MemoirJohn Sutherland is an academic who writes - shock, horror - readable criticism, a biographer (the authorised Spender), a high-end journalist and a reformed alcoholic who told the story of his journey to sobriety in Last Drink to LA. Now, for those who want more of his story (and I am of that parish), we have The Boy Who Loved Books, in which he explains what made him a drunk.
Sutherland's father was a brainy lowland Scot who joined the Metropolitan Police during the depression. Somehow (Sutherland doesn't know where - his mother never told him) his parents met. They married and he was born in south London in 1938. The war started a year later and in 1942 his father was killed on his RAF cadet pilot training course.
Mum Liz, a small, sexy blonde with huge social ambitions, fled London for her parents' home in Colchester, Essex. Her mother was a cleaner, and her father a clothes "presser". Liz parked John with them, got a job and set about re-branding herself as middle class by having discreet affairs with numerous army and air force officers.
Meanwhile, first ignored and then abandoned when Liz went to Argentina in 1945 with a lover (she was gone for three years), John had to fend for himself. His lumpen proletariat grandparents had no inner life (or so he thought) and he had no siblings either: and so, like many a lonely child, his only recourse was the book. He read omnivorously, comics and the popular children's fiction of, among others, Captain Frederick Marryat, RL Stevenson, H Rider Haggard. Reading consoled and explained. Reading, he also discovered, made him attractive to the adults in whose midst he was marooned. Adults liked a reader: a reader was never any bother. But it came at a price: as he was later to discover, the boy who read alone was father to the man who drank alone.
THE GREATEST EVENT of Sutherland's childhood - other than the war - was the Butler Education Act (1944). This established the 11-plus exam, which supposedly (it later turned out to be a fallacy) could determine whether a child was bright enough for grammar school or not. Sutherland passed and got to Colchester Royal Grammar School. Thereafter, he bobbed along, reading anything except what was on the syllabus, scraping through his exams and generally not fulfilling his academic potential. His adolescent binge-drinking made a bad situation worse.
His A-level grades - the equivalent today of two Cs and D - could only secure him a place at Leicester to read English. A new university - it had originally been an outpost of the University of London and had only got its "charter" in the 1950s - Leicester had no status. So, having nothing better to do, Sutherland elected for National Service, made lieutenant, and was posted to Germany, where he boozed and read and was happy at last.
Three years later, and back in civvies, he tried again for university and again (life being a circle, one of Sutherland's themes) only Leicester would have him. He started in 1960 and discovered, to his surprise, that the English department, "pound for pound, [ was] the best . . . in the country". It had Richard Hoggart, who had just published The Uses of Literacy, Philip Collins, the greatest Dickensian of his age, and Monica Jones, Larkin's muse and lover, the model for "Margaret Peel" in Lucky Jim. He became a favourite of hers: this also came at a price, for she fostered in him "a kind of marching out of step which guaranteed that - like her - one would never get on in career terms".
After he got his degree, Monica sent him to Edinburgh, where he drank for 10 years and taught; from here he went to UCL (more drinking), then to Los Angeles (industrial drinking and rehab) and finally back to UCL, where he is now Emeritus Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature.
THIS IS A memoir full of cultural allusions, painful confessions and sharp descriptions of British working-class life. It also reminds us (more necessary than ever since we've forgotten this as we've got richer) just why governments must distribute wealth and opportunity downwards.
Sutherland's maternal grandfather, a man rendered obsolete by the rise of the iron, committed suicide in 1957. Searching afterwards for his will, Sutherland and his mother discovered hundreds of library books at his home, not his but his wife's: grandmother, it transpired, had been stealing books to read for decades. Most were romantic fiction but there were moderns in the mix; Sutherland still has the Hemingway stories stolen by his grandmother for her self-education programme, which was the only one available to a woman of her class and vintage.
The opportunities available to Sutherland's mother were slightly better (she did a Pitman's secretarial course) and she made the best of what she had. She ended life a JP, married to a man in the motor trade, living on a yacht at Cannes. But it's her son who's made the biggest journey, thanks to the welfare state created by the Labour government of 1945-51. That administration transformed his life, along with the lives of so many others, simply by making resources available. It's not rocket science: that's how to help the poor, and it works. New prime ministers and new governments alike, please take note.
Carlo Gébler is a writer and becomes chairman of the Irish Writers' Centre in the autumn
The Boy Who Loved Books: A Memoir By John Sutherland John Murray, 261pp. £16.99