90 The EconomistDecember 7th 2019
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henever he eruptedonto a set or into a studio, Jonathan
Miller made an instant impression. Part came from his
height and gawkiness, the tweed jacket, the excessively angular el-
bows and knees (since the body was not only possesssed by him
but also possessed him, making up a large part of what he actually
was, including his notions of effort and success). But he also drew
attention because, as often as not, he had a book of neuroscience
in his hand.
The point he was making was this. Science was hard, and need-
ed constant application. But the sort of thing he spent five decades
doing, putting on plays, making television documentaries, direct-
ing more than 50 operas, he could achieve with his left hand be-
hind his back. Art was easy, ridiculously so. Most television was ut-
ter banality; most opera forgettable, vulgar and sentimental. So it
took very little originality to make them memorable. He liked to in-
voke the psychologists’ duck-rabbit sketch, in which the seeing of
the duck precluded the alternative seeing of the rabbit, and vice
versa; to bring to the fore “aspects” of a work, as Wittgenstein said,
that had previously been invisible, so that audiences would per-
ceive it in a completely different way.
For the bbcin 1966, for example, he turned “Alice in Wonder-
land”, which had been horribly Disneyfied, into a Victorian child’s
dream of a hot Oxford summer in which all the characters were
prating or dozing dons. That was what the story was about: Oxford,
childhood. (People who said it was Freudian clearly knew nothing
about Freud.) In 1982 he set Verdi’s “Rigoletto” in Little Italy in New
York, with mobsters swaggering and “La Donna è Mobile” kicked
out of a jukebox, because Verdi’s duke was clearly a hoodlum too,
and the atmosphere that of “The Godfather”. His “Così fan Tutte” in
1995 had costumes by Armani, huge mirrors and mobile phones, a
comment on the narcissism of the modern age. His “St Matthew
Passion” took the performers out of their tuxedos and inert choirsand put them in a circle, in their own clothes, acting out the drama;
his film of “The Symposium”, called “The Drinking Party”, put the
actors into dinner jackets as old boys at a school reunion, reading
Plato’s discourse on love in one of the temples at Stowe.
All those were great successes, cementing his reputation as the
most brilliant mind on the British cultural scene, and yet even then
he agonised over why he was doing this. He had meant to be a doc-
tor, specifically a neurologist. Instead, probably out of weak-mind-
edness, he always said “yes” whenever anyone turned up at his
door and asked if he would like to play. (It was almost involuntary,
like blushing or sneezing, and he could never identify the point at
which the conscious exercise of intention occurred.) The first of
these accidents happened when he was lured away from his medi-
cal training by three Cambridge friends, Alan Bennett, Peter Cook
and Dudley Moore, to write and perform in “Beyond the Fringe” in
1960, a revue which pilloried everything the English held dear,
from the Battle of Britain to tea to Shakespeare. After this had elec-
trified both London and New York, it was hard to go back to hospi-
tal work. But he would have done, had he not been invited to direct
a play at the Royal Court...then to direct opera for Sadler’s Well-
s...then to the National Theatre...and so it went. He fell into work as
he fell into long-lasting love, accidentally.
Yet he should have stayed intentionally with medicine. First,
because what he was doing was ephemeral, even when his “Rigo-
letto” and his “Mikado”(translated to the Marx Brothers’ Fredonia,
and with the Japanese stripped out) were both in the repertoire for
decades. By contrast, originality in medicine could bring lasting
benefit. And second, because in science one was either right or
wrong, and one’s work was peer-reviewed by people who at least
knew the topic. Instead he had to put up with critics, snivelling
pipsqueaks who knew 100% less than he did about the piece in
question but whined that he was messing it around. When they
called him a polymath, a term he loathed, they really meant he was
a jack of all trades and master of none. What idiot invertebrates
they all were, like the sea slugs he had collected as a boy and then
had the greatest pleasure dissecting and slicing for his micro-
scope. God (though it had never occurred to him that there might
be a God) could rot the lot of them.
As some consolation, he could bring his medical expertise to
bear on art. For the bbc he produced a television series, “The Body
in Question”, in which among a firework display of observations
he compared red blood cells clotting to Duchamp’s “Nude descend-
ing a staircase” and the movement of cilia on cells to Van Gogh’s
“Wheatfield with Lark”. His radio series on madness featured the
voices of both experts and those being treated. In opera, too, he ap-
plied the knowledge gained from listening to, and watching, pa-
tients. In “La Traviata” he asked Violetta to twist her hair as she
sang, another almost involuntary gesture, and strictly made her
stay in bed for her death aria. It was a full-time business, dying.The incremental world
England he found difficult, with its snobberies and condescen-
sions. His knighthood (though of course he said yes to it, weakly, as
ever) made him shrivel up. He could have lived in New York, where
he briefly worked for the New Yorkerand where, for the first time,
he felt Jewish. But he stayed put, moving all of a mile from Park
Crescent nw1, where he was born, to Gloucester Crescent nw1, with
Alan Bennett over the road. He lived among countless books, the
notebooks in which he recorded his curiosity about everything,
and his photographs of bits of buildings and superimposed layers
of posters on walls, the discrete instalments from which his per-
ception of the world incrementally emerged.
Did all this add up to a triumphant life? Many would have
thought so. In moments of relaxation and satisfaction he would
rock his long frame back and clasp his hands behind his head. But
Wittgenstein’s nagging question remained: exactly what made the
difference between “I lift my arms,” and “My arms go up”? 7Jonathan Miller, alternately pillar and goad of the British
cultural scene, died on November 27th, aged 85Intention and accident
Obituary Jonathan Miller