R: It could happen; it did happen once in fact. The Nanking government, just at the moment the Japanese invaded and put an end to everything, had set up--with the Minister of Education as Chairman--a committee to put my recommendations based on Basic English into China wherever the authority of the government could be enforced.

It was too good to be true, and I couldn't believe it had happened. By the time I got back to Peking--this all happened in Nanking--I found the Japanese had invaded in strength and all that sort of thing was over. Something like it could happen again given the right government set-up. The Chinese could be very flexible indeed, as flexible as the Japanese have been. . . .

I: To widen the scope a bit, I've heard you say previously that you question the efficacy of the study of English by undergraduates. Could you elaborate on this?

R: It's hard on the poets to make everybody study them like this. I think that's the main thing I had in mind: that literature, one's own literature, is for enjoyment. As far as I can see, making it into an academic subject has not increased the amount of enjoyment taken in the poems, or the novels or the plays or anything. No, I'm against it.

I think it's all right that a very small special crew should study the works and battle with one another. I'm very doubtful whether we want a great number of biographies or studies in detail. You see, what is a man who's done English as an academic, literary subject, what's he to do the rest of his life, except to write books-about-books-about-books and reviews of them? I'm agin' it on the whole; I think we're burying the valuables under loads of derivatives. . . .

I: So many of the Cambridge dons between 1900 and 1935, yourself included, ended up discussing language. What prompted this, and how would you evaluate the results?

R: I'm very glad they did because sooner or later enough discussion of language--it's a very queer kind of pursuit, you know, using language to discuss language--should mean improvements. What worries me about so much of these discussions is that they're not practically oriented. My own peculiar slant on language, I think, is that I regard studies in language as, for me, preludes to linguistic engineering.

I: Did Russell play any role in this development of yours and have you had any contact with him since on this point?

R: Oh, some. Russell always to me was too much of a logician on this. His interest in language has been a logician's interest. That again is another queer thing. Mathematics and logics lead people away from the actualities into, well, surprising generalities.

There's a story, probably apocryphal, that I'm fond of about the great mathematician Hilbert. He was attending a conference in Copenhagen, and they took him to see the very celebrated bridge they have there. He admired it duly and then said, "It's astonishing! Wonderful! It's Exactly like the bridge at Hamburg." At which the local Danes, his hosts, were much affronted because there's no bridge at all like that in Hamburg. They said, "How is it like a bridge at Hamburg?" Hilbert answered, "Why it goes from this side to that side and the river goes under it." I feel that a great many of the perceptions about language that logicians develop are rather Hilbertian. Just a shade too abstract. . . .

I'm a linguistic engineer. And an educational engineer. I'm looking for new and better ways of making many more capable and useful people through verbal means. Everyone's got that view, I'm sure, but I'm perhaps a bit impatient. There is the disaster that I'm always aware is coming on us. It may not be the third world war as we have been dreaming of it; it may be a general crumbling, a general inability to staff our ventures and to follow through. All partly because of the enormous increasse of wealth that the rich communities are undergoing and the contrast with the ever increasing poverty of poor regions.

I: If the rich nations are not able, as it seems that they are not, to construct a generally competent educational system for themselves, do you foresee any hopes of such a system created in Africa or Asia--in view of the crisis facing both in the next twenty years?

R: I believe we can construct a world-wide educational system which will teach better than we have ever imagined. I could offer you evidence on that. Organizing it would be easy compared with swinging people round the moon. It would be much less costly and far more repaying. And sounder as a defense investment too. The program would be for: 1) teaching English very, very smoothly and easily and 2) at the earliest possible point, not teaching it as English, but teaching it as the necessary vehicle of modern world views! That's the thing I care about most. You don't want to teach a language just as a language (except to linguisticians). You should use it as a means for letting people learn what they most need to learn, which is how to run a sane state and how to run an educational system which will keep the state sane and in being. And cope too with the frustrations and tensions which are causing such terrible trouble on our home front. There isn't an advanced society today, the United States, the United Kingdom, or France, that isn't in a terrible mess.

I: It seems that in the past sixty years our culture has taken such a sharp turn that the problem in England and the United States lies in a re-interpretation of our own culture--Milton's milieu or earlier--a culture almost as foreign to us as the Greeks or Romans were to our literary fore-bearers.

R: A good point, that--Milton being at about the turning point. After Milton, I think you'd agree, things became more intelligible. Professional instruction, as it were in English Literature, might very well stop soon after Milton. There's obviously a case for people being taught how to read Chaucer; people don't get into Chaucer just by the light of nature, not as well as they do into Tennyson. I see no excuse for tremendous courses on Tennyson. I'm a great admirer of Tennyson, but I think courses haven't helped him and won't. Milton's the turning point. What most people need, though, with Milton more than anything else is to hear him really well read aloud. He's the most readable-aloud poet there is, magnificent beyond description. . . .