BOOKS

Quiet flows the don

Bevis Hillier

LETTERS TO FRIENDS, 1940-1966 by K. B. McFarlane, edited by Gerald Harriss Magdalen College, Oxford, £17.50 (plus £1.50 postage), pp. 255 Keep this letter to smile over 50 years hence when I shall be ninety or dust,' K. B. McFarlane wrote to his pupil Karl Leyser on 26 August 1945. Dust, I'm afraid, old friend. Bruce McFarlane died of a heart attack in 1966; and now Leyser is gone, too.

McFarlane was writing from Magdalen College, Oxford, where he taught history, principally mediaeval, from 1927 to 1965. Leyser was still abroad after war service with the Black Watch. McFarlane wanted to tell him how he had spent the two VJ Days, 15 and 16 August. On the 15th, in a wild release of joie de vivre, he had devoted the hours of 10 am to 6.30 pm to tracing the fortunes of 'those who were Gaunt's retainers in 1373'.

Then he had slackened off and changed into a dinner-jacket for a victory feast in Magdalen Hall. Among the guests was E.H.W. Meyerstein, the biographer of Thomas Chatterton, who makes a tragi- comic appearance as a flagellant in John Wain's autobiography, Sprightly Running. McFarlane restricted himself to three glass- es of champagne; no one else showed 'such abstinence'. (Magdalen had not changed much since Gibbon's time, when, as he wrote of the dons, 'Their dull and deep potations excused the brisk intemperance of youth.') It was nearly dark by the time McFarlane took round the snuff. Over coffee, the dons lit their cigars. Afterwards they played bowls under the windows of the President's lodgings. Next day the Oxford Mail reported: 'The chief attraction in Oxford was at Magdalen where a group of men in evening dress played a solemn game of bowls.'

On 16 August, McFarlane found an alternative way to celebrate victory over the Japanese: a jaunt with his colleague A.J.P. Taylor, Lord Berners and others to Kelmscott Manor, once the home of William Morris:

The front door opened and an angry young woman in a picturesque blue dress and freck- led arms emerged and said sharply, 'You can't come in here.' We hesitated and signed in the direction of Berners who now returned and said that it was all right. The young woman — Mrs Scott-Snell, the wife of the tenant in the garden — did not give way but repeated the caveat. Berners merely slipped past her into the house and we followed. It was an absurd and very embarrassing adven- ture. We marched through the house to a stream of protests and, 'No, you cannot go in there's' ...

McFarlane added that the Scott-Snells were 'artists, dreadful artists':

They paint mermaids, nymphs, knights in armour in stained-glass attitudes in disagree- able colours; and these hideous watercolours were hung on top of Morris hangings and tapestries.

The party went on to lunch with Berners at Faringdon House, where they met his boyfriend, Robert Heber Percy (`like some pleasant kind of animal') and Lord Faring- don (`an extremely young 45 . . . with all the delicacy of feature and figure that you often find in the third generation parvenu . . . He and I rather hit it off. Some would say he was rather cissy. . . '). McFarlane hoped he would meet Faringdon again; but he did not feel the same about Lord Bern- ers, the composer, artist and writer: His music and pictures repel me and most of his books are silly .. . There is no — how shall I say it — chime between us. He is too much a dabbler.

This letter was a special effort, designed to cheer up his favourite pupil in exile; but its qualities are found in most of the other letters in this book. It shows how McFarlane managed to combine gruelling scholarship with the life of a luxurious bachelor don. It gives tastes of his gift for characterisation, his often acid humour and his acumen as a literary critic. (His one blind spot was Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim — 'I couldn't read it' — but I suspect that that was because the novel had been widely over-praised; McFarlane was a natural challenger of received opinion.) The letters strip him of his gown and show him en deshabille, as near 'at ease' as he ever got.

He was the most renowned British medi- aevalist of his time. Never was a great rep- utation won by so little publication. He published only one book, a small one on John Wycliffe — and that had to be charmed out of him by his friend A.L. Rowse, for a series Rowse was editing. A few years back, I met Hugh Trevor-Roper (Lord Dacre) at a party in Edinburgh and mentioned that I had been a pupil of McFarlane. Trevor-Roper quickly made it clear that he was no venerator of McFarlane. Of his scholarship, he said: 'He was not only impotent himself; he castrated his pupils, who, instead of writing books themselves, had to spend years editing his unpublished lectures and notes.' A letter written by McFarlane in the last year of his life gives a clue to Trevor-Roper's animus against him. Writing to his pupil Rees Davies (later Chichele Professor of Medi- aeval History at All Souls), McFarlane snarled: 'I'm in the middle of tearing Trevor-Roper to pieces at the moment. It could hardly be more awful.' He was reviewing The Rise of Christian Europe for the New Statesman. (The professor's alter ego seldom writes badly even when he knows little and seems to have thought less . . . ', he wrote in the magazine. 'This hasty, shallow, somewhat philistine little book was not worth reprinting.') McFarlane did publish, besides the Wycliffe book, a number of influential arti- cles, elucidating in particular the term 'bas- tard feudalism' — the replacement of tenure as the basis of service and loyalty by money and indentured retinues. But it was as a teacher — 'one on one', as they say in basketball — that his real reputation was made. Alan Bennett, whose aborted doc- toral thesis on Richard II's retinue was supervised by McFarlane, has recalled him, in Writing Home, as 'the most impressive teacher, and in some ways the most impres- sive man, I have ever come across'.

One could go and chat to him without seem- ingly ever touching on the subject of one's research and come away convinced that studying one's tiny slip of a subject . . . was the only thing in the world worth doing.

In a postscript to the Letters, Bennett describes how even his handwriting began to resemble McFarlane's and how he and others of Bruce's pupils took up his habit of writing 'Esquire' after men's names on envelopes. I was also influenced by McFarlane's handwriting, though I deduced from it a more general theorem, that 'Clever men write small' — rather as, I've noticed, admired pianists tend to play comparatively softly. Another reminiscence of McFarlane is contributed by Rees Davies. Those pupils who became McFarlane's friends will endorse Davies's assessment of his friendship. First, its 'utter directness and true equality'; he 'brooked no difference of age, background and status'. And second, 'an intellectual honesty and integrity of almost terrifying proportions'. Davies felt that McFarlane `took nothing for granted or read; in life and in history he built for himself and from fundamentals'.

Bruce McFarlane was born in 1903 the same year as Evelyn Waugh and A.L. Rowse. (I once asked him whether Waugh had been well-known in their undergradu- ate days. 'Yes. Chiefly as a male prosti- tute.') He became a fellow of Magdalen in 1927, when the ineffable Sir Herbert Warren was still President of the college. Warren had created Magdalen in his image, as Jowett had moulded Balliol in his. Jowett's criterion was intellect; Warren's was class. As a sometime Marxist, McFarlane had little time for the upper- class dunderheads foisted on him.

I first met Bruce McFarlane when I went up to Magdalen in 1959 to read history. His rooms were filled with cats: a real Siamese called Bogo, with a tinkling bell at its neck, and pottery cats, metal cats, painted cats wherever the eye rested. 'There's no secret about my feeling for cats; I WORSHIP them, all but literally,' he wrote to Alan Bennett in 1960. 'I hope that shocks you.' To a forthright friend of mine called Philip Mansergh, McFarlane said, at the begin- ning of a tutorial, 'If the cat jumps up on you, do brush him off.' Don't worry, I will!' Mansergh replied — and McFarlane was never quite so cordial to him again. McFarlane was tall and carried his unusually large head on one side, so that the look he gave you had a quizzical ten- dency — though there was often a glint of humour. Except with those who became close friends, he suffered from a paralysing shyness, and this was contagious. One paused outside his door, before knocking, with a tremor. In 1960 I was let off tutorials because I was entering for the Gladstone Memorial Prize (a 12,000-word essay on Gladstone and Joseph Chamberlain). But McFarlane suggested I should sit in on the tutorials of my friend Nicholas Orme now Professor of History at Exeter Univer- sity and an authority on education in the Middle Ages. It was typical of McFarlane that he knew Orme and I were friends from looking down from his windows. Unfortunately for me, Nick Orme was, and is, a brilliant mimic; and as he and I made our way across the quad to McFarlane's rooms, he would be imitating McFarlane's rather rarefied, slightly Scottish, accent 'You made such a noise coming downstairs that you've made the cairt sick.' Result: by the time we reached the fatal door, I had helpless giggles as well as nerves to quell. I got my revenge in the tutorial, where Nick Orme had to read his essay and take all the flak, with me as an interested spectator. AJ.P. Taylor was meant to guide me over the Gladstone essay; but McFarlane (between whom and Taylor a minimum of love was lost) said he'd never bother and offered to read the chapters himself. So I experienced the McFarlane criticism too, no punches pulled.

Before this book, our main authority on the private McFarlane was A.L. Rowse in his autobiographies, in two poems and in an essay in his book Historians I Have Known. The two knew each other from their undergraduate days. McFarlane told me that he and Rowse are seen side-by- side in the large photograph in the Oxford Union of Dean Inge's visit for a debate. He added: 'I couldn't possibly call him by either of his Christian names, Alfred or Leslie; so I call him Rowse and he calls me Boo-Boo.' (It is a shame that McFarlane's letters to Rowse are not in this book why?) But now for the first time we hear about McFarlane's private life from the horse's mouth. He writes of his love for his mother, who died young; his antipathy for his father; and how, at Dulwich College, late alma mater of Wodehouse, Raymond Chandler and Dennis Wheatley, cruel teas- ing left him with a permanent feeling of being deformed. One revelation, in a letter of 1956 to Gerald Harriss (the excellent editor of this book), is that McFarlane was `partially' sexually active in the early 1930s and sexually active after 1935-36 — 'I put this on record for my biography!'

Was that activity heterosexual or homo- sexual? A.J.P. Taylor, in his autobiography A Personal History (1983), took it for grant- ed that McFarlane preferred his own sex: Like most homosexuals, he was neurotic, easily involved with his pupils, whether for or against, and often emotional over college business.

While we would not have put it so sneer- ingly, most of his pupils in my time made a similar assumption. The most handsome man of my year was invited to McFarlane's house at Stonor for a weekend. 'Weren't you worried he might make a pass at you?', he was asked. 'It was the first thing I thought of!' But nothing happened. Anoth- er contemporary, of no special academic distinction but with boyish, slightly spotty good looks, confessed himself mildly embarrassed by the many invitations to the theatre and the tete-a-tete dinners pre- pared by the college chef with such delica- cies as melon orientale, porcupined with exotic fruits on toothpicks. But again there was no hanky-panky. Rowse, in his poem `Bruce' (Prompting the Age, 1990), seems to hint at repressed homosexuality: ... All that was flesh consumed with fire At Headington, near your years at Combe There in the wood where the boys made love Down in the bracken in the ferny glade You asked them in to tea to their surprise And uncomprehending embarrassment.

Against this, McFarlane's only book was dedicated to a woman, Dr Helena Wright, with whom he shared two successive houses and went on holidays. As he says in one of the letters, she was of his mother's genera- tion — a pioneer of birth control along with Marie Stopes. More than once he states that he might have married if he had not valued his independence too much. In a letter of 1964 to Rees Davies he goes this far: 'My coevals and my juniors of the [female] sex might threaten my bachelor- dom! Not "might"; for indeed they do.' But in general he is not taken with women: through these pages, from the tenant of Kelmscott onward, moves a procession of women variously found 'disgusting' or `ridiculous'. By contrast he is constantly beguiled by men undergraduates and research students. His dislike-father, adore-mother psychological profile is that of a text-book 'invert'. One of my contem- poraries recalled how he went to see McFarlane to tell him that he was engaged to be married. The news was greeted by a silence which lengthened into a terrible silence. I wonder how McFarlane reacted when, during my time at Oxford, Karl Leyser married one of his pupils. I remem- ber sitting next to McFarlane at a perfor- mance of Montherlant's Queen After Death, and his looking redly down at the back of the programme, a full-page advertisement proclaiming 'Legs Look Their Prettiest in Pretty Polly Stockings.'

Someone composed a 'Magdalen Masque' on the lines of the '13alliol Masque' that begins, 'First come I, my name is Jowett . . .' The first two stanzas ran:

First come I my name is Boase; I am benign and comatose.

I always smile and never frown, Even when sending people down.

Next come I, K B. McFarlane I am the one who wangled Karl in. He'd not have wed the girl he tutored If only I had had him neutered.

It must be said at once that the lines about Leyser were a disgraceful libel. Though his friendship with McFarlane can- not have hindered his application for a Magdalen fellowship, he was himself a his- torian of extraordinary gifts. (`My aunt!', McFarlane commented, when he saw the footnotes to Leyser's thesis.) The stanza about Tom Boase, the President of Magdalen in my time, was fair comment. Many were the puns about this courtly, silver-haired gentleman — 'Coronary Tomboasis'; Boase yeux'; 'He couldn't say goo to a Boase.' In 1953 there was a new jest when he accepted a large sum from an American millionairess to create a rose garden in the High opposite Magdalen — `Boases's roses'. John Betjeman, and Graham Greene's wife Vivien, regarded the plan as 'suburban' and campaigned against it — in vain. When the garden was finished, Betjeman and friends stole out the night before the grand opening and placed garden gnomes among the rose bushes. It is a pity this book does not contain McFarlane's letter of support for Betjeman with its tart remarks on 'the President — damn him'.

Few men were heroes to Bruce McFarlane. History taught him a scepti- cism close to cynicism. Appalled by the Suez episode of 1956, he wrote to Gerald Harriss that it had made him 'sick of histo- ry' — 'How is it possible to devote one's life to a subject, the essence of which is the meanness of politicians?' One man he did hero-worship was the historian F. W. Mait- land. In April 1965 he was writing a review of Maitland's Letters for the New Statesman. 'What a very great man he was — man, I mean, as well as historian,' he wrote to Rees Davies. In the review (4 June 1965) he wrote:

What other English historian has combined such exact scholarship with so much imagina- tive insight, intellectual grasp and brilliance in exposition? Outside Britain his only rival is Mommsen. He writes like a brilliant talker . . . That is the chief reason why his letters are so disappointing. They might have been written by almost any competent scholar. It is his manly Victorian reticence that prevents him from being a good letter-writer.

McFarlane was in many ways a historian uncannily like Maitland. But, luckily for us, his letters are not inhibited by manly Victorian reticence. When he stood on the lecture dais, towering above it, with his lop- sided head, like some Brancusi sculpture — or a railway signal — the gravitas was daunting. But he was a child of the Twen- ties, with all the post-Bloomsbury taste for letting oneself off the leash in correspon- dence. Virginia Woolf herself was not more gossipy or bitchy. In the letters he even allows his passion for accuracy to slip. Writing in 1964 to Norman Scarfe, that splendid historian of Suffolk, he quotes some doggerel by me — if that is the right word for six lines of verse about a cat. He describes me as 'ceramics correspondent of The Times'. There has never been such a post on the paper. I was then a home news reporter in training to be museums corre- spondent. McFarlane also rewrites the penultimate line of my poem, changing 'On dry-stone walls his Guv'nor sits' to 'In deck-chaired ease his master sits.' An improvement, I don't doubt; but regretfully I conclude that if Bruce McFarlane had ever had to consider himself as a 'source', he would have had to reject himself.