Jeremy Lewis
‘Cyril Connolly was the ultimate ditherer, seeing umpteen sides of every question, declaring that he believed in “God the either, God the or, and God the holy both” ’
Although I always have a book on the boil, I’m a shamingly superficial reader, with a memory like a sieve. Fifty years ago, when we were first married, I read Bleak House out loud to my wife: she had never read it before, but although this was my third encounter, I had no idea what was going on, and repeatedly asked her for an explanation. These days I’m equally baffled by television dramas, and by Scandi-noir in particular, and Petra spends a good deal of time pressing the ‘pause’ button in order to explain what is going on.
A year or two earlier, in my last year at university, I read a book which somehow stuck in my brain. A Mirror of Nazism by Brigitte Granzow, a German academic, was published by Victor Gollancz, and it boasted one of those yellow jackets with black and magenta lettering associated with the firm. It described how the British press had reacted to the rise of Hitler in the years before he became Chancellor, and how the general feeling – most explicitly spelt out in the Manchester Guardian – was that he was not only a ‘lightweight’, manipulated by big business and the military, but that were he ever to rule Germany he would soon be tamed by the practicalities of office: in other words, there would be a great gulf between his rabble-rousing rhetoric and the realities of everyday politics. Nothing could have been further from the truth: the Enabling Act, which gave Hitler absolute power, was passed within two months of his becoming Chancellor, and his rule proved far worse than anyone could have anticipated.
I was reminded of Dr Granzow’s book apropos the election of Donald Trump. Let’s hope the analogy doesn’t prove too apt. Perhaps one can draw cold comfort from that fact that liberal-minded papers like the Guardian and the Observer are far more apocalyptic about the rise of Trump than those on the Right – a reversal of the situation back in the early Thirties. With luck they’ll be proved wrong once again.
Very early in my publishing life – at about the time I was being baffled by Bleak House – I realised that authors and publishers are very different animals. The men might have looked the same – both then given to long hair, corduroy jackets and (if employed by Jonathan Cape) open-necked shirts – but whereas good publishers were essentially literaryminded businessmen-cum-impresarios, authors tended to be shyer, more reclusive creatures, only coming into their own when hammering a typewriter or draining a bottle of house red. I became even more aware of this when, years later, I wrote biographies of Cyril Connolly and Allen Lane, the founder of Penguin Books. Connolly was, like so many writers, the ultimate ditherer, seeing umpteen sides of every question, declaring that he believed in ‘God the either, God the or, and God the holy both’, and articulating with great wit and style one’s all too familiar feelings of ambiguity and ambivalence. The most brilliant and influential publisher of his day, Lane was far more interesting for what he did than for what he said or wrote: he seemed a single-, even simpleminded soul compared with Connolly, but without that single-mindedness and decisiveness he would never have succeeded.
A month or two back, Barack Obama declared that he was, in essence, a writer. I haven’t read any of his books, but I’m told that he not only wrote them himself – a rarity in that world – but that they’re well worth reading. Be that as it may, his being a writer manqué might explain why he turned out to be such a likeable but ineffectual President. Those who like the idea of a writer at the helm could, I suppose, cite the example of Winston Churchill: but as well as being a politician and a prolific writer he was, at various times, a soldier, a journalist, a painter and a bricklayer – an exception to every rule, and never averse to employing a ghost.
I’ve never been good at grammar – I’d be hard pushed to define a preposition or a conjunction – but I hate to see words or punctuation marks being misused or neglected. Protesting about the misuse of ‘disinterested’ is, alas, a lost cause, but were I a committee-minded man I would set up preservation societies for the colon and the word ‘whom’. Because I’m a grammatical ignoramus, I have no idea how the colon should be employed, but – like my literary hero Hugh Trevor-roper – I love to use it to introduce a list, the ingredients of which are too long to be separated by a mere comma; and I know, instinctively, that it does a very different job to the semicolon. Like the colon, ‘whom’ is threatened with extinction: it hasn’t been sighted in the Daily Telegraph for years; some Oldie contributors know nothing of it, and the missing ‘m’ has to be added at proof stage.