English Voices

by Ferdinand Mount

  Where Freedom broadens slowly down

  From precedent to precedent.

  The common law is not the creation of a single glorious revolution or a single brilliant legal mind. It is the deposit of ages, the outcome of legal battles yesterday and long ago, of judgments since refined, enlarged and sometimes revoked by generation upon generation of judges. Some of its principles have endured for centuries. Large parts of Magna Carta – and the judgments based on the Great Charter – remained law until the late nineteenth century. Even today we still have the clauses about not selling, denying or delaying justice and not imprisoning or dispossessing anyone ‘save by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land’. The law against eavesdropping was part of English common law for nearly 600 years until it was tidied out of existence by the Law Commission in the 1960s – just when it was about to come in handy as a deterrent against phone hacking.

  We cannot leave Tennyson’s little poem without noting how, in typical English style, he undercuts his own grandiloquence in the final stanza:

  Yet waft me from the harbour-mouth,

  Wild wind! I seek a warmer sky,

  And I will see before I die

  The palms and temples of the South.

  The English common law may be a fine thing, but the English poet is off to sun himself in San Remo.

  The common law had from its beginnings a peculiarly intimate relationship with the English language, for one simple reason. Right from the start, almost everything that mattered in Anglo-Saxon England was written in English: law, poetry, history, medical advice, especially law. Everywhere else in Europe, Latin was the language of learned men doing their business. Not in England. And nowhere else produced such an abundance of written law as England in the centuries before the Norman Conquest. As Nicholas Vincent points out in his study of Magna Carta, Anglo-Saxon England, though not Norman France, was ‘a society already hard-wired with law’. Written codes of Anglo-Saxon law survive in numbers, perhaps from Ethelbert’s day, more reliably from Alfred’s. Elton was dazzled:

  Naturally, the laws being written down provide splendid information on the kind of society with which we are dealing. The first remarkable thing about them is the language in which they were originally composed. The kings and their advisers used the vernacular; unlike the rest of Western Europe they escaped the bureaucratic imposition of Latin.

  And even though the Norman conquerors rewrote the laws in Latin and conversed in French, English re-emerged as the elite language in the course of the thirteenth century, in tandem with the development of the common law.

  Elton points out that

  the fallow time proved to have been truly beneficial. Middle English is a distinctly more flexible language than Anglo-Saxon, grammatically simpler and with a markedly rich vocabulary including much borrowing from the temporary ascendancy languages. In this period the English language began its remarkable career as easily the most adaptable and most varied means of communication ever put together by man – much superior, it should be said, to Latin or even Greek, and far less hampered by rules than either French or German.

  For two centuries, the English language went underground officially, while remaining the language of the people. And those two centuries were the making of it. The language of Chaucer may be hard for us to read today, but it is essentially our language, in its grammar and syntax, its turn of phrase and much of its vocabulary too.

  And what a vocabulary it has. The English-French volume of my fat Harrap’s dictionary contains 1500 pages; the French-English volume a mere 900. The endless mingling (or, if you prefer, smorgasbord, gallimaufry, hotchpotch, mishmash, mosaic, kaleidoscope or omnium-gatherum) of borrowings – from Latin and Greek and the Germanic languages, from the Norse tongues and from the Romance ones, the haphazard inflow of terms from Arabic and Hindi and Yiddish and every variety of pidgin – contrasts so strongly with the minimal rules of syntax and grammar, the relative absence of declensions and conjugations.

  Unbounded richness and incomparable freedom. It’s a rare combination, and one which often bewilders those who are learning English as a foreign language and who search in vain for clear structures to guide them. Anyone who has learnt another language to any degree of rigour will be aware how unusual English is in the way it shrugs off even those rules it does profess, so that it is near impossible to be told ‘you can’t say that’. That, after all, is why Voltaire famously could not get on with Shakespeare: ‘he has neither regularity, nor propriety, nor art; in the midst of his sublimity he sometimes descends to grossness and in the most impressive scenes to buffoonery; his tragedy is chaos illuminated by a hundred shafts of light.’ (Though we must remember that Voltaire’s friend Alexander Pope thought much the same, for the reaction against Shakespeare’s disorderliness was as much a matter of literary fashion as national difference.)

  The ascent of English as the first truly global language, far outstripping Latin even in its heyday, is a story of our own time. English today is our most universal export and passport. But long before that extraordinary event, language had shaped almost everything about us, our freewheeling cast of mind, our indifference to verbal propriety, our taste for eccentricity and serendipity, our wacky humour. It is a vagabond language open to the seven seas, a language fit for an amphibious mob.

  The English began with their language, and what they leave behind, long after their global empire has vanished and their global banks have gone bust, is their voices. The mongrel richness of the tongue generates an almost limitless individuality. With most of the people discussed in these pages you know who is talking after you have heard a couple of sentences. That may be what has sparked the English obsession with human quiddity, with what makes one person different from another, an obsession which so often turns English literature into life-writing and life-writing into literature in a way that can be unfamiliar and puzzling to speakers of other European languages. Nowhere else is the art of biography so revered; in France, by contrast, it is positively despised as no more than the higher gossip. But to us, telling the stories of English lives seems as good a way as any to tell the story of England.

  That at least is my excuse for parcelling up a collection of portraits which take the life and the work together, melding quite unashamedly biography and critique. Most of the subjects are English or at any rate British by birth or residence, some carry other passports, but all are voices in our conversation, and voices that deserve to be celebrated. For the English, biography is phonography.

  VOICES IN OUR TIME

  Mild and easygoing, perhaps a little sluggish in the uptake: that is how the English like to picture themselves. Compared to other more ‘excitable’ nations, our minds and bodies seem to us (I’m joining the selfie here) to have a low cruising speed. Of the four medieval humours we identify with the phlegmatic. In fact phlegm used to be our prime export to the colonies, enabling the British to withstand the climate and the natives with equal fortitude. If we are good at being tolerant, which too we fancy we are, it is because it comes naturally to us, just as duckweed grows thicker where the stream runs slow.

  So it’s all the more of a shock to listen to those voices in our own time which have most resounded in our ears. I’m talking here of writers who were born between the outbreaks of the two world wars and who have flourished in the half-century after 1945. You might not think such diverse talents would share a common tone, but they do, even if you only notice it when you read them one after the other, just as a group medical inspection may bring out certain shared defects in the recruits, such as overweight or fallen arches. And it is a tone which is the opposite, a defiant, in-your-face opposite of the traditional self-image of the English.

  The writers who caught my attention are mordant, morose to the point of sour, intolerant, impatient, unforgiving. Their wit does not play or caress, it bites. Nor are they slow-spoken. On the contrary, they are quick on the draw, partly because most of them are in a chronic state of suppres
sed rage. If you were choosing a medieval humour to sum them up, it would be the choleric or the bilious.

  They vary in pace and temper, of course. Alan Bennett and W. G. Sebald have each perfected their peculiar strain of lugubrious lucubration, the Eeyore Tendency elevated to the condition of art. John Osborne and Kingsley Amis specialize in a high-voltage rant, which is more thoughtfully weighed and constructed than it seems. V. S. Naipaul and John le Carré pilot us through the deceptions, fractures and estrangements of the modern world. Hugh Trevor-Roper and Germaine Greer use feline bitchery to bolster their arguments about history and politics. But in one way or another, they are all angry.

  When the Angry Young Men were first spotted as the coming thing, they were explained or explained away as an irruption of the grammar-school-educated lower-middle class into the previously genteel world of English letters. But even if the AYM were ever a group in any serious sense, which they weren’t, the class explanation won’t do. Young men from similar backgrounds, such as H. G. Wells and Arnold Bennett, had broken through after the Great War, and they had been genial upbeat characters.

  The prevailing rancour, the sense of disappointment and disenchantment, the sense even of having been cheated, these were new. And they must surely have had something to do with the country’s knackered, bankrupt, irremediably shabby and reduced state. We had come down in the world, and we lacked the means, the energy, the self-confidence to climb out of the crater. In The Military Philosophers, Anthony Powell describes the feeling of letdown at the thanksgiving service in St Paul’s at the end of the war: ‘everyone was by now so tired. The country, there could be no doubt, was absolutely worn out.’

  In such a shattered city the only answer was the wrecker’s ball. Out of the ruins there comes an earsplitting series of blasts and wails, the scorching sound of strips being torn off and pretences being ripped away, and above all the sound of laughter. This must be the funniest bunch of writers ever to be working at the same time in England. The laughter is by turns derisive, vulgar, delicate, coarse, sublime, sour and very occasionally sweet. And it is irresistible.

  What is marked too is the virtual absence of hope. There is no looking forward, only a vigilant raging against the present, and now and then a guarded, almost furtive looking back to the days, if not of innocence, of a life that was somehow more genuine: for Alan Bennett his parents’ butcher’s shop in Leeds, for V. S. Naipaul the carefree saunter along Miguel Street; for Hugh Trevor-Roper and Derek Jackson the headlong gallop across the hunting field; even, surprisingly, for Germaine Greer the simple life of an Italian village where women had a natural and honoured place, even if it wasn’t anything like the place she wanted for them.

  KINGSLEY AMIS: THE CRAVING MACHINE

  What is it about fruit? There is no more searing passage in the memoirs of Auberon Waugh than the bit when three bananas reach the Waugh household in the worst days of post-war austerity and Evelyn Waugh places all three on his own plate, then before the anguished eyes of his three children ladles on cream, which was almost unprocurable, and sugar, which was heavily rationed, and scoffs the lot. So in all the 900-odd pages of Zachary Leader’s marvellous The Life of Kingsley Amis there is nothing that chills the blood more than the moment when Hilly Amis’s eight-year-old son Jaime reaches for the one peach in a fruit bowl otherwise containing only oranges, apples and grapes and Kingsley shouts, in a voice described by his son Martin as ‘like a man hailing a cab across the length of Oxford Circus during a downpour on Christmas Eve’, ‘HEY! That’s my peach.’

  Behind the sacred monster’s mask lurks a monstrous baby, an insatiable craving machine. There is a line which appears in Take a Girl Like You, but which was also uttered by Kingsley himself as he and some friends pulled up at a fried-clam joint on the way to the Newport Jazz Festival: ‘Oh good, I want more than my share before anyone else has had any.’ Just as Kingsley would later tell the ‘That’s my peach!’ story against himself, so he was constantly working his own episodes of unbridled selfishness into his fiction. In his last book, The Biographer’s Moustache, the novelist tells his biographer, ‘These days the public like to think of an artist as a, as a shit known to behave in ways they would shrink from.’ To which the biographer, maddened by his subject, retorts at the end of the book, ‘You’re not a reluctant shit and certainly not an unconscious shit, you’re a self-congratulatory shit.’

  Amis was perfectly aware that he had, in the words of his poem ‘Coming of Age’, ‘played his part so well / that he started living it, / His trick of camouflage no longer a trick.’ He had worked up his public persona so effectively that he became a natural choice for an up-market fabrics campaign – ‘Very Kingsley Amis, Very Sanderson’. Yet now and then he was plaintive about the costs of the impersonation. Why did he sit for twenty minutes in the bar at the Garrick and nobody come near him? His drinking partner, the naval historian Richard Hough, replied, ‘Kingsley, doesn’t it strike you that it could be because you can be so f***ing curmudgeonly?’ Again, one is reminded of Evelyn Waugh sitting looking like a stuck pig in the bar at White’s and glaring at each incomer, then complaining about nobody talking to him and the club going downhill.

  The rage needed fuelling, of course. Throughout most of his later life, Amis was on a bottle of whisky a day, not to mention any available liqueurs, plus a ferocious assortment of drugs: Frumil for his swollen legs, verapamil for his heart, Brufen for pain, allopurinol for gout, Senokot and lactulose for constipation. The more he turned drink into a hobby like jazz or science fiction, the more he drank. Travelling through Mexico, he insisted on carrying with him a sort of mobile cocktail bar containing tequila, gin, vodka and Campari, plus fruit juices, lemons, tomato juice, cucumber and Tabasco. Wine was always a lesser interest though not a lesser intake. The first GP or General Principle of his book On Drink is: ‘Up to a point (i.e. short of offering your guests one of those Balkan plonks marketed as wine, Cyprus sherry, poteen and the like), go for quantity rather than quality.’ I can’t remember which Amis character it is who pats the fresh bottle that the waiter has just brought and murmurs happily, ‘Nice and full.’ Continuity of supply was a constant anxiety. He always liked to see where the next drink was coming from.

  All this took its toll. As early as 1956 when he was only in his thirties, he was passing out cold after lunch or dinner, and in the 1970s often went upstairs to bed on all fours, though he never missed a morning at the typewriter. Yet it would be facile to imagine that it was the drink that somehow did for him morally. Like Waugh, he had a cruel streak long before he was seriously soused – it was an integral part of their comic genius. Both writers had fathers who were jovial, sentimental good sports. In Amis, as in Waugh, the savage gene skipped a generation. Kingsley’s father, William Amis, had ‘a talent for physical clowning and mimicry that made him, on his day, one of the funniest men I have known’, but he also had ‘a rowdy babyish streak in him which caused him, when perfectly sober, to pretend to be a foreigner or deaf in trains and pubs’.

  In theory, not so very different from Kingsley’s lifelong habit of delighting his audience with imitations of squawky radios and trains going through tunnels. It was his imitation in the quad at St John’s College, Oxford, of a man falling down after being shot that made Philip Larkin, who had not met Amis before, think ‘for the first time I felt myself in the presence of a talent greater than my own’. At Amis’s memorial service, Martin played a tape of his father’s celebrated party piece of FDR addressing his British allies over a faulty short-wave radio. The tape itself proved faulty, and so Martin relentlessly played it again – an episode straight out of a novel by either Amis. But William Amis’s turns were all too often facetious – and for this, like Arthur Waugh, he was not to be forgiven, or not in his lifetime:

  I’m sorry you had to die

  To make me sorry

  You’re not here now.

  Nor were the fits of howling and night terrors that woke Kingsley in his later years a new dev
elopment. As a young signals officer, he had splashed on to the Normandy beachhead only a month after D-Day – his first trip abroad – but he had always been subject to what we now call panic attacks. From childhood he had suffered screaming fits. When he was eighteen and the City of London School had been evacuated to Marlborough, his housemaster’s wife had to comfort him in the middle of the night when these fits woke him up. When his first wife Hilly was about to have their third child, he was frightened to go to the callbox by himself to summon the midwife and had to take Martin with him. Martin was then aged four. After his second wife, the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, left him, he was petrified of being alone and his children had to organize a rota of Dadsitters. He was so terrified of finding himself in an empty tube train that when he and Jane were living out in Barnet, he would choose to travel in the rush hour for his sorties to the Garrick Club.

  This sensitivity was immediately obvious when you met him and made him even more attractive. As the pictures in this generously produced biography show, he was dazzlingly handsome as a young man and all his life he had a charming voice, hesitant but not diffident, and somehow confidential as though he was talking to you alone. He seemed quite extraordinarily natural in a way that made other people in the room seem loud or forced, and as John Bayley, who met him first at Oxford, pointed out, ‘The natural Amis stayed with him all his life alongside the other one.’

  Nor were these qualities superficial or put on. He was a tactful consoler and capable of great generosity to people in trouble. Although his household at Barnet already contained at least eight assorted adults – they also entertained on a heroic scale – he readily assented when Jane invited the dying C. Day-Lewis and his wife Jill Balcon to come and live with them, despite the fact that he didn’t much like Day-Lewis and Jane had once had a brief fling with him.