Heresies and Heretics

by George Watson

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  In 1979 Hugh Trevor-Roper became a peer, and in 1980 he left Oxford on being elected master of Peterhouse. Three years later Fate, as if envious of his triumphs, struck him down. In 1983 the Times invited him to authenticate papers claimed to be Hitler’s diaries, and he was flown to Zurich for the day on Rupert Murdoch’s private jet and spent several hours in the vault of a bank where the papers were stored. After the briefest of inspections he rashly declared them to be genuine, and the disgrace haunted him for the last twenty years of his life. The forgery was gross and palpable, a humiliation that might have been planned by the gods. He had made a life-long profession of exposing frauds and charlatans. He was a biter bit. The culprit, Konrad Kunau, was a petty forger who, after serving a prison sentence in Germany, returned to his trade and was later fined for faking driving licences. The media loved the story, ran it for weeks and was unsparing in its derision. Lord Hugh of Old Roper, a satirical weekly dubbed its victim, and he had to endure the sly contempt of colleagues who had bided their time for years. What goes around comes around, as the saying is, and he spoke of it little in his last years and wrote of it even less.

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  His semitophilia, which I share, perhaps needs some explanation. In the age of refugees in the Thirties Jews could easily look like the first interesting people you had ever met. It was a post-depression world where families tended to be amiable, hardworking and dull, and school-friends all too much like yourself. The arts barely existed beyond radio, gramophone and books – hardbacks, usually, in worn library copies. If there was a local gallery it contained landscapes under dull varnish and portraits of aldermen who looked respectable and almost certainly were. Life, a poet once said, is colour and warmth and light. It did not seem so then, or not yet.

  In the late Thirties a stream of refugees from central Europe changed all that, especially after the Anschluss of March 1938. They brought the intellectual excitement of Berlin, Vienna and Prague into dim and dusty places. Art history – even iconography – chamber music and the philosophical ferment of Karl Popper and Wittgenstein came too. Aby Warburg had died in 1929, but disciples brought his library from Hamburg to London, where it flourishes still. Art historians like Ernst Gombrich, Edgar Wind and Nikolaus Pevsner came. So did Arthur Koestler of Budapest, liberated from a death-sentence in a prison in Franco Spain. He was soon befriended by George Orwell, and they partnered an attack on Soviet tyranny that owed its authority to their experiences in the Spanish civil war. All that put paid to the tea-table world of the Bloomsbury group and the sophisticated cultural nostalgia of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. The way was clear for polemics in an age grimly braced for armed struggle.

  It was routine, in such a world, to have a Jewish sage. As Winston Churchill had Frederick Lindemann (Lord Cherwell), as political historians had Lewis Namier from Poland and Geoffrey Elton from Prague, so did Hugh have BB. It was a commitment dictated by circumstance and fashion. Hugh was a social snob, as he freely admitted, but snobbery did not stand in the way. In 1922 Louis Mountbatten had brought German Jewry into the circle of the royal family by marrying Edwina, granddaughter of Sir Ernest Cassel of Frankfurt, a financial adviser to Edward VII, and by the 1940s the arts of theatre, film, dancing and painting were so thickly populated with central European immigrants as to be unimaginable without them. Two lord chief justices of England in succession were Jewish, not to mention Sir Isaiah Berlin, president of the British Academy, who was born in Latvia. This was the last great age of German culture, if the word may be allowed to embrace eastern lands where German once predominated as the language of an intelligentsia. It was at once tragic and glorious, and it deserves to be recorded and celebrated.

  Hugh believed that most academic history in his native land was dull, and it was a conviction that has borne fruit in the startling popularity of history (and above all biography) in recent years. History sells: in that sense, among others, it has returned to the tradition of Macaulay. Isaiah Berlin became a star of the international lecture circuit, his books read far beyond academe, and it seemed entirely natural Hugh should back him vigorously in 1951 as warden of All Souls. The campaign failed, but he later became master of a new Oxford college named after Isaac Wolfson. It was not difficult or unusual in that time and place to be semitophile.

  In his provocative inaugural ‘History Professional and Lay’ (1957) Hugh proclaimed that fertile error had a greater role to play in intellectual progress than archival accuracy, that Gibbon and Porson had achieved more in the eighteenth century than any pedant, and that Marx and Freud had done more for our knowledge of the past than the dunces and dullards who opposed them. To professionalise history, he believed, is to kill it; to prize statistics over individual heroism is to neuter it. History is a study ‘not of circumstances but of man in circumstances,’ and it should amuse, infuriate and excite.

  After 1980, as master of Peterhouse for seven contentious years, his wit did not falter or fade. His hostility to Jesuits was abiding, and at his farewell dinner in Oxford as Lord Dacre he recalled how Evelyn Waugh, convinced he had worsted him in an argument, had remarked: ‘There is nothing for Trevor-Roper to do but to change his name and go to Cambridge.’ Hugh paused to let it sink in. ‘I do not mind giving Mr. Waugh his little victory.’

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  The iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth its poppy, it is said, but it is still likely to spare Hugh. His name will survive as the youthful author of a masterpiece about the death of a dictator and a devastating critic of forgeries like the Ossian poems of the 1760s, proclaimed by a Scottish poet to be based on Gaelic originals from the third century. The fiasco of the Hitler diaries, when a press baron railroaded him into a gross and hasty misjudgement, will excite wonder rather than contempt. His name will be unforgotten, his books read.

  There are few great dictators now, few student militants, and the Whiggery Hugh applauded has won, though nobody seems to want to talk about it. Reform that you may preserve might be the slogan of the times, but Macaulay is seldom hailed as a prophetic author. Perhaps optimism is seen as irredeemably glib. In Hugh’s Cambridge years (1980-7) the spirit of Reagan-Thatcher ruled the Western world and became a vivid presence in academe, and a New Right replaced the New Left in a pendulum swing that was predictable and predicted. Peterhouse became for a time an epicentre of the new conservatism, which numbered Edward Shils of Chicago among its members, or imagined itself to be; and it boasted the allegiance of ministers in the Thatcher government.

  Hugh waited for retirement before he published his view, though it was a view he was well known to hold by those who knew him. A year or two later in the Independent (9 December 1989) he unmasked his guns. There is nothing conservative about a competitive economy, he insisted, and the Tory tradition is statist, protectionist and exclusive. For years it had backed church establishments and tariffs. His own tradition, he announced, was that of Adam Smith, a Whig who in 1776 had declared for a free market and free trade, and of Sir Robert Peel, who as a Conservative prime minister had split his party in 1846 to repeal the corn laws. It was the Whigs, he reminded the New Right, that had ‘undermined the Anglican monopoly’ of parliament and the judiciary, opened public life to Dissenters and Jews and ‘brought us to where we are.’ 1989 was a decisive moment for free men. The Berlin wall had fallen weeks before, and the Thatcher government collapsed within months. As Hugh had always hoped, the future belonged to progress within tried and ancient forms like parliament and crown.

  He feared reaction in church and state: clerical dogmatism, religious fundamentalism and political superstitions such as Left and Right. Dunces use such words as a substitute for thought, but they have never explained why political beliefs should be seen in linear terms or why a diagram invented by the French Revolution should have any bearing on where the world stands now or goes next. Marxists have never explained what is conservative about a competitive economy, and nor has anyone else. Historians n
eed to raise the game and see what they are for: to abandon conformity, notice the world they are in and listen to the tune of the times.

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  Hugh’s blind spots remain: not just the Hitler diaries but a blind and inveterate snobbery that made him a butt. His contempt for state welfare sometimes took a vividly personal turn, as when he abandoned his country house in the Scottish borders because the National Health Service had built a hospital nearby. He never understood, as Churchill understood from the start, that state welfare is among the essential defences of private enterprise. ‘Where there is no hope, be sure there will be no thrift.’ No thrift, as Churchill saw, meant no investment; no investment no growth. Post-war Britain was not drab because of the welfare state, which had been founded in Prussia in 1883 against socialist opposition by a Prussian monarchist called Count Bismarck, and by Asquith in England after 1908. It was drab because of Hitler’s war.

  Berenson summed up his young friend: Hugh was arrogant without insolence, he remarked in his diary, his angular gestures ‘sawing up and down, and finishing arguments with a clenched fist.’ Like all snobs he lived a contradiction, desperately eager to impress those he affected to despise, and no one was ever more easily bored or worse at disguising it. He once confessed to me, after a glass or two, that few or none of his academic proposals had ever been adopted, though he had often succeeded in blocking others, and to him power-games never lost their fatal appeal. No doubt in some absolute sense he was disappointed in his life. I recall sitting beside him at a packed meeting in Cambridge Senate House ostentatiously reading a sumptuously illustrated auction-catalogue from Monte Carlo, as if determined to be bored by the event and to appear so. ‘Dull,’ he would say. His colleagues at Peterhouse were not passable, he explained – socially acceptable – and he never ceased to dream of a Tuscan villa and its treasures. He had found civilisation in a formal garden.

  About history, at least, and composing history, he was right. It is under no obligation to bore, and it is far too important to be left unread, or to be read only by historians. What it has to say is momentous. It is about controlling the future, and the world has an urgent duty to learn from its disasters and to profit from its past triumphs. It has no business, in a word, to be dull.

  27. Frank Kermode

  He lived to be ninety, and at his death in August 2010 it looked certain that his talent would survive. As Melvin Lasky, the editor of Encounter, used to say laconically, if you were rash enough to mention him, he was a good critic, and good criticism outlives the years and the centuries, as the deathless fame of Samuel Johnson testifies. It is not as evanescent as you think.

  Sometimes, however, a talent can be put to strange purposes, and in his memoir Not Entitled (1995) Frank Kermode wrote as he wished to be remembered. It is a highly readable book, like everything he wrote, compounded of fact and fable. I knew him for over fifty years, and we sparred cheerfully when we met, since the dogmatic divide was too wide ever to be bridged. It was an affable friendship which survived, above all, by silence.

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  Frank Kermode was born in the Isle of Man in November 1919, his father a warehouseman, and schooled there. In his mid-teens he was converted to communism by a chance meeting with a Scottish shipyard worker, and studied at Liverpool University in the heady days of the Popular Front and the Spanish civil war, in which he was too young to fight. Liverpool left happy memories of student camaraderie, bridge-playing, affairs, and not writing a doctoral thesis. His literary memory was superb, and languages were never a problem: he was taught Latin as a freshman by George Painter, a young classicist from Cambridge who was to become famous for a biography of Marcel Proust, and he acquired Greek.

  As a young lecturer at Reading University in the early fifties he made the short journey one evening to Oxford to talk about W.B. Yeats. That is how we met. The audience numbered a dozen or so, and what they heard would one day appear in his first book, Romantic Image (1957), revealing unnoticed connections between the Modernism of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot and a preceding generation of late romantic poets and critics like Yeats and Arthur Symons. We had been corresponding over a bibliography, so I introduced myself and remember his startled look, in a gesture he learned to control. I was nearly a decade younger, and bibliographers are easily imagined decrepit and white-bearded. I have since grown into the part, but he remained much as he was: compact of frame with a voice and face almost unageing.

  Romantic Image won deserved acclaim, and he briefly returned to the grimy north, as he cheerfully put it, with a chair in Manchester. The north never quite left him, even after he had left it in 1965 for Bristol and London, though it did not survive in his voice. There is a gentle, persistent paranoia common among upwardly-mobile northerners of humble origin, and he never quite lost it, though he always insisted his boyhood had been well fed. Even if you are not patronised or persecuted you feel you might be. Donald Davie, a Yorkshireman whose first teaching post was in Dublin, used to remark that the Church of Ireland had suited him perfectly in his Irish years, being Low Church and slightly persecuted as a minority sect. There is security in the thought.

  Fame took them both to America before 1960, and they continued to go, drawn by popular admiration, salaries and dry martinis at faculty parties. That had nothing to do with admiring the United States, least of all its foreign policy. They liked being in it. American literature is largely a protest literature, after all, or easily seen to be, and there were always plenty of colleagues happy to attack the administration of the day, with or without martinis. They did it better than any foreign visitor: they had had practice. America taught pay-bargaining, too, which traditionally does not exist in British universities, where salaries are fixed. Mid-century America, by contrast, was as rife with pluralism, subsidised apartments and leave-of-absence as the medieval church, and academic conversation was full of talk of three-star restaurants and cottages in the sun. A visit to America, in those days, could turn your head.

  All that has nothing to do with politics, and Kermode remained lifelong a man of the Left. Socialism glories in equality, but it needs and demands subordination, since it is only through planning and the power of hierarchy, as Lenin saw, that equality can be pursued. It needs trained elites like the Bolsheviks and the privileges that accompany supreme power. A nomenclature was not an accidental effect of Soviet communism, and no one in the Soviet Union ever imagined it was. You need hierarchy to plan, as the pigs discovered in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, and total power needs purges simply to survive.

  Kermode belonged to the first generation for whom ideology had replaced religion as core belief: a shift in commitment which the world is still digesting and some are trying to reverse. In the Europe of the Thirties it commonly meant Marxism and its rivals, and like his friend Raymond Williams, whom he found sound in dogma though tedious in style, he never gave Marxism up, retreating only gently and in stages from the Old Left of the Thirties and the New Left of the Sixties into a state of indeterminate conviction promoted during his last years in London and Cambridge by what was becoming known as French critical thought. That involved a search for foundations of knowledge widely accepted to be undiscoverable, not wholly unlike Eliot’s lifelong struggle with words and meaning since his year in Paris in 1910-11 as a young Bergsonian. Like all heroic struggles it was doomed. If you confuse knowledge with account-giving, as critical theory commonly did, the denial of knowledge is inescapable. With all his uncertainties Kermode was always certain about that. ‘There is no One Correct Interpretation’. In his masterpiece The Genesis of Secrecy (1979) he mourned a double loss of faith, first in God, then in the classless society. The world, ‘our beloved codex,’ cannot be read and understood: ‘We may not see it, as Dante did, in perfect order, gathered by love into one volume’. We are forever at sea, forever doomed to think what we like because we can no longer hope for certitude. But we can ‘travel back and forth at will’ and enjoy ‘a momentary
radiance’ before the door of disappointment is finally shut. There will be no Armageddon, alas, no class war, no utopia. Mankind was once promised not answers but the Answer, first by religion and then by ideology, and those promises remain forever unfulfilled, like blank cheques no one can cash.

  The retreat from Moscow, for that very reason, was slow and never complete, and he clung to the wreckage of faith in a class-war that never happened and spoke of it little. It occasionally surfaced in his prose. In 1965, at the end of his Manchester years, he wrote an article for Partisan Review denouncing a nation that had almost re-elected a Conservative government, and declared that the Conservatives ‘epitomised most of what we know to be wrong with England.’ That knowledge, at least, called for no foundation. It was rooted in the warm-hearted gaiety of working-class life, he insisted, ‘non-existent in the English middle classes, with all their poses to hold.’ He was holding his own poses, by then, as a Manchester professor, but the Left remained an indispensable symbol of loyalty to his origins and his hunger for a lost innocence. It gave absolution to whatever you do or want, as religion had once done; like God it promised the remission of sin.

  In 1965 he left the grimy north for good and spent two idyllic years in Bristol, where he lived among fields and gardens before moving to University College in Bloomsbury. He was already the literary editor of Encounter. The warm-hearted gaiety of working-class life was far behind him by then, and he became a member of the Garrick Club, a Victorian club of conscious elegance in the heart of London founded in Victorian times to encourage actors to meet gentlemen and gentlemen to meet actors. It was fulfilling a role its founders would have approved, and he would tell joyfully how Stephen Spender had taken him there and how they had chanced at lunch to meet T.S. Eliot, sitting with him over cheese as he finished a meal. Eliot died in January 1965, the year Kermode left Manchester, but in thought he had already left northern grime far behind.