Memoirs

I respected but did not really share Johnson’s Toryism. Decades later, as I was told, Michael Hartwell, then the proprietor of the Daily Telegraph, was discussing with Bill Deedes his possible successor as Editor. I had recently given up the editor-ship of The Times, and my name was mentioned. ‘He’s not our kind of Tory,’ said Michael, and that closed the issue. I never have been a Daily Telegraph Tory, and I did not find myself a Samuel Johnson Tory either. He was a near Jacobite, King and Country, traditional Tory, although he was liberal in his views of the great social issues of race and poverty, and not an imperialist. I have always been a John Locke, Declaration of Independence, Peelite, even Pittite, type of Tory, and Johnson would have sniffed me out as a closet Whig.

It was not only Johnson’s mind and personality which attracted me, but the book itself, and above all the eighteenth century. I do not believe in reincarnation, but that is the best way to describe the impact that Boswell’s Life of Johnson had on me. I felt that I was re-entering a world to which I belonged, a world which was more real to me, and certainly more attractive, than the mid twentieth century. I felt that what had happened since Johnson’s death in 1784 was a prolonged decline of civilization, the industrial revolution, ugly architecture, the slums, the heavy Victorian age, the great European wars of Napoleon, the Kaiser and Hitler. I yearned for the age of harmony before the fall. It took me half a lifetime to get used to the modern age, and I have never become particularly fond of it.

In reading Boswell, I was able to slip into the garden of the eighteenth century and regain a lost paradise. I enjoyed everything about that century, the houses, the furniture, the landscape, the paintings, the music, the literature, the letters, the politics, the people. Although this perception of the eighteenth century as a golden age has gradually eroded, it still remains quite vivid. In the years when our own family was growing up, Gillian and I lived in two fine eighteenth-century houses, Ston Easton Park in Somerset – a beautiful extravagance – and Smith Square in London. Now we live in an early twentieth-century flat in London and a late fifteenth-century house in Somerset. I delight in both of them; the eighteenth-century nostalgia has eased. But it is still the period from 1714, the death of Queen Anne, to 1789, the year of the French Revolution, which is my true homeland in history and literature.

I never suffered from Johnson’s extreme fear of death, but I did feel sympathetic to his congenital melancholy. I also admired the energy he put into friendship. The passage I best remember from my first reading of Boswell’s Life is the one in which he helped a nearly destitute Oliver Goldsmith; this account is in Johnson’s own words:

I received one morning a message from poor Goldsmith, that he was in great distress, and as it was not in his power to come to me, begging that I would come to him as soon as possible. I sent him a guinea, and promised to come to him directly. I accordingly went as soon as I was dressed, and found that his landlady had arrested him for his rent, at which he was in a violent passion. I perceived that he had already changed my guinea, and had got a bottle of Madeira and a glass before him. I put the cork into the bottle, desired he would be calm, and began to talk to him of the means by which he might be extricated. He then told me that he had a novel ready for the press, which he produced to me. I looked into it, and saw its merit, told the landlady I should soon return, and having gone to a bookseller, sold it for sixty pounds. I brought Goldsmith the money, and he discharged his rent, not without rating his landlady in a high tone for having used him so ill.

The novel was The Vicar of Wakefield; £60 would probably have had the purchasing power of £5000 in modern money.

That summer I was in the senior form of the junior section of the Clifton Preparatory School, a form taught by Captain Read. With war imminent, it was a time of heightened emotional tension, a time when everyone’s imagination was stretched. Read was a quiet man, a good schoolmaster, who was a veteran of the First World War. I now suspect that he may have been one of those good officers who never wholly recovered from their war experience; he did not speak of it to us.

Captain Read set us an essay on ‘a building we had visited during the holidays’. I wrote about the little Catholic church at East Harptree, and described, in rather sentimental terms, how it had been built by poor Irish labourers in the nineteenth century. Captain Read recognized that this was an unusual piece of writing for a ten-year-old boy, gave it a top mark, perhaps even ten out of ten, and praised it to the class as exceptionally well written.

This encouragement was very important to me. Before that I had no idea I had any special talent for writing. I knew that I was reasonably bright by the standard of the school; I usually came third in class placings, behind my contemporaries Pym and Foster, who contended for the top position. Captain Read told me I had a special talent for writing essays, and I believed him. I have been writing them ever since.

It was through my fascination with Johnson that I came to read the poets of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. My favourite book, one of the favourite books of my lifetime, became Johnson’s Lives of the Poets. My mother bought for me a calf-bound set of the 1779 first edition of Johnson’s Poets, with the works of the poets from Cowley to Lyttleton in fifty-six volumes, two volumes of index, and twelve volumes of the Lives. This was a fourteenth-birthday present, bought from George’s of Bristol; it still has their price marked in it, of £6 15s. The first owner had been an eighteenth-century clergyman, Francis Mills, who was born in 1759. He may have bought the first volumes when he was twenty, and lived through to die in 1851 in his ninety-second year. I hope these little books gave him the lifetime’s happiness they have given me.

Johnson’s Poets covers the period from the 1620s to the 1760s. The minor poets of this period include Rochester, the libidinous Earl; Addison, one of the most delightful of English essayists; Gay, who wrote The Beggar’s Opera; the saintly Isaac Watts, one of the best English hymn writers, and Gray, who wrote the Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. When I suffered from adolescent depression at Charterhouse, I found Gray’s Elegy, the mirror of my mood, a great comfort.

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,

The lowing herd winds slowly o’er the lea,

The Ploughman homeward plods his weary way,

And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

In Johnson’s collection, there are four major literary voices, those of Milton, Dryden, Swift and Pope; of those Swift is a great satirist rather than a great poet. Dryden is indeed a great poet, free-flowing with fire and energy, but I never found him a particularly interesting writer despite the intellectual quality of his criticism. The two great poets whom I have come back to again and again, who, after Shakespeare, have done most to shape my mind, are Milton and Pope. Milton came rather the earlier of the two; I can remember first hearing Lycidas read in a form room at Clifton.

Lycidas was written in memory of Edward King, a young Cambridge poet who shared Milton’s idealism and died in 1637. One can imagine a young Cambridge poet of the 1930s writing such an elegy about one of his contemporaries, who might have died fighting Franco. It is a poem of the left, which foreshadows a dark future; I was reading it in just such an historic context:

The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed,

But swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw,

Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread;

Besides what the grim wolf with privy paw

Daily devours apace and nothing said;

But that two-handed engine at the door

Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more.

These lines from Lycidas gave me the true thrill of great poetry then, and they still do now. When written, they were indeed prophetic of the civil war that was about to break upon England. The executions they prefigure, which may already have been foreshadowed in Milton’s mind, were those of the men, such as Laud and Strafford, whom he regarded as having failed to feed ‘the hungry sheep’; the young poets in the 1930s regarded Neville Chamberlain and the appeasers in much the same way. King Charles I himself, on 30 January 1649, was executed by the axe, that ‘two-handed engine at the door’.

I enjoyed the poetry of public affairs; I was already storing up phrases and the rhythm of sentences which I felt I could use. If I sought to learn the use of irony and antithesis from Johnson, a line like ‘Daily devours apace and nothing said’, with its dying fall, became part of the inner rhythm of my early attempts at English prose.

No doubt John Milton is a greater poet than Alexander Pope; he is indeed second only to Shakespeare in the canon of English poets. But in learning how to read, which I was doing with the definite intention of learning how to write, ‘elective affinities’, to use Goethe’s congenial phrase, go for as much as poetic merit. I learned most from the poets whose personalities I liked best. I admire Milton; I love Pope.

Although our ability to classify poets by political temperament has often been denied, it seems to me that it is sometimes quite obvious. Alexander Pope loved Horace, a natural conservative among Roman poets. Pope took the view ‘whate’er is best administered is best’ – not a radical view of politics, he admired the Augustan ideal and detested what he saw as the contagious vulgarity of Grub Street. Milton was a man of the left, a radical progressive, a supporter of Cromwell, a hardline servant of the revolutionary government. Had he been a young Frenchman in the early 1790s, he would have been a Jacobin; if a young Russian in 1917, he would have been a Bolshevik.

I knew perfectly well at the age of ten that my own political temperament belonged to the conservative type, that I had no political sympathy at all with Milton’s radical progressive point of view. I had read about Cromwell in my early history books and saw him as an enemy. The poet who was to have the strongest influence on me was bound to be one who shared the temperament of rational conservatism. I found such a poet in Alexander Pope. He has been the friendly guide to my literary life.

His critics have said that Pope is not a poet at all, but, in effect, a brilliant prose writer, using verse as his medium for expressing what they would regard as merely prosaic thoughts. He is indeed an unusual poet; he was a cripple, marked by the effects of a tubercular disease of the spine in childhood. He was some inches short of five foot in height. Such an experience has its impact on the development of personality. As with blindness, certain aspects of life are cut off, but other aspects are intensified. Language, and the control of language, became his resource, into which he focused an astonishing energy.

In no poet does one feel to the same degree that each line has been packed with an intensity of meaning, so that phrase after phrase comes to the reader primed to explode, not as a sparkler or grenade, but with a nuclear energy. I do not know if I appreciated this when I first read Pope; Shakespeare and Blake are great poets who are highly accessible to children; Pope is a poet of argument, and the arguments are often mature in character. Later I was to realize that Pope’s arguments compress whole books into a couplet or two. Take these opening lines in the second book of The Essay on Man:

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;

The proper study of mankind is Man.

Plac’d on this isthmus of a middle state,

A being darkly wise, and rudely great:

With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side,

With too much weakness for the Stoic’s pride,

He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest;

In doubt to deem himself a God, or Beast.

Each couplet is a tablet of stone. Although both are great poems, the preference between Lycidas and The Essay on Man is inevitably a temperamental one; it is the choice between the radical’s sense of destiny and a conservatism tempered with scepticism. I was already seeing the world through Pope’s eyes rather than Milton’s. For me Milton might be the greater poet, but Pope was far more sympathetic.

The virtues of the best prose include clarity, energy, rhythm, strength and concentration of meaning. No word should be wasted; words should have colour as well as logical coherence. These are the lessons of Pope; everyone who aspires to write good English prose, and particularly journalists, who have to write too much of it, too fast, should read Pope, not occasionally but regularly. In any case such a habit is a great, and reliable, pleasure. If one has the right temperament for it.

Chapter Five

But we’ll do more, Sempronius

In September 1941, my father drove me for my first term at Charterhouse in his green 1932 open Lagonda, using some saved petrol coupons; I remember our happy feeling of companionship. The setting of the school is beautiful, and even then I appreciated it; the old school buildings, the best Gothic of 1870, look out over the green, where later I was to watch Peter May as a thirteen-year-old batsman; he became one of the finest English batsmen there ever was. The green itself is at the summit of the steep hill which runs up from Godalming; the view stretches out to Haslemere. Around the school there were walks in its extensive grounds, and beyond that the Surrey countryside, though Surrey seemed brown and scrawny compared to the green meadows of Somerset.

In summer the setting was delightful, but in autumn, winter and spring, it was cold, almost as bone-chillingly cold as the Charles River in mid-winter, if one walks back across the bridge from Harvard to Boston. My father had been cold at Charterhouse; I was cold. Nevertheless, I was quite happy in my first year. I was a fag in Verites, which was my house; ‘fag’ was then an innocent word, which meant that I had to perform minor domestic tasks and run errands for the monitors. My own house monitor soon discovered that he would do better to polish his own shoes than have me polish them.

I was in the scholars’ form, and found myself sitting next to Simon Raven, on the alphabetical principle. He was as good a classical scholar as I was a bad one, and was soon moved up a year into the fifth form. The quiet and elderly form master of the Remove, Mr Lake, had taught my father when he was a young man, and shared my enthusiasm for the novels of Anthony Trollope.

My great-grandfather had been to Charterhouse, in the time of Thackeray; my grandfather had been to Charterhouse, less than ten years before the school moved out of London and down to Godalming in Surrey; my father had been to Charterhouse in the years before the First World War. None of them had been happy; all had received a sound classical education and retained a loyalty to their old school. For much of the time I was not happy, or in good physical health, but I too retain an affectionate loyalty for Charterhouse.

Institutions are like people; one has a temperamental affinity with them, or a temperamental unease. I doubt if I have an ‘anima naturaliter Catholica’, a naturally Catholic soul. Left to its own devices, my soul is rather inclined to Protestant liberalism. I do, however, have a naturally Catholic temperament; I enjoy the personality of the Church of Rome, as well as being thankful for its graces. I love the ancient institutions of Somerset. I love the institutions of the United States. In another life I would have liked to have been born in Boston, preferably in the 1860s, studied at Harvard and – if my career flourished – become a Senator for Massachusetts during the Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt. I related reasonably well to Clifton College, saw the appeal of an Eton I did not go to, am loyal to Charterhouse, rather disliked Balliol – which returned the compliment – but enjoyed Oxford, and particularly the Oxford Union, had a liberal education at the Financial Times, worked well with the Sunday Times, have had by far my greatest professional loyalty to The Times, seriously disliked the institutional BBC, was happy and useful at the Arts Council and enjoy a peaceful old age in the House of Lords. Balliol and the BBC, out of all those institutions, I did not take to. They were not my cup of tea, and most decidedly I was never theirs.

One story illustrates how Charterhouse sees the world. My daughter Charlotte, who was a sweet rebel as a teenager, had left Cheltenham Ladies College in disfavour; it was, in my view, the College’s fault rather than hers. I remember writing to the Chairman of the Board of Governors a letter which contained the sentence: ‘You make the girls unhappy and then punish them for being so’. We decided that Charlotte should, if possible, take her A levels at Charterhouse. They received a letter from Cheltenham, which, apparently, warned them against Charlotte in strident terms. Their reaction was to decide at once that they ought to take her. I was an Old Carthusian, which constituted a bond; Charlotte’s education was in difficulty; they obviously ought to help. That is how sympathetic grown-ups think. It is not how all schools would have reacted. So Charlotte became the fifth generation of Rees-Moggs to go to the school of Addison, Steele, Blackstone, Wesley, Thackeray, Max Beerbohm and Robert Graves.

At the start of the autumn term of 1941, the war was shuddering towards its tipping point. Germany had invaded Russia, and at first had been having every success. The Russian winter was holding the German army before Moscow. Towards the end of my first term at Charterhouse, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and the United States entered the war. After that, there was never any doubt who was going to win. Of course, Pearl Harbor came as a great relief to the British; the Japanese had given us an invincible ally. Despite the loss of Malaya and then of Singapore, the turn happened in the last months of 1941, and every schoolboy knew it.

At Christmas the scholars were promoted to the Special Remove, which was then taught by a charismatic man, Bob Arrowsmith. He would have regarded the word ‘charismatic’ as new-fangled, possibly blasphemous and certainly vulgar. He had three great enthusiasms: Charterhouse, cricket and eighteenth-century literature. He found that I shared all three; having discovered in the nets that I was a hopeless duffer at cricket, he particularly encouraged my interest in the eighteenth century. He received antiquarian booksellers’ catalogues, and left them for me on his desk; he got me to read Gibbon’s Decline and Fall; he let me explore the minor eighteenth-century poets, such as William Shenstone; he introduced me to the great classical scholar Richard Bentley, and to the eighteenth-century letter writers. In those days, when his arthritis only showed in a slight limp, he was a great walker and we went on country walks together and discussed what Gray had written to Mason, or John Wilkes’s reply to Lord Sandwich. ‘You will either die of the pox or by hanging.’ ‘That depends, my Lord, on whether I embrace your Lordship’s mistress or your principles.’

For some boys, probably the majority, Bob Arrowsmith was a great teacher. We used to imitate his drawling vowel sounds. ‘My dear Sir’, he would say, and it was easy to imitate that. With those he did not like, he could be more alarming. Max Hastings, who has edited both the Daily Telegraph and the Evening Standard, was later to have him as a housemaster. I believe that Bob tried to be kind to him at an unhappy period of his life, but I do not think Max has ever forgiven him for his inability to reach a common ground of sympathy.

In February 1942, I asked Bob whether, in addition to my ordinary school work, in which I was rather idle, I could write a weekly essay for him. It never occurred to me, nor, I think, to him, that I was putting him to any trouble. For the next couple of terms, I wrote these essays. I remember one of his comments. I had been reading Bacon’s Essays and was writing in similarly short, staccato sentences. Bob said that my essays reminded him of the Book of Proverbs. None of those essays survives, and I imagine they expressed antiquated prejudices in antiquated language; indeed, Bob would have liked that. But those weekly essays, with their echoes of Bacon, or Addison – I was reading Addison’s Spectator – Johnson or Gibbon, helped to teach me how to write. I tried to imitate Addison’s conversational style, but could not resist a rhetorical antithesis. One should get a big style as a teenager, so that one can tone it down later on.

My first year at Charterhouse was a good one, particularly the summer, when I spent my spare time divided between the cricket field, at least as a keen scorer, and the excellent school library, with its huge patent Victorian stove in the middle.

It was after I had returned to Somerset for my first summer holiday that I fell ill, and for the next couple of years that illness changed my school life, even leading to a suggestion by J. C. Holmes, my housemaster, that I should go on indefinite leave to try to recover my health. I remember the first illness being diagnosed by Dr Brew, the jovial and very old-fashioned Somerset doctor from Chew Magna. He was a farmers’ doctor, and was full of farming stories, such as that of the old farmer who had not been to the end of the garden for six weeks, and commented, ‘you’d better send a ferret up’n’. He listened to my symptoms, felt the area of my liver, and diagnosed the infectious jaundice which had become epidemic in the unsanitary mass feeding of wartime. It would now be diagnosed as Hepatitis A.

I have never felt so horrible; I had less than no energy; my urine was the colour of mahogany; I was struck by the depression which is a symptom of the disease. The illness and convalescence lasted from late July into October, when I did manage to go back to Charterhouse, but I do not think my energy or my spirits fully recovered so long as I was still at school.

I do remember one happy moment when I was at home, but had started to recover from the acute stage. My mother wanted to cheer me up. I had set my heart on a set of the Pickering ‘wreath’ edition of Christopher Marlowe, which I had seen earlier in the summer in George’s Bookshop, at the top of Park Street in Bristol. It was priced at £2 5s. That would now be the equivalent of about £75; if I saw the same set in a bookseller’s catalogue, I would now expect it to be priced at about £350.

I have the books in front of me as I write. They are bound in a Victorian half-green morocco, an excellent, clean copy. I put a regrettable rubber stamp of ‘W. R-M.’ in the end fly leaves, and stuck my great-grandfather’s armorial book plate, which is far more appropriate, in each volume. I also put a red ribbon as a book mark to each volume; two of the three still survive. The title pages read: ‘The Works of Christopher Marlowe. Volume the First (Second, Third) [wreath ornament] ‘Marlowe renown’d for his rare art and wit Could ne’er attain beyond the name of Kit.’ London: William Pickering, Chancery Lane; Talboys and Wheeler, Oxford; J. Combe and Son, Leicester. MDCCCXXVI.’

This birthday present introduced me to Christopher Marlowe, and for a year or more I was drunk on his plays. I read the plays in quite a careful way. In Act II, Scene II, of Tamburlaine the Great, there is a line which Pickering’s edition reads as ‘His arms and fingers long, and snowy-white’. My pencil note, slipped in, reads: ‘Sinewy is now the generally accepted emendation to snowy-white’. It would indeed be surprising if Marlowe had praised Tamburlaine for his lady-like hands.

I found my imagination stirred by all of Marlowe’s plays. I delighted in the bravura poetry of Tamburlaine the Great. I wrote to John Gielgud, asking him to put on a performance of The Jew of Malta, not realizing how anti-Semitic it was, but taken with the beauty of the verse.