JOHN GROSS

Editor of

The New Oxford Book of English Prose

1998

JOHN GROSS WAS an intellectual, even a highbrow, though neither word seems quite right for someone with so much humor in him, such charm, and whose social gifts were always in evidence. Ideal guest that he was, when did he find the time to do all that reading? He appeared to know everybody and to possess some extra-sensory perception of who was in and who was out, with all their pluses and minuses. Hour-long telephone calls with him were as good as a news service.

Every year at the beginning of summer he used to give a party in the Basil Street Hotel in Knightsbridge. He liked to call himself “the Elsa Maxwell de nos jours.” His guest list was so comprehensive that people mingled who normally would not have tolerated being together in the same room. It wasn’t the occasional flashes of silence that made his conversation perfectly delightful, as Sydney Smith pinned down Macaulay, but the creative flow of it, a name leading to another name, an anecdote to another anecdote, each one a gem of gossip, irony and quirkiness. “Stop me if I’ve told you this” was one of his leitmotifs, and another was, “Before you go, there’s just time for one more story if you can bear it.” His memory was flawless, his quotations word-perfect. Most of all, the intention was to laugh, not to hurt.

It is possible, though I think it unlikely, that the story-telling was protective, an appeal for friendship because in his inmost self John was timid, on the qui vive for fear that something or somebody nasty might be in the offing, so it was as well to be all things to all men. More probably, he just agreed with Kingsley Amis’s password for today that change means worse, therefore it’s sensible to make do with whatever raw material is at hand.

Temperament forced him to enlist in the culture wars of the moment. The cause of these wars no doubt lies in unfathomable depths of history, empire, the death of kings, resentment of one’s elders and betters, and who knows what besides. The effect is felt continuously in matters great and small. People have to adjust to the political goals on offer, to reinterpretations of the past, to the way reputations are manipulated to rise and fall, to the uses and abuses of language. As the theater critic of the Sunday Telegraph, John particularly held out against reading into plays and operas all sorts of moral or political messages at odds with the original work. At one point he asked if I didn’t think that pop music was the great cultural divide. Those born in the era of this immense but mindless revolution in taste and manners were condemned never to understand those born before it, as we had been.

John’s regular contributions to the New Criterion under the rubric “London Journal” were dispatches from the front in the culture wars, and they are every bit as illuminating as George Orwell’s similar London letters to Partisan Review, written during the real war with the Germans. When Tony Blair had just become Prime Minister, John pointed out that he spoke of “rebranding” Britain as though dealing with a supermarket; the wider conclusion was that this encouraged the nation to wave goodbye to its historic identity, a pointless and unsettling step. The BBC was also coarsening the culture, John believed, in one typical instance concocting the nonsense that Wordsworth knew Coleridge to be a better poet than he and therefore pressed him to continue with drugs in order to destroy him. After 9/11, John was particularly incensed by a BBC television program when Muslim extremists accused the United States of bringing this outrage on itself, and his comment revealed his state of mind. “You start thinking you can’t be surprised anymore – not when it comes to left-wing opinion-makers at least – but you end up being surprised nonetheless.” Over the last twenty-five years, John would wryly underline, nobody from the BBC had been in touch with him. Culture wars are fought from the trenches, in close combat.

Most of the correspondence from John that I kept simply evokes company and good times. “I do hope that I didn’t outstay my welcome the other night; if I did I can only plead it was the pleasure of seeing you that kept me.” Writing from a Park Avenue apartment, he hopes we can meet in New York. For five long years, he had the Sisyphean task of reviewing two books every week for the New York Times. He seemed to manage this easily, and the goings-on of his colleagues on the paper added to his repertoire of irresistible stories. By this time, he was also a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and to Commentary – in other words, he occupied a position in no-man’s land.

One postcard asks rather typically if I have read a review by a critic we both held in low esteem, of a new book by a famous novelist we held in even lower esteem. “In a grim way it might amuse you.” And here’s another dated March 1981 with a portrait of Mao Tsetung gazing with poster-like uplift into the distance. A strip across the bottom of the card reads, “Father’s Mind Was Set on a People’s Republic.” On the reverse are five printed lines all in capitals: “The Youth of Today – Narcissistic – Depraved – Dangerous. All Over the World Right-Thinking Folk Are Crying Out This Thing Has Gone Too Far. Our Young People Are Sick. A New Magazine Chronicles the Terrors of Teen Tyranny. Time Is Running Out – Final Days – Edited by John Stalin.” Underneath this inspired but presumably fictitious name, John has simply jotted “T.L.S.” and thanks me for a review for him of Saul Friedländer’s When Memory Comes. Now an eminent historian, Friedländer described unforgettably what he had gone through as a child in the war, and drew the conclusion, equally unforgettable, that Jews “obey the call of some mysterious destiny.”

John was only thirty-four when he published The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters, but the book has the scholarship and poise of someone at the close of a long and thoughtful career. It also opened a front in the culture wars. John wrote that some English men of letters had been gifted while others were boring, but all had contributed to a literature that was a national glory. Academics with university salaries, however, had then driven them out. Critics had become either too specialized to be of interest or they were just doormen at the discotheque. Although he was cataloguing men of letters as a more or less extinct species, John chose to become that very thing himself, like a latter-day Eminent Victorian, but one who reserved the right to flick ink from the back of the classroom. At various moments in this role as man of letters, he was literary editor of the New Statesman and of Melvin Lasky’s Encounter, a commissioning editor with the publishers Weidenfeld & Nicolson, and from 1974 to 1981 the editor of the Times Literary Supplement.

The official history of the TLS compliments John for maintaining an extremely high standard of reviewing, “helped by the fact that he had no difficulty in discussing almost any subject with his contributors on an equal intellectual footing.” Roger Scruton, for one, tells me that he was virtually unknown until John commissioned lengthy articles from him. Another contributor whom he introduced was Alastair Forbes, a member of a well-connected Bostonian family who had made his home in London and Château d’Oex in Switzerland. His know-all name-dropping and a prose style that was a log-jam of sub-clauses gave him a certain cachet. My biography of Unity Mitford was an ideal opportunity for him to show how much more he knew than I did, about Unity, Hitler, the other Mitfords, the whole political and social background of Unity’s drama. When he asked to review it, John weighed the pros and cons for several days before accepting the risk, he told me afterwards. In the event, Forbes took the line that my father and I had moral defects that destroyed the right to have opinions. Alan had edited the TLS from 1948 to 1959. An embarrassed John rejected the review, whereupon Forbes re-titled it “The Piece the Jews Rejected” and circulated a hundred or so photocopies around London, including one put into my mail box. The scandal persisted until John eventually published an edited version of the review.

For a writer, as John put it, “the fact of having been born a Jew can mean everything or nothing,” or, he adds in a rather characteristic qualification garnished with a bracket, “(more usually) something in between.” Shylock, published in 1992, was John’s first attempt to discover through the medium of print what being Jewish might mean for him. Shakespeare’s Jew has long been a stereotype, a villain who has become part of world mythology. The demand for a pound of flesh has provided an enduring foundation for anti-Semitism. Actors have tried to play Shylock as a comic character, or as noble, heroic and ultimately tragic. What’s always left, though, in John’s conclusion, is “a permanent chill in the air.”

John’s memoir of his childhood and upbringing, A Double Thread: Growing Up English and Jewish in London, addresses his identity as an English Jew more directly. He dedicated the book to his children, Tom and Susanna, of whom he was limitlessly proud. His recommendation was that everyone with these two threads in their identity should feel relaxed about it. John did not enter the sea of the Talmud, as he put it in the words of a religious dictum, but his father, a doctor, and his bookish mother gave him a sense of Judaism, including Hebrew and Yiddish. His experience was very different from Saul Friedländer’s, but he too could come to think that Jews obey the call of some mysterious destiny.

John’s upbringing was, nevertheless, overwhelmingly ordinary and English, for which he was grateful. During the Second World War, the family moved from the East End of London to Egham – “A Small Town in Surrey” is the title he gives to the relevant chapter. What formed him were boys’ comics, the songs of those pre-pop years, period films, teachers in friendly schools who led him to the poetry of Eliot and Auden and the prose of James Joyce, even cricket, and not an anti-Semite or a proper Communist anywhere on the horizon. The path was short and straight to an Oxford scholarship in a college whose Warden, the majestic Maurice Bowra, liked to boom to the attending world, “All my geese are swans.”

An innately modest man, John made no claims for himself. A spasm of disavowal would certainly have crossed his face on hearing that he has influenced literary perceptions and taste and will continue to do so. His anthologies – The Oxford Books of English Prose, of Comic Verse, of Essays, of Literary Anecdotes, and The Oxford Book of Parodies, (which came out just before his last illness when he was still able to take pleasure in the reviews) – are celebrations of the English literary tradition, its range and its civility.