| This isn’t a memoir, but an autobiographical sketch
and a disconnected set of pen-portraits by Baroness Warnock, sometime Oxford
don, headmistress of Oxford High School, chatelaine of Hertford College, Oxford,
Mistress of Girton College, Cambridge, serial quango chairman, and woman
about the Establishment. If the title is the relic of a time when Warnock planned to write a continuous account of her life, it ought to have been ditched, rather than having a subtitle tacked on, let alone this one: not only is ‘People and Places’ already the title of at least sixteen other books, but the places don’t merit equal billing here. Titles, indeed, are not the publishers’ strong point: could anything be a more plonking name for a chapter than ‘Some Women Philosophers (1)’? Perhaps only ‘Some Women Philosophers (2)’. Not only are title and subtitle pedestrian and inappropriate, but their conjunction inverts the natural order of People and Places: A Memoir. Had Duckworth persuaded Warnock to call her book Five Women, Two Men and Me we should know sooner what it was about. Indeed, considering how little is required of publishers in comparison with authors, it is surprising how badly they sometimes perform. Some other pitfalls are exemplified here too. The first impression given by the jacket, that this is a book about Warnock by another hand, is reinforced by the eccentric inclusion in the left-hand running headline of the author’s name. Nor has Warnock been efficiently served by her copy-editor (if any). She isn’t rescued from an erratic use of the comma or the occasional dangling modifier. The useful distinction between the hyphen and the en-rule is ignored. What ought to be footnotes, as well as being defective, are shoehorned into the text, presumably in deference to the strange view that general readers are alienated by footnotes, when in fact they are far less intrusive in their proper place. No one has expunged a smattering of stylistic banalities – too many occurrences of ‘as I have said’, reports of deaths vacuously qualified by ‘sadly’. She is allowed to say ‘Speculation is pointless’ about an indeterminate but probably checkable hypothesis, and ‘There was a kind of weekly round-up’ of The Archers – was? kind of? – and so on. Enough pedantry – Ed. But though this will doubtless all be water off a Duckworth’s back, these things matter: it is worth protesting occasionally about the increasing barbarism of much contemporary publishing (though I can almost forgive it all because of the sewn binding, which my publisher never allows me). Luckily, the book survives its mildly sloppy presentation, and a delightful book it is, even if its readership is likely to be somewhat restricted. Large tracts will not make much sense to those who have not known Oxford from the inside; other readers probably debarred from continuous enjoyment include non-philosophers and those who find the fine detail of Labour Party history tedious. Warnock sometimes forgets that people of immediate interest to herself because they are relations or friends are not necessarily fascinating to outsiders. But mostly her enormous percipience and charm, and the plentiful fund of good vigorous anecdote, seduce the reader into turning the pages. She writes well, too, in a pleasantly informal and apparently unselfconscious style. The objects of her scrutiny are four women philosophers (herself, Philippa Foot, Elizabeth Anscombe and Iris Murdoch); the English don Rachel Trickett; the politicians Peter Shore and Margaret Thatcher; and her brother Duncan Wilson, diplomat and Master of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. In writing about the philosophers she gives us some enviably lucid summaries of important philosophical phenomena, especially Wittgenstein’s ‘private language argument’ – by which, however, she is taken in. She sounds like an excellent teacher, though I can reveal that she once praised an essay on Hegel assembled tongue-in-cheek from secondary sources by an undergraduate who didn’t understand a word she had written. She is merciless to politicians of whom she disapproves: Thatcher gets it wonderfully in the neck (what did the scourge of higher education make of her chapter, if she read it?), and so, more briefly, does Tony Blair. Warnock is refreshingly direct and explicit, though selectively. Honesty, she claims, compelled her to reveal, at the risk of upsetting his family, that the great classical scholar Eduard Fraenkel groped his female pupils (though not his male ones, if my experience is typical). But the same honesty does not oblige her to account for her own non-marital sexual activities, though she leaves us in no doubt of their existence. I don’t say she should have identified the relevant personnel, even though at least two have now died – one is outed, perhaps unkindly, in John Bayley’s Spectator review – but she has had a high profile in her official ethical inquiries, which makes it a matter of public interest how she has handled her own moral life. Did her family know or mind? Does she think adultery acceptable? If so, why? Was it honest, moreover, to allow her husband to write most of her B.Phil. thesis for her? Might she have revealed whether her full-time career required her to sideline her (five) children, or why Cecilia Ady was dismissed from St Hugh’s (an event portrayed as crucial in the College’s history)? She doesn’t tell (or rebut) the story of her refusal to attend an interview for the Principalship of Lady Margaret Hall on the grounds that the Fellows already knew her. Is she deliberately tantalising us when she writes that her friend Imogen Rose was ‘for one reason or another, in deep trouble’? Or tells us that Philippa Foot was the granddaughter of ‘a President of the USA’ without identifying him as Cleveland? Finally, to record the murder of a member of the Vienna Circle but not to name him is brazen Shlick-teasing. There are other oddities. She tells Isaiah Berlin off for writing carelessly in his old age, but then approvingly quotes remarks from a book of late interviews (carelessly misspelling the interviewer’s name). And she generalises unwisely from her own experience: how many wives would agree that it is ‘crucial to marriage’ that one should ‘always want to talk to [one’s spouse], to do things with him, and never feel bored in his presence’? She approvingly reports Iris Murdoch’s example in The Sovereignty of Good of a mother-in-law who, having written off her son’s wife as ‘vulgar, noisy and impertinent’, discovers that she is actually ‘spontaneous, good-natured and friendly’. But this is a two-way street. What of the son-in-law who first comes across as cheerful, outgoing and considerate, only to emerge on more careful inspection as obsessive, melancholic and self-centred? In Leningrad she ‘loathed going into churches used as either museums or nothing at all’. If memory serves, she once made a similar point more vividly when she said on the radio that although she believed none of the propositions in the Anglican service of Evensong, she thought it extremely important that it should continue to occur, and not just as a cultural relic, but as one of the practices of a living Church. This position is unsustainable: if you reject the metaphysical underpinnings of a faith, you cannot lay claim to the fruits of its rituals – even if, as she recommends, you preface prayers and hymns by saying to yourself ‘Our religion teaches’. Such cavilling aside, many readers will get a great deal of pleasure out of this gem-filled book. Warnock may seem, at times, evasive and smug, and slightly cerebral about matters of the heart, but one’s overriding impression is of an extraordinarily intelligent, in many ways most attractive, and certainly unusually keen-sighted victim of the publishing trade. |