You ask about his early life.
Our parents were friends. We were described by them as great chums almost from birth. I believe that Charles regards this as wryly as I do and did then. We went to the same prep school. We were neither of us particularly distinguished. We stuck together out of homesickness an alliance of mutual aid and defence, if you like. My view of that period does not coincide with Charles at all, as emerges rather painfully when we ever discuss it. Briefly, I think he was rather a con. But not deliberately or consciously. However, Ill skip all that and choose a typical incident from Rugby where we both went together. The summer we were both sixteen our form master invited six of us for a summers yachting, based on the Isle of Wight. I was one of the six. The invitations were not personal, but issued every holidays on a sort of rota system, in quite a regular, fair way. This master was a kindly man, quite the best influence on my young life, and I daresay on Charles too. The reason why I was invited that holidays and Charles was not was simply that I was minimally older. Now, I had done a fair bit of yachting for various reasons, and my parents were better off than Charles parents. I knew he was not looking forward to going home that holidays, and for a variety of reasons. To cut it short, I suggested to the form master that Charles should go instead of me. Again, I must ask you to take it as read that it was not possible for Charles to remain impervious to the fact that this was a real sacrifice on my part. The form master was surprised and touched. No, that is not why I did it. It was just that, given the circumstances, Charles might have been expected to show a consciousness of some kind. When Wentworth told him I had backed down in his favour, Charles simply nodded. Wentworth was so surprised that he repeated what he had said that I had offered to back down, and Charles said, Yes, thanks, Id like to. I said nothing to him about it, when he did not mention it. Now, it was a particularly good summer, and I was stuck with a pretty boring crowd, and I am afraid I did spend far too much time thinking of that crowd down there, on the water, and of Charles quite extraordinary attitude. I never mentioned it. I could not bring myself to, for it stung so badly. Not until years after, after the war as a matter of fact. I said to him in so many words perhaps I was hoping to take the sting out of the memory, what I had felt throughout that summer holidays. He looked at me and said: Well, there was no need to offer it, was there?
And of course, there was not.
I am sure that looks a very small thing and very petty, and it does me a great deal of discredit to mention it at all. But you did ask me to say what I thought and that anything I could tell you might be helpful.
That incident sums up something in Charles for me.
I must say at this point that our relations were formalised by the time we were nine in this way: Charles was the original eccentric oddball, and Jeremy was the solid dependable one. Ive always played along with it. Im stuck with it, as it were. But when I say to Charles and to others that what I admire is his originality and his daringness of thought, and so on, that is not the point at all. For in fact there is something too careless, almost sloppy, about his originality. I suppose he is a bit of an anarchist. Of course his experience has tended to make him one.
His father was in business and did badly in the slump. Charles started work, while I went to University. He did every variety of job, and there was talk of his going off to the Spanish Civil War, but he didnt. The war started and he joined up at once. I was flying throughout the war, and Charles was in infantry, and then with Tanks. We met once or twice. I knew a bit of what he was up to, through mutual friends. He refused a commission, more than once. This was so like him. I asked him why, and he began roaring with laughter and said he had refused to annoy people. I found it then, and find it now affected. And unconvincing. I told him so. I could say that this caused ill-feeling but as I was about to write that, I realised that it might have caused ill-feeling in me, but I dont think in Charles. We did not quarrel, though Ill acknowledge that I would have liked to quarrel at last.
When the war ended, Charles went back to University. This he got through well and easily. He has a not uncommon facility a memory that is really almost photographic. For an examination he will study day and night for the month beforehand, get phenomenal marks and will have forgotten most of it three months later. He says this of himself.
Very well. By the time he was ready for a job, I had been lecturing four or five years. I was in a position to pull strings or at least put a friendly oar in. There were a dozen applicants for the post and Charles was the youngest, and least experienced. Well, he got the post and through me but that is not the point. Which is this. In the crisis week, when things hung in the balance, he came to visit me. He was scruffy, untidy, a bit flamboyant all this as usual. Nothing terrible not like our present students, far from that level of exhibitionism, but pretty irritating. I told him that he had to take his appearance more seriously, and that he was putting me in a difficult position. He listened, didnt say much. Next time I saw him, he had got the post, and he was looking like me. I must explain that. We are physically different, but I have some mannerisms. Not that I knew of them until Charles showed me them! He had equipped himself with an old jacket of mine asked my wife for it, she was throwing it away. He had acquired a pipe, which he had never smoked before, and he got his hair cut like mine. When I first clapped my eyes on this, I thought it was a monstrous joke. But not at all. Youd expect this to be a joke between us perhaps? Or at least an issue? No, it was not mentioned for a long time. Yet everyone noticed it, commented. When I came into a room, or saw him across a street it was like seeing a monstrous caricature of myself.
When someone did finally mention it (my wife, as it happened), and I looked at him, hoping for some comment, he merely nodded, rather impatiently, but not very. With a sort of small frown, as if to say: Oh that, what a detail.
I suppose it may strike you as a detail, too. But I may add that now, years later, people tend to think that it is I who have copied Charles, modelled myself on him. And that fact says everything about how we are both judged. And yes, it rankles.
Now an episode from last summer. It so happened that my wife and I were having a stormy patch. I had been overworking and so had she. We had agreed to spend the summer apart. We knew we were on the slippery slope to divorce. We had quarrelled and talked and made scenes, the usual sort of thing, and I daresay we were as much emotionally worn out as anything. She decided to go to her mother in Scotland, leaving the children with friends as it happens, the Watkins. Both of whom were towers of strength throughout the whole episode. Charles drove Nancy to her mother. Nancy was in a pretty hysterical state, as she would be the first to admit. Now I find it rather hard to describe what happened in a way to convey its importance. Far from Charles behaving badly, it was the opposite. Nancy says he was kind and helpful. But before they even reached Scotland, she was pretty upset because of his attitude which was that the whole thing was not very important. He took it absolutely for granted that she would be back with me before the year was out but that if she were not, what of it? Now I must mention Felicity, his wife. I have a valuable relationship with her. Ive known her since she was a tiny thing. No, Im not in love with her, nor ever have been, but we have always known that we are close, and that if neither were married elsewhere, we might well hit it off pretty well. My wife has always known of this, so has Charles, there is nothing to hide.
Before Charles left Nancy at her mothers he stayed over for two days, and in those days he behaved impeccably, supporting Nancy against her mother, who was cutting up rather, and taking her for walks and so on. But he was making her worse because of his attitude not making light of the whole drama, on purpose, but it was implicit in his attitude. He spent a whole afternoon, she tells me, pointing out that he might have married her and I, Felicity, and it would have been the same, and that we all were much too personal about the whole thing. Yes, we are all much too personal about the whole thing. He was talking about marriage, after all. After all, we arent Hottentots. Anyway, Nancy found herself half crazy, because of Charles. She describes it as feeling as if her entire life was made to look silly, and that she was not any more important than a she-cat or a bitch. Well, she was in a pretty emotional state anyway. In the end she screamed at him to go away and leave her. Of course she apologised afterwards, I insisted on it, for he had been wonderfully kind, as had Felicity. Afterwards my wife said to me that the real crisis that summer was not her leaving me to give us both a rest, but the four or five days in Charles company. Any more of him and she would have cut her throat, she says, or could have done if she had been able to believe it mattered whether she did or not.
Ive chosen this last incident because again it illustrates something pretty fundamental in Charles. It is that he doesnt even pay lip service to ordinary feelings. Perhaps they arent as important as we think. But perhaps I would respect him more for his attitude if I believed there was conflict involved, if he had ever thought it out, or even suffered over it, instead of its being his nature.
Now, a final incident. In spring of this year there was an evening at our house which struck me very unpleasantly indeed, but I suppose I am used to being uncomfortable where Charles is concerned. There were present myself and my wife Nancy, Charles and Felicity, a couple of other members of our team as I like to call it! and a visitor from America. Now I dont like to think that we have to put on a special show for visiting firemen, but on the other hand there is such a thing as tact. Our American visitor was on his first visit to our country, and was hoping to and may even yet succeed spend a year with us. Charles behaved outrageously. I thought he was drunk, though he is not a drinker. It is simplest to say that he behaved like an undergraduate, if I may be permitted that oldfashioned comparison, but I am not one to be proud of flattering the youth. Charles was not even witty, which he very often is. He was boorish, badmannered, in a silly sort of way. The classics were hogwash and the course of lectures we had drafted together for him a lot of pigs-swill. And so on. Im afraid his epithets were pretty limited, but that is the nature of undergraduate humour.
Now, if I were a reactionary and impervious to new ideas it would be easier to understand, but I am not. I cannot remember ever refusing to listen to Charles or to anyone else when they have a new angle. But to say that everything taught under the heading of Classics is pigsfeed from beginning to end, and never has been anything else, and that we have never had any idea at all of what Plato or Socrates and Pythagoras were teaching and etc. and so on, that kind of thing well, I did cut him off short and sharp more than once during the evening, and he went home early. Felicity his wife was annoyed, and did not go home when he did.