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Wednesday 9 July 2008

The Spectator's Notes

Charles Moore's reflections on the week

In the latest Sunday Times, John Carey reviews Ferdinand Mount’s memoirs (Cold Cream, Bloomsbury), and calls them ‘a wilderness of name-dropping’. This raises a question: what is the writer of memoirs to do if he has known famous people? The Diary of a Nobody begins with Mr Pooter saying, ‘...I fail to see — because I do not happen to be a “Somebody” — why my diary should not be interesting.’ Quite right, but Carey goes one further, seeming to believe that anyone who is a ‘Somebody’, or who knew lots of ‘Somebodies’, should shut up about it. If this rule were followed, the loss to literature would be incalculable. Professor Carey’s logic would ban Boswell’s Life of Johnson and Aubrey’s Brief Lives, for a start, and possibly St John’s Gospel as well. The apparent answer to Carey is that mentioning the famous is only ‘name-dropping’ when the anecdotes about them have no intrinsic merit once their fame is subtracted. But even this is not true: it is much more interesting to learn that, say, Tolstoy liked Marmite for breakfast or that Queen Victoria always relaxed with a Havana cigar than to be told the same about people one has never heard of. Ferdinand Mount’s powers of observation are too well known to readers of The Spectator to need defending here, so let me merely ‘drop’ some of the names he mentions in his book to indicate what pleasures, in his hands, they promise — John le Carré, Keith Joseph, Harold Acton, Isaiah Berlin, Alfred Sherman, John Betjeman, Margaret Thatcher, Donald Maclean, Siegfried Sassoon and Oswald Mosley.

People sometimes say, ‘Ah, there’s a name to conjure with.’ Selwyn Lloyd surely does not come into that category. No one has heard of him now. His small surviving public reputation is as a byword for dullness. But Ferdy Mount, who worked for Lloyd in the early Sixties, does indeed conjure with him, bringing him alive as an admirable politician, the type of modest English virtue. This is the opposite of name-dropping — picking a poor dusty old name off the floor, and lovingly polishing it up.

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