They used to say that Cambridge was better at “science”; the deceptive word “scientist” as opposed to the superior term “natural philosopher” not having been coined until the 1830s. Very well, it was at least true that Isaac Newton had operated here (his frantic experiments in bogus alchemy more than once igniting his own rooms) and that Charles Darwin had occupied the very same chambers as William Paley, author of Natural Theology and supreme bard of the quixotic argument “from design.” More intriguing to me and my young contemporaries, restlessly modern as we aspired to be in the early 1960s, was the chance to walk past the Cavendish Laboratories and see where the atom had first been split, or to pass by The Eagle pub, into which Crick and Watson had strolled with exaggerated nonchalance one lunchtime to announce that with the double helix they had uncovered “the secret of existence.”
My encounter with all this liberating knowledge and inquisitive atmosphere was very nearly over before it had begun. In my very first term, in October 1962, President Kennedy went to the brink, as the saying invariably goes, over Cuba. I shall never forget where I was standing and what I was doing on the day he nearly killed me. (It was on the touchline, being forced to watch a rugby game, that I overheard some older boys discussing the likelihood of our annihilation.) At the close of the BBC’s programming that night, Richard Dimbleby enjoined all parents to please act normally and send their children to school in the morning. This didn’t apply to those of us boarders who were already at school. We were left to wonder how the adult world could be ready to gamble itself, and the life of all the subsequent and for that matter preceding generations, on a sordid squabble over a banana republic. I wouldn’t have phrased it like that then, but I do remember feeling furious disgust at the idea of being sacrificed in an American quarrel that seemed largely to be of Kennedy’s making in the first place.
I have changed my mind on a number of things since, including almost everything having to do with Cuba, but the idea that we should be grateful for having been spared, and should shower our gratitude upon the supposed Galahad of Camelot for his gracious lenience in opting not to commit genocide and suicide, seemed a bit creepy. When Kennedy was shot the following year, I knew myself somewhat apart from this supposedly generational trauma in that I felt no particular sense of loss at the passing of such a high-risk narcissist. If I registered any distinct emotion, it was that of mild relief.
If politics could force its way into my life in such a vicious and chilling manner, I felt, then I had better find out a bit more about it. At Mount House I had enjoyed the “current affairs” class and taken part in a few school debates, forcing myself to speak in public because for a short while I had developed a stutter. Who knows where this originated in my psyche (my mother later told me that I’d also stuttered a bit when my baby brother was born, no doubt in another cynical bid for attention), but it was certainly made worse by teasing and I once made the huge mistake of trying to say the name of my railway destination at term’s end — Chichester — in front of a large group. The driveling Chi-Chi-Chi-Chi-Chichester noise that resulted was to follow me around for a bit. Anyway, the main position I can remember taking was in opposition to the Tory attempt to ban “colored” immigration from the West Indies.*
Two aspects of The Leys combined to change not just what I thought, but — always much more important — how I thought. The first pressure was negatively charged, so to speak, and the second more positively so. To begin with the negative: I was highly conscious of being very fortunate to be at the school, and of having parents who were willing to sacrifice to get me there and keep me there. It offended me, in an almost aesthetic way, to find that the bulk of my contemporaries took this immense good fortune as no more than their due. Methodism is a trade like any other, and the majority of the boys were the sons of solid Lancashire and Yorkshire businessmen, who thought it entirely natural that they need not attend the sort of school where they might have to consort with the children of their employees. I found myself immensely disliking this mentality, and the accents in which it was expressed.
On the positive side, The Leys was in Cambridge, and if your father was a don at the university you could be a “home boarder”: in other words come to the school daily and go home at night. This meant that there was a certain leaven in the lump, and many lifelines to the outside world. There were boys with names like Huxley and Keynes, who really were from those distinguished families, and there was the son of a Jewish Nobel Prize winner named Perutz. As the general election of 1964 approached, a number of Labour bumper stickers were to be seen on our teachers’ cars. Then there was one of Methodism’s many paradoxes, which was its historic identification with the working class. This has been overstated and often distorted — the historian Élie Halévy had a memorable debate with Eric Hobsbawm over whether it was Methodism that had defused revolution among the lower orders in the nineteenth century — but it meant in practice that some of the visiting preachers on Sunday were unpolished ministers from tough working-class parishes, who gave us some idea of how the other half (actually very much more than half) lived. Donald Soper, the best-known Methodist in the country, was an announced socialist with a column in Tribune, George Orwell’s old weekly. His visit to address us in assembly was a sensation. The country’s other leftist weekly, the New Statesman, was kept in the library, along with a specially displayed copy of the Fabian Society pamphlet that called for the abolition of the public school system. The great J.G. Ballard, who had had the reverse of the Ian Watt experience in that he’d been interned by the Japanese (Empire of the Sun) as a small boy, before being sent to the same house in the same boarding school as me, once did jokingly say that the food at The Leys was inferior to the Lunghua camp in Shanghai, but was later to admit that he’d been agreeably surprised by how comparatively little torture there had been.
This duality in the life and mind of The Leys was beautifully captured for me by an incident in my first year. I was cornered in some chilly recreation room by a would-be bully named E.A.M. Smith, a brainless and cruel lad a year or so my senior. This tough and tasty dunce excelled at games and was a member of a highly exclusive Christian crackpot sect named the Glanton Brethren, which in its own disordered mind constituted an elect of god’s anointed. “Hitchens is being gassy,” he said, using the school’s argot for people like me who talked too much. “The cure for being gassy is a bit of a beating.” I wasn’t completely sure that he couldn’t deliver on this threat, and the uncertainty must have shown on my features because suddenly a voice cut in: “Oh, please, don’t give a damn about Smith.” The moron’s grin began to fade and the few who would probably have sided with him lost interest at once.* My rescuer was a tall, thin boy with a certain presence to him. Who was this chap, who could make a muscular thug shrivel? His name, it turned out, was Michael Prest. He was in the next “house” to me but was a home boarder because his father was an economics don at Jesus College. I recognized him without knowing his name because every morning in chapel, when the rest of us bent forward at the call to pray, he remained sitting up and unbowed. There was nothing the prefects and teachers could do about this: the law said we had to be in chapel every day but they couldn’t force us to pray on top of that, or even compel us to pretend to do so. I admired this stand without emulating it. Within a few days I had made a new and fast friend and then one morning, as everyone else but Michael crashed lazily forward in their pews, I took a deep breath and held myself upright. It felt very lonely for a moment but soon there was nothing to it. I started bringing books to read during the sermons and the prayers, in order to improve the shining hour. R.H. Tawney on Religion and the Rise of Capitalism was, I remember, an early choice.
The lexicographer Wilfred Funk was once invited to say what he thought was the most beautiful word in the English language and nominated “mange.” If asked, I would without hesitation give the word “library.” The Leys not only had a fine library of its own, but my house — “North B” (the other houses,
since shamed by the magnificence of Hogwarts, being unimaginatively named “North A,” “East,” “West,” and “School”) — also had its own mini-version. From this hoard I one evening borrowed a life-changing book called Hanged by the Neck, a Penguin paperback issued as part of the growing national debate over the death penalty. It had two authors: one was Arthur Koestler and the other C.H. Rolph. The latter was the crime correspondent for the New Statesman: the name concealed the identity of Inspector Bill Hewitt of the City of London police, whom I was later to meet. Between them, these two simply demolished the case for capital punishment and gave some hair-raising examples of cold, hideous miscarriages of justice. This had two effects on me: it drew me further into the then-raging argument over the historic British institution of the gallows, which eventually culminated in its abolition in 1967, and it decided me that I would read anything by Arthur Koestler. Before long I was re-reading Darkness at Noon for what felt like (and quite possibly was) the third time in a month.
Things were quickening with me, in other words. I was in a sophisticated city with a treasure-house of culture. (One evening I found myself sitting in King’s College chapel, listening as Yehudi Menuhin played, just in front of the newly acquired Rubens, Adoration of the Magi. I recall thinking that this was almost too rich a mixture for a Navy brat.) The Leys if anything favored sciences over the arts — its old boys tended to be “quietly eminent,” as one newspaper article rather devastatingly phrased it — but we could boast of having produced James Hilton (“Mr. Chips” having been based upon a veteran master of the school named W.H. Balgarnie*) as well as Malcolm Lowry and J.G. Ballard. I became too omnivorous in my reading, trying too hard to master new words and concepts, and to let them fall in conversation or argument, with sometimes alarming results. I gained a reputation among the sporting types (and perhaps, to be fair, not only among them) as a pseudo-intellectual. I recall two diagnoses from this period. The first, from some school counselor with a psychologist’s bent, awarded me an “Aladdin’s Cave complex.” This was flattering in a way, since it suggested that I had an embarras de choix. But it also suggested that I was too brittle to decide among so many possible treats. The second, blunter verdict came from my fairly genial if unillusioned housemaster. He informed me, in the course of one of several harangues about my character, that I was in some danger of “ending up as a pamphleteer.” It was one of those moments that one knows instantly will always be retained in the memory. At last I had a word for it! And a word that had been applied to Defoe, at that.
By the time that I was fifteen or so, then, I had acquired some precocious knowledge of the Cambridge-related worlds of Bloomsbury and the Fabians, symbolized by the figure of Bertrand Russell, whose books I was also smuggling into the chapel. I knew enough to know that my next stop ought to be Oxford, which furnished the other half of this socio-intellectual equation. I even had a clear notion that the ideal Oxford college would be Balliol, and the desired course of study Philosophy, Politics and Economics, or the famous “PPE.” I was doing well enough at “The Lit”: the Literary and Debating Society run by one of the more urbane classics masters. My stutter almost banished, I even did a little acting and made a small success of the part of Taplow in Terence Rattigan’s classic The Browning Version. And I was beginning to try some writing.
I had “known” for years that this was what I really wanted to do. Indeed, in my grander moments I would want to claim that I had always “understood” that it was what I had to do. But I had no real concept of writing as a “living,” let alone as a life. At prep school and in the holidays, I had filled little exercise books with chiefly historical efforts, including a soon-abandoned grand narrative of the Napoleonic Wars. At The Leys there was an annual thing called the Thomas Essay Prize, with a book-token at the end of it and a handshake from the headmaster on the school’s open “speech day” every summer, for the doting parents to witness. I entered myself for this prize in my first year and was runner-up, and I won it in one form or another every subsequent year. The only set topic that I can now remember (because there was always a set topic and it was always a worthy and elevated one) was Martin Buber’s homely maxim that “True Living Lies in Meeting.” (How was I to know that this pious old hypocrite, the author of I and Thou, had after 1948 moved into the Jerusalem house from which the family of my one-day-to-be friend Edward Said had been evicted?) Cacoethia scribendi, says Paul Cavafy somewhere: “the itch to scribble.” If I could be moved to write by the banalities of Buber, I was plainly a bit more than just itchy. The eclectic urge struck me in every department of scribbling, and I flung myself into verse parodies, short stories (for some reason very often about animals) and, in one especially regrettable episode which involved brooding, meaning-of-life, moody walks along the river that led from Cambridge to Grantchester, a project for a “libretto” to be co-written with a musically inclined boy named Spratling.
This could all have ended very badly indeed, with wilting affectation and high self-indulgence. But then I discovered something that I have struggled ever since to convey to my own students. In writing and reading, there is a gold standard. How will you be able to detect it? You will know it all right. I got full marks for an essay on Chaucer’s wonderful “Prologue” to the Canterbury Tales (and how fortunate I was to have Colin Wilcockson, one of the world’s experts on Langland, as my instructor). I couldn’t sleep for two nights after first reading Crime and Punishment. Yet never did I breathe the pure serene, as I might fetchingly have tried to say in those days, until my little craft crashed on the reefs of, first, Wilfred Owen and then George Orwell.
It can be good to start with a shipwreck. Your ideal authors ought to pull you from the foundering of your previous existence, not smilingly guide you into a friendly and peaceable harbor. Just as Llewellyn’s tale of Huw Morgan had upended my sense of the social scale, so the words of Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est” went off like a landmine under my concept of history and empire. The moment came in class. It was the turn of a very handsome boy named Sean Watson to read. As he stumbled his bored and boring way through the lines, I was consumed first by a sense of outrage, as if seeing somebody taking an axe to a grand piano. How could anybody be so brutish and insensitive? I wanted to wrench the book from his hands and declaim the poem. But then I found that this would not in fact be possible, because my eyes were blinded with stinging tears. To this day, I have difficulty reciting the poem out loud without a catch in my throat.
I became consumed with the subject and got hold of a revisionist history of the First World War, In Flanders Fields, by Leon Wolff, as well as All Quiet on the Western Front and an anti-war British novel of the trenches called Covenant with Death, by John Harris, the neglect of which I would still define as a huge injustice. (Its action follows a group of workers from Sheffield, from the day they enlist as friends to the day their lives are callously thrown away.) I read all the other war poets, from Siegfried Sassoon to Edmund Blunden to Robert Graves. I could feel all the ballast in my hold turning over as I came to view “The Great War” not as an episode of imperishable valor, celebrated every year on 11 November with the jingoistic verse of Rupert Brooke and Lawrence Binyon, but as an imperialist slaughter that had been ended on such bad terms by such stupid statesmen that it necessitated an even more horrible second round in 1939. Even Winston Churchill and the “Finest Hour,” in this perspective, seemed open to question, and if there was one thing that was not open to question, to someone brought up in a British military atmosphere in the 1950s, it was Winston Churchill and the “Finest Hour.” When allied with my socialist and Fabian readings in other areas, this soon had me thinking of the Spanish Civil War as the only “just” war there had probably ever been. And so I was fairly soon immersed in Homage to Catalonia.
I actually couldn’t make head or tail of this book in those days because the ideological battles within the Left were still opaque to me. And I had come to Orwell by an unusual path anyway. We were all expected to rea
d Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-four, which had been placed on the syllabus as part of the curriculum of the Cold War. (I took the opportunity to show off, and to compare and contrast Animal Farm to Darkness at Noon, which I alone in the class had read.) But I had chanced on Orwell’s “social” novels first, and had consumed Keep the Aspidistra Flying and A Clergyman’s Daughter as well as Coming Up for Air. In these pages, I found some specimens of exactly the lower-middle-class family that was familiar to me from life: the insecure and anxious layer of old England that strove to keep up appearances and, as Orwell put it, had “nothing to lose but their aitches.” I understood that Miss Austen and Mr. Dickens and even George Eliot had written with sympathy about folk of the middling sort, but I still hadn’t quite appreciated that actual fiction could be written about morose, proud but self-pitying people like us, and was powerfully struck by the manner in which Orwell mimicked and “caught” the tone. If he was reliable on essentials like this, I reasoned, I could trust him on other subjects as well. Soon enough, I was following Orwell to Wigan Pier (James Hilton, creator of “Shangri-La” as well as Mr. Chips, also came, it may interest you to know, from Wigan) and shadowing him in mind on his other expeditions to the lower depths.
Highly derivative in my approach, I began writing grittily polemical and socially conscious essays and fiercely anti-militarist poems. When these were turned down by the school magazine (which was not every time but often enough to inspire bold thoughts of revolt), Michael Prest and I and a few kindred spirits set up a magazine of our own, cautiously and neutrally called Comment to avoid too much official attention, and actually learned to operate a manual printing press in the basement of one of the school buildings. Ink-stained pamphleteer! Very heaven!