Conversations with Roger Scruton

201 Pages·2016·1.59 MB·English

by  Mark Dooley

Conversations with
Roger Scruton
Roger Scruton and Mark Dooley
Contents
Preface
1 Childhood and Cambridge
2 Becoming a Philosopher
3 Becoming a Conservative at Birkbeck
4 Some Thoughts on British Philosophy
5 Eastern Europe
6 Why Architecture?
7 Why Sex?
8 Leaving Birkbeck for Boston
9 Farming and Family
10 Sinful Pleasures
11 Rediscovering Religion
12 Living as a Writer
13 Making Music
14 Acceptance
Afterword
Notes
Index
Preface
These conversations took place over three days in March 2015. They were
conducted at Sunday Hill Farm, Roger Scruton’s home in Wiltshire. I wish to
thank Roger, his wife Sophie and their children Sam and Lucy, for their
wonderful hospitality during my visit. I am especially grateful to Roger for the
time and commitment which he gave this project. I am also thankful to my
editors at Bloomsbury, Robin Baird-Smith and Jamie Birkett, for their
encouragement and patience.
What follows is a broad-ranging and fairly intimate portrait of Scruton’s life
and career, one that sheds some new light on both. While the form of the
conversations is generally chronological, they often move from biography to
ideas and back again. I hope that this will give the reader a greater understanding
of Scruton’s thought, but also of the unusual life that lies behind it. In the end,
however, this book can be summed up by something Scruton said to me shortly
after I arrived at Sunday Hill Farm: ‘So, Mark, you have come to show the world
that I am human!’ These conversations testify to the fact that Roger Scruton is
indeed both human and humorous. And it is he, not me, who shows the world
that this is so.
Dublin
November 2015
1
Childhood and Cambridge
‘It was not a happy home’
I had already published two books on Roger Scruton, dealing with his
philosophy, conservatism and his many other interests.1 This time, however, I
was in pursuit of the man behind the work. I wanted Scruton to tell the story of
how he became the person that he is. And so I travelled from Dublin to Sunday
Hill Farm in Wiltshire, where Roger has lived since 1993. This would not be my
first visit to a place to which he has so often and movingly paid tribute in various
writings. As you approach Sunday Hill, which sits on the outskirts of
Malmesbury, you realize just how apt Scruton’s descriptions of his beautiful
‘settlement’ are. One, in particular, comes to mind each time I spot the farm on
the horizon:
It was thus that … I came to Sunday Hill Farm, bringing with me a library,
three pianos and four horses. I was the first ‘off-comer’ to attempt to settle
among families that had farmed here for centuries … Sunday Hill Farm is
an old cottage of Cotswold stone, with a stone barn attached to one side of
it. My first act on moving in was to replace the metal-framed windows and
to cover the grim concrete extension with a veneer of rendering. So far as I
could see nobody in the valley had ever before carried out building work for
aesthetic reasons. It was a dangerous thing to do; still more dangerous to
pull down three sheds built from panels of some hideous aggregate with an
appearance of dried vomit. I was acutely aware of the eyes observing me, of
the suppressed indignation at the sight of useful things destroyed, and of the
insult to farming implied by my bourgeois need for things to look right,
rather than to work right. For my neighbours the landscape was reality – the
source of their livelihood, and the recipient of their toil. For me it was
appearance – the view from my window, my ‘sweet especial rural scene’.2
Today, Sunday Hill Farm is very much woven into the fabric of the Wiltshire
farmlands. Scruton’s attempt to make it ‘look right’ was in keeping with his
conviction, best summed up by Oscar Wilde, that ‘it is only shallow people who
do not judge by appearances’. The ‘old stone barn’ has been converted into a
library, containing antique furniture and two pianos. It is in this room that
Scruton writes, composes and ponders his ‘sweet especial rural scene’. His home
– which he shares with Sophie and their two children Sam and Lucy – is
testimony to Scruton’s cultural values, his love of music, his concern for his
surroundings and in particular his passion for horses.
People often ask me how I became interested in Roger Scruton. How was it
that an Irishman should come to share the vision of the quintessential English
conservative? One of the reasons, apart from our shared philosophical outlook, is
that my family has long been associated with the horse. My great-grandfather ran
a successful stable yard, and it was from there that my grandmother emerged as a
horsewoman of some skill. Indeed, she would go on to compete at the highest
levels of Irish show jumping. My parents met through show jumping and
continue to compete. I, too, competed for many years before taking up a position
as commentator on the national show jumping circuit.
When I first encountered Scruton, I was struck by the fact that his life, like
mine, had been touched by horses. As he wrote in On Hunting:
My life divides into three parts. In the first I was wretched; in the second ill
at ease; in the third hunting. Most hunting people are brought up in the
sport, and shaped by it into a kind of intermediate species, an ancient
synthesis of horse, hound and human. Even now I have the sense of
hovering on the periphery of the rite, a fascinated spectator of something
which has come into being like a language, to be passed down the
generations and absorbed from birth, and which can be learned in later life
only at the cost of speaking with a foreign accent.3
Unlike Scruton, I was one of those who had been shaped by hunting and show
jumping. I was someone who had absorbed from birth the equestrian vernacular
of my ancestors. Yet, for all his anxiety, Scruton is certainly no spectator. He is
very much at home in the world of horses and has, in turn, given many of them a
good home. The home into which I wandered to conduct our conversations is
not so much one of books and ideas, although they dominate as much as
anything else. It is, if anything, a world where the horse is at home. And, that
being the case, so was I.
All aspects of Scruton’s thinking are embodied in his homestead and lifestyle.
This is a world of farmers and philosophers, of Wagner and wine, of animals and
Aristotle. Shortly after I arrive, we are joined by Paddy the dog. Paddy is a black
Labrador with big soulful eyes. This is the first time he has been to his new home,
and yet it is as though he has been here all his life. Such is the rhythm of life on
this farm that those who visit feel as though they have always been part of the
routine. As such, Paddy and I settle in seamlessly.
Roger Scruton did not start life this way. His was not a world of horses,
scholarship and culture. ‘I had a very ordinary childhood,’ he exclaims as we sit
in his converted barn. We already know from his previous autobiographical
statements that Roger Scruton’s childhood was, indeed, relatively ordinary. Born
to Jack and Beryl on 27 February 1944, he was raised with his two sisters in the
town of High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire. As he wrote in Gentle Regrets:
Thoughts from a Life:
My mother was born and bred in the genteel suburbs of London, cherishing
an ideal of gentlemanly conduct and social distinction that my father set out
with considerable relish to destroy. She saw in me her great hope of rescue
from the Lawrentian wildness of Jack Scruton, and of a return to the quiet
tea-parties and box-lined gardens of Upper Norwood. She therefore decided
that I should be called Vernon, after a distant cousin who looked sweet and
poetic in photographs, but whose greatest merit was that he had emigrated
to Canada before he could reveal how few real merits he had. My father,
who perhaps saw in this name a fitting revenge for my existence, acquiesced
to his wife’s desire. However, a residual tenderness towards his son
reminded him of the misery that would be faced by a boy with a cissy name,
if he could not fight his way to another one. He therefore insisted also on
Roger, after Sir Roger de Buslingthorpe, who lay in effigy in the church next
to the farm where I was born. Furthermore it was mercifully agreed between
my parents that, while I was to be called Vernon by all my relations, Roger
would be the first name on my birth certificate and, as it were, the official
title that I would one day win through my deeds.4
Those deeds would, in time, reward ‘Roger’ with great fame as a philosopher,
writer, journalist and intellectual dissident. As a child, however, he did not have
‘those rapturous, Proustian moments in which the whole of one’s forthcoming
life is condensed’. That was, he believes, because he came from a home where
‘there was obviously trouble between my father and my mother of some kind,
that we never really fully understood’. There was ‘great tension in the household,
and the children constantly crept around this tension, afraid of tripping the
switch’. The source of that tension was his father, whom Roger describes as ‘a
ball of electricity that sat silent in the middle of the room’.
Beryl, on the other hand, was ‘the mildest and sweetest of people, who would
never respond with anger to the anger that she received’. The sad truth was that
although the Scruton children loved her dearly, ‘we had each grown a carapace
against this love, knowing how much it would expose us to his anger’.5 However,
even this protective strategy could not shield Roger from Jack’s ‘malign energy’.
Emerging into self-consciousness ‘around the age of six or seven, I became more
and more aware that his feelings towards me were not straightforwardly those of
a father to a son: there was rivalry and frustration at his own life which
continued to accumulate. As a result, I could not say that I had a happy
childhood.’
Jack Scruton was the most important influence on the young Roger. He was ‘a
strong demonic character with a touch of his old Manchester working-class grit.
He had very strong beliefs of a socialist, egalitarian kind. These went with a
burden of resentment towards the upper classes, something which made him
very much of his time. My father was, therefore, the fount of all the ideas and
emotions that perambulated in our household.’ Conversely, Scruton’s mother
was a ‘gentle, introspective person who was very unconfident in herself’. Unlike
Jack, ‘not very much came out of her. She was, however, very intelligent and
understood what was going on, although she did not want to put herself forward
in order to express what she knew.’ Was she a source of consolation in the midst
of all this anger? ‘She was and she wasn’t, simply because she was so frightened
by it that she couldn’t stand up to the real attacks.’ Such consolation as the
Scruton children had, ‘we had in each other. My eldest sister and I were very
close and still are. We recognized that we had to shelter each other from the
prevailing winds.’
As we talk about this black period in his life, I recall reading previous
statements Scruton made about his parents and asking myself why two so
seemingly ill-suited people should have got married. When I ask Scruton for an