One of my earliest journalistic heroes was the beetle-browed Henry Bernard Levin. I think the book that first drew me to his work was Enthusiasms, a collection of essays on many of the things he genuinely adored (orchestral music, Shakespeare, walking, cats, fine dining, himself), but I’m no longer sure.
You see, I ended up interviewing him and it was all a bit of a damp squib, leaving me little the wiser about anything other than the folly of having journalistic heroes in the first place.
This week marks the 20th anniversary of Levin’s death in London, the city where he was also born to Jewish parents 75 years earlier. It’s the sort of moment that would have once had me reflexively glancing at the shelf where I used to keep his talkative titles. As well as Enthusiasms, there were the collections of journalism, a social history he produced about the 1960s, and the less successful travel books, all sprinkled among my go-to English essayists.
English is the word. Bernard Levin may have known a bit of the Yiddish that his Lithuanian grandparents brought with them to the UK, but Hebrew was a complete mystery to him.
A lot of what he knew about Jewish state he didn’t much care for, either. While acknowledging Israel’s achievements, Levin said he offered “the strongest condemnation of her crime against the original Arab population and the campaign of lies she has waged ever since”.
In this and other respects, the London School of Economics-educated journalist’s overarching English air recalled one of his own heroes, Hilaire Belloc, another outsider with a yearning to be at the heart of all things English.
Levin first made his Anglophone mark in the 1950s as the pseudonymous author of an irreverent political column in The Spectator. What we recognise now as the parliamentary sketch he pretty much blueprinted during this period, wittily drawing on his earliest work as a theatre critic to capture the bad manners and petty brutalities of the Commons. And much else besides.
The portfolio of Levin’s subjects grew enormously from 1971 as a columnist, first for the Daily Mail and then The Times, grinding out opinion pieces and reviews up to five times a week. He wrote about anything that took his fancy — which is to say, virtually everything.
Politics remained at the core. Aphoristically laying into fashionable leftish causes was Levin’s signature move, casting himself in Bellocian style as the conservative rebel kicking against the conventions of the unconventional. Whom the mad would destroy,” as he typically put it, “first they make gods.”
"He pumps hot air into the English language,” Clive James once wrote a little wearily of such antics, “but at least he is using it, not abusing it.”
And it garnered him many fans, not only in his own neck of the global woods but even in far-flung New Zealand, where I discovered him as a young reporter in the late 1980s. As luck would have it, I was also invited to chat with him at around this time ahead of one of his Antipodean speaking tours.
This was in the dear, doomed days of Margaret Thatcher’s final prime ministerial years, a subject Levin himself had been sorrowing over in his latest book of the time, All Things Considered. My editor thought it would be a splendid wheeze to have him interviewed in the question-and-answer format about the subject ahead of his appearance in the South Seas.
Bullets move like arthritic snails compared to the alacrity with which I jumped at the opportunity.
After dialling through to Bath, however, I quickly discovered that Levin had a couple of problems with the proposed Q&A arrangement. One was he didn’t much care for questions. Nor, as he soon made clear, did he much like answers.
“Reading your latest collection,” I began, “I got the impression you feel Mrs Thatcher’s government has begun to lean rather heavily in an authoritarian direction.”
Levin paused for a long moment before replying.
“I think it probably has,” he replied.
Silence.
“Does that mean you have lost faith in her?”
“No,” he said.
“She is, then, as you’ve argued, the best thing to have happened to Britain in memory?”
“Yes.”
“Could you enlarge on that?”
“You can take it how you find it, really.”
Obviously, another approach was called for.
“Is British modern art in good shape?” “I don’t think I can really answer that question.” Now it was my turn to pause. Although still relatively new to journalism, I already knew a strategic silence can sometimes elicit revealing responses.
“My book is there to be read,” he said eventually, “you can take it or leave it.” More silence.
“Well, can you tell us about the next book you are working on?” I asked my journalistic hero.
“It’s about New York.”
“Ah! Like the last travel book, the one you did about the Rhine?”
“Precisely.”
And that was basically that.
Oh, well. Experience keeps a dear school, but young fools will learn in no other.
Not too long afterward, I got a shopping bag and filled it with all my Levin titles, which until that point had enjoyed pride of place on the bookshelf and trundled off to a second-hand bookseller. I emerged a few kilos lighter and a few dollars wealthier, and, perhaps, a little wiser about the necessary distinction one sometimes needs to draw between impressive writing and the individual who crushes it out.
Levin permanently left the journalism scene on August 7, 2004, doubtless bound for an eternal assignment clacking out memorable critiques of celestial choirs and bygone Kentish summers. In one small corner of the world he left behind, though, his spirit faded a little earlier.
