Jesus Christie

Letters

Vol. 7 No. 18 · 17 October 1985

From A.N. Wilson, Katherine Duncan-Jones

SIR: Neither of us was close to J.T. Christie, so we do not write for personal reasons to protest at the review by Richard Wollheim of J.T. Christie: A Great Teacher. But one does expect the London Review of Books to review books. The three pages of artless malice with which your issue of 3 October opens say hardly a word about the volume which it purports to notice. The fact that, nearly fifty years later, Richard Wollheim has not grown out of hating his old headmaster is a matter for his medical advisers. But it is scarcely sufficiently interesting to justify the space you afford him. Those of us who have not read the book can have no idea, having studied Mr Wollheim’s splurge of poison, what the volume contains. It is said to be ‘A Selection of his Own Writings’, but nowhere are these writings quoted or discussed.

That Christie was a great teacher, generations of schoolboys and undergraduates would testify. In later years there were many who enjoyed his charm as a host or his spry and bookish conversation. On the rare occasions when Wollheim’s exercise in self-contemplation deviates into a literary judgment, he shows himself to be crass. We are apparently meant to sneer at Christie for saying that he admired Virginia Woolf’s sense of fun. ‘No one could,’ splutters Wollheim. Has he never read Flush or Orlando? His claim to know what Christie really admired in Virginia Woolf is as impertinent as his implied knowledge of what passed through Christie’s mind when he ‘came in early for the school service for private prayer’.

In order to get his revenge on that learned and delightful man, Wollheim waited until Christie was long dead, and only had family left to feel wounded. The chief interest of Christie, if your periodical is to be believed, was that he did not much like Wollheim. If Wollheim the boy was anything like the tortured creature who penned that ill-constructed article, the explanation is not hard to seek.

A.N. Wilson, Katherine Duncan-Jones
Oxford

Vol. 7 No. 20 · 21 November 1985

From Richard Wollheim

SIR: The letter from Katherine Duncan-Jones and A.N. Wilson (LRB, 17 October) is a reminder that mine is not the only conceivable view to hold of J.T. Christie. I was aware of this fact, and it was so as to make this point – and others – that I was at pains to present my view autobiographically. That I did so seems to have displeased your correspondents. In three small matters their letter stands in need of correction. 1. Of course anyone could admire Virginia Woolf’s sense of fun. What I do not believe is that anyone could admire her for – that is, primarily for – her sense of fun. That is the point at issue, and how – I must ask now – do your correspondents know that I splutter when I make it? 2. The evidence for thinking that Christie struggled with himself when he prayed comes from the book under review: it is supplied by Sir Roger Young’s memoir and by Christie’s religious addresses. 3. I have been ready at any moment in the last forty years to set down my opinion of J.T. Christie. It was the LRB that bided its time. I hope your correspondents are not suggesting that it is impermissible to write unfavourably of anyone unless he is alive and his family dead.

Richard Wollheim
Berkeley, California

From Editor, ‘London Review of Books’

‘Biding its time’ is Professor Wollheim’s little joke. What we did was to arrange without expedition for a book to be reviewed.

Editor, ‘London Review of Books’

From William LeFanu

SIR: What a surprising essay about himself from such a distinguished philosopher as Richard Wollheim, masquerading as a review of J.T. Christie: A Selection of his Own Writings (LRB, 3 October). Every schoolboy hates some of his masters but the interests of later life usually obliterate provoking incidents even when a little unforgiving thought persists. The first half of Wollheim’s three-page reminiscence describes his self-education, before John Christie became Headmaster of Westminster, including his first year as a King’s Scholar in that prestigious school; since it belongs to the Royal Abbey, has any school more duty to teach Christianity, against which Wollheim rebelled? The second half is a recital of what Shakespeare called ‘scorns, despising of persons, and poutings fitter for girls and schoolboys’, all directed against Christie and depicting him as a pillar of salt. Wollheim admits that John was a uniquely inspiring teacher, but each merit is damned with faint praise and no allowance is made for a young headmaster’s worries: not only insolent boys, but critical elder masters, an occasional obstructive governor and, worst of all at Westminster, snooping reporters from the evening papers if a school row was noised abroad by day-boys. The deliberately offensive title attributed to Maurice Bowra derives, I believe, from a cartoon of Christie circulated by one of Wollheim’s contemporaries which any headmaster, to keep ‘a happy ship’, was bound to suppress. I knew both John and Maurice for nearly fifty years; they were lifelong friends, utterly different but rejoicing in each other’s wit. Christie certainly had a fierce side. One of his close Oxford friends admitted: ‘I sometimes hate him.’ Yet both Bowra and he would help any pupil who made a fool of himself when they thought reproof followed by encouragement would bring him to sense. Wollheim quotes the book he is ostensibly reviewing only three or four times, each time to Christie’s disadvantage. The concluding anecdote seems deliberately aimed to wound John’s widow, now an old lady still in touch with many of his pupils, who know that his marriage, five years before he came to Westminster, brought him lasting happiness (Wollheim declares, ‘Happiness was not what he sought’), and that she smoothed away his rough edges, of which all his friends had been aware. How pitiable that a successful, serious man should publish in detail the pains of fifty years ago, as if from an analyst’s couch: ‘who would not laugh if such a man there be, who would not weep if W. were he?’

William LeFanu
Chelmsford

Vol. 7 No. 22 · 19 December 1985

From Frank Herrmann

SIR: As begetter and publisher of the book on John Christie, I felt reluctant to enter this correspondence until I saw Professor Wollheim’s letter following his review (LRB, 21 November). John Christie was also my headmaster at Westminster and I knew Professor Wollheim as a pupil there. I doubt whether he will remember me. He borrowed my bicycle pump. He has never returned it, but he is welcome to keep it now. He was certainly regarded in my day as something of a character. His progressive intellectualism and conflicts with authority did not go unnoticed by the school in general. But whatever Professor Wollheim’s personal recollections of John Christie may be, there were others of us who, both at Westminster and later in life, recognised in Christie a man of outstanding calibre as a formative influence on a whole generation and a personality and teacher of charismatic significance. It was for these reasons that we felt that the three brief memoirs of him and a small selection of his writings in many fields should be published and read: so that there might be some permanent record of this modest man’s achievement. The book has sold well and received many appreciative (if non-autobiographical) reviews during the 12 months it took Professor Wollheim to pen his own.

Frank Herrmann
Maldon, Essex

From J.B. Bury

SIR: I have only just read Richard Wollheim’s fascinating piece (LRB, 3 October), in which he uses the pretext of reviewing a book on J.T. Christie to describe his own schooldays at Westminster. His vivid picture of his school contemporaries, who, it seems, were (with a few charming exceptions) a thoroughly nasty, brutal and caddish lot, reminds me irresistibly of the characterisation, in an old Victorian saying, of the four great public schools of England:

Eton, boatmen; Harrow, gentlemen;

Westminster, scoundrels; Winchester, scholars. The validity of traditional stereotypes sometimes persists with unexpected tenacity, so that Wollheim should perhaps recognise himself as a Wykehamist manqué, and see the tribulations which befell him at Westminster as the fatal result of being sent to the wrong school.

J.B. Bury
London SW19