Thoughts from a Life: A Man of Letters

By Mark Dooley

There is a strange feature of Roger Scruton’s life that not many people appreciate. Of all the writers that impressed him, the one that he admired most was the leftist luminary Jean Paul Sartre. He wrote scathingly of Sartre’s philosophy, most especially in Modern Philosophy: An Introduction and Survey and Fools, Frauds and Firebrands. However, Sartre’s ability to steer seamlessly between genres served as a model for Roger’s own literary achievements. In our book Conversations with Roger Scruton, he describes Sartre as a ‘great literary figure’, and it was, he says, ‘a tribute to France that so many people thought that his death marked the end of an era and a moment of real cultural loss.’

For Roger, Sartre was the quintessential ‘man of letters’, someone who could convey his menacing message in fictional, philosophical or political form. Likewise, Scruton was not simply an accomplished and penetrating philosopher of global status. He was someone who sought to ‘re-enchant the world’ through works that were both intellectually rigorous and stylistically exceptional. That is why he rejected the description of ‘public intellectual’ in favour of ‘man of letters’. As he told me: ‘I would prefer to think of myself as a “man of letters”. John Gross’s book The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters was very significant. I think he was right that, somehow, this calling has gone. In that respect, I suppose I am now somewhat unusual.’  

At the age of sixteen, Scruton agonised over where he was going in life. Invariably, the answer would be that ‘I must be a writer – that is the thing I must be’. He never thought about being an academic let alone a philosopher. His calling was always to write poems, essays, novels, and criticism. That he wrote, at a minimum, five hundred words every day, proves how inexhaustible his ambition was to be not merely a writer, but a great writer. And the fact that he realised this ambition should be clear to anyone who reads his comic masterpiece Xanthippic Dialogues - a book that testifies to the fact that he more than surpassed Sartre in pursuit of literary perfection.

Scruton was a writer, a composer, a critic, a philosopher and, lest we forget, a first-rate journalist. But, like everything else he wrote, his journalism was also a masterclass in literary precision. Consider these opening lines to a column he penned for The Times in 1984: 

Who remembers Iran? Who remembers, that is, the shameful stampede of Western journalists and intellectuals to the cause of the Iranian revolution? Who remembers the hysterical propaganda campaign waged against the Shah, the lurid press reports of corruption, police oppression, palace decadence, constitutional crisis? Who remembers the thousands of Iranian students in Western universities enthusiastically absorbing the fashionable Marxist nonsense purveyed to them by armchair radicals, so as one day to lead the campaign of riot and mendacity which preceded the Shah’s downfall?

This is language used not merely to convey fact, but to heighten tension, to unsettle and enrage. Each word is carefully chosen to assail the defences of his enemies and to stoke the righteous fury of those seeking truth over ideological fiction. It is enticing, provocative and scintillating. It is writing at its best.

‘I must be a writer – that is the thing I must be’. And that is what Roger Scruton was: a man of letters who understood, like Hegel, that the intellectual life is ultimately a spiritual endeavour to synthesise art, music, religion, politics, and philosophy. That Scruton achieved this with apparent ease belied the fact that he worked tirelessly to perfect every sentence he wrote. 

As he insisted in our conversations, ‘craft really matters’. That, like every other truth he defended, was one he never betrayed.   

Dr. Mark Dooley is an Irish philosopher, writer, and newspaper columnist. Dooley serves as the executor of Roger Scruton's literary estate and is a member of the Foundation's Advisory Board. He is the author of several books including The Philosophy of Jacques Derrida (2007), Roger Scruton: The Philosopher on Dover Beach (2009), and Conversations with Roger Scruton (2016).