The great Karl Miller

It was as a schoolboy at Daniel Stewart’s College, concentrating on Music and English, that I first heard mention of Karl Miller. A little older than me, he was the boy genius, and eventually dux, of the Royal High School  when it still occupied its classical premises at Calton Hill, before it moved to Barnton and the old building became an art gallery and concert hall and, as was hoped, the future seat of a Scottish government (this never happened), a sensational Spanish fantasy of a parliament building being created down at Holyrood instead.

 But the old school still stands, holding its memories, and people still speak of them.  Sir Walter Scott was educated there, and one of my teachers spoke of  how the future novelist reputedly had a habit of twirling his fingers round a button on his jacket while narrating something in class. One day a rival pupil, having spotted this tendency, craftily cut off the button, which left Scott  struck dumb at the start of what he had intended to be an eloquent oration.

Karl Miller, who died on Wednesday at the age of 83, was not a novelist but he was certainly a writer and one of the school’s most important modern literary products. Sadly, somehow or other, I never met him, though I could easily have done so, and though I read him assiduously, not least because one of his favourite topics was “doubles” or “dual personalities,” as represented by Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, as well as by Schubert’s greatest song, Der Doppelganger, horrifically declaimed by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau in a famous recording.

Although Miller ws never my editor, his activities in that often dangerous field were prodigious, fulfilling all the predictions made about him when he was an Edinburgh schoolboy and my English teachers advised me to look out for his name, for who in Edinburgh would call his son Karl without expecting him to do well?  Well, someone did it (he was born in Straiton in the shadow of the Pentlands). At Downing College, Cambridge, he came under the influence of the fierce FR Leavis, and before long was literary editor of both The Spectator (under Ian Gilmour) andThe New Statesman, where he fell foul of Paul Johnson, who paid him £3000 to go away (Miller tore up the cheque and flung it over his irksome boss).

But Miller was a great resigner, just as he was a great editor. He worked for, and resigned from, the BBC. He edited, and resigned from, The Listener. He held, and abandoned, the Lord Northcliffe chair of English at UCL. He founded, and left, what many regarded as his greatest and final creation, the London Review of Books.

His own final book, a collection of sixteen essays entitled (not very catchily) Tretower to Clyro, came out in 2011 with a lengthy, warm and witty preface written by Andrew O’Hagan about a sort of Highland Jaunt he had taken with Miller and Seamus Heeney.

What seems to be the essence of Miller’s quirkily Scottish personality is here caught to perfection. I do wish I’d met him. Even as a boy, as my English teachers recognised, he was someone clearly destined to be “going places.”
27 September 2014