Books : Man of Letters Becomes Prime Minister

Harold Macmillan, Politician, 1894-1956 by Alistair Horne (Viking: $24.95; 502 pages)

Americans never get the English quite right. We keep mistaking the butler for the duke, probably because he is so much better dressed.

One of the peripheral pleasures in reading Alistair Horne’s biography of Harold Macmillan--the book is mainly rather stolid, and it is the peripheries that count--is the way it readjusts our image of the man.

“We,” of course, refers to Americans old enough to remember John F. Kennedy and the early 1960s. Kennedy meant an air of style, among other things; and one of the elements that contributed to this air--privileged, graceful, down-to-earth--was his comradely relationship with the tall, hooded-eyed, immensely urbane man who was Britain’s prime minister at the time.

Trollope on His Night Table

Macmillan kept Trollope on his night table. We never quite knew what Kennedy kept on his night table, or whether he even had one. Somehow, though, Camelot got a kind of transatlantic charge from Macmillan’s Trollope and from his graceful mix of warrior, wit, man of culture, and political hard-baller.

The English aristocrat par excellence, we thought; Eton, Trinity, the Guards regiment, married to the daughter of the Duke of Devonshire. Macmillan was a man who went into battle in World War I with Aeschylus in his pocket--gravely wounded, he lay on the field for hours reading it--and who took “Pamela” with him when he went off to muscle a government into place at the start of the Greek civil war.

“Supermac,” he was called; unflappable and presiding over a Britain at the height of its trendy glory. There were the Beatles, Carnaby Street, and a happy end to the class war.

Horne, who had access to private papers and a number of long talks with Macmillan in his advanced and sometimes candid old age, gives us the shaky foundations of this assured superstructure.

Macmillan’s family was in trade, even if it was such a genteel and well-established trade as that of book publisher. Money, the right schools, the right regiment, were important, of course; and the Duke of Devonshire welcomed him as a son-in-law.

Nevertheless, there was insecurity. The renowned, aristocratic Cecils, lordly for four centuries, were patronizing; his odd costumes and country weekends caused comment; and Churchill’s inner circle thought of him as wet. They disliked what one called “his ingratiating smile.” Horne writes that in photographs, young Macmillan always seemed to be at the edge of the picture, “looking in.”

It wasn’t mainly a class thing, perhaps. Horne documents Macmillan’s nerves, his insecurities, and his occasional depressions. He was never good with women. At Oxford, he had sentimental attachments to several young men. His married life with Dorothy Cavendish produced children, but she conducted an open, lifelong affair with Bob Boothby, one of Churchill’s lieutenants. It left Macmillan not only solitary but publicly humiliated; at one point, he had a nervous breakdown.

Before his wife, there was his mother, Nellie; an American of immense authority, and particularly over Harold. Horne suggests that in some ways she marred his life; on the other hand, her forcefulness and connections undoubtedly gave him a boost.

When Macmillan joined an inferior regiment at the start of World War I, Nellie pulled strings and got him into the Grenadier Guards. Guards officers paid for the honor by dying in particularly large numbers, and Macmillan was wounded several times, once gravely.

Macmillan went into politics early, in the 1920s, while keeping a connection with his family’s publishing house. Holding on to a Conservative seat in the depressed industrial town of Stockton--he lost it from time to time but got it back--was an achievement. He did not make much of a mark, however; his relatively progressive views made him a marginal figure in his own party.

At 45, he was more or less a failure; a minor member of the anti-appeasement group that supported Anthony Eden and Churchill. It was the war that saved him.

Just as the fighting in World War I seems to have given Macmillan a chance to demonstrate his inner prowess and fortitude, his World War II assignment was a challenge that allowed him to soar. He was Churchill’s political representative in the Mediterranean. In North Africa, he won both Eisenhower’s confidence and De Gaulle’s. With an extraordinary mix of wit, charm, deviousness and clear-sightedness, he managed to preserve this difficult Frenchman against Roosevelt’s hostility, Churchill’s impatience and De Gaulle’s own megalomania.

At the end of the war, Macmillan was no longer a minor figure but a power in the Conservative Party. He served in various cabinet posts--defense, foreign affairs, the treasury. The book closes--there will be a second volume--after the Suez debacle.

Macmillan’s own role is puzzling and unclear. He was an early anti-Nasser hawk but buckled and turned dove the moment the United States--whose reaction he was chiefly responsible for miscalculating--put the pressure on. Eden was destroyed by the affair; Macmillan emerged from it as prime minister.

Horne’s portrait is at its richest when he writes of Macmillan in wartime, in North Africa, Italy and Greece. He benefits from the fact that his subject showed something approaching political and personal greatness in these roles; and that Macmillan’s memoirs and diaries write of these missions with such wit and grace.

He was, in fact, a man of letters all his life. Reading was a passion with him; and as a stylist, it could be argued that he surpassed Churchill. There was something highly appropriate in the fact that at his wedding, the bride’s side of the church was filled with dukes. The groom’s side contained the likes of Henry James and Thomas Hardy, both published by Macmillans.