Heresies and Heretics

by George Watson

  He had also, almost certainly, forgotten a remark he had once made at a dinner in King’s College, Cambridge around 1930, though the college did not. Lytton Strachey was there, and when the young Snow was offered snuff he declined it: ‘Not my century.’ ‘What is your century?’ Strachey asked in his high falsetto voice. ‘The twenty-first?’

  Fortunately the answer was No. If Snow had lived to the end of his century he would have found the free market triumphant, to his amazement, democracy back in style and parties of varying complexions intent on pushing back the role of the state. He would also have found the friends of those sophisticates Hitler and Stalin dead or in hiding, some of them branded as war criminals. He had espoused a future that did not happen. It was the past, after all, that had been in his bones. But then if you have read every important book written since the Renaissance, and heeded them, you are at least as likely to be impressed by the past as by the future. Avant-gardistes have a way of looking back for their new ideas, and any idea they take up with, like 1840s Marxism, is likely to be Old Hat. The future, as they conceive of it, has already happened, and tomorrow is another day.

  23. Hugh Sykes Davies

  He had done so many things, and played so many parts, that you never felt you had come to the end of him. Some knew Hugh Sykes Davies as a wit, some as a lover, some as a teacher; and there were those who read his novels and even his poems. He also married a good deal. He had many wives, four of them his own; taught at Cambridge for nearly half a century – a communist for half the time; was a surrealist in the Paris of the mid-1930s; and finally, as faith and dogma ran dry, a structural linguist. He was once to have been a candidate for the House of Commons, too, in 1940, in an election cancelled because of invasion fears. Soon afterwards he found himself an official in the wartime Ministry of Food, and later an ardent campaigner for school reform. He cooked and fished. Above all he talked.

  In 1959, when we first met, he would soon turn fifty, and chaired an English faculty I joined that year. By then literature interested him only spasmodically. The real passion of his life was fishing, which induced a state of passivity, he would say, almost of non-being, not otherwise attainable. He loved his motor-bike too, till his wife and mother joined forces to make him give it up. At his age, they felt, it was too dangerous. He probably felt it was not dangerous enough, since it was danger above all that attracted him. He loved doing things he could not quite do, such as writing fiction or playing the accordion. If it was not new – new to him – it was not interesting. Thought had to be dangerous too, in a high theoretical way. ‘One must always have a general analysis,’ he once remarked to explain why, after socialism had failed, he took to structuralism. A love of novelty explains his marital career, which began with the poet Kathleen Raine and ended by remarrying his third wife as his fifth. It was not a return but something new, since he had never remarried anyone before; and besides she was related to a baronet. ‘Every time I marry her I get into Debrett.’

  He was half famous and content to remain so. In April 1959, on receiving a letter inviting me to Cambridge for an interview, I vaguely felt I had heard of him and went about asking ‘Who is Hugh Sykes Davies?’ Others too felt the name rang a bell. But what bell? A bibliography suggested he had written something called Petron before the war, but it did not seem to be in any library, and I discovered only later it was a prose-poem written in his surrealist period when he knew André Breton in Paris. I am slightly ashamed to say I have still not read it, though I do not think he would have minded and might even have preferred it so. By 1959 he had long outlived surrealism, though he was pleased to receive letters from total strangers working on dissertations in California who had spotted him in group-photos taken in Paris before the war; they wondered if he was still alive, and he was happy to reassure them. An inveterate avant-gardiste, he rightly felt no sense of loyalty to the nonsense of his youth, but it was still nice to feel unforgotten. In a television programme of the 1970s, on spying for Stalin, he hinted strongly he had been as much a communist traitor in the 1930s as his friends Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean – Cambridge men who had become famous by fleeing to Moscow in 1952. His charm, however, guaranteed that no one altogether believed it. As an old friend crushingly remarked, ‘Hugh is harmless.’

  He was always, and by choice, on the margins of life, rather like the hero of T. S. Eliot’s ‘Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’; and it is perhaps a pity Eliot wrote the poem before he met Hugh, though he may have had moments of recognition when he did. Prufrock calls himself an attendant lord, mindful of the characters who stand about in court scenes of Elizabethan plays; and Hugh was supremely the Prufrock of English letters between the wars, humming his love-song in an unromantic world, living his life in fragments or (as Eliot put it) measuring it out in coffee spoons, and making do in a haphazard existence where all beliefs are transitory. No settled conviction links you to family or tribe, and no choice looks certain in an over-abundance of choices: ‘Do I dare to eat a peach?’ As a post-Marxist you are not sure of your class; as a post-Darwinian you are not even sure of your species: ‘I should have been a pair of ragged claws/Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.’ Others might indeed be unclear who or what you were. But then you were unclear yourself, and life was not a finding but a baffling and unending search.

  ____

  It was Hugh’s foible to know people before they were famous and to drop them – never to be dropped – before celebrity came. He had known Eliot closely down to the mid-1930s, taking him to football games and inviting him to college dinners, but he deserted him in 1934 when an audience crowded with bishops and lesser clergy at the first performance of The Rock persuaded him at a glance that Eliot was no company for a devout atheist. The son of a Yorkshire clergyman, Hugh was implacably against God, and it was one of the few convictions he retained all his life. Religion was so closely allied to madness, he believed, that it was difficult to know which had caused which. That differed interestingly from the atheism of his lifelong friend William Empson. Empson thought religion made you evil. Hugh thought it drove you mad – assuming, that is, you were not mad already.

  His friendships with the not-yet-famous were numerous. Before the war, which caused C.P. Snow to move to London, Hugh spent many convivial hours with him, though he found Snow laborious in conversation and delighted in mockingly calling him Percy instead of Charles. He drank with C.S. Lewis, who came to Cambridge in 1954, avoiding topics that involved conflicting opinions such as religion and communism; they enjoyed discussing the Italian comic epics, though he occasionally found Lewis over-disputatious. He had known Maynard Keynes, though he took no serious interest in economics, and Henry Moore, a fellow Yorkshireman still unknown as a sculptor. For a time he lived in north London with Moore and his Russian wife Irene, and he would tell how the sculptor would go down to his basement studio after breakfast and light a cigarette. Carving, however, is a noisy business, and Irene was ambitious. ‘Henry, what are you doing?’ she would shout repeatedly down the stairs with rising emphasis, until he reluctantly threw away his cigarette and took up his chisel.

  Hugh had learned about Picasso in the 1930s from his fellow-communist Anthony Blunt, with whom he later quarrelled, since Blunt saw surrealism as apostasy and bourgeois decadence. Hugh made the young Malcolm Lowry his ward to protect him from drink, and they lived for a time with Conrad Aiken in Rye in Sussex, where Aiken had settled out of admiration for Henry James, once its most famous resident. Aiken and Lowry were dedicated alcoholics, each consuming a bottle of brandy a day, and Hugh kept them company in the habit, so as not to seem unsociable, and enjoyed beating them at ping-pong. But he miraculously escaped addiction, though he retained a warm liking for gin-and-vermouth as well as brandy, and interested himself (like De Quincey and Baudelaire before him) in drugs deriving from opium. Then Aiken went home to America and Lowry wandered the world, settling in Vancouver, and all contact was lost. Lowry’s Under the Volcano, wh
en it finally appeared in 1947, meant nothing to Hugh. It was alcoholic fiction, he declared, though near the end of his life he was persuaded by Canadian television to make a programme; and he did it on the symbolic condition they supplied a bottle of brandy in a Cambridge pub during the interview. That put him in a high good humour. As he walked home late he came upon a lonely policeman standing outside King’s College and approached him unsteadily. ‘Have there been any interesting fires in the colleges this evening, constable?’

  He had known Salvador Dali too, assisting him one warm afternoon in 1936 as he lectured on surrealism in London at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Dali loved to make an effect. He entered the lecture-room in a diver’s suit leading a greyhound on a leash, then opened the glass window covering his face, and delivered the lecture while Hugh danced around him loosening the screws at his neck for ventilation. Hugh had known Wittgenstein too, a drinking companion, not as a philosopher but as a whistler. Ludwig, as he called him, could whistle an entire movement of a Beethoven symphony – not just the melodic line but the harmonies beneath. But Hugh never read his philosophy and only once went to a class. Wittgenstein, when they met in the street next day, was not pleased. ‘I saw you at my class yesterday, Hugh,’ he said, ‘and I hope you won’t come again. My stomach-ache is not your stomach-ache.’

  ____

  A bohemian life meant escape from the factories of Yorkshire and the stolid parsonage where his family, who had been Methodist before they were Anglican, practised the strictest abstention. In fact his grandmother’s middle name, he delighted to recall, had been Abstemia. A freshman in 1928 he found Cambridge a liberation, and spent the rest of his life defining himself against the values of a puritan childhood, discovering the virtues of abstention only when it was too late to matter. He had lost his virginity at a remarkably early age at a boarding school, when a nurse brought in to deal with an epidemic had been rashly allowed a latchkey; and he never forgot his anxiety, as he crept back after his first amorous adventure, wondering whether it would impair his performance that afternoon at football.

  Cambridge put him at eighteen into the middle of the only school of critical theory on earth, and he adored a new theory even more than solid or liquid stimulants and in much the same way. In the heady days of I. A. Richards theory could turn you on and help you drop out, which he did, editing an undergraduate journal called Experiment with his fellow-undergraduate William Empson. It was a critical school dedicated to T. S. Eliot, then a young American poet in London; but he broke with Eliot over religion, and at Eliot’s death in 1965 he wrote an obituary called ‘Mr Kurtz, He Dead’ in which Joseph Conrad’s bitter epitaph in Heart of Darkness sums up an abiding sense of betrayal. Kurtz had exterminated blacks in the Congo, and Eliot’s Anglicanism seemed to Hugh hardly better; worse still his equivocal attitude to Franco during the Spanish Civil War and his fellow-feeling for Marshal Pétain after the fall of France in 1940. The Vichy slogan Family, Fatherland, Work summed up everything Hugh did not believe in and quite a lot that Eliot did. Not that Eliot rejoiced in the defeat of France. ‘But he did think it an opportunity,’ Hugh said sadly, ‘to do something interesting.’ Eliot had taken a path many of his disciples could not follow.

  In his late twenties Hugh’s life had been paradoxically saved by illness. The onset of tuberculosis coincided with the Spanish Civil War, in which he would certainly have fought and probably died; and his long cure in a Swiss sanatorium, funded by his friend Lord Rothschild, left him too weak to serve after 1939. In any case he rejected as an active communist all collaboration with what the party called an imperialist war, at least until Hitler attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941; and a meeting with George Orwell at the BBC, when Orwell invited him to broadcast to India, struck him as an act of betrayal. His party loyalty in those days was unqualified. Stalin’s pact with Hitler in August 1939 was ‘just another custard pie to throw at Neville Chamberlain.’

  ____

  By 1959, when we first met, he had given up almost everything, including Marx and André Breton, and regretted a good deal. ‘My conscience reproves me when I am wrong,’ he would say sadly, ‘and never commends me when I am right.’ Even critical theories of I. A. Richards such as Basic English no longer held his attention, though he continued to love Richards’s company after he returned from nearly forty years at Harvard. ‘The subtlest mind in the West,’ he would call him. He had given up communism shortly before we met, not long after the Russian invasion of Hungary in 1956: not because of the invasion, apparently, which he had defended in a public speech, but for reasons he would never quite explain. Hints, however, were occasionally dropped. ‘Workers don’t work any more,’ he would exclaim bitterly, and he was horrified by transport and power strikes in the days when British unions were militant. I picture him standing on cold railway-stations waiting for trains that would not come. He loathed, too, what some presume to call progressive education, and he would deride teachers who protested they could not teach children to count or spell. He never became a conservative, however, and kept up a connection with the Left by opposing nuclear armaments. But on many issues, and more and more, he thought conservatively.

  By then the Left’s literary avant-garde, to which he had given his life, was running out of issues. If you are an inveterate avant-gardiste you need a quick supersession of new ideas, or ideas that look new, to replace what fate and chance have forced you to abandon; and there is a natural limit to the search for novelty. It is called old age, or middle age. He had given up Modernism because of Eliot’s reactionary ideas in politics and religion. He had given up surrealism on sadly realising that you need fixed points, after all, both in life and in the arts. He had given up Richards’s Basic English because no native speaker of English, he belatedly realised, can remember what eight hundred-odd words he is allowed to use. And he had given up socialism, in all likelihood, because of union militancy. Dying in June 1984, a few months after his friend William Empson, he did not live to see the Soviet collapse of 1989-90, but I suspect he would not have minded. The failure of his marriages, too, had faded into a limbo of mind; and fishing was a consolation that it took him to lonely places. ‘I am glad to say I have parted from all my wives on the terms of the greatest possible bitterness,’ he would say with a smile that made a virtue of his isolation. The art of life, he would add, quoting a Greek motto, was to lurk; and he sometimes tried to look invisible as he entered rooms or walked familiar paths, and almost succeeded. It was as if he had wrapped a cloak of invisibility around himself.

  He was not a great traveller and avoided cities when he moved. ‘I am a citizen of no mean city,’ he would say of his country retreat in Norfolk, misquoting Saint Paul. He was never in America and showed no wish to go, though one of his daughters lived as a lawyer in New York. Indeed he was never out of Europe, apart from a two-day trip to Tunis during the second world war to victual a British Eighth Army that had just defeated Rommel. The visit brought one memorable encounter. He was told that, as a representative of the British government, he should pay a courtesy-call on the head of state known as the Dey. A small dark man sat cross-legged on a divan, and Hugh made an unpractised little bow. The Dey looked infinitely gloomy, but he had evidently heard the visitor had some connection with food, and asked, ‘Vous avez du chocolat?’ Hugh said he thought he might manage some, and the Dey brightened a little. ‘Et vous avez un frigidaire?’

  ____

  A classic twentieth-century man, he moved from heresy to heresy, from coterie to coterie – the Richards circle of critical theorists, the Communist Party, the surrealists – and eventually found there were no new things to do beyond fitful enthusiasms. A sudden craze in his fifties for sky-diving was derisively dismissed by his friends and remained happily unfulfilled. He was always ‘into’ something, and a colleague once remarked that the word might have been invented for him. One day it was the grammatical functions of the brain, another word-frequency in the great English
novelists and poets, another the imminent danger of a nuclear war.

  These were his spots of time, as he called them, quoting his beloved Wordsworth, and like Wordsworth he felt their vivifying virtue. Wordsworth, he once explained in a collection he edited called The English Mind (1964), was a precursor of Sigmund Freud, whom he had met in Paris in 1938 in the home of Princess Marie Bonaparte, ‘the only princess I have ever known’ and head of the French Freudians. He was a refugee on his way from Vienna to London, where he died; and like Wordsworth he saw experience less as a continuum than as a broken chain of crises and traumas, a shattered record where almost all the fragments are jettisoned as meaningless, the remaining few to be interpreted and reinterpreted into patterns of healing significance. That is what Wordsworth’s Prelude is about, after all, and Proust’s great novel, and that is how Hugh too saw time, in its aimless passage from a birth you cannot remember to a death you will never recall.

  A sworn foe to pomposity, he was content to let such moments emerge in talk as farce, parodying and mocking them to weaken their power and render them more conversable and less real. He regretted his mistakes. A being of some elegance and endless charm, he preferred to see his life as a series of quick takes like scenes from the Marx brothers, whose films he adored. As a young man in the Italian Alps, for example, on Lake Garda, he had hired a boat propelled by standing, like a gondolier, pushing hard at the prow on an oar. It was an object which, as a skilled Cambridge river-punter, he had never seen before, which was why he wanted to try it. As he moved the boat unsteadily from the shore the boatman at the lakeside began to entertain understandable qualms about its safety, and shouted anxiously after him if he knew what he was doing. ‘E capace?’ Hugh shouted back reassuringly ‘Si, sono capace,’ floundering at his oar, and somehow made it back to the shore. But then he was a strong swimmer and, what is more, he had beginner’s luck.