Heresies and Heretics

by George Watson

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  In 1967, newly arrived in London, two storms broke over his head. The crisis in the English department in Bloomsbury, though intense, made no headlines: Kermode decided it was an Augean stable, as he bluntly put it, and forcibly changed it into a school of literary modernism. Colleagues never forgave him though, as Winifred Nowottny later remarked, ‘we decided not to quarrel.’ He spoke for years after of the Augean stable he had cleansed, and the resentment never died.

  The second storm, triggered by his resignation as literary editor of Encounter, broke in the same year and made international headlines. In March 1967 two American journals published claims that the CIA was subsidising Encounter by way of front organisations like the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and Kermode wrote to the chief editor, Melvin Lasky, to demand a full account of its financial sources. He had accepted the literary editorship without any such demand. The two talked in a garden near Bristol; then the trustees of the journal met in London, as Kermode relates in his memoir, probably for the first time, two of them crossing the Atlantic for the purpose. Spender is said to have left the meeting to look at pictures in the National Gallery, which was nearby, though he later denied the story; and negotiations were more seriously interrupted by the death of Kermode’s mother, which called for an absence of several days in the Isle of Man. On his return he found that Cecil King, the press baron, had called a decisive meeting in his office at the Daily Mirror; Lasky absented himself, but Kermode went armed with Spender’s letter of resignation which he was empowered to use if required. It was a manoeuvre that failed. ‘I was outclassed and had already been out-manoeuvred,’ he wrote in his memoir, and the reference to class echoes a social resentment he was never entirely to lose. He resigned from Encounter at the meeting and tendered Spender’s resignation too.

  I had been writing for Encounter since my first visit to Poland, which was in 1957 on behalf of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and knew the office staff. In future years they called the drama ‘the putsch that failed’, having watched a developing friendship between two British editors and their impatience with Lasky’s wayward manners and his unflinching conformity with the views of the State Department. Kermode explained it all to me over lunch soon after the crisis, and blamed the press for the red herring of funding. ‘The press decided it was all about the CIA,’ he told me, ‘and by the time I resigned it was too late to do anything about it.’ By the time he wrote Not Entitled it was much too late, as he may have felt, and in the age of the Vietnam War he must have known that the myth would do him no discredit. A failed crusade looks nobler than a failed putsch.

  It was the strangest of outcomes. The good name of those who had plotted against their chief had been preserved by a capitalist press, and the CIA myth became a universal assumption. Lasky, an ardent cold warrior, held the editorship till the journal expired for lack of funds in 1991, its work done. There was an office party in November 1989 to celebrate the fall of the Berlin wall, when a large, merry meeting drank cheap Spanish wine and ate pub sandwiches, but circulation was falling and only the editor doubted that the end was soon. Lasky, who already lived partly in Hamburg with his German wife, insisted that in Germany a Nazi revival was an impossibility, and his audience, British and Polish, did not wholly believe him. They were wrong, it is now clear, and he was right, and he ended his days in Berlin collecting books and writing a history of journalism, that mighty art which has still not found its chronicler.

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  Kermode was a Cambridge colleague of mine by then, and soon an ex-colleague, his eight unhappy years as Edward VII professor of English (1974-82) ending in acrimony. He had tried to transform Cambridge English as he had transformed English at University College in London, and in a collegiate university he found to his indignation it could not be done. He had been told, and he had not believed it: collegiate universities are not departmental. They are different. Colleges appoint fellows, dispose of funds and allocate rooms and secretarial staff. He was suddenly in a world he did not understand. ‘Nobody has power,’ he incredulously told a reporter, who printed it.

  Weeks before his appointment he burst into my college rooms with the American graduate student who was to become his second wife and told me excitedly of his plans. I listened with a sinking heart. He had listened to the warning of his predecessor L.C. Knights, but without belief; he was confident that power was about to be his. Then the lady spoke, to him rather than to me, and insisted she had no intention of settling in Cambridge: he would have to keep their London apartment. That was because she was writing a thesis for an American university, and I failed to persuade her that theses are written in Cambridge too, as I had once failed to persuade him that Cambridge professors do not have power. Sometimes, as he would discover, they do not even sit on appointment committees.

  Advice meant nothing to him, and to his dying day Kermode believed he had been slighted by a place where he nonetheless chose to spend the long decades of his retirement. He was unappeasable. His second wife departed, and he ended his days a lonely survivor of the European Left, which had once numbered Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre and E.P. Thompson among its luminaries. He was, by slow stages, single and alone.

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  His death in August 2010 was the end of an era, as the platitude goes, and platitudes are worth recalling. Not Entitled exudes pride in professional success – in what he called a miniature version of log-cabin to White House. Even the failures, in retrospect, came to look heroic. Encounter defeated him through the machinations of a press baron, he had decided, Cambridge English by a class snobbery still endemic in ancient universities proud of their privileges. He was probably unaware that King’s College, of which he was a fellow, had been founded as a charity school in 1441 with statutes that excluded the rich – the titled and the well-connected who flooded into Cambridge and Oxford in the eighteenth century and after being largely replaced by grammar-school boys long before the Victorian age was out. Oxbridge is a meritocracy, not an aristocracy, and to eavesdrop on its fellows and undergraduates is to notice it. Kermode never noticed it. He seldom met colleagues; as for undergraduates, he taught them for one year, found it frustrating and gave it up.

  His humiliation at home was played out, however, against a background of international triumph. In America it is called Making It, and his many visits changed him in a notable and ever-present way. Gossip about pay-bargaining fascinated him, and he adopted campus phrases like ‘getting mileage’ out of writing a book. They entered the bloodstream of his thought and talk. American academe was in its dizzy post-war boom when he first went there, and it changed those who went and was coveted by those who could not. The skies darkened, to be sure, with the Vietnam War, Iraq and finally bank failures. But by then Kermode had seen and done it all.

  America squandered praise on its guests as well as money, and he needed both. Books made him famous. He collected his reviews, which were worth collecting, and wrote a compelling book at eighty called Shakespeare’s Language (2000). I often sent congratulations, in full sincerity, but no praise was ever enough. A review I wrote of his Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne (1971), which embodied chapters from an abandoned book on The Faerie Queene, was entirely positive, but I had failed to mention a chapter on George Chapman in my review and received a sharp reproof: ‘I took a lot of trouble with that.’ When he complained that his lectures were ill attended I went to one, which seemed attended enough, and left when it was over because he was engaged in conversation. That cost me another reproof when we met. I could never believe, however, that he was a victim. He eventually married his American feminist, though not for long, and lived alone in a commodious house in the best suburb of Cambridge surrounded by ample lawns, but complained about a lack of room and the difficulty of finding gardeners, ending his days in a luxury flat in the heart of Cambridge, less splendid (one was given to understand) than one occupied by the American bestselling novelist James Jones in the hear
t of Paris. Much was given, including honours and titles, but much was not enough.

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  That helps to explain why his allegiance to the Left, though fading, never quite vanished. It followed a pattern familiar in his times: as socialist economies failed, and as the Soviet empire disintegrated, he joined the ranks of those for whom a hatred of American foreign policy is a sufficient substitute for connected thought. Then socialism became the S-word and dropped from use, and public commitments became ever more abstracted and ever more elaborately unclear. By the 1980s indeterminacy was the wear, in politics and in literature. ‘There is no One Correct Interpretation.’ Knowledge, for a time, turned into a cloud of unknowing, which it easily does for those who wilfully confuse knowledge with account-giving. As a reviewer, none the less, he remained firmly convinced that some books are better than others, and his intellectual life turned into a tightrope, the acrobatics increasingly elegant and well timed. He wrote better and better as he aged, an eloquent octogenarian.

  By then there was more and more to forget. In Stalinist days he had endorsed or condoned the greatest act of mass-murder in human history – perhaps three times the scale of Hitler’s holocaust. When Saul Bellow accepted the Nobel prize for literature in Stockholm in December 1976 he publicly denounced the claim of the Left to superior virtue, quoting ‘Race and the Socialists’, which I had published in Encounter a month before, and drew a telling conclusion: ‘There is no simple choice between the children of light and the children of darkness.’ By then Kermode had retreated to a more equivocal position, where insular Anglo-Saxon critics in three-piece suits were imagined to have panicked over a challenge called Deconstruction which they could not answer into hoping theory would go away. Then he hoped it himself. ‘When people say they want to do theory,’ he would say in disgust, ‘they don’t mean a theory of anything,’ and the school of Jacques Lacan and Roland Barthes, as he came to see, had become a desperate academic resource for those with nothing to say.

  That left little to applaud in life except worldly success, which always signified more than material advantage. It meant social acceptance – an embarrassing triumph, perhaps, for one who had once applauded proletarian solidarity. Not that there was much of a proletariat, by then, but it would have to do. He had no disciples, as Leavis and Empson once did, having shifted position too often, and his two failed marriages rate only a sentence or two in the memoir. He had friends, but he had lost the esteem of colleagues by denouncing his faculty in public at the Senate House for having rejected his reforms. His account of the incident is imaginative, however, and makes no mention of blocking the appointment of a junior colleague whose disappointment was the occasion for the meeting, or of smuggling his second wife without official approval into the lecture-list, or of trying to turn junior colleagues into ‘aides’, as he majestically called them, who would relieve him of official duties. As chairman of a degree committee he publicly announced that any failed candidate for a doctorate who threatened litigation would be allowed a second examination with new examiners – a proposal predictably greeted with refusals to examine under the threat of intimidation. He treated colleagues with contempt, and they returned contempt with hatred. In 1982 he declined a farewell party to mark his early retirement, and nobody was surprised.

  He lived on, and by choice, in a place he claimed to despise. Perhaps his knighthood in 1991 and his honorary doctorates consoled him. Music was his hobby, especially grand opera, and he had once tried hard to master the violin, but his life was in writing. That is what men of letters want, but in his last, lonely years one heard little but the note of complaint.

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  Someone once gaily compared him to Philoctetes who (as Sophocles tells) was exiled by the Greeks with an aching wound to a desert island and rescued because of his magical bow. For years Kermode was the best writer in English studies – style was his bow – and so few professors of literature have written well that his excellence is a matter for remark. Odd, perhaps, that he never wrote novels, as his friend Raymond Williams did, but like many novelists since Daniel Defoe he loved the interface of fact and fiction, and Not Entitled might be seen as a fictional masterpiece. In History and Fact (1988) he fantasised ingeniously about the Thirties Left to which, as a teenager, he had once given allegiance and faith, and offered the most elegant defence ever conceived of a lost generation that had advocated mass-murder as a solution to mass-unemployment. The generation of Auden and Spender could be read as a love story, he proposed, ‘almost a story of forbidden love,’ when young poets and novelists of good family and privileged education publicly called for a proletarian revolution that would destroy their own class and establish a one-party state. Only a very gifted man could have thought of that. But it would take a still more gifted one to justify what they did.

  Perhaps, at the back of his mind, he was recalling a wartime incident at sea that might stand forever as an image of the socialist age. A group of men rescued from a blazing ship loaded with explosives were seen from a distance to turn back and re-board, presumably because they were told the vessel had been made safe, to be blown up with no survivors. That might stand as a symbol and an image of an intelligentsia that believed first in Stalin and then in Mao, and one can only wonder whether Kermode thought so too. He had thought and rethought a good deal, after all, by his last years, and knew a lot about symbols and images.

  28. Douglas Adams

  Alone one night on a mountainside in Austria, somewhere near Innsbruck, he thought of something. In his rucksack was a hitchhiker’s guide to Europe, and staring up drunkenly at the night sky Douglas Adams wondered idly if anyone could ever write a guide to the cosmos too. That was how his first book, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, was born. It is about a humanoid called Arthur Dent adrift in space with a paranoid robot called Marvin. He offered the idea soon after, along with two others, to a BBC producer over a Japanese lunch in London, and the producer liked it, so it started as a radio serial in 1978. Neither of them could remember afterwards what the other two ideas had been.

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  Douglas was born in Cambridge in 1952, nine months before Francis Crick and James Watson discovered the double-helix structure of DNA there, and since his middle name was Noel he used to boast of being the first DNA. I taught him at Cambridge for three years from 1971, and after our first meeting we went to an Indian restaurant opposite the college to consider life in general and the study of English literature in particular. Food, as I later discovered, figured large in his life, and he eventually figured large too. Tall and gangling as a freshman, he turned portly under its influence, and by his middle years he looked rather like Charles de Gaulle, with several double chins and a jolly laugh. Somebody said he reminded you of a big shaggy wolfhound, and he was so awkward that he once, in conversation, broke his nose on his knee. An undergraduate performance in Sheridan’s The Rivals as the Irish baronet Sir Lucius O’Trigger, which I loyally attended, did not lead to an acting career, and he even had trouble keeping his accent in place. So he turned to writing scripts for student reviews, and went on doing that, or something like it, for the rest of his life, dying in 2001 of a heart attack in a gym in Santa Barbara, California, before he was fifty.

  He had been famous before he was thirty, and his early success worried him a little. When he first thought of a guide to the cosmos, I remember his saying, he had no idea of writing it himself. But then he hated writing more than writers usually do, and never expected to succeed – certainly not early in life. ‘I imagined plodding on and achieving a mild renown at about the age of forty.’ It all happened so fast – ‘rather like having an orgasm without the foreplay.’ By then he was living in a big house in Islington in London full of the electronic gadgets he adored – I even learned how to use some of them – and it seemed quite effortless and natural he should be a millionaire.

  He had followed his father to his college in Cambridge and, after his father h
ad given up a clerical career and remarried, was blessed with a stepmother who liked him and gave him what he wanted. Impulse-buying and intercontinental travel came naturally to him even as a teenager. As a freshman, at our first meeting, he astonished me by saying he had just been to Istanbul and loved it so much he was going back soon, as if hopping a plane to distant places was natural to him; and an expensive new dictionary I showed him soon afterwards, acquired with some difficulty on a college grant, so excited him that he went straight out and bought one for himself. His early struggles after graduating included cleaning chicken-sheds, playing electric guitars and guarding the door of an oil-sheik all night. That was in a London hotel, and he used to tell how, as he sat in the corridor reading, a young woman emerged from the opposite door, looked at him enviously and said, ‘It’s all right for you – you can read while you’re working.’ Then, and in no time, he was famous.

  His fortune, when it came, seemed continuous with his student life, since he had always adored expensive gadgets and noisy parties. A Douglas Adams party was memorable. When he finally married in 1991 he held one in the Groucho Club in Soho, and it was so crowded with friends and colleagues that we had to semaphore to each other across the room. Even his mother, a retired hospital nurse, came to that party, and sat there looking bemused and out of place. Then he called for silence and made a one-sentence speech. ‘Jane and I were hoping to tell you we were going to get married, but we can’t do that, because we got married this morning.’ Applause, and a lot more drinking, in the heart of Soho. A good half of the light-entertainment industry of the English-speaking world seemed to be there to celebrate.

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  Writing was always an agony to him, though he followed Hitchhiker, first a radio series and then a book and later a play and a film, with three sequels – ‘a trilogy in four parts’ – and eventually a fifth. Finally came his one serious book, a plea for endangered species that followed a trip to Madagascar called Last Chance to See. That was in 1990, and he was immensely proud of it, though he was ultimately too good-natured to be a crusader. Soon writing saw less of him, though he continued to work on a Hollywood adaptation of his masterpiece, and in 1999 he moved to California. The trouble with comic writing, he would say, was that it was all in the form of words, so drafting means getting it right, or nearly right, phrase by phrase. That was when he started collecting first editions of P.G. Wodehouse, who must have had the problem and who certainly had the solutions. Writing went on being hard, and it was no strain giving it up. He was a publisher’s nightmare, and deadlines lay scattered in his wake. ‘I stare at a piece of paper until my head bleeds.’ Once, when I called on him in London, I found two women camping in the house who had been told by his publisher not to leave without a complete manuscript, even if it took all night or several nights. Douglas, who was endlessly gregarious, was delighted with the interruption, the ladies less so, and I was skilfully ejected after a cup of coffee.