DIARY
A.N.WILSON
There is a peculiar pleasure in reading poetry, and in knowing it by heart. I find that it is a pleasure which grows with the years and, with the pleasure, grows a gratitude to the inspirational English teacher who first taught me really to enjoy and appreciate Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer, Yeats and the Romantics. His name was Timothy Tosswill. He also intro- duced me to prose works which have been friends for life — Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, Tom Jones, Boswell, the novels of Jane Austen. No one was less like Jean Brodie in the classroom. He was a terrifying presence, exuding an air of bad temper and melancholy, as he stood at a lectern and expounded Paradise Lost as if he were giving a university lecture. There was no 'class discussion', of the kind which modern teachers think so important, and his comments upon one's written work were usually withering. His manner was formal. I never saw him teach without a gown over his dilapidated tweeds, and he quite often wore a battered mortar-board which gave to his appearance, during the phases that he wore a moustache, more than a passing resemblance to the teacher in the Bash Street kids. One day, I was delighted and amazed to arrive at the door of his school and see Tosswill standing there in mufti. 'I must ask you not to come into this room,' he drawled to us in his much-imitated but actually inimitable voice, 'this is a picket line.' The NUT had called a strike for that day, and he was showing solidarity with the comrades. He was the only member of staff at Rugby to be a member of the NUT, and it was my first inkling that he was a lefty, like myself. He had been a boy at Rugby with Philip Toynbee and some of that shambolic Thir- ties left-wingery remained a permanent part of his nature. By paradox, I never knew anyone who was a stronger believer In the public school system, and the (to me questionable) virtues of being a 'good all-rounder'. During the term while I was preparing for the Oxford exam, we became friends. Over the years, we would see one another fairly regularly, and he sometimes came to stay, filling the house with his aromatic pipe-smoke, and my days with amiable chat about books, former school- friends, and the crossword. 'I only like small-talk,' he used to say, but his small- talk was better than anyone else's 'big' talk. Tosswill died recently. He had many accomplishments. He was a good sound broadcaster. He was a dab hand at the science of tug o' war, and an expert on all-in wrestling. He held various posts at American universities, and his textbooks, such as Seven Romantic Poets and Chapters from the Modern Novel should be on every schoolmaster's shelves. But his chief memorial will be the love, mingled with a little awe, with which his many grateful pupils will always regard him.
It was entirely thanks to Tosswill that I chose to go New College, Oxford, and met my tutor there, John Bayley — the best critic of the age, as any reader of The Characters of Love, or his books on Hardy, Shakespeare and Pushkin would agree. It is astonishing to think that John, who in latter years has been the Warton Professor of English at Oxford, should have reached retirement age. I was even more aston- ished to learn that John has been replaced by Terry Eagleton, an unimpressive char- acter who would seem, from his published works, to have more interest in politics than in literature. Eagleton is still a Marx- ist. I know this sounds like quite a good joke, and as someone who for years was branded as a 'fogey', I can see the charm of doggedly upholding untenable and obso- lete forms of belief. But Eagleton is such a bore, and he writes so badly. He got his job at Wadham College in the first place because Maurice Bowra, then the Warden, thought it would liven things up a bit to have him around. 'He's a Pope John Marxist,' Bowra barked. 'Pope John Marx- ist', repeating the phrase approvingly in his rapid bullet-fire manner of delivery. That was 20 years ago, and the world has moved on a bit; but not the new Warton Profes- sor. It is said that Eagleton owes his present elevation to the machinations of Professor John Carey, who, like Bowra, enjoys annoying his academic colleagues, and must be feeling pleased with himself.
The Carey family have been doing rather well for themselves lately, with John If you can be 29 every year, why can't I go on being six?' as the Merton Professor of English Litera- ture at Oxford, and George as the newly- elected Archbishop of Canterbury. Almost as impressive as the Dennings, who could boast an admiral, a general, and a Master of the Rolls whom, for legal reasons, I have been asked never to mention in print again. I like the idea of England being ruled by such humbly born, but impressive, dynasties. I sometimes wonder how the two brothers knock along together. John is chiefly noted for his acerbic book reviews in the Sunday Times, which, though much less funny than his reviews in the old New Statesman, have a sarcastic tone which must sometimes worry his good-hearted clerical sibling. I cannot imagine that the Professor, for his part, much enjoys the tambourine-bashing and merry singalongs which are the Archbishop's favoured mode of expressing himself. At the wedding of their charming niece in Wimbledon last Saturday, the Professor told me that he particularly hated the modern liturgy, and was glad that Jane had chosen to be married by the old-fashioned formularies of the Church.
0 ne of the delights of living near Regent's Park, as I do, is that you can wake up in the middle of the night and hear the roaring of lions, the squawk of vultures and the howl of wolves. Now, much to my chagrin, I read that London Zoo is threatened with closure unless it can raise some footling sum of money — £2 million according to some papers, £10 million according to others — to stay open. I am rather hoping that when the contents of Graham Greene's will have been declared, it will be revealed that, in addition to benefiting Libyan terrorists and Guatema- lan guerrillas, the old man will have left a few million to the giraffes and rhinoceroses of Regent's Park. I wish the Government had spent more money on the Zoo; but then I wish they had spent more money on the railways, the universities, the health service, and on many other things. Their meanness in this area is encouraged by animal-rights fanatics who believe that zoos are cruel. Christopher Booker, in a newspaper earlier this week, said that the closure of the zoo would be a 'giant step for mankind'. I do not see it myself. Presum- ably, when it closes, those of us who live near the Zoo will feel our consciences pricked, and decide that we must offer accommodation to as many of the evicted animals as possible. I am clearing a spare bedroom for the gorillas, and think there is just about room for a small penguin-pool in the back garden. I should love to take in a wolf, but I am afraid that it would be frightened of the ferocious cat in the next-door garden.
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