‘Gentle Regrets’: A Life in Ideas
A review of ‘Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life’, by Roger Scruton; Continuum, 2005.
Generally speaking, a memoir should be written at the end of life, or towards its end, at any rate. Not at the height of the writer’s fame, as in the case of the football player, or the pop star. It is not just that if the memoirist wrote at the end of her life she would have so much more to say; it is that she would provide more interesting commentary. Kierkegaard, after all, wrote that ‘life must be lived forwards — but it can only be understood backwards’. In other words it can take some time for us to see why things unfolded as they did. Of course, some people are unfailingly interesting.
So Sir Roger Scruton’s memoir, Gentle Regrets, is a treat. Written by a very interesting man at the end of a very interesting life, it deals with Sir Roger’s journey, as it were, from a childhood spent in a violent home in High Wycombe to student life at Cambridge, the vaulted heights of academia, and the world of the conservative man of letters. Made up of a series of essays, it is at once personal and expansive: to inhabit his universe is to submerge ourselves both in life on the farm in Malmesbury, Wiltshire, and in Kant, Wagner, Hegel and Bach.
In ‘How I Discovered Culture’, he describes his discovery of books, and his obsession with the idea of ‘knowledge beyond science, beyond calculation, beyond our attempts to gain mastery over the future’. He writes that sadness ‘looked out at [him] from art and literature … in the words of Rilke … the mad paintings of Van Gogh.’ Spengler, author of The Decline of the West, was a powerful influence, connecting his indefinite sense of decline to civilisation the destiny of civilisation itself. More important was Spengler’s view that real truths, ‘those we understand and accept in the life-process itself’, are inaccessible to the scientific method’.
Spengler, author of The Decline of the West, was a powerful influence.
‘Sleeping Cities’ deals with his reflections on Prague, a city to which he travelled often in the 1980s, smuggling great Western texts to the dissidents living under communism. He compares the mortuary silence in which cities like Prague or Budapest slept under Soviet rule; the capitalist city, in contrast, never sleeps: there are noises you will never hear in London or New York — noises that are only audible, faintly, when the great machinery of the market ceases.
But Scruton is known best for being – that rare thing – a conservative intellectual, and he describes the moment he became a conservative in a chapter with that title. It happened in May 1968, when he witnessed young university students ‘shouting and smashing’ and trashing (as he perceived it) the material expressions of the culture that shaped them. They defended their actions in Foucauldian gobbledegook, giving basic mob-behaviour an intellectual gloss. But what Roger saw was people seeking to usurp the ‘bourgeoisie’ to which they owed the freedom and prosperity that enabled them to ‘play on [their] toy barricades’. It struck a stark contrast with the beliefs of the man they hated most, the ‘Old Fascist’ Charles de Gaulle. His Mémoirs de Guerre opens with the immortal line ‘Toute ma vie, je me suis fait une certaine idée de la France’ (‘All my life, I have had a certain idea of France’). De Gaulle saw France as defined by its language, religion and high culture. He felt in his heart that those who wished to protect and affirm those things were his natural allies.
He is most compelling, I think, when discussing philosophy and art. It is, as it was for Burke and Schelling and Bishop Erik Varden, an animating force and emotional fuel. He scorns the ‘culture of repudiation’ in which he perceives us to live, more interested in tearing things down than lifting them up. He is convinced, ‘despite all the alienation, nihilism and existential despair’, that high culture is ‘a monument to ideals, part of the attempt — always necessary and never successful—to make us at home in the world and to affirm our moral right to it’:
Myths, stories, dramas, music, painting — all have lent themselves to the proof that life is worthwhile, that we are something more than animals, and that our suffering is not the meaningless thing that it might sometimes seem to be, but one stage on the path to redemption.
He is most compelling, I think, when discussing philosophy and art.
Scruton is provocative, self-effacing, candid. His defence of unpopular positions often cost him dearly, and he does not avoid exploring the personal toll of standing up for what we believe in. But he also argues that our ideals define us: ‘between them, they are all that you have,’ he writes. And so, though he has regrets, they have nothing to do with the way that over and again he would stick his head above the trenches to say what he thought was true and right. But he insists his views, however unpopular in academia or the media world, are views shared by most ordinary people. He cares more than anything about the ‘first-personal plural’, the we, and considers it the job of the conservative to affirm that ‘we’, with all of its quirks, so that its members live in harmony and with the sense that they belong. For conservatives like Scruton or James Orr, the ‘individual’ — a modern invention — is a fiction. We belong together.
William F. Buckley, Jr., a very different kind of conservative man of letters, once lamented that he ‘wins all the little battles, but loses all the big ones’. Conservatives like Scruton will always be on the losing side of things, for nothing remains forever. They content themselves with the slowing down the rate of change. ‘Delay is life,’ said the Marquess of Salisbury, who gave his name to Scruton’s infamous periodical The Salisbury Review. Thus Gentle Regrets has a mournful quality, for looking over our lives we cannot help but see how much things have changed. But that is not to say the memoir is lugubrious or depressing. The opposite: it is a fine and quite inspiring character study, for it concerns someone who really did ‘live loudly’, as Émile Zola once pledged to do.
Gentle Regrets is just a defence of Scruton’s intellectual legacy and basic decency. It is also a testament to the power of ideas to shape a life. It prods us, gently, to reflect on our beliefs, values, convictions and the extent to which we live them out, as well as the extent to which our failure to disclose them or to embody them diminishes us.
