Daring to Hope: the Diaries and Letters of Violet Bonham Carter
edited by Mark Pottle
Weidenfeld & Nicholson £25, pp442
Buy it at BOL
Is it possible to be smitten by a woman who died 31 years ago aged 81 simply through the diaries she wrote in the last two decades of her life? In the case of Violet Bonham Carter, the answer is yes. You feel yourself in the presence of a great woman, a woman of wit and cultivated discourse, passionately devoted to the Liberal principles she inherited from her father, H.H. Asquith, Prime Minister from 1908 until 1916, and utterly loyal to her family and friends.
Her liberalism was principled, certainly, but it was perhaps more truly dynastic. Fidelity to her beloved father's memory and reputation was the mainspring of her life. Indeed, he had only one rival - Winston Churchill, whose declining years are one of the central themes of the diaries, the last of three volumes. Her husband Maurice Bonham Carter ('Bongy') gave her domestic happiness but Churchill was in other senses the love of her life. An entry for 1967 records the answer she gave to Kenneth Harris when he asked her before a television interview 'if she had been in love with Winston'.
'I had not been in love - though I could not have loved him more - & - our relationship was an intimacy of minds - & words & an emotional one.'
It is perfectly truthful as far as it goes, but these diaries were written with an eye to posterity and are not fully confessional (the editor, Mark Pottle, has removed passages which would be hurtful to those still living). As Churchill's daughter, Mary Soames, discloses in a perceptive and elegant introduction, Violet found some difficulty in accepting his marriage in 1908 to Clementine Hozier and was rather rude about her in letters and conversation. Eventually, they were reconciled and with good sense Clementine made no attempt to stand in the way of her friendship with her husband.
The account of Churchill's twilight years is vivid and touching, but her affection makes her tolerant of his faults. He could be jealous of rivals and was unable to reciprocate Attlee's respect and liking, though his reluctance to hand over to Anthony Eden was fully justified by the botch his successor made of Suez. And this passionate opponent of racism and apartheid forgives her hero's racism as a minor blemish in a 'great tree' towering over all the rest in the political forest.
The diaries are largely an account of an energetic public life in which her Liberal principles, uncontaminated by the exercise of power, burned with a kind of purity. With Churchill, she had opposed appeasement before the war; now with him she embraced the European movement and as the opportunities of boarding the European bus slipped by she lamented the loss of cohesion and pace. With him, she detested de Gaulle and the high tone of the diaries falters when she almost exults in his ill-health and imminent death.
For all her devotion, she refused Churchill's repeated offers of an electoral pact, preferring a long electoral winter to the end of principle. For the Tories, Churchill apart, she entertained a genuine contempt. Instead, she poured her energies into helping her son-in-law, Jo Grimond, lead the party's hesitant revival that began with her son Mark's victory in the Torrington by-election of 1958.
But the most important man in her life, until her death, remained her father. She was fiercely proud of his achievement, particularly in building the foundations of the welfare state, and scornfully dismissive of Lloyd George who supplanted him. And the diaries assume their only note of real personal distress, moments of personal bereavement apart, when she contemplates the proposed publication of 500 letters written by her infatuated father over three years from 1912 to her own close friend, Venetia Stanley (later Montagu). He abandoned the relationship after Venetia's marriage.
Pottle deserves a special word - he is the Jeeves of editors, ever ready with a concise but helpful footnote, the master of the informative appendix. He edited the first two volumes with Mark Bonham Carter, who died in 1994, but was the sole midwife of the third. The result is once again a highly readable book, with narrative pace.
For all her egalitarian and humanitarian principles, Violet Bonham Carter was a member of the old ruling caste, a toff. In 1961, after a lifetime of being driven about London, she returns from a performance of Beyond the Fringe. 'I got back by Tube from Holborn which I was rather proud of finding my way to.'
Violet was not only clever, articulate, principled and brave; she was sweet, too.