Triumph of a miniaturist

Book title: The Wartime Journals

Author: Hugh Trevor-Roper

Publisher: I B Tauris

Pages:

Price: £25

The papers of Lord Dacre of Glanton, previously Hugh Trevor-Roper, have been extraordinarily generative since the historian’s death in 2003. Aside from the publication of three major works of history, which had been abandoned incomplete, the archive has also produced Letters from Oxford (also edited by Richard Davenport-Hines) and a full-length biography by Adam Sisman. To these two works The Wartime Journals prove a worthy prequel and delightful addition. Composed between 1942 and 1947, the Journals were written during the course of Trevor-Roper’s career as an intelligence officer in the Secret Service. They are not, as the editor points out, a daily chronicle of events. The writing of diaries by Secret Service personnel was strictly forbidden and could lead to a court-martial — though this did not prevent Trevor-Roper from writing such a diary, which he destroyed in 1940, or a series of entries about his work and colleagues used in The Wartime Journals. Rather, they are a series of reflections, portraits, observations, aphorisms, miniature essays and personal records.

For Trevor-Roper, life within the Secret Service, though at times exciting and certainly important, was predominantly drab and frustrating. Exasperated by the incompetence and pomposity of his superiors — “a bunch of dependent bumsuckers held together by neglect, like a cluster of bats in an unswept barn” — he sought solace in alternative activities. One was reading, another was conversation. In 1940, he became acquainted with Logan Pearsall Smith, the self-styled “Sage of Chelsea”, who greatly admired Trevor-Roper’s Life of Archbishop Laud and who had collected around him a group of young literary figures. Over the next six years Trevor-Roper would be a frequent guest at Smith’s salons where the conversation ranged over an array of literary and historical topics and the performers vied with one another to hold the floor. “The beauty of conversation”, Trevor-Roper noted ironically, “consists in the mute, attentive faces of one’s fellow-talkers.”

For a historian who famously failed to produce the ‘great work’ which his contemporaries expected and his talents demanded, it is possible that Hugh Trevor-Roper could have faded into obscurity. That he has not is in large part due to the work of a number of his friends and disciples who have raked through his papers and completed or resurrected a number of works without which the ‘republic of letters’ (as Trevor-Roper was fond of saying), would undoubtedly be poorer. High among these are his letters to Bernard Berenson and the current volume. Both of these have been brilliantly edited by Richard Davenport-Hines and both highlight the essential genius of their subject: Trevor-Roper may never have produced a ‘big book’ but then Chopin never produced a ‘big piece’. What this does not prevent is either of them from being seen as two of the greatest miniaturists of their time.

PUBLISHER: TIMOTHY PLEYDELL-BOUVERIE

Published on March 23, 2012

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