I encountered this unassuming memoir while reading Fredrik Logevall’s biography of JFK’s early years¹. Called Pilgrim’s Way for its American release (in allusion to Bunyan I guess), Scottish writer and 15th Governor General of Canada John Buchan (1875–1940) recounts his life in what Logevall calls “a sterling example of English prose”². It was one of Kennedy’s favourite books, first read in March 1943 when the newly commissioned naval lieutenant, age 25, was on his way across the Pacific.

Published in 1940, though my copy is a cheap reprint with that telltale print-on-demand feel, Memory Hold-the-Door is a lovely meditation on the genre with quiet moments of self-awareness. The author calls it “a record of the effect upon one mind of the mutations of life”, though “not written in the experiencing moment, but rebuilt out of memory”³. This may be the expectation we hold of all memoir, yet I found it characteristic of Buchan to make this explicit.

Gertrude Himmelfarb called Buchan “the last Victorian.”⁴

On to the passages I collected:

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On time, memory, and place

As we age, the mystery of Time more and more dominates the mind. We live less in the present, which no longer has the solidity it had in youth; less in the future, for the future every day narrows its span. The abiding things lie in the past, and the mind busies itself with what Henry James has called “the irresistible reconstruction, to the all too baffled vision, of irrevocable presences and aspects, the conscious, shining, mocking void, sad somehow with excess of serenity.”

Page 8

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My years at Oxford were, I think, one of those boundary periods, the meaning of which is missed at the time, but is plain in the retrospect.

Page 58

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A man is only truly intimate with the countryside which he has known as a child, for then he lived very near the ground, and knew the smell of the soil and the small humble plants and the things that live at the roots of the grasses. He explored it on all-fours, whereas he strides or gallops over later landscapes.

Page 86

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…with the habit to which I have already referred of linking philosophy with terrestrial objects, the works of Aristotle are for ever bound up for me with the smell of peat reek and certain stretches of granite and heather.

Page 95

I’ve been searching for language on time and memory. With a limited collection so far, I was drawn to Buchan’s opening reflection and his vivid impressions of the added role of place and object and sensation, faintly reminiscent of David Berry’s recent On Nostalgia.

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A dispassionate approach to intellectual life

My interests, as I have said, lay not in the search for a creed, but in the study of the patterns which different thinkers made out of the universe. I had a tidy mind and liked to arrange things in compartments even when I did not take the arrangement too seriously. This meant that inevitably I missed much; quidquid recipitur, recipitur ad modum recipientis⁵. My quest for truth, unlike Plato’s, wholly “lacked the warmth of desire.” It was a mental gymnastic, for I had neither the uneasiness nor the raptures of the true metaphysician. “Philosophy,” Sir Isaac Newton once wrote,”is such an impertinently litigious lady that a man had as good be engaged in lawsuits as have to do with her.” I loved the intricacies of argumentation. A proof is that while I am not conscious of having ever argued about religion, or about politics except professionally, I was always very ready to dispute about philosophy. I would have been puzzled to set down my views as to the nature of thought and reality, for they were constantly changing. I never considered it necessary to harmonise my conclusions in a system. Had I been a professed philosopher I should have been forced to crystallise my thought, but, as it was, I could afford to keep it, so to speak, in solution. L’ineptie consiste vouloir conclure⁶. I was of the opinion of the Scottish metaphysician that it is more important that a philosophy should be reasoned than that it should be true.

Page 42

Prefigures the principal project of the great Sir Isaiah Berlin and many of the concerns that my own project contends with.

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On Raymond Asquith

Buchan writes glowingly and at length about his friend, Raymond Asquith, son of British prime minister H. H. Asquith and who was killed in action in 1916, and the whole section is worth reading. But this opening characterization and later pithy insight connect back to JFK.

There are some men whose brilliance in boyhood and early manhood dazzles their contemporaries and becomes a legend. It is not that they are precocious, for precocity rarely charms, but that for every sphere of life they have the proper complement of gifts, and finish each stage so that it remains behind them like a satisfying work of art.

Page 65

Perhaps more warranted and less illusory than George Eliot’s “spontaneous sense of capability some happy person are born with, so that any subject they turn attention to impresses them with their own power of forming a correct judgment on it”.⁷

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He disliked emotion, not because he felt lightly but because he felt deeply.

Page 77

Logevall writes that as Kennedy was en route to fight another world war, he was particularly animated by Buchan’s account of the life and character of Raymond Asquith, and that Ted Sorensen would later describe Jack Kennedy’s conflicted emotional depth with those same words.

Eliot again offers a parallel in her title character: “To say that Deronda was romantic would be to misrepresent him; but under his calm and somewhat self-repressed exterior there was a fervour which made him easily find poetry and romance among the events of everyday life.”⁸

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1. Fredrik Logevall, JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917-1956 (Random House, 2020) ↩︎
2. Logevall, 238 ↩︎
3. John Buchan, Memory Hold-the-Door (Read Books, 2013), 8 ↩︎
4. Gertrude Himmelfarb, Victorian Minds: A Study of Intellectuals in Crisis and Ideologies in Transition (A. A. Knopf, 1968, reprinted by Elephant Paperbacks, 1995), 249. ↩︎
5. Whatever is received, is received in the manner of the receiver ↩︎
6. Ineptitude consists in wanting to conclude ↩︎
7. George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (Oxford World’s Classics, 2014), 32 ↩︎
8. Eliot, 171 ↩︎