Gotham Diary:
Uncle Roy
11 July 2014
When I came at last to the end of Roy Jenkins: A Well-Rounded Life, I felt that I stood at the very abyss of mortality and oblivion, but also that there was nothing very frightening or even unsettling about it, because, when we fall into it, as each one of us does, we are unencumbered by bodies that might get hurt in the tumble. We are unencumbered even by ourselves. We have become whatever it is that other people remember about us — people who will also die one day; soon enough, there will be no one alive with a personal recollection of who we were — and therein lies the mystery, or at least the uncertainty, of death.
Consider Shakespeare for a moment. It is unlikely that the name of Shakespeare is going to be forgotten anytime soon. We have, more or less intact, the work that he produced during his lifetime and we know a good deal about his career. But the man himself remains almost invisible. There are no personal letters or diary entries. There are no public addresses. The man Shakespeare has been completely dissolved in the lines of his plays and his poems, and if it were even possible to precipitate his own character from the solution, we don’t know how to do it. Shakespeare is as unknown to us, as an individual, as the groundlings at the Globe.
Roy Jenkins (1920-2003) visited the United States often and numbered many well-known historians, economists, and statesmen among his American friends, but he was not, I think, ever well-known on this side of the Atlantic. Because he was never the British prime minister, he never stood in for his government in American journalism. Television was not his milieu. Exaggerating somewhat, one might almost say that it was easier to know Roy Jenkins himself than to know about him. Now, of course, there is no knowing Roy Jenkins. This is not to say that he is a mystery like Shakespeare. On the contrary, from the quantity that he wrote, and from the even greater quantity written about him (in newspapers and diaries), a very clear picture of the man emerges. But if you don’t know about Jenkins in the first place, you’d want to know why you ought to bother. Who was he, and what claim does he make on your attention?
There are two ways of answering both questions. The first is to pile up his political achievements. This will never be easy to do in the United States. The British and American political systems are so different that almost everything known about the one must be forgotten in order to learn about the other. You either grow up knowing what it means to be Home Secretary or Chancellor of the Exchequer or you don’t. Then there is the problem of ephemerality in politics. The social reforms that Jenkins put through as Home Secretary during his first stint in that office — the legalization of homosexuality and of abortion — proved lasting, but, even though Jenkins came to be regarded as the best chancellor of the second half of the Twentieth Century, the fruits of his “two years’ hard slog” at turning the British economy around, after a catastrophic devaluation of the pound, were crushed by the opportunism-as-usual of his successors. In later life, Jenkins led the formation of the Social Democratic Party, a centrist fusion of right-wing Labourites and Liberals. That is at least what he was hoping for. Whether or not his project met with success remains uncertain more than thirty years later. Upon inspection, the achievements disintegrate, leaving only a man who was in the news for over fifty years.
The alternative is riskier but more satisfying. It begins with the assumption — sometimes, in order to learn things, you must take other things on faith — that Roy Jenkins was a Great Man. Or, somewhat more modestly, that he did indeed live a “well-rounded life.” Roy Jenkins’s life was by no means devoid of sharp disappointments, but it is difficult to read about him at any length without the image taking shape of Jenkins sprawling comfortably at the mouth of a cornucopia. He came from a family of Welsh laborers, but he sparkled as an undergraduate at the Oxford Union. He married once, in 1945, and was survived by his widow; yet he maintained discreet relationships with at least two amies amoureuses of long standing. Until the very last years, he was healthy, and socially active to a degree that seems utterly at odds with his literary output — his earnings from which supported not only his family but his excellent wine cellar. A bon viveur, he was sincerely, earnestly, and not ineffectively devoted to the cause of eliminating poverty and squalor in Britain. Although he developed into a plummy mandarin who was thoroughly at home in the ceremonial folderol of Oxford — he was the university’s chancellor from 1987 until his death — Jenkins was, constitutionally, anti-patriarchal; he believed that, given a modicum of comfort, each man is the best judge of his own happiness. (It must be pointed out that he grew up in a world without television, and that the role of broadcast journalism during his prime, in the Sixties, was quite limited; upon his return to Parliament, in 1983, he would find that television had ruined everything, although he never complained much about it.) Jenkins was a radical, willing to try anything new that promised to work, in search of stability.
In short, a man whom it is easy to regard as a tissue of contradictions, or, less kindly (as his many enemies on the left wing of the Labour Party were wont to call him), a hypocrite. If you lazily assume that a passion for claret does not sit well with political philanthropy, then Jenkins looks a fraud. If your idea of a political progressive cannot compass a fluent speechmaker who spends most of his generous lunch hours convivially dining in Clubland, then Jenkins will look like a covert Tory. If you insist on adherence to a rigorous ideology, Jenkins is a subversive counterrevolutionary. But if you are me, then all of these negative impressions add up to a thundering endorsement. Anyone with enemies like Jenkins’s is bound to appeal to me. Topping it all off is the man’s genial sense of humor.
***
If the world is a better place because Roy Jenkins made himself both useful and comfortable in it, he is nevertheless no kind of personal model for me. He was naturally shy, but he made many good friends, and almost everyone of any substance in the Home Counties was an acquaintance. He could never have gone (nor would he have thought it natural) for an entire week without having an actual, person-to-person conversation. Nor would he have been nearly so productive had he not been lucky enough to live in the style of a wealthy Victorian clergyman:
Of course, in recording the amount of time Jenkins has for reading and writing one must remember that he lived, by most people’s standards in the late twentieth century, an extraordinarily pampered life. All his domestic needs were taken care of… If he had a lot of time to read and write, it was because there was literally nothing else he was required to do except eat, drink, and talk. (634)
It takes biographer a John Campbell a long time to point this out, but the delay is not inapt. It would not have occurred to anyone writing when Jenkins was young, or even in his prime, to note that men of affairs needn’t trouble themselves with domestic or secretarial concerns. He lived in that twilight of servants where wives and personal assistants took the places of valets and parlormaids.
But the fact that, on these two points, my life could not be less like Roy Jenkins’s is a triviality. I should like to be as generous as Jenkins was, and, even more important, I should like to think as clearly. I fall short on both counts, but the example of this noble Roman inspires me to do better.
Bon weekend a tous!
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