In Cambridge there was a good deal of High Table homosexuality, some of it still struggling in the closet but a lot of it out in the open and dancing around on tiptoe. Recently the full story has been told of how the homosexual mathematician, Alan Turing, most gifted of all the many Queens of King’s, saved Britain’s life in World War II. With a then unusual combination of mathematical and engineering genius – two departments which the English educational system had always worked hard to keep separate – Turing devised the mechanism by which radio signals encoded through the German Enigma machine could be read in time to produce the stream of useful, often vital, secret intelligence known as Ultra. It was the society outside Cambridge which hounded Turing to an early grave. Cambridge itself, even if it did not precisely cherish him, at least offered him its tolerance and protection. Even more than Keynes’s or Wittgenstein’s, Turing’s case, it seems to me, is decisive. Though it could be said that Cambridge was equally tolerant and protective of a whole succession of Foreign Office and MI5 prodigies who subsequently turned out to have been drawing an extra salary from the Soviet Union, nothing can alter the fact that Hitler, who threatened the whole of civilisation, owed his defeat in a large part to a high-voiced but not very predatory invert who threatened nobody, and that the dons of King’s, who knew all about Turing’s proclivities, did nothing to sabotage this desirable outcome. Where victimless crimes are concerned, tolerance is an absolute good. Cambridge will probably never get round to formally approving homosexuality, but the type of homosexual involved perhaps prefers a blind eye to public acknowledgment, and meanwhile a tacit understanding seems to provide liberty enough. In my time as an undergraduate, however, I sometimes had to concentrate very hard on how horrible most of the boat-rowing heterosexuals were if I was to offset my distaste for some of the more epicene dons, of which Footlights had a full quota among its senior membership. Dating from the long era when every May Week revue had been a big-budget exercise in make-up and drag, they would turn up at term-time smokers and form a swooping group at the back of the room, muttering archly at the pretty pass to which things had come. One of them was among the nicest men I had ever met, but I didn’t go for his pals. They obviously thought I was too butch to be plausible, and I was constantly afraid of being knocked fiat by their flailing wrists. I bottled it up, though. Human nature is various, and I have never been pleased enough about my own nature to be fully contemptuous about anybody else’s, provided he isn’t homicidal. These weren’t that: they were just a bit high-pitched. The kind of undergraduates who swarmed around them certainly weren’t being misled, unless sugar misleads ants.
In order to be weird, however, a don didn’t have to carry bundles of old newspapers, cross snow-filled courtyards diagonally with only his head showing, or make up his eyelids with the very lightest touch of blue shadow. Some of them could maintain an unbroken rectitude of deportment while still going comprehensively haywire, especially if they were involved in the humanities. Cambridge science having done such earth-shattering things, it was sometimes suggested that non-scientists were suffering from an inferiority complex. If so they kept it well hidden. A more likely explanation concerns the relative difficulty of keeping work separate from life. A physicist can’t live his physics. A humanist can live his humanism and after too much Madeira might find it impossible not to. One of the young Cambridge philosophy dons specialised in aesthetics and made sure you knew it. He dressed the part, wearing a black leather jacket, tight trousers and high boots. He had not, at that stage, produced any of the substantial writings in which he has since expounded his viewpoint, but such was the level of personal invective he maintained in conversation that you always knew where he stood. He stood on his opponent’s throat. He was a Leavisite, junior model. He had taken his master’s principles of literary criticism and applied them to the other arts as well. Thus it came to light that in each field of artistic endeavour there were only three or four master practitioners, all the others being enemies of civilisation. In music the three or four were reduced to one: Wagner. I once heard this terrifying young man say that one of the many great things about Wagner was that when you realised his true greatness it obviated the necessity of listening to pipsqueaks like Puccini. I searched his face for a sign of humour but could see nothing except certainty. It was Leavis that had made him certain. On the rare occasions when the black-leather Wagnerian could be tempted into print, it was usually an encomium in the Cambridge Review for some collection of addle-pated late essays by Leavis, or else it was a passionate attack on a book, any book, by someone who, at some point in the past, no matter how distant, had disagreed with Leavis or merely failed to endorse his every opinion. Even Wagner came second to Leavis.
Leavis himself, though nearing the end of his career, was, as I have mentioned, still active around Cambridge and more irascible than ever, particularly against his disciples. To do him credit, he could never be depended upon to go on lapping up the hosannahs of his sycophants indefinitely. At some unpredictable moment he would turn on his arselickers and deliver a series of stunning kicks to their pursed lips. Later on, almost with his dying breath, he publicly repudiated the Wagnerian for having ‘misrepresented my views’. Far from having misrepresented Leavis’s views, the Wagnerian had endorsed them even at their most fatuous. When Leavis wrote his last-gasp, break-through essay in which Tolstoy was discovered to be a great novelist, the Wagnerian, either having forgotten about the existence of Matthew Arnold or else never having heard of him, announced that nobody had dared to proclaim Tolstoy’s eminence so courageously before. With his tongue thus applied to the heel of his master’s boot, the acolyte was ill-prepared to receive its toe in his teeth, The Wagnerian never fully recovered. He took to wearing a Harris tweed jacket and ordinary shoes, and not long ago, at a dinner party in a private home, I caught him red-handed listening to other people instead of just laying down the law as of old.
Really he shouldn’t have taken it so hard, Leavis’s views were almost impossible not to misrepresent, because they were designed so that only he could hold them. This was partly true even in the early, fruitful part of his career, and became completely true later on, when dogma took over from doctrine. Those who opposed him he merely insulted, but to support him invited vilification, and anyone who arrived at one of his conclusions before he did suffered treatment that differed from character assassination only in being prolonged like torture. When he gave his famous Dickens lectures the hall was jammed. I was there along with the worshippers, the admirers and the merely gullible. Brian C. Adams was sitting in the front row, with two fountain pens ready in case one of them ran out. He was doing his best to appear critically detached but there was no mistaking his look of exaltation when Leavis came trotting briskly in. Leavis was Seriousness personified. He even had a serious way of being bald. Though I had, and for some years to come retained, respect for the intensity of his commitment, I suppose I was the only person present who actively disapproved of him. There were plenty who detested him, but they had stayed at home. I wanted to see at least the vestiges of the mental force he must once have had in order to cause those decades of fuss and bother. I hadn’t tried to enroll in his seminars because I had passed the age of being caught up in his rhetoric. This will sound like light-mindedness to all those Cambridge graduates – many of them now prominently placed in the theatre, radio, television and journalism as well as the academic world – who think that Leavis made them serious about literature. But literature would have made them serious about literature. They met him at an impressionable age, and they have matured since only to the extent that his influence has been ameliorated by the thing he preached of but saw with such distorting strictness - life. It depends not just on who your mentor is, but on when you meet him, and I no longer needed Leavis to tell me that Shakespeare was a greater poet than Shelley. If Leavis had had something to say about the kind of poet Shelley would have been had he lived to middle-age, I might have listened. But the good Doctor dealt
in absolutes. Nevertheless I was prepared, as that bald-eagle head bent over its pile of notes and cleared the gaunt throat in its open collar, to admit that he had something, if he had.
What he had, alas, was a long series of attacks on all those critics who had made the unpardonable mistake of calling Dickens a genius before he did. Humphry House came in for an avalanche of abuse, clearly because Humphry House had given half his life to Dickens while Leavis had still been proclaiming that only Hard Times merited serious attention. The names Graham Hough and John Holloway also kept cropping up, although their connection with Dickens was not clear. ‘We know what to think of Dr Hough’, sneered Leavis, as though no further explanation were necessary. ‘We know what to expect from Dr Holloway.’ Perhaps Hough and Holloway had not only been prematurely pro-Dickens, they had also been anti-Leavis, or, even worse, pro-Leavis without permission, Then a strange thing began to happen. The names Hough and Holloway went on cropping up, but they cropped up mixed up. ‘This is the kind of misrepresentation, I need hardly point out, which we have learned to associate with the name of Dr Houghoway.’ Not long afterwards there was a reference to Professor Hollohough. Some of Dr Leavis’s pages seemed to be in the wrong order. He shuffled them, apparently at random, and read on. This should have been a touching, if not exactly comic, grace-note to the performance, but the outpouring of venom forbade sympathy. As the hour neared its end, there was a peroration against Edmund Wilson, who had pioneered the movement which, long before Leavis got around to joining it, had brought the critical appraisal of Dickens into line with public appreciation. ‘We doubt Edmund Wilson’s qualifications to discuss Dickens,’ said Leavis, and although I am quoting from memory the memory is so indecently vivid I would swear by its accuracy. ‘We doubt Edmund Wilson’s qualifications,’ he wound up triumphantly, ‘to discuss any literature.’ Beside me, an Indian girl student in a sari noted it down: ‘doubt E. Wilson quals. discuss any lit.’ In a blessed life, that moment was as close as I have so far come to witnessing clerical treason in its pure form, dogma distilled into a pathogen. One day I might write a book about how I think cultural memory is transmitted, and perhaps I had better put off discussing this sad business until then, but for now I should say, in order to stave off charges of frivolity, that I thought any amount of frivolity preferable to the Leavisite parade of seriousness. Better Lord David Cecil at his most fruitily fluting than Leavis’s Vyshinskyite tirade, his inquisitorial denunciations. The hall was full of students who would have profited immensely from reading Edmund Wilson’s literary criticism, which was, and is, full of discovery and judgment. Wilson’s appreciation of Dickens was just what they should have been encouraged to read. Instead they had been given an excuse to do something for which students need no encouragement: not to read.
Not much of a reader on the course myself, I was in no fit state to climb on a high horse. Helping me to contain my rage was the suspicion that this event was more parody than reality. The Leavisite brand of odium theologicum had all the characteristics of totalitarian argument, right down to the special hatred reserved for heretics. But the patterns of thought which had filled the concentration camps of Europe proper had arrived in England in the mercifully diluted form of university politics. The ruckus surrounding Leavis, though too nasty to be a farce, was not toxic enough to be a tragedy. You could always have gone somewhere else. Leavis himself could have gone somewhere else, but fought to stay on in Cambridge. It couldn’t be said while he was alive, and is still considered bad taste when said now, but the reason he was shut out of university preferment had little to do with his supposedly challenging originality. It was personal. People will submit to having their opinions contradicted, but not to having their characters attacked at the same time. They can’t watch their fronts and their backs. They would rather shut the door. So Leavis, as he put it, became part of the real Cambridge: the Cambridge in spite of Cambridge. He was part of the landscape. You became accustomed to seeing him walk briskly along Trinity Street, gown blown out horizontal in his slipstream. He looked as if walking briskly had been something he had practised in a wind tunnel. Not long before he died I was in Deighton Bell’s second-hand bookshop looking over the rain-ruined books of the literary booze-artist John Davenport, who must have left the library doors open on the stormy night of his suicide. Suddenly Leavis’s wife, Queenie, appeared at my shoulder. ‘Nasty piece of work, Davenport,’ she muttered, having no reason to know me from Adam. ‘While he was up here he was the leader of a particularly odious set.’ Seeing me buy Davenport’s cracked and stained Pléiade edition of Rimbaud, she nodded approval. Almost any teacher, no matter how intransigent his or her views, can be moved to tears by the sight of a student voluntarily purchasing a book, but the light in Queenie’s eye was one of reminiscence. ‘With Frank it was Laforgue. He nearly broke us, buying up those Frenchmen. On to it quite independently of Eliot. In France you couldn’t get him past a bookshop. We were there a lot when we were young.’ She sniffed for a while at a row of damaged books which Davenport had failed to return to the London Library. Then she left. In later years I have remembered that chance encounter as part evidence that in matters of the spirit the truly dangerous poisons are refined from flowers. In her husband’s youth she must have found him as easy to love as in his last days I found him easy to loathe. I tried not to hate him, though. Of all the moral lessons he had to teach, the one that stuck was the one he taught inadvertently. In his later books he libelled his literary opponents so scandalously that when he tried to condemn Stalin he had no harsh words left over. If he had been asked to give his opinion of Hitler and Himmler, he would not have been able to summon up any terms of disapprobation that he had not already lavished on Houghaway and Hollohough. He had given up his sense of reality, and all in pursuit of the very study which, he went on insisting, was the only thing that could give you a sense of reality. He was a self-saboteur.
5. YANKS ON THE CAM
You can make a good case for even the weirdest don if he stimulates the young to anything, if only anger. At my age I didn’t need the goad. Though I was still too idle a student to put much time into the business of seeking out a sound teacher and listening to what he had to say, at least I recognised such a one when I heard him. Theodore Redpath, for example, was an old man by then and his lectures on tragedy didn’t sparkle. You had to strain to listen. But when he talked about Sophocles he was responding to the Greek text. His little book on Tolstoy took in all the Russian scholarship. He was unspectacular, but I had come just far enough to know that he was worth listening to, and precisely because he had no big ideas. He talked nothing except sense. Younger undergraduates couldn’t be blamed for wanting stronger stuff. In Pembroke, the star students in English were nearly all Americans. Some of them went to hear George Steiner, recently installed at Churchill College, talk eloquently about how the crisis of Western civilisation had reached a point where it would be better if everybody stopped talking. Others went to hear Leavis talk about how the crisis of western civilisation had been made worse by Steiner. Some of them went to hear both, took verbatim notes from each, intercalated the results and served up the synthesis in their weekly essays. Sharing practical criticism seminars or group supervisions with the Americans, I would marvel at the seriousness with which they took it all. But there would be ample time for them to become less gullible later, and for the time being their all-fired keenness was probably more fruitful, and certainly more attractive, than my indolence. They had a hard enough time fathoming the English, so my own transitional persona must have seemed as out of focus as a chameleon crossing a kilt.
They, to me, looked perfect. Whether Ivy League WASPS, New York Jews or third generation Polacks and Bohunks with names full of ‘c’s and ‘z’s, they were fully in character and inexhaustibly supplied with authentic all-American dialogue, They were all very bright, of course, which helped. Fulbright scholars and Phi Beta Kappa almost to a man, they were reading the second part of the English Tripos, like
me. Unlike me they had degrees which had been won by hard work against deadly competition at Yale, Princeton, Harvard, Columbia and Amherst, Of the Ivy League types, the outstanding example was Stradlington Westwood Blantyre III, called Strad for short, like an expensive violin. And indeed he was a finely tuned instrument, though built like an upper East Side brownstone. Six feet four in his triple-welted brogues, he had grown a moustache out of shyness and looked apologetic that it had hidden no more than his upper lip. The expression ‘modest to a fault’ had been invented for him. President of Triangle when at Princeton, he had a fine line of songs and monologues, but could be forced on to the Footlights stage only at gunpoint. The only male graduate who could cycle past Newnham and make its inhabitants appear at the windows spontaneously – the rest of us could not have obtained the same results had we thrown tear gas – he never noticed the sensation he caused. Every day he was invited to tea at Girton, more than once by the dons themselves, He.was actually invited to that heavily defended castle full of unattainable females. The rest of us would have been picked up by the searchlights and fixed, machine guns before we had even cut our way through the barbed wire and reached the moat full of alligators. But what did he do when he got there? He discussed Thackeray. As the inmates passed him cucumber sandwiches with trembling hands, he quietly made clear that there was a fiancée waiting for him at home. Pending his graduation and marriage – the two events were apparently scheduled to take place simultaneously – energies left- over from study were expended on rowing. He rowed for the college and would probably have done the same for the university if he had not been so intelligent. In the grad pad after Hall, when the affiliated students would stand around drinking port or coffee in a vain attempt to quell memories of what they had eaten for dinner, I would accuse Strad of wanting to do all the right things. ‘No,’ he said, after thinking it over, ‘I just want to do things right.’