivy League and especially Harvard. Columbia, Yale, Princeton, Chicago, and other great faculties have also sent personnel to successive governments. But there is an important cultural difference that distinguishes the American circumstance from the British one.

Let us run down the representative names of the American policy establishment. Henry Stimson, Cordell Hull, George Marshall, George Kennan, Averell Harriman, John Foster Dulles, Dean Rusk, Dean Acheson, John J. McCloy, Charles Bohlen. Chronologically, these figures correspond to Lord Annan's Our Age. Like his friends, they played important policy-making roles. The Americans were powerfully willed, and in the historical event destroyed Communism, no small accomplishment.

They were impressive men, but they were single-minded. In contrast to Lord Annan's friends, they did not have much of a bohemian mode. None of them hobnobbed with writers and artists. None, with the possible exception of George Kennan, cared about minimalism or Jung's archetypes. Did Adolf Berle or Harry Hopkins know Wallace Stevens? Probably they had never heard of him. These men were lawyers, Wall Street types, bankers. They were intelligent but not intellectuals.

At the same time, the broad cultural trends that Our Age prompted in England also swept through the United States: a movement toward socialism, the vulgarization of popular culture, legal permissiveness, a superstitious egalitarianism, a startling decline in personal honor, the spread of pornography. Lord Annan's establishment actually approved of these trends, though no doubt disliking what emerged. The American establishment was not really aware of them; it had other things on its mind.

Was Our Age responsible for Britain's decline? Annan answers the question obliquely. In considerable part, it seems to me, his answer amounts to yes.