Simon Hoggart: a satirical gadfly and my beloved brother

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/may/09/simon-hoggart-satirical-gadfly-beloved-brother

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I had never written a funeral tribute before this January. Now I have delivered two in just over three months and am preparing to write a third. The first was for my brother, Simon, the second for our father, Richard, and the third will be for our mother, Mary, who followed her husband out of this life on Monday. My parents had been married for 72 years, utterly devoted since they met as freshers at Leeds University.

This concertina crash of bereavements has made me reflect in a new way on the qualities of two men whose inspiring, occasionally intimidating presence has loomed over my entire life. As the warmth of the obituaries testifies, both had large and enthusiastic followings. Yet to outsiders, the demarcations have often seemed sharp. Dad was a serious academic, a leftwing social moralist, informed by the puritanism of his Methodist upbringing – a Roundhead, if you like. Simon – whose memorial service was on Wednesday – was funny, a satirical gadfly with a sharp eye for bullshit, but no obvious political agenda, who could find humour in almost anything and who revelled in fine wine – a cavalier.

Yet the more I reflected on their lives, and on early family life with our parents and sister Nicola, the more I realised that my father and six years older brother were two sides of the same coin. In private my father was funny, verbally if not physically playful. Simon's wit was underpinned by a moral outlook forged at the family dinner table.

It would be kind to say that Dad's humour could be Rabelaisian. He loved to shock us with mock crudery. If asked to "say something rude" he would exclaim "Hair on men's legs!" as we children cackled like alarmed poultry. Touring Germany in the early 1960s, we passed a garage owned by one "Rudi Knies". It turned out to be a chain and each time we passed another branch Dad would exclaim excitedly, "Look! Rudy Knees!" (more cackling from the back seat). Joining in a game of Consequences one Christmas in the early 1970s, this lifelong onion-loather invented the worst dish he could think of: "Shark's pizzle in onion sauce", delighting in his own silliness and at our reaction to this unexpected contribution from the then assistant director general of Unesco.

More significantly, his sociological observations were laced with amusement. He was alarmingly unself-conscious and would make comments about fellow diners in cafes, barely lowering his voice, as we cringed in embarrassment. "Do you see that chap over there? He's got one of those pointy cardboard hankies in his breast pocket. If he actually tried to use it, he'd saw his nose off." It was almost a kind of observational comedy, a style Simon elaborated and refined for his entire career.

Even in the depths of the dementia that clouded the last years of his life, Dad enjoyed teasing and being teased. Me: "Dad, I'm writing a preface to a new biography of you. The world will finally know what a monster you really were." Dad, aged 94, immobile, but grinning broadly: "Oh dear. I suppose that means I'll have to flee the country."

I can't remember a time when Simon didn't make jokes, often at my expense. When aged about eight, I appeared as a pageboy in a Leicester University production of Love's Labour's Lost I had one, to me, extremely challenging line: "Lord Longaville is one!" which I repeated endlessly as I struggled to learn it. "But Lord Shortaville is half," Simon added from across the breakfast table, "yet Lord Family-Size is two!" When Dad gave evidence at the trial of Lady Chatterley's Lover, Simon and Nicola quickly converted the title to Lady Loverley's Chatter and then Lady Chuvverly's Latter.

As a student at Cambridge, Simon became a paid-up radical, joining the Socialist Society and attending the famous anti-Vietnam war demo in Grosvenor Square, but he inherited from Richard a mistrust of all forms of political extremism. Although Dad remained a lifelong believer in the benign justice of public ownership and profoundly suspicious of all forms of commercialism, he disappointed many on the Left through his failure to embrace Marxism and Marxist cultural theory. It was too mechanistic, too prescriptive and he loathed any form of authoritarianism. Simon disappointed many Guardian readers through his (in my view excessive) scepticism about the environmental movement and his failure to embrace Tony Benn. He had heard far too many bitter Labour moderates spitting blood about the damage they felt Benn had done to their party's electability in the 1980s.

For right or wrong, my father set his compass by a moral instinct rather than theory or dogma, and a version of the same compass guided Simon's satire. They both had their share of detractors. Dad was naive, atheoretical, a closet cultural elitist, some would say. Simon had sold out, swapping his birthright for an easy gag and a case of fine wine. Such criticisms missed the point. Dad's approach to cultural analysis and Simon's to the foibles of politicians shared a deep-rooted suspicion of fashionable dogma, self-righteous extremism, of self-serving sophistry or charlatanism dressed up as progressive idealism.

It was often daunting to be the kid brother following these two contrasting, but equally driven talents. My consolation, very late in life was that I managed to publish a novel, A Man Against a Background of Flames, when both had told me that they would have liked to do so but somehow couldn't. Dad was proud, but, probably mercifully, beyond reading it. Simon could not have been more supportive. I like to think there are smatterings of both of them stirred into this satirical historical thriller. If my father and Simon were indeed two sides of the Hoggart coin, I have sometimes felt like a version of that coin myself, at the age of 62, still spinning in mid-air, uncertain which way up to land.

The differences between them are really reflections of the experiences of two remarkable generations: Dad of the "scholarship boys" who strove to create a fairer, more socially just and more artistically creative society after the war; Simon of the first-wave baby-boomers who joyously surfed the explosion in popular cultural vitality, the death of political deference and the new personal freedoms of the 1960s.

In mid-January I interviewed Sir Ian McKellen about his Broadway Pinter revival. He began by commiserating kindly over Simon's death. Then, as the interview ended he added, "And I also wanted to say how very much your father's book meant to me as a young man." I felt like a Hobbit being blessed by Gandalf. But then that's what Richard and Simon had in common. Whatever their flaws, they both appealed to people like Sir Ian, thoughtful and kindly disposed with lively, open minds.

Paul Hoggart's novel A Man against a Background of Flames was published in October