Even as We Speak (18 page)

It shouldn’t have mattered, but in the long run it did. While Russell had no objections to colonialist wars against ‘primitive’ peoples (in his view, such wars spread
enlightenment), he deplored wars between civilized nations. Unremarkable at first blush, this stand required courage in the war fever of 1914. Having consecrated his vows with a stretch in prison,
Russell unwisely went on to pursue pacifism as part of his religion of reason. He erected peace into a principle instead of just espousing it as a desirable state of affairs: if enough people
believed in peace, there would be no more war. The principle started looking shaky when Hitler came to power and set about incarnating the intractable truth that unless absolutely everyone believes
in peace the few who don’t will subjugate all the others. Einstein, a clear candidate for subjugation, gave up his pacifism straight away: he didn’t have to be a physicist to figure it
out. But Russell the philosopher was slow to get the point. And, even when he did, the principle was never given up. It was there waiting to lead him on to his biggest absurdity: unilateral nuclear
disarmament.

To an issue that he might have helped clarify he added nothing but confusion. While there was a good case to be made for multilateral nuclear disarmament, there was none at all to be made for
unilateral nuclear disarmament, since it depended on presenting a moral example to a regime that was, by its own insistence, not open to moral persuasion. Russell knew this: he had been one of the
first visitors to the Soviet Union to warn against what was going on there, and when the Americans were still the only possessors of the atomic bomb he had recommended threatening the Soviets with
it in order to change their ways. He knew it, but somehow he had not taken it in. I myself, as a multilateralist who did my share of marching from Aldermaston in the early sixties, well remember
the hard-line-unilateralist Committee of 100 and its adherents: talking to them about modern history was like talking to a Seventh-Day Adventist about Elvis Presley. They were fatuous, but with the
support lent them by Russell’s immense prestige they could believe that they had been granted a vision of a higher truth, beyond the sordid realities of politics. The eventual effect,
transmitted through the left wing of the Labour Party, helped to keep the Conservatives in power for a generation, because the public was unable to believe that Labour could be trusted with the
deterrent – a distrust that proved well founded when Michael Foot, during his doomed general-election campaign, bizarrely promised to keep the deterrent for only as long as it took to bargain
it away.

Russell spoke and thought as if the mass of humanity needed convincing that war was a bad thing. Somehow, he never quite took in the fact that most people already knew this but were genuinely
divided as to what should be done about it, and something he never took in at all was that there is no such thing as the mass of humanity – there are only individuals. Failing to grasp that,
he was, for all his real sympathy with the sufferings of mankind, paradoxically orating from the same rostrum as the century’s worst tyrants. Trying to wake us all up, he could never believe
that we were not asleep; that our nightmares were happening in daylight; and that his religion of reason could do little to dispel them. How could he not realize it? In this courageously frank
first volume of what could well amount to a classic study of the personality of genius. Ray Monk shows us how – by showing us that no matter how brilliant a mind may be, its stupidity will
still break through, if that is what it takes to assuage its solitude. With his eyes on the heights, Russell never noticed that his trousers were around his ankles: but now we know. They’re
ready for you on the set, Mr Wilder.

New Yorker
, December 1996

Rebecca’s Vest
by Karl Miller

As compact and nutritious as a field ration, this deceptively slight autobiography is a classic from the day it appears. Whether its author appears is another question, which he
is the first to ask. He takes off his helmet, and then the mask, but there is still the make-up. Fascinated by doubleness, the author of a highly original critical work on the subject, he calls
himself a double man, but understates the case. There are more than two of him in there.

Just to start with, there are the child who is the father of the man, the man who is the author of the knotty style, and the knotty stylist who can straighten the prose of others. In a
generation of outstanding literary editors, he stood out even from the rest: the back ends of the
Spectator
and the
New Statesman
, and both ends of the
Listener
,
flourished under his tutelage. His recent departure from the
London Review of Books
was bad news not just for that paper but for the whole of letters. If he has indeed edited his last
magazine, then an era is over. We should remember, however, the Stoppardian discovery that every exit is an entrance somewhere else. For Karl Miller to fall back for a better jump would suit the
duplex nature of a limelit recluse who always relished the idea of leaving even as he arrived, seeing things through to the bitter end only on the understanding that he was sorry he ever started.
Miller willingly appropriates D. H. Lawrence’s observation about some dark-blooded miner, that his soul was a strange engine.

Miller’s strange engine first turned its cogs in Scotland. A shilling version of his life would say that he was a fatherless boy from Edinburgh who did well at school, found out just how
systematic the class system could be when he was drafted into National Service, achieved upward mobility as a scholarship boy at Cambridge, and went on to bulk large in the general transformation
of the postwar British arts world which now looks more like a functioning meritocracy than any other aspect of the national life. Such would be a true enough account, but it would imply that he had
left Scotland behind.

He never has, and Britain is lucky that he is more of a Scots patriot than a Scottish Nationalist, or he would make a formidable champion for secession. Instead he favours a
Länder
solution, the cherishing of regional identity. Much of his written work – he is rightly sorry that there hasn’t been more – is in critical but proud appraisal of Scots writers and
thinkers. Drummond of Hawthornden, Burns, Sir Walter Scott – he knows where they are coming from and belongs among their number. But he is not a bit provincial, for one conspicuous reason:
the province had schools that opened on the world. In the Athens of the North he was taught Latin and Greek, a background that gave him, eventually, the whole of Europe for a garden. The
inculcation of hard books – how enviable an upbringing it now seems. It makes England, not Scotland, look like the province.

The vest of the title was worn by the Rebecca in
Ivanhoe.
Scott clearly appreciated her abundance of cleavage. Miller appreciated it in his turn. The boy bent over his books was also
the boy who watched some of the other boys having sexual intercourse with a small hole dug in the earth. Sexual intercourse was tremendously in evidence. Or, to put it Miller’s way:

He means that there was a lot of it about.

Unfortunately most of it was in the mind. The girls were hard to get, yielding up their chaste treasures in the dark of the cinema to stocking-top height only, whereupon the frail but firm hand
clamped down. Miller had obligatory recourse to secret diaries, basic training in the ability to brood. The classicist chastened the romantic, the romantic energized the classicist, and a
personality was developed which had the gift of attracting company by its air of solitude. Fleetingly invoked, the name of Alain-Fournier fills the bill. Miller often compares himself to young
Werther but the hero of
Le Grand Meaulnes
is a better fit. Karl Meaulnes must have wowed the girls even then.

Later on the girls became women and Karl Meaulnes pursued his sentimental education among them with what sounds like success, although the hints are so reticent as to achieve a better simulacrum
of modesty than male memoirists commonly contrive. He doesn’t claim it himself (and probably won’t enjoy having it claimed for him), but his combination of certitude and vulnerability
didn’t hurt him at all with the female collaborators on his various publications. As with his eminent contemporaries Ian Hamilton and Terence Kilmartin, testosterone behind the editorial desk
commanded an impressive loyalty amongst the surrounding oestrogen. Male contributors slaving for these hard taskmasters could easily fall prey to envy. We would have preferred to see our editors as
the kind of limping squadron adjutant who looks after a chap’s kit when he flies off to fight. But they were up there at the front of the formation, silk scarves fluttering in the
slip-stream, the roar of their strange engines barely drowning the massed female sighs aimed adoringly from below.

The dandy in himself is one of the selves Miller explores. Without Cambridge he would never have broken out into his fastidious clothes. At Cambridge the double man became triple at least.
Studying under F. R. Leavis, he deepened his seriousness, even to the point where he could see that the good Doctor, egged on by the implacable Queenie, had pushed seriousness to the verge of
frivolity. But serious Miller was drawn to the frivolity of Mark Boxer, who incarnated the appealing notion that stylishness was a discipline too. All those of us who still keenly feel
Boxer’s absence will feel it more keenly for his presence here. His portrait is one of the many keepsake miniatures which would make this book a little wall of Hilliards if there were nothing
else going on. But Miller being Miller, the other people, though he generously paints them as if they were there for themselves, are inevitably there for him. That people are dear to us according
to how they help us grow is one of the book’s many implicit teachings.

In later life Miller has been a professor (of English, at University College, London) and it is easy to imagine the Edinburgh schoolteacher that he might have been in his early life if academic
brilliance had not led him away. Muriel Spark’s Jean Brodie, haughty but susceptible, strikes a chord within his breast. The most valuable poise contains a passion. The clear intellect
performs its intricacies of style only on the surface of the instinctual deep. One of Miller’s favoured paintings is Raeburn’s, of the skater on the loch, his arms folded with apparent
insouciance, buoyed up by impending doom. The author of this book is on thin ice, and prefers it that way.

Self-pity, self-examination, self-renewal – they all saved him from self-satisfaction. He could easily have relaxed into the Establishment. Instead he has been one of the indispensable
people who have helped the Establishment to shake itself up – an injection of responsibility which one would like to see institutionalized in its turn. But to keep a country’s
institutions alert takes a supply of functionaries who are bigger than the job, overqualified, containing multitudes. They are hard to come by. Placemen settle in.

At one stage there was a Miller who hobnobbed with aristocrats. Unlike Evelyn Waugh’s aristocrats, some of whom tried to tell him that they were not the romantic paragons he painted them
as, Miller’s really were romantic paragons: the McEwen family, whose boy children came home from Eton on a private railway track to their country seat, Marchmont. A gifted and tragic bunch
who embodied all of Miller’s romantic longings – the death of his particular friend, Rory McEwen, is written short but with tears for ink – they could have pulled Karl Meaulnes in
and made him
le grand
Miller, with Marchmont for his Coole Park. But another Miller, the footballer, drew him back towards the proletariat. Even at the time when I was seeing all of the
best London literary editors at least once a week I was told that I would never get their true measure unless I saw them play football on the weekend.

I imagine he was Killer Miller. Certainly I wouldn’t have wanted to try putting a ball past him, having felt his wrath at Langham Place when he was editor of the
Listener
and I
wrote a radio column without having listened to the radio. As a result I had to listen to him. It was such a hell of a tongue-lashing that I left it to go on by itself and sprinted away down the
corridor. His secretary, holding her high heels in her hands, just managed to catch me. It turned out that I wasn’t fired at all. If the reason I never listened to radio was that I always
watched television, I might try to redeem myself by reviewing that instead. Thus his generosity had an influence on my life.

There are scores of writers who would pay him the same tribute. This book shows where that generosity came from – a mind whose outlook is fortified by the gaze within. If his prose does
everything but fly, it is only because he lacks the fluent writer’s actorish knack of completing himself on the page. Miller, already complete, can’t allow himself the glib rush. But
his considered pause, his capacity to dwell, gives us a unique book, whose only false note lies in its carelessly voiced double assumption that he will not edit again or write enough good books.
Coming from a man well aware that at the same age Verdi was twenty years short of composing
Falstaff
, it sounds like petulance, as if the skater on the loch had decided to walk home in a
huff.

Spectator
, 25 September, 1993

Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life
by Andrew Motion

Somehow serene even in their consuming sadness, beautiful poems made Philip Larkin famous while he was alive. Since his death, ugly revelations threaten to make him more famous
still. This unsparing biography furthers the work begun by the
Collected Poems
and the
Letters
of revealing how much more the poor tormented genius had to hide than we ever
thought. The mood is catching. By now everybody with something on him is bursting into print. Glumly we learn that he wasn’t just a racist, a wanker, a miser and a booze artist, he was also
prey, in his declining years, to such nameless vices as forming a friendship with A. N. Wilson.