A Don’s Self-portrait

Press, Volume CV, Issue 30953, 8 January 1966, Page 4

A Don’s Self-portrait

Spots Of Time—A Retrospect of the Years 1897-1920. By Basil Willey. Chatto and Windus, 249 p.p.

In general an autobiography —the one book every man is believed to have in him—takes one of two forms; selfadvertisement or self-analysis. Unhappily today the former is more prevalent than the latter. To see the world in relation to one's self is a far less difficult task than to see one’s self in relation to the world. Sc it is that those who have at any time enjoyed the public view cannot bear to leave the evidence of their actions undocumented, cannot suffer posterity to make up its own mind as to the significance of the roles they have played. Public autobiography is at the present time as pernicious as it is prevalent. Less common. but far more rewarding, Is what one might term private autobiography: stemming from the desire of a man to set down and assess for himself, as much for his own instruction and delight, as for his reader’s those events, incidents, and processes which have gone to make up a life and have created a man. Those moments which Wordsworth has described as “. . . spots of time/That with distinct preeminence retain/A renovating virtue. . . .”

Professor Willey, who recently retired from the King Edward VII Chair of English Literature at Cambridge, has had a public career as distinguished as it has been wellearned. In this book, however, he has intentionally turned away from the world outside to examine what can be called his “lehrjahre”—his childhood and growth to early manhood. This is very much a private book. It is also an honest one. Professor Willey contrives to present a true self-portrait, like all honest self-portraits at once attractive and repellant

His was very much a middleclass education. A preparatory school in Hampstead, unusual for that date, in that it was co-educational. University College School, a brief time at Cambridge and then the war. All rather ordinary, and yet as every individual’s education must be, unique. It is in this uniqueness with which Basil Willey so skilfully conveys the picture of one man’s

life, that the real interest of his ’ book lies.

He does not spare himself. The young Willey is both precocious and something of a prig. As a young subaltern he seems far more concerned about the bad language and excessive drinking in the officers’ mess than he is about the war in which he is involved. The war itself is a distasteful, rather than a disturbing experience, and his experiences as a prisoner of war have an air about them almost of enjoyment. The life he records, at home, at school, in the Army, is a tranquil one, sustained by a deeply felt Christian faith, a delight in literature, and a passionate love of the English countryside.

It is indeed a somewhat grey life, and in consequence “Spots of Time” is a somewhat grey book. Yet it has a certain fascination; a fascination comparable perhaps to that aroused by that other rather grey work, the autobiography of John Stuart Mill. At the least it provides a clear understanding of why Professor Willey can himself write with such sympathy and imagination of the Victorian sages (and of Mill in particular) for he is in many respects one who has continued to subscribe to their values. Depending on one’s point of view this may or may not lead one to read Professor Willey’s book as much for profit as for pleasure.