Blair Worden - A Book of Friendship

BLAIR WORDEN - A BOOK OF FRIENDSHIP

To Elton’s praise I add another thought. Meekness is a disability in historians. One cannot write prose of beauty, grace and exactitude without a high level of self confidence. Blair wrote his masterwork in his twenties: his prodigious sureness of himself is still beautiful to behold. As Director of Studies Blair was patient and painstaking with troubled undergraduates. He made unavailing efforts to save a wilful boy who would not allow himself to succeed: a Traveller who was determined that Cambridge reject him because of his background. He went beyond reasonable limits to save a self absorbed worm who kept failing exams. But he had no truck with complacent idlers who used the varnish of snobbish charm to shine. I remember Blair’s grin after he had despatched, with a wigging, the senior history master of Radley, who had appeared at Selwyn to complain that Blair had not played a straight bat by rejecting an applicant who was a well-spoken, clean-limbed conformist without a spark of originality in his noddle. Blair had a wholesome distaste for the smarmy self-confidence of youths from those non-Clarendon boarding schools where Debenham was over-friendly with Freebody. Of St Edward’s School, Oxford, though, he spoke with pride, gratitude, love, and derision. The grateful love went to his inspirational teacher, Malcolm Oxley. The mockery, and O! it was delicious, was directed at Pat Brims, a dithering classicist, the most virginal and bewildered of bachelors, who was deputed to instruct Blair in the Facts of Life. Blair’s imitation of Brims stammering and wincing his way through his narrative, taking refuge in Latin at every step, is unforgettable: ‘Vagina! That of course means a sheath and is much used by Livy’. Blair’s best gifts to me were extracurricular. He allowed me to help him, in a small way, with the proofs and indexing of The Rump Parliament . The thrill of this work impelled me to follow him into authorship. Then there were the Watergate hearings. Blair used to take me into Selwyn’s senior common room at midnight and we would watch Professor Archibald Cox’s televised interrogation of Richard Nixon’s accomplices in the plot against American democracy. Blair’s commentary, with its shrieks of scornful hilarity, taught me as much about statecraft and historical criticism as Guiccardini or Clarendon.

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