A book in my life

Grimond

What sort of book should you choose to write about under this heading? Such of the notorious novels of the English ,,attgnage which I have read, which are not 'e,_tY numerous, I read as a boy, usually len suffering from some disease. My Parents who seldom read anything themselves and were indulgent to their Children forced no classics upon me. A pity 1,11scline ways, as at about the age of eight to '111 would have read anything on which I could

.4 my hands. While suffering from

measles I became expert on the complica- r,r. o „„'" of civil war in China by absorbing every article I could find on this abstruse !eblect. Such poetry as I have read, I read ir1, the back benches of history classes at ei`eri- When I hear of the enormity of remember of over 15 in the state schools I under that few classes at Eton were ,"tider 30 which left boys free of too much ikePervision. The mood passed, I shall go to

grave innocent of Richardson, -;,

"aelceray and most of Scott, Dickens and e.°rge Eliot, not to mention more modern *titers. When, to borrow Maurice Baring's restio n, Charon asks me what I have to ,,eceLare, my light luggage will include a lot waugh, a P. G. Wodehouse and detec- lve stories, a fairly thick sprinkling of 44,1ilarn Greene, Linklater and Stevenson. pr,„" some poets, the obvious ones, Dunbar, tir'ne, Burns, Keats, Shelley, Tennyson,

Belloc, Housman, Yeats.

Inth the books that have been enjoyed leave es mark more effectively if they have no ii,e„ssg But I have, with few exceptions, ,ever found other people's recommenda- yo-hris very successful — reviews which leave 617.43 make up your own mind, yes, the ci llamas paragraph about books which tiel,s!tve prizes, no. Nor does it seem likely ecli I shall be able to throw any new light purpose of preaching a sermon I had to ae4d John's gospel not so long ago. It is thsautPrising story. It left me with the feeling tronit nothing more needs to be said. Yet it is ue a few thousand words. The same is ai; of the book I have selected — 'An si,°biography' by R. G. Collingwood. ih'lee I am incapable of enlightening or en- a:pslag You about literary efforts of the im- datinn I fall back on a readable but se;"ctie work which says something which

s important, at least to me.

Da Ile book contains 167 not very long anges. It has no index. It is not the sort of thet, ill c3bingraphy in which you look first at end to see if you, your enemies, Chur- tigo"Diaghilev of Isaiah Berlin were men- edred, indeed very few people are mention- the never saw Collingwood though he was Professor of metaphysics when I was at Oxford. He wrote among other books an excellent book called The New Leviathan. This is an account of his intellectual life. From it Collingwood appears to have been self-centred, indeed arrogant. So far so good; it is no good having sycophantic pro- fessors hoping to make a good impression. He seems without self-pity. So far, so very much better; he had no chip on his shoulder. He appears not to have cared how the world treated him, what interested him was his own mind and how he treated the world.

Up to the age of 13 he was educated by himself and his father, Latin at four, Greek at six, then geology, astronomy, physics. He found out how the locks and pumps around the house worked. At nine he came across Descartes's Principia which taught him that thought and science have an un- finished history. A rich friend of his father's sent him to Rugby. This was something of a set-back in his education. But he bears no grudge. 'If my five years at Rugby were mainly waste, the fault lies partly with the obvious faults of the English public school system . . . though among its faults I do not reckon the institution of fag- ging or that of government by members of the sixth form, both of which 1 count as vir- tues, partly with my father who gave me an adult scholar's attitude towards learning and partly with myself for being a conceited puppy and an opinionated prig: There is no evidence that he felt the slightest contrition about the last.

The middle of the book is taken up large- ly with his defection from 'Realism' the philosophic doctrine then in the ascendant, propounded by Bertrand Russell, Cook- Wilson, Whitehead and others. Realism is the supposedly common-sense doctrine that knowing makes no difference to the known. There is a 'real' world and we have the faculty, a largely passive faculty of ap- prehending it, as a film 'apprehends' the subject of a photograph.

Collingwood maintained that knowing was a positive activity. That to be worth anything it must consist of asking ques- tions. He developed this with reference to archaeology, which along with philosophy was the passion of his life. It is no good dig- ging into a site which you believe to be Roman in the hopes of finding something. You must decide what you are looking for.

Whether Collingwood's logic is sound I am not competent to say but I have found his advice of great service in politics. There is a tendency today to believe that if wise men sit long enough gazing at something they will find something out. Hence the ad- miration for enquiries, commissions, panels, committees, impartial research. But my experience in politics confirms Coll- ingwood's view. You have to decide what questions you want to ask and then go to the man or woman most likely to answer them. For instance, in regard to local government finance do you want a system which will raise the most money or do you want a system which will bring home responsibility to the local resident, or what? In regard to the Inner Cities are you asking how the blacks can be made happier or how architecture or planning may be improved? A further useful caution is to discover what people meant when they used certain words. As he points out, the Greeks when they spoke of 'triremes' did not mean old- fashioned steamers.

Another lesson from Collingwood: never believe what others say someone has said, particularly not what the press has said. Again, I am not capable of carrying this in- struction out at the highest level. I find what Brian Magee says Popper said much easier to understand — and thetefore more enlightening — than reading Popper. But Magee is a serious expositor. Most reporters are not. If you are seriously interested in the squabbles within the Labour Party you had better read what the protagonists say in the original rather than in the headlines attach- ed to speeches by sub-editors.

Finally, Collingwood discovered ,two Collingwoods, indeed three, when he con- sidered politics. There was the 'gloves on' Collingwood who wanted politics treated as a science and a 'gloves off' Collingwood who wanted to cheer Marx and take the gloves off. I feel the same dilemma. To take his own example, the reforms of Mr As- quith's Liberal Government were admirable and to be cheered on as 'gloves,off' politics. But Mr Lloyd George's advocacy of them as `ninepence for fourpence' was deplorable. This indeed is the downfall of the Welfare State: the promise that you can have the Health Service, free travel, reduced licence fees for pensioners and everything else but no one need pay. 'Gloves off' politics always depends upon a degree of deception. Usually this is concealment, the aversion of the eye from the obvious consequences of political conduct; sometimes it is distortion, the description of communist governments as 'democratic' or of political opponents as `Reds' or 'Fascists'.

Since Collingwood's day we have seen the distortion of philosophy by either relegating it to linguistics or the pretence that some ideal final solution is possible. Though he differed from them, Coll- ingwood admired Bradley and T. H. Green, now despised or forgotten. But they at least believed that how you thought, your understanding of how you got into the pre- sent situation and what questions you ask- ed, were important. Politics are not merely a question of trying to describe a world which exists separate from human action, they are about influencing that world in the light of knowledge. All put very persuasive- ly in Collingwood's narrative of his own development. Not the last word of course- Collingwood did not believe in last words but a contribution to the endless adventure.