Karl Miller obituary
The enduring reputation of Karl Miller, who has died aged 83, will be as the greatest literary editor of his time, and one of the greatest ever. He founded, with Mary-Kay Wilmers and Susannah Clapp, the London Review of Books, and went on to edit "the paper" (as he always called it) for 10 years, and co-edit it for a further three years with Wilmers. Alan Bennett described the LRB as "the liveliest, the most serious and also the most radical literary magazine we have". Over its lifetime, it has elicited contributions from all the best British writers – Philip Larkin, Seamus Heaney, Angela Carter, Martin Amis, Hilary Mantel – and, with its long and often playful essays on every conceivable subject, become an indispensable part of the nation's intellectual life. A main aspect of Miller's editorial genius was his ability, intuitively, to match a book with the right reviewer, whom he had known for years and whom he could persuade to do the thing for pennies as a "favour to Karl".
The LRB was devised to fill the vacuum left by the Times Literary Supplement when, in 1978-79, an 11-month lockout at Times Newspapers left Britain without a serious reviewing organ. The idea had been around for some time, bruited originally by Stephen Spender and Frank Kermode, but it took Miller et al to get the LRB off the ground – initially as a supplement to the New York Review of Books, but soon as an independent publication. Working simultaneously as professor of English at University College London from 1974 to 1992, Miller toiled indefatigably at the LRB. It was not uncommon to see him marking proofs while listening, with one ear, to a visiting lecturer. Multitasking came as easily to him as overwork.
Miller was born in Straiton, Midlothian. His world fragmented when his parents, as he ruefully records, decided they were disinclined to stay married to each other "or to me". An only child, in every painful sense, he was brought up by his maternal grandmother, in the lee of the Pentland Hills, within sight of Edinburgh.
It pleased him to note that his middle names Fergus Connor connected him to Scottish radicalism (although his politics, like those of his idol, Henry Cockburn, were Whiggish). Karl – a commoner (un)Christian name on Clydeside than Edinburgh's Morningside – resulted in the "rumour that I was named after Marx". His mother, Marion, was a committed socialist, but in fact "Karl" was a tribute by his father, William, to a Dutch farmer who had been kind to him when a prisoner in the first world war.
William Miller was an unsuccessful artist – an unsuccessful anything. Karl retained an occasional relationship with him until well after the second world war; they sometimes came close to blows. With his mother, who took up residence in nearby Gilmerton, he was on Sunday visiting terms by bicycle. He claimed never to have been "conscious of bearing my parents any ill will for not being around". But a temper which could flare out suggested lifelong deposits of resentment.
His grandmother stabilised his childhood. She survives in tender anecdotes such as when he asked her (having come across the term in Scott's The Heart of Midlothian) what a "brothel" was; she tactfully explained it was a place "where bad people went to dance". The death of his grandmother, in 1948, was one of only two occasions in his life on which Miller records feeling grief. The other was his resignation from the editorship of the LRB in 1992.
Miller won a place at the Old Royal high school on Calton Hill, Edinburgh, and left it "a hardworking scholarship boy, a dux, a valedictory orator, a poet" and determined "in a Scottish way, to get on".
There were obstacles. Two years' national service was obligatory in the late 1940s. He was not, for all his schoolboy laurels, handy in ways approved of by the army. He scored "nothing out of 20 in an intelligence test in which you assembled the parts of a bicycle pump". Nor did Miller approve of the army. "National service," he recorded, "made me turn to the working class as to a beautiful woman."
The badge of working-class affiliation was his lifelong love of football (listed in Who's Who as his only recreation). Those who took to the pitch with him (as much as those who took to it against him) record it as being a terrifying experience. He was eventually dissuaded from playing by physicians, perhaps fearing apoplexy if he continued. Watching remained a passion and, when editor of the Listener, he inaugurated – via Hans Keller and Danny Blanchflower – a distinguished style of soccer journalism.
In the army, defiantly un-commissioned, Miller worked with the British Forces Network in Hamburg. Bicycle pumps might defeat him, but he took naturally to media. Already he was establishing a personal network that he would consolidate through life. In 1951 he went to Cambridge to read English at Downing College, under the fearsome FR Leavis. Miller was a "Scottish scholarship boy" and unpolished. At one sherry party, asked by a Sitwellian don which public school he had attended, he replied "none". Later he overheard the comment "remarkable fellow, that Miller, entirely self-educated".
He was strongly influenced by Leavis although "not close." Had he been close, his move to the post of editor of Granta would have been prohibited. "Miller", the Leavisites muttered, had "begun to call people 'darling'". Although he had defected, Miller kept much of the faith. "I was disliked," he recalls, "by members of the London literary world as a Leavisite zealot, and disliked by Leavisite zealots as a renegade who had sold out to the London literary world." Neither prejudice was correct.
During his editorship (along with Nick Tomalin, in succession to Mark Boxer), the magazine published early work by Thom Gunn, Ted Hughes and Claire Tomalin. Already Miller was conducting, rather than contributing, the best writing in town.
On graduating from Cambridge, with the inevitable first, Miller spent a couple of years (one of them at Harvard) doing research on Scottish literature. He married in the same period, which rendered a life of scholarship, on scholarships, financially inadvisable. The couple quickly started a family. Becoming a father, Miller believed, was the best antidote for never having had one. Two sons, Daniel and Sam, were followed by a daughter, Georgia. His wife, Jane Collet, would go on to become one of the country's leading educationists.
He found his niche, after brief and unhappy stints in Whitehall and at the BBC, as literary editor of the Spectator (1958-61), while the magazine was under the patrician editorship of Ian Gilmour (later Margaret Thatcher's defence minister, and later still her deadly foe). The regime suited him, and companionship with congenial wits such as Bernard Levin and Alan Brien rendered it a happy interlude. But it was a short one. After three years, he took over the literary editor's chair at John Freeman's rival New Statesman (1961-67). From the magazine's offices on Great Turnstile, Miller published criticism by VS Pritchett, Frank Kermode, Christopher Ricks and William Empson. He established what would be a career-long relationship with Conor Cruise O'Brien.
Miller was, however, restless and wholly unbiddable. When the subsequent NS editor, Paul Johnson, objected to Empson's knottier contributions, Miller promptly resigned. Johnson, as an act of goodwill, handed over a parting cheque for £3,000 – good money in 1967. Miller, as an act of independence, tore it into confetti at his editor's desk.
By this point, Miller was ringmaster to the most distinguished stable of writers in Britain. Careers such as those of VS Naipaul, Dan Jacobson, Brigid Brophy, Beryl Bainbridge and Seamus Heaney were nurtured by him. More importantly, contributors wrote their best for him.
Miller moved from the New Statesman to the editorship of the Listener. Here he virtually invented the new craft of TV reviewing, recruiting John Carey, Raymond Williams, Ian Hamilton and Clive James.
When, after what was now a pattern of rupturing dispute, he resigned in 1973, Miller was at a loose end. Noel Annan, provost of UCL (and a fellow Cambridge Apostle, it was widely suspected), eased his way into the Lord Northcliffe chair of English, recently vacated by Frank Kermode, in 1974. "Why are you here?" AS Byatt, a lecturer in the department, asked him. Because he liked literature, Miller mildly replied. Byatt's was a good question. He had no book, as such, to his name (Cockburn's Millennium would not come out until 1975); no higher degree; nothing that resembled a learned article. But the chair, as set up by the Harmsworth family, had been designed to bring together the worlds of academic, creative and journalistic writing. Miller fitted that bill perfectly.
He would stay at UCL, running the English department, for the longest stint of his professional life – 17 years. He wrote good, scholarly books (Doubles, in 1985, is the best and the most characteristic). His imperturbable management skills and unswerving loyalty to colleagues kept the department steady during the horrors of Keith Joseph's "cut and freeze" assault on the British university system.
As a don, Miller distrusted the turn to "theory" introduced by his predecessor, but tolerated anything that was clever. Among the research he supervised was Blake Morrison's pioneering thesis, later a book, on the Movement poets, whose verse, among all the moderns, Miller most admired and whose careers – most of them – he had materially advanced.
Miller resigned his chair at UCL and the co-editorship of the LRB in the same year, 1992. He was always a great mover-on and seemed strangely exhilarated by the willed act of separation. But this time there was no magazine waiting for him. Only 61, he felt the lack of magazine as the amputee feels the phantom limb. But he turned his energy to writing autobiography (Rebecca's Vest, 1994; Dark Horses, 1998) and the work on Scottish literature that he had begun at Harvard a half-century earlier. It was published as Electric Shepherd (2003), a study of James Hogg, like Miller a Pentland man.
In a late poem (he wisely kept most of his verse private) Miller pictured himself as a "sad foreman" – one who glumly oversees the work of others. "I would like," he said, "to have been more a writer of books than I have succeeded in being." Like Francis Jeffrey, founding editor of the Edinburgh Review (1802-29), whom he much admired, Miller's hugely formative influence on the literature of his age was a behind-the-scenes thing, but no less remarkable for that.
He is survived by Jane and his children.
• Karl Fergus Connor Miller, writer and editor, born August 2 1931; died 24 September 2014
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