THE DAYS OF YORE “Late Developer” From The Days of Yore Website Administered by Astri von Ahlander Michael Scammell March 28, 2011 Michael Scammell is a distinguished biographer and translator. He is the author of Solzhenitsyn, A Biography (1984), which won the Los Angeles Times Award for best biography in the USA and the English PEN Centre’s Silver Pen Award for biography in the UK, and, most recently, Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth Century Skeptic (2010), which won the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for the best biography in the USA, and the Spears Magazine Award for best biography in the UK. He is also the editor of Russia’s Other Writers (1971), Unofficial Art from the Soviet Union (1977), and The Solzhenitsyn Files (1995). His translations include The Gift and The Defense, by Vladimir Nabokov, Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Childhood, Boyhood and Youth, by Leo Tolstoy. His work has appeared in the New York Review of Books, AGNI, and Harper’s. In 1972, Scammell founded Index on Censorship, for which he served as editor until 1981. He received his B.A. from Nottingham University and a Ph.D. from Columbia University, where he now teaches nonfiction writing. What did you want to be when you grew up? A soccer player. Why? I grew up in working class England, and sport seemed the obvious route to fame and riches. My father was a good amateur soccer player and we kids spent all of our waking hours playing soccer, listening to soccer on the radio, and occasionally getting taken to a professional game on a Saturday. But in high school I realized I was one of the smallest people on the pitch, so that faded. Once the soccer dream faded, where did you set your sights? I really had no idea. I got to a good high school through pure chance – one of only two from our village in my year – and found myself in a place where they studied Latin, French, German, math, history, geography – a full range of academic subjects – and it turned out I was good at nearly all of them. But I paid a price. My school was an hour away, students who went there were considered to be “stuck up snobs” by the boys in the village. I was cut off from my friends and no longer understood by even my father, a plumber, or my mother, a former chambermaid – though they were very proud of me. I guess it was the start of what would now be called alienation. What did you do after you graduated high school? The only thing I had to cling to was something my English teacher said to me in exasperation one day. “Scammell you’re too facile with your words. Have you ever thought of trying journalism?” I hadn’t the slightest idea what I would do after leaving school at the age of 16 – which was the norm in those days – so, I thought, why not? I sent out about forty letters to every single newspaper within a radius of sixty miles whose names I found in a press directory and got one offer back: to work as a copy boy, that is, messenger boy, at a daily paper in nearby Southampton. But I was warned I wouldn’t be allowed to write a word for the newspaper, and so it turned out, with the exception of about six brief items in a gossip column. How long did you do that job? Two years. Luckily I was befriended by the paper’s theatre critic, who asked me to babysit for his children and invited me to stay over at his apartment because I lived too far away to get home. I had the run of his bookshelves and it was like Aladdin’s cave to me. For my birthday he gave me Candide by Voltaire. He introduced me to the writers known as the “Angry Young Men” – Kingsley Amis, John Osborne, Philip Larkin, and so on. He also lent me books by D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Forster, Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, and took me to the theater, so that was the beginning of my real education, I would say. Did all this reading make you think that perhaps you wanted to write books as well? I began to think about it, but at the age of eighteen I was drafted into the army, which I considered a disaster at the time, since for most people it was a complete waste of two years, a dead end. But your two years in the army weren’t at all wasted, I gather. No, quite the opposite. It was another astonishingly lucky break. I was crazy about motorcycles at the time, and I found out that if you wanted to ride a bike in the army you had to join the Intelligence Corps – don’t ask. It all had to do with something called Field Security. At various interviews I was asked if I would be prepared to learn Russian. No way, I said, the first couple of times, but the third time I said I would if that was the only way to get into the Intelligence Corps. So you could ride a motorcycle! Yes! And believe it or not, I was transferred to the Intelligence Corps and I was put on the Field Security Course with a vision of ending up on a motorcycle. But one day a notice went up on the announcements board: “The following people are being transferred to the Joint Services School for Linguists”- a military school for studying Russian – and my name was on it. I complained to the Adjutant, but the army doesn’t listen to stuff like that. So, I was sent to study Russian. And that changed everything? Yes. After a few months of intensive preparation we were sent to study at Cambridge University for one out of our two years of service, though we lived separately from the regular students and had classes all day long. But in approximately a year and a half we went from knowing not a word of Russian to being completely fluent, and I went from being a hick to semi-educated. I was surrounded by high flyers. One fellow on my course was teaching himself Sanskrit on the side, another was reading Proust in French. I later found out that writers like Alan Bennett, Michael Frayn, and D.S. Thomas had taken these courses too. Everyone seemed headed to Oxford or Cambridge or London universities. I didn’t have the qualifications to go myself, so I studied on my own and ended up at Nottingham University. Being fluent in Russian is one thing. But when did Russian literature enter the picture? Well, that was the amazing thing about the army course—Frayn and Thomas have written a bit about it themselves, and a whole book on it also came out recently. We read Pushkin and Lermontov, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Turgenev and Chekhov. We got to publish our own newspaper and put on plays in Russia. I mean, poetry in the army, it was crazy! I imagine that probably doesn’t happen in the American army… I suspect not. It was a very British and very eccentric project, and for me it became another step in my real education. In fact, I can say I owe almost everything to the army. I got a first class degree (the equivalent of summa cum laude) in Russian. I wrote for and then edited the student newspaper, winning a national prize along the way, and that’s when I truly began to think about being at least a journalist, if not a real writer. What did you do when you graduated from the University of Nottingham? Well, innocent fool that I was, I had no job to go to, no idea what to do, no one, really, to advise me – unless I wanted to line up for interviews for jobs in business and industry. Luckily, one of my professors mentioned the possibility of a job to teach English in the former Yugoslavia – in Slovenia in the far north of the country. I jumped at it, having studied Serbo-Croatian as a minor at Nottingham, only to learn that the Slovenians spoke their own language – Slovene, which was even more difficult than the already difficult Serbo-Croatian. Slovenia, like the rest of Yugoslavia, was governed by a stiflingly orthodox, communist dictatorship. I was shadowed almost everywhere I went, and virtually no one would speak to me outside the classroom, because they were afraid, so it was a miserable time in my life. I had applied for a Fulbright to come to the USA, for the banal reason that I had met and fallen in love with a young American grad student at Nottingham. You see how well directed this career was? How totally clear I was on where I was going? [laughs] I didn’t get the Fulbright the first year, but I did get it the second year and I came to Columbia, to graduate school, to study – what else? – Russian literature. And what about the writing, were you making progress? I had begun writing in university, for the school literary journal as well as the newspaper, and I really wanted to write novels. My two idols were D.H. Lawrence and James Joyce…two very easy people to emulate [laughs]. I filled many long hours in Slovenia trying to write a novel, a sort of Joycean pastiche set in Ljubljana, where I was living, but it was a mess.