Portraits and Miniatures (43 page)

For some time Sakharov made his protests on a very privileged network. He had been admitted to the Academy of Sciences, membership of which was highly restricted and which conferred specific and desirable benefits, at the exceptionally young age of thirty-three. He was three times decorated as a Hero of the Soviet Union, which must surely have been at least the equivalent of an OM, if not of a KG as well. And when he wanted to complain he often did it direct to Beria, Malenkov or Khrushchev, sometimes just by ringing them up.

It is indeed the case that while refuseniks or dissidents had to take terrible risks they were also, if grand enough, able to avail themselves of a surprisingly high proportion of the privileges of a plural society. Thus Sakharov for a long time after his suspension from ‘the installation' (the equivalent of Harwell or Aldermaston) was able as an academician to summon a car and driver from the official pool. He was also able even when attending trials as a gesture of support for the defendant to flash his Hero
of Socialist Labour card (until it was taken away from him in 1980) and get a priority seat on aeroplanes. And even during his occasionally persecuted exile in Gorky from 1980 to 1986 his wife was for the most part allowed to go by train to Moscow and hold press conferences.

One form that the persecution took was the purloining on two occasions of part of the manuscript of his memoirs. He had twice to reconstruct them from memory. That makes it the more remarkable that the first part is the better, for it was presumably that part that was twice stolen. No doubt his memory unassisted by notes was better for his early years. But there is also the indisputable fact that most sections touching the Elena Bonner years are written more defensively, more flatly, more dutifully. In the mid-eighties in particular she was subjected by the Soviet propaganda machine to calumnies in which she was portrayed as a fiendish puppet mistress. I discount that, but it is nevertheless the fact that she was not good for the liveliness of Sakharov's literary style - her own writing on the Gorky years was, I believe, much better.

This book ends with Sakharov's release from the Gorky exile. For six and a half years he had been deprived of a telephone but late one evening one was suddenly installed in his apartment there. He was warned to expect a call the next morning. When it came through it was Gorbachev himself who told him that he was free to return to Moscow and ‘go back to his patriotic work'. Most people would have dissolved in a mixture of deference and gratitude. Instead Sakharov began to argue about other detainees and eventually hung up on Gorbachev in a huff.

That unselfish self-righteousness is no doubt what made him a great man. His was the voice that could not keep quiet. It was the more remarkable because he was always at least half a supporter of a reformed Soviet system, who disapproved of Solzhenitsyn's flip into a detached blanket hostility. Sakharov nearly killed himself by hunger strikes to get his step-daughter-in-law permission to go and live in Massachusetts. It was the last thing he would have wanted for himself.

An
Observer
review of a ‘political life' of Samuel by Bernard Wasserstein, published in 1992 (OUP).

Herbert Samuel was an able and diligent man of high public spirit who lived for a very long time, occupied a wide variety of public positions between 1905 and 1955, although not the ones he most coveted, was a slight disappointment in most of them, often made false judgements, most notably over Hitler, which was surprising for a leading member of the old Anglo-Jewish community, yet accumulated over the decades a considerable reputation for sagacity and integrity. He was made an OM at eighty-eight, a rare honour for any non-Prime Ministerial politician, and he died at ninety-two. ‘He was vewy nearly a great man,' said Bobbety (5th Marquis of) Salisbury, who had as much difficulty with his ‘r's as do one or two other politicians.

Samuel published his own discreet
Memoirs
in 1945, and in 1957 John Bowle, a schoolmaster who had had an adventurous career at both Westminster and Eton, wrote a friendly ‘living' biography. This was an odd matching of writer and subject, for Samuel, who was intensely puritanical on anything to do with sex, which made his two brief tenures of the Home Office Liberal with only a capital ‘L,' was a dedicated scourge of homosexuals.

Despite these publications there was a gap waiting to be filled and Professor Wasserstein, who is British by upbringing but is now Dean of Arts and Sciences at Brandeis University, does so definitively. He is fully aware of the plodding and unspontaneous aspects of Samuel, and indeed draws devastating attention to the limitations this set to his friendships and his popularity. Yet, although thoroughly comprehending the boring side of Samuel, Wasserstein never himself seems to be bored by it. If he were an undisciplined writer this might have been a recipe for disaster,
but as he is the reverse and has managed to fit the whole ninety-two years into a neat 170,000 words, it works out very well.

In addition, Professor Wasserstein, while not a pedantic writer, is an extremely accurate one. Almost his only solecism, let alone significant error of fact, is inserting two or three redundant hyphens in Lady Violet Bonham Carter. This latter tiny mistake has, however, a certain symbolic quality, for during the first half of his career Samuel probably admired the father of Violet Asquith (as she was then) more than anyone else, yet was totally excluded from his intimate circle, whereas his first cousin, the more worldly Edwin Montagu, in spite of going on to commit the double apostasy of marrying Venetia Stanley and serving under Lloyd George, was very much part of it. In correspondence with that lady Asquith habitually referred to Montagu as ‘the Assyrian' and to Samuel as ‘the infant Samuel'. Both were mocking, but there was no doubt which was the more dismissive.

Nor did Asquith greatly admire Samuel's public ability. In a Cabinet order of quality that he drew up for private amusement in 1915 he placed him eleventh out of the sixteen he categorized, with below him only a ‘tail' of five equal lasts between whom he could not be bothered to differentiate. But this was nothing compared with the dislike Samuel aroused in Lloyd George (which it must be said was mutual, although ingested by Samuel and extruded by Lloyd George). With almost schoolboy petulance (at the age of seventy-five) Lloyd George referred to him as ‘the politician he hated most', and this was not the anger of a moment or provoked by Samuel's pro-Munich stance, for six years earlier he had spoken in a public speech of ‘the flaccid oleaginous Whiggery of Samuel', and four years before that he had written of him as ‘underhanded and grasping'.

There was obviously some special irritant quality about a Liberal politician who was so coolly treated by Asquith when he was in his forties and so excoriated by Lloyd George when he was in his sixties. Yet he did not really deserve either treatment. Lloyd George's strictures in particular were very wide of the mark. Samuel was not ‘underhanded', but naïve and over-trusting, although often insensitive to his audience or his interlocutor. He
would not have dreamt of behaving as Lloyd George did with the manipulation of his notorious private political fund. Nor was he grasping. He never sought personal fortune (he had quite a lot of money to begin with, but that is by no means necessarily a prophylactic against greed, and it began to run thin during World War II), and he was the one minister involved in the Marconi scandal (because he was Postmaster-General; the others were Lloyd George himself, Lord Reading and the Master of Elibank) whose behaviour was spotless. His weakness was that he liked high public appointments, but, with one possible exception (when he was not successful), there is no evidence that he behaved badly in order to get them. The trouble was more that he behaved with technical efficiency but unimaginative insensitivity when he had got them. The possible exception was that his fruitless desire in the late 1930s to be a very elderly Viceroy of India may have predisposed him towards Neville Chamberlain and Munich.

Nor was Samuel really a Whig, oleaginous or otherwise, in so far as that prismatic political description, giving out different lights in different directions, has any precise meaning. Certainly it is impossible to imagine any public figure of this century who was less like Charles James Fox. Economically he was more a Cobdenite, although with a strong social reform overlay and also a non-Cobdenite attachment to imperial causes. He was close to the Webbs as a young man and remained in some sort of contact with them throughout their lives. Wasserstein, rather dismissing Samuel's wife, thought that Beatrice Webb was the woman who understood him best. What is certain is that he was the one person whose high seriousness even she found excessive. And her late (1939) judgement on him was
‘good but mediocre,
devoid of distinction, except perhaps in industry, kindliness and sanity'. While they do not make for excitement, they were not a bad trio of qualities.

This is based on a 1991
European
review of the first volume of M. Servan-Schreiber's memoirs,
Passions
(Fixot).

Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, now approaching seventy, has been for me an immanent but personally unknown figure near the centre of the French stage for most of the one and a half decades of the Fourth Republic and the three and a half decades of the Fifth. He has operated at the junction between journalism and politics, striking the attitudes of a ‘Young Turk', and giving them conviction by appearing always to have the energy, style and certainties of a young man. Just as some people have gone through decades without appearing to change much - Jean Monnet and William Rees-Mogg are two disparate examples - because they were born middle-aged, so Servan-Schreiber has accomplished the more difficult feat of being perpetually a rather young thirty-five.

Growing old is therefore probably a more disagreeable experience for him than for most. However, this does not show in his writing, which retains all the virtues of vigour and some of the faults of immaturity. Sometimes he reminds me of the later Hemingway. Virility is important, but at least it is not measured in the consumption of dry Martinis. Servan-Schreiber is not a reflective writer.
‘A la une'
(on page one) is a favourite phrase of his, and it seems to me that he still sees life very much in
‘à la une'
terms. Events and relationships are epitomized in snatches of conversation, which over a gap of forty years or more are always rendered in the most precise and dramatic of direct speech, with Servan-Schreiber himself present at a remarkable number of the turning points of recent history, and often delivering the punchline himself.

Even allowing for some
‘esprit de l'escalier',
however, the first
forty years of Servan-Schreiber's life, which is all that is chronicled in this first volume of memoirs, were fairly remarkable. He was the son of a well-known editor of the economic daily
Les Echos,
who was himself the son of a former private secretary to Bismarck, who had renounced Prussianism and emigrated to Paris on the eve of the Franco-Prussian war, and of a mother who was certainly more beautiful, with looks more spirited, and whom he describes as
‘la femme de ma vie'
. At the age of thirteen he had an eyeball-to-eyeball encounter with Hitler (because he had not given the Nazi salute) on a bridge in Munich, and at the age of sixteen he and his father accompanied the French government so closely on their flight from Paris to Tours to Bordeaux that he gives the impression of being on bedroom-visiting terms with Paul Reynaud and Madame de Portes.

After a couple of years under Vichy in Grenoble, studying for his entrance to the Ecole Polytechnic, being seduced or ‘initiated' as he prefers to put it by his thirty-five-year-old landlady and listening to the BBC, he departs via Spain to join the Free French in North Africa and to be sent to train as a fighter pilot in Alabama. Passing through Washington on his way to the Southern base, he picked up the pieces from an historic row between de Gaulle and General Marshall. He qualified too late for combat in the air, but he manages to invest his training period with more drama than most people could get out of several campaigns. It culminated with his being offered a captaincy and the command of two squadrons in the American Air Force and immediate US citizenship. He refused
‘pour la France'
but with a sense of self-sacrifice as strong as the emotion of disappointment with which he says the offering colonel received his reply.

From this account of Servan-Schreiber's first twenty-one years certain reflections flow. First, he cannot see a drama without imagining himself at the centre of it. He even writes about Roosevelt's death as though he personally brought the news from Warm Springs to the White House. Second, America made a tremendous impact upon him. When he was offered a choice of there or England as a training ground he says almost as a manifesto rather than a bare statement of fact:
‘J'ai choisi les Etats-Unis.'
And he was
long subsequently, and particularly during the Kennedy years, the man who tried to bring the clean-cut vigour of the New Frontier into the stale corridors of the Palais Bourbon. This had the effect of directing his Anglo-Saxon interest almost entirely away from Britain. When he was a BBC listener he had an uncritical admiration for Churchill, of whose determination to sink the
Bismarck
he writes a somewhat imaginative account, but thereafter shifts his gaze westward to where he thought the land was bright, and does not I think mention another Englishman in his remaining 340 pages.

Third, he insists on writing about his relations with women (in spite of putting her first he has not been too much of a mother's boy to avoid them) with the cool precision and the faint suggestion that he was doing each one a favour that he applied to Madame Marcelle, the determined (but beautiful) Grenoble housewife. Even Françoise Girued, who was also his distinguished collaborator in the outstanding success of
L'Express,
the quality weekly he launched in 1953, is subjected to this treatment. This was none the less his finest hour. Apart from assembling an outstanding team of contributors which included François Mauriac and Sartre, as well as an in-house core of Girued, himself and Jean Daniel, he also associated Mendès-France, Mitterrand and Gaston Defferre with the paper. Its founding cause was the end of the war in Indo-China, which Mendès-France achieved with the help of Mitterrand as a Minister of the Interior at once subtle and determined. Its subsequent cause was the ending of the war in Algeria, which put Mitterrand on the other side and dragged on for another seven years, including a six-month period when Servan-Schreiber was re-embodied into the army and sent to take part in the
‘sale guerre'
on the edge of the desert. During these years he did not have to imagine his conversations or delude himself that he was at the centre of the stage. He really was there for once, and this shows in the quality of the narrative, which is, however, always easy to read because of both its pace and the simple directness of the French.