JOURNALISM AND POLITICS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 786, 13 August 1954, Page 12

JOURNALISM AND POLITICS

LIFE SO FAR, by Wilson Hartis; Jonathan Cape, English price 21/-. AY-DREAMING as a young jour-~ nalist about the most delectable of professional jobs, I decided on the editorship of the Spectator, then under

St. Loe Strachey, or Punch. Now I am Teviewing the life story of Strachey’s second successor, Wilson Harris, who teigned from 1932 to 1953, and made the Spectator better than it had ever been in my long memory, an opinion strengthened by what I read here of the compliments paid him on retirement. In length of life and sustained quality, the Spectator has been the most famous English literary weekly of our time, You might not agree with it, but you always respected it. So its editor for twenty-one years has a valuable story to tell and a long one, perhaps a shade too long in some of its details of travel and hospitality. Wilson Harris admits it is discursive; but, so. he says, an autobiography should be. It is the story of a Quaker upbringing in Plymouth; education at a sound school and Cambridge; a short spell of teaching, during which he was a colleague of the original "Mr. Chips"; Liberal journalism in London, which involved covering some of the most important international conferences abroad after the first war; his long editorship; and election for Cambridge University in 1945. The conference chapters have a special interest for students of history. Nearly every leading figure in the European post-war world, and some Americans, with a host of permanent officials, walk through the pages, in a light cast by a trained observer, and we are given glimpses of the negotiations that shaped history in what proved so tragically to have been armistice years, Similarly, in London, scores of distinguished figures are associated with Wilson Harris. He maintained the "leftcentre," independent tradition of the Spectator, and the reader realises how difficult it was to take an editorial line amid the many crises. We get a picture of a man of the highest integrity; strong in opinion; scholarly, and well informed in world affairs; a maker of friends; a little dry perhaps, but forceful, and at times. witty. Moreover, he was "Janus," and really good columnists are about as. fare as good editors. At seventy, he was asked to resign "to give the younger men a chance," and didn’t like it. The Parliamentary chapter is the brightest. Like Herbert Morrison in his book .on government, Wilson Harris brings out the basic spirit of co-opera-tion in the House, and the bouquet of Parliam ameptely witticisms he gathers is delightf He left politics with the abolition of the University seats, after illustrating admirably the value of a special representation for which there is little or nothing to be said on strictly

democratic grounds.

A.

M.