| Editor's Note: Jonah will be back to filing your favorite "news"letter next week. In the meantime, we at NR thought we'd make this "G-File" a "B-File" and share this classic "Letter from Abroad" by our founder, William F. Buckley Jr., from November 23, 1957. In it, WFB profiles the charming assortment of personalities he encountered at a party thrown in his honor by longtime friend Alistair Horne. Notes from London I write not knowing whether this evening's plane will carry us back to New York, but certain that if it does not, tomorrow's will; for surely my wife's tenacious cold, which has resisted science, must soon succumb to longevity. We do not discuss what brought it on, because our relationship with our hosts being of the kind that permits frank talk, we twitted them, while we were together in the sun of the Continent, about English heating habits. Having done that, we are now estopped from bringing the matter up. The first day or two after we arrived, my host and I spent the better part of the day going from room to room flicking switches. He was turning the electric heaters off, I was turning them on. It was not, the Lord knows, that these exorbitantly generous people begrudge us the electricity. It is simply that out of an egregious solicitude, they have sought to anticipate our every desire: among which most surely was (their actions indicated) a running anxiety to do something about the suffocating heat. It was only along about the third day that they perceived that we like it that way, so the word is out that no one, with the exception of myself, is permitted to turn a heater off. Poor Alistair! He gets up very early to do his work, for, though he says nothing, I can tell that during the day he cannot bear to be in his study, in which I have a desk. Too hot. I met at a small party given for me by the Hornes some attractive and intelligent men, one or two of whom are familiar to National Review readers. I persuaded Mr. Colm Brogan, the witty and learned journalist whose brother Denis W. is the more or less official English interpreter of America (he is more serious than Alistair Cooke or J. B. Priestley), to write about Aneurin Bevan for us, in a future issue. Anthony Lejeune is a far younger man than I had imagined, and I listened with fascination while he explained and defended primogeniture; we seized the occasion, of course, to bemoan the respective financial difficulties of Time and Tide and National Review. Lord Altrincham, By appointment of H. M. the Queen, First Critic of the Queen, believes (and has so written in the National Review of which he is editor) that the Queen has greatly improved her public demeanor in recent months, and is quite prepared to go along in a post hoc ergo propter hoc explanation of that improvement. David Price, whom I knew well at Yale, I last saw in 1954, at which time he scientifically demonstrated to me the impossibility of his being elected to the House of Commons, six months before being elected to the House of Commons. Now, once again, he explained that it would be a sheer impossibility for him to be re-elected at the next general election—which he is certain Macmillan, all things being equal, will not call until the very end of his term. Philip Goodhart, amiable, intelligent, always a little withdrawn, was formerly an editorial writer for the Daily Telegraph, for the Sunday Times, and was once editor of Time and Tide. He is now a member of the House of Commons, and parliamentary assistant to Julien Amery, a leader of the hard right who wrote an analysis of the Middle East for National Review a few months before Suez. Subsequently he supported vociferously Eden's move into Suez, in the councils of his divided party. Philip rues the day he was sent to America to school, and blames the deficiencies in his education on the leisurely gait of American secondary schooling. Ian Fraser, a brilliant journalist whom I met a few years ago when he headed the Reuters office in Rome, has turned, in disgust, to investment banking.
There is a wonderful amiability among Englishmen of conflicting political faiths which, for an American, is strange and awesome. I don't know it for a fact, but I shouldn't be at all surprised if the editors of the Economist, the New Statesman and Nation, and the Tablet met regularly to exchange gossip, witticisms and ideas, to further, in a personal way, the dialogue they carry on with cannonades in the pages of their journals. Dwight Macdonald wrote a year or so ago in Encounter that though he had edited a magazine of opinion in New York for five years (Politics), is middle-aged and gregarious, he does not to this day know a single editor of Time, Newsweek, or of half a dozen journals of opinion, because it is not the habit of American journalists of different opinions to mix. In England one can hurl insults at a man, in Parliament or in the press, today, and tomorrow serve as godfather to his child. Surely the Englishman most tormented, throughout his career, by Winston Churchill's invective is Clement Attlee: but Attlee gladly contributed a chapter, two years ago, to a volume panegyrizing Churchill, even while Churchill was Prime Minister and head of the hated Tory Party. and, noblesse oblige, when he retired, Sir Winston made Attlee an earl. The English carry it too far, to be sure. On the day I met with the galaxy I described, Jacob Malik was entertaining at the Soviet Embassy, a brilliant affair celebrating the anniversary of what the bourgeois press of the world persists in calling the Russian Revolution; and sure enough, exactly one year after the British diplomatic corps, summoning up its deepest resources of indignation, had refused to take tea at the Soviet Embassy party as a protest against the rape of Hungary, there they were—all of them, from Selwyn Lloyd on down, beaming away. If there was any stiffness in the air, it was caused by the uncertain fate of Little Lemon (that is what the English have dubbed the dog), whose use by the Russians has caused an uproar in the land where the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals has the power to depose kings. If the Soviets bring that cur back alive, God help us: as far as England is concerned, we'll have to go it alone. And so, back to work. |
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