Sparkling wine flowed, hors d’oeuvres were passed, speeches were given. There were panel discussions, an archives tour, a reception and dinner. I wasn’t there, and you weren’t either. Nor was anyone you know. And the occasion? Something you never heard about, involving someone you likely never heard of.
All that is by way of sharing a little-noticed event that prompted that celebration in Kingston, Ontario: the 150th anniversary of the birth of John Buchan.
John Buchan, you say. Who’s he? And why should we care that he was born in Perth, Scotland, a century and a half ago Tuesday?
Probably you don’t, but as a lazy summer comes to an end, maybe you should. For Buchan was a polymath of the old school, a historian, a politician, a novelist, a diplomat.
He was an important figure north of the border, but not under the name of John Buchan. In the British way, he was sent to Canada as Lord Tweedsmuir and is remembered, if at all, for being governor-general of the country from 1935 to 1940, meaning that he was the resident representative of George V, Edward VIII and George VI in Ottawa. The government still honors him and his wife, Susan (or, if you prefer, Lady Tweedsmuir), by saying, on an official website, “Canada was graced with a very literary viceregal couple.”
Now a sentence that will tender meaning to this column: John Buchan was the author of “The 39 Steps,” which became a global sensation after Alfred Hitchcock made it into a 1935 film.
And another: He was the author of “Pilgrim’s Way,” a splendid autobiography that was John F. Kennedy’s favorite book and that, when I sought to retrieve it the other day to give it a second look — I had read it years ago — was tucked away under special care in Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Library. (When Kennedy speechwriter Theodore Sorensen struggled to explain JFK’s public stoicism, he employed a phrase Buchan applied to Raymond Asquith, son of a British prime minister and a sparkling example of British aristocratic youth in the second decade of the 20th century: “He disliked emotion, not because he felt lightly but because he felt deeply.”)
One more: When the prodigious historian Niall Ferguson — defender of the British Empire, biographer of the Rothschilds and Henry Kissinger, once described by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world and a hedge-fund adviser and tech entrepreneur himself — decided to form an international macroeconomic and geopolitical advisory firm, he named it Greenmantle LLC, after Buchan’s 1916 novel.
“I created Greenmantle as something that would do the kind of work that I love — historically based research — but would do it independently and privately,” Ferguson said in a March lecture to the John Buchan Society. In an introduction to “John Buchan Reconsidered,” published last month in England, he called him “a superhumanly prolific writer.”
Plus this: Buchan and some elements of his life’s work — novelistic characters with views impeachable in our time, a stint serving as assistant private secretary to the top British administrator in South Africa during a period of brutal colonialism — raise important literary questions about intent and context. Those questions are major issues today and form battlegrounds in today’s fraught atmosphere in Washington, D.C., and at Harvard, Columbia and the U.S. Naval Academy, where 381 books were removed from the Nimitz Library, though most were later returned to the shelves.
Buchan isn’t without controversy, and the controversy is worth lingering on. Some of his characters evince antisemitic, homophobic or racist views, and a yeasty argument has grown up around whether these are portraits of characters of the time or reflect the views of Buchan, otherwise known as a supporter of a Jewish homeland and who was on a Nazi hit list for what was described as his “pro-Jewish activity.”
As a result, the celebrations of Buchan’s life are a wedge into an important question, of whether the mere act of portraying racist, homophobic or antisemitic language and characters is itself racist, homophobic or antisemitic. This debate rages in classrooms and on campuses, particularly when “Huckleberry Finn” is on the syllabus.
This important contemporary debate no doubt would be top of mind today for Buchan, whose writings if nothing else reflected the environment in which they were produced. In Buchan’s case, as in ours, “The world was undergoing mysterious chemical combinations in which no element was left unchanged. The constituents of society were being altered, both in proportion and quality. The old economics were going out of date, since they were dedications from a state of things which had ceased to be.”
In an address to a group of Robert Burns admirers in London in 1918, the last year of World War I, Buchan, referring to Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe and Dante, said that “a time of national crisis is the very time to turn to poetry.” He argued that a poet writes “not for the common round only, but for the great moments of life,” adding, “There is something in such epochs of crisis which quickens the imagination and the mind, and brings the spiritual world of the poet closer to our common life.”
In reacquainting myself with “Pilgrim’s Way” this summer, I lingered on a passage that, had I read it a decade ago, would have thrilled me but, reading it now, actually chilled me:
“The United States is the richest, and, both actually and potentially, the most powerful state on the globe. She has much, I believe, to give to the world; indeed, to her hands is chiefly entrusted the shaping of the future. If democracy in the broadest and truest sense is to survive, it will be mainly because of her guardianship. For, with all her imperfections, she has a clearer view than any other people of the democratic fundamentals.”
This reminded me, sadly, of a passage I had read the night before, in Andrew Roberts’ magisterial 2018 biography of Winston Churchill, who was affected by many of the forces that shaped Buchan and shared many of his views on the British Empire. In the course of a description of Churchill’s early autobiography, “My Early Life,” written in 1930, Roberts quotes the future prime minister: “Scarcely anything material or established which I was brought up to believe was permanent or vital, has lasted.”
The great fear is that Buchan was right in 1916, and that Churchill is right in 2025.
A Swampscott High School Class of 1972 member, David M. Shribman is the Pulitzer Prize-winning former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
