Ifs and Buts E-Book

Frederic Raphael

• Herausgeber: Carcanet Poetry
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Seitenzahl: 424

Beschreibung

June 1978: Frederic Raphael is in a studio for the dubbing of his television play Something's Wrong, and a routine moment is captured by his wry alertness to vanities and foibles. Ifs and Buts continues the sharply stylish extracts from the journal of time spent, in the words of The Sunday Times, 'with one eye on life's greasy pole and the other on the eternal verities'. Both, for Raphael, are subjects for curiosity, scepticism and entertainment. Ifs and Buts includes encounters with David Garnett and Rebecca West, with their still-vivid memories of H.G. Wells and Lytton Strachey, D.H. Lawrence and Bloomsbury; an account of working with Diana Dors, and of not working with Diane Keaton. Alongside are darker reflections on public and private life, on what it is to be a Jew, on terrorism and the cruelties within relationships.

Leseprobe

Frederic Raphael

Ifs and Buts

Personal Terms 5

For Beetle, Paul, Sarah and Stephen, always

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction

1978

1979

Index

About the Author

Also by Frederic Raphael from Carcanet

Copyright

Introduction

More than fifty years ago, the racing driver Mike Hawthorn used to write (or have written for him) a weekly column in Beaverbrook’s Sunday Express. In one multiple choice quiz, he asked what was most dangerous: bald tyres, lack of a rear-view mirror, defective brake lights or exceeding the speed limit. The value of seat belts did not arise; no one had yet invented them. If they had been available, Hawthorn might not have died in his Jaguar, in 1959, while exceeding the speed limit, on the wet Guildford by-pass. As it was, he declared that lack of a rear-view mirror was more dangerous than anything else on the list.

Looking Back was the title of a memoir written by Somerset Maugham in the late evening of his ninety-one years. It was generally assumed that Max Beaverbrook, had put him up to it, since the book was serialised in the Sunday Express. It included what seemed outspokenly sour memories of Maugham’s wife, Syrie. They sold copies at the time, but would be mild today. Syrie’s sad fault was that she went on loving Willie when he could no longer stand the sight of her. As a result, she ‘made me scenes’, not what a writer needs when he is trying to make his own. In fact, the main reason for Maugham’s aversion was that she belonged to the wrong sex.

His reputation for man-of-the-worldliness was dented by the spleen which he unleashed in Looking Back, but a succession of biographies, the most recent by Selena Hastings, proves that ‘the Old Party’ – a title he assumed when hardly more than sixty years old – has retained his interest for the public. Whether or not, as Hastings advertised, his sins were scarlet, his books continue to be read, although rarely ‘taught’. Maugham’s connection with the theatre (and later the cinema), and Virginia Woolf’s sneer, echoed by Frieda Lawrence, that he ‘wrote for money’, have put him into the category of writers who excite both envy, for their success, and scorn, because they are assumed to have pandered to vulgar appetites in order to gain it.

In the first volume of Personal Terms, I noted how I went to see Willie, as insiders called him and I never did, in the autumn of 1954. I knew little of his personal life and cared less. Of Human Bondage had incited me to write fiction. I had been working on my own first novel, about the rise of a proto rock star, in a small hotel bedroom in Juan-les-Pins, on the day that I took the bus to St Jean Cap Ferrat in order to have tea with him at the Villa Mauresque.

I still envy the facility with which, when young, some people gain access to impressive company. Biographies frequently tell us how, within a few days of arriving in a strange city, their subjects have met the reigning artists or intellectuals. I lack the nerve to rap on the doors of people who regularly appear in indexes, even though I might have learnt, from Maugham’s amiable response to my letter out of the blue, that the famous can often be as lonely or curious as they are remote. When Maugham, always the Edwardian gentleman, replied to my letter, in his own ‘claw’, as Churchill put it, he remarked that it was ‘undated’ (he did so only because he wondered if I would ever receive his inviting answer). Which of Shelley’s ‘antique courtesies’, is now more dated than letter-writing, using pen and ink?

Only the finest prig denies himself the facility of e-mails, the promptness of despatch, the speed of reply; but there is a systematic frigidity in electronic correspondence. The date is supplied automatically, but today’s writers tend to omit introductory endearments and proceed, usually with platitudinous directness, to whatever the matter is. E-mails have no individual script; they are the medium for the toady, the huckster and the importunate: it has never been easier to quiz authorities.

When I went to tea with Maugham, he was wearing a fingerless leather glove on his bent right hand. After six decades of writing with pen and ink, he was an incurable sufferer from writer’s cramp. He might have adopted Henry James’s late habit of dictating his fiction to a secretary, but he never did. As far as Maugham was concerned, the lesson of the Master was that more was altogether too much. He told me that he had written all the books which he had ever had in mind to publish. Writing had become a physical sport to which he could no longer easily turn his hand.

As for his notebooks, the 1949 epitome was all that was ever set up in print. Most of his private papers went up in the smoke of the bonfires which he and his last secretary, Alan Searle, took pleasure in lighting in the garden of the Villa Mauresque. Selena Hastings makes Searle into the villain of Maugham’s twilight years, mainly on account of the legal wrangles involved in the division of his estate. I found him charming, patiently attentive company for a sad man who, it seemed to me, was older than anyone could ever choose to be. Did Searle, as Tom Moore did with Byron’s diaries, throw into the fire letters or manuscripts which could have ruined, or enhanced, their author’s reputation with posterity? Selena Hastings’ hot revelations of what we largely knew already suggest that it is unlikely that anything was destroyed which publishing scoundrels have failed to glean. Remembering what happened to Oscar, Maugham feared that his homosexuality would come out and do him harm; it did, and it didn’t. As Willie might have said of anyone’s secrets but his own, what does it matter?

I am now close to the age which the Old Party was when I went to visit him. I was then twenty-three. ‘You have plenty of time,’ he said. Now I don’t. It is one of the small graces still left to us that we do not, in the normal course of things, know how long we have left. It is just as well. A friend of ours, a cheerful ex-ballerina who often cooked elaborate meals for her guests, was told, when in her seventies, that she had oesophageal cancer. She could expect to live only a few more months. She was filled with dread. She waited for the symptoms to get worse. She ceased to entertain or to go out. The symptoms did not get worse and, almost four years later, she is still alive. Either her tumour went into remission or it was misdiagnosed. Meanwhile, the joy has gone out of her life. Denied what she feared, she has become a Sibylline hypochondriac, possessed by death.

My father used to say, after he had read my latest volume, ‘I hope you have yet to write your best book.’ His less than kind hope is now mine. I am aware that my notebooks contain more ideas that I can ever develop, more plots and characters than are likely to be plumped into full-size fictions, and yet I go on adding ideas to them. If I say again that I never intended to print what I have squirrelled into those cahiers from Joseph Gibert, it will be taken as evidence that that was always my intention; but it is true.

I go back to them without knowing what I shall find. The stories in this volume which Rebecca West told me concerning Willie Maugham are, for all I know, common knowledge to insiders, but I had entirely forgotten, in particular, the one about Syrie and the handsome Lord Lovat. Retrospection is, I daresay, a function of advancing mortality: one averts one’s eyes from the narrowing prospect ahead and finds pleasure, and sometimes treasure, in the blue remembered hills of the past.

Since this volume, like the last, covers a short span of years, it may seem comic for me to say that I have been rigorous in shortening the original text. Dr Johnson’s advice remains sound: he told a young writer that he should go through his work and, when he came upon something he considered particularly fine, he should strike it out. I have also honoured Eric Korn’s suggestion, in his review of Ticks and Crosses, to omit all further references to family holidays.

It would not have surprised me if he had also proposed that I say no more about Jews, with or without ‘the’, but there I should not have obliged him. I have, however, cut as deeply as I can in that department, without falsifying what seems important. It has come home to me that, as was said by Mr Eliot (whose lack of anti-Semitism is so often applauded these days), ‘the jew is underneath the lot’. I grant that his minuscule j may be less an affectation than a reference to standard French usage, for instance by Charles Maurras, whom Eliot always admired; but then the reference itself just might be an affectation.

Korn is an antiquarian bookseller, whose main service to the Times Literary Supplement is to deploy his recherché knowledge in order to put down people who dare to be a little too like him. In Ticks and Crosses, I mentioned, in a passage concerning a family holiday in Crete, how I had misunderstood the price, in drachmae, demanded by a boatman who took us the few hundred metres to the small island of Mochlos. I thought he said ‘dtheka’ (ten) when, as it turned out, he wanted ‘ekaton’, ten times that much. Korn chose to puncture my (small) delusions of Hellenic competence by saying that the exchange proved that I could not have had even the rudimentary Greek to which I pretended.

I took petty pleasure in writing him a two-page letter in Greek, in my own claw, in which I pointed out that ‘eka’ was common to both words and that, in the toothless mouth of a Greek oarsman, one could indeed, and did indeed, be mistaken for the other, not least because the larger number was, in those days, an excessive one. Korn’s spidery reply was more amiable than his review. It was, however, obvious that he had not been able to understand anything much in my letter apart from the fact that it took exception to his sarcasm.

I found it incredible, back in the 1950s, when Mr Maugham told me that he no longer read reviews. Now that I am almost as old as he was then, I am at least much less interested in what is said about my work, although I do not object to having flattery thrust upon me. A good rule is not to look at reviews until at least several months have passed; a year or two is recommended. It cannot be denied that one of the consolations of seniority is to find that you are still a target for reproach or parody. It warms the heart to be accused, as I have been quite recently, both of pretentiousness and of ‘selling out’. I might wish, in view of the price of educating our grandchildren, that I had done the latter with more profit, but one cannot have everything. This volume, with its mixture of pensées and showbiz, portraits and caricatures, does little to refute either charge.

It is possible that if I had not written movies, I might have written better novels. No doubt there would have been more of them, but I do not think that the influence of the cinema on fiction has always been pernicious. I have a notion that the jagged form of The Waste Land was as much a tribute to movies as to The Golden Bough: it even has a mute soundtrack, weiala, Shakespeheerian rag and all. A novelist can do worse that to read his or her dialogue aloud and listen to how it plays.

I should never wish not to have had the pleasure of rehearsing with actors and hearing my words on their lips (no one has done it better than Tom Conti). It remains chastening to look back and realise how much time and ingenuity I spent on movie scripts which never got the green light. A New Wife, which features intermittently in these pages, was only one of the hits which were expected to bring me fame and fortune until circumstance aborted them. If Diane Keaton and Al Pacino had agreed to do the picture after a director had committed to it, instead of demanding the right to select him, I might have been able to live my imminent eighties in a Malibu house with a deck overlooking the shore. But they did not, and I shan’t. Perhaps, in that respect at least, I have been luckier than I know.

FREDERIC RAPHAEL

2011

1978

10.5.78. In 1950s Cambridge, ‘The Critics’ on the radio had a cachet unmatched by any of today’s pundits. Hence my silly pride when Philip French, who produces Critics’ Forum, the current version, offered me three weeks at the end of March. Since he had just been appointed the Observer’s film critic, he consigned me to Leonie Cohn, once the mistress of Herbert Read (or was it Henry Reed?). As a producer, she proved the blight that I was never born for; exigent and plaintive, the grim crone haunted every event we covered to check for truancy. My stint done, I had a feeling of liberation from a childhood appetite. How nice that there are some things one will not regret never doing again!

Buñuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire was the single worthy target of our attentions; its masterliness was perhaps too grateful a joy, so badgered had we been by the protracted paltriness of the RSC’s Henry VI. One performance was of such lock-jawed amateurishness that my colleagues clubbed together to drub its perpetrator. True, Young Clifford had taken an unconscionable time a-dying, the end of an arrow protruding from his epaulette at an angle unlikely to cause a graze; but there was something so vulturous in the desire of the glee club of Richard Cork, Alex Walker and others to nail the sorry actor that I said, ‘Hasn’t he got enough of a problem trying to make a career when he has no talent at all? Must we broadcast his ineptitude to the whole parish?’ They insisted that it was their duty to name names where an artist had failed. In that case, I said, I should make a point of attacking Terry Hands. It had to be as much the director’s as the actor’s fault when a scene was that badly played. Once I threatened to zero in on someone they might meet in chummy circles, not a single just word was uttered about young Cliff.

Hospitality. Christopher Ricks jumped up to pass the cheese as if involved in an audition for Second Waiter.

At the TLS spring party, Tom Conti was confronted with a critical mass, all of whom, he told me, ‘clearly wanted to fuck, and couldn’t’. One of them said, re TV reviewing, that it was enjoyable to look at something ‘with hostility’. The same man added (after a wince from Tom?) that he liked nothing better than to admire something. They all want to be high court judges without ever having been on the circuit.

He declares his love for his wife by selling her scribbling services to newspapers and magazines. Having wound her up and set her to work, he procured her the means by which she can now afford to despise him. That nocturnal run down a steep hill into an unseen brick wall seems to have ended her youth. Why did she marry him? Because she had heard such a lot about him that she hoped that love could turn the famous trick for her. What is more heartless than callow ambition?

11.5.78. Aldo Moro has been murdered. ‘Death,’ they said in an early bulletin, ‘was not instantaneous.’ When we lived in Vigna Clara, Moro was the head of Democrazia Cristiana. With that blaze of white in his ebony hair, he had the mournful pride of one who knew where bodies were buried. There was an air of woeful amusement about him, as if he mistrusted a society willing to vest power in him. His interment, in an inconspicuous cemetery in his native Puglia, marks the end of the affair. No Regulus, he had begged his ‘friends’ to make a deal to save him from ‘execution’ by the Red Brigades. In his long despair (after his kidnap, he spent more than fifty days expecting death), he could have bet that his colleagues would never separate cant from sincerity. That they should not negotiate, but advocate the stoic course (the stoicism had to be his), was of a piece with the callousness that had made them, and him, what they were. When had any of them distinguished the interests of Italy from their own? Terror led him to secede, in those last desperate messages, from Party solidarity. His only loyalty then was to his family. When he denounced the governing clique, he confessed the futility of his own career.

12.5.78. My father dwindles away in the dismal surroundings of the Royal Hospital and Home for Incurables. For several years, he served on the Committee of Management. I attended a meeting, in Mayfair, when they were considering a change of name. In the event, they persisted with the unsubtle but purse-opening version.

The patients are not all mentally damaged; but most suffer from the irreversible consequences of meningitis or accidents or congenital defect. The majority of the staff consists of aliens. If some are amiable, few have any sense of what the patients once were or might have been. Cedric, on the second floor, shares a room with a man, forever recumbent, who believes that every day is his first in the hospital. He has been there for fifteen years. He is addressed by his first name, Ralph. The voice is raised when anyone needs to tell him what food is on his tray and where positioned. He eats lying down, muttering disjointed syllables to which my father, his bed at right angles to Ralph’s, behind a curtain, pays no attention. He accepts the presence of a man with whom he can never communicate with the gloomy patience with which a boarding school boy had to tolerate whomever he found in his dormitory. Ralph is preferable to a bully or a bore.

Cedric has not changed; he has shrivelled. As he becomes more helpless, he gets less help. Do they really take away his bell if he rings in the night? He is not so much ill-used as despised, in an impersonal way. His appearance slowly worsens. I found fragments of egg in the creases of his pyjamas, his blanket and his sheet. He goes home, he hopes, every weekend; but he dreads the exception when some malfunction will make it ‘more sensible’ (in my mother’s phrase) to remain in situ for the weekend. He must never sneeze nor confess to a sore throat lest his leave be cancelled. His best day is Thursday, since it precedes Friday. As soon as he is in his own home, he is happy; except that being there is the prelude to being returned to his cell. We have tried to persuade Irene to have him home again for good. I will pay for the necessary nursing, gladly. No: she coped for years, she says, until the death of her own ninety-three-year-old mother, which was accelerated by the crass decision of a mercenary GP to send her for surgery to her back. In hospital, Fanny fell out of an unguarded bed, broke her hip and died, slowly, in gasping terror.

My mother then disembarrassed herself of my father too. He was clever enough to foresee that she would. Fanny’s presence had prompted demonstrations of conjugal worthiness which she was no longer obliged to mount. The old lady had also been the scapegoat on whom she and Cedric could vent common frustrations. The bugbear removed, their alliance lost its butt. Beetle says that if Irene loved Cedric she would have him at home. Did he treat her badly or has he loved her too well? He has loved her slavishly; but in too masterly a fashion. He was unkind enough to do nothing with which she can reproach him. She might have been liberated by cruelties he never visited on her. Who is less free than someone for whom everything possible has been done?

To demand and, by fidelity, to merit virtue in a wife is to imprison her. The door need never be locked; she cannot open it. Conjugal love puts a cloche over its object; it is pampered and embargoed from its own vitality.

Sophistication implies aptitude for deceit.

Deception is the spice of erotic delight; there is limited happiness in having nothing to hide.

In the train going up to London, I frowned at the fluent quasi-intelligibility of three ladies, one of them the very instance of a seaside landlady. Chapel-going, round-hatted, they chatted across the aisle in a language almost familiar. Then I remembered an advertisement for Esperanto I had seen in Venice. The Latinate forms interspersed with the Anglo-Saxon ‘yes’ meant that identikit confection had to be the right answer. Flemish, French and English, with no language in common, they talked mainly of health, and its price. They had substituted the ability to talk for serious conversation. Plain speaking could not have been plainer. Proud of their system, they recommended it in terms of the money that would be saved, at the UN and elsewhere, if universalism replaced the many tongues which jostled for audition. They had difficulty, they told me, recruiting the young; they preferred variety to the pursuit of a common tongue. Esperantists have a programme of salvation without metaphysics, an easy target for satirists such as Graham Greene. They dream of a cosmic bungalow that reaches to the heavens; their sky is at first-floor level.

Just such a simplicity of humane purpose may have been behind Steiner’s alleged catastrophe at Babel. Might it be that when the happy band of masons were building that tower, united in practical banality, some malcontent sensed the need for conflict, depth, diversity, duplicity? What became obvious at Babel was the mounting dreariness of uniformity, course on course. The heterogeneity with which we are said to have been cursed made progress and nuance possible.

‘All right, my love?’ she said to him, when in the dull dungeon of his unattended room she knew everything to be wrong. He dared not protest, lest he be docked of his sole comfort, the weekend for which he endures the weekday calvary. Should he risk the remission of his resurrection? He agrees to be persuaded that she needs her time without him. Would he ever have delivered her to similar anguish? She has exiled him from his own flat, for which years of petty labour and ignominy (when he was demoted and degraded in the service of Trevor Powell) have paid and paid again. She never, in their whole married life, earned a penny. Perhaps he would not have wished it. She now sits and sleeps alone in a three-bedroom flat, paid for by his pension, and hesitates to spend money on his care for fear that, when he dies and the pension is halved, she will not be able to maintain herself in the style to which he has accustomed her.

She is surrounded by a sorority of widows. While they are generous, after a fashion, to my father (they volunteer for weekend bridge as warders do for chess in the condemned cell), they are glad to induct Irene into the sexless world where unwanted, unwanting women live. Because of his Parkinson’s, he can no longer hold thirteen cards in his hand. He racks them in an upturned scrubbing brush.

The pitilessness of vengeance lies in its patience. The unforgiving are never so implacable as when they are willing to bide their time.

An American woman proves her femininity by devoted contempt for her mate. Avarice trumps sensuality; it is more bankable. Fidelity in the flesh is the cover for a dissidence more callous than adultery. As Michael Ayrton told us, it is a chastening punishment to have an implacably faithful wife.

Joan A. There is nothing she would sooner keep up than appearances. Reality, what good is that to a girl? Modesty is to her what nakedness is to the exhibitionist: her compulsion is to hide every natural thing. She has used this skill to attract and to inhibit men; an American girl of her day might use her sexuality to enchant others but should never yield to or enjoy it herself. Forced to prudery by dread of the desire which her own body excited, she grew to be the chaperone of her own charms.

The widows, with their pensioned greyness, cross a slow bridge of sighs, a little after the men who have been their victims and their oppressors; and then the game is done. Having flinched from self-sufficiency, they have waited for the mortality of the men they chose to geld, and cosset.

Of all the fruits of fear, modesty of expectation is the least juicy.

As he lay apparently dying, after the accident, she made a promise to God, ‘Let him only survive and I will never complain, even if he is incapable of speech or movement’. The Almighty, considering His record, answered her prayer on rather generous terms. Cedric recovered, though never completely. She was not seriously hurt in the accident, which only bruised her, but incurably. Although he walked and talked again, she was resolved never again to allow him equality; she would take care of him, and of herself.

He suspected, at one time, that she had a lover and would not allow her out of his sight; now he says, with helpless resignation, that she ought to have one. If she honoured her bond by being his nurse, she would not go back to being his wife. For a time she sought even to educate him to enjoy music and galleries, teaching him what she might have wished he could have taught her. Until his second accident, that banal fall in the bedroom which broke his hip and brought on his present disability, they continued to live a ‘normal’ life, though she made him more of an invalid than he was. All that time, Fanny Mauser continued to live with them; suspicious, indomitable, deaf and touchy, the peasant mother-in-law to a man in his seventies. He muttered, but under his breath; he never reproached Irene and he never abused Fanny; he was a gentleman.

He never recovered from the death of the old woman who he must always have wished would go, or had never come. The hospital is now wearying of him as Dr Cooper did of Fanny. On every visit I find him more soiled, more negligently regarded. He watches a TV no one adjusts. Irene insists that the picture is excellent, even when it is rotating and contracting in a series of tics and lurches. ‘Are you all right, my love?’ He stares at her with the unblinking eyes of a child who knows that if his lids close, he will burst into tears. It is the look one gives one’s parents when, for the first time, one realises that they are actually going to dump one among strangers.

He was not to come home that weekend (I saw him last Friday) because he had to see the eye man at mid-day on the Saturday. He would, I know, sooner be blind at home, but the prevalence of doctors’s orders over human wishes had, conveniently for my mother, to be respected. He had to do what he did not want to do. Years ago he said to me, ‘Try and do one thing every day that you don’t want to do’; now he does nothing else, except when he is suffered to go home at the weekend. ‘They’re killing me here,’ he says of the hospital. My mother takes care of the dwindling money, but does not see the dwindling man.

A bad Chinese meal at the Lotus House with the children, which we much enjoyed. I staved off the headache which a visit to Cedric had brought on. My mother drove me down Putney Hill in the rain. She had no intention of taking me all the way to Green Street, although she could see that I was feeling ill. She suggested that I go to Waterloo by train; she thought it a short cut. I took a taxi. Rain fell in the orange light; every road was clogged with traffic. Yet the evening turned out well (in the middle I heard from H. Rubinstein that W.H. Allen had made a firm offer for my critical pieces and also for the Byron, if I ever write it). We laughed together all the way to the tube station, where we left the children; they were all three going to the Cup Final, Arsenal–Ipswich, the following day. I had a twinge of envy, of their youth and of their separateness. I could imagine how easily they could cope with my death; how able they were to live without us.

The feelings of the lover, as a woman walks out of his life, have less to do with the wish that she would come back to him than with the desire to be the someone else she is going to. Must I always, always be myself?

14.5.78. Three Chelsea supporters, twelve or thirteen years old, were sitting in the non-smoker when we boarded the tube for Liverpool Street. We had gone as far as Tottenham Court Road when there was an incursion of Arsenal supporters, fifteen to twenty of them. The quiet carriage was suddenly, noisily crowded. It seemed that the newcomers knew the Chelsea boys; they attacked them as if they had found the source of their innate grievance. ‘Gimme that scarf,’ said one. I imagined, for an inert moment, that it had been stolen from him. The Chelsea supporters sat there, paralysed, and were pillaged. It was cruel and almost casual, like the assaults one sees in nature programmes, predator at prey. The two groups were on their way to the same water-hole, Liverpool Street, where they hoped to cadge, buy or steal tickets for the Cup Final.

One of the Chelsea supporters, a little old man of twelve, had seven quid swiped from his jeans. The Arsenal boys picked him clean, like soldier ants. They then gave him back ten pence or so, since otherwise he couldn’t get home. The Arsenal gang included several coffee-coloured youths, who seemed more decent and more sophisticated. One had a picked spot in the centre of his forehead, like a caste mark. A boy who came and sat next to me wore a gold earring in his right ear. He had close-cut black hair and very dark eyes. I asked him where they had come from, supposing they had been to a game. ‘Finsbury Park.’ Why had they set about the other lads? ‘We don’t like Chelsea supporters.’ ‘That’s no reason to rob them, is it?’ ‘They’d do the same to us, if there was more of them.’ ‘Is that a good argument?’ ‘That’s the way it goes, innit?’ Several of the boys were smoking, inept and impertinent. I made no effective move whatever, watching the tearful boy who had been robbed of his seven quid with the sympathy you give a pheasant as it walks in front of a car. Should I have insisted that the money be restored or was I – what? – prudent to play safe? Boys would be boys, wouldn’t they? I was certainly prudent and I was certainly afraid to get mixed up in their affairs, less for fear of being beaten up – though they could easily have downed me – than for fear of being ridiculous. The callous eyes, Pinkie in modern dress, of my brutal, polite neighbour belonged to a species impervious to pity or authority. ‘You’d do the same to us,’ they said. ‘No, I wouldn’t; I promise.’ ‘Oh promise!’ The victim cried, stern-faced, jaw jutting, ignoring the appeal of his own tears.

When the train reached Liverpool St, the Chelsea supporters got off with their attackers and, as they moved up the platform on their way to find some innocent spud-bashers from whom to lift their Wembley tickets, they were already indistinguishable. I worried lest Paul and Sarah and Stee run into such a group on their way to the match, but all went well, as I thought it would with P. in charge. We had the last laugh: Ipswich 1, Arsenal 0. Arsenal played in yellow.

Arnold Toynbee (subsidised by the Arabs) denounces Judaism as a ‘fossil religion’. True? The Jew is pressed between the plates of history, without ‘spiritual development’; at once the wanderer and the man who deserves to have nowhere to go. There is no evolution for him, no redemption, no re-birth; he endures and that is all. His eternity of waiting is without blissful prospect; he must forever consider what he has forever missed: a tick in his margin from Toynbee, A.

Endurance is the mark of another archetype, Prometheus, whose obstinate survival, in the face of Zeus’s righteous, and vindictive, anger (extension stretches justice into cruelty), turned the impious traitor into a Romantic hero.

The Jew came to accept (to ‘assume’ in Sartre’s term) his exclusion from metaphysical redemption. Barred from its guichets, he abandoned hope of winning anything in Pascal’s heavenly tote. Instead, he set about understanding and re-describing (and, later, entertaining) the world as if there was no life after death. Despair and optimism conceived a golden city on earth which stood in for the city of God, which was unattainable for infidels.

The odd, yet unsurprising, outcome of Jewish emancipation was the expansion of the Jewish prophetic style. Marx and Freud looked at society and at the human beast and stripped them of metaphysical trappings. The renovated, unvarnished versions combined cruel accuracy with infectious chic. The emperor’s new tailors left him with nothing flattering to wear. Against intelligent expectation (Trotsky’s, for instance), the Jews soon again became the object of exclusive, then of murderous, resentment. It requires extraordinary obstinacy for ‘the same people’ to abide exclusion from heaven and then, when they have accepted that, to be excluded from the earth as well.

The Jews have played the Archimedes role twice over: they provided the platform from which ruinous leverage was applied to the Roman world, and were trodden upon in the process, and then – from Spinoza to Einstein – they supplied the philosophies by which the world scheme of Christianity was tipped into doubt.

The French Revolution is accused of being the primer of modernity, but the myth of Jewish responsibility has a certain shapeliness. Jews of genius sold the world a new package of ideas and its citizens pinched them with flattering speed. Gentiles, of various tastes, then found socialism and capitalism so shamefully attractive that they had to nominate some scapegoat who could be cursed with having saddled them with their lust for gold and material pleasure.

Both the inverted idealists who embraced Marxism and the realists who yearned to be Rothschilds were relieved of the dread of ‘another life’. They joined the fraternity of cosmopolitan wanderers. Neither revolutionaries nor capitalists honoured boundaries; neither sported a conscience. However good it felt to abandon, or no longer to be saddled with, Christian hopes, they also felt guilty; and they knew whom to blame: the Jews had liberated their liberators and paid the price by being stigmatised yet again, for supplying the keys.

The role of Jews in the apparatus of the Communist Party is sufficiently similar to that in the early Church (first dominant, then disparaged or evicted) to be comic and unnerving. Jews cannot, it seems, for long maintain their positions even – perhaps especially – in organisations for which they have provided the first impetus. It is true even of Shell Oil.

After the triumph of Christianity, the Gentiles wreaked spiritual vengeance on the Jews; after the triumph of materialism, it had to be physical. Jews became the ideal enemy both of those who resented the loss of the past and of those who had prophesied an immortal tomorrow. When an idealised future, this side of the grave, replaced the afterlife, the Jew was excluded from both the Nazi and the communist versions of it.

When Hitler fastened on the Jew as the vermin of the world, he made a policy out of clichés available in any European gutter or drawing room.

A journalist from Israel who came to quiz me about Anglo-Jewry told me that ‘Arab’ is used there as a term of abuse. Once again the dispossessed become the despised.

After the war, even as a few Germans were being ‘brought to justice’ for their murders, the survivors of the camps were labelled ‘displaced persons’. They acquired the smell of fish that have been kept too long. Denied anywhere to go, they earned the contempt attached to the homeless. The dread that they would claim their rights ensured that they did not deserve to be granted them.

Do all architects lose the friendship of their clients? Are they often, like D., weak men with shrill wives? Norman Foster, whom I met at the University of East Anglia, seemed of tough, if not entirely likeable stuff. He had a knobbly face, with small eyes, like an alert potato. Suspicious, even when applauded, he was attended by an American-looking second-in-command (i.e. not at all commanding) with horn-rimmed eyes and a seersucker suit. Foster is in his early forties. His first big success was for Norwegian shipping people whose London operation he revolutionised by building offices in which dockers too had social facilities. The Port of London Authority was displeased by the three-dimensional precedent.

19.5.78 Our hostess does not invite women who compare favourably with herself. Even her daughter is conveniently less handsome than she. Joyce is indeed good-looking and assured; she lacks only the charm which might dispose you to want to know her better. Perhaps there is no better to know. Elegant and well-proportioned, she reminds you of Chauncy Gardner in Kosinki’s Being There, whose knowledge of life derives entirely from television. Her attractiveness is that of the speakerine: she introduces all sorts of topics, charmingly, but can go no further than that. She has a rationed smile, of which the objective correlative is that she serves diminutive refreshments. We are lucky to get a small slice of her.

Marghanita Laski. She has been well known for so long that one has forgotten why. Does her fame begin with Little Boy Lost? It was a very English story about post-war Europe, in which one sad case stands for the whole horror of the Shoah and its aftermath. Marghanita played the sentimental card, lest she make the Allies more anti-Semitic than would be tactful. Unamended features make her seem ageless: one looks at those teeth and that mouth and thinks ‘She hasn’t changed in thirty years.’ Start plain, you never have to.

Not having met her before, I approached her with apprehension. I had heard her, with difficulty (her voice being so full of plums), enthusing about The Glittering Prizes on some critical programme; she had said that she had never enjoyed anything on TV so much. Why apprehensive? I knew of her friendship with Celia Ramsey, who would, I think, gladly have played Leah to my Chéri years ago. When Celia took ostentatious and obstinate offence at Orchestra and Beginners, I imagined her spreading ostracising malice as widely as she could. Marghanita, the bien-aimée, would surely be on the committee.

When I dared to mention Celia’s name, Marghanita did indeed appear embarrassed; but it was not because she had been reminded of the duty to be her friend’s friend, but because she had to confess that she herself had not recently been in touch with her; so touchy a character, she told me, became uneasy company: Celia could take offence at the smallest gesture of goodwill.

Laski must be rich; she sits in her fine Hampstead house, Capo di Monte (a title made of money) with no evident income apart from being ‘a regular broadcaster’. She is involved with the current supplement of the OED, which includes the letter P. She is pressing, she said, for a reference to The Glittering Prizes; the phrase may be F.E. Smith’s but, she told me, the locus classicus has now been dislodged. This compliment beats captious congratulations in the louder press.

I had depicted Guy Ramsey, Celia’s late husband, whose memory I treasure, as Vernon Dorset, a slightly silly ass whose verbal tics (‘I couldn’t A with you M’) were indeed cadged from Guy. Celia affected to be outraged by my treason, although she had herself depicted Guy in a much more scathing and detailed fashion in one of her own novels. Celia’s rage was, I suspect, at least sustained by my casual reference to Vernon’s wife as a very plain woman.

3.6.78. Stanley Donen’s presence at Cannes was advertised to us before he called. He had been seen tap-dancing in the lobby of the Hôtel du Cap with Lew Grade. Both had been hoofers. Lew has now made a multi-picture deal with him. Stanley’s fortunes were due for repair, though the maintenance of his price depends on the success of Movie Movie, as he and Warner Brothers have decided to call his new double feature picture/picture. He wants me to re-do a script called, God help us, French Villa, on which the Grade people have already spent much treasure and found none. He asked me to go to Paris, but I prevailed on him to come here. Yvette preferred to set off for the US, in the accidental company of Richard Gregson, who is also seated on the Grade bandwagon. Yvette is to make a TV film and has been offered a part by Bob Fosse in All That Jazz. She once said, in his presence, ‘Any man under five foot four is bound to be a shit.’ Fosse said, ‘Whew! I just made nice guy by half an inch.’

I met S.D. at Brive. He had considered hiring an air taxi to fly to Bergerac but the guy wanted $1,500. Summer is suddenly and superbly here; the sinuous drive was no hardship. The train came in a little late. I stood reading Popper to prove that I didn’t mind. The passengers disembarked; the announcement came of the train’s imminent departure; no S.D. The train pulled out, disclosing Stanley on the far platform, bewildered at the absence of a welcome. He is at once worldly and oddly innocent; so used to having things arranged for him that any dislocation renders him helpless. He was carrying (and so, soon, was I) a very heavy suitcase. The heaviest item, which he later showed us, as if the hope of endorsement of its authenticity, was a sculpture, a bronze by someone who lives in Caracas and is called, I think, Littman. It portrayed a woman (in a bathing suit!) clutching her knees, her head between them, so that she became all but spherical. She was supposed to sit on a rubber cushion, but that came later. Stanley said he also had a McWilliam, whose work in the museum at Norwich I had particularly disliked. He shares his name with my first Head Monitor at Lockites. Stanley seems happy, certainly happier, since he is back in work. Having lost the ambition to be the best, or even good, he wants above all to be comfortable. The extraordinary is for others; he will settle for jokes and cash.

Is he still happy with Yvette? She is an expensive girl who says she wants only the simple life. She loves flowers, but her flowers involve gardeners. The complications of simplicity are the comedy of riches. They are thinking of leaving the mansion on Stone Canyon to their staff and removing to Yvette’s old place on Oak Pass. The little house has recently been brutalised. They let it to a lawyer and his wife who had an option to buy which they had to exercise by a certain date. They failed to do so, but then claimed the right to buy the place anyway.

The Donens tried to evict them, after the rent had been withheld for two years. The tenants considered themselves the owners since they had deposited 10 per cent of the putative price. The Donens eventually won the lawsuit, but the lawyer and his lady were not good losers. The unoccupied house and the adjacent bungalow were attached with picks and axes. The cost of replacing the glass alone will be fifteen grand, not covered by insurance. Some of the furniture was missing.

The police called the ex-tenants who confessed to holding the stolen property against the settlement of outstanding grievances. It was clear that the damage had been at least commissioned by the aggrieved couple, but there was no proof. The police said it was ‘a civil matter’. How could the vandalisation of a house be regarded as something to be settled in private? Well, it was.

The LAPD were more interested in the fact that the man had no job and no known source of income (he did not practise law). They suspected him of being involved in drugs. Stanley said that they discovered bundles of letters in the house addressed to Swinging Publications, in which the man declared the bisexual appetites of his wife. She liked to play ‘the aggressive role’. Stanley chose to be shocked by the blatancy of this correspondence which, it would appear, had been left almost aggressively behind. I suspect that Stanley is haunted by the scandalous propensities (and potency perhaps) of those around him. There is uneasiness in the way that he speaks of Y. and in his determination to make money. This has led him to agree to produce a scifi movie for John Barry. It smacks of a panic dash for cash by a man in need of gilded reassurance.

He was thoroughly nice while he was here. He suggested that we rose at 7.30 on the day he left in order to have a second doubles match with Stee and reported promptly for play. There is a desperation behind the niceness though, as if he could not be so nice if he were not so desperate. He has agreed that he will never be great and wants to be rich instead. The beating he has taken from the critics has loosened his vanity. I was left with the sorry sense that if I write a film for him I would be well advised to avoid excellence; something good enough will be more than good enough.

5.6.78. The Mardigians came here on their holiday. She is about forty, with a nose job and curly back-combed hair. Decidedly slim, she knows how to take photographs even at dusk. They have five children from previous misalliances, none in common. He pats her flat belly, ‘Not bad for two kids.’ An interior decorator, she studied Art History at UCLA and now employs four people. She did John Calley’s office. She seems shocked by the money people spend, but lives on her percentage of it.

Last year they had to cancel their European trip because they couldn’t afford it. Her business had been so successful that the taxes impoverished them. Dedicated Europhiles, they have booked all their hotels in LA, to avoid anxieties over language. I asked Merle whether her clients fell in love with her. ‘Only all the time.’ Often they are in a mid-life crisis and are setting up home again with plenty of money and a determination not to make any more mistakes, which is their mistake: it makes them nervous and fussy.

Merle is a patient pander, comforting clients with inanimate pleasures. Sedulous in canvassing clients’ likes and dislikes, she will not move anything into the house until she can put everything in it. Like the delicious whore who will not allow a man to look until she is perfectly naked, M. will not give the client a sight of his house until it is perfectly dressed. So far, she has had no dissatisfied customers. She works often with the same architect, with whom she clicked years ago. There is about her an air of modest competence. She has none of the ladylikeness (and long Bostonian a’s) of Joan Axelrod, whom S.D., with uncharacteristic savagery, describes as ‘literally dirty; she doesn’t wash’.

The odd thing about Lynn is that one cannot recall what she looks like. One dreads meeting her again for fear of not recognising her. Is she the same woman with whom I had drinks at the Beverly Wilshire? Her hair was black then and straight. She has not quite enough personality to give her a durable profile. Anxious only to please, she was not quite pleasing.

I drove to Bordeaux at 4.30 a.m., with the beginnings of a cold, in order to catch a flight that would allow me to get to Ealing in time to dub Something’s Wrong. As I overtook an articulated lorry, in the lightening darkness, it twitched in the narrow, tree-lined road, as if to pass a phantom cyclist. The fear of death rose biliously in my throat. I loitered behind the rig until the road widened and then surged past. It lumbered on without any deviation. Perhaps my lights had startled a dozing driver.

Dubbing was made a mild pleasure by the vanity of authority. A pianist who had to be a member of the Musicians’ Union played the theme from Beethoven’s Ninth with two fingers in order to provide the final false note which witty ignorance demanded. ‘E flat all right?’ ‘Fine,’ I said, as if I had something more chic in mind, but had agreed to compromise. I had breakfast first in the canteen. The recently married Graham B. joined me. His week’s honeymoon in South Devon had been perfect. The wedding no less so; 150 people had drunk 300 bottles of champagne without, it seems, spilling a drop. His cup is overflowing just now and I was measured a dram of the effluent. He was proud of having been to the Cup Final under the auspices of Jeremy Isaacs. He sat with Verity Lambert, immediately above the royal box. ‘Who won then, Graham?’ I asked, as if I didn’t know. He supports Arsenal, we Ipswich, at whose victory we wept silly tears.

The film is finished. Am I also finished with films, directorially? There is vain pleasure in the rush of invention to which power alone gives rise. The principal joy of making Something’s Wrong lay in the creation of an artefact about which ‘they’ can say what they like, or don’t like, without it mattering to me.

On Monday night, I walked down Baker Street to a meeting at HTV with Patrick Dromgoole and his henchmen. P.D. is a small, cocky man and a friend of ‘John Patrick Sullivan’ with whom he says that he spent a lot of time talking about me, at the Savile Club. He and his people sought to embroil me in the Rothschild project,