Jeremy Lewis
‘We lived in a ramshackle windswept cottage fifty yards from the English Channel and my mother thought it more important to go for long walks than to attend job interviews’
John Julius Norwich’s annual Christmas Cracker included a withering attack by the poet Stevie Smith on the demotion of the Authorised Version of the Bible, one of the greatest works of English literature, and its replacement by the banalities of the 1961 New English Bible. I was only nineteen at the time, but although I had been brought up on the King James Bible during my schooldays at least – my parents were anti-god, or at best indifferent – I was too young to feel strongly either way: but over the years I became ever more infuriated by an act of cultural vandalism perpetrated by a gaggle of second-rate clergymen and academics with no literary gifts, no sense of history and a demented devotion to such modish shibboleths as accessibility and transparency. The then Archbishop of York, Donald Coggan, chaired the committee responsible for translating the great work from Hebrew and Greek: his literary advisers included Professor Basil Willey of Cambridge, the Oxford classicist Roger Mynors, the poet Anne Ridler and the young John Carey – none of whom would have dreamt of simplifying Shakespeare or rendering Milton into everyday English on the grounds that they were unintelligible to the uneducated or to English speakers from overseas. T S Eliot, rightly unamused, wrote that the new Bible ‘astonishes in its combination of the vulgar, the trivial and the pedantic’, and with its arrival such phrases as ‘Get thee behind me, Satan’ vanished from the vernacular.
Supporters of the new Bible rightly claimed that those who pined for the Authorised Version – and the equally magnificent 1662 Prayer Book, also demoted – were fearful humbugs, in that very few of them ever went to church or lent support to the C of E, and were for the most part agnostics or outright atheists. I was, and am, a signed-up humbug in that sense, and my love for the old order is aesthetic and nostalgic rather than religious: but one doesn’t have to believe in God to love old churches, or to subscribe to St Paul’s every utterance to relish the incomparable English prose in which – to take an obvious and much quoted example – 1 Corinthians 13 was once made available to us (‘And now abideth faith, hope, charity; but the greatest of these is charity’).
High-minded C of E clerics desperate to seem worldly-wise have made awful asses of themselves during my lifetime, but at least they ended last year on a high note by commissioning a new window in Westminster Abbey from David Hockney. I’m sure it will be a miracle of light and colour, and although it can’t make up for the loss of the Authorised Version, at least it’s a move in the right direction. For various reasons, mostly of the tiresome medical variety, I’ve spent more time than usual over the past year looking back on my life; and, at the risk of sounding smugger than ever, I think it’s been happier than many, if short on drama and high adventure. I’ve been very lucky indeed in my wife and daughters and in my friends, and although I can’t pretend I relished every moment of my office life, in the days when I was chained to a regular job, I’ve always found my work extremely interesting. It never occurred to me to consider a ‘proper’ job, to follow my father into medicine or to train as a solicitor or a surveyor or an accountant: we lived, when I should have been job-hunting, in a ramshackle, windswept cottage fifty yards from the English Channel, and my mother, a great influence on our lives, thought it far more important to sunbathe, go for long walks, swim several times a day and eat enormous meals than to attend interviews in London. But eventually I was stirred into action: fifty years ago I ended up in what one might vaguely call the literary world, working – over the years – for five publishing houses, two literary agents and three magazines, as well as writing nine books and more reviews and obituaries for newspapers than I could begin to count.
I found – and still find – this world both fascinating and entertaining, but I’m very well aware that 99 per cent of the population would find it of no interest whatsoever, and an entirely footling way of spending one’s days. The pay is peanuts, they would argue (rightly); why would any sane man want to waste his days writing the life of an obscure publisher or newspaper editor, or correcting the howlers in someone else’s prose? Back in the late Seventies we spent a few years in Oxford, where I’d been offered a job in publishing: north Oxford was full of kindred spirits, but I found it socially claustrophobic in that everyone shared the same rather self-congratulatory terms of reference, and it came as a relief to return to our humdrum London suburb, where one’s neighbours had never heard of Balliol or Chatto & Windus, any more than I’d heard of the businesses they worked for. Interesting lives, I suspect, are in the eyes of the beholder, and long may it remain that way.