The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Dean’s diaries or curate’s egg?
Alan Don had a ringside seat to the abdication, yet rather than juicy gossip he gives us accidental laughs
FAITHFUL WITNESS by Alan Don, ed Robert Beaken 528pp, SPCK, T £25 (0844 871 1514), RRP £30, ebook £19.99
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Alan Don was a Scottish clergyman who found himself at a fascinating junction in English society at a remarkable period in English history. He became chaplain to Cosmo Lang, the archbishop of Canterbury, in 1931, and soon collected chaplaincies to the king and the Speaker of the House of Commons, too. During the war he became Rector of St Margaret’s, Westminster (Parliament’s church) and in 1946 became Dean of Westminster.
These diaries – edited by Robert Beaken, a fellow clergyman and author of an acclaimed biography of Archbishop Lang – are labelled as “confidential” which raises the hope of the reader about what might be in them. But Don was terminally discreet and not, it appears, writing for an audience in the way that other diarists have, so revelations are not thick on the ground.
Indeed, he occasionally – before he finds his feet in London – sounds rather like the Rev Mr Pooter. “It has been an interesting time and friendships have been made which will bear fruit in years to come” he writes on October 20 1931, after several days of the Anglican and Orthodox Doctrinal Commission, which might well be the most that could have been said for it. Or, later the same year, he records that “Muriel and I went to Welbeck Street to discuss my teeth with the dentist. There seems to be no doubt that ultimately they will have to come out, or at any rate most of them. But we decided to do nothing about it for a month or two.” Ah, the days before fluoridation.
Don’s diary runs until 1946, though he kept one for years afterwards that Beaken was denied the chance to see by the Westminster Abbey librarian, who keeps them, because people mentioned in them are still living. Given the dear old Dean’s pathological caution, it is hard to imagine anyone being libelled by him: in what is printed in the published diaries the raciest it gets is when, four days before the abdication, Don has lunch with a psychologist who speculates on what is driving the king. “But unfortunately such things cannot be revealed to the public,” he writes. “I should suspect that His Majesty is sexually abnormal which may account for the hold Mrs Simpson has over him.”
By that stage much of Britain – which had only really learnt of the crisis the previous week – had reached the same conclusion, and without Don’s privileged access to the Establishment. His Pooterism is frequently evinced during this mother-of-all constitutional crises: when Alec Hardinge, the king’s disaffected private secretary, turns up to consult Archbishop Lang, Don writes that “I do not know what they talked about, but I can guess!” It is clear that these diaries were not intended to be amusing; but unintentionally, and frequently, they are.
Don’s relations with Lang dominate the book, even after Lang retires in 1942. Don appears not so much to be his chaplain, but his manservant, nursemaid and, to an extent, the wife he never had. We learn much about the physical ailments of the archbishop (or CC, as
Don refers to him, after this signature “Cosmo Cantuar”) – earwax and stomach gripes are particularly chronic – and the stresses and strains he is under: though, sadly, there is little juicy about the abdication, an event in which Beaken downplays Lang’s role, not so much because of Don’s discretion, but because of Lang’s: he clearly took his Privy Council oath exceptionally seriously.
And Don is unfailingly loyal to Lang. When the archbishop made what Beaken admits was the most profound mistake of his archiepiscopate, which was to give a distinctly unchristian broadcast on the BBC about the former king and his circle a few days after the abdication, Don is full of praise: “a courageous rebuke” he called it, a view that at the time probably only Lang himself shared, and not for long.
Anyone interested in the internal politics of the Established Church in the 1930s and during the last war will find much to interest them in these diaries. The bursts of All Gas and Gaiters that pepper its pages sometimes verge on the preposterous, such as when Don’s predecessor as Speaker’s Chaplain forgot which king he was praying for, and was invited to resign.
But it also reminds us of a time when the Church of England was the Tory party at prayer, and not the Left-wing gynocracy into which it has been transformed in recent times, before attaining full flaccidity under Archbishop Welby. As such it is a period piece, and should be judged as such. For a quiet chuckle in an armchair by the fire after luncheon on the Lord’s Day, these diaries are just about perfect.
His Pooterism is often evinced during this mother-of-all constitutional crises
HEAVY LIGHT by Horatio Clare
352pp, Chatto & Windus, T £14.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £16.99, ebook £9.99
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Two years ago, Horatio Clare pointed his Toyota towards a Yorkshire reservoir, released the handbrake and let it roll from the road into the darkness. As it picked up speed, he opened the driver’s door, tumbled out onto the grass and watched the tail lights disappear. After hearing a distant crash he removed all his clothes (apart from his boots) and punched himself in the face until his nose broke. He was scared and confused. But he also believed he was a secret agent following orders from MI6. Staging this bizarre crash was part of a mission to secure global peace. To achieve this noble goal, Clare believed his handlers had instructed him to post banknotes down drains and marry Kylie Minogue.
Absurd, of course. The stuff of pre-teen make-believe. But readers of Clare’s game-changing memoir of “madness, mania and healing” will be struck by the fact that a mind so recently dominated by straight-to-DVD fantasies is now capable of reflecting on them with so much gentle wisdom and acute self-awareness. And in such beautiful, witty prose.
Fans of Clare’s previous adventure books (on swallows, JS Bach and life aboard container ships) will know him as a romantic writer. His family memoir, Running for the Hills, described how his childhood fractured when his parents (both journalists) parted ways. His mother chose the brutal/blissful life of a sheep farm in Wales, his father the more abstract literary life in London. The consequence was a child whose fragile identity shattered when he began smoking cannabis as a teenager. Eventually, there were crises. One in 2008 (after a trip across Africa) and another in France in 2016. The triggers for both were “stress, heat, exhaustion and cannabis”. French doctors diagnosed him with cyclothymia (a milder version of bipolar disorder, not much recognised in Britain).
But there was nothing “mild” about what happened to Clare in 2019. Exhausted from a book tour and using cannabis to cope, he went on a skiing holiday with his family. By the time they reached the airport he was convinced “conspiracy waited like a gun under a coat”. By the time he landed in Innsbruck, he was convinced he was a major player in a covert international conflict. He could tip the balance of international affairs by placing cigarettes the wrong side of ashtrays. The downward spiral towards the carcrash nudity was fast.
Clare is embarrassed by the grandiosity of his delusions. But he finds solace in the theory of psychoanalyst Darian Leader, who argues that “delusions offer solutions”. Clare has written about the paralysing self-hatred that comes with depression. It’s likely that the delusion of self-importance might be the traumatised mind’s defence against suicide: you cannot die because the entire world depends on you.
He’s sharp on the common delusion of being controlled by spy networks: “How wonderful, in a way, to have no secrets. How wonderful to be vetted and studied by security services, to be known fully [...] the ultimate cure for existential isolation.” But he’s deeply critical of how people in the grip of psychosis are treated by modern medical staff.
His partner, Rebecca, describes the crisis team as “rubbish all the way through” and the police (who often worked beyond shifts to keep him safe) as “wonderful”. Rebecca says she was “gaslit” by support workers who kept saying her husband didn’t “seem” like a danger to himself or others. She was repeatedly told that Clare’s use of drugs and alcohol was the problem, long after it had become a symptom. She wants to reassure anyone in her position to keep pushing and refuse to be “fobbed off ”.
Clare recovered without most of the pills he was prescribed. While he holds cannabis partly responsible for his breakdown, he doesn’t think the medication that left him “spinny-dizzy-thick” can help in the long term. He advocates “nature, exercise, mindfulness, art, creativity and horticulture [and] conversations with therapists”. And he says we should rethink psychotic episodes. They don’t have to break people. They could, instead, be a “sunrise of the soul”.
PLACES OF MIND:
A LIFE OF EDWARD SAID by Timothy Brennan
464pp, Bloomsbury, T £19.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £25, ebook £12.59
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It may be that the fate of all intellectuals who venture into the public realm is to be slightly misunderstood – the context of their views ignored, their qualifications glossed over, their subtleties and ironies unregistered – but Edward Said suffered this indignity more than most.
What the world at large saw through the media was the embodiment of what Tom Wolfe labelled “radical chic” – a sophisticated Manhattan academic of Arab extraction with Park Avenue friends and a Savile Row wardrobe who supported campus Leftism and Palestinian terrorism (a canard reinforced by a widely circulated photograph of him symbolically lobbing a stone at a fence on the disputed Israeli-Lebanese border). Only his more finely tuned students and readers appreciated the broad humane scholarship and integrity of a man motivated by passionate moral conscience.
The aim of Timothy Brennan’s patient and thorough biography is to correct the picture. Neither hagin iography nor hatchet job, it paints an openly admiring but not adulatory picture of its subject, and even if the explorations of Said’s engagement with the philosophies of Vico, Gramsci and Adorno make challenging reading, the book also traces an intriguing account of an alluring but evasive character. Those who want to dig deeper into the oeuvre should invest in the forthcoming expanded edition of The Selected Works of Edward Said 1966-2006 (also published by Bloomsbury at £16.99).
“‘Islam’ and ‘the West’ are simply inadequate as banners to follow blindly,” Said wrote in response to the 9/11 attacks. That one simple sentence lies at the heart of Said’s intellectual endeavour and suggests the extent of his personal journey. A Palestinian Arab born in 1935 in Jerusalem, he was largely brought up there and in Cairo, then a largely liberal, secular and cosmopolitan city under the British mandate. He was not a Muslim, but an Anglican, albeit an inactive and agnostic one, baptised with the name of Edward VIII, then prince of Wales, in mind. His father was a prosperous businessman with American citizenship that he bequeathed to his son; his mother was his emotional intimate and inspiration.
During his private schooling, music appeared to be his outstanding talent and he could perhaps have made a career as a pianist:
later life he wrote extensively about the classical canon and became close friends with Daniel Barenboim. Together they set up the wonderful West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, composed of young Arab and Jewish players without regard to political divisions. Even as peace in the Middle East looks as sadly distant as ever, the orchestra still shines like a beacon of hope.
In 1951, in the wake of Israel’s expropriation of Palestinian lands, the Said family moved to the US, where Said enjoyed an Ivy League education. He ended up for 40 years as professor in the English department at Columbia, during a period in which literary study was highly combative and politically charged. Said was a magpie, borrowing eclectically from
all the major ideological positions: “New” Criticism focused on textual analysis, Lukacs’s Marxism, Raymond Williams’s socialism, Lionel Trilling’s liberalism, and later the French structuralists and poststructuralists.
But he was never a mere aesthete. His most famous work is Orientalism – a study of the way that Arab and Muslim culture had been exoticised and caricatured to justify imperial domination. First published in 1978, it led to a boom in what is now known as “postcolonial studies” and Said became, as it were, their dean.
He also remained a respectable face of the Palestinian cause, though he fell out with Yasser Arafat after his futile sell-out to US and Israeli interests in the 1993 Oslo
Accord – an agreement Said compared to the Treaty of Versailles. Sadly, the subsequent persistence of violence on both sides of the argument soon proved him right.
Ceaselessly restless and productive, Said’s personal life appears to have been relatively uneventful, though hints dropped by Brennan suggest that he might have been inhibited by tact in respect to Said’s surviving family (a second wife and two children). In 1991 he developed a form of leukaemia, which he bravely endured until his death in 2003.
The loss of his rational and sensitive yet forceful voice has been keenly felt in the screeching hysteria of an era that has seen all notions of civilisation, Eastern and Western, so profoundly threatened.
HEAD HAND HEART by David Goodhart 368pp, Penguin, £10.99
We put too much value on university education (“head”), and underrate the “hand” and “heart” industries – i.e. key workers – Goodhart argues, in a book every MP should read.
The acclaimed US comedy-drama comes to the UK. Kaley Cuoco is a blast as the titular good-time girl, caught in a sticky situation… p.34
James Caan plays a bestselling writer whose car crashes in a remote part of snowy Colorado, where he’s rescued by Kathy Bates on Oscar-winning form as his
“Number One Fan”. Stephen King’s 1987 chiller about every celebrity’s worst nightmare makes a seamless transition to the screen in the capable hands of director Rob Reiner. It is the only one of his adaptations to win an Oscar; and one of his personal favourite film versions of his books.
1950, b/w
Talking Pictures TV, 9.05pm
Most recently given his own starring turn in David Fincher’s biopic Mank, writer and director Joseph L Mankiewicz has a nose for the nuances of female betrayal in this rich and heady psychodrama. Bette Davis glitters as an ageing Broadway star who is flattered by a young acolyte (Anne Baxter), only to find the girl is a cuckoo in the nest. It was nominated for a then-record 14 Oscars , winning six of them.