1947–53
St Paul’s School
MILLER MOVED ON FROM PREP SCHOOL to St Paul’s in the autumn of 1947. Barely a teenager, he felt daunted entering the portals of this top-flight public school: a financially exclusive, single-sex establishment in Hammersmith, west London.1 Its neo-Gothic buildings (which have since been demolished) were designed by Alfred Waterhouse along the lines of his other huge edifice, the city’s Natural History Museum.2
Complete with soaring spires and lancet windows, the place was the size of a cathedral, constructed in red Victorian brick and terracotta. Inside, seemingly endless corridors stretched away into the distance, lined with Graeco-Roman statues. At the top of the stairs, none too encouragingly, stood the Laocoön: the plaster cast of two sons and their pater being throttled by serpents. Further along, the forbidding office of the headmaster or High Master, R. L. James, lay behind frosted glass.
St Paul’s illustrious alumni, who included Milton, Pepys and G. K. Chesterton, encouraged keen aspirations. Field Marshal Montgomery had added a dash of military glamour, having used his alma mater as his wartime HQ. He had delivered his brief for D-Day there, and he returned annually to lecture the new boys on single-mindedness, ‘the necessity of deciding what you want to do, what time to get up in the morning and give Gerry a jolly good thrashing’.
That did not become Miller’s mantra. He merely parodies Montgomery’s punctilious delivery, but he was soon happily ensconced in the First Year Classics form. The Small Lecture Theatre served as their raked classroom. Here he practised his Latin grammar and simply carried on working, along with other Jewish pupils, while everyone else attended school prayers in the barrel-vaulted Great Hall. ‘It just seemed very pleasant, doing Latin exercises, getting your conjugations right . . . And those faintly overheard sounds of hymnody’, he says with nostalgia, ‘are probably one of the reasons I later included “Immortal, Invisible” in my film of Alice in Wonderland.’
As he moved up the school, his exam marks improved dramatically, and this won him parental approval. Betty repeated her mother’s form of congratulations, ‘That shows you can do even better.’ He felt that she was right: he could and should do better. ‘Yes,’ he reflects, ‘it was very pleasing that they seemed pleased.’ By this time, he had found several benevolent teachers among the staff as well. He pays tribute to his form master, Mr Longland, for being a lovably vibrant man, and to one or two other ‘nice, sloppy, Fitzrovian bohemians’ in the art department.
When it came to entering the Lower Sixth or Year 12, known as the Lower Eighth at St Paul’s, he was all set to specialize further in Classics. He had a role model in that line, his kinsman Henri Bergson having been a professor of Greek and Latin philosophy. In spite of that, one afternoon, loitering outside the biology department, he underwent a crucial change of heart. Pressing his face to the laboratory window, he found himself longing to join the boys on the other side of the glass who were absorbed in the dissection of dogfish. It struck him as a scientific paradise from which he was excluded, ‘being condemned, instead,’ as he puts it, ‘to a prison of the Classics’.3
In desperation, he asked for a special audience with the High Master to discuss changing course. Opining with fingertips pressed lightly together, R. L. James proved a frosty classicist. He asserted that Miller should not think of forking away from the pre-arranged path, and concluded with a piece of logic worthy of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass. ‘Has it occurred to you, Miller,’ said he, ‘that, if you discover a disease (as I’m sure you will), without Latin you won’t be able to name it?’ Instantly possessed by Montgomery-style decisiveness, Miller exited and signed up for the Lower Biological Eighth – the science course.
At home, his enthusiasm for studying microscopic pond life had already expanded. He had performed primary dissection on frogs and worms from the garden, wielding a scalpel and forceps supplied by his father. Most influentially, he had read the scientist-novelist H. G. Wells’ descriptions of turn-of-the-century labs, and had fallen in love with that scene of bearded Victorian savants gathered round darkly gleaming teak benches. Though science is obviously forward-looking, concerned with new revelations, he saw it – courtesy of Wells – in a romantic, retrospective, sepia-tinted light.
In his adult life, Miller has been regarded as a man of the moment and/or the spirit of a long-gone age, as an exemplar of the revolutionary Sixties and/or a Renaissance Man. His adolescent taste for Wellsian science could be said to encapsulate his Janus-like nature, forward but also backward looking. Certainly, he seemed a teenager born after his time, by 50 years or so, as he became obsessed by Victoriana and hoarded stacks of mildewed, pre-1900 tomes on pathology and microscopy, thrown out by Emanuel.4
Regardless of their divergence over religion, Miller was captivated by his father’s consulting room, which was in Harley Street by this point. Visits paid there on Saturday mornings felt, he says, like secular communions in a sanctified annexe. There was also a hint of gentleman’s club. He was lured by the beautiful antique equipment, heavy ebony rulers and vintage drug jars, all combined with the smell of ink, tobacco and leather upholstery. His novelty-loving side, meanwhile, appreciated the ‘spruce novelty’ of seeing his father at work, rescued from the erosion of domestic familiarity, and he loved the almost psychedelic effect generated by Emanuel’s bright ophthalmoscope.5 A paternal eye inspection always left an after-image, ‘dancing like a lime-coloured sixpence on the floor of the taxi on the way home’.6
His boyhood memories are strewn with such jewel-like, magically luminous circles. At Queen’s Grove, his microscopy became a passion, and he would regularly burn the midnight oil examining magnified slides. A year-long journal was also kept, recording developments in a jar of rotting hay which served as a thriving habitat for tiny organisms. Like a schoolboy Faust or the student Frankenstein, he would grow sore-eyed as he noted down observations in his desk lamp’s ‘dedicated circle of light’. As he recalls, he played the scientist with a mix of narcissistic romanticism and genuine interest.7
He had additionally embraced chemistry, commandeering the garden shed as his lab. Cadging round-bottomed flasks from industrial suppliers in nearby Kilburn, he cooked up compounds with a methylated spirit lamp. He would spend hours observing catalytic reactions and colour changes. To this day, Pyrex’s trademark triangle (embossed on every beaker) is his equivalent of Proust’s madeleine cake, precipitating memories. ‘I can still’, he says, ‘feel the greased glass tap of the burette and hear the zizzing of acid jetting into the alkaline solution.’
One of his early friends at St Paul’s had an impressively lavish laboratory at his home in Hampstead.8 They sometimes played a dangerous game, acquiring a hefty lump of solid sodium, hacking it into slices like a swiss roll on the lawn, then firing the garden hose. When water hits sodium, the latter becomes incandescent and explodes: a spectacular DIY bomb.
In preparation for the Lower Biological Eighth, Miller spent a whole vacation reading about organic chemistry. He was intrigued by carbon atoms and molecules. Their architecture was particularly satisfying: long string formations with side shoots called radicals; and the benzene ring (C6H6) forming a tight circle with strong internal bonds.
Socially too, even before he entered the Lower Eighth, he became friends with Oliver Sacks and Eric Korn who were both outstanding scientists at the school. They cannot quite go down in history as the phenomenal Class of 1953, because Sacks and Korn were one year ahead.9 Nevertheless, convening in the science labs during their lunch-hours (a time for extracurricular activities at St Paul’s), they swiftly became what R. L. James might have termed a triumpuerate. Sacks and Korn helped trigger Miller’s positive use of the term ‘Jewish’, referring to sparky and cultured kindred spirits, without religion being an issue.
Sacks is now, of course, a world-famous neurologist and author, and, in his autobiography Uncle Tungsten, he depicts his first encounter with Miller in the school’s Walker Library. He himself was in a nook, reading avidly about electric eggs, when a shadow slipped across the page. ‘I looked up,’ he records, ‘and saw an astonishingly tall, gangling boy with a very mobile face, brilliant, impish eyes, and an exuberant mop of reddish hair. We got talking together, and have been close friends ever since.’10
One of Sacks’ own areas of neurological expertise, the unreliability of memory, crops up because Miller begs to differ. Having exclaimed that ‘Oliver has aspects of a Borgesian fantasist,’ he insists that they met on the sidelines of a rugby pitch where Sacks cut a rotund yet elegant figure, swathed in a long tweed overcoat.11 Wherever the location, they had a considerable amount in common. Besides the fact that Sacks’ father had come from the East End’s Lithuanian community and trained as a medic with Emanuel, Sacks himself had a stammer, like Miller, and had been distressed by prep-school beatings. He was unwillingly dispatched to child psychiatrists and, at times, felt that his parents were busy absentees. Though Korn was never to attain renown on a par with the other two, he was another extraordinarily intelligent individual. Humorously dubbed the Ink Louse at St Paul’s because he was a small, heavily bespectacled creature, permanently blotched with fountain-pen stains, he went on to gain a zoological PhD (specializing in snail brains). He then turned into an antiquarian bookseller, and wrote erudite and entertaining articles for the Times Literary Supplement and Guardian.12
Miller still gives Korn the top rating, describing him as having been brilliant across the board, and Sacks ranks himself third, saying: ‘I’ve always felt that Jonathan and Eric were much more gifted than I was, and Eric was the most precocious and articulate of us.’ Korn has modestly pointed out that, somewhere along the line, he lost his scholarship to Miller in a reassessment process.
Whoever was nudging into first place, these whizz-kids were soon conducting further crazy chemical experiments on Hampstead Heath. A staggering three-pound slab of sodium – not your average case of teenage substance abuse – was lobbed into Highgate Ponds where it skated around dementedly, engulfed in flames.13 When the friends visited each other’s houses, Sacks quivered with awe at Emanuel’s library of learned monographs (around 10,000 books in all), while Miller adored Sacks’ mother, Elsie Landau.14 She was an eminent, magnificently quirky and enthused gynaecologist, as he explains:
Oh, she was wonderful! She did this extraordinary thing: she totally blurred the distinction between domesticity and surgery. So, for example, you’d go and watch her doing operations and you’d hear her say, ‘Oh, Sister, remind me to get some crystallized ginger on the way home, could you hold that protractor still?’ Then you’d be having supper with her and she’d say, ‘Oh, Jonathan, interesting case, elderly patient, I cut through the acres of fat, opened the peritoneal cavity, it was absolutely full of pus, Sam, pass the mayonnaise.’ She was absolutely marvellous!
The schoolboys were in the doghouse at one point, after they were left in charge of Betty’s rented summer cottage for a week or two. This was another ill-fated vacation in the cursed town of Hythe. On this occasion, it could have been written up as Beside the Seaside: A Holiday Without Parents, or maybe Bang Goes the Basement. Innocently thinking it would be nice to come home with some pickled marine specimens, the trio begged a stack of unwanted cuttlefish from a trawler, stowing them in alcohol-filled jars in the cottage’s cellar. A few days later, hearing muffled explosions, they tiptoed down to discover lumps of shattered glass and putrid flesh adorning the walls like shrapnel. An intolerable stench rose and mushroomed out across the garden, and their cunning plan to disguise the pong with splooshes of coconut essence backfired horrendously. Greeted by nauseating waves of the twin smells on their return, Miller’s grim-faced parents reeled away, returning to London, and the property reportedly remained unfit for habitation months later.15
At school, the threesome’s motto was manifestly not ‘Mens sana in corpore sano’. Miller’s extreme aversion to sports was something of a running joke. He would try to get excused from athletics with mock sicknotes about Jewish plantigrade feet. During cricket matches, the trio would lie low in the long grass, reading books and ducking the malignant whizzing ball which seemingly refused to obey Newtonian laws.16
They were, most unwillingly, roped into the annual boxing competition, the Green Cup. A contemporary remembers that Miller and Sacks were, on one occasion, pitted against each other and camped it up hilariously, with much puffing, kangarooing around and pirouetting.17 Other muscle-bound opponents, however, smashed Miller mercilessly across the nose, releasing a cold smell of aluminium as the blood began to flow. Worse, Sacks suffered a sadistic blow which left him with a traumatic cataract in one eye.
The softer option was referred to as Jewish Gym. There Miller was allegedly so unco-ordinated that his tumbles became a spectator sport, with bets placed on the frequency of him keeling over, as if he were a junior version of Lewis Carroll’s White Knight. In the swimming pool, he struggled with the idea of arms and legs pursuing different rhythms. A far cry from his Uncle Wolfe, the swimming champion, he remarks: ‘All I could ever do were these rather incompetent breast-strokes, the very fact that they were called breaststrokes seeming to call into question our manliness and suitability for membership of a public school.’
That is not to say that he and his friends were all brain and no brawn. During another holiday, they buckled down to hard manual labour in order to earn some money, smashing and smelting old sparkplugs in an industrial unit under the arches in Battersea, south London. Korn was, by the by, a long-distance runner of surprising stamina, and Sacks, when dropped into water, swam like a seal.18 They and Miller, nevertheless, still scorned the athletic and military side of St Paul’s, especially its Combined Cadet Force where boys volunteered to march around in blancoed gaiters, as if their years doing compulsory National Service were not going to suffice. The geography teacher, an ex-army man, would try to recruit with a threatening sneer thrown in, as Miller recollects:
He would get himself up with a swagger stick under his arm and address the school, then range his eyes over the Jewish intellectuals at the front, adding: ‘No doubt, there will be those who choose to grease their way out of their obligations.’ We would drop our eyes and undertook to grease our way out of our obligations . . . We secreted a protective shell around us, so that the world of sporting Christians and the CCF simply had no contact.19
The biology labs became a key haven. The trio spent more and more lunch-hours there, becoming highly skilled at dissection. They felt jubilantly fulfilled and safe among the sciences, under the aegis of Mr Pask. Affectionally known as Sid, Pask was a quiet, yeomanish fellow with a shredded-wheat moustache and a severe stammer, which did not stop him being a great teacher.20 It was, quips Miller, rather surprising that any information was exchanged with so many stutterers in one room. However, Sid would fix everyone with his large bulging eyes, while he wrestled with the name of some obscure crustacean, and everyone was hypnotized.
Sacks compares Sid’s Bunsen burner to the perpetual flame above the ark in a synagogue, and describes how the boys adored their master:21
Our love was intense and comprehensive, sometimes exceeding the love we bore our parents. I well remember how three of us, chatting in the park one day, wondered how we could express our love for him. One of my friends suggested that we kiss him . . . This amazing suggestion was received at first in a thoughtful silence, until we remembered his constant pipe, and fell into helpless laughter at the thought of this troublesome burning thing between us, being thrust down one or another throat.22
Drawing a literary parallel with Miss Jean Brodie and her girls, Korn says that they adored and made a kind of fetish of Pask.
Theories about parental and other love substitutes are questionable in Miller’s view, but he does make ‘Mr Pask’s bright boys’ sound like a band of intellectual devotees, and he says they were nourished and nursed by this exceptional man.23 He names Pask as the strongest influence in his life, for igniting a passionate interest in biology and provoking a phenomenal level of scholarship. This teacher brought in scientific experts as guest speakers and stocked the library as if it were a professional research institution, such that his students were, apparently, almost ready to sit their Finals when they arrived at university.24 The admiration was mutual, for Miller was to be Sid’s most warmly remembered pupil.25
Scientists were making international headlines in this period. Remarkable advances included Einstein’s new generalized theory of gravity; the inauguration of CERN; and Bernard Lovell building the world’s biggest radio telescope at Jodrell Bank, in the English county of Cheshire. In medicine, trailblazers came up with the first kidney transplant and artificial heart, not to mention award-winning insights into the immune system, key developments in penicillin, the polio vaccine and TB-fighting antibiotics. Britain was second only to the USA in the number of scientific Nobel Prizes which it was accumulating, so Sid’s fledglings certainly had their sights set high.
From Pask, Miller also acquired a teacherly urge to disseminate knowledge. During the eighth form, he became a self-styled proselytizing Darwinian. Even today he clambers up and down a stepladder in his Gloucester Crescent study, eagerly sharing the books he first encountered under Pask’s tutelage.26 He fetches down Kerner and Oliver’s Natural History of Plants, revealing its beautiful illustrations, like fairytale vegetation alongside no-nonsense facts. He blows a light dust off D’Arcy Thompson’s On Growth and Form, admitting he struggled with the mathematical graphs about mice, then he plucks down J. Z. Young’s The Life of Vertebrates. Young became another of his personal heroes, writing about anatomy, psychology and neurology, as well as actually turning up at St Paul’s for the boys’ viva examination.
Miller’s memories are equally lit up by Pask’s histology classes when they learned about plant structures: cutting cross-sections of stems; mounting them on slides; and differentially staining the cells blue and pink with exotically named pigments. He reprises those names like an enraptured liturgy – ‘eosin, haematoxylin, gentian violet’ – and he describes the result as a wonderful, glowing rose window.
The learning extended beyond school hours, with Pask’s Field Club expeditions being a source of great delight. On winter weekends, his brainy corps would make a beeline for the Natural History Museum, where Miller became fanatically excited about morphology, spotting likenesses between organic chemistry’s formal regularities and animal design.27 The repeated metameric segmentation of worms and crustaceans became an obsessive interest, and he was riveted by the idea of ancient structural blueprints or baupläne. ‘I just loved the idea’, he says, ‘that nature had already got the basic forms or plans in place, probably shortly after the Cambrian Explosion [around 530 million years ago].’ While noticing that segregation was upheld (‘no wooing and screwing between species’), he was most intrigued by the deep homologies, the increasing affinities discovered when a line is traced back along the branches of evolution. The splint bones in horses’ legs are, for example, the pentadactylic remains of ancestrally separate digits.
During the summer months, the Field Club sallied forth to oak woods, chalk downs and verdant habitats all over south east England. These hikes were at once Elysian and pragmatic, with Sid leading the way in his wellingtons. Frequenting canals, the boys would trawl the waters with delicate nets on brass-hinged poles, and they gathered flowers in the meadows, stowing them in a black tin satchel or vasculum. Their mission was then to identify these plants using Bentham and Hooker’s Handbook of the British Flora. ‘It was all about dual, dichotomous decisions,’ Miller elucidates. ‘Through a series of forking choices – “It’s not that, so it’s that” – you would arrive at the genus and finally at the species. Taraxacum officinale, the dandelion!’
The schoolboy Miller relished taxonomy’s neat classification system, even if his adult career path was to fork and branch out repeatedly rather than narrowing down in a scientific manner. In his youth, he evidently found it soothing to see order imposed, whether that was via Bentham and Hooker’s methods or in the form of morphological baupläne. It was the opposite of his own restless sense of being, socially, ‘neither fish nor fowl nor . . . good salt herring’. Hard science was like a rock, providing certainties after his rootless, unsettling war years. Sacks observes that he, likewise, adored chemistry’s systematic periodic table, partly as a relief from his youthful upheavals.28
Miller’s characteristic hybrid of humour and erudition also blossomed at St Paul’s. What leaps out from the written accounts left by Pask’s bright boys, preserved in the school archives, is their comical springiness combined with dedicated learning. The two were absolutely intertwined, like a double helix, whenever Sid’s star pupils went on excursions or were offered in-house platforms (presenting lectures and scientific demonstrations of their own). To take one example, the Apposition Exhibition was part of a major open day, and the school magazine, the Pauline, records how Pask’s Field Club held an excited preliminary meeting. ‘Miller volunteered to bring back large sections of the Scottish coast,’ it says, ‘while the Secretary sought the loan of the School truck in order to obtain a piece of Wimbledon Common.’ The fizzy mix of larking and learning is again irrepressible in a reported visit to Kew Gardens where, one reads, ‘unfortunately the risk of being arrested stopped even the boldest from collecting specimens but we were nonetheless agreeably surprised by a rare Ginkgo’. Then there was the trip to the canal at Byfleet when, it was noted, ‘our Gargantuan Secretary [Sacks] fell through a “bridge of duckweed”, but nevertheless we collected . . . a fine Nuphar for the School pond’.29
In the event, at the Apposition Exhibition, Miller’s display on blood was impressively elaborate and a great success. He answered parents’ questions for hours. Meanwhile, his lecture on whales was an astonishing if untamed Leviathan for, the Pauline reported, ‘In spite of his amazing alacrity, he did not manage to cover the whole subject, even though he gave a second performance the next Friday.’ He was willing to give impromptu talks on anything, explaining vertebrate evolution with much dramatic gesticulating from behind a pile of old bones – possibly the hind legs of a donkey?30 One fellow biologist still remembers him playing the student-teacher in class, hilariously imitating a horse in orgasm ‘at the same time as having presentation skills and as much knowledge as any master’.31
One cannot leave the Field Club without mentioning Cumbrae, for this was the boys’ transcendent adventure. Catching the night train out of London, they headed north, across the Scottish border and all the way out to Millport, a small island town in the Clyde Estuary. This Easter trip began Miller’s long love affair with Scotland. ‘I have never’, he muses, ‘really recaptured the . . . idyll of that sun-lit fortnight,’ and it remained a joyful memory for Korn and Sacks too.32 They established their HQ in a professional lab at Cumbrae’s marine research station, and glorious spring days were spent down on the beach, scrambling over the rocks to collect specimens. This was in competition with the station’s venerable researcher, Lord Victor Rothschild.
Back in the laboratory, they would stay up into the small hours watching the ritual fertilization of the sea urchins. Adding the urchins’ male sperm to the eggs with a pipette, they would view, under the microscope, ‘this enchanted illuminated disc in which’, as Miller puts it, ‘you could see the cells developing a waist, as if an elaborate corset had been tightened. Then they each divided into two cells, then into four . . . these sixteen cell stages until you began to discern differentiation and the emergence of destinies.’
The shoreline, so often associated with anthropological rites of passage, was both blissful and formative. It was where Pask’s intellectual bequest seemed truly to mature. Miller and Korn so loved Cumbrae that, in their twenties, they would return there with their future wives, simply to go down to the water’s edge and collect again. In Miller’s photograph album is a snapshot, slightly blurred and fading now, yet somehow iconic and encapsulating: a translucent jar of sea life, held on Rachel’s knee, with the stony beach and hills beyond. If Miller believed in ghosts, his eternal haunt of choice might well be this austere littoral.
On his first expedition to Cumbrae, Miller saw his emerging destiny to be a life in science, but he had, along with Sacks and Korn, become part of a group of eighth-formers at St Paul’s whose interests spanned the arts and the sciences. They simply called themselves ‘the gang’, although they are described by their contemporaries as a sextet of eccentric geniuses.33 Of the six, Tony Cutler was officially the odd man out, being the only non-biologist. He was classified as ‘the arts person’ and, indeed, went on to be a professor of art history at America’s Penn State University. The other two were Misha Nathani and Dick Lindenbaum who, like Miller and Sacks, were to train as medics.34 Nonetheless, Lindenbaum yearned to be a poet, Nathani was a keen lover of the arts, Sacks was a talented musician, and Korn was extremely well versed in literature.
The arts were enjoying something of a boom in post-war Britain. This was encouraged by government schemes, especially the creation of the Arts Council which promised state funding. The demand was there, with the nation hankering for more leisure activities as it gradually emerged from the culture of austerity. Cinema-going was massively popular. Even if one-fifth of West End playhouses were bomb damaged, the Old Vic company was rising from the ashes in a pioneering mood, a match for Stratford-upon-Avon’s reopened Memorial Theatre.35 A buzz-creating drama critic, Kenneth Tynan, burst on to the scene in 1951, and the foundation stone (if nothing else) was laid for the National Theatre by the young heir presumptive, Princess Elizabeth.
Orchestras reassembled. Ballerinas pirouetted back into London along with opera productions. Enticing festivals sprang up elsewhere, notably the Edinburgh International Festival of Music and Drama and the Aldeburgh Festival, brainchild of Benjamin Britten. The television industry was still finding its feet, having had its development arrested by the war, but the number of viewers was swelling. In the meantime, BBC Radio’s remarkably highbrow strand, the new Third Programme, began broadcasting concerts, plays, poetry and reviews of exhibitions on an unprecedented scale.36
For those seeking out the fine arts, the National Gallery was lined with masterpieces once more, having been stripped during the Blitz, and in 1949 the Tate reopened fully for the first time in a decade. Crowds flocked to exhibitions of Van Gogh, Picasso and Matisse. Modern art, moreover, became a national talking point after the Royal Academy’s annual dinner (broadcast live) turned into a bunfight. With thrilling irreverence, fusty old Sir Alfred Munnings was heckled during his presidential speech in which he was slating avant-garde ‘silly daubs’.
The morale-boosting Festival of Britain, in 1951, symbolized the idea that the country could shine in more than one field. Its purpose was to celebrate the nation’s ongoing recovery and promote a bright future in both the sciences and the arts. Everyone, including Miller, went to see the festival’s flagship site on the South Bank.37 A bomb-blasted wasteland beside the Thames, near Waterloo, had been architecturally transformed into an almost space-age realm. The Dome of Discovery housed exhibits demonstrating technological advances. Beams of light gloriously shone from the ground beneath your feet, Miller remembers. Nearby was the rocket-like construction called the Skylon, under which sat the Royal Festival Hall for music and other arts. This was the new venue which would subsequently form the core of the South Bank Centre. Over at the festival’s affiliated Battersea Park site, a funfair merrily sat alongside sculptures by Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth and Jacob Epstein.
The marriage of arts and sciences in Miller’s schoolboy gang of six was not always so happy. An occasional quarrel erupted when members of the group took up polar positions, arguing over whether to visit the Natural History Museum or the National Gallery. Tony Cutler recollects that he and Nathani thought of Miller and Sacks as barbarians because they knew little of the humanities. ‘And Jonathan’, he adds, ‘would sometimes get very angry and bad-mouth people. He would go off on – not exactly screaming fits, but it was quasi-hysterical.’38
More general sparring and teasing arose for, as Korn acknowledges:
The gang was a sort of society, a group that put an enormous premium on quick responses, on slick answers . . . [and] Jonathan had a terrifically flashy mind at that age . . . The gang could be an arena for testing one’s new weapons. Oliver was always gentle, but Jonathan could be cruelly sarcastic and, no doubt, so could I.39 There was a bit of that. The terms of membership were you gave as good as you got, you didn’t complain, you took no prisoners, and I remember being jeered at, from time to time, for some foolish thing I’d said.
Using Robert Louis Stevenson in a memorizing competition, Miller and Sacks recited swathes of his prose, and Sacks won by a narrow margin. That must have been quite a feat, even allowing for an element of exaggeration in the comparisons which some have drawn between Miller’s powers of recall and those of Henri Bergson. The latter could reel off France’s railway timetables.
One ex-classmate suggests that Sacks felt eclipsed when Miller started to outshine him in other respects, and even that he ultimately quit Britain for America because he felt the stage was not big enough for both of them. This theory is not really confirmed by the protagonists’ own accounts. Miller merely recalls that he, Sacks and Korn jockeyed a bit, seeing who could best enumerate and describe the vast variety of polychaetes, cephalopods and holothurians (polychaetes being the bristled worms favoured by Miller, cephalopods encompassing the squid and cuttlefish beloved of Sacks, and holothurians being Korn’s speciality, your sea cucumber).40
When asked about mutual competitiveness, however, Sacks thoughtfully responds:
Well, that’s an interesting question which Jonathan and I may both underplay because we, neither of us, like the idea. In many ways, we have gone in different directions [since St Paul’s] . . . I have intermittent feelings of being a flop, and I’ve been wistful and envious of Jonathan’s success and this and that . . . I wish I had his knowledge of drama . . . But I have always been surprised when – though I don’t bring it up – my analyst has wondered whether Jonathan too has envied me . . .
One episode [from St Paul’s] comes to mind, although it’s not to do with competitiveness. I had just read Maynard Keynes’ essay on Newton and talked about it excitedly to Jonathan . . . About three weeks later, he came up to me very excitedly and said, ‘I’ve made an amazing discovery, Maynard Keynes on Newton.’ I said, ‘Jonathan, how did you get on to this essay?’ and he said, ‘I don’t know.’ I was intrigued by this . . . Though he has a prodigious memory, I think he genuinely didn’t know . . . The Russian psychologist Vygotsky likes to talk about dialogic memory, and now Jonathan and I have had an intermittent conversation for over 50 years. Often we don’t know what emanates from whom, all we know is it came out in the interaction . . . and there are innumerable things in which I, consciously or unconsciously, appropriate what Jonathan says.41
Frictions within the group never led to punch-ups. They thought of themselves, collectively, as neurotic Jewish subversives.42 According to Korn, they all had inferiority complexes, large or small, and the gang offered protection. The group could be divided up in various ways, having close pairs within it, and triplets hooking up, but no leaders: a structure not unlike organic chemistry’s benzene ring, in fact, with its six molecules circularly linked by single and double bonds.43
The group played a key role in Miller’s increasingly enjoyable adolescence, and their assorted interests broadened his intellectual range. So it was a clique, but a cerebrally expansive one, contrasting with the standard notion of a gang mentality. It was a coterie where they were all contributors – synapses firing – to generate constant activity and discussion. As Cutler highlights, at this stage, Miller was terrific fun, if sometimes fiery:
In this sort of magical way, we struck sparks off each other and ideas would flow, and I have never been able to find that sort of ambience again . . . There was a connective tissue which linked all our interests, and Jonathan was the best connector of all.
Significantly, one of the books they passed round was The Hedgehog and the Fox, in which Isaiah Berlin discussed two personality types: your ‘hedgehog’ who has a centripetal mind, inclined towards concentrated expertise; and your ‘fox’ with a naturally roving intellect, pursuing many ends. The copy of that essay which the gang shared is still in Cutler’s possession, with its flyleaf inscribed by them all, and Miller was to be a fox for the rest of his life.44
Under Korn’s influence he started absorbing more modern literature, especially James Joyce and T. S. Eliot, whose Four Quartets left him ‘intrigued’, as he puts it, ‘by things I only half-understood, and still only half-understand’. In turn, Miller introduced Sacks to the works of Proust and the Swedish novelist Selma Lagerlöf.45 The whole group headed off to poetry readings at Swiss Cottage’s Cosmo café, where cultured émigrés listened to Dannie Abse, the Jewish–Welsh compound of doctor and versifier.
Fired up by this, the boys founded their own Literary Society at school, setting up readings, inviting VIP speakers, and speedily rivalling St Paul’s official literary club.46 Sacks was a charmingly uninformed president, startled to discover that their guest Richmal Crompton (of Just William fame) was not a man. He also asked George Bernard Shaw if he would pay them a visit. G. B. S. wrote back very sweetly, in a shaky hand, saying he would love to but he was ninety-three and three-quarters.47
Disaster struck when the High Master got wind of The Prickly Pear, a journal which the gang started mimeographing under the Literary Society banner. Using the school’s Gestetner printer (a forerunner of photocopiers), they churned out reams of articles smudged with its trademark purple ink. Nota bene, this was not the St Paul’s equivalent of Shrewsbury School’s droll journalism, which emerged almost simultaneously and is regarded as a precursor of the Satire Boom.48 The Prickly Pear was more impudently seditious.
Misha Nathani had contributed a steaming, radical piece about Jewish world domination, naively lifted from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (the 1903 tract actually forged as part of a Russian anti-Semitic libel). As Korn explains, Nathani really just liked the prose style, but their big mistake was ‘to leave this inflammatory thing to be printed off by the school porter who promised to look at it. He did look at it, and promptly took it to the High Master.’
Not remotely amused by his biologists-turned-bellelettrists, R. L. James appeared to think St Paul’s was facing an all-out revolution, as if Miller, Sacks and co. were members of the Stern Gang. That Zionist terrorist group, abhorring the British Mandate in Palestine, were said to have planned a London bombing in 1947, so maybe James was on paranoid red alert.49 In high-and-mighty mode, he summoned Sacks to his office and decreed that both The Prickly Pear and the Literary Society were axed, with no reprieve. ‘I don’t have to have reasons,’ he declared. ‘You can go now, Sacks. You don’t exist. You don’t exist anymore.’ He snapped his fingers and Sacks showed himself out.50 The gang were enraged and shocked by their sudden powerlessness. The High Master was a dictator, a little Hitler, or a small-scale equivalent of Joe McCarthy over in the States where, at this point in time, left-wing artistic types were being hauled up and blacklisted as communists by the House Un-American Activities Committee (in spite of protests by stars including Danny Kaye).
Sacks’ literary activities were, obviously, not quelled for ever. Today, his acclaimed books, eloquently describing his neurological research, are defined by the author himself as hovering at the intersection between fact and fable.51 That is medicine and creative writing rolled into one, his own idiosyncratic brand of science/fiction. The whole gang bounced back swiftly from James’ censorship by organizing play readings off the school premises. Miller remembers them selecting James Elroy Flecker’s Hassan (from 1922), which was hardly cutting-edge but was a steamy saga set in Old Baghdad with luscious dancing girls. He can still quote chunks of it.
The only stage show he recalls having actually seen as a wartime child was Jack and the Beanstalk: a phosphorescent pantomime where he fell for the principal girl and, doubtless, relished the audacity of giant-slaying. His adolescent brushes with drama increased when, besides the play readings, he began going to the theatre with his parents. They saw a couple of musicals including South Pacific, but mainly went to historic dramas presented by the Old Vic company, which had been refreshing its reputation with star performances by Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson. Miller recalls outings to Shakespeare’s Henry V (with Alec Clunes) and Love’s Labour’s Lost, Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair, and Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer, where the high-born heroine pretends she is of the servant class.
Classic plays were, he points out, the only sort he saw. Though he read T. S. Eliot, his parents did not choose to take him to premieres of The Cocktail Party or Christopher Fry’s experimental verse dramas which were in vogue. In Miller’s own career, he would largely stick to staging the classics too.
It would be some years before he caught up with the director Peter Brook whose groundbreaking, pared-down style would strongly influence him and who was, at that time, cutting his teeth in Stratford-upon-Avon. Melodramatic hamminess and the decorous stuffiness of drawing-room dramas were, in general, persisting in the British theatre. The Old Vic productions were, however, being staged by innovative spirits, notably George Devine and Glen Byam Shaw, with the young Dorothy Tutin, Michael Redgrave and Leo McKern on board.52
Miller says that he cannot link these early experiences to his own directing career. He states that, before the eighth form, he had studied Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, taking pride in knowing every line but never even envisaging it on the stage. In turn, his Old Vic visits seemed completely unrelated when, years later, he ran that very venue. As a young theatre-goer, it was as if an invisible glass wall divided him from the performers, yet he acknowledges that it was magical and thrilling:
People wore very bright make-up, with strongly outlined eyes and red cheeks. The actors were like living toys – very large, animated, living toys. It was another world, an alternative world, what the philosopher Saul Kripke called a possible world . . . When I returned to the ordinary world, accommodating my eyes to the evening, I found that the buses were not as brightly coloured as the people on the stage had been. This was very interesting . . . I longed to go and see these things happening.53
The glowing stage reminded him of an aquarium, an analogy which suggests that it was as entrancing as the translucent jars and the magnified slides of his biological pursuits.54 Furthermore, the invisible glass wall, as in Through the Looking-Glass, might ultimately be traversed.
He was struck by another image of someone spookily passing through a mirror to ‘the other side’ when he saw Jean Cocteau’s 1950 film, Orphée, an updating of the death-conquering myth of Orpheus. Alongside his theatre trips, Miller’s taste in films was growing more sophisticated as he now frequented Hampstead’s Everyman Cinema, watching what would, today, be called classic and art-house movies. He was still relishing Hollywood comedians: Charlie Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, and especially the Marx Brothers whose scripts he came to know by heart. At the same time, European cinema was becoming chic, and he and his friends became au fait with Marcel Pagnol and René Clair’s light satires as well as Cocteau’s dreamlike fantasies. He was even more lastingly impressed by the British film-maker Carol Reed’s The Third Man, starring Orson Welles. ‘When I came to direct [for stage and television],’ he comments, ‘I was also probably very influenced by the films Welles himself made, by the arrangement of space, the deep focus in black-and-white, as well as his overlapping conversations.’
On the gang’s trips to the National Gallery, Tony Cutler supplied mini guided tours, teaching the others about paintings. These could never match up to Miller’s lectures, though, delivered in front of dusty cases in the Natural History Museum, ‘and giving you’, as Cutler recalls, ‘the whole of evolutionary theory plus the philosophical implications, with this astonishing capacity to start small and elaborate the universe out of that point’. Miller was manifestly learning from Cutler’s art history, nonetheless. He started to chip in, discussing how the distorted, anamorphic skull worked as a trompe l’oeil in Holbein’s portrait The Ambassadors. ‘There again’, Cutler remarks, ‘was the philistine scientist not looking at the brushwork. But that [issue of the trompe l’oeil] added another dimension, of course, and Jonathan was exploring that long before the books on Holbein which have been written since.’ Visual teasers are, interestingly, akin to hyphenates: morphing before your eyes, presenting themselves as one thing then another. And such trompe l’oeils were to intrigue Miller down the decades, repeatedly featuring in his own work.
By his own account, he was ignorant about art as a youth, vaguely liking the Impressionists and hardly aware that Jackson Pollock was making a splash. However, he appreciated the relaxed atmosphere of St Paul’s art department and he briefly took up painting as a weekend hobby.55 Archival records of the school’s Chesterton Society – a forum for lively debates – additionally reveal that the ‘volcanic Mr Miller (flames on top and a crater below)’ was turning into a pundit already, defending modern art and reviling the Royal Academy’s crustier members with histrionic flair.
Declaring that the RA’s president Sir Alfred Munnings (after his ‘silly daubs’ gripe) was a fogeyish ‘fate worse than death’, he contended that to be hanged by the neck would be preferable to having your portrait hung in that institution. He went on to challenge aesthetic definitions, ‘waving a few pictures of the South Bank, obviously cut from [the magazine] Picture Post’, and insisting that photographs must be considered artworks because they were good reproductions. He won this debate by a huge majority and in absentia. Blithely whisking off to take an exam, he left the room in uproar with his parting comment on Winston Churchill’s RA efforts: ‘God bless his soul, sir; but God damn his paintings.’ Miller’s style was mock-archaic, like Samuel Johnson in a coffee house, except with an avant-garde conclusion – verbally giving Churchill a V-sign of the rude variety.
His nascent pedagoguism entailed some overwrought gabbling, at least according to the Chesterton secretary who noted, in the minutes, that this grandstander was ‘no doubt of the opinion that a good speech can be appreciated without being understood’. Still, Miller was enjoying himself, ‘twist[ing] his mouth into a wondrous sight, a despiteful pout, a chastisement of the small-minded children that sat before him, an apotheosis of the true artistic perception’.56
Jazz became his great joy as he revelled in the Dixieland revival. Even though compelled by his parents to be home by 11 p.m., he gained an electrifying sense of independence when he headed off with the gang, on Saturday nights, to catch live bands. This was at the 100 Club, in Oxford Street, and other sweaty basements. ‘It was absolutely our Damascus,’ Korn says. ‘Dancing had been awful ballroom lessons, but this was wonderful!’ Exhilarated by the blasting front-line trombones, they saw Humphrey Lyttelton and George Melly live, and they jived to ‘Tiger Rag’ amidst a sea of duffle coats and Fair Isle jumpers. Apparently, you had to dress as if you were on the bridge in The Cruel Sea to have legitimacy. Miller adds that he was good at dancing. When asked for a retrospective review of his friend’s moves, Korn exclaims with widening eyes:
Incomparable! Very balletic. I remember a blur of these extraordinary long limbs, like an octopus. I was famous for incorporating a few of the steps of the Ukrainian gopak: your buttocks five inches off the ground, legs shooting out in all directions. But I had no rhythm nor any sense of melody. Jonathan was kind of body-popping before it had been invented. He was always graceful, certainly enormously gangly, but very much ‘in’ his body.
Miller hasn’t stopped dancing yet. In 2009, the ska group Madness was on a publicity stunt, gigging in an open-topped double-decker bus around Camden Town. Peering into someone’s living-room en passant, the lead singer Suggs was pleasantly surprised to see an old geezer skanking to the beat, and positively astounded when he recognized Dr Miller.57
Omitting to master any instrument, Miller would never perform music himself, nor did he act in any straight dramas at school. He designed one distinctly spartan set for a production of Julius Caesar, his decor amounting to three chairs, two statues and one bench. This sounds intriguingly like his later minimalist aesthetic. Most likely, though, he simply had no budget.58 Where he really shone was as a leading light in St Paul’s regular comedy shows, called the Colet Clubs revues.59
Back at Arnold House, his final prep school in St John’s Wood, he had already been something of a child star. Admittedly, he was no Julie Andrews. She was playing the London Hippodrome, aged twelve in 1947. Nevertheless Arnold House’s staff had drafted Miller in to entertain the whole school with his chicken and train impressions whenever rain cancelled outdoor sports, and he went on to appear in the Colet Clubs revue of 1949, mimicking Danny Kaye.60 One of his fellow entertainers, Michael Codron – who became a major West End producer – recollects getting meagre applause for his own sketch, only to be followed by this freckled boy with an unruly manner who made the audience scream with laughter.61
Incidentally, it is also tickling to find, in the school’s records, how the young Miller and Codron twice debated the relative merits of Shakespeare and Woolworth’s. Codron switched sides, initially favouring the chain store then plumping for the Bard, while Miller doggedly argued that William S. owed a heck of a lot to Woollies.62
In 1951, Miller paired up with Korn as a double act for the Colet Clubs revue, and their skit ‘Round the World with Radio’ was hailed by the Pauline magazine as exceptionally accomplished. They were pre-university wits with imitative powers of ‘astonishing range and skill’.63 This sketch was a collage of soundbites, a boiled-down version of the BBC’s output: something like flicking through the Radio Times, getting ludicrously bad reception on the wireless, or spinning its dial. In using compaction as its comic principle, ‘Round the World with Radio’ was also a structural forerunner of Tom Stoppard’s speeded-up Hamlet and of the Reduced Shakespeare Company’s hit format.
By the 1952 show, Miller and Korn were a major high point, performing spoofs of journalistic film reviews. They were merrily, albeit discerningly, praised as:
M. E. Korn and J. W. Miller with their inspired lunacy of the Marxian [i.e. Marx Brothers] variety. Too long – yes; indistinct – yes; ebullient – yes; clever, certainly. Here were two boys completely at home on the stage, able to add impromptu touches at will: they knew they had the audience in the hollow of their hand. A remarkable performance.64
Korn narrowly missed going on to become a Satire Boom luminary along with Miller. In a subsequent chapter of his life, he was enrolled in the Joint Services Russian course, which aimed to train conscripts for intelligence work or interpreting. Korn’s contemporaries there included Alan Bennett (pre-Beyond the Fringe) and Michael Frayn. They created off-duty entertainments and Frayn was seen, by some, as Korn’s protégé. In regard to the Colet Clubs revues, Miller plays down his own comic talents, saying that Korn thought up the wittiest lines. His own lack of fecundity, he says, led him to recycle material from St Paul’s for years, for the Cambridge Footlights and beyond.
Korn had left St Paul’s by 1953, along with Sacks. Both were bound for Oxford. For his last Colet Clubs revue, Miller therefore teamed up with a new partner, Michael Bacharach, whom he warmly describes as a dandy-like genius and a further member of the ‘subversive underground resistance’. Bacharach went on to become a decision theorist and Oxbridge academic.65 Their joint routine was punningly entitled ‘Les Enfants du Parodis’, and the Pauline lauded Miller’s growing originality, garnering him with ‘the palm for inspired buffoonery and sheer intelligence’.66
He had become an adroit physical clown, whirligigging, turning his body into living cartoons, pulling grotesque faces and stretching his limbs as if they were elastic bands. In this regard he was Britain’s Marcel Marceau, several years before the Frenchman became internationally famous.67 The flexibility, by the by, contradicted Henri Bergson’s seminal theory of comedy, namely that what provokes laughter is automaton-like rigidity. Still, Miller’s style chimed with Bergson’s broader belief that life is quintessentially fluid, forever mutating, driven by élan vital.68
The Pauline’s reviewer spotted the young comic’s natural (or naturalist’s) ability to look amusingly like a whole ark of animals. Describing how he morphed into some fantastically interbred octopus/mosquito/jazzman/terrapin, the commentator wrote, ‘I remember best the small gesture . . . the rubberised proboscis and chin, the clever treatment of the Duffle [sic] coat, which at last let me see through the benignly vacuous expression of the captive turtle.’69 Down the years, Miller would be compared to everything from a stork to a camel that has passed through the eye of the needle, with one reviewer vividly recording, ‘At the mere mention of marsh birds, his chin is sucked into his Adam’s apple and he is twice round the stage at a high-stepping gait with one arm reared into a majestically elongated neck.’70
What Miller mainly recalls from the Colet Clubs revues is the laughter from the other side of the footlights. ‘I remember that being very intoxicating,’ he says, ‘and I remember the thrill, the humming suggestive darkness, and then stepping out into this bright light onstage.’ The applause surely made him feel loved and may have been addictive.
Or else it was the experience of standing in the wings that really entranced him. He says:
It wasn’t just a matter of being onstage. It was the backstage hush and – an image which has always stayed with me – the glimpse of people performing, watched from the wings, somehow looking elsewhere or, if they did look at you, looking remarkable because their faces were heavily made-up and they were speaking louder than usual, with special exaggerated gestures. It was this brilliant, illuminated elsewhere, right next to you in the dark . . . I shall always be mystified by the view from the wings.
That specific spot is a kind of shoreline between viewing and participating in the performance. You can stand there as much as you want as a director, and Miller still loves to do so. Given his future career dilemmas as a doctor/comic/director, his conflicting interests were encapsulated, as well, by the very boards he trod at St Paul’s. They literally lay over a laboratory bench, the auditorium being a converted lecture theatre for the sciences.71
Only eight weeks after Miller and Bacharach’s school gig, they became BBC Radio starlets. Having sent up the Corporation, they were sent for and they found themselves on air. If not having your cake and eating it, this was surely the art of biting the hand and being fed. The Radio Times listing for Under-Twenty Parade (a series which promoted teenage talent on the Light Programme) announced: ‘John Miller and Michael Bacharach, in their very first broadcast, take a friendly sideswipe at some of their fellow under-twenties . . . (practically no holds barred).’ Clearly a hit, they were invited back several times in 1953–4.72
Another glass wall, ultimately penetrable, crops up in these early recording sessions, as described by Miller:
We’d go downstairs into those airless basement studios, with the enormous cheese-grater microphones they had in those days. It was all basketwork tabletops, and you’d be sitting behind glass, unable to hear what the producers were saying until they’d mouth ‘Sorry!’ and switch on . . . I’ve been doing that ever since, in and out of BBC basement studios for more than fifty years.
He denies that he got a taste for it but he enjoyed these early sessions, and being paid a few pounds was another step towards independence.
A fragment of Miller and Bacharach’s Under-Twenty Parade material has, remarkably, survived in the form of a rough transcript of studio takes.73 Though only a snippet, it is illuminating as regards Miller’s subsequent West End performances and his longer-term creative style. As the transcript records, the double act parodied a panel of critics who were part of the programme. The pair aped the perky ‘Hello, listeners’, the critics’ waffle, every little cough, the bad segues and the indecipherable ‘talking together’. Then they joined the panel (for real) to discuss their techniques. During that exchange, the boys said that they generated routines by conversationally ad-libbing and had struggled with the BBC’s request for a formal script. An improvisational approach, in the spirit of jazz, was to continue throughout Miller’s career. Combining a musical ear with near-scientific observations, his adolescent comedy was serious-minded at root. ‘We are interested’, he said, ‘in the sound pictures that are made by people . . . just the noises and the flux of noises . . . [And] even now’, he told the panel, ‘exactly the same rises and falls, exactly the same cadences are occurring.’ That Miller was to spend his life tuned in to the rhythms of conversation was natural enough, given his upbringing amidst the intelligentsia, the chattering classes.74 The ‘talking together’ in this critics skit also interestingly foreshadows Miller’s later approach to classic plays, radically overlapping lines of dialogue.
The Under-Twenty Parade panel dubbed him a satirist for the first time on record, but then he and Bacharach proved wildly surreal as well. They performed a variation on the Miller-Korn skit ‘Round the World with Radio’, combining imitation and way-out imagination.75 Mingling BBC announcers, gale warnings and newsflashes, it ran like this:
Er, er, that was ‘Lift Up Your Socks’ . . . Next week, ‘A Short Gap’ recorded anonymously . . . the South of England is going to move in a westerly direction . . . Now here is a police message, published Methuen at twenty-one shillings. There was an accident last night on the Great North Circular Road, when an elderly chrysanthemum was knocked down by a steamroller and received injuries from which the Chief Constable of Hertfordshire has since died . . . The police are anxious to interview a man with long blue hair – they have never seen a man with long blue hair.76
‘Round the World with Radio’ was also to provide further evidence of dialogic memory at work. It would be refined by Miller into a quirky Cambridge Footlights monologue – renamed ‘Radio Page’ and applauded by West End crowds – without Korn or Bacharach getting a writing credit.77
What is remarkable, more immediately, is this extract’s sheer craziness. It is garbled, elided and dreamlike, with slivers of the everyday made strange by being miscategorized, everything playfully grafted into the wrong slots. Miller’s own theory of comedy, expounded in later life, would home in on precisely that: laughter aroused by errors of classification.
The boys had clearly been influenced not only by the Marx Brothers but additionally by BBC Radio’s own madcap comedy series, such as Take It From Here.78 Fans of The Goon Show might see a direct parallel with Spike Milligan’s and Peter Sellers’ zany style. The Goons indeed penned a comparable newsflash skit and Miller listened to their show in the 1950s, relishing their latently satirical anti-authoritarianism (not least the caricaturing of flatulent old Major Bloodnok). Nevertheless, The Goon Show was only part of a broader wave of surrealist comedy and, actually, ‘Round the World with Radio’ just preceded Milligan and co.’s first broadcast.79
Miller and Bacharach probably were not echoing the radical absurdism of Eugène Ionesco’s play La Cantatrice Chauve, his works not being well known in England at that point.80 Ionesco, however, admired psychiatry’s concept of letting the irrational loose, and the key may be the link between that idea of freeing up – as propounded by Emanuel’s profession – and comic performance. Miller Snr may have turned his son into a comedian by dispatching him to all those child psychiatrists who encouraged him to play around or say whatever sprang to mind.
Miller Jnr and Bacharach’s turn on Under-Twenty Parade was so wacky that, afterwards, they had to reassure the discussion panel they weren’t complete nutters with their neurological wires crossed.81 Likewise, Tony Cutler remembers:
Most of us, onstage and off [stage in the Colet Clubs revues], just stared in awe at – within a repressed public school society – this incredible liberation of Jonathan’s. He could achieve a sort of release, could let the spring go in a way that was quite amazing.
Miller’s manic glee spilled over from the revues into the school corridors and the Chesterton Society debates. In fact, the society’s minutes paint a picture of him as St Paul’s anarchic jester, a bit like Hamlet, the Clown-Prince of Denmark, acting crazy. The society was sometimes a kind of mini-House of Lords, soberly discussing the topical issues of the day – the fledgling NHS, sanctioned gambling, sexual equality, racism – and Miller himself could be earnestly incensed.82 The minutes describe how, opposing the motion ‘This House Believes in Ghosts’, he ‘attacked bitterly’ such superstitions as mental aberrations and argued ‘through a barrage of criticism’ that no reputable scientist would ever associate himself with ‘psychic trickery’.83
More often, the Chesterton became another comedy show, effervescing with humour. Korn and Sacks, before they left, had contributed to the high spirits. On the topic of better quality BBC programming, Korn had suggested Mrs Dali’s Diary and Housewives’ Joyce. In turn, Sacks abandoned his shyness to praise perpetual motion machines in a farcical vein, crying ‘Forward the revolution!’ while attempting to lift himself up by his own hair.84 Miller, though, proved the most madcap of all. One comic monologue, tucked away in the minutes, records how he sent a discussion about a new casino in Brighton into free fall. Although this is juvenilia, for sure, the loopiness is extraordinary:
Mr Miller revealed to us that Brighton was a mystery town. There are only four in Britain – Brighton, Bath, Plymbe-under-Firs and a town which only one man knows and he won’t tell. This can now be revealed as Tooting. The only indication of Brighton being a mystery town is the sudden drop in temperature of 2.5 degrees according to Sir Alexander Plankton or 2.7 degrees according to Andreyovitch Michaelov Trotski, the eminent English nuclear physicist.85
Some of Miller’s contemporaries from St Paul’s suggest that he was an anxious and self-conscious adolescent, one for whom mimicry and fooling served as a shield – another safe haven. Having somewhat envied the mental release that accompanied David Niven’s brain disorder in A Matter of Life and Death, he had now found his own form of crackpot-style escapism.
The surrealist movement’s interest in unfettered, reason-free self-expression originally sprang from André Breton’s experience as a World War 1 medic, observing the ravings of shell-shock victims. In the light of that, one might wonder if Miller’s comic lunacies were actually imitations of Emanuel’s psychiatric patients. They occasionally arrived for consultations at Queen’s Grove, and Miller does remember his father speaking of one near-surreal case, a man who wanted his buttocks transplanted onto his shoulders. He never encountered Emanuel’s patients at close quarters though, and the schoolboy’s humour may well have been homegrown without direct contact with anyone profoundly deranged. Emanuel himself could be hilarious and eruptively absurd when his gloom lifted. Even if Mrs Miller’s wit was less delirious, she could be freewheeling too, as in her ‘long rambling modulations’ so enjoyed by Isaiah Berlin.
What is unmistakable is how Miller’s role as ‘the Clown-Prince of the Chesterton’ (for such he was dubbed) anticipated his adult ambivalence towards institutions.86 He was a valued member of the society, yet there were rules and he breached them more cheekily than anyone else. He alone had several speeches ‘entirely censored’, and on two occasions – when he got his hands on the minutes book – he proved an outrageously careless honorary secretary. His was the shortest ever entry, laid out with mock formality:
Here lie the unwritten
minutes of a debate meeting
killed at 1.10 in room 2 by
the inefficiency of the secretary
aided by an uncooperative society.
Summarizing the debate as merely tedious, he concluded with a flourish:
At this point the secretary ceased to take minutes.
Lord preserve us from the plague.
signed
J. W. Miller (Dishon. Sec.)87
He got away with this as the society’s licensed fool. His second round of note-taking, in January 1953, caused official consternation, however. We are told that his wayward minutes, when read out, prompted roars of laughter ‘in all the wrong places’.88 They were duly covered in stern corrections by another hand, and Miller disappeared under a cloud, never to be mentioned again. As one Old Pauline remembers:
It was a lot of fun having him around but he just couldn’t conform. He stood out so, being tall like a bird, with that red hair, and doing impressions of the masters’ walks . . . The thing was to keep on the right side of the line, and Jonathan hadn’t developed that protective mechanism.
There was some trouble at home before Miller headed off to university. Although he conversed, now and then, with his father about their shared interests, they had furious rows too, not least when Emanuel accused his son of purloining some curios from his study – a set of glass eyes. Miller’s curfew was also enforced with a shocking rigour when he returned home late after celebrating a New Year’s Eve in town. Every entrance was bolted and he had to wander the streets all night. The feeling of punitive exclusion must have been genuinely chilling. ‘My mother was haggard and worried in the morning,’ he says, ‘desperately wondering where I’d been. Well, I hadn’t been anywhere, except round and round the house.’
He became much closer to Betty during his last years at St Paul’s. Even if she and Emanuel were not always on speaking terms, mother and son came to enjoy each other’s company. It was as if the infant and the young adult were, for her, two different people, a dull pupa and a brilliant butterfly. Miller does not go so far as to say they developed a warm emotional bond, yet he speaks of their brief meeting of minds with discernible tenderness:
It was a rather strange companionship, but I had a very good time with her then. I got close to her for two or three years, sitting opposite her at the dining-room table, swotting for my exams [while she was writing] . . . I was beginning to think about zoology and philosophical ideas, and was getting acquainted, through Korn, with some literary notions. I can’t remember what we talked about, but we seemed to engage one another. She felt that she was in the presence of an intelligent and interesting colleague. I think, in some ways, I replaced [her brother] Henry when I was eighteen.
Through Betty’s connection to Bergson and Proust, he was, moreover, drawn to A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, reading the leather-bound copy which Emanuel had given to his wife as a wedding gift.
One family friend suggests that the Millers were a classic Freudian constellation, with the son wanting to please the love-object, his mother, and to slay his father metaphorically, by becoming more celebrated. It is tempting to recall the tea-table scene in Betty’s On the Side of the Angels, with Honor’s little boy beaming and saying, ‘Now there’s only you and me.’ Nonetheless, Miller says he neither competed with, nor emulated Emanuel.89 As for his mother, parent–teenager relations often happily adjust to incorporate more sibling-style egalitarian elements.
Extant is a humorous letter written by Betty and sent off with a draft of her Robert Browning biography, explaining that the script is ‘in folders lent to me by my son’ and ‘the title “The Invertebrates” does not refer to the Brownings’.90 Her book enveloped in her child’s biology file is a curiously touching image, and Miller was proud of the acclaim which the biography won on publication. He presented copies to his friends.
It was in his very last term at St Paul’s, at eighteen going on nineteen, that he met his future wife, Rachel. According to Tony Cutler, Miller was no ladies’ man, being a gawky scruff who ‘could never look the part . . . [and] was extraordinarily awkward around women’. However, various girls had hooked up with the gang, via the north London Jewish social circuit. This outer circle of ‘group girls’ expanded through parties where jiving and necking were prevalent, and where Miller’s fame spread quickly as a boy-mimic who could go stellar.91 The group girls included Hannah Horovitz (daughter of Phaidon Press’s co-founder Bela Horovitz), Nina Obstfeld (now mother of the film director Beeban Kidron), and Elishiva Landman (Miller’s old playgroup friend from Hampstead). A fourth, Judith Mundlak (who was destined to become a neurologist), admits readily that she was ‘very taken’ with Miller because he was ‘wonderful looking and extraordinary fun’.92 A St Paul’s pal remembers him proving that he could chat up an impossibly sophisticated blonde at a jazz club.93
Miller himself is fairly sardonic about his limited dating, referring to a ‘brief going-out’ with Judy Mikardo, daughter of the Labour MP Ian Mikardo. On one cinema trip, he spent an eternity trying to touch her little finger, his hand creeping towards hers like a near-paralyzed spider, only to be left unsure, after all that, if there was any response.94
Rachel materialized in the Walker Library, attending a play reading organized in conjunction with St Paul’s School for Girls.95 He may condemn the theatre for diverting him from science but he does not regret Rachel arriving as an added distraction. He set his heart on her almost immediately and with great determination. She struck him as wonderfully alluring and glamorous and, he says, he knew ‘something very different had happened’ as soon as they began seeing each other.
She was seventeen, and there is a photographic portrait of her from that time. Beautifully dignified, with dark glossy hair and a luminous heart-shaped face, she holds the camera’s gaze. It is a look of captivating composure: classy and sweet, with just a hint of astute mockery. Her mother, Ruth Collet, was a Slade-trained artist who came from a wealthy and intellectually well-connected Jewish family, the Salamans.96 Rachel’s father, Robert, was a pianist, a professor at the Guildhall School of Music, and a polyglot of Anglo-Saxon Unitarian stock (with anti-slavery and Chartist ancestors). Robert impressed Miller by practising a piece and reading a book simultaneously.
The middle child and one of three sisters, Rachel had been a potential star at the Sadler’s Wells Ballet School (now the Royal Ballet School), only her planned career went awry at fifteen. She had outgrown the minute dimensions demanded by the profession, and she felt a lingering sense of guilt about not going on the stage – the inverse of Miller today.
He did not exactly charm her at their first encounter, urging her to ditch modern languages (her new focus) in favour of medicine (the only worthwhile pursuit). ‘Apparently he was famous, but I hadn’t heard of him!’ she exclaims, raising an eyebrow. Over 50 years on, their relationship is down to earth and fundamentally rock-solid. She is silver-haired now and stylish in a very casual, unshowy way. She can be judiciously sharp yet always with a robust supportiveness underneath, and he patently adores her, appreciating both her teasing and straight talk.
As he explains, his attempted gallantry in the Walker Library – offering his scholar’s gown because she was cold – struck her as dreadful showing-off, and she vowed that she would never see him again.97 Then he embarrassed her by loitering outside her school gates like a love-struck pest. ‘My teachers thought I was just a loose woman, a flibbertigibbet,’ she declares, ‘with Jonathan hanging around on Brook Green!’ She got into further trouble, spotted doing her prep with him in Hyde Park, scandalously not wearing her school hat.
When Sacks – back from Oxford of a weekend – first played the cupid-chauffeur, driving his friend out of London to the Collets’ home in Northwood, the romance faced another temporary uphill struggle. Rachel’s older sister, Jane Miller (the feminist writer who shares the surname by chance, through marriage), remembers seeing Jonathan coming along the garden path:
He was bearing this very unfortunate pink cyclamen in his very red hand with a very red face. In those days he stammered a lot and was very nervous. So there was this wonderful sight, really, at the door. My sister Naomi – who’s quite a lot younger – looked horrified at the arrival of these boys and said, ‘You can’t come in. Dad’s got eczema.’
Miller’s ardour was flattering but overwhelming, causing Rachel to fight shy. ‘I didn’t know what had hit me quite,’ she says. ‘Jonathan had this mixture of being very full-on but also being aware that I was rather reserved, and considering it a terrible disaster. This put me in a difficult position.’ Her father asked the boy’s parents if he could lay off a bit and, when Rachel went to Italy that summer, she had a small fling which caused a temporary parting of ways on her return.
Even at seventeen, she felt very comfortable with him in many ways. ‘Knowing what to talk about was never difficult with Jonathan,’ she observes. ‘He’s never been short of something to say!’ Moreover, Great-Aunt Brenda thought he was splendid. This was the ancient and august Brenda Seligman, president of the Royal Anthropological Society. Because Northwood was so far from school, Rachel spent half of every week with her in Kensington. It was an odd existence: living like an only child, surrounded by display cabinets which housed antiquities from China and Benin (now in the British Museum). This aunt was quite a character as well. Ensconced in a wheelchair referred to as ‘the chariot’, she was autocratic yet also cherished Rachel like a surrogate daughter, having lost her own.
She adored Miller because he knew, from Emanuel, about anthropology, Freudian theories and botany – all her interests. She would, in her last will and testament, leave him many of her books, and his anthropological knowledge, enhanced by her, went on to enrich his theatre productions. Meanwhile, the gang had swiftly decided that Rachel was first-rate and the one for Miller, turfing a rival ‘group girl’ out of the car on a collective outing. Thus, even with their initial advances and retreats, this young couple soon became a fixture. Sacks fondly recalls how Rachel had a tranquil sanity, unlike the rest of them. She was the magnetic still point of Miller’s turning world. Tony Cutler, casting his mind back, believes she was a kind of balm, for he says:
Rachel was quiet, at least she seemed quiet and calm, and she had an amazing effect. She was the only person who was able to pacify Jonathan. In some way she was able to mollify him and turn him into a functioning human being, instead of a loony genius.