I was brought up in a culture that made no special place for the “intellectual” as a distinct human type, and which regarded learning in the same way as any other hobby: harmless and excusable, so long as you kept quiet about it. The person who studied the classics at home, who wrote poetry in the early hours, or who listened in private to Beethoven quartets was, in my little patch of suburban England, no more to be despised than the expert in tarot cards, the amateur acrobat, or the breeder of exotic chickens. But if he should begin to display his hobby in ordinary social gatherings, or to imagine that his knowing the works of Emily Dickinson entitled him to some measure of respect not accorded to those who had gotten no further than page three of The Sun, then it was time to put him in his place as a social outcast.
In our narrow world, education was neither a disadvantage, as it is rapidly becoming today, nor a thing to be proud of. As an educated youth I was a “social incast,” as ordinary as any other boy of my generation, who was encouraged to pursue interests that he might share with other harmless weirdos, so long as he didn’t mention them in public.
This attitude to learning reflected a long-standing feature of English life. Unlike the French and the Russians, for both of whom the intellectual has been a recognizable and awe-inspiring phenomenon, with a distinctive and redemptive role in human affairs, the English have traditionally had no use for such a category. In the nineteenth century, the scholar and the man of letters were both acknowledged. So too was the educated person. But none of those was entitled, on account of being acquainted with books, to any special social privileges. Our leading English thinkers at the time of Flaubert and Baudelaire were as likely to be respectable as disreputable, and their vices, should they have any, were not badges of distinction, but simply the run-of-the-mill signs of ordinary human degeneracy.
