One of the most influential as well as controversial British journalists of his era, Bernard Levin was a columnist for The Times from 1971 until 1997. He was a devotee of H.L. Mencken, a fierce debater, an unashamed intellectual, and a masterful stylist. His greatest gift, said fellow journalist Alan Watkins, "was to overcome the inhibitions which the written word presents; get over a barrier; acquire freedom and even fly." Well known for composing unusually long sentences (as demonstrated in the passage below), he once wrote a 1,500-word column with only a single period.
In this excerpt from Enthusiasms (1983), a discourse on the pleasures of his life, Levin recalls a fortuitous encounter with failure in a woodworking class at boarding school.
From the Carpentry Shop to the Forge
from Enthusiasms, by Bernard Levin
The woodwork teacher was a kindly soul. In what proved to be my last lesson in his class I was attempting to make a simple office filing-tray. I had cut one of the long sides, and it had turned out rather better than my usual efforts; or so it seemed to me, but in fact I had on that occasion surpassed myself in incompetence, for I had sawn the wood straight across the grain. When the teacher, making his rounds of the class, got to my bench he picked up the rectangle of wood and looked at it for a minute in silence, turning it this way and that in his hands, as if he could not believe the evidence of his eyes, as perhaps he really couldn't. Then he turned to me and, apparently in a spirit of genuine inquiry, asked, "Is this a joke?" I assured him it was not, realizing a moment later that it might have been better if I had insisted that it was.
He nodded gravely, then took the slab between finger and thumb at both ends, snapped it in half, threw it into the rubbish bin and bade me follow him to his dais at the end of the room, where he intimated to me, in the most courteous terms, that he doubted if I would ever make a success of carpentry, a conclusion I had already come to on my own behalf. I awaited news of my fate; I was not to know that what lay before me were perhaps a hundred of the happiest and most satisfying hours of my entire life; indeed so piercing was the happiness those hours gave me, that even now, as I conjure it up forty years later, I can feel it in all its power, and restrain the tears with difficulty.
In addition to a carpentry shop, the school had a forge; the passer-by would hear the roaring of the furnace and the bellows, the clang of iron, and see, whenever the door was opened, a Stygian gloom lit by the fires of hell. Or so memory portrays it, and certainly the decision to transfer me from the comparative safety of the woodwork class to the unimaginable perils of the forge struck me speechless with terror. But the forge was an alternative to carpentry; one or the other was obligatory, and the woodwork teacher doubtless felt that I could not be more hopeless with iron than I had shown myself to be with wood, and that at least he would be rid of me. The next week, I reported to the forge; an enveloping leather apron was draped over me, I was shown how to operate the mechanical bellows and the simpler tools, and given instruction in safety procedures. Then, under careful guidance (possibly the woodwork teacher had passed the word along to his colleague in the smithy), I heated a bar of metal red hot, laid it upon the anvil, and hammered it flat.
The most suitable way for this story to continue would be, I suppose, in the form of a revelation that I turned out to be a metal worker of genius, culminating in a shy confession that it was I who made the iron chandelier, forty feet in diameter and most elaborately chased, with a thousand fantastically decorated candleholders, which hangs to this day in the nave of East Grinstead Cathedral. It is not so; I was quite as hopeless with my hands in the forge as I had been at the carpenter's bench, and all I had to show at the end of all my hours among the sparks and the furnace, my efforts twixt hammer and anvil, was a toasting-fork of extremely irregular design. But I had stumbled upon one of the great, holy, all-consuming loves of my life: fire.
For additional specimens of Bernard Levin's prose, see Bernard Levin on Writers and Writing.
Selected Works of Nonfiction by Bernard Levin:
- Taking Sides, 1980
- Enthusiasms, 1983
- In These Times, 1986
- All Things Considered, 1990
- A Walk Up Fifth Avenue, 1991
- I Should Say So, 1996
- Hannibal's Footsteps, 1997
- Enough Said, 1998
Enthusiasms by Bernard Levin was published in Great Britain in 1983 by Jonathan Cape Ltd.; it was published in the U.S. in 1984 by Crown Publishers.
