Light reading catch-up

A very tiring but also very productive week in Ottawa: several pieces of important business seem to have been well and truly accomplished. Collapsed into bed when I got home this afternoon, slept for some hours, then did my reading for tomorrow (Roland Barthes's The Neutral, Pope's The Rape of the Lock and a very good essay by Claude Rawson on mock-heroic and 'Pope's Waste Land') but will have to write my comments on last week's graduate student writing assignments in the morning: digging deeper to get them done now seems impossible. However I think I've done enough tonight that I can carve out the time for the Beast boot camp tomorrow morning: it knocks out everything from 5:45 rising all the way through to 9 or so, with a quick interlude for breakfast post-class before I get back on my bike to ride uptown, so I wasn't sure it really was going to be feasible, but it is a priority as I missed two classes last week.

I had hardly any time to read while I was away (mostly only in airports): an advance copy of Terry Pratchett's latest Discworld novel, Snuff, got me to Canada, and James Lee Burke's Rain Gods whiled away a few nighttime hours during the week and got me most of the way home. My copy of Alan Hollinghurst's new novel, ordered from England via The Book Depository, finally arrived in Cayman in September, and B. brought it to give to me in Ottawa, but I haven't even had a chance to crack it open. Fairly busy this week till Tuesday late afternoon, and with one substantial chunk of reading (Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments!) to do for Wednesday afternoon also, but the week opens up as of Tuesday evening and I am very much hoping I will be able to lounge, recumbent, and devour it - I am feeling much in need of restoration and recovery!

Men of feeling

At the LRB, Ferdinand Mount on Harold Macmillan's diaries and a new biography. Here is Mount on the long aftermath of Macmillan's wife's affair with Bob Boothby in the late 1920s (she claimed that Boothby was the father of her youngest daughter Sarah):

In 1975, he went to see Boothby at his flat and asked, for the sake of his peace of mind, to know the truth one way or another about Sarah. In the unbearably painful conversation that followed, Boothby assured him that Sarah was not his daughter because he was always scrupulously careful in his affairs. What Macmillan did not know was that Boothby had just been presented with a tape recorder by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra of which he’d been chairman for many years. Before Macmillan’s arrival, he had been taping a Tchaikovsky symphony from the radio. He had turned off the radio but unwittingly left the tape recorder running on the floor behind a sofa. And so all the agony that Macmillan had poured out to him was on tape, and Boothby played it back to his new wife, Wanda, when she came in, with tears running down his face.

This is how D.R. Thorpe tells the story, eloquently and elegantly, as he does everything in this exemplary biography, which complements if it does not entirely supplant Alistair Horne’s two-volume official Life; Horne is better on the military, Thorpe on the political and personal. At every juncture Thorpe presents the evidence in a scrupulous and equable style. He is charitable, just as he was in his earlier biographies of Selwyn Lloyd and Eden, both of whom had reasons to be resentful of Macmillan’s behaviour. By not taking sides, Thorpe leaves readers room to come to their own judgment.

And if you want my guess here, I don’t think that Boothby, that insatiable seducer of both sexes, left the tape recorder on by accident. I don’t mean that he had it in for Macmillan exactly, although it is always hard to forgive those you have wronged, especially when you have been wronging them for years. It is more that Boothby, himself the ripest of old hams, would have been unable to resist the dramatic potential of the scene: the aged ex-prime minister with tears running down his face, and then a few hours later Boothby, the man of feeling, recalling the recalling with tears running down his face.