If all good novelists are good magicians, able to create terrific characters and scenes out of thin air, then Robert Harris is a Houdini, so versatile in his selection of subject matter and time period that it is hard to believe that the man who wrote the best-selling Fatherland, his first novel about what would have happened if Germany had won World War II, is the same person who wrote a three-volume saga about Cicero and ancient Rome. His new book, Precipice, takes the true story of British prime minister H. H. Asquith and his affair with the much younger socialite Venetia Stanley and spins that fact into a wondrous web of intrigue, love, and treachery during the early days of World War I. Harris fans will be enthralled as usual, and for those for whom Precipice will be their introduction to Harris, well, they now can look forward to reading his dozen previous acts of magic.
Jim Kelly: What is so remarkable about your new novel is that the facts are as compelling as your fictional imaginings. Here is a married prime minister in his 50s so besotted with a comely aristocrat less than half his age that he writes her constantly, sometimes as many as three letters a day, spilling wartime secrets and even including a memo that would prove crucial to his career. She kept the letters he wrote to her, but Asquith destroyed the letters she wrote to him, requiring you to imagine what she might have written. How did you go about the process of creating her side of the correspondence? And why are you so sure their relationship was not just platonic?
Robert Harris: Asquith liked to have a letter a day from Venetia. Even factoring in that she sometimes missed a day or two, he must have had a collection of around 350 letters from her, which he kept in a box in Downing Street, and seems to have burned in December 1916, when he was forced to resign. I was able to reconstruct what some of them said from his replies. For the rest, I imitated her tone of voice—funny, sharp, clever—from surviving letters she wrote to other people.
When you only have one side of a passionate correspondence, the effect is distorting: this is why it’s been possible to portray Asquith as a kind of fantasist. But in August 1914, for example, when they were 400 miles apart, she sent him Shakespeare’s 44th sonnet, in which the poet wishes that their thoughts could be bodies. I’m quite certain the affair was physical. They both had passionate natures. He was notorious for his advances towards young women, and Venetia later had other affairs with married men. And his car! They went for weekly drives of an hour and a half, and I discovered that Asquith’s car had a fixed glass screen with a curtain, separating the chauffeur from the passengers; that the passengers communicated with the driver using a push-button console that illuminated instructions on the dashboard; and that there were blinds on all the other windows. It was effectively a bedroom on wheels.
J.K.: You put great stock in a letter Asquith wrote to her in 1915, just after he had agreed to a coalition government. The letter implies that Venetia had given him invaluable counsel, which considering the fact that Britain was at war is pretty remarkable. Just how influential was she in the affairs of state?
R.H.: The last two paragraphs of the novel show Asquith in torment—she had broken off their affair, and he wasn’t able to talk to her before he agreed to dissolve the Liberal administration and go into coalition with the Tory opposition. He strongly implies that the decision might have gone the other way if they had spoken. As there was never to be a Liberal government again, it shows how important a hidden influence she was on British politics.
J.K.: Asquith’s career came to a bad end in 1916, ousted by David Lloyd George as prime minister. Venetia had married a year earlier, and her choice of a husband, a good friend of Asquith’s, shocked him. Is there any record of what their relationship was like after he stepped down? Asquith died in 1928, at age 75, but you note Venetia was the last person he visited before illness confined him to home.
“When you only have one side of a passionate correspondence, the effect is distorting: this is why it’s been possible to portray H. H. Asquith as a kind of fantasist.”
R.H.: They gradually started speaking and meeting again, although the affair was over. Her marriage was unhappy. Recent DNA tests have confirmed that her only child was the daughter of the Earl of Dudley. Asquith met the little girl when he visited Venetia and wrote that he hoped to see more of her, but when he got home his illness worsened, and he never went out again.
J.K.: Speaking of prime ministers, and since you spent part of your career as a political columnist, did Asquith’s letters and your research for this book make you more sympathetic to those holding the office? And, not to put you on the spot, but 20 years from now who will history treat more favorably than it does now: Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, or Boris Johnson?
R.H.: Yes, I did feel great sympathy for Asquith and the pressures he was under. No one knew how to cope with the escalating horrors of World War I. It would have been easy, in this post-#MeToo era, to portray him as a predator, pursuing a woman more than 30 years his junior, but I don’t think it was like that. She was a strong character. She enjoyed his attention, and also, I suspect, the risks of it. Only as the war worsened and he became utterly dependent, sending her a great deal of secret material, did she start trying to pull away.
I think history will regard Thatcher as a towering figure. Blair, less so. Johnson is, and always will be, a bad joke.
J.K.: Your Ancient Rome Trilogy, which focuses on the career of Cicero, is so good, and reminded me of I, Claudius in its ability to put the reader into the mind of a Roman politician. What drew you to that period, how much research was involved, and did it in any way inspire you later to write Conclave, about the election of a fictional Pope?
R.H.: The research took two years initially, with more along the way as each book was written. I always wanted to write a big novel about power, but was reluctant to invent a fictional president or prime minister. The last years of the Roman Republic seemed to offer a mirror to our present politics, and the character of Cicero—about whom we know so much, and who was remarkably modern in his approach to his career—was the best way in.
The trilogy is really the story of very rich oligarchs portraying themselves as champions of the people, and whipping up the populace to attack the elite. Sound familiar? It did lead on to Conclave in that when the present Pope was elected, and I watched the cardinals gather at the big windows overlooking St. Peter’s Square, ready for the new Pope to make his first appearance, I thought, “That is exactly what the Roman Senate must have looked like.” That led me to research how a conclave operates. It struck me as politics in its purest form, but with this immense spiritual dimension—the sacred and the profane.
J.K.: The film version of Conclave will be released this winter, starring Ralph Fiennes and directed by Edward Berger, whose All Quiet on the Western Front won the Oscar for Best International Foreign Feature Film. How involved were you in this production, and if you had your druthers, would you prefer to write the screenplay based on your books, as you did on the astoundingly good The Ghost Writer, based on your novel The Ghost?
R.H.: I was involved quite a lot, meeting the screenwriter and the director, and also Fiennes to discuss his character. The film closely follows the novel—the same scenes and even some of the dialogue. On the whole I prefer to stick to novels, where I can be my own master, but the chance to work with Roman Polanski was too good to miss—this was in 2007, before his cancellation.
I learned a lot writing the screenplay of The Ghost Writer, and also An Officer and a Spy, my novel about the Dreyfus affair, which is I think the best of all the films of my work. Although it won the 2019 Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival, and was No. 1 at the French box office, it has never been taken up by any distributor in the English-speaking world. That is perhaps the greatest disappointment of my career.
J.K.: Growing up, who were some of your favorite authors, and did a book or a teacher prove to be especially influential to your career choice?
R.H.: I love Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Georges Simenon. Perhaps my greatest influence was George Orwell, who said his aim was to turn political writing into an art—by which he meant, I think, using the form of fiction to universalize political ideas, as he did in Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. I had a couple of wonderful English teachers from the age of 14 to 18. Allow me to tip my hat to Mr. Blythe and Mr. Hargreaves.
J.K.: If you could have dinner with one of the historical people you have written about, who would it be? And, finally, who would you find more interesting to share a pint with: Rishi Sunak or Keir Starmer?
R.H.: I would have been fascinated to meet Cicero and Churchill, quite similar figures in many ways. Any dinners with those two would not have involved my speaking very much. Churchill once confessed that at any dinner party he attended, he either sat in silence or no one else could talk. As to the present leaders, I would choose to have a pint with Starmer. I would have to: Sunak is teetotal.
Jim Kelly is the Books Editor at AIR MAIL
