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Bernard Levin
Every time I check the British news sites for cultural events, it seems that another of my favorite non-fiction writers has died. Roy Jenkins ... Ben Pimlott ... and now Bernard Levin. He was a renowned political and cultural opinion columnist in the UK, but I'm not sure how well he's known in the US. I first came across his work maybe 15 years ago, when I found in an anthology an excerpt from his book on music festivals, Conducted Tour. It described an opera performance that went hideously wrong because the stage was slippery, reducing the audience to helpless laughter. What made the account so much fun to read was Levin's elaborate, ornate, referential way of describing what it's like to be laughing uncontrollably.
From Levin's one openly political book, a political/cultural history of Britain in the 1960s called The Pendulum Years, and from hints in his collected columns, I could see that he was the kind of old-fashioned liberal who believed the foundation of liberalism was his own idea of a decent civilized society, and who thus turned cranky and right-wing when he saw that society crumbling. But even when I disagreed with Levin (he criticized anti-smoking campaigns from what he considered the safe position of being a non-smoker himself: he didn't think an occasional cigar disqualified him!), I enjoyed reading what he had to say. And on some matters, particularly musical, I was there with him, though I don't share his adoration of Wagner. It would be impossible to improve on his description of Anton Webern, in The Way We Live Now:
I find Levin enjoyable to read not only when I don't agree with him, but even when I have no interest in his subject, and that's a rare talent. I wrote him a fan letter (but also taking issue with something he'd said in A World Elsewhere) some years ago, and got a reply; that must have been before he became too ill to write: his last book was published six years ago. I've rarely seen his books in the US, but he's on my regular scouting list when I'm in Britain. Maybe now's the time to consider delving into newspaper and magazine archives to find some of the work he refused to collect.
There are, allowing for a few who have already died (it is not true, though it might well have been, that some died of laughter at the time), hardly more than four hundred people who now share, to the end of their lives, an experience from which the rest of the world, now and for ever, is excluded. ... He who, after such happiness, would have demanded more, would be greedy indeed, and most of us were content to know that, for one crowded half-hour, we on honeydew had fed, and drunk the milk of Paradise.I made a note of his name, and a few years later found in a small bookstore in Cardiff a paperback collection of his columns, Speaking Up. I knew he was an author for me when I read this one:
'Dog shoots its owner', said the headline. Oh God, I thought, it's started. Nor was I much reassured by reading the story underneath, in which it was alleged that the beast was not animated by mens rea, but had merely jumped up playfully and knocked the gun to the ground, thus setting it off. That, no doubt, is what the dog said. But how do they know it was telling the truth?And he concludes with sublime pomposity,
I don't like dogs, armed or unarmed, and I have no intention, merely because they are apparently taking over, of pretending otherwise. When they come for me, I shall fight to the last with every weapon I can lay my hands on, and when I am finally overpowered I shall refuse the blindfold and die with a cry of 'Long live cats!'
I thought it was time I made my attitude plain. I have accordingly done so. Long live cats.Hear, hear. From this and half a dozen other Levin collections I've picked up over the years, I've found that, although he wrote most of his columns about British politics and indeed made his reputation that way, he refused to put any of his political columns in his collections, filling them up instead with broader political themes (e.g. passionate screeds against genocide), cultural commentary (classical music was his particular love), and lighter matters (the long saga of his mother's quest to get her water heater fixed). He had a particular talent for writing gripping reviews of what one might consider unreviewable books: a list of names of Latvians killed by the Soviet government, or the index to the multi-volume edition of Pepys' diary.
From Levin's one openly political book, a political/cultural history of Britain in the 1960s called The Pendulum Years, and from hints in his collected columns, I could see that he was the kind of old-fashioned liberal who believed the foundation of liberalism was his own idea of a decent civilized society, and who thus turned cranky and right-wing when he saw that society crumbling. But even when I disagreed with Levin (he criticized anti-smoking campaigns from what he considered the safe position of being a non-smoker himself: he didn't think an occasional cigar disqualified him!), I enjoyed reading what he had to say. And on some matters, particularly musical, I was there with him, though I don't share his adoration of Wagner. It would be impossible to improve on his description of Anton Webern, in The Way We Live Now:
The one thing that can be said in favour of Webern is that his works are mercifully short; each of the Five Orchestral Pieces, for instance, consists of not much more than three plinks and a plonk, and even the Six Orchestral Pieces, which are massive structures by comparison, were all over in less than ten minutes the lot, with an average for each item of five plinks, two plonks and a grrrrrr.Levin also wrote a history of utopian literature, A World Elsewhere, which has some very complimentary remarks to make about Tolkien, and a series of travel books beginning with Hannibal's Footsteps, the book version of a tv series in which he followed those footsteps across the Alps.
I find Levin enjoyable to read not only when I don't agree with him, but even when I have no interest in his subject, and that's a rare talent. I wrote him a fan letter (but also taking issue with something he'd said in A World Elsewhere) some years ago, and got a reply; that must have been before he became too ill to write: his last book was published six years ago. I've rarely seen his books in the US, but he's on my regular scouting list when I'm in Britain. Maybe now's the time to consider delving into newspaper and magazine archives to find some of the work he refused to collect.
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