Personal Terms E-Book

Frederic Raphael

• Herausgeber: Lives and Letters
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

In 1951, when he was twenty, the novelist, screen-writer and homme-de-lettres-to-be Frederic Raphael bought a spiral-bound notebook from Joseph Gibert in the Boulevard St Michel and started keeping a curious kind of writer's journal. His purpose was 'to catch ideas and incidents on the wing' and 'to train myself to notice things as they were'. He continues this practice today, though the word 'things' has come to embrace more or less everything that matters in the writer's world. These notebooks are at once a detailed Biographia Literaria and a creative resource, not only for him but for other writers and readers. Raphael includes reflections, sketches for stories and other projects, vignettes of people and places. Some entries are pages long, some are pithy aphorisms, all in one way or another illuminating the vocation of writer and the equally urgent and vital vocation of reader. A writer's chief tools are watching, listening, guessing, keeping an open mind, reading the present and rereading the past to keep contact and faith with the works which until recent times constituted the imagination and critical discourse of our cultural tribes. Personal Terms is a generous collation from Raphael's notebooks, beginning (as Alice advises) at the beginning, and continuing the intermittent story up to 1969, that year of political crisis and disillusion. By then the eighteen-year-old boy in the Bou' Mich had become the author of eight novels and much else for the page and screen. He still visited (as he does today) Gibert's shop to acquire his enabling notebooks.

Leseprobe

Frederic Raphael

Personal Terms

The 1950s and 1960s

For Beetle, and our children.Always.

Contents

Title PageDedicationIntroduction1951195219531954195519561957195819591960196119621963196419651966196719681969Also by Frederic Raphael from CarcanetCopyright

Introduction

I may have dreamed of opening the bowling for England, but I never intended to be anything other than a writer. During my adolescence, in the 1940s, such an ambition was more unusual, and lonelier, than it is now. Creative Writing courses were unknown; authors rarely made a living. Had I sought his advice, ‘Oily’ Malaher, the Careers Master at Charterhouse, would have advised that authorship was ill-rewarded, and ill-regarded. Literary O.C.s were renowned for unflattering descriptions of the domus Carthusiana. No wonder that I was keen to be of their number.

Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That, for instance, was notoriously lacking in the school spirit, yet the classical education he received in Godalming was at the root of his poetry. With a little help from Suetonius, it also enabled him to make his fortune with two pseudo-autobiographies of the emperor Claudius. Graves’ idiosyncratically annotated, best-selling register of Greek myths was no less evidence of the benefits of the education to which he could never wholly say goodbye.

Like Graves, I spent my young years doing Latin and Greek proses and verses for a succession of capable, rarely inspiring beaks. A classical education was the assumed course for young scholars. If it was no preparation for anything so banausic as getting a job or even changing a fuse, composing proses and verses in the style of Cicero or Ovid, Demosthenes or Euripides, did at least foster the habit (or intention) of accurate imposture which proved invaluable in becoming a writer. The Old Man of the Sea is the unsaintly but engagingly mutable patron of anyone who aims to impersonate a variety of characters.

The Classical Sixth had only one period of English a week (taken by the Games Master who had to be occupied somehow), but even without it we should have been introduced, at a tangent, to a wide range of English prose and verse. Translating Macaulay, Froude, Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, Herrick, Gray, Junius, Gibbon, Tennyson and many other worthies into their equivalents among the most eloquent of the ancients offered an early, involuntary, experience of de/reconstructing a text. If the study of relativity or nuclear physics might have been more relevant, as they say today, what we did seemed an unquestionably good idea at the time. Especially since, if we came to do it well enough, it would secure us entry to Oxford or, if all else failed, Cambridge.

The Charterhouse library was both well-stocked and warm. Even the corners of the big room remained hot in the rigid winters of the rationed late Forties, thanks to the unusual, two-hearthed central fireplace. Smoke was ducted downwards, through a sort of S-bend, and then piped under the floor before escaping up a chimney at the side of the building. Periodicals were ranged on the flat top of the fireplace. My preferred reading was always Harold Nicolson’s Marginal Comment in The Spectator (its founder, Joseph Addison, was a Carthusian, as if I cared). The ease of Nicolson’s delivery, and his lordly diffidence, reminded me of Somerset Maugham. I had no notion that both men might have adopted their man-of-the-worldly stance the better to cloak the homosexuality which both of them practised, but to which neither confessed until after it was no longer a crime. Was I inclined to mimic their acerbic civility in the hope that it might mask the Jewishness which had set me apart from most of my schoolfellows?

Until I was seven years old, I lived in America, where I was born. When he was transferred to the London office of Royal Dutch Shell, my father – who had been born in England – consoled me for our leaving New York by saying, ‘At least you can now grow up to be an English gentleman, not an American Jew’. He was not ashamed of being Jewish nor was he disposed (like some other members of his sprawling, eccentric family) to conceal the fact. He saw no more contradiction in being a Jew and an English gentleman than St Paul had when, as a Jew from Tarsus, he announced ‘Civis Romanus sum’. Pre-war America, on the other hand, openly marginalised Jews as well as Negroes. England, my father liked to think, was more civilised. Its then unquestioned conviction of cultural superiority subtended a tolerance only faintly flavoured with condescension.

The assumption of an educated style was a respectable form of assimilation. As Dr Johnson proved, mastery of the Classics offered a regular way for outsiders to establish their claim to preferment. A first in Greats, we were promised, opened many doors. The cult of the ancient world was never the preserve of nobs, though the hierarchy had its share of prigs. The freemasonry of classical scholarship, from which small practical dividend is to be expected, is still generous with time and advice, even to eternal amateurs. A club without premises, its membership is by self-invitation.

Books were my escape from a loneliness with no other available cure. It was a relief to discover that all genius was misunderstood. I was prompt to conclude that the only enviable crown was composed of thorns. Art made a virtue of rejection. You did not need to be in a team to read a book. I got through the whole of War and Peace one summer term while walking, head down, between classes. It was not the first adult novel I ever read. During one lonely holiday, I had happened on a sepia-illustrated copy of Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage in my parents’ flat in Putney. The plump image of Miss Wilkinson revealing her stays while in the process of seducing Philip Carey was meant, I suspect, to emphasise her brazen want of charm, but it still excited me. When you were a solitary male of fifteen in 1947, you were glad of what visual stimulus you could find outside the air-brushed nudes to be scanned, furtively, in the monthly Lilliput.

Philip Carey’s misfortunes were both very readable and – because so unremittingly grim – finally rather comforting. I had the company of a public schoolboy even more ill-favoured than I. Philip’s clubfoot was an inescapable blight, more difficult to conceal even than Jewishness. Maugham was so pitilessly sympathetic to his hero that I guessed that he had used his own experiences to furnish his story. With a growing sense of liberation, I realised that my own adolescentangst could be dignified, and even treasured, by being transformed into fiction. Self-pity might be modulated into irony; pariahdom could foster an accurately disillusioned account of the futility of the human condition. I could hardly wait for further indignities to plume my eligibility for authorship.

In the hungry years that followed, I read many other – and not a few better – modern novelists, but Maugham had abidingly instructive qualities, not least that of nicely turned clarity. I am not alone in owing Willie a debt, though – as Gore Vidal has shown – it is often repaid in mature resentment at ever having had time for anyone so trashy. Such disavowals recall what Maugham once said about Norman Douglas: that the subject which he read at Oxford was ‘biting the hand that feeds him’. Maugham’s work is like the ladder in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus which, once used, is cast away. He was not, in truth, a great writer, but he combined urgency with durability, intelligence with professionalism. You are free, as he would say, to take him or leave him, but he did what he set out to do: he did not compile a few precious volumes but a solid, enjoyable oeuvre.

In the autumn of 1949, I went into the Charterhouse bookshop, which did not usually carry popular authors, and saw a copy of A Writer’s Notebook for sale. Maugham’s usual Arabic emblem was on the cover. I bought it at once. It was a providentially instructive purchase. I was like a man who knew only that the hands of a watch went round and who discovered one of those models with a transparent back, through which to observe the intricate mechanism and understand the means of its precise rotations. The old magician had consented to reveal at least a part of how he contrived his tricks.

Maugham’s text consisted of prudently abbreviated extracts from jottings from as far back at the turn of the century. There was something of his usual cunning in the apparent artlessness with which the Old Party (as Maugham prophylactically called himself) failed to excise a measure of the callowness of his apprentice years. If, for that reason, he appeared more naïve than the chin-up novelist whose portrait had recently been painted by Graham Sutherland, he also managed to seem surprisingly, and engagingly, vulnerable. The knots of imperfection were part of the pattern in his carpet.

Maugham declared that he had never intended to publish what had been assembled only to serve as aides-mémoire. His notes were often scribbled when he was on his travels and recorded off-the-cuff impressions which could later be worked up into stories, plays or novels. Tersely interpolated comments indicated where, for example, a few quick paragraphs had later been elaborated into Rain, the famous short story about Miss Sadie Thompson and her ‘corruption’ of an English missionary during a drenched stop-over on a tropical island. Graham Greene once said, with reproachful admiration, that Maugham had done more than anyone else to foster the impression of the man of God as a repressed and joyless humbug. After my enforced experiences in Charterhouse chapel, I could hardly wait to join him.

I immediately bought myself a notebook and, in my first entries, sought to reproduce Maugham’s tone of world-weary detachment. Since I was working for the university scholarship which I was to take later that same Quarter (the Charterhouse year was divided, quaintly, into three Quarters rather than terms), I had no time for sustained entries, but I found sporadic opportunities for acid emulation. André Malraux said that people became artists less through looking at life than by looking at art. Mimesis is the source of most apprentice work. Originality comes later. Meanwhile, there was delectable duplicity in detailing the crassness of my fellow-Carthusians without their suspecting that a nascent Old Party had come their way.

The addiction to notebooks has never left me. It was not my intention, any more than Maugham’s, ever to publish them. I set myself to depict things as they were, not as they were said to be. If I meant to be unguarded and direct, I should have realised that the adoption of a style, no matter how perspicuous it may seem, affects everything described in it. Even Christopher Isherwood’s camera had a very specific lens, and blinked more often than advertised.

Since I have been unable to find my Carthusian notebook (I daresay it is just as well), the present cull begins at the end of my first year at Cambridge in 1951, when I was not yet twenty years old. Nineteen was very young in those days. In the Long Vac, I went to France, and the Mediterranean, for the first time. It was a romantic and enlightening journey with the girl I loved. She figures little in my notebooks, but she is at the heart of my life. For all my programme of disabused vigilance, I saw France not as it was, but as a lover does.

Our Parisian guidebook was Eliot Paul’s A Narrow Street, a genial memoir of entre-deux-guerres Bohemia. The post-war Left Bank had become the home of black-trousered existentialism (a philosophy which, I liked to think, sanctioned unlimited sex), but St Germain-des-Prés was also redolent of the artistic life which I longed to inhabit.

I bought my first cahier from the Librairie Joseph Gibert, in the Boul’ Mich. I have relied on the same source ever since. Spiral-bound, the pages are squared, like enlarged versions of the graph paper we used at school, with forty-two horizontal lines to the page. I always fill them from margin to margin. That very competent professional C.S. Forrester, with whose Captain Hornblower I sailed as a boy, recommended this way of writing to abort any temptation to hurry to the bottom of the page with spaciously laconic dialogue. Notebooks are distinct from journals or diaries. From the beginning, I resolved to avoid what the French call ‘étâts d’ame’, the self-conscious parade of one’s feelings. I proposed both to observe and to comment, but as far as possible to avoid my own shadow falling into the picture.

Terence Reese, the great bridge player, advised beginners to adopt the posture of mature confidence. By sorting and holding one’s cards as the masters do, the novice can acquire an attitude conducive to mastery. An initiate who sits confidently is not thereby empowered to make the subtle bids or execute the refined squeezes which mark the expert, but he is already positioned to do so. A young writer can do worse than to adopt something of the same determined intentness. If he can later transcend what he began by aping, so much the better.

I have excised some of the most naïve as well as the more overwritten paragraphs. Hindsight has been applied to little of what remains, apart from the correction of some of the howling infelicities. If I appear to deliver a portrait of the young novelist as a priggish outsider, there may be some truth in it. It is not, however, the whole truth: during my twenties, when I still sought to make my tone seem maturely caustic, even to myself, I married and became a father. As the years went by, I learnt to love my wife, and my children, and hence life itself, in a way for which Mr Maugham, and my own apprehensions, had hardly prepared me. Since these pages contain neither diaries nor confessions, my family life is depicted only in very brief and, I fear, sometimes petulant vignettes. How blessed we were in those sunny years when I thought that bad reviews were the worst thing that could happen to me.

Part of the pleasure of being a writer is to create a persona which others take to be indistinguishable from the man himself. Equally, of course, it is part of the reader’s fun to divine more from his words than the author intended. It may be that, if the dots are joined up, a clearer profile of the artist will emerge than he ever intended. However, what is said here will give a misleading impression unless it is understood that, as I became a professional writer (i.e. managed to live by writing), I grew more likely to resort to my notebooks when stalled in the doldrums than when occupied with demanding, and substantial, work.

I began making notes with apprentice eagerness; I persisted because I was interested to discover what my unguarded self had to say. These pages are not fair copies of fully formed ideas or consideredpensées. The act of handwriting supplies a style, and exacts revelations, distinct from what comes of using a typewriter or a word processor, but what is written in private is not written in a private language. Neither spontaneity nor sincerity is a method in art. These cahiers comprise a form of mediation between me and my selves. The truth emerges; it is not presented. Perception is an act; what men take to be reality is a construct, not a given. One’s own ‘inner’ reality is no exception.

In publishing these and, I hope, subsequent notebooks, I admit to being driven by a certain vanity (without it, how could anyone find the lonely resolve to become, and stay, a writer?), but I have also realised that their pages resemble the report of some private detective – no wonder Graham Greene made use of them so frequently in his fiction! – who has been tracking me all my life, pretending to be me. Their accumulated verbiage amounts to an involuntary dossier on what I have secretly been doing and thinking. They do not always put me in a very admirable light, but there they are and I must stand by them.

The cannibal strain runs through literature: each generation consumes what it admires and becomes whatever it has digested. Ambitious writers pick and choose whatever diet appeals to them. If these pages serve to remind some young person as callow as I was (if such people still exist) that writing is not about markets or advances or prizes or fame or fortune but about a certain kind of personal testimony, the wish to leave honest marks on the page, that will be excuse, and dividend, enough for making private pages public.

F.R.

1951

Ramatuelle. In the early evening we walked along the high road. The village was a turban scarfed around the summit of its hill. Piles of cork, unsleeved from the raw tree-trunks, stacked by the roadside; insects chatter and scrape. Beyond the village, the silver necklace of the sea, polished by the sweep of the Camarat lighthouse.

In the deep night we bathed on the long white beach at Pampelonne. Afterwards we made goose-pimpled love on shingle that stuck and freckled the skin. We walked back through the vineyards, past the farms, heralded at each one by vigilant dogs. There was a villa on the main road blinded with shutters. I called it ‘eyeless in Gaza’.

The villagers go into St Tropez in the bus for fresh milk and other food. The village shop sells only eggs (sometimes) and tinned goods. Women collect water at the spouting fountain in thin-throated tin jugs.

The Auberge de l’Ancre. The villagers spoke of it reluctantly. An English couple, who had come to Ramatuelle for the day, told us that they went there for supper. Asked what there was to eat, the patron chuckled and eventually said, ‘Curried chicken, as much as you can eat, mille cinq cent francs.’ Could they get a drink first? He directed them upstairs to the bar. The room was filled with couches on which couples reclined, smoking what seemed to be reefers. A waiter asked them what they wanted. When they asked what there was, he said, ‘The usual.’

The couple fled. In the village café they asked us how we were going to get back to St Trop. We said we weren’t; we were staying there. They said, ‘Staying here? What do you find to do?’ We were in love; there was plenty to do. A Swede whom we used to see on the rocks above the beach at L’Escalet called out to us, ‘Adam and Eve…Adam and Eve.’

Cambridge. D. opened her handbag and I happened to see that it contained a piece of lavatory paper. I asked her why. ‘Oh, to remind me there’s more to life than the things of the mind.’ Who but a Newnham girl would need, or select, such a reminder?

1952

A child was collecting shells in the shingle-strewn bed of the river. What little water remained jittered between boulders like fat, smooth muffins. The road looped round the river, crossing it where it narrowed. Whitewashed political slogans were scrawled on the concrete of the bridge.

Pisa. A chocolate-and-white palace like a child’s bilious biscuit. Flat-faced houses fronted the river. They had the emptiness of lost glories. The front halls smelt of tobacco and old women. Many bridges crossed the river, few with traffic on them. An occasional tram flipped left or right from a bridge and resumed its even course to the station or the duomo. A little Russian church, meretricious with pinnacles and statues, crouched down by the river, under the big houses with their blank façades, like milady’s pooch, pert and distinct, in some smug bourgeois painting.

Fontainebleau. The tram was olive green, with straw-mat seats. The conductor was an old man with a wispy moustache and a tired square cap. He collected the fares and put them in a leather satchel. We swayed and jolted through the back streets of the town, past recondite mansions, little cafés and general stores. In the early morning, the café owners hose down their tables and chairs and rely on the sun to dry them before the customers arrive. Snails could have overtaken us. It was a place that seemed to be waiting to die. The old conductor and the tram seemed necessary to each other; when one died, so would the other. We had to run to catch the train.

Lyon. We tried to leave our luggage at the station but were warned that it was ‘déconseillé’. The man was unwilling to say why. Later we discovered that a strike was imminent. If we had left our bags, we should have been sentenced to stay in Lyon until the grève ended.

The nearest cheap hotel was beside a heavy steel railway bridge. You went through the restaurant to the office. A large dog growled. We were advised that it was trained to bite anyone who stroked it. The patron was scarcely able to write and had protracted difficulty in filling in our fiches.

To get to our room, we had to go through a glass door to the adjacent stairs. They were of greeny stone and, in the evening, very dark. There was a lavatory on each half-landing: an enamel covered hole in the floor. When you pulled the chain, the whole floor flooded with dark water. The bedroom contained a double bed, a wardrobe, a single chair, a basin (behind a screen) with one tap. A bare bulb hung from the ceiling. 650 francs.

Heavy, bent old ladies, in black, shapeless dresses, walked the narrow streets on knobbly, distorted feet.

Lucca. The station is outside the fifteenth-century walls. You walk along tram tracks, through a strait gate into the city. A wide drain divides the rich quarter from the poor. The people were suspicious because I wore a beard and looked fierce. They stopped in the street and watched us go by. Once I shaved the beard, they lost interest. The young girls wore crosses round their necks and kept their bodies covered. Old ladies wore black dresses and cloth shoes. During the day, men wore jeans and T-shirts, but in the evening they changed into suits and ties for the ritual passeggiata. Radios play popular music all day. The heat is oppressive and dry as earthenware. The woman who owns the Pensione Ardea wanders about with her eyes almost closed and clutches a shawl around her shoulders.

Bagni di Lucca. The bridge used to be named after the Virgin Mary, but now they call it ‘ponte di diavolo’. It is arched like an angry, petrified cat. The upward slope is a sunny ladder to paradise; it soars as if never to descend. At the top of the arch, however, it falls in a warp to the left and ends deep in shadow, by the grassy railway line. The bridge is cobbled and steeper than any other bridge. It is solid and unbudging, but you feel oddly insecure until you reach the far side.

At Viareggio. The pedlars tramp along the hot beach, in broad straw hats, leaning away from the wide, heavy baskets on which they tote their goods. From where you lie on your rented mattress, they seem up to their knees in sand. ‘Bomboloni, gelati, aranciata!’

The Impressario. George Black is Alfred’s brother, and Albert his; their names are indissociable. G. is well-dressed, in a slightly ‘off’ way. He wears monogrammed shirts and his fleshy face sports a small moustache. The brothers’ office contains two wide his-and-his desks; standard lamps with fat cylindical navy-blue shades. Above the mantlepiece, a large chalk portrait of Sid Field; in the corner, a white mini-piano; on the shelves, reference books with photos of actors and actresses, taken years ago.

G. is courteous, offers cigarettes and seems on good terms with members of the profession whose calls he takes. All he wants is to please the public. He had just been to Paris and caught up with an Apache act. ‘As soon as I saw it,’ he told us, ‘I thought of it.’ The dancers asked four hundred pounds a week. Robbery, right? He memorised their routine and is getting a cheaper troupe to perform it. He thought a sketch in which some children end up burning an RSPCC inspector at the stake had a ‘splendid twist’.

The Foots’ house. The lavatory has an original Henry Moore on the wall and a bookcase to the left of the throne; serious books in it. The lounge is grey-walled, L-shaped; many books, cheap and fancy editions thrown together without class consciousness. A Henry Moore and Renoir, of a small pinkish woman; not very good. Marble fireplace; glass soot-screen; black cat. Crimson curtains in box pelmets; three chairs and a sofa, all upholstered in beige plaid. Squat lamps and flowers in squat pots. The ostentation of wilful modesty. Michael refers to the House of Commons as ‘the boys’ club’. Before he goes there, he checks in the mirror to be sure that his red, woollen tie is not straight.

1953

Grenoble. The bus crosses a steel suspension bridge and goes up a long street to the central square. The terminus is flanked by tinny cafés. Mountains rise sheer and sharp; a castle on a spur commands the valley. It is a quiet town. In the evenings the populace come down to the cafés by the river. The other guests in the pension were all French. The Grenoblois are hard-working artisans; there is no industrial unsightliness. The people are methodical, tidy and not given to ostentation. During the war, so I was told, they killed just one German a night.

Peter Tranchell. Renowned for his naughty, deadpan wit; one of his monologues begins ‘It is spring and we are beginning to feel ourselves again.’ We went to his house above Castle Hill to be instructed in how to write Footlights lyrics. He took the whole thing very seriously and was surly with anyone who sought to be amusing. It was, he said, wrong to write ‘In the nice quadrangle/ The vice squad wrangle’ because it was clear that the rhyme was contrived. Better to say ‘The vice squad wrangle/In the nice quadrangle’: the more improbable phrase should always come first. Sound advice, but for a famously sardonic person he did tackle his task with rare solemnity.

Another Footlights musician was famous for walking along Trinity Street and, if someone inadvertently bumped into him, calling out ‘That’ll be ten shillings’. One night he picked up a paratrooper. The next morning he walked across First Court to breakfast wearing a red beret.

1954

J.G.W. Davies. He once bowled Don Bradman for a duck. He talks about ‘the boy, the wife’ etc… He has no doubts and despises whoever does. The four ‘secretaries’ at the Appointments Board do not much like each other; they are united only in the criteria upon which they judge about-to-graduate applicants for jobs. They dislike Jews, ugly people and swots; they admire Blues, club organisers and Presidents. They noted of one of my acquaintances that he was ‘Jewy and wore Jewy-cut clothes’. Luckily, I don’t want a job and chose never to go near them.

A few years later, Bernard Levin wrote in The Spectator that there was no longer any sign of anti-Semitism in England (as we then called it). Perhaps he confused his own success, as the pseudonymous political columnist Taper, with evidence that Jews were no longer subject to discrimination or disparagement (he should have heard what his targets said about him behind his back). Since I had a sheaf of the Appointments Board’s disparaging remarks about Jews, both undergraduate and potential employers of graduates, I dared to write and tell him he was wrong. One of the Secretaries had even confessed, as if it were no sort of confession at all, that he felt ‘instinctive’ hostility to ‘the Chosen Race’. Levin was promptly on the war path and published the more contemptible comments in his ‘diary’. Lord Rothschild, he told me, ‘s’interesse’; he was sure that heads would roll. Fairly soon, however, B.L. (and his lordship) lost interest in the cause, not least because the revelations were received impenitently by the Secretaries. Certain assurances were, it was promised, given that such things would not be said, or at least recorded, again. But no one resigned. When I mentioned the matter to Bernard several years later, he had more or less forgotten about it. He told me that he destroyed all his correspondence at the end of the year and kept no record of what had been written to him. I asked him if he was not afraid that he would forget or destroy what might have proved interesting to posterity. He said that he had small interest in it.

Tony Becher and I went to dinner with Charlie Broad. The professor was sitting, reading, in an armchair on the far side of the enamel stove in the fireplace. His domed forehead shone in evening light that glimmered through the sash windows overlooking Trinity Great Court. Clusters of undergraduates were making their way to Hall. ‘Now then, come along, boys,’ he said, and showed us where to hang coats.

A serving table stood under the window, a tureen on the lower shelf. The dining table was already laid for supper: two glasses at each place; at the corners, a lamp-like candle-holder fringed with beads; the centrepiece a silver bowl filled with budding anenomes. Broad poured us sherries and sat us in armchairs. We talked of the weather and of travel. He took annual holidays in Sweden, but he was about to go to the US for a lecture tour. He had had to fill in many forms about his politics. One of his destinations was Delaware. Maryland had regarded him with particular suspicion and required him to swear not to subvert the constitution of the state by force. ‘I never swore to anything with a clearer conscience,’ he said.

The other guest arrived, Simon someone, a fleshy undergraduate whose family evidently included old friends of C.D.B. A gyp came in with a two-handled college tray with high edges. It contained hot dishes and a basin of soup. The gyp put the tray on the floor and unloaded the plates and a silver chafing-dish onto the serving table. Broad thanked him in an amused way, as though it had struck him that it might well have been he who served the food and the gyp, a Pole I think, who gave the orders.

Broad went into the scullery and lit the gas and heated the soup to which he added some grated cheese. ‘I think we can begin,’ he said, as he decanted the soup into the tureen. ‘Raphael, you might cut some bread, would you?’ He lit the candles and stood behind his chair. We went to our places and stood by them. Broad had the reputation of being an atheist, but we all seemed to fear that he might say Grace. On the chimneypiece was a framed canvas with a Biblical quotation on it in faded Indian ink. He regarded us (and our thoughts perhaps) with a blue twinkle of amusement and then he said, ‘Shall we sit down then?’

He is a small, well-polished man with those china blue eyes and a long thin mouth. He wore a blue suit; small, puffy hands emerged from white cuffs yoked with heavy gold links. In town, Tony and I often see him in sports jacket and grey flannels, a fawn scarf around his throat and a green snap-brimmed trilby. Once he told us that he was off to buy yoghurt, from which he cultured fresh supplies. It was, he assured us, the only scientific experiment which still interested him since its results were unpredictable. Under identical conditions, dissimilar consequences followed: if A, then B, but also if A, then not-B.

After the thick, meaty soup, chicken with rice and cauliflower; a Rhenish wine with it. The candles shone gaily, deepening the shadows in the room. A mahogany bookcase at the far end was filled with fat works by philosophers from a longwinded age. When Broad criticised MacTaggart, it took two volumes of some five hundred pages each one. Now he himself is to be the subject of a volume of critical essays, to which he is to add the customary responsive chapter. This tome will be a weighty addition to what he calls ‘the library of moribund philosophers’ (the editors prefer the adjective ‘living’).

Broad said that he had become especially fond of ice cream since he started wearing false teeth. It used to give him ‘tuthache’, but now he could enjoy it without painful consequence. It was followed by cheese and Madeira. A Victorian silver biscuit dish opened in an elaborate manner: by lifing two handles at the centre, the lid slid round and underneath the vessel.

When we returned to our armchairs, cigars were offered. Broad extinguished the candles and lit the lamp on the table by the fireplace. Tony raised the tactful topic of Comic Verse, on which B. is said to be expert; he quoted extensively from Lear, Hood and Belloc. He took us to see a first edition of Ruthless Rhymes which he kept in his bedroom. It was lined with books, mostly philosphical.

Later he told a story about W.S. Gilbert. He was informed by a young man who had listened to a rigmarole of conceited reminisences that ‘self-praise would never get him anywhere’.

‘On looking at you, young man,’ was Gilbert’s reply, ‘self-abuse doesn’t appear to have got you very far.’ B. reddened as he told the story, but laughed loudly.

We set about leaving at 10.30, though he seemed happy to have us stay all night. After the others had made their excuses, he said, ‘You don’t have to go yet, do you, Raphael?’ I did.

Charlie Dunbar Broad’s style of philosophy had been outmoded by Russell and Wittgenstein, but the latter had no little respect for his philosophical taxonomy. Although C.D.B. disagreed thoroughly with the former’s pacifism, which led Trinity to withdraw his fellowship, he dissented from the action taken against him. He had been one of three most assiduous of the young Russell’s students, and the most ‘reliable’. Broad’s principles were, in some respects, more honourable than his opinions: a puckish appetite for shocking people led him to declare himself, in print, to be an admirer of the racial theories of the late Adolf Hitler, but he never practised the anti-Semitism which he seemed to preach and, to judge by his attitude to me, he either failed to recognise or had no aversion from individual Jews. What he seems most obviously to have shared with the Führer was an admiration for blonde young Aryan men, which was, no doubt, why Sweden was his regular summer destination. He was a witty man whose indexes are unusually amusing. That of Five Types of Ethical Theory has an entry which reads, ‘England, Church of, The author’s respect for.’ When he lectured, he repeated everything he said; he repeated everything he said. I have copious notes of his lectures on Berkeley, but although I recall vividly his saying ‘I shall list seventeen objections to this theory; I shall now list seventeen objections to this theory’, I could not now say what any of them was.

The great actor was in his fifties, but still very good-looking. He took his new knighthood with becoming seriousness and saw himself as one of the pillars of the artistic world. He signed letters to The Times about the salvation of ancient houses and, especially, theatres. He championed poetic drama, though he and his wife preferred to appear in more popular work. He liked to be thought of as an intellectual, but he remained childish: his relations with others consisted largely in giving and, preferably, receiving compliments. Though solicitous and courteous, his sentences often started with the first personal pronoun.

His eyes were dark and lustrous. The front rows of matinées were said to be filled with women who booked their seats weeks in advance in the hope that his mobile eye might fall upon them. When other actors had lines to say, his habit was to turn his head slowly in order to give the audience a long opportunity to see him full face. ‘Is it…all right?’ he asked.

‘Oh yes,’ she said, smiling, ‘it’s perfectly all right.’

She had been ready to make love before he arrived. But she had not known that he was coming.

Later: ‘Do tell me you love me sometimes.’

‘Oh I do, I do. Sometimes.’

D. was away for most of the earlier part of the term. His illness became less real to us than when he was there, hollow-eyed and with his clothes sagging from his thin shoulders. When he came back he took care of himself. We thought it meant he was getting better.

I went to see him in the London Clinic. It did not have the usual smell of a hospital. There was a notice in the hall reminding those who were about to pay their twenty-eight guineas a week that all proceeds went to the improvement of the facilities. It is the smartest place in London to die. D. was on the eighth floor; a cheerful nurse took us up in a deep lift.

D.’s room had double doors, despite being small. All we could see was his head above a bank of flowers. He was in good spirits and often squeezed out that giggling laugh of his. We stayed for a couple of hours. We kept it light, and he seemed very bright. Yet it was hard to avoid the feeling that one was visiting the condemned cell: the prisoner might not look unwell, but he was going to die all the same.

In Cambridge, the comments have been unfeeling. Brickell said, ‘Oh’; Bricusse went as far as ‘Oh dear!’

A man should make up his mind, the philosopher told them. So they shot him.

David was cheerful today, when I phoned him. He is out of pain and eating good meals. Unlike other of his ‘friends’, I have seen a good deal of him. Why? I cannot help wondering to what purpose I may one day put my altruism. He is quite alien to me, a grey, emaciated figure in a hospital bed; now ill, now better; now hopeful, now desperate. What good am I to him?

D.’s mother told me that he has ‘a great chance’ of never being ill again. The relief makes the terror of one’s apprehensions seem almost wilful: a cruel dramatisation which allowed one to participate, safely, in a tragedy. When she told me the news I leaned over and squeezed her hand. Yet I do not think she likes me and I am not sure that I like her.

Pat Burke. She took Leslie and me to the French pub. Her complexion is shot with stage make-up, but her keen eyes are set in well-moulded sockets and her jaw is firm, fretted with down. She is a member of the C.P. In her husky voice, she told us, contemptuously, of the tricks of the Binkie Beaumont establishment. The ‘queers’ form a clique who can decide, as in the case of Sonia Dresdel, to run someone out of show business.

An independent producer took an option on The River Line, by Charles Morgan, and asked Pamela Brown and Paul Schofield to star. They took the play to Binkie and he advised them not to touch it. The independent had to relinquish his option. The next day, Binkie acquired it and put Brown and Schofield in the play.

Another impressario leased one of Binkie’s theatres for The Big Knife. The agreement was that if the takings fell below a certain figure the show would close. By the time Binkie wanted the theatre for one of his own productions, the requisite drop had not taken place. The other impressario began to hear that people couldn’t get tickets for The Big Knife. When they rang, they were told that nothing was available. The impressario himself called and was told the same thing. Binkie had instructed the box office not to sell any seats. The takings would fall below the cut-off figure and he could repossess the theatre.

The day the Tripos results went up was sodden and dank. I dropped off the bus at the corner of Caius and went through the iron gates of the Senate House. There were few people about; no one I knew. I glanced quickly at the glassed board and saw my result, and Tony’s First, and I walked quickly away down Senate House Passage. I carried a brown paper bag of books, which I had to return to various libraries, through Tree Court and out onto the Backs.

The Backs shone with beady rain; the river was pimpled with it. Beyond the Wedding Cake the heavy sky sagged with rain.

Out of the Blue, the Footlights May Week show, went for a week to Oxford before opening at the Phoenix for two weeks (which was extended to three). While we were staying in Oxford I again met W., with whom I had been at Charterhouse. He was engaged to a girl called Louise who, when we met, looked keenly at me. She told me that she had expected me to be ‘very rude’. I had apparently been the subject of many Oxford conversations. She seemed disappointed that I behaved less scandalously than she had been led to hope. When W. said that he had something he had to do, she asked me to go for a walk with her.

We went through the great gate of Christ Church, under Tom Tower, and through to the river. Heavy heat lay on the meadows, gauzing them with yellow and blue and white light. In the shade of the trees by the old farm people were lying, in twos and threes, reading or sunbathing. L. took me down to the Cherwell, which flowed between the shady banks from which Zuleika’s suicidal fans had pitched themselves into the water. Suddenly she said to me, ‘Do you think I’ll be a good thing for W.?’

I was astounded, and a little touched. I said, ‘I scarcely know either of you. It’d be utterly impertinent of me to answer.’

She shook her head, as if she knew that I had an opinion but was refusing to give it. She told me how jealous W. was; they had broken off their engagement and then resurrected it. She seemed to be trying to tell me that she was a more volatile woman than I imagined. She had been to Cornwall on a holiday and had met some man, already married, and became ‘involved’. She was ‘rescued’ by a flying visit from W. and S., a school friend of his.

S. told me later that someone of ‘strong character’ would always be able to ‘overcome’ Louise. It seemed that I too was regarded as a ‘strong character’ by the ‘posse’ of Old Carthusians who surrounded W. I felt that I could kiss L. if I wanted to, and that she would not be sorry. Somehow what she was telling me was an invitation to do so. I didn’t.

She and W. married and had six children. Louise became a Justice of the Peace and W. a businessman and then a lecturer in the North East. A few years after I met L., they invited themselves to stay with us in our rented cottage in East Bergholt. We were poor; they were presumptuous. Not long afterwards, I wrote a novel called The Graduate Wife, elements of which derived from my sour impression of them. They were the only friends (not excluding the dedicatees) to write and congratulate me on it. I imagined that they must have been blind to the à clef aspect of the book. Thirty years later, they invited themselves to visit us again, for the day. We had a very amiable time. As they left, they said, ‘Now you can write another book about us.’