The publishers IB Tauris did a great service to book-lovers by issuing Hugh Trevor-Roper’s Wartime Journals in this handsome paperback earlier this year. Trevor-Roper was one of the most distinguished UK historians of his generation, specializing in England and Europe in the 17th century, and in Germany under the Nazis. But during World War II he was employed by the British Secret Service and, lacking the time to study and write history, he appears to have penned these journals to keep his mind fresh, and as respite from colleagues who he compares to “a cluster of bats in an unswept barn.”
We last encountered Trevor-Roper in this column when reviewing Edmund Trelawny Backhouse’s Decadence Mandchoue [Taipei Times, Oct. 17, 2013]. He’d written Backhouse off as a liar and a fraud, but the editor of the edition then under review blamed him for the subsequent neglect of what he considered a fine historical and sexual record, a judgment I found myself agreeing with. Any attempt to decide the issue finally, of course, would involve reading Trevor-Roper’s 1976 book on Backhouse, The Hermit of Peking.
If Trevor-Roper was wrong about Backhouse, this would constitute his second misjudgment — more famous was his 1983 opinion that Hitler’s forged diaries were genuine, a tentative view that was quickly taken as gospel truth by those anxious to make a large amount of money by rushing them into print. But Trevor-Roper had genuine successes he could point to, his much-praised 1940 biography Archbishop Laud (the High-Anglican head of the Church of England under Charles I) and the definitive account of Hitler’s death, The Last Days of Hitler (1947).
RELIGION
An illuminating moment occurs when Trevor-Roper considers Christianity. Its claims of redemption, resurrection, incarnation and the rest, he writes, have been endlessly shown by philosophers, scientists and thinkers to be meaningless. But it’s no use pointing this out to the devout, he observes, because their belief is based not on reasoning but on psychological need. Hence he proceeds to say that the wise will not announce themselves as atheists but ally themselves with a religion that’s benign, mild and essentially harmless. He consequently announces himself as an Anglican (Episcopalian in US terms), but keeps his mouth shut when asked whether or not he’s a Christian.
There’s a great deal of enthusiasm expressed here for rural England, especially Buckinghamshire (between Oxford and London) and Northumberland (Trevor-Roper’s birthplace, in the country’s far north-east). They could hardly be more different, but Trevor-Roper’s appreciation of their contrasting landscapes is united by his love of fox hunting (now illegal). Not a strong man physically, he nonetheless regularly mounted his horse and joined in the fray with landowners and minor aristocrats, sustaining on one occasion a serious injury (his horse rolled on him and broke vertebrae of his spine in 1948).
“There was no more pathetic, yet heroic, sight than Trevor-Roper, on his knees in a ditch, scrabbling around trying to find his spectacles,” Lord Beaumont of Whitley recalled in conversation with the editor. Probably Trevor-Roper was the only man in the field carrying a pocket-sized edition of the poet Horace, Davenport-Hines perceptively adds.
PASS THE BOTTLE
All this, combined with a considerable enthusiasm for alcohol — two bottles of Bordeaux or Burgundy and a bottle of port between the two to round off a college meal — makes Trevor-Roper appear like a would-be country gentleman today. But the fact that he regularly hitch-hiked to his hunt meetings points to a more unusual individual.
At one point he describes himself as a British Whig, ie a believer that elites are necessary, indeed natural, but that those who currently constitute the British elite needed to be replaced by a more intelligent, skeptical and rational set of individuals.
Trevor-Roper’s two great friends were the Oxford philosopher Gilbert Ryle and the American expatriate Logan Pearsall Smith. The latter lived in Chelsea, London, and once told Trevor-Roper that he might dislike the idea of flagellation, but only a few doors away was an establishment where people went for a hard spanking, and enjoyed it very much.
Much of the last part of the book is concerned with Germany. Trevor-Roper went there at the end of the war and, in addition to researching Hitler’s last days, discovered his will (buried in a glass jar in a garden in Iserlohn, west of Berlin) and interviewed the only surviving one of the Von Stauffenberg brothers who’d tried to assassinate Hitler in 1944.
These journals are not diaries. Instead, they’re a sequence of highly-polished entries, clearly written and improved in advance, then carefully copied into notebooks. They contain some extraordinary pen-portraits, such as the one of the Socialist-Catholic Frank Pakenham (later Lord Longford) who Trevor-Roper holds responsible for his being roughly treated in a Dublin hotel as a suspected spy during a visit to neutral Ireland in 1942.
One of the reasons this book is such a delight is that you’re in the hands of a true scholar and literary sophisticate in the person of the editor, Richard Davenport-Hines. He’s the author of many books, including a wonderful biography of the poet WH Auden and a history of drugs since 1500, The Pursuit of Oblivion (2001). His professionalism and sheer stylishness are everywhere evident, and he’s thus an appropriate commentator on Trevor-Roper, who aspired to be a stylist above all else.
When he was appointed Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford in 1957, the offer came from the Prime Minister’s office in a buff envelope that resembled a tax demand, and for several days Trevor-Roper left it unopened. When he eventually gave his inaugural lecture he warned against over-specialization in the subject, and Davenport-Hines remarks that these journals demonstrate how much we’ve lost, and how much we have still to lose, in widely-educated, non-specialist historians. A reviewer can only add that Davenport-Hines himself is a living example of this long-established, if threatened, literary and scholarly culture. His notes are incredibly thorough, and his Introduction is the best thing in the book.
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