Going Up (14 page)

Mark Boxer hid his origins in the open; the unique, he seemed to suggest, needed no precise provenance. He appeared to have the key to some atavistic box of tricks, dodgy and delicious and not without a false bottom. The shrill laugh suggested bisexuality, but made no promises. Mark was never boring because he made no effort to entertain; other people were there to entertain him. The shriek of his greeting, or its lack, told them whether they were in or out. We were never friends, but Mark did look at me, and I at him, as if we had some unspoken affinity: it suggested that we were both getting away with (and from) something, and I was pretty sure what it was. The last time I saw him, shortly before he died, of a brain tumour in 1988, it was at the wheel of his car in the Cromwell Road. In a characteristic show of brave egotism, he got out of his car, left the door open, and came to embrace me, unhurriedly, while the traffic complained.

Typical of Boxer’s minimalism was the early resection of his first name, by a single letter. After Cambridge, he soon become Marc the
Tatler
cartoonist, later the first editor of the
Sunday Times
colour magazine, and – second time around the marital merry-go-round – the husband of elegant
Anna Ford, the ladylike newscaster. His advent as editor of Cambridge’s literary magazine
Granta
, which Leavisites such as Karl Miller had made serious to the point of tractarian, converted that publication into something more like Oxford’s
Isis
, in which Ken Tynan had figured as an ‘Isis idol’.

Karl had established himself, very soon after he arrived at Downing, as the ruling literary pundit. Solemn and laconic, he was wise enough to offer no evidence of being either a poet or a candidate for prosaic publication. Brevity was all his wit. He avoided being judged by sitting in prompt, often negative, judgement on others. Once instated as editor of
Granta
, he was Cambridge’s literary centurion: he bid some come; others he waved away to cheap prints such as
Varsity
. Those whom he selected were liege men who did not fail to endorse the accuracy of his taste. Nor did he lack female acolytes such as the ‘giggling armful’ Claire Delavenay, who later chose Nick Tomalin as a likelier, perhaps comelier, candidate for clever matrimony.

Nick became President of the Union and was soon a boy wonder on Fleet Street. He was one of the first English journalists to report on the Vietnam War. His article ‘Zapping Charlie Cong’ made such an impact that, a few years later, in 1973, Harry Evans, then editor of the
Sunday Times
, persuaded him to cover the war that had just broken out between Israel and the Arabs. Nick was killed on the Golan Heights by a Syrian heat-seeking missile, which struck the vehicle in which he was sitting while others took a roadside leak. Harry then appointed Claire literary editor of the
Sunday Times
.

Dressing self-importance as an austere, lifelong duty, the mature Karl Miller assumed the sighing supremacy of the man who cut and distributed laurels. He gave the rudiments of a pulpit to the various editorial chairs that he occupied as the
pontifex maximus
of British letters. He saved and he damned and there was, as the Aberdonian preacher said to Byron, ‘No hope for them as laughs.’ Karl’s capacity for sitting in judgement was unlimited. When, in due time, he reviewed
The Double Helix
, James Watson’s account of his and Crick’s Nobel Prize-winning discovery, with a little
unacknowledged help from Rosalind Franklin, of the structure of DNA, Miller confessed that he was unqualified to evaluate the description of their activities in the laboratory. He was, however, able to confirm the accuracy of the account of the scientists’ lunches in the courtyard of the Eagle (a Cambridge pub adjacent to the Cavendish), since he had eaten Scotch eggs there himself during the same period.

Karl’s public sponsor was Noel Annan, the tall, bald young Provost of King’s who had secured his own early elevation to high places by joining himself, closely, to experienced climbers. Annan did little significant academic work, but he was the pundit to consult, and impress, when it came to the North Face of English academic ascendancy. He advised a friend of mine, whose father was a well-known publisher, to abandon the study of Geography – of all things! – before it damaged her prospects beyond repair. After Dear Noel introduced her to Edmund Leach, she went on to achieve the smart distinction of a First in Anthropology.

As Annan’s protégé at King’s, Boxer gave off a licensed whiff of sulphur. His dark, unblinking glance promised access to diabolical improprieties. Had some latter-day Lord Queensbury accused him of ‘posing as a sodomite’, his shrillest laugh might well have welcomed the soft impeachment; secret straightness was more to be concealed than his aptitude for outrage. Narcissism was a convenient posture; it required the pursuit of nothing deeper than a polished surface in which to verify his allure. His cartoons enhanced the fame of those whom they lampooned. The leading Cambridge actress, who had a clever voice, very short legs and a plain, bloodless face, was caricatured as a sex symbol captioned ‘Dudy Foulds, the well-known animal lover’. While there were several more attractive females in the register (Margaret Baron in particular), Dudy’s primacy was crowned, her illusions of stardom sustained, by Marc’s barbed generosity. There was no more desirable promotion than to figure in his pillory. I was not yet among those who did so, but when he became editor of
Granta
in the following
year, I made bold to submit a short story about a Chelsea novelist who blamed his infidelities on the obstinate fidelity of his wife. Mark said he loved it and promised to publish (and illustrate) it.

In the issue previous to the one in which my story was to appear he printed a poem in which God was portrayed by one Stephen de Houghton as a tired old man, incapable of managing his unruly creation. The poem, no more than a naughty exercise, was deemed blasphemous by the university authorities. Despite a plea in mitigation by Morgan Forster, who was permanently encased in King’s and whose reputation as our greatest living novelist became more and more unassailable as the decades passed during which he published few books and no fiction at all, the Vice-Chancellor ordained that Mark be sent down. Not since Shelley was dismissed from Oxford, for publishing a provocative squib entitled
The Necessity of Atheism
, had either of the great universities acted with such draconian piety.

Theatrical and literary Cambridge staged a show of indignation. Boxer became the smartest martyr ever to be sentenced to catch the London train. Blasphemy was established as a staging post on the way to fame, for the poem’s publisher, if not for the poet. Thanks to Noel Annan’s emollient diplomacy, Mark’s sentence was reduced, at the last moment, to precisely one week’s rustication during May Week. This was intended to ensure that he could play no pseudo-messianic part in the college’s May Ball.

Despite the negotiated brevity of his imposed absence, Boxer’s departure was accompanied by a procession of his supporters, complete with pipes and drums, down King’s Parade all the way to Cambridge station. It was as close to a political demonstration as Cambridge ever came during my time there. I watched, from the window of the Copper Kettle in King’s Parade. The mock funeral was organised by David Stone, a square-jawed boxing blue, whose devotion was as superfluous to Mark’s redemption as it was ruinous to his own prospects. Having dived in to save someone in no danger of drowning, Stone neglected to turn up several of his Tripos
papers, failed his exams and was sent down without exciting any show of reciprocal solidarity. He became the manager of a group of south London local newspapers. Soon after I had come down, I met him outside Stamford Bridge. He offered me a job writing up Chelsea FC’s home matches. He died soon afterwards.

In their officious determination to make an example of Mark, the university authorities forgot that May Balls went on into the early hours. Since his period of exclusion ended on the stroke of midnight, the resurgent exile was within his swiftly claimed rights to make a spritzy entrance while revellers and their girls were still doing the valeta and whatever other dances Acker Bilk or Nat Temple and his orchestra were there to purvey. The small, lasting consequence of Mark’s brief, not very bruising fall from grace was that he was barred from resuming the editorial chair of
Granta
, to which Karl Miller was promptly restored. Shortly afterwards, he informed me that my short story was not suitable for publication.

T
ONY BECHER AND I went to the last public lectures given by ‘Bertie’ Russell in Mill Lane. In all eyes but his own, he had been superseded, as the emblematic great philosopher, by his quondam pupil Wittgenstein. The biggest lecture room was thronged beyond its large capacity. Microphones had been rigged to carry the great man’s words to the frustrated crowd outside. Not flattered to be viewed as the paragon of intellectual antiques, Russell regarded us with baleful hauteur. After delivering his lecture, with Whiggish precision, he said, ‘I suspect that some people have come here for the wrong reasons. Accordingly, next week’s lecture will be twice as difficult.’ I have never again heard the word ‘accordingly’ used in colloquial speech. Tony and I returned, early, for the more difficult second lecture. As Russell may have calculated, it attracted a greater audience than the first.

My appetite for the new philosophy was excited by the notion that, by demystifying language, it would puncture prophetic pretentiousness and render void the confident Christian promise that He would come again. Religion and ideology would cease to sanction the forces of reaction. The existence of God could not be disproved, but His dominion could be shown to be superfluous to any useful explanation of the world (as ‘phlogiston’
was to combustion). The Jews, I liked to presume, would lose their millennial miasma.

In due time, Ayer’s ‘Verification Principle’ was shown to be an unreliable measure of the truth of a proposition, not least because it could not itself be verified; but I was quick to assimilate it into my idea of fiction. I have never quite relinquished the idea that whatever was said in a novel should, in principle, be available to the senses: dialogue and accurate description, even of imaginary events, allow the reader to impersonate experience and to assess the honesty, if not the truth, of a story. Nouns and verbs are good, adverbs and adjectives suspect; speech is audible and plausible, or not; the stream of consciousness carries too much mud and too much confectionery.

Renford Bambrough’s recommendation of Karl Popper’s
The Open Society and Its Enemies
chimed sweetly with my appetite for iconoclasm. During a wartime professorship in New Zealand, Popper had learned ancient Greek in order to be sure that he fully understood what Plato meant to say, the better to dismantle his political thought. His diligence did not inoculate him against accusations, by prim classicists, of having misconstrued the original text. It was overenthusiastic to blame antique sources for unfortunate events in the present century. Master Popper could be forgiven for denouncing modern ideologues, but to arraign Plato, as the
fons et origo
of totalitarianism, was tantamount to blasphemy. Popper’s polemic opened a second front against both Friedrich Hegel and his nemesis Karl Marx. Schopenhauer was cited to back the case against the prolific Hegel, one German against another. It was a relief to be told that Hegel, the voluminous trimmer, was not worth reading. As for Heidegger, did he merit so much as a mention among philosophy’s guilty men?

Popper, like Wittgenstein, made no direct reference to what was later labelled ‘the Holocaust’. Philosophical ‘systems’ in general were ripe for disparagement; but in the 1950s, no proper noun had yet been allotted to the systematic extermination of six million Jews, on a warrant primed by
the Catholic Church and seconded by Martin Luther and, by implication, Karl Marx, in his reference to the Jews as a race of ‘hucksters’. Of Jewish origin, Popper had been raised as a Protestant. Agnosticism allowed him, as if in accordance with a universal scientific rule, to discount all religious doctrines and vanities. The only respectable alternative to ‘holistic’ ideologies of all kinds was ‘piecemeal social engineering’. Open societies should rectify their flaws in a case-by-case, consensual manner. The greatest treason of the clerks was to seek to cook humanity’s books in line with
a priori
recipes.

After the war Popper was translated to a professorship at the London School of Economics. He became
persona non grata
in Wittgensteinian circles, as a consequence of a notorious fracas at the Moral Sciences Club in Richard Braithwaite’s rooms in King’s in 1946. In heated dissent from Popper’s paper, which had announced that, while discounting old-style metaphysics, he did believe that there were such things as universal moral laws, Wittgenstein snatched and brandished the poker from the fireplace. Popper observed that one instance of such a law was that people should not threaten visiting lecturers with pokers. Wittgenstein then stormed out of the room. Popper was never invited to the Moral Sciences Club again. Cambridge myth had it that Wittgenstein had had the better of the exchange. The fortune that he had renounced still served to gild his halo. The unadmitted comedy was that both philosophers had donned
ersatz
personalities – the sublime, eccentric Cambridge genius and London University’s leading Doctor of Science – but their antagonism could be read as an instance of ‘the return of the repressed’. The spat was decidedly unEnglish, but hardly unprecedented in conflicts between ex-Viennese and (though no one said as much out loud) ex-Jewish vanities.

The neo-Wittgensteinian form of argument that Renford Bambrough advocated was known as ‘therapeutic positivism’. Wittgenstein had come to consider metaphysical convictions as essentially neurotic: they could not be refuted, but they might be
cured
. The recommended treatment was
to refrain from aggressive confrontation (however tempting recourse to the poker might be). Like Freud’s neurotic, the metaphysician was to be encouraged, by sympathetic attention, into disclosing more, and more, of the ‘reasoning’ that lay behind his ideas. He might then come to see for himself that they were at odds with practical experience and that some absurd private logic had beguiled him into conjuring up self-contradictory and/or irrational chimeras. Because there were lions, it did not follow that there had to be unicorns. As any number of egotists have argued, reason is the sovereign cure for egotism.

Renford told us how, on one occasion, Wittgenstein had met his disciple John Wisdom one day and asked him how his meeting had gone with a certain philosopher. Wisdom confessed that it had been an exasperating encounter. Wittgenstein said, ‘Perhaps you made the mistake of disagreeing with something Casimir said.’ Casimir Lewy, another refugee (although I never cared to guess it), was a Trinity philosopher who set himself such high standards that, not unlike Wittgenstein, he was rarely disposed to publish his work. Rigour made him an implacable opponent. Wisdom, who succeeded, with at least a show of reluctance, to Wittgenstein’s professorial chair, brought Anglo-Saxon humour to a dour discipline. His skittishness did not always find favour among the
purs et durs
of the Moral Sciences faculty. Under his quirky aegis, philosophy offered a combination of recherché comedy, salutary high-mindedness and coterie conceit.

My private wish was that anti-Semitism could be shown, if not proved, to be nonsensical and, in a revised public language, might be rendered literally unspeakable. I did not disclose this ambition to Tony Becher. He regarded philosophy as an extension of mathematics, in which rhetoric had no place, except in arming scorn for the illogical. I wanted it to supply the muscular intelligence that would confound the barbarians, especially those already within the gates. My curiosity was both purposeful and limited. I never thought of attending the lectures of the thick-legged, brown-stockinged,
allegedly knickerless Mrs Braithwaite, whose subject was ‘the logic of a picture language’. She was no picture herself.

We were warned that to become a Moral Scientist entailed, almost certainly, that one would not get a first-class degree. Philosophers were the poor friars of the humanities. Unworldliness did not inhibit unnamed colleagues from ironising on the fact that John Wisdom had not got a first-class degree. ‘But then,’ they would say, ‘he did go and get himself psychoanalysed!’ Wisdom propounded his version of meta-Freudian therapy in a series of nine o’clock lectures entitled ‘The psychology of philosophy’. They had no specific content and he never referred to traditional texts. He brought no books to the podium and rarely resumed the topic he had been dealing with last time, even if he could remember what it was.

A long, domed cranium, flanked by backswept wings of grey hair, like his quizzical eyebrows and hollow whisper, gave Wisdom an air of caricatural sagacity. Each morning, he seemed amazed that there we all were again. Initiates sat in the front row and were primed to offer topics apt for dissection. Wisdom could appear startled by even a planted query. Like a wise comedian, he would gaze at the speaker (often Mr McKnelly, later a parish priest, sometimes Mr Gomme, later a Leavisite professor, occasionally Mrs Gomme, later divorced) and pause, aghast, before responding in a voice at once hollow and carrying, dubious and assured. His words seemed urgent, even pained. They were also calculated to amuse.

Newcomers were not immune to gentle ridicule. When he first attended one of Wisdom’s lectures, Piers Paul Read (a Roman Catholic writer, at Cambridge a decade after me) responded, perhaps too promptly to a request for a ‘metaphysical question’, by proposing ‘Does God exist?’ On Read’s account, Wisdom looked at him with practised dismay and said, in a tone calculated to amuse the
cognoscenti
in the front row, ‘Oh! I was thinking of something more along the lines of…’ He tapped the desk on his dais. ‘Is this a table?’

Wisdom reacted with affectations of dismay to naïve tourists, who demanded that he define his terms. ‘It depends what you mean by X’ was a sophism made popular by C. E. M. Joad on
The Brains Trust.
Joad, a professor at Birkbeck, was not held in high esteem in Cambridge. Asked to review one of his books, Russell had responded, ‘Modesty forbids’. Joad fell from radio grace after being convicted of travelling on the London–Exeter railway without a ticket, a boasted habit of his. The publicised fine of £2 in effect ruined him. His name endures if only because his conduct on the tennis court figures in Stephen Potter’s
Gamesmanship
. He is depicted as demanding a clear call of ‘in’ or ‘out’, even when his return of service had hit the back netting without touching the court. ‘Cyril’ was a Hampstead neighbour of Guy and Celia Ramsey and an unsubtle
coureur de femmes
. He thought nothing of female intelligence and proclaimed the sex to be good for only one thing.

Russell matched and outlasted him in that regard, but he was wise enough to refrain from loud disdain for women. Russell’s amorous ambitions were not abandoned with age. Legend promises that on one Saturday night, when there was a large party at 5 Jordan’s Yard, an old gentleman knocked on the door, announced to the foreign girl who had opened it that he was Bertrand Russell and asked whether he might come in. Monik or Ilse is said to have advised him to try the old people’s home. This story is either true or untrue and so, in theory at least, it belonged to the realm of the empirical, even though, in practice, there is no way of verifying it. There were, as A. C. Ewing used to say, from the philosophical wilderness in which he grazed (his voice was famously sheepish), more things in heaven and earth than positivists could ever be positive about.

Definitions, Wisdom suggested, were a matter more of decision than of predetermined rigidity. ‘How would I define a good book?
Must
I?’ There was an anguished pause, then: ‘
Good!
’ He tasted the word cautiously, as if it were stem ginger. ‘Um, would it help to say, as a definition, that something
was good if it added up to an even number?’ One day, again pressed for a definition by some neophyte, he asked if any of us had read David Garnett’s novel
Lady into Fox
. If not, no matter: the title encapsulated the plot, which was that one day, the wife of a fox-hunting man was transformed into a fox. Wisdom asked us to imagine the transformation, the lengthening of the muzzle, the rust of fur which then appeared on it, the levitation of the ears and the bushing of the tail, possibly. At what point, he wanted to know, would we be forced to say, ‘By George, she’s now definitely a fox!’? Wisdom made Garnett’s story seem more subtle, or macabre, than it actually is. In the novella, the lady turns into a fox with instantaneous abruptness.

Wisdom’s charisma secured the allegiance of his entourage, but it did not travel well. Lacking an impressive bibliography, he had no eminent standing outside Cambridge. In the 1970s, he would be struck off the register of philosophical worthies by Bryan Magee and Bernard Williams, the scrutineers of merit in the television age. If Wisdom’s raising of the eyebrows suggested amazement at human credulity, there was also secret anguish in him. He would not go into a church even for the funeral of his painter wife, Pamela. His hobby was riding horses, though not to hounds. He quit the Moral Sciences faculty before reaching retirement age and accepted a chair in the University of Oregon, where he was reported to be happier than in pedestrian Cambridge. He kept a horse on campus and could leap almost directly from his chair to the saddle.

I discovered Cambridge philosophy to be a talking game which had something in common with amateur dramatics. There was, however, no cynicism in my zeal for therapeutic positivism. I shared what I took to be its aversion to religious beliefs. Wittgenstein’s executors, Peter Geach (who never wore socks) and Miss Anscombe, were proselytising Roman Catholics. After he had died in Dr Bevan’s house in Cambridge, they made sure that the Master, who had indeed been baptised as a child, was given a Roman Catholic funeral.

Although no one was coarse enough to say so out loud, post-war Cambridge philosophy (including the franchised version preached in Oxford) seemed
Judenrein
. There was nervous symmetry between the admitted wish, common to some extent to both Popper and Wittgenstein, to purge the world of the demons that had bedevilled Europe and an unadmitted desire to be done, in the most refined sense, with the Jews. As Wisdom said of invisible snakes in the lecture room: ‘You can’t see them, but they’re
there
.’ He meant, of course, that they were not; but then again, there they were. Jewishness was inherent in Wittgenstein’s personal magic. Late in his life, he claimed, or confessed, that his thinking was ‘100 per cent Hebraic’. His attempt to purge the world of false gods was a kind of piety.