Growing Up In a War (39 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

UNTIL I WENT
to Oxford I had little idea of rational thought as anything different from the sort of activity you engaged in when you read a novel, or saw a play, or argued about politics. These things engaged the whole of you, part of which was your mind. But analytic thinking as itself the mode of engagement – or the primary one, the cutting edge, and a disciplined activity – was something I did not properly understand until I found myself being trained in it. Then I discovered that, used as an additional tool, it increased my understanding of everything, and usually by an enormous amount. I have valued it exceedingly – and done a great deal of it – ever since. However, the academics who trained me in it seemed to imagine that in itself it constituted the whole and sole correct approach, and this was a view that impoverished their understanding. So a crucial distinction needs to be made between the defectiveness of the academic approach when allowed to be the only one, and the immensely valuable enrichment it can bring to a fuller understanding when that is rooted at deeper levels.

For me the earliest stirrings of this sort of thinking occurred at Christ’s Hospital, not in a classroom but in the school library. If I visit that library now, my spirit soars as I walk in, because this was where my mind awoke. In classrooms I was reacting, responding to instruction, doing what teachers required me to do; but browsing at liberty in the library I was pursuing my own
interests,
going spontaneously where curiosity led, and this was so much more enlightening. A lot of the time I followed my nose and grazed, ruminated, then wandered off to the next grazing point. Frequently I came across things by accident, as when a book just happened to stand next to another on the shelf, and my eye was caught by the colour of its binding. It gave me deep inner happiness to spend a Sunday afternoon browsing like this, with the library to myself; and I would often drop in there for shorter periods on other days.

The first book I read there that made a lasting impact on me was called
The Bible of the World
. It consisted, it said, of the essential passages in the scriptures of each of the world’s main religions. What impinged on me most was the first section, consisting of Hindu scriptures. Some of the things it said were things I had thought but did not know anyone else had. Chief of these was that what actually existed was, in itself, something it was impossible to make any direct contact with, and therefore impossible to imagine. The Hindu scriptures said that all you ever had were images. These, being images, were insubstantial and ephemeral. Only what was behind them was real and lasting. But this, being not image, could never be in a mind. I was astonished that this thought had been thought thousands of years ago, and written down in what were now, it would seem, classic writings. It gave me reassurance. It was my first realisation that mine was not an oddball view, slightly mad, but a solidly based approach that was shared by large numbers of people. This took me out of the isolation I had felt myself to be in and made me feel part of something wider. But these Hindu writings went on to give an explanation that had not occurred to me. The lasting reality behind the images, they said, did not consist of what were somehow the same things only in a different, perhaps invisible, form: the
real
mountain, the
real
tree, the
real
house. There was just one big, unimaginable something. All real reality was one,
and
this was veiled from us by the itemised world of experience. It was only in the world of experience that separate items existed. We ourselves, individually, had emerged from the single oneness of everything at our conception, and would return to it when we died. In between, our lives were a sort of aberration, like amputations, some kind of mistake, or a sort of delusion.

I did not know what to make of this. Even on its own showing we could not know if it were true, I thought. Nor could we know if it was untrue. I could see no reason for rejecting it, but felt no inclination to believe it either. I was passionately attached to the life that it told me was illusory, in fact I held it more dear than anything else; but I knew only too well that it was ephemeral; so I had to concede that it could not, in itself, be lasting reality. I was left agnostic on the question of how, if at all, this life and what was not this life were related. Even so, what had spoken powerfully to me was the fact of the distinction: the fact that an uncrossable gulf exists between this world of ours and whatever else there is, such that from within this world we cannot get much conception of the rest. There is a sense in which I have been trying ever since to fight my way out of this impasse, but although such efforts have enriched my understanding of the problem, they have not carried me as far as a solution. Wittgenstein maintained that anyone who penetrated the problem to the bottom would find that it evaporated, and that there was, properly understood, not really a problem at all; but I am as sure as I can be of anything that this is wrong. The more one truly understands the problem the more substantial it becomes, and the more baffling and frustrating. It is the fundamental problem of experience, and of all human existence.

I suppose this must have been the first time I found myself reading about what could be called philosophical problems. I also came across two books by Nikolai Berdyaev, an actual philosopher, an exiled Russian who at that time was alive and publishing
new
work. These books appealed to me even though I did not understand them. They were very Russian, I thought, and although they were socialist they were anti-communist, mystical, even a bit religiose. It is possible that if I read them today I would find them mushy, but at that time I found them elusively moving – moving in a way I would not have expected writing about ideas to be.

The experience of finding that something was interesting even though I did not understand it was one I had with a lot of my reading, and was at its most intense with contemporary poetry. I discovered modern poetry because of the thinness of the volumes. When my eye first fell on them on the shelves I was startled to see volumes that were so big in format, with stiff covers, yet had so few pages. I would not have expected them to be published as books at all, but as pamphlets. I took some of these thinnies down and found that they contained poems, although it was not poetry as I had encountered it, nor had I heard of any of the poets. Poem after poem was unintelligible, yet tantalising. I re-read those that tantalised me most, then read them again – and again. Parts lodged in my mind, and I would find myself saying them over to myself at other times, especially in bed at night – still not understanding them. Why were they so interesting? It was as if these poems were enjoying a joke at my expense by playing with my curiosity, and there was something playful in my response to them, as someone might feel who was labouring at difficult but witty crossword puzzles. I became addicted. And the more I understood the poems, the more seriously I found myself taking them, until I grew into a fully fledged devotee of what was then contemporary poetry. One of the unknown writers stood out above the others, T.S. Eliot; but W.H. Auden was jolly good, and there were people called C. Day-Lewis, Stephen Spender and Louis MacNeice. All of them were not only alive but in the prime of their lives – Eliot was in his fifties, Auden not yet forty – and producing new
work.
This fact itself excited me – it was all happening
now
. For years after that I marinaded in the writings of these poets, trying out new ones and occasionally adding another to the central canon, the chief of these being Dylan Thomas. That kind of poetry played a more important part in my inner life than any other sort of writing for a considerable period. The nature of the poems I wrote myself was changed by it, and from having been an old-fashioned romantic I became a modern.

Because this poetry meant so much to me I started digging around in its references – because Yeats was so dear to Auden I read Yeats; and because Hardy meant so much to Dylan Thomas I read Hardy. I read Dante in translation because Eliot treated him with such deference. I also started reading criticism of the writers I most enjoyed. My discoveries spread outwards all the time. I became an excited tracker-down and looker-up of things from one book to another, and a user of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
and dictionaries of quotations. When I found the names of the same contemporary novelists cropping up again and again I dug their books out of the library and found myself reading E.M. Forster, Aldous Huxley and Somerset Maugham – also D.H. Lawrence, who was the recently dead writer most often referred to. I read all Forster’s novels while still at school.

In all this I felt an involvement and enthusiasm quite different in kind from anything I felt in classrooms, where we pursued no such matters. I talked about it excitedly to my friends, but most of these were not especially interested. Many thought it all a bit arty-farty. So in this respect, at least, I found myself again in a world of my own.

The feeling that I myself was a writer in the making began to grow in strength and confidence. I started to publish poetry in school magazines, indeed to think of myself as a future poet, and perhaps a novelist too. At no time did it enter my head to think of such things as connected with classwork, or having anything to
do
with school. I saw writers as being different sorts of people from academics. Real writing, it seemed to me, was creative writing – poetry, plays, novels, short stories – and people who wrote other things did so because they could not manage the real thing. Biographers, historians and the rest were in this sense failed writers, usually novelists manqué.

At the same time as all these things were happening – though unaware of it, mostly, since my interests were only intermittently engaged – I was getting a good education of an old-fashioned sort in the classes I attended, one that provided me with a solid academic foundation for the rest of my life. In the central tradition of public-school teaching, it was heavily weighted towards languages; in fact all I was learning now apart from languages was higher mathematics, history and geography. Two of the more memorable teachers – memorable chiefly because they were the only ones I was frightened of – taught me Latin in two successive years: Derrick Macnutt and the headmaster. I have since been an object of awe to devotees of the crossword puzzle for having been taught by Macnutt, for he is regarded by many, still, as the greatest setter of puzzles there has ever been. He was Ximenes of the
Observer
, author of the still-classic book
On the Art of the Crossword
, and was at the height of his powers during the period when he taught me. In the classroom he was a terrorist. He shouted nonstop (his nickname was Boom), and after asking a boy a question he would stride across to his desk and stand over him, shouting down at him, then beating him about the head if he gave the wrong answer, or if, understandably in these circumstances, he became tongue-tied. The only way not to be beaten by Boom was to come up instantly with the right answer. All the boys were terrified of him and dreaded being asked a question, because if you even so much as paused to think it was
Whack! Whack!
‘Come on, boy.’
Whack! Whack!
‘Don’t leave me just standing here.’
Whack! Whack!
‘We haven’t got all day.’
Whack! Whack!
The blows were delivered
hard,
with the butt of the hand against the side or back of the head. If in desperation you came out quickly with what you hoped would be the right answer but wasn’t, he would shout, ‘
Think
, boy,
think
. Why don’t you
think?
’ and give you an even harder whack on each repetition of the word
think
. If you made many mistakes in your written prep he would beat you on the bottom with a cricket bat. In the house of which he was housemaster he caned boys on their bare buttocks until they bled, and was notorious for doing this arbitrarily and unjustly, especially to boys who happened to be good-looking. He would position them for the caning with great meticulousness, making them crouch face down in an armchair with their naked bottoms sticking up into the air. There is no doubt that he was a sadist in the literal sense of that term, a person who got sexual pleasure (including, if some of the stories were true, orgasm) from the infliction of pain. Yet the fact is that I learnt more Latin from him than from anyone else: he just made me do it.

Under the headmaster we read Book Two of Virgil’s
Aeneid
, a lifelong possession in some ways, though the Latin itself has gone. He was another shouter, also frightening. But, unlike with Boom, there were strands of civilisation in his method. It was from him that I acquired a genuine understanding of why satisfactory translation is impossible – basically, because words have their meanings in terms of observation, experience and activity, the living circumstances in which they are learnt and used, not in terms of other words. As he liked to put it: ‘Words don’t mean words.’ My studies in Latin literature, such as they were – mostly Caesar, Livy, Virgil and Ovid – had a lifelong effect on my view of the relationship between moral behaviour and personal integrity. If you knew what was right, you ought to do it regardless of the cost to yourself, even if that was greater than your life. If you commanded an army in which your son was serving, and he committed a crime for which any other soldier would be put to death, the right thing
to
do would be to execute your son, even though everyone expected you to invent some excuse for not doing so. Needless to say, I have never come anywhere near to living with such alarming rectitude; and if I were in the Roman general’s situation I would spare my son. But I would do it shamefacedly. There is something about the Roman notion of impersonal justice that commands my assent, whether I like it or not; and it has had an influence on me, even though I am incapable of living up to it.