Homage to Naomi

Robert Oakeshott

THE NINE LIVES OF NAOMI MITCHISON by Jenni Calder Virago, £20, pp. 340

Wisaw

It was on the train between Livingstone and Lusaka, in far away Zambia, that I first met Naomi Mitchison, probably in 1965. Most recently, but as long ago as 1987, I was delighted to accept an invitation to a London party in honour of her 90th birth- day. She was wearing a long evening dress of a strikingly emerald green and an even more strikingly low cut. In between the first and most recent intersections of our orbits, 1 more than once lent her my rondavel at Shasi River School in Botswana to occupy during a stop-over on her way south through the country to the important vil- lage of Mochudi, the chiefly camp of the Bagkatla tribe. Naomi had been recognised some years before by Chief Linchwe II as both his own and the tribe's 'official moth- er • Quite rightly she still refers to this hon- our in her entry in Who's Who, though she has sadly not been strong enough to visit Mochudi since 1991. The honour is also reflected in the opening lines of a poem addressed to Chief Linchwe — 'Warning to a Chief — and published along with some others at the end of an autobiographical account of her early visits to Botswana, Real'?" to Fairy Hill:

We Royals must fear nothing, must face all, Must swim the Zambesi when the waters race to the fall.

When Naomi first met Linchwe he was still just — or anyway almost — a school- boy. In Return to Fairy Hill she allowed herself to fancy him becoming a philosopher king, and lent him a copy of Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies.

1 shall come back to Botswana again, mainly at the end. But there is much else which must also be dealt with: Naomi's writing, for a start, but also her political activity, the astonishing Haldane family into which she was born, and her work in Scotland's Highlands and Islands. And that is by no means all, even if I leave out, as I shall have to for reasons of space, her con- tributions to the cause of feminism in gen- eral and birth control, as a founder member in the 1920s of the pioneering Birth Control Research Committee in par- ticular.

Naomi Mitchison, as she has wished to go on being called, notwithstanding the peerage conferred on her late husband Dick, is already well into her 100th year. She will celebrate her 100th birthday on 1 November.

More prodigious than the number of her years is that of her publications. The jacket of The Nine Lives tells us that its heroine has written 'over 70 books'. Her biographer offers the precise figure of 73, albeit having slightly extended the relevant category to cover pamphlets as well. There is a mass of journalism and unpublished material with- out counting letters. She evidently started writing for a public at an early age. Her first poems were written while she was still at preparatory school and before the death of Edward VII.

Her poetic contemporaries from those early days are thus people like Rupert Brooke, Edith Sitwell and Robert Nichols. Equally notable is the identity of the preparatory school at which her writing career started. She overlapped for a couple of years with her eider brother, Jack, at the celebrated Dragon School in Oxford. To her great regret she was not allowed to fol- low Jack to Eton. Her spell as a 'pretend boy' ended with puberty. Jack went on to become the hugely distinguished biologist, Fellow of the Royal Society, and for many years Communist party member, J.B.S. Haldane.

Unfashionable as it may be elsewhere, I hope it is acceptable to Spectator readers to devote some space to the unusually gifted Haldane family. After graduating in medicine at Edinburgh, Naomi's father, John Scott Haldane, became Britain's lead- er in the study of mining gases. He even made what the 1955 edition of Encyclopae- dia Britannica calls a 'fundamental discov- ery', though I wouldn't trust myself to give a clear as well as accurate account of it. But for me the prince of Haldanes is Naomi's uncle Richard, war minister and subsequently lord chancellor in successive Liberal governments after the Campbell- Bannerman landslide of 1905. His reorgan- isation of the army was and still is widely acclaimed. But perhaps his greatest claim to fame was his exclusion, as a result of popular and Tory prejudice, from the coali- tion government of 1915. The grounds were that he was too pro-German. The main evidence adduced was his work on Hegel and spells at German universities when a young man. Lord Haldane was in fact later appointed lord chancellor once again, by Macdonald in 1924. In the select category of serious thinkers who have also been professional politicians, he cannot have many rivals in this century. His key insight for me was expressed in a truly memorable aphorism:

It is neither Capital nor Labour which creates wealth but mind.

The marriage between Naomi Haldane and Dick, later Lord, Mitchison produced seven children. Five survived to adulthood and are still with us. Each of the three sons holds a professorial chair in the sciences and two, like their uncle JBS, are Fellows of the Royal Society. There are clearly some glittering Haldane genes weighted rather more to the sciences than the humanities.

At least in the case of Naomi and JBS their behaviour also seems to reflect the inheritance of an engaging 'rogue' gene. JBS spent the final years of his professional life in a Calcutta rather than a UK labora- tory. He evidently 'went native'. Having declared that 60 years of wearing them was `quite enough', he dispensed with socks. Naomi visited him in 1958 and Jenni Calder supplies an unforgettable snapshot of what they got up to:

They swam at night in a tank where kitchen refuse floated and Naomi was grateful for the darkness which kept it from her sight.

The Nine Lives offers another illustration of this rogue gene at work on its heroine. We are observers at the local ceremony in Mochudi which marked Botswana's inde- pendence. The British flag is coming down for the last time:

It was all too slow for Naomi who seized the Union Jack and hurled it at the feet of the officials declaiming, 'Stand not upon the order of your going. But go at once.'

Sandy Grant, an old Mochudi veteran who is still staying on and may well be the source of this anecdote, has described her as a 'career boat-rocker'.

So much for the Haldane genes. What, next, about Naomi's writing?

My starting point is her own admission, in a letter to the same Sandy Grant, which seems to have been written in the mid- 1980s: 'I am madly out of fashion.' Given that much of her output consists of histori- cal novels, it is tempting to comment that such books have only rarely been high on best-seller lists, anyway since the days of Sir Walter Scott. The temptation is all the stronger to the extent that Naomi's writing in this category is evidently as notable for its didactic messages as for either its pace or the drama of its plots. For a synoptic judgment of the writing and of Naomi's lit- erary reputation, I cannot do better than Jenni Calder:

Naomi's first books were greeted with excite- ment and praised for their innovative approach to historical material. For a decade or so she was a respected and prominent writer, if never a best-seller. By the second world war her reputation was in decline.

I would add no more than a footnote or two. In the second half of her life Naomi became a friend of Doris Lessing. Indeed they both took part in a visit to the Soviet Union, organised by some more or less fellow-travelling writers' group, in the 1950s. In the 1930s she was an older friend and something of a champion of the then new generation of writers, people like Auden and MacNeice. A liking for MacNe- ice's poetry may be reflected in her having written some add-on verses for his Bagpipe Music. It would be good to see them.

Taking a further step backwards in time, Naomi became a close friend of Aldous Huxley while still a teenager and remained one until his death. When still in her teens and when he was living in her parents' Oxford house as a family guest, she sug- gested with characteristic boldness that she join him in bed. According to Jetini Calder he declined. Still the incident, though of no literary relevance, was perhaps in other ways a portent. It also helps to highlight the enormous age range of the writers with whom Naomi has been on friendly terms.

Turning to her political activities, I take as a starting point an earlier visit to the Soviet Union, roughly 20 years before that writers' group visit in the 1950s. It seems to have taken place under semi-Fabian Society auspices. But she was not, as I used to think, a member of that most famous group of Britain's intellectual lefties who went to the Soviet Union to 'see for them- selves' at about the same time, which included Bernard Shaw as well as the Webbs. Still, two members of Naomi's group, Hugh Dalton and Frederick Peth- wick-Lawrence, later became members of Attlee's first Cabinet. Moreover, and in contrast to the Webbs, Naomi managed not to fall into the trap of deducing from-statis- tics, like those of increasing cement output, that all was for the best — or at least get- ting there. The reaction of the future Lady Mitchison was evidently more balanced and guarded by a whole order of magni- tude. She was on the whole positive about some of what she saw: for example, the position of women and the fact that they enjoyed a legal right to abortion even if the latter often meant no more than access to procedures which had to be conducted without anaesthetics and which could be as she herself chose to witness — horribly painful. But she was critical too: about the squalor and about what she saw as an unacceptable degree of authoritarianism. About the reactions of Dalton and Pethwick-Lawrence, and indeed about those of the two other women in the group, Kitty Muggeridge and Christina Foyle, Miss Calder is silent. But she does report a curious sexual transaction which Naomi initiated with one of the male members of the party, probably either Dalton or Pethwick-Lawrence, since the only other man was her cousin, Graeme Haldane.

Concerned about what she perceived as the sexual repressions of one of the male members of the group, she undertook to make herself responsible for overcoming them.

This is perhaps the least bad place for a brief digression from Naomi's politics. can do no better than quote selectively from Jenni Calder:

The year was 1925, in many ways a watershed . . . Physical relations with Dick were obvi- ously not a total failure, but at the same time neither . . . was happy with the sexual dimension of their marriage . . . It was in 1925 that they agreed to accept relationships outside marriage and according to Naomi this agreement would not have been reached if they had not both had someone in mind. For Dick the someone was Margery Spring Rice . . . Naomi turned to Theodore Wade Gery.

As Spectator readers who were up at Oxford in the first decade or so after the war will know, Theodore was the H. T. Wade Gery who held the Wykeham Profes- sorship of Ancient History at that time. But the main point to make here is rather dif- ferent: that both Margery Spring Rice and H. T. Wade Gery had successors in these relationships with Dick and Naomi Mitchi- son. In particular Margaret Cole seems to have had a long affair with Dick, and John Piney, then an important young commu- nist, before his marriage, with Naomi. And there were others in both cases. But it makes no sense to pursue this particular digression further, especially as, despite these affairs, both husband and wife evi- dently maintained an enduring commit- ment to each other and their children.

Naomi's commitment to her husband is well illustrated by a decision she took In 1945 which effectively put an end to any ambitions she may have had for a role in national British politics. In the election of 1935 they had both stood as Labour candi- dates and both lost: Dick for Kettering and Naomi, more adventurously, for the then Scottish Universities seat. Dick was re- selected for Kettering in 1945 and won. For that same election Naomi was invited to stand as candidate in one of the two, much more winnable, Labour seats in Dundee. She refused, because, according to her biographer:

She felt she should support Dick in his cam- paign. She also realised that problems could arise if she got in and Dick did not.

Who knows? She may also have felt that there could be problems if they both won. In any event, from then on Naomi's politi- cal energies were expended at local and Scottish, rather than UK, national level: locally in the Highlands and Islands. She and Dick had bought Carradale House near Campbeltown shortly before the second war and she has lived there continu- ously since. She was an elected member of the local county council off and on between the late 1940s and the 1960s, and an appointed member of the Highlands and Islands advisory panel for longer. She was involved too with the so-called Scottish Convention, a sort of proto-Scottish Nationalist party. She told Compton Mackenzie that it was dull but worthwhile and went on: It doesn't matter what it is so long as it wakes people up. And it is doing that.

Talking to her biographer, Naomi showed an exemplary modesty about her Political achievements in the Highlands and Islands. There were only three. One was the successful defence of an individual mother's right to teach her daughter at home. I suspect that she would want to be modest too about the physical specifics of her work in Mochudi. There is a library, a Community centre and a cluster of teachers' houses for which she had special responsi- bilities.

Sometimes, no doubt, it is the physical results of the work of individuals, groups of individuals and regimes which are impor- tant. The 15,000 new lavatories which Judge Tumim succeeded in having built when chief inspector of prisons, as well as the Pyramids, are good examples. But in other instances the more enduring and consequential results are changes in peo- ple's minds. Jenni Calder offers a persua- sive judgment on these lines about her heroine's work in Botswana: 'Part of what Naomi achieved was the proof that action was possible.'

Put rather differently in the language she herself had used to Compton Mackenzie, she woke people in Mochudi up, perhaps specially some of the women. Put different- 1Y again, using a phrase that I thought was in her Who's Who entry but which I now can't find, her aim in both Mochudi and in the Highlands and Islands has been to speed up the mills of God. In both, her work can be described as piecemeal social engineering. In the former Sandy Grant and others well placed to make reliable judgments are confident that she has done well. Linchwe II may not have gone the whole way as a philosopher king, but he is given high marks in the important judicial Position that he has come to hold as presi- dent of Botswana's Customary Court of Appeal. As for Naomi's work, I am inclined to refer back to her uncle's aphorism about the role of mind in creating wealth, and I am almost tempted to invent a new if quali- fied beatitude: 'Blessed are the encour- agers though they themselves may bsonaetimes become discouraged as well as 2ring.' Her biographer reports that iNaorni's grandchildren, staying at Car- radale, used to offer a penny for every hour in which she made no mention of Africa.

Jenni Calder has written a splendid book about easily our most interesting about-to- become centenarian. But it is marred at the margin by barely forgivable mistakes. Patrick and Liz are van Rensburgs not von Rensburgs. It almost defies analysis that she should get that wrong, since she inter- viewed Patrick and he is a holder of the Alternative International Peace Prize. Given the years she apparently spent in Nairobi, it is also scarcely credible that she thinks Lusaka is in Zimbabwe.