A Very Private Celebrity

by Hugh Purcell

  A good example of the New Statesman’s ‘more rational and penetrating’ articles to point up the inequalities of the 1960s and the need for social justice, were the essays by Peter Townsend on ‘The Meaning of Poverty’ and Richard Titmuss on ‘Income Distribution and Social Change’, both published in 1962. The four essays of Richard Titmuss are hard going. Norman MacKenzie introduced them with an article on ‘The Double Standard’ that resonates today: ‘Professor Titmuss has reminded us that all through public life there runs a double standard – one criterion for the “fiscal welfare” of the prosperous payer of income tax and another for the “benefit welfare” of the retirement pensioner, the chronic sick and the claimant of national assistance.’

  On 9 January 1962 the New Statesman published an obituary of the economic historian, socialist and educational, R. H. Tawney. It has Freeman’s imprint:

  Tawney never believed in the inevitable triumph of socialism. Both The Acquisitive Society and Inequality are passionate assertions that man cannot be whole or dignified until he lives in a community where his private motives lead him to seek the public good. For him, humanism was an act of will, not history. He believed in the rule of decency and reason.

  After six months of Freeman’s editorship, Anthony Howard reported that:

  The paper has felt the new editor’s impact. It has shifted from the wild frontier of the far left to a position more in line with today’s socialist thought. In place of the drain of readers it suffered in the latter half of 1960, has come almost a flood of new ones.

  In July 1961, the circulation rose to a record 85,000.

  These changes were taking place while Kingsley Martin was editorial director, an appointment Freeman had given him for twelve months after his retirement. It was a mistake. ‘The paper had to be given a new look,’ said Freeman, and this was difficult while Kingsley occupied ‘half the editor’s chair’. For his part, Martin could not stop interfering, demanding an office and attending the Monday meeting. As a friend of his said, ‘Kingsley had a genius for stepping back into the limelight.’ Freeman’s method of coping with this was to encourage Martin to take long trips abroad, to South America, to Cuba, to the United States, and then to cut his copy very short – without explanation – when it was sent in. On one occasion the price of this cutting down to size was heavy. Kingsley correctly predicted the ‘Bay of Pigs’ invasion of Cuba by Florida exiles in April 1961, and wrote a despatch to that effect from Washington, but Freeman did not use it. Kingsley expressed ‘grave concern about your [Freeman’s] attitude to me in the future’; Freeman rang him in Washington and told him to write ‘very short or not at all’. After Kingsley ceased to be ‘editorial director’ relations improved but were never resolved until both had left the New Statesman behind them. Freeman told C. H. Rolf after that happened: ‘We had conversations of apparent friendliness. It may be that on some days he felt genuinely affectionate and on other days remembered past bitterness.’6 Martin continued to write for the New Statesman until he suffered a stroke in 1963.

  What sort of editor was John Freeman? According to Norman MacKenzie:

  The paper was meticulously planned. We knew what was going into it, who was being commissioned to write what. John ran the paper as a totality. He was a proper executive editor. The price was that he was not very imaginative. He didn’t respond to sudden change and the Monday meetings were nothing like as unpredictable, as exciting as when Kingsley had come and announced that over the weekend he had had a new idea.

  Freeman, said MacKenzie, was a chief-of-staff type of editor – with a radical streak: ‘He could have been a kind of radical soldier in Cromwell’s army. I could well imagine him taking part in the Putney debates. He liked the army very much, its structure and its sense of a well-oiled machine. He brought some of that to the New Statesman.’7

  One or two of Kingsley’s old guard thought the magazine had become ‘professional’ and this was not said as a compliment. They preferred the wild enthusiasm of the old days to Freeman’s insistence on ‘getting it right’ and selling more copies. Tony Howard agreed with MacKenzie; Freeman’s editorship was one of administrative and editorial efficiency: ‘It was a tight ship, with John Freeman every inch the captain. He set himself high standards and expected, and exacted, them from his staff.’8

  MacKenzie and Howard agreed that Freeman gave little away about himself, that he hated intrusions into his privacy. Howard recalled when a professional photographer took photo after photo of the editor at his desk. He was trying, he said, to ‘catch you in an unguarded moment’. ‘Alas,’ Freeman told him, ‘there are not many of those.’ Howard noticed Freeman’s ‘thin-lipped smile with just a suggestion of self-mockery in it’.

  MacKenzie and Freeman would visit a pub on Thursdays near the New Statesman printers in High Wycombe. On one occasion Mac-Kenzie remembered ‘a man at the bar put his finger up at John and said, “You can’t get away without me recognising you. I know who you are. Yes, you’re the chap on the Chan Canasta show.” John was absolutely livid and stalked out. He hated any kind of personal publicity.’

  He was very self-aware and on guard. Someone said: ‘John Freeman gives a brilliant impression of being John Freeman – and he will never turn in other than a good performance.’

  MacKenzie found Freeman’s manner ‘intimidating’:

  He walked as stiff as a ramrod. I think he actually did wear a corset at times because of a bad back, but he always walked as if he wore a steel corset. He kept his temper under stiff control too. He was always charming, but in a sort of opportunist, febrile manner; ‘My dear fellow, how good to see you’ kind of thing. But he was frequently contemptuous of people and did not suffer fools. He was a man of principle in his public life and contemptuous of people who did not do what they said they would do. I remember once when Harold [Wilson, Prime Minister] had been slippery he said, ‘I’ll put some backbone into that little runt.’

  He was reserved, impersonal, but under that he could be very kind and frequently funny.9

  Francis Hope experienced the contrasting sides of Freeman’s office manner. He joined the staff as Karl Miller’s literary assistant and in his first week he had the temerity to tell the editor, who had just given him advice on a minor typographical point, that he would just check it out with the literary editor: ‘I was confronted by steady, if not steely, blue eyes. “My dear Francis. Let me make one thing quite clear. What I have just said was not a suggestion. It was a decision.”’10 Later, Freeman took him out to the Garrick Club, perhaps before making him diplomatic correspondent: ‘I suppose I feel more at home here than anywhere,’ said Freeman to Hope. Then he qualified this as a ‘shaming confession’. And so he might because, although the Garrick was and is most popular among writers and actors, it is still one of the bastions of clubland, and Freeman was a professed ‘non-joiner’ with strong egalitarian views. He wriggled out of this by claiming that he preferred the conversation of the Garrick Club’s servants to that of its members.

  The editor’s prerogative was the ‘London Diary’, although other writers contributed to it. Freeman, writing as Flavus, did not enjoy the weekly duty. He would shut himself in his office on Tuesday afternoons and ‘slog it out’, as Howard put it. MacKenzie remembered that he wrote carefully and competently but he was not a diarist:

  When you work in an office you soon pick out the way people write. Kingsley would take his coat off – he always wore a short-sleeved shirt – get a pen out and write, just like that. He was a show off and readers knew Kingsley’s personality from what he put in his diary; there were many light pieces about his gardener and his weekends in the country. John was not willing to show anything of his personality so there was a stiffness about his writing. It lacked the fun, the vivacity of Kingsley’s.11

  Howard went further and said Flavus was ‘boring and flat’ because Freeman ‘would not give anything of himself’. Considering that Freeman was writing scripts for broadcast during this time, which had to b
e direct and precise, Flavus could be infuriatingly passive, devoid of the letter ‘I’:

  The numbed silence in which the audience is left at the end of ‘The Representative’ gave way to a stir of excitement last Monday as the lights went up at the Aldwych Theatre and onto the platform filed four speakers to launch an open discussion. (15 November 1963)

  Or:

  This journal has played in recent years an important, and honourable, role in championing the cause of the homeless and very poor. Particularly in trying to protect them from the indignities, which even a well-meaning bureaucracy is quick to put upon them unless the bureaucrats themselves are made to feel someone is watching them. (4 September 1962)

  A welcome exception was a mellow Flavus bringing in the New Year of 1962 from the village of Chilham in north Kent. Freeman had bought a cottage here from Edward Hyams, the ‘countryside correspondent’ of the New Statesman.

  Five minutes to midnight on New Year’s Eve in the church belfry; with the new snow deep on the ground and the thermometer at 16 degrees. The bells bobbed their way through a cheerful peal, which splendidly proclaimed the New Year to a deserted countryside. Round the walls of the belfry sat the revellers, glowing with wine and love, momentarily hushed by wonder. Afterwards, whisky in the White Horse and a snow fight. The appeal of the year’s turn seems to be deep, archetypal magic.

  John and Catherine were spending their Christmas holidays at Chilham with their baby son. He told her that 1961 had been an ‘annus mirabilis’ because of his editorship of the New Statesman and Matthew’s birth: ‘I never knew it was possible to be so happy.’

  Freeman admitted that ‘he was not primarily a writing editor’. He said afterwards: ‘The greatest satisfaction I found was discovering new talent who would take over from me.’12 Reading Flavus over the years of Freeman’s editorship, I am struck by the prominence of two themes. The first is the New Statesman’s traditional support of colonial revolution, from Indian independence onwards. He wrote many paragraphs about the iniquities of apartheid and the emerging nations of Africa. The second is more Freeman’s own: a fascination with crime, vice, law and order. Many weeks Flavus is in a magistrate’s court, a reception centre, a prison; exposing legal anomalies, the working of the Street Offences Act and the wrongness of capital punishment. He even notices the new fashion in soft porn magazines of displaying girls from the Iron Curtain countries: ‘Nothing I have read of the relaxation of communism is as totally convincing as the bare bosom of Manya Gaspararovna, “a jazz-digging dental technician from Leningrad”’: hardly the style of Kingsley Martin.

  In October 1962 the world came as close as it ever has done to nuclear war. Once again the New Statesman was an important forum for national debate; once again it showed the confused thinking of the late Kingsley Martin era. The occasion, of course, was the Cuban Missile Crisis.13

  American spy planes obtained photographs of Soviet nuclear missiles recently moved to Cuba in retaliation for similar American missiles placed in Turkey and Italy. The United States considered attacking Cuba by sea and air but decided instead to blockade the island, a military and legal ‘quarantine’, to prevent the delivery of more offensive weapons and as a way of demanding the removal of those already in place. When the New Statesman went to press on 25 October these facts were not clear and the Soviet response to the blockade was unknown. It was a fearful time. The day before Khrushchev had written a public letter to Kennedy accusing him of ‘an act of aggression propelling human kind into the abyss of a world nuclear-missile war’. Russian ships attempted to run the blockade and two days later a Soviet missile crew shot down an American spy plane.

  That week, editor John and Catherine Freeman were in Paris and the leader was written by Paul Johnson. Contrary to expectations, particularly to those who remembered his anti-American leaders of the late ’50s, he placed the New Statesman dogmatically behind the United States:

  The Russians stand accused of an act of provocation unprecedented since the outset of the Cold War, carried out in haste, in secrecy and behind a curtain of falsehood… Kennedy has chosen the least of three evils [the other two being diplomacy and invasion]. Russian response suggests that Khrushchev will not allow the operation to degenerate into conflict. He will accept humiliation over Cuba.14

  This prediction proved correct. On 28 October the Russians withdrew from Cuba taking their missiles with them. The New Statesman leader had been courageous. Even the Daily Telegraph had hedged its bets by calling for the United States to act through the United Nations.

  Behind the scenes, however, there was dismay in Great Turnstile. Anti-American feelings on the nuclear issue could not be eradicated overnight. It so happened that Kingsley Martin had been booked to write the ‘London Diary’ for 25 October. He began, jauntily, ‘I presume Kennedy’s military blockade of Cuba has not yet triggered off a nuclear war?’ Even more contradictory was the introduction above a doomsday essay by Bertrand Russell ‘Can Nuclear War Be Prevented?’: ‘This article was written before the Cuban missile crisis became acute. Kennedy’s recent irresponsible warmongering illustrates the truth of all that follows.’ The early nickname of the New Statesman as ‘the naggers and staggers’ was proving all too accurate – as in, staggering from one view to another. Presumably it was Freeman’s absence in Paris that accounted for this lack of ‘editorial efficiency’ as Howard called it.

  Norman MacKenzie had retired from the New Statesman the previous week to return to academia. Now he wrote a long and anguished letter to John Freeman. He blamed Paul Johnson’s leaders for taking away ‘the conscience of the paper’:

  Paul cannot bear those aspects of English radicalism for which the paper has traditionally stood – scepticism, uncertainty, the small battalions, even emotional responses if you like. The paper’s job is not to be bedevilled by taking sides, but to have the courage to stand alone, to rise above the sterilities of Cold War polemics and to offer a view that may not be ‘practicable’ but is desirable as an alternative to cynicism and stupidity.15

  What was the editor’s view? Freeman had delegated the editorial to Paul Johnson, as he often did, so he stood by him. It so happened, however, that he took part in a BBC Overseas Service discussion a day or so after the New Statesman’s publication. In it he argued (against Peregrine Worsthorne) that President Kennedy had over-reacted by blockading Cuba. If the Russians tolerated having American missiles so near their borders in Turkey, why should not the Americans tolerate having Russian missiles so near their borders in Cuba? Was this Freeman’s dispassionate view or did he simply want a robust argument? In either event, he was at variance with his own paper.

  The fiftieth anniversary of the New Statesman was celebrated in the edition of 19 April 1963. It was the 2,605th edition in the magazine’s history, as Freeman pointed out in his leader, ‘The 50-Year Itch’. The magazine’s most established writers wrote on their favourite themes: J. B. Priestley on ‘Fifty Years of the English’; Kingsley Martin on ‘The Way of Dissent’; Richard Crossman on the ‘Newstatesmen’; and Malcolm Muggeridge on ‘Life with the Staggers’. Robert Graves contributed ‘Four Poems’ and Graham Greene a short story ‘Mortmain’. To this galaxy of home writers, every bit as distinguished as those in the 1930s and ’40s, were added eight once, present or future heads of state who sent greetings: President Kennedy; prime ministers Macmillan, Nehru and Nyerere; Earl Attlee; Harold Wilson and others. In his leader Freeman asserted the ‘fundamental purpose’ of the New Statesman:

  It is to show our readers by scientific analysis and reason how they may apply to public affairs and great issues the standards of personal morality, good order and common sense, which civilised men take for granted in their private dealings. That individual men and women should take personal responsibility for asserting that principle at the level of national and international affairs is the fundamental proposition on which democratic socialism must be based.

  When Freeman was supposed to be at the New Statesman printers o
n a Thursday afternoon he was sometimes somewhere else, so he left phone numbers with the office where he could be contacted. One of these was for the home of the Irish novelist Edna O’Brien. In 1968 she published a collection of short stories called The Love Object – the title of the first story. It is about a young woman’s obsession with an older man and her breakdown, almost suicidal, when he leaves. It is sexually explicit:

  ‘Hey,’ he said, jocularly, just like that. ‘This can’t go on, you know.’ Then I raised my head from its sunken position between his legs and I looked at him through my hair, which had fallen over my face. I saw that he was serious. ‘It just occurred to me that possibly you love me,’ he said.

  Edna O’Brien disguises the identity of ‘the love object’. He is a famous lawyer, not a broadcaster or journalist, but in many small and intimate ways, such as the descriptions of his face and body and his obsessive habits like folding his trousers along their creases before getting into bed, he is clearly John Freeman. There is a scene Catherine remembers when ‘Martha’ (Edna) identifies ‘Helen’ (Catherine) at a party:

  I noticed a dress I quite admired, a mauve dress with very wide, crocheted sleeves. Looking up the length of the sleeves I saw its owner’s eyes directed at me. Perhaps she was admiring my outfit. People with the same tastes often do. I have no idea what her face looked like, but later when I asked a girlfriend which was his wife she pointed to this woman with the crocheted sleeves. The second time I saw her in profile. Those eyes into which I looked did not speak to my memory with anything special, except, perhaps, slight covetousness.16