Against the Stream E-Book

Frederic Raphael

• Herausgeber: Lives and Letters
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Serie: Personal Terms
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 655

Beschreibung

Against the Stream is the latest volume of Frederic Raphael's acclaimed memoirs Personal Terms, an unrivalled parade of the author's eventful and provocative life, opinions and times drawn from his living and breathing cahiers and journals. 'Shrewd, funny, gossipy and elegantly written,' as Jeremy Lewis said in the Literary Review, these writings are as unguarded, sardonic and tactless as they are candid. This seventh volume relives Margaret Thatcher's first years in office. Raphael's wide acquaintance in the world of politics, literature, journalism and the movies gives him rare access to the character of those, in England and America, who dominated the times. The unintended result is a Proustian parade of people, famous and otherwise forgotten, and events momentous and strictly personal, presented by an unabashedly partisan, unblinking eye-witness. There is nothing else quite like this unfolding project in English or American literature. 'I am not a camera, but – as these carnets prove – I am a pen. The moving finger writes differently from the clicking keys.''In these notebooks, Raphael shows himself alert to every vanity but his own, a shortcoming that, far from repelling a reader, becomes part and parcel of the their fascination. He is one of those writers who most reveals himself in his acerbic anatomy of others' (Anthony Quinn, Telegraph).

Leseprobe

Frederic Raphael

AGAINST THE STREAM

Personal Terms 7

Contents

Title PageDedicationIntroduction AGAINST THE STREAM 1981 1982 1983 1984 IndexAbout the AuthorAlso by Frederic Raphael from Carcanet Copyright

For Beetle, then, now, always.

Introduction

Kingsley Amis considered writers who had recourse to notebooks to be somewhat suspect. The implication was that writing secretly and solely for the author’s own eyes smacked of, yes, playing with oneself. Philip Roth, whose best-known work, often as he may seek to rise above it, is Portnoy’s Complaint, told me that he once tried to keep a notebook. He was unable to continue because he didn’t know who his audience was. Unsurprisingly, his novels are often cast in the rhetorical, stand-up mode of a woeful comedian: they tend to be laments, accusations and confessions, in whatever variety of voices. Without an audience to play to, such a performer becomes self-conscious, then mute.

My notebooks have been compiled with no audience in mind. Until some twenty years ago, when Michael Schmidt became my Maecenas, it had never occurred to me to type out (some of) the always handwritten pages of these carnets. Their only intended purpose had been, and remains, to serve as a repository of specimens caught alive and, like Nabokov’s lepidoptera, pinned on the page for later inspection. I have not reproduced in print my manuscript dreads and regrets. Unless comic or lyrical, like that expressed by Catullus in his verses, self-pity is nobody’s business or pleasure. If the volumes in Personal Terms furnish an involuntary autobiography, they do so by depicting the world from my point of view: I am shaped – who is not? – by choice and chance. What I write may be inescapably ‘me’, not least when false, jejune or pretentious, but my subject is not myself.

A number of the characters described and plots outlined have served as the source of fiction, sometimes almost at once, quite often years later. Not a few of the people and events have lapsed entirely from my memory: Denys Gueroult, for instance, is among those whom I would swear I had never met, were they not penned in my private zoo. It may be that the tone which I imagined to be dispassionate will strike some people as unduly caustic. If so, so be it: I am not a camera, but – as these carnets prove – I am a pen. The moving finger writes differently from the clicking keys. Manuscript has a small affinity with drawing: the hand seems to think, and shape sentences, as well as the brain. When writers abandon handwriting, they lose something of their signature.

Our daughter Sarah was invited, as a very young artist, to paint the portrait of the retiring Master of Jesus College, Cambridge. From the very beginning, when she needed the money and the kudos, she disliked commissioned work; but she agreed to go to Cambridge and meet her proposed subject. After an exchange of courtesies, she suggested that it might be best if she first did a drawing of the sitter. ‘To find out whether or not you can get a likeness, you mean?’ ‘No,’ Sarah said, ‘so you can see what you look like.’ Had Graham Sutherland adopted the same procedure in portraying Winston Churchill, he might have been spared the trouble of completing the portrait, which was so true, at least from the artist’s point of view, that Winston had it destroyed before it could become iconic.

Sarah compared portrait-painting with being an ant crawling with searching ubiquity all over the face of the sitter. Like Goya, what she saw she drew or painted, never mind whether the sitter liked it. Mutatismutandis, I write on the same principle. What is not on show in these pages, in the way of protracted états d’âme, has been excised at the terse suggestion of my wife, the best in-house editor a man ever had. I make no apology for the tactlessness of my reportage. I have never regarded writing as a diplomatic career (or any kind of a career at all). It is too bad if anyone finds my sketches caricatural or ‘unfair’; as Pontius Pilate said, ‘Ho gegrapha gegrapha’: what I have written I have written.

Against the Stream

1981

30.7.81. Maggie Jones began in the BBC as a copy-typist; now, producer of Talking Heads, she convokes celebrities by their first names. When, under her aegis, I was on the air with Denis (Healey) and Malcolm (Muggeridge), she told me that she and her ‘feller’ were going to be in the Dordogne during the summer, in a cottage close to Lagardelle. She called on Sunday and proposed coming for an early evening drink with Gerry Davis, an Old Carthusian, and his twenty-one-year-old son, Danny. Davis drove an off-white Cortina of the kind that companies allot to employees who can take it or leave. Shortish and muscular, in a red Adidas shirt, he was at Cambridge between 1950 and 1953, but remembered me from school; moi non plus. He rowed at Cambridge and swam at Charterhouse. Since they had been doing building work all afternoon, I was prompt to offer them the pool. Gerry said he preferred to get to know me first. ‘Ambitious programme,’ I said.

Maggie was carefully edited: hair low and regular, teeth white, orangey-red dress over a bathing suit she never revealed. Danny wore bovver boots, shapeless grey-brown trousers, khaki shirt he lowered, apprehensively, over his sun-scorched back; cropped head, putty face with jutting, colourless lips, boxer’s malleable nose. Neither Maggie nor his father addressed anything to him. Davis was a Bodeite; he said that he once shared a study with Brian Glanville.1 Maggie gave an unassuming account of her career and interests: hot-air ballooning is her gas-filled bag. Danny said he was a mechanic and jazz guitarist. He took one of the bronze knights from Michael Ayrton’s chess set and examined it with such close appreciation that I suspected he might pocket it.

Davis is a solicitor for Readicrete, one of a team of five resident lawyers at their Hindhead offices. He had towed one of their electric cement mixers down to the Périgord in order to add a car-port to his cottage. Danny went to test the pool, but returned dry; its kidney form inhibited him from doing lengths, so he chose not to take the plunge. He drank beers (posting his cigarette stub in an empty) and told Beetle, ‘Bring the matches,’ when we moved from the patio to the house. She did not hear him, she told me, or she would not have done so.

M.’s interest in ballooning arose from living in Bristol, a centre for it. She relishes going up with those making their maiden flight. There is something voyeuristic about women who revel, like brothel madams, in the initiation of others. I was reminded of John Cheever’s story ‘Torch Song’, about a female angel of death. Ballooning is not very dangerous, she says; the pilots’ greatest difficulty is landing in a wind. The basket may be bumped along the ground or the passengers spilled out. M. was dragged, on one occasion, through chicken wire. You have to watch out for electric cables; risk from aircraft is negligible; there are, she promised, no mechanical failures.

I suspected stored danger in G.D. and his son; Maggie just might be there to see the eruption. G. has the cocky chagrin of the separated man. He may not love M., but he has her. He is content to explain small things – cement does not dry, it hardens – as if expert jargon elevated a drab career. Never have visitors shown less interest in the place. The ascended copy-typist played the happy star of our small stage; Gerry appeared content that nothing violent or embarrassing should happen.2

2.8.81. A meaty little friar of the classics, Sullivan might as well wear a cassock, though his rope belt would sport no chastity knots. Apart from an old aunt in Liverpool and brother Denis in Australia, he has no family; without children, his line lacks a future. He assumes that people are likeable and that they like him. With little notion that there is anything risible about him, unless he relies on it, he has always presumed Scouse pawkiness to be endearing; ‘if you don’t mind’ a characteristic civility. His feminism declares itself in the claim that the female superior position (common in Ovid’s Rome) implies male deference; it allows the woman to ‘control the action’. He favours louche company and drops the same names – Patrick Dromgoole and Xaviera Hollander – again and again. Sporting an honorary colonelcy in the ranks of Amazonia, he goes out of his way to attend feminist conferences. At one, he was reproached – ‘Sir, you are taking up too much room’ – for dancing expansively on a floor where, among fifty couples, he was the only man. His mother, he declares, was very fond of him.

Born in Texas, Judy spent her childhood in rural Kansas. She runs a kindergarten in Santa Barbara. She neither likes the parents nor enjoys the children. Now in her late thirties, she was first married when she was twenty-one. She calls Sullivan ‘Johnpat’; you can hear the inverted commas. She has tan skin and wears cotton overall-type outfits. The glasses are rimless polygonic. No statement of opinion by anyone else passes unchallenged; even her agreement can be prefaced by denial. The nose is neat but prehensile; she is a sniffer out, not least of ungranted favours. J. is about to go to Oxford, as a fellow of Wolfson, to write his Martial book. With much research in prospect, he intends to go alone. At a loose end for three months, Judy proposes, more Americano, to spend them with friends. She asked why we lived so far from stations or airports. Beetle told her that it avoided uncalled-for visitors.

I was hoping to hear that, after a lacuna since the breach with Tony, Anne B. had consoled herself with some willowy William from the Foreign Office, or indeed the milkman, or anyone at all. She remains inconsolable; or at least unconsoled. The Sullivans refuse to take sides; indifference is all their kindness. Judy’s failure to arrive on time at Bordeaux (her train was nine hours late from Portugal) did excite some conjugal anxiety – John called to ask ‘sapete alcuna cosa di Judy?’ – but their modus vivendi is void of sentimental niceties. Judy so dislikes domesticity that they play a hand of poker to determine who will do the washing up. Every two weeks a gang of men arrives to ‘deep-clean’ the house.

Do scholars regularly make reference to ancillary texts which they have not fully scanned? Is the composition of fibliographies a common practice? When I informed G. Steiner that I could Xerox and send him the Greek text of Ritsos’ Ismene, of which he could find no translation, he preferred that I synopsise its ‘argument’.

J.P.S. told us that Kenneth Dover, in his original introduction to Greek Homosexuality (1978), referred to having been buggered by Maurice Bowra. Harvard U.P. was scandalised and insisted that the confession be deleted.

John’s friend Brad, a huge ex-football star, dropped some LSD and took a walk. He was held up by two muggers who demanded ‘all your money, now!’ Dwelling on the demand for immediate delivery of all his money, he itemised the difficulties in the way of instant compliance: most of his cash was in the bank; he would have to go get his chequebook; his house was jointly owned with someone who was out of the country; it would take a while to put it up for sale and realise the money; his belongings would need some time to sell, etcetera. The protracted literal-mindedness unnerved his attackers. ‘I don’t know what the guy is on,’ one said to the other, ‘but he’s sure higher than high on something.’ And off they went.

Life and Loves. Having assisted in the rescue of a man off Noah’s Long Island home, Jason and his brother have a feeling of renewed and justified conceit. Jason and Susie and their children are visiting the older Noah and Miriam. The saved man comes to the house with the brothers. When his alarmed mistress arrives, she is indignant at finding him in relaxed good spirits. She has been so worried that the pair come to blows. We cut to Jason and Susie driving back to the big city, seemingly reconciled by their amusement. Then, in Voice Over, as the car moves away from us, onto the bridge into Manhattan, we mix to the quarrel which will precede her leaving him.

J.P.S. refers, with regret, to our old tutor Renford Bambrough having become ‘right-wing’. John remains cautiously loyal, the caution partly sentimental, partly politic. Renford will always be the man who taught him Greek prose composition. Judy holds that R. is a ‘closet roué’. If so, it is probably in a closet for one.

Life and Loves. Jason is revealed not to be the son of the father whom he goes to see in the Retirement Compound; that he is no more than Noah’s half-brother is both relief and divorce. His mother Gertrude’s insistence on living her own life comes home to him in his alarm at Susie’s appetite for independence. This declares itself in an attack on his mother’s ‘extortionate’ black lover. When he tells Gertrude that she shares the latter’s favours with someone else, she says ‘We all share people with other people, don’t we?’ Knowledge of his true paternity prompts Jason’s affectionate return to the bedside of his dying nominal father. Sympathy is readier when it can be a performance.

John says that he first went to the US because it was the quickest way to secure a divorce from Mary. He still sees his pretty, dark-haired second wife (‘Judy Sullivan’). Married to a realtor, she lives in Buffalo. While bruised by her defection, he makes light of it, as he does of most things; and wishes that others would. He has since been in a lot of beds. He insists that Irish blood explains his capacity to absorb alcohol without impairing his wits; but a weary undertone, when he boasts of his workload, suggests that his brain is paying pickled taxes.

12.8.81. Patrick, Jilly and Emma Sergeant have just left. The contrast with our other summer visitors, Tony Smith and Shirley Williams, lends charm to the Sergeants. Shirley, a wife without a husband, fearful of the flesh, but not short of it, punishes herself with a self-denying diet and runs about in bursts of energetic pointlessness. Smith is the director of the British Film Institute; a grey man, just into his forties, he has been a Fellow of St Anthony’s. On the fringes of smartness without being smart, he has some sort of an important job without marked importance. His publications, on communication theory, supply him with credentials, never fame. He wore rather elegant, or elegantly intended, new clothes; they might have looked elegant on someone.

According to a recent poll, Shirley’s portmanteau party is still holding forty-three percent of the votes. Roy Jenkins’ resounding victory at Warrington suggests that he will probably be Prime Minister, should the ‘swing to the centre’ be maintained. Shirley has the unflinching tolerance of a woman who will give you the time of day so long as she never has to alter her clock. When the deputy High Mistress of St Paul’s begged her, almost tearfully, not to destroy the Grammar Schools, it served only to hold her to her guns: enemies are to be appeased, friends denied. The levelled world they claim to want is one in which they would never live without a measure of dissidence.

Shirley invited herself to Lagardelle. We were assumed to be flattered. She has the ‘lumping in’ style of the good (and persistent) guest. She brought carefully weighted gifts: English biscuits, marmalade for Stee. One morning she even made his bed. If she winced at luxuries – why did we need two swimming pools? – it was because she feared what others might think if she were found to have wallowed uncritically in them. She was willing, in her calculating heart, to put us down rather than compromise herself in the eyes of those in whose houses she would never seek to be a guest.

Politicians of the Left frown at what comforts them and are wary of those with whom they are most at ease. Advocating a society in which they are likely to be less comfortable than at present, their pleasure is to moralise rather than to live.

13.8. 81. I fell out with Shirley over the integrity of the IBA Board. She and Master Smith claimed to know what could have happened better than I knew what actually did. Reiteration of the facts was necessary, with specific detail, before their prejudice – identical with their pride – could be dented. Crusty with the lichen of office, Shirley challenged my account of the part played by Lord Thomson on the old Tory grounds that she had ‘known him for thirty years’ during which he had repulsed countless opportunities to enrich himself. Did it follow that he was incapable of the intimidation of which I observed him to be guilty? Dislike of losing, or being crossed, need not have anything to do with money. Glorying in being privy to the machinery of appointments, Shirlet and Smith were disinclined to conceive of unworthy motives chez le gratin. Her benevolence is without remorse; I should not care to be at her monitorial mercy.

The egotist does only what is best for him; he spares us the prig’s confidence that she knows what is best for others.

Patrick and Jilly had been kind to Sarah; Patrick has often played host to me, after tennis in Highgate; we felt an obligation. Four days seemed a long time to talk to strangers. The morning of their scheduled arrival, il tombait des cordes. The house was lachrymose with leaks, the guest flat awash after an uncured deluge from the roof of the little pool. We faced the prospect of an indoor life with outdoor people: the tennis court was the only place where we had expected easy conversation. As they arrived, the weather cleared. They proved excellent guests, as generous in taking as in giving. How mature Tony and Shirley had been and how superficial Patrick was by comparison; yet how much more alive he and Jilly were, and how very much more amusing!

P. has now abandoned Maggie Thatcher in whose company, he was peacock-pleased to declare, he had spent a candid hour on the previous Thursday. I recall that he jettisoned Jim Slater with similar abruptness. Thatcher has not succeeded and he will not pretend otherwise. The fun of being a journalist was to be of help to one’s friends; who can help those incapable of helping themselves? Patrick thinks of sixty thousand pounds a year as no more than a decent screw for his ‘young men’. He travels first-class, even to Bordeaux, and likes to be recognised. He was not pleased to be called ‘Mr Patrick’ (his bag being labelled Sergeant, Patrick) in the VIP lounge.

Jilly has money of her own and a tongue – made tarter by the South African accent – which Sarah has incited her to use. Jilly has no plans for her own escape from the Highgate doll’s house, but she has subsidised Emma’s. Drink is a happy feature of their diet; Jilly claims to need the sugar to power her forehand; she proves that she has conquered her dependence by limiting it to white wine; it’s the ice, she says, that makes her tipsy. Patrick takes whisky and soda in a beer mug. He was warned by his fond and faithful wife against becoming ‘as fat as an old eunuch’.

15.8.81. Patrick had a Jewish mother who converted to Catholicism. Since, at the time, both the girls had Jewish boyfriends, they were thrilled to learn of the Semitic skeleton in the family cupboard. Shaped more by war service in the navy than by ancestral connection, P. was pleased to tell an old story, about the American aviator brought down by British fire, which ended with the tag ‘You shouldn’t have joined, mate, if you can’t take a joke!’ His father, well over eighty and blind, is contemplating a third marriage. His last wife was thirty years younger than he. On the Monday she seemed in excellent health; on the Friday she was dead; her husband blind. He lost his sight at the shock of her death, though there were medical reasons for it (diabetes?) which could have been diagnosed. Patrick goes for a check-up every six months, an alternative to abstemiousness. His father’s latest lady is a Jehovah’s Witness. He has consented to conversion, even though he is known to say, ‘Every woman is delightful and different and every wife is always a terror and the same’.

17.8.81. Peter Nichols called, just as we were sitting down to lunch with the departing Rubinsteins: could they drop in on their way north? They have not yet sold their place near Ribérac. Thelma has been an art teacher; a shortish, plump, dark woman with large eyes, she notices more than she chooses to declare. P. does the talking; she does the thinking. With Ken McLeish’s inclination to believe that working-class origins warrant a ticket to sympathy, Peter hurries to display social stigmata. They have been to stay with Hal Prince on Mallorca. They were there for a fortnight (‘We soon learned to say “two weeks”’). Last year they had a lot more fun. This time they were swamped by the New York rat-a-tat of Adolph Green and Betty Comden and Harry Grossman, the composer, who were working with Hal P. on a musical based on what happened to Norah after she walked out of the Doll’s House; women’s lib and sugar.

Hal has in common with Alan Pakula the fastidiousness which abandons specific identity in favour of dandyism. He has become rich as a result of the unlikely theatrical success of Evita. Despite his staging genius, he shows little aptitude for film; Ken Russell is to direct the screen version. Hal is married to a girl/woman called Judy, née Chaplin, California-raised daughter of Sol Chaplin, a musician. She knew everybody from way back. Peter conjured her up with an explosion of black hair and ebullient smartness. He sees her as wasted in the hermetic luxury of the gilded ghetto in which successful New Yorkers are content to live. P. is intrigued by their sophisticated emptiness. He says that after the wisecracking smartness of their opening sallies, such people reduce everything to snappy formulae.

Nichols and Thelma had stayed overnight in Nice where they bumped into Bryan Forbes and Maggie Smith and who all else at the Hyatt Regency on the Promenade des Anglais. B.F. is directing a movie called Ménage à Trois, with David Niven. People are afraid no one will understand the title. P.N. did not know Bryan, but introduced himself, brazen with the confidence of his successes, Passion Play the latest. He harbours grievances, especially vis-à-vis the BBC. Mark Shivas commissioned a mini-series which was abruptly terminated when Jim Cellan Jones took over. I remembered (and did not say) that Mark had found the scripts disappointing. Peter had taken routine acknowledgement of the episodes as they were delivered as an earnest of enthusiasm. He attaches inflated significance to the decorum of a class to which he claims to be glad not to belong.

He has little time for the Social Democratic Party; a more ‘radical’ solution is needed for England’s malaise, though he cannot articulate what it might be. He made play with the need to shoot a few people when a left-wing government achieves power. Yet he had small confidence that such executions would procure either happiness or justice. Without specifying who the scapegoats should be, he was happy to contemplate their fate. Demanding to be told why the violence of the Left was so much more deprecated than that of the Right, he was close to arguing that the Bennites would establish their credibility only by claiming a few, or several, victims to balance those (of what date?) already sacrificed by the Tories.

Dismissive of the intelligence of actors, P. himself is a performer more likely to hold your attention while impersonating others than in propria persona. In repose, he takes on a lugubrious aspect, more the condemned man than someone apt to lobby celebrities in grand hotels. Thelma asked Beetle how old I was, because P. looked so much older. He is fifty-four, an about-to-be-pot-bellied, high-shouldered, busy man with slim shanks and a cropped grey head. Prognathous, with village graveyard teeth, he is at once entertaining and unappealing. He is married to a lively woman who almost identifies herself with his work. She supplies communiqués with enthusiastic uneasiness. He is writing a pantomime for the Royal Shakespeare Company, about the Opium Wars, in which Dick Whittington’s great-grandson plays some part. I can wait.

P. and T. were once the Frayns’ best friends. They used to visit frequently. Michael, the eager host, always on the balls of his feet, believed in domestic democracy: protracted debate preceded commonplace decisions, such as whether to go for a walk. Reason served in the office of impersonal authority. Though Frayn was courteous and articulate, many things were not said between them. He looks like a ‘strained corpse’, P. says; he should know. Something disturbed their friendship before M.’s break with normality. The Frayns once called P. and T. from Biarritz, wanting to come and stay at Ribérac for a few days. The Nicholses responded that the house was full, although it was not. Peter envies Michael’s worldliness; he assumed it to be a Cambridge habit to solicit addresses and introductions from one’s friends.

P. and T. were happy to take whatever was available in the way of dinner and a bed, quite as if it were the beginning of a warm relationship. I do not expect to get to know them well; no closeness is likely between P. and me. There is pain beneath the jokey mimicry: he was good as Christopher Morahan, whom they had introduced to his present wife, thinking she might be suitable for C.’s oldest son. P.’s work is founded on sorry experience. He re-opens cupboards like a housewife with a dwindling larder who is afraid she may never get to the shops. Determined to extract every possible laugh from its painful preservation, he hoards his potted past. Yet he scarcely controls his laughter at Thelma’s Welsh father, who refers to the Champs Elysées as ‘the shambles easy’. P. thinks of going to America because of the largeness he sees there; Broadway opportunities cannot banish doubts about whether he could become American, ‘though millions have’. Fretted by the grieving chain stamped Made in England, he is a kennelled talent. As he sniffs the far horizon, his glum larkiness mantles incurable parochialism.

Life and Loves. Jason goes alone to dinner with the young couple with whom he has become friendly and whose marriage he has idealised. He tells them of his fantasy of advertising for a woman who will be his mistress, solely for sex and with a view (unlike those matter-of-fact sentimentalists in the New York Review of Books) to nothing but fucking. A few days later, the ‘innocent’ Maria calls and offers to perform that role. She must have appeared to be bright and sensitive, pretty and of a quasi-virginal fastidiousness.

19.8.81. To insist on other people being happy is a form of selfishness; when they have nothing to complain about, they will have no excuse for not listening to me.

How unnerving the angry bombs in everyone’s luggage! We hear the tick and stand away from the suspect traveller, clutching our own undisclosed tragedies and grievances like contraband treasures.

20.8.81. As we veer towards death, solitude settles on us like grave clothes, never to be changed or doffed.

Deprived of the ‘h’ on my typewriter, I am like a runner with a small, sharp pebble in his shoe.

Helge Rubinstein upholds the institution of marriage by sedulous service as a counsellor. She confesses to wondering, sometimes, whether she would ever have started a family had the pill been available in her day. She takes instruction from Hilary, quite as if she had once been his secretary, but there is a small rebellion in her resolve to learn how to play tennis properly: coaching revives her body even as Hilary’s declines. They asked us – it was a kind of election – whether we would consider going walking with them in January in the mountains of Nepal. Beetle thinks Hilary doesn’t like her and is pretty sure that she doesn’t like him. Recalling V.G.’s office, she has H. down for a bully, though he is always cordial with us.

I prefer to play the host. It required effort to allow Patrick to take us to lunch at Domme. I made sure to be lavish with the flow of wine at other meals. I never cared about money until I began to have some. During days of unworthy work, I am driven to accumulate more and more, the better to penalise myself by lavishing it on others.

24.8.81. On Friday evening, when I was expecting California, Zara Steiner called. Ken (she called him ‘McLeish’) had collapsed in Greece and been taken to hospital in Athens. The English telephone people were unable to give her the number; no one could read Greek script. I obtained it, with small difficulty, from the French. The Athenian hospital officials were kind and articulate: bebaios I could to speak to Ken. Sedated if scarcely sedate, he said there was a brain surgeon at hand. He had fantasies of impending surgery, even though the doctor to whom I spoke assured me that there was tipote wrong with his kardia or his kephali.

Ken had been at Delphi where he and George Steiner had found each other congenial. G.’s imminent lecture made him so nervous that the two of them had a bibulous lunch in the heat. G.’s performance was literally stunning: at its climax, Ken keeled over. Steiner’s vatic delivery seemed to have laid him out. Tests discovered his condition to have its source in a car accident in Mallorca twenty-two years ago. Ken’s spinal column had been forced upwards by the thumping shock. The impact created a small pocket at the base of the skull, which filled with fluid. Delphic heat caused the fluid to expand, putting pressure on the brain, from which the other symptoms derived. Might it be that the anguish which K. has suffered ‘from his nerves’ has a physiological source? It is typical of the insular notion that ‘character’ determines conduct that no NHS medic has proposed a thorough physical examination. All K.’s doctors had prescribed drugs to treat a ‘psychological’ condition susceptible of practical remedy. He is scheduled to travel to London with a medical dossier prepared by the Greeks, on which the NHS may be persuaded to act. He never delivered his lecture on tragedy, but he has been wheeled out as a pundit by the left-wing Greek press: they declare it a scandal that, when a savant was taken ill at Delphi, there was no machinery for treating him (or anyone else) nearer than the capital.

After Ken passed out, at the end of George’s tour de force, he was asked whether he had not had too much sun. His whispered response: ‘No. Too much Steiner’. He was semi-unconscious for two hours. They thought he had had a heart attack. George names Geoffrey Kirk the calm hero of the hour. There was no ambulance in Delphi and no cardiogram at Livadia, where Ken had been taken in a private car. Kirk showed officer-like qualities in commanding a helicopter to lift the distinguished Hellenist to Athens.

On Ken’s account, he and Steiner had had a rare meeting of minds; but this evening G. was scathing. Due to excess traffic on the M4, Ken had missed the plane that carried the other symposiasts to Athens. He was out of his depth, socially, from the moment he arrived in Delphi. When not ‘behaving childishly’, he was intellectually ‘lightweight’. Taken ill, he panicked, cried like a baby, refused the simplest treatment. Does Ken merit so spiteful and premature an obituary? G.’s gleeful recital had a brutality which I was powerless to negate, not having been there. Like many academics and pedagogues, Ken is no stranger to bluff, but he has a rare breadth of reading and synthetic culture; his musical knowledge and Hellenic proficiency certainly trump George’s.

Ken and P. Nichols carry their ‘working-class’ origins (hardly proletarian) as if at once a garland and a cross; gaucherie is their certificate of being in the right. A Jew or an American will be quick to change accent, posture and attitudes as he achieves wealth or fame or status. Nichols is forever amassing reparations for his deprived past. After proposing themselves for dinner, and having been quick to stay the night, neither has had the routine politeness – so middle-class! – to drop us a card of thanks. As they left, Thelma said, ‘Perhaps we shall see you at Beaumont’.3 It might have been civil to suggest, if never to mean, that we take tea with them at their house. P.’s grievances are an insurance against having to honour social graces. It suits him, as it does Ken, to play the class inferior: it allows for there being courtesies he need not observe.

27.8.81. Ken has returned to England unable to sit or stand without falling over. His brother-in-law to be, who had never seen him before, says that the symptoms could be those of a stroke, despite the absence of aphasia or paralysis. This morning, Stanley Baron called and mentioned that K. had written to say that he and I were ready to proceed with the Greek book. I never endorsed any such démarche. K. must need to bank whatever commissions he can procure; his present condition is made doubly fragile on account of the cash he had to find, and will continue to need, as a result of the move from Lincoln because his children were bullied at school. He now has double-vision and will be unable to work for at least ten days. He has acquired a taste for junkets and talks of going to a classical conference in Oslo in October.

Robin Jordan came to the Queen Elizabeth Hall just before my Byron show with Alan Bates and asked for my autograph like a stranger, sly fellow. Having fallen into his trap, I recovered wryly. He offered me the kisses of his new Argentinian Jewish wife who, he said, volunteered them to wish me luck. She was about thirty, sharp-featured but pretty, with brownish-red hair and a complaisance which seems to R.’s taste. Now lean and without precise nationality, he survives in the gutter like a rat who is also a dandy. They live in Florida.4

28.8.81. Shirley discerned a tragic figure in Sir Keith Joseph, a man who has reasoned himself into isolation and despair. She liked and respected him when he was Minister of Health. He believed in public service, cared nothing for self-advancement. He had the brains, if never the wit, to make himself liked and respected. By pure cerebration, he moved from the concerned left to the ideological right of the Tory spectrum. He came to believe that he would better serve party and country by abandoning compromise. Convinced that monetarism and honesty were synonyms, unsmiling determination made him the ally, even the evil genius, in certain eyes, of Mrs Thatcher. He had been married for many years to a hard, capable woman who left him during the first days of the Thatcher government.

Donning the hairiest shirts as earnest of his earnestness, he became a zealot. He addressed meetings all over the country, having announced the titles of talks calculated to aggravate students and infuriate Trades Unionists. As Secretary for Trade and Industry, a kind and intelligent man has turned himself into a paragon of intransigence. He believes his position to be logically impregnable and that he is the only sane man in the asylum. Yet he has been cozened into funding British Leyland almost to the exclusion of any other industry. The rigour of his discourse has won him neither the applause of his party nor the gratitude of the BL workforce. He is accused of tightfistedness when, in terms of actual cash dispensed, he has given away no less than his spendthrift predecessor. He has made himself the scapegoat for a policy in which he may well believe but lacks the two-facedness to implement.

29.8.81. Burt Weissbord reports that John Schlesinger’s Honkytonk Freeway has opened in sixty cities and took an average of $1,500 over the holiday weekend. No more than twenty people are likely to have attended any performance. J. spent twenty million dollars of Universal’s money on a confection which did not even have any pretensions. Blaming ‘the Americans’ for a failure which they alone had the funds and foolhardiness to sponsor, he has sworn never to make another film in the US. Paramount, his old friends, have been the first to dump him. Were I the tycoon du jour, I should make him an offer, however modest, he would have difficulty refusing. A flop from such a talent can be a good sign for those who have not invested in it: John can only go up from here.

I idealise females because I never went to school with any of them.

Arnold Wesker’s lamentations are again à la une in the Sunday Times. Did the RSC actors have no right to dismay when offered unperformable parts in The Journalists? A.’s complacency is revealed not so much by his sentiments as by the clichés in which they are voiced. He boasts of ‘twenty-five years of being a playwright’ rather as shops in Beverly Hills announce that they have been there since the day before yesterday.

On the Contrary. The necessity of Prometheus: ruling circles have to be subverted. For even a divine society to be articulate, it had better allow room for what disconcerts it.

3.9.81. John Schlesinger asked that we send A New Wife to Paramount because of his close friendship with Barry Diller. Rejecting the package, Paramount let it be known that they would be glad to see anything I wanted to do next. John is so mortified that he will not agree to the script going anywhere else with his name attached. We have become reconciled at the one moment in the last fifteen years in which he has no cachet whatever: inverted opportunism. What kind of a rat swims towards a sinking ship?

5.9.81. Only gods speak safely in the future tense.

The representation of Oedipus as a tyrannos brought low by an inadvertent ‘sin’ is of a man not entitled to privacy, the theatrical paradigm. The drama-king, Dionysos enacts his personal agon; the god motoring his own machine.

Sartre made ‘good faith’ dependent on conscious choice, itself a performance, hence inauthentic.

8.9.81. In Cahors. A woman in a wrap-around skirt walking in the hot street towards the post office was caught by a gust of wind. It blew the skirt up from white and shapely legs; unspoiled flesh against the used face above the clothes. I nearly said ‘jolies jambes’, just to give her pleasure; then I heard that English voice and its freight of joylessness.

13.10.81. Paros, Mykonos, Ios. The wave of tourism, like tepid lava, has carried plastic and cheap glass to previously secret corners. A plastic lavatory seat was the submarine treasure on the public beach at Mykonos where we once bathed alongside the Steinbecks (not that he ever swam). The new charm of Ios at sea level lies in the pretty girls who spread themselves naked in the sun. Lack of shame baffles furtive curiosity: who can spy on what is blatantly offered? Naked males dangle their egos with unlovely obstinacy. A trio of Germans took too much sun on their first day and were scorched like unbasted joints. Burnt here, blanched there, they veiled their afflicted – never their sexual – parts with bits of silly clothing: socks, a little hat, a pair of shorts.

On the last morning, on the way to the Olympeion, I went into a small antique shop selling the kind of copper and brass Byron might have seen. The bearded proprietor looked at me and said, ‘You have translated the great tragedies? Aeschylus rather than Sophocles?’ That intuitive sense of a stranger’s personality used to be common chez the Greeks; it is rare in a Hellas full of money and of regret, almost, for what it has cost.

Waiting on the quay for the Naias on Mykonos, a pretty girl, no more than nineteen, with her baby. She was with a couple, the man grey-curled, the woman well-preserved; perhaps the child’s grandparents. The absence of an obvious father for the child recalled an old idea of mine about a couple who kill their unwanted or sick infant, on an island in a foreign country. They are obliged forever to wander from one place to another. If they settle, and have to establish their identity, there may be inquiries about what happened to the infant. As long as they keep moving, no one will do anything but take their money; a father and his daughter, it might be, who live in fugitive isolation.

16.10.81. Schlesinger wants to pursue an idea I suggested over a year ago, about the Lucan affair. His Lordship was said by Aspinall to be a born ‘leader of men’; did he ever lead anyone further than the bar or do anything more noble than be born? Dandified coteries who take exception to social change, and are bonded by corrupt chivalry, recur in societies in which wealth is no longer increasing in the wallets of those cradled in its expectation. Resentment and snobbery are common neighbours, as Maurice Cowling’s sour candour concedes. How about the juxtaposition of a Lucan and a Kagan, both lords, both on the run, obliged to disguise themselves as a homosexual duo, two men who both need and despise each other; a murderer and a finagler who has disgraced the ermine he never deserved? Imagine Lucan obliged to circumcision in order to qualify for asylum in Israel. Can it be worth it to an anti-Semitic prig to stay immune at the price of being a Jew?

The second anniversary of my father’s death. The most memorable thing he ever said to me was ‘It doesn’t much matter who you marry’. He seemed dedicated to the beautiful woman he had been bold enough to capture; yet he could deliver himself of that cold remark. With his post-war bowler and brolly, he appeared so English that I tended to forget how much he liked America and all that 1930s jazz. Back in England, fidelity – to Irene and to Shell – seemed, like Adamson’s pin-stripes, to suit him perfectly. His gambling was as restrained as it was habitual. He always termed it ‘investment’. Had some millionaire (his uncle Jessel for instance) left him a fortune, he would not have reflected for a second on the justice of inheritance or the putative claims of others. He was a fortune-hunter with no fortune. Because I was his only son,5 I had the idea that I must be important to him.

18.10.81. On her way home to England towards the end of the war, travelling on a Portuguese ship, S. and her friend were pursued by sailors who intended to rape them. They ‘had their trousers down’ when somehow the girls managed to get away and were chased around the deck. Eventually, they hid in the men’s lavatories, the one place no one expected to find them, and crawled out when it was dark. They then concealed themselves under the tarpaulin of a lifeboat. When they reached Lisbon, they were interned, for days or weeks, by the Portuguese authorities. S. was terrified of men for some time thereafter. She particularly feared being alone with her father; she always wanted her mother to come and say goodnight to her at the same time. I believe that her brother, who later rather wasted his life, was also on the ship.

At the end of my BUPA check-up, I had a reassuring meeting with a Dr Isaacs, a bald Welsh physician with goggle eyes. Qualified since the age of twenty-one, he cheerfully laments never having had anything but responsibilities. He feels cheated of his life. Integrity makes us wish for duplicity. His son is a double First and a brilliant lawyer. He seemed surprised when, having been asked about my children, I told him that they were wonderful.

A cousin of his was murdered about a month ago, in Swansea. He was walking to shul on a Saturday morning, a clever and nice man, with his three children, when they were rammed by a man in a car. Dr Isaacs’ cousin’s legs were broken. While he lay in the street, the driver got out and stabbed him seventeen times, under the eyes of his children. He died on the way to hospital. A taxi-driver saw what had happened and followed the killer, radioing for assistance as he went. When caught, the murderer proved to be a German called Neumann.

Isaacs said that he had never been bothered by the sight of blood since the days when he took chickens to the kosher slaughterers and stayed behind, as if for a treat, to see the sheep killed. He mentioned with clinical clarity that his cousin had a severed aorta. He was forty-one. Isaacs’ gleaming good humour was all but unchanged by the story he told. He accepts the absurdity of life. Less interested in reasons than remedies, he congratulated me on my physique, as if I had kept a second-hand car in sound running order.

After the Byron film was transmitted, another Isaacs got in touch with me, Tony, of the BBC World About Us team, which he captains. He wanted me to front a clutch of programmes about South America which he is having prepared. I was tempted, as so often, because I was asked. Why reject the chance to have access to the ‘best’ people in six such countries? (I am not that easily had: I turned down four films during my fortnight in London.) Asked whether I spoke Spanish, I answered, with evasive honesty, that I had no Portuguese.

I drove up to Cambridge for dinner with the Steiners. I had hired a Ford Fiesta at Heathrow. I parked it all day in rainy London. When I went back to it, I failed to notice that the driver’s seat was wet from leaks in the roof. By the time I arrived in Cambridge, my trousers were soaked. I was spared the comedy of sporting George’s spare pants (my father would have said ‘bags’) by the loan of a sumptuous cowled robe which Zara had bought in California. We had a poor, generous meal, and watched the slow second episode of Brideshead Revisited. As the end titles rolled, I said, ‘Let me know when it starts’.

The western powers are more powerful than they care to acknowledge; to admit their superiority might oblige them to exercise it.

Wandering through the familiar and unfamiliar streets of Cambridge, I was filled less with nostalgia than with the apprehensions which G. had installed. A coward without a visible enemy, I had no appetite for books or goods. I might have been a ghost; the city walked through me. I left late, reluctant to arrive too soon at the McLeishes, hoping for some consolatory encounter. Valerie had sent directions, but no indication of the distance between one landmark and the next. I drove and drove across the flat landscape. Farmers’ harrows had scored the only marked distinctions. Autumn was a flat dish, brimmed with light. The grey exclamation mark of a church spire or the low excavation of a rivulet, fat with sun-hammered water, as if somewhere a flood was giving notice, provided the only punctuation. Villages were indicated, left and right, rarely traversed. The road bent and then straightened, often for a league or more. It was surprising to see how many people inhabited this undecked barge of peat sitting on a buried ocean. There is no bottom to many of the fens. Tractors can sink and sink to unplumbed depths and never be recovered.

The drive to Holbeach St John took an hour and a half. I had to cross a wide ditch, on a concrete slab of a bridge, before I found myself in a cluster of new houses, a quasi-suburban Close in the breadth of the country. The McL. house was on the left, where the buildings were less new. It is their first detached residence, bigger than their place in Hewson Road, Lincoln, but with fewer rooms; they plan to build an annex. Green sleeves of land trail behind the house and girdle it with apparent largeness. The long garden, with its elevated lily-pond, is richly loamed; the spinach was fat, as if engorged with green blood. A neighbour keeps his pony in the paddock at the far end. Its manure is thrown, smelly bonus, onto adjacent gardens, tipping the blackish earth with fertile pungency. Almost anything will grow here. K. and V. do not know what will come up next and wonder if they will have the knowledge to cultivate it.

The neighbours are friendly. When K. was in hospital, one of them, seeing V. putting up curtains whose ends failed to meet, offered to lend her money. Another, said to be very nice, is a Pole with – why did Ken tell me? – overt anti-Semitic credentials. The house was white-plastered; it might have belonged to a jobbing builder. The furniture sat about like conscripts waiting for assignment. The books on the shelves were still in bales. There was a folded ladder in the upstairs loo. I took them a Wok as a housewarming present.

3.11.81. K. was large, fattened on his back, a measure of apology in his careful shyness. We were new acquaintances on that account. He moved easily enough about the little house (there was always something near enough to lean on), but took a stick when we went into the garden. Reprieved, he is still under sentence, for life. V. gave us an excellent lunch, including purée of swedes, homemade and colourful. She has lost weight and gained confidence. It is hard to believe that she is younger than I am; she has the middle-aged resignation of the provincial schoolteacher, obliged both to endurance and to insecurity. K. is now able to do most things, but not for long. He cannot put one foot directly in front of the other, as if on a tight rope, without falling over. It might not be difficult to get through life without indulging in such a manoeuvre, but something is fused in his brain and unlikely to be mended. He can work for no more than an hour a day and cannot read at all; a poor look-out for a journeyman of limited fame whose main weapon has been speed of performance. He never commanded big fees, but he could always hope for regular work. Having no capital, he must generate income through the accumulation of pages.

George labels him my ‘evil genius’. K. is neither evil nor, I fear, a genius. G. claims that he behaves like a parody of me; he is inclined to frivolity or playfulness beyond his means. Steiner makes a system of his own ambition: because grandiloquent and domineering, it has to be adult and worthwhile. He despises K.’s gentleness. Physical self-pity may disgust him; he is scarcely proof against it morally. Uncourted by the Sunday Times, he is determined to see writing on the wall for the whole literate world. He could not abide a metaphysic that was not incomprehensible; simple ideas are necessarily false. As a friend he is false too; he must wound if he is to achieve intimacy.

George’s heart attack in Paris may have been agonising; it did not impede his loquacious appearance on Apostrophes. Publicity and mission are one with him; he craves an ovation, yet preaches like an intellectual Meursault, as if ardent, like Camus’ anti-hero, for outraged howls. While longing to break the code of eternity and talk to God in the second person singular, he is consumed by the present world; appalled and excited by its brutalities and its rewards, he would not be anywhere else: heaven can wait. He takes sensual pleasure in things of the mind, as only the misshapen can. His bluff, mantled in trilingual erudition, calls for an intellectual pathologist too subtle for easy availability. He boasts that, in a tight spot, he can always invent passages from Hegel which no one will ever have the patience to expose. Keeping his intellectual records in inaccessible quarters, he leapfrogs the local taxes to which monoglots are subject. He presumes himself involved in so complex a geopolitical congeries that he may well not know which safe house contains real secrets, which bumph. Exalted on an auto-da-fé of his own heaping, the faggots are the texts to which his polysyllabic verbiage must allude, though the world longs to torch them.

The self-portrait can be the most pitiless of pictures; it should have the accuracy of those who need not even look up to achieve a likeness.

Inverted Antaeus, I have only to have England beneath my feet to feel weakened.

4.11.81. Albert Speer could never abandon the idea of his own importance. Hallmarked by Hitler’s favour, he survived as the whitened sepulchre of the Third Reich. Its last beneficiary, he made a show of donating tithes from his many interviews to charity. So long as he could parade his guilt, he was free to imply his innocence. Confident that he had done all he could to achieve her victory, he accepted no blame for Germany’s defeat. His most recent book suggests that allied private enterprise was more efficient, inventive and flexible than the machinery insinuated into the tissue of German industry by the greedy ineptitude of the SS. Did it occur to him that a healthy society would never have embraced the Nazis in the first place? Why was Hitler’s Germany fighting except to justify the savage methods Speer came to declare unrewarding? Appealing to civilised norms which the Nazis found contemptible, he implies that there might have been a decent way of achieving indecent ends. The justification of ideology relies on a distinction between the right and wrong way of wrong-doing.

Having served his time in Spandau, Speer became an ex-convict too exemplary not to have a car sent for him, a room reserved, a bottle iced. The Allies had a vested interest in preserving, in the aspic of publicity, a German of the inner circle who could appear civilised and intelligent and yet had behaved more disgracefully than anyone on the winning side. Speer’s acknowledgement of the effectiveness of allied bombing raids (discounted by some military historians) assuages consciences troubled by the Dresden and Hamburg fire storms. How can we verify his claim that Czech workers were ‘not unfriendly’ when he visited them on the eve of the Nazi defeat? Must we take his word for it that the Reich Minister was exempt from the odium felt for other Nazi leaders or that Germans in general were popular in a country which they had dismembered?6

What is more revealing than Speer’s partiality for the ‘sincerity’ of Nazi thinkers, notably Otto Ohlendorf, by whose callous intelligence he was once seduced? Imagine a mass-killer capable of articles that you might find in The Economist! The murderous Otto’s execution, after the Nuremberg trials, served to lend martyred authority to his essays. Speer, the technocrat with publicly washed hands, proved récupérable, unlike the anti-hero of Sartre’s Les Mains Sales. He endured as a greying scapegoat, hung with garlands and royalties and promised that he might safely graze, next to the dodo, in the retirement section of Animal Farm.

I dreaded going to speak at the Cambridge Union. Had the president not been Irish, should I have been so easily seduced? When told that Melvyn Bragg was to be my partner, I made intimidated noises: how should I second so smooth an article? As it turned out, I was épaulé by Humphrey Burton, who seems still to be Head of Music and Arts at the BBC. Teddy Taylor M.P., our heaviest opponent, had the rounded shine of an absconding pawn from the great chess game of state. Can such a man have real prospects of being in the Cabinet (or even of refusing to be in it)? When he took his place at the despatch box, or whatever Unionists call it, I had to admire the seriousness of his address. Entering into the straight-faced levity of the occasion, he was eminently patient when interrupted: ‘Of course’, he said, as he gave way to me on a point of detail.

The first two speakers, undergraduates, raised not a single laugh; they were very earnest. I had mentioned to Claire Tomalin that I was going to speak at the Union and recalled how intimidated I had been by the performances of our contemporaries. When I was polite about Nick’s eloquence, C. denied that he had been a good speaker and confessed, unless she insisted, that she had always been embarrassed to hear him. H. Burton told Giles Kavanagh what a brilliant public speaker I was. When I challenged this, he recalled an evening at Joan Bakewell’s dinner table where, he insisted, I had entertained the guests ‘without using a note’. Can there be people who do use them on such occasions?

Burton is the very instance of the higher apparatchik; no surprise that he has been empanelled on the Arts Council. He wore a ruffled evening shirt and pranced to the lectern where he read a dull and canting speech. I had written mine out, but delivered it as if the pages before me, at which I scarcely glanced, were on quite another topic. Prudence led me to sit down when on the crest of a firm wave of laughter, although it meant omitting three or four good jokes. A phobia was purged; in an elderly maiden speech, I had held the audience like some Disraeli of the sticks.

It is amusing to cleave to the formal rectitude which even the educated have abandoned. Grammatical niceties are a form of nostalgia.

Ken Tynan died with a dandy’s gallant flippancy. Breathless with emphysema, he gasped and stammered, but scarcely stopped talking. If he could not easily get a word out, who could get one in? Snob among levellers, red among blues, he could provoke any regime, yet accommodate himself to it. Refuting Descartes, he was a parasite whose distinction lay in rising higher than his host.

Robin Jordan: as a schoolboy, he was sensitive and seemingly refined, gentle yet attracted to muscle. The change from the chaste, Hippolytan style to that of the cosmopolitan sensualist is almost too pretty to be true.

The crassness of Anthony Burgess’s W.S. Maugham figure in Earthly Powers. Not hesitating to deal at basement level with Great Issues, B. seems unaware that they have been broached with more wit and subtlety by a host of previous pens. He treats homosexuality with a coarseness that makes cardboard out of flesh. To create characters, he lists characteristics. Flippant and industrious, gluttonous and gross, he is a slapdash cook in a fancy restaurant, doling cream and spices onto re-heated meat.

My exiled artist should resemble a composite of Michael Ayrton and David Garnett. Like M., he has become literally shorter, the result of his warped backbone. Like D.G., red-faced eccentricity is all that remains of his narcissism. Having married a much younger woman, he watches her take a lover with serenity which contrasts with his rage at critics who fail to appreciate him. When young, he was famous; in old age, he can imagine being cut dead even by obituarists. The last twist of the knife comes when his mistress, a plain, devoted girl like Rachel D., telephones London with a false report of his death. She imagines that if she can have the newspapers print his obituary before he dies, it will prove how misguided his paranoia has been. She discovers that today’s press is as vindictive de mortuis as about the living. She finds the cuttings under his body when she next goes to visit him. An old friend has been quick to send him the bad news. Her ruse to keep him alive has killed him. Imagine the horror; then the pride. How pretty the unspoiled potager is! And how full of beans she feels! She leans to savour some of his raspberries as he lies there, face down.

Why did Michael volunteer to be the eyes of the waning Wyndham Lewis? Because he so much admired the other’s draughtsmanship? Or because of some deferential vindictiveness in the face of a fascisant genius who, now weak, might have used his strength, when he had it, to crush the man on whom he has come to depend?

6.11.81. The Brideshead