Outside of a Dog (29 page)

This new degree had an evangelical flavour: it aimed to train ‘sensibility’, to promote moral awareness, and to produce a cultural elite of readers who were highly sensitive to the
demands not merely of literature, but of the life from which it was drawn and with which it was engaged. The message was explicit: reading literature is good for you, and good for us all. It may
not confer gentility, but (as Matthew Arnold observed) it gives a leavening of culture. The great literary models provide instruction and guidance, and may supply that bedrock of value that
religion once offered. If Arnold was the priest of this revaluation of the importance of letters, F.R. Leavis was his curate. It is impossible to miss in Leavis’s tone and demeanour the
grimly entrenched, almost medical, belief that literature is good for you if you take it in the prescribed texts, forms and doses. Literary criticism, after all, has some of its root structure in
Biblical exegesis.

We remember Arnold’s definition of God: ‘There rules an enduring Power, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness’ and his conclusion: ‘
therefore
study your
Bible and learn to obey this.’ This isn’t much of a formulation (you may as well define soap as the power, not ourselves, that makes for cleanliness) but it points the way: if no longer
to the Bible, then at least to Wordsworth, Austen, George Eliot and Lawrence. Study the right texts in the right way and you will become wise. Read English!

This is an attractive position, and you can see why it became necessary, if the study of English was to shed its historicist and philological biases. But it is also an empirical claim, with a
clear implication. If the study of literature conveys wisdom – much less righteousness – then it should follow that proper students of literature are the wisest and best of persons. Yet
I have scanned myself in vain for traces of wisdom and exceptional goodness, and wondered whether my former colleagues exhibited these qualities. Certainly the splenetic Leavis was hardly a proper
role model for the young and impressionable. (The opposite assertion, that a lifetime study of English makes you
worse
, seems to me more feasible.)

So by the end of the first hundred years of the teaching of English at universities there was no common understanding of what a course should consist of, no shared methodology, no common
teleology. English sat uneasily in that Teutonic structure in which the study of a discipline demanded rigour, accountability, methodological clarity, clear aims and values. By these criteria it
was not clear that English was a discipline at all, and it is to this day regarded as a soft option by, say, scientists or mathematicians.

On these grounds, V.S. Naipaul has recently suggested that English should no longer be offered as a university subject, and all English Departments disbanded: ‘I think it would be a great
fillip, a great boost to the intellectual life of the country. It would immediately have a great impact. It would release a lot of manpower. They could go and work on the buses and things like
that.’ I sometimes argued similarly to my colleagues (who wouldn’t have made good bus conductors) that the ‘common pursuit of true judgement’ of literature, if it is to be
enjoyable as well as serious, would better take place in forums like reading groups or adult education courses.

No one listened to me, but when a Nobel Laureate talks like this one assumes that people may pay attention, even when he is notoriously iconoclastic and grumpy, and the potential academic
audience famed for not listening. But no debate ensued, and Naipaul’s provocative remarks have by now been pretty much forgotten, if not forgiven.

Had Sir Vidia gone on to say that teaching in an English Department is bad for you, I would have agreed with him. It had stiffened my emotional and intellectual sinews, drained my reservoirs of
delight, made me (more) pompous and domineering. ‘Becoming less intelligent’ was an attempt at reforming myself, and I suppose it had to begin with deforming what had preceded:
detoxifying, I called it. There was nothing pretty about the process.

One afternoon, playing golf with my friend Simon Grogan, I was having a particularly bad round. On the elevated ninth tee I hit my drive into the lake, teed up another ball, hit that into the
lake, teed up another and scuffed it along the ground. It rolled down the gentle slope of the hill and came to rest in a bush about forty feet away.

‘Fuck!’ I screamed. ‘Fucking fuck!’ I took my driver and flung it down the hill. It turned in an ungainly parabola and landed next to the bush where the ball lay.

Simon looked at me disapprovingly. He had no objection to the bad language – which he was rather partial to himself – but throwing clubs was definitely rotten behaviour.

‘You know this project of yours – becoming less intelligent?’ he said, tartly.

‘What? What!’ I started walking down the hill. You don’t talk to a man who is lying five in a bush. It is neither polite nor safe.

‘You could be taking it too far,’ he said, walking quickly ahead to avoid having anything else to do with me.

He was right. You can’t deny who you are, or abandon what you have read and cared about. What I had read defined me, informed my judgements, influenced every moment of who I was and what I
did. It is all very well: become less pompous, be less intelligent. But you can’t live by Carl Hiaasen alone. If he is funnier, more enjoyable to read, and more passionately committed than
many of our syllabus’s canonic authors, he isn’t as good a writer. That still matters. There is something to be said, after all, for literature.

When I was teaching at Warwick, we used to interview all prospective students. (I gather they no longer have the time or energy to do so.) In answer to my question: ‘Why do you want to
read English?’ I would often get some variety of the answer: because I am interested in people, and in how they work. Why, in that case, I would ask, don’t you read psychology? Or
history or philosophy or sociology? Surely that is where you learn about people and how they relate to each other? Reading English is for people who care about literature. Not about the truths that
literature may reveal (the paraphrases and ‘meanings’) but the literature itself.

I still feel this passionately. We have to preserve some area in which literary language and form and tonality are foregrounded: to preserve the practices and virtues of close reading; to stake
out this territory, to define it, and to defend it. To keep our eyes and fingers on the page, warmly. What you then do with these skills, once acquired, is up to you: do ‘readings’ of
literary works if and only if you know how to read: do post-structuralist ones, even. I don’t care. It took me a while to reach this position, and when I did I was no longer angry, nor so
dismissive of my former incarnation as a university teacher. I believed I had transcended ‘literature’, with the help of Carl Hiaasen, but – what a lovely irony! – it seems
that I was wrong, or at least that my concept of ‘literature’ needed refining, not my concept of intelligence. In 1999, the redoubtable literary partnership of Colm Tóibin and
Carmen Callil published
The Modern Library: The 200 Best Novels in English Since 1950
. They included
Double Whammy
.

17

I have never read Peter Wright’s
Spycat
cher
, by all accounts a pedestrian tale of life in the security services that gained its fifteen minutes of fame when
Mrs Thatcher was foolish enough to ban its importation, upon its overseas publication in 1987, for contravening the Official Secrets Act. The resultant publicity catapulted the book into
prominence, and copies were smuggled to the UK from Australia and America in their thousands. Within a year the ban was overturned by the Law Lords, and the book could be assessed for what it
really was: a dull and ill-written, self-serving account of a former minor spy.

I have no interest in the world of espionage, all that pretending and betraying, skulking about in trench coats and hats, save for an admiration for the works of John le Carré and Graham
Greene, both of whom served in the English secret services. Greene, who maintained a taste for a well-cut trench coat, tended to write his espionage books as a form of relaxation from the more
taxing and morally heated novels that explored crises of faith engendered by human frailty.

In the late 1980s I was a regular visitor to Antibes to see Greene (from whom I was buying a number of manuscripts, letters and books), making my living as a full-time rare book dealer. I was
happier than I had been for years, my decision to leave Warwick fully vindicated by my new form of life. It hadn’t been a hard decision to leave, it just took a while, and then one day
I’d woken up and said to Barbara, ‘I’m going to quit.’

‘I’ve known that for ages,’ she said, ‘it always takes you a long time to recognize what you’ve already decided.’

She was the key, and it wouldn’t have happened without her support. The children were fourteen and eight, and abandoning a safe £15,000 a year for an uncertain future might have
looked irresponsible from her point of view.

‘It’s fine,’ she’d reassured me, ‘if we need more money we can always sell the house.’

There was no need. The first year after leaving I made £30,000, and I never made as little as that again. But the business I was doing with Greene was headier than any I’d yet
encountered. In his modest flat at La Residence des Fleurs, in Antibes, he pulled manuscript after manuscript off his shelves and out of his bureau: two volumes of travel diaries, five books filled
with daily accounts of his dreams over twenty years, his letters to his mistress, Yvonne Cloetta, and, finally (I had to pick these up in Paris), all of his copies of his own books. I wrote cheque
after cheque, to his puzzlement and delight.

‘Surely this is too much! Are you a gambler?’ he asked, after pocketing a cheque for £35,000.

‘Not at all,’ I said. He seemed disappointed. ‘What I am is a poker player.’

He looked puzzled.

‘It’s a matter of skill and reading the odds and the situation,’ I said. ‘I have great customers for this sort of material. I’ll make a very good profit.’

The next time I showed up in Antibes it was in a new white Saab convertible. I filled it up with bibliographic goodies, bid Graham and Yvonne a very fond farewell, set the cruise control on 170
kph, and headed north. After six hours (equals 600 miles) I stopped in Joigny at La Côte Saint-Jacques, a small luxury hotel with a three-star Michelin restaurant, and gave the doorman
£20 to carry all of my new books and manuscripts – some ten boxes full – into my suite. I ate and drank exceedingly well – there was a young waitress whose only job was to
dispense a variety of chocolate truffles – and then went and wallowed like a pig in books on the floor of my room.

Two months later, the treasures dispersed and the large profit banked, I took the family on a holiday to Block Island, between Long Island and Connecticut, renting a Victorian house so grand
that we kept finding tourists walking round it, guide books in hand, under the impression that it was open to the public. I hardly noticed them. I was upstairs, moping about. ‘It will never
be that good again,’ I moaned, like a teenager granted five minutes of bliss with Marilyn Monroe.

But it soon was. Some time before he died, in 1991, Graham (a lifetime friend of Kim Philby’s) suggested that it might be enjoyable and profitable for me to go to Moscow to meet
Philby’s widow, Ruffina. According to Greene, Mrs Philby might be willing to sell some of Philby’s books, and all of the papers that he had accumulated during his Moscow years. The
archive was of considerable historical importance, and provided the clearest indication possible of what Philby was up to between 1963, when he defected, and his death in 1988.

Kim Philby was the cleverest, most important and elusive of that set of spies – Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean and Anthony Blunt were the others – who had been Cambridge undergraduates
in the 1930s and subsequently worked for the Soviets. Though Philby had been rumbled and largely discredited by a series of inquiries into his behaviour, he’d never been arrested, and was
working as a journalist in Beirut when a defector from the Soviets informed MI6 – what they had suspected for some time – that Philby was indeed a Soviet agent.

What happened next could only have come straight from a
Carry on Spying
film. An agent was dispatched to Beirut to confront Philby and to bring him back to London. The ensuing
conversation, apparently, went more or less like this:

‘We have you banged to rights!’ said the agent. ‘You come back to London, you bad spy!’

‘Shan’t!’ said Philby.

‘Would you come if I said please?’ said the agent.

‘Certainly not!’ said Philby firmly, and commenced packing his bags.

Disconsolate at this rejection, the MI6 man returned to London. By the time he arrived, Philby was on a boat to Moscow, where he was soon to be reunited with Burgess and Maclean.

But if MI6 didn’t quite know how to handle Philby, neither did the KGB. He had been the source of some useful information, no doubt about that. But there was something, even to the
Soviets, a little … shall we say, untrustworthy about the urbane and unflappable Englishman. Could he be some sort of triple agent after all? Philby protested his innocence – or do I
mean his guilt? – but the KGB were unmoved. They set him up nicely, with a good two-bedroom flat and a toothsome red-haired interpreter called Ruffina, who later became his fourth wife, for
Philby changed his sexual allegiances even more frequently than his national ones.

Ten years passed, slowly: a time that he spent reading and writing letters home, wandering round Red Square trying to find the latest cricket scores from English tourists, and occasionally in
bed with Maclean’s wife Melinda. But, at last, the barriers came down, and Philby began to present his ‘English seminars’ at the KGB. Their purpose was to train Soviet agents how
to pass when they were working in England, which involved a lot of astonishing nonsense about MCC ties and the laws of cricket, which accents to acquire and clubs to join, and the arcana associated
with a public school and Oxbridge education.