"for i must tell you," Freud wrote to his colleague Pfister, "that in private life I have no patience at all with lunatics." Not just with them, I would add; I have little more patience with cranks. Or so I used to think.
Although Nicolas Walter-who died a few weeks ago-wasn't a lunatic, there was an obsessive quality in the concentration of his passions which made many people think that he was, at best, a boring crank. If so, he converted me to the virtues of crankiness. I greatly relished his writing, not least in the pages of Prospect, as well as in the correspondence columns of most newspapers. I relished his personality, too, even though I learned the hard way just how abrasive it could be. He was the man who knew everything. After Oxford (and before that, National Service in the RAF), he joined the anarchist and peace movements, campaigning against nuclear weapons and the Vietnam war, and writing About Anarchism, which had large sales in several languages.
After a variety of other jobs he worked as chief sub-editor for the TLS in 1968-74, a post perfectly suited to his talents. I wish he could have been chief sub to all our national newspapers. Many of his thousands of letters over more than 40 years denounced the falsehoods of religion, but many simply corrected that melange of mistakes and compendium of error which we call the British press.
We met nearly 25 years ago. Apart from those letters, I had also read him in little magazines such as Anarchy, where he wrote an excellent article on Orwell many years before his fine essay on him in Prospect (October 1998). When I was literary editor of the Spectator in the late 1970s, I used Walter as a reviewer (despite the complaints of Tory militarists). He was a good reviewer, with a nice dry style and a huge range of interests, as well as depth of knowledge. Did he pine for more recognition as a journalist? After receiving one of Walter's scolding missives, my friend Alan Watkins replied, irritably but reasonably, that he was surprised that Walter didn't write more paid-for, by-lined articles rather than endless letters. His personality probably didn't help with commissions. His crankiness could seem like fanatical integrity, or plain obstreperousness.
Several years ago, I wrote an article for the Atlantic Monthly of Boston on The Satanic Verses affair. While working on it, I remembered that Walter had published a book on Blasphemy Ancient and Modern. Not expecting to find it in the Bath branch of Waterstone's, I rang him in his Islington lair to ask whether I could buy a copy. He said that he would send me a copy, adding ironically (as I took it from the famed secularist), that this would be "a Christmas present." A few months later, I sent him a note of thanks enclosing a copy of the piece as it had appeared in print, with which I was quietly pleased.
When one does this, one vaguely expects, if not honeyed praise, then a polite word or two. Instead I got a letter: "Dear Geoffrey, It was kind of you to send me the Atlantic with your article. Unfortunately it was badly informed and badly argued. Yours, Nicolas."
My immediate reaction was: "Well-you too, sweetie." But after a while I stopped grinding my teeth and began to relish the letter. It was all of Nicolas Walter-and so unlike the "reciprocal civility of authors" which Johnson thought one of the most risible sights life offers. Walter's honesty excluded any kind of emollient hypocrisy.
His political and religious-or anti-political and irreligious-opinions did verge on the cranky or, at any rate, the way he promoted them. Walter's ceaseless toil on behalf of the Rationalist Press Association sometimes seemed a waste of his energies. Reviewing AJ Ayer's memoirs some years ago, Perry Anderson was derisive about Freddie's anticlerical campaigns as a don at Christ Church in the 1930s. As Anderson said, anyone would think this had been Monsignor Seipel's Vienna, with clerical reaction visible and savage, rather than poor old tepid Anglican Oxford.
In the same way, Walter's battles with the godly seemed like flogging a horse on its way to the knacker's yard. In a country where a Church of England is by law established, but whose services are attended by all of 2 per cent of the people, aren't there more important targets for polemical energy than revealed religion?
But that, too, was part of Walter's character: craggy, eccentric but honourable, and notably old-fashioned. He had more in common with the burning faith of an evangelical believer than with the vague, polite agnosticism of most modern Englishmen; a reminder that English free thought had its roots in radical protestantism.
Walter was one of those who do not merely ignore God, but actively dislike Him, raging against the gods who, as Goethe says, would starve if children and beggars weren't hopeful fools. In this, as in other respects, Walter was a Victorian; I think he might have been more at home 100 years earlier, in that great age of cranks. He was a spiritual contemporary of Bradlaugh and other ardent pamphleteers against Christianity, rather than of fatuous pop singers with sniggering empty jokes about religion.
If he was a crank, he gave crankiness a good name. Nicolas Walter's trouble was that he was an homme s?rieux in a deeply unserious age. n
