In Two Minds

A Biography of Jonathan Miller

Kate Bassett

• Publisher: Oberon Books
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781849437387
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Artist Biographies

In Two Minds is the first comprehensive biography of Jonathan Miller – the story of one of post-war Britain's most intriguing polymaths. Descended from immigrants who fled Tsarist anti-Semitism to become shopkeepers in Ireland and London's East End, Miller was born into an intellectual milieu, between Bloomsbury and Harley Street – the son of a novelist and a leading child psychiatrist. Miller trained as adoctor but then forged a career as a stellar comedian and as a world-renowned theatre and opera director. He is a controversial humorist, public intellectual and TV personality. As a star in the groundbreaking satirical revue Beyond the Fringe, he shot to fame alongside Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Alan Bennett. His expertise and interests encompass many areas, from medicine (he wrote and presented the hugely acclaimed BBC documentary series The Body in Question) to the history of art, Mozart, atheism and the nature of laughter. Jonathan Miller is one of the most multi-talented Britons of his generation, celebrated for his dazzling intelligence and anti-establishmentarian wit. Drawing on in-depth interviews, this is an entertaining and illuminating portrait of a fascinatingly complex man.

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BIRTH AND PARENTS

An infancy in print

JONATHAN WOLFE MILLER made his first appearance on 21 July 1934. He was born just off Harley Street, the main artery of London’s medical mile. His father, Dr Emanuel Miller — as a distinguished psychiatrist — had easily secured a bed for his 24-year-old wife at the Welbeck Nursing Home, a private maternity hospital of some prestige.¹ The National Health Service was, of course, only a twinkle in Aneurin Bevin’s eye at this point.

Emanuel had married Betty the previous year and their home was just a short walk from Welbeck Street. The perambulator merely had to trundle three blocks west from the hospital and turn on to Portland Place, by the BBC’s new edifice Broadcasting House. There, over the portico, stood Eric Gill’s sculpture of Prospero symbolically sending Ariel out into the world. Then three blocks north, where the road branched, was the Millers’ home at 23 Park Crescent: a maisonette above Emanuel’s consulting room.²

Looking over Marylebone Road towards Regent’s Park, this is no common or garden address. Although the perfect circle planned by its architect, John Nash, was never completed, the Crescent’s graceful neoclassical arc makes it the loveliest of all his stately terraces round the park.³ It is like a wedding cake turned concave: all white columns and tiers of stucco. This is blue plaque territory as well, with grand previous inhabitants. Betty and Emanuel’s infant would have been crawling in the footsteps of Joseph Bonaparte, ex-king of Spain and a fleeting resident of No. 23.

Science and the stage, the two magnetic poles which would proceed to tug at Miller throughout his life, also flanked his childhood abode. On one side had resided Sir Charles Wheatstone, the inventor of the stereoscope, an optical gadget which – using two views to create an illusion of 3-D depth – has always fascinated Miller.⁴ On the other side, the dame-next-door was the West End star Marie Tempest. In 1934 she was playing in Theatre Royal, Edna Ferber and George S. Kaufman’s affectionate send-up of thespian types.

Miller has one very early shard of memory: being lifted up to look over the balcony at a gleaming troop of soldiers as they marched along the Crescent. They were on their way to George VI’s coronation, which dates it to May 1937. He vividly recollects certain smells and sounds too: the sweet aroma of Bengers milk drink and the peculiar percussive score of Nanny Hogarth’s underwear. Sharing his room, as Betty’s resident home help, Hogarth always disrobed in the dark after Miller had been put to bed, but her elastic twangs and thwacks only encouraged fantasies about the female body. The small boy wondered if Nanny separated out into an array of blancmanges.⁵ His enquiries into this received only the Sibylline reply, ‘I’m doing what I’m doing’ (a line later immortalized in the play Forty Years On by Miller’s friend Alan Bennett).⁶

The young boy was not much the wiser, as regards the facts of life, after a brush with some older girls in a privet hedge. This occurred in Park Square Gardens, just opposite the Crescent, where the said girls sought to inspect his personal equipment, tantalizingly holding out the promise of a Hornby train set in return. The deal was halted as Nanny extracted him from the hedge.

Soon afterwards, the Miller family moved to St John’s Wood, on the north side of the park’s circumferential road, the Outer Circle. With his sister Sarah born in 1937, his parents wanted more room, and 35 Queen’s Grove was a large Victorian semi-detached in a leafy street. ‘Living in what you might call a grand middle-class house, we never lacked anything,’ Miller acknowledges. Yet he adds, with a perplexed frown, ‘Those memories I have of childhood are mostly wretched and miserable.’ He was something of a ‘problem’ child, evidently bright and often exasperated, sitting on the lawn and crying, ‘I want to be occupied!’ That cry, he states, is the only link he can see between his infant and his adult self, because he still suffers from dismal moods when left to kick his heels.

His boredom threshold has always been extremely low and, according to Sarah, he screamed so much, out of acute unhappiness, that Nanny was driven to distraction. Evidently, Hogarth did not share the positive views of today’s cognitive neurologists who (opposing the Attention Deficit Disorder label) believe that low boredom thresholds indicate exceptional intelligence and energy, with potential for inventiveness and multi-tasking.

Miller also spoke with a stammer, an astonishingly shaky start for someone who was to be the darling of chat-shows on both sides of the Atlantic. Detractors say the man became logorrhoeic and he has been nicknamed Windy Miller. However, in his prime, his genius was for incisive fluency and the perfectly chosen word. Admirers have declared they would rather hear him talk than listen to Caruso sing, and he has been described by chat-show host Dick Cavett – America’s equivalent of Michael Parkinson – as ‘one of the most amazing conversationalists the world has ever produced’, and of an extremely rare breed ‘whose conversation is instantly publishable’.⁷ He has sometimes made his interlocutors feel inarticulate, his lexicon being so extensive and his eidetic flair for painting in words being dazzling.

Nonetheless, he suffered for decades from a stutter which was, he says, bad enough to wobble his jaw, deform his face and humiliate him. As a schoolboy using the London Underground, he was given extra money by his parents in case he couldn’t say his destination and had to name a station further down the line instead.⁸ Nowadays, hitches surface in his speech only occasionally: when he is re-establishing contact after a while on the telephone, or when he has to introduce himself in public. Rather than saying, ‘I’m Jonathan Miller’, he just takes a longer run-up with ‘My name is Jonathan Miller.’ He is a patron of the British Stammering Association, and is fascinated by language-related neurological dysfunctions.

As a child, getting stuck on the letter ‘m’ made him sound like a train being held at a station, ‘a sort of Westinghouse stammer,’ as he recalls. One cure for that, he discovered, was slipping into a foreign accent: liberation gained through play-acting and adopting a different persona. One pre-school friend, Elishiva Landman, affectionately remembers him, at playgroup, as all red hair and freckles with a loud voice. Plainly, he wanted to make himself heard in spite of his impediment, unless he was having to up the volume just to articulate. Landman believes he stuttered because he thought faster than he could talk, although Miller himself remarks that speaking rapidly helps him whoosh through or ski-jump over obstructions.⁹

Voracious reading and a highly retentive memory soon helped him expand his vocabulary, and he learnt to sidestep his ‘speaker’s block’ with more elegant paraphrases. Even today he may be redesigning a sentence behind what seems like a thoughtful pause. Perhaps the hunt for synonyms underlies his acclaimed propensity for associative thinking and illuminating similes.

His stammer may well have been genetically inherited from Emanuel who had similar trouble as a child, but the young Miller was further afflicted with distressing incontinence.¹⁰ With clinical frankness, as well as a flash of bewilderment, he states: ‘I was an anxious child. It just all seemed incoherent and I couldn’t make my way and I wet my bed and shat myself and did all sorts of things.’ His infantine difficulties tie in, significantly, with a feeling of being underloved. He has spoken most publicly of this on BBC Radio’s In the Psychiatrist’s Chair, in conversation with Dr Anthony Clare.¹¹ When asked if Betty had been motherly, he replied: ‘Not at all, no. I was never kissed by either of my parents as a child, never embraced. Any extravagant display of emotion, indeed any display of emotion was “surplus to requirements”.’

A few old acquaintances consider that ungracious. Many parents rationed cuddles in the 1930s and 1940s as a matter of course, and to see Dr and Mrs Miller as purely cerebral cold fish would be wrong. Betty’s writing is sensitive and sensuously alert. That said, it rarely conveys open affection, and Sarah’s memories support her brother’s: ‘Ma had a great deal of charm, but not a great deal of warmth. Neither she nor Dad were physically demonstrative.’ They were, it seems, semi-detached parents, only half there for their children. One early friend of Miller’s adds that Emanuel seemed ‘old as Methuselah and completely unapproachable’, while Betty was never maternal, wafting around with a faintly ironic air. ‘Once Jonathan and I were duelling’, he says, ‘with sticks: we were sort of Errol Flynn out in the garden. To make it more real, we were making the noise of steel against steel, and Jonathan’s mother appeared at the window, just repeating “Tish, tish” – as if it was the most irritating noise in the world.’¹²

Having grown up as an emotional child in a repressed era, Miller wonders if his ‘limited capacity’ for friendships in adult life stems from those early ‘disorders of attachment’. Although Betty and Emanuel are no longer around to contest or assent to that view, they both wrote books that contemplated tricky parent–child relationships. These now create an intriguing kind of perpetuated dialogue with their son’s personal memories. A survey of their early lives and writings certainly sheds some light.

Betty’s roots were complex. She was born in Ireland in 1910, the second child of four.¹³ Her father, Simon Spiro, had emigrated in 1882 from Silauliai (which is officially in Lithuania today, though he described himself as Russian). He joined the mass exodus from the Pale of Settlement, the western flank of Tsar Alexander III’s empire which was rife with anti-Semitism. Unjustly blamed for Alexander II’s assassination in 1881, the local Jews – known as Litvaks – faced xenophobic assaults; draconian laws limiting where they could live; and the conscription of their sons from the age of twelve.¹⁴ Back home, Simon’s family had apparently been innkeepers, but Jews trading in alcohol had become scapegoats, accused of causing the ruin of the local peasants.

In his teens, Simon escaped. He boarded a ship and disembarked on the south coast of Ireland after being assured, by the crew, that the vessel had reached America with quite remarkable speed.¹⁵ It would be 1964 before his grandson, Jonathan, sailed all the way across the Atlantic to perform in the satirical revue Beyond the Fringe on Broadway. Meanwhile, Simon settled in Cork and became an exceptionally successful, self-made businessman. Sporting dapper three-piece suits, he managed to be assimilated and still religiously devout. A shopkeeper of standing – owning a cigar store, a jeweller’s and other properties – he became the highest ranking member of the town’s Jewish community. He was appointed president of the local synagogue. He acted as a grand juror and Justice of the Peace, as a committee member for the Cork Savings Bank, and as the master of a masonic lodge.¹⁶ In his spare time he played the violin in the orchestra at Cork Opera House, and he married, by arrangement, a Swede of Polish stock.

Sara Bergson came from a family of prosperous garment manufacturers in Karlstad. They were Jewish but less strictly orthodox. Having gained a teaching diploma from the esteemed Royal Women’s Superior Training Academy in Stockholm, Sara was a confirmed intellectual and the proud possessor of a leather-bound library. She was prone to quote Goethe and Nietzsche. Though gentle in manner, there was a touch of frost about her: a shortcoming that, while being a family trait, was described by her daughter as a ‘bit withering’.¹⁷

Several illustrious relatives figured on Betty’s family tree. Through Sara, she was a great-niece of Henri Bergson, the Nobel Prize-winning, Franco–Polish philosopher and polymath.¹⁸ His renown was burgeoning during her childhood, with his works being translated into English. Marcel Proust was, in turn, related (his second cousin marrying Bergson) and A la Recherche du Temps Perdu was famously influenced by Bergson’s theories about memory. Having met Henri once or twice, Betty would go on to employ the double surname Bergson Spiro when she became a novelist: a smart move in self-promotion, and an indication of how she prized the connection.

Problematically for Simon, Cork was near Clonakilty, the birthplace of the Sinn F...