Rough Copy E-Book

Frederic Raphael

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

Beschreibung

My notebooks are my conscience,' writes Frederic Raphael. 'They contain a writer's letters to himself.' This second volume of his notebooks covers the first three years of the 1970s: years of slump, treacheries and deceits in the film world, of literary achievement and private tragi-comedies - the storm that washes away weeks of hard work in the garden of the Raphaels' French farmhouse, the serious accident in which his father nearly dies, before being unexpectedly restored to alarmingly irascible life. Raphael's sharp wit spares no one, not the sacred monsters of the movie business and the literary world, nor the incidental characters whose unguarded stories and personalities become the material for fiction. Least of all does he spare himself. Rough Copy is a self-portrait of a writer whose precision and honesty are both entertaining and searching.

Leseprobe

Frederic Raphael

Rough Copy

Personal Terms 2

For Beetle, and our children and grandchildren, always.

Contents

Title PageDedicationIntroduction1970197119721973IndexAbout the AuthorAlso by Frederic Raphael from CarcanetCopyright

Introduction

My notebooks are neither journals nor diaries: they are insufficiently sententious to be the former and lack the regularity of the latter. They are, quite literally, cahiers, of the same kind that Lycéens use. They provide privacy for mental as opposed to physical jerks: where better than an exercise-book to work out, to bend and to stretch and even to fall flat on your face? Their always handwritten contents were never designed for publication. Then why should anyone wish to write for his own eyes in a style sometimes formal and even convoluted? Well, a notebook is a place in which to see what one thinks when there is neither market nor public: they contain a writer’s letters to himself.

In theory, I was amassing material which, as they used to say, I might later ‘work up’ into books or stories, but in fact I have seldom gone prospecting for recyclable gold. Although even dead wood can have its uses, part of the fun of being a writer is to tell oneself new stories. Sometimes, however, you can have had a good idea at a bad moment, or a difficult one when you want to take it easy. For instance, I am still planning to write a novel about Catullus which I began, and aborted, rightly, at Cambridge. There are fragments of a renewed attempt at it here.

The first volume of Personal Terms covered the years between 1950 and 1969. I assumed that the second would cover roughly the same span. In fact, I am slightly embarrassed to see, it covers scarcely three years. How should I defend what may read like vain prolixity? The truth is that, during the early 1970s, handwriting was a regular escape from the taints and temptations of the movies and public print. In private (if never in a private language), I could sketch people and things and ideas with no concern for what anyone else might think or say.

When looking through the sketchbooks of our beloved daughter Sarah, Beetle and I have been struck by the meticulous mercilessness with which she observed even the people whom she loved. Her unbounded tenderness and generosity towards others never mitigated Sarah’s urge to depict the truth. If these notebooks lack her genius, they echo that same will to accuracy. An artist’s pitilessness has nothing to do with malice, even though his or her vocation is, literally, to put things down.

As much as possible I have refrained from (or curtailed) introspective entries, but of course my most accessible target is myself. If in the course of depicting others I have supplied a join-up-the-dots portrait of myself, I am willing that it should be as revealing, and as merciless, as any sketch of anyone else. The self-portrait is least interesting when it is a form of self-advertisement. Michael Ayrton once taught Sarah a lesson she never forgot: your best model is your own anatomy. By looking at your own arm, he told her, you have a model for as many arms as Shiva’s.

I have changed a number of names, both from prudence and to avoid causing what would seem unprovoked distress. In other cases, in particular when fame has affected the subjects’ features, I have not concealed their identities. What I say about such people is not meant to be wounding, nor yet to raise me to some judicial role. When I pick up my pen, it is as it was when Sarah picked up her pencil or her brush: I write what I see and the pen becomes determinant in how I do it. I am not a camera: the medium affects the message. If what I say about friends, or even enemies, seems unfeeling, I neither apologise nor regret it, though I have no wish to give them pain. That is how they looked and sounded to me. As a writer, that is all I care about.

I began, and continue, with the illusion that my purpose is to tell what truth I can perceive, to pander neither to received ideas nor to editorial or public appetite. My notebooks are my conscience. Where they are callow, I wince; where they are pompous, I groan; where they are painful, I smile; and where they are joyful, I am tempted to cry. The effect of one’s work is not part of why one does it.

My editorial principle has been to avoid self-humiliation by correcting spelling and by abating long-windedness and tedium. I have trimmed, but not falsified, and I have avoided smart afterthoughts (except in the rarish form of notes). While I have cut a great deal, I have kept some things in the text despite the sane advice of my wife, my friends (notably George Walden) and my peerless publisher Michael Schmidt. If anything infuriates the reader, that is fine; if it bores him or her, it can be skipped without losing the plot. Like it or not, j’y suis, j’y reste.

FREDERIC RAPHAEL

Lagardelle, 2004

1970

I trained to London and took the underground to Sloane Square for lunch with Jo Janni and Jonathan Miller. A clear, chilly Chelsea day when my out-of-towner’s briefcase was a badge of shame. The kids, with their aloof glasses and pale faces, shaggy, long waistcoats, fun furs and unkempt wool, pace about carrying parcels or caressing their loose hair. Urgent loiterers, some of them lounge in the doorways of boutiques where, with a pinch of banality, you realise that they are, in fact, employed.

Despite a dawdle at Ward’s bookshop, I was first at Au Père de Nico. Must those who travel furthest always arrive first? I sat in a corner of the no longer popular, no longer cheap restaurant sniffing at Encounter, now a pressed, unseasonable flower. An article on Oswald Mosley had snared me. Jo arrived in a neat, dark grey suit; white flesh bulbous under Huntsman’s cloth; self-conscious with his first, black-rimmed, glasses. Had I ever had to wear them? My denial aged him. He had gone to Wales the previous day, but it was too fine for sport: the fish could see the cast and the shadows.

Dr Miller, rusty rather than red, bulked out in unfashionable gear, loomed over us with important shyness. He asked at once for cigarettes. I remembered him too barefooted and boyish for such urbanities. We practised a few philosophical falls and found we could still slap the mat with the old huggerhah. So: why had he in mind to do The Portrait of a Lady?

Vanity had brought him unprepared to discuss his own idea. I covered for him by asserting the essential cohesion of James’s novel, saying – as if it were well-known – that it was a mistake to suppose that the suitors whom Isabel Archer rejected would have been any more suitable than Gilbert Osman. All were impersonations of her various delusions: the theme was not – as Jonathan had proclaimed – the corruption of American virtue by European guile, but misconceptions born of the proud humility with which Isabel herself approached the experience of Europe.

When Jo looked dubious about the project, Jonathan paraded other ideas. He had the eagerness of a variety artist who, finding you don’t want a comic, confesses that he has always preferred juggling. How about The Golden Bowl (which I doubted that he had read) and/or Kafka’s Amerika? Set in England, of course.

Bragging of his victimisation by Hal Chester, who produced Take a Girl Like You, his sole ‘commercial’ credit, Jonathan disclosed that the picture had been taken away from him entirely, and re-cut. Hearing that Chester had even re-shot behind his back, I saw a director neither trusted by his associates nor sure of himself. He revealed self-doubt which doctorate, curly-headed fame and cosmopolitan connections were usually patched together to obscure: having failed to make a fool of Hal C., he remained too raw for reticence. Were it not for the big play he is able to make with ‘Larry’, whom he is soon to direct at the National, Dr Miller would now be threatening to return to medicine.

What he and I have in common creates a bond that both links and separates us: like one of those iron tow-bars used by heavy lorries. We proceed together, at a fixed distance. ‘Weak like hell, I must say,’ said Jo on the telephone later.

The Vice-Chancellor: ‘I made allowances for everything except a desire for frivolity. I assumed that anything might be asked of me except that I should find myself ridiculous. I accepted that my office be accessible to all; I did not entertain the possibility that it might be used to piss in. The students actually pissed in my desk drawers. They may claim a serious purpose, but their vandalism cannot be validated: the piece was an antique. Should Vice-Chancellors accept such expensive furnishings? It is open to question. But the ruin of something of quality is vandalism.’ Who could deny it? Right about almost everything, he did leave one with a faint, unworthy desire to piss in his drawers.

See a man as a victim and you can begin to imagine him a friend.

A screenwriter finds himself dreaming in print. Even in his subconscious he sees only the scripts of his fantasies. He cannot get his dreams produced.

Edward Hyams’ Killing no Murder inspires a callous look at the death of Mrs McKay. She was murdered when her kidnappers’ plan for extortion failed. Yet there are features of a mythic order in the case.

The poor lady was mistaken for the glamorous wife of Rupert Murdoch. The kidnappers were a pair of immigrant brothers (West Indians?) who assumed the wealth of the British upper bourgeoisie to be boundless. They demanded the ‘unrealistic’ – but appropriately legendary – ransom of a million pounds. At one stroke they would both do down the privileged and acquire the entrance fee to be counted among them.

The shattered family of the stolen lady – who, like all the female members of the pampered classes, was said to have not an enemy in the world – claimed that the sum demanded of them was absurd. Yet poor Mrs M. had been mistaken for rich Mrs M. because she was running round in the office Rolls (on business?). The McKays, no less than the Murdochs, made their money by invading other people’s privacy; the business (and pleasure) of the Press is to break and enter. If ever there was a proper scapegoat – its innocence being of the essence – it was this nice lady who lived blamelessly on immoral earnings.

The police announced the crime to be one for which there was ‘no British precedent’. Their amateurish investigation almost certainly ensured the death of the victim. The no less naïve kidnappers seem to have imagined that, as accepted immigrants, they were socially (and accentually) homogenised. Had not the local Master of Foxhounds called on them? They spoke undisguisedly on the telephone and showed themselves, with no fear of being markedly alien, near where the ransom collections were to be made. Their later conviction that they should be acquitted sprang from callow faith in British justice: they expected it to find them innocent even after they had been proved guilty, the form of justice which every patriotic criminal would choose.

It was always tempting to call him a phoney; his fame has made it a duty.

I shall die on a day when the undertakers are in a hurry to get away.

For The Triangle ABC: It is only when we are betrayed that we have a full sense of being alive, unless it is when we betray others. Or both; or both.

The rival professors were like the last two men to speak an esoteric language. If the other did not exist, the survivor would be unique; but then who would understand him?

Dinner with Don and Kay L. in Capener’s Close, an enclave on the fat knuckle of land between Belgrave Square and Knightsbridge. Kinnerton St glows with tight charm; it contains the smallest pub in London: a counter in the window of a small shop chin-high to the pavement. The incessant moan of large cars being chivvied into small spaces. After Frederic Mews comes Capener’s Close: metal gates into a narrow yard: doors on each side, a wooden barricade ahead. High above and beyond, a framed glimpse of navy-blue walls and white candle-brackets, glowing lights; the expectant luxury of a chic restaurant before the clients arrive. A man in a white shirt – a waiter who had not assumed his coat, maybe, or the patron checking the flowers – moved back and forth. We rang and the window went up: the maître d’ was Don. ‘You found it then. At absolutely the right time.’

I had bought a tight bunch of Belgrave Square pink roses for Kay, who came down in a long floral dress: pixie grandma. The first impression was of walls covered with pictures, mostly primitive, Victorian silhouettes, rag portraits, posters, lithographs; bric-à-brac everywhere, clocks, pot pourri under a glass dome, brass lamps: the cave of Ali Baba, brocantier.

A grand main room enlarged by the sumptuous paucity of furniture: big, elbowed sofa along the side wall under new pine panelling, faced by a pair of orange Conran chairs, a bench behind, on which our roses appeared in a majolica jug. Ice-blue rug on the floor, shaggy and lank; drapes almost to tone. Zena Marshall, the actress, had sold the place in order to appear homeless by the time her divorce petition was heard. A Welsh dresser at the far end of the room, hung with glazed pottery and china; white, hip-high cupboards along the wall facing the broad windows, designed (D. said) to cover the central heating pipes. You felt the place must be costing them a fortune. The rent is three pounds a week. They have a Westminster Estate lease with four years left. The two daughters go to a state school.

Odd to meet this socially ill-defined couple – whom we had only ever seen when they sold us Lagardelle – in the West End of London. They now revealed themselves once to have been the rivals of the Samuelsons, my distant cousins, who have become millionaires by renting out cinematic equipment. The Longs’ first flat was near the old cut-through from Shepherd’s Bush to Hammersmith: fourteen shillings a week.

After they had been there a fortnight, their landlord, who was a PO sorter, said that he had some bad news: a new rate demand meant the rent would have to rise to fourteen shillings and threepence a week. Every Christmas he came up the stairs with a bottle of port; the last Christmas they were there, he tripped and dropped the bottle.

Since the place had neither garden nor bathroom, they advertised for a swap. They came to terms with Tilly, a half-German blonde with a large bull-terrier and a garden flat in Maida Vale. When they told the sorter they were leaving, he was distressed. They promised to find him someone else. Tilly was presented as a friend, and accepted, provided there were no animals. They persuaded the old man that the bull-terrier had been given to her as a birthday present after the bargain had been struck.

Before moving out, they realised that the sorter no longer went off at six each morning; he had retired. After a lifetime at the Post Office, where he could get all his meals at the canteen, the old bachelor was unable to look after himself. Tilly – ‘The kindest person you could ever hope to meet’ – took care of him. Eventually, after she had left perhaps, the old boy died; of malnutrition, the inquest showed.

Don told us that someone had explained that the reason for all these new amusement arcades was that the owners were hoarding all the pennies. They were expected to increase sharply in value when the new decimal coinage comes in. A penny piece had only to be worth tuppence for people to make a 100 per cent profit. ‘It makes you think, that.’

It was difficult to turn in at the gate of the Auberge de la Montespan in the evening of a brilliant day. The windscreen was poxed with the hard smudges of dead insects. Their pimpled traces flared in the jaundiced lights of oncoming poids lourds. The routiers had the hauteur of men who must continue work when others have finished. I had to turn across them to reach the gate of this untried hotel. At the edge of the wide and dusty pavement, a motorcyclist had been knocked from his machine. He lay on that dark, recently warm roadside, surrounded by silhouettes of attention, his moto twisted in the gutter. He supported himself, like his own most solicitous helper, on a thin ex-dare-devil’s elbow; crash-helmet clamped red and white over a small, wan face. An ambulance drifted up through the traffic, yellow light rotating, like a relative looking for someone in a crowd. We wheeled under the lee of a panting lorry and through welcome gates and down to the riverside front of the prim hotel. Red flowers in concrete window-boxes dressed its déclassé nobility.

A., in Coventry at school, climbs a steeple on the old chapel, a traditional challenge: if he can do it, he will no longer be in Coventry. He is terrified but succeeds. And then, at the top, he realises that he has not had the foresight to bring with him the traditional po which would testify to his achievement. When he comes down and announces what he has done, no one believes him. Having failed to procure public redemption, he has – by witnessing his own fear – succeeded only in humiliating himself.

A.’s desire, which endures, to be punished – to be recognised – by someone more beautiful than himself. (Cf. the Ghetto child, quoted by Steiner, who wanted to grow up to be a German.) A. always remembers the handsome, naked young monitor taking roll-call in the showers. A later meets him, bespectacled and fat, at a bridge match where the other makes a buffoon of himself.

Robin Midgley called shortly before I finished my novel. Would I come to Leicester to do a production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof? Fear of being afraid made me say yes. The pay was a hundred pounds for three weeks. Beetle was touchingly willing to make the best of three weeks of hotel life. After a few frantic days finishing Who Were You With Last Night?, we set off.

It was fifteen years since my previous, and only, contact with the professional stage. Theatricals are different from film and TV actors; even when the same people work in both, they adopt different personae for the camera. Fresh from Cambridge, I recall reading the cast of Jubilee Girl brisk lectures on their craft. They heard me out with doomed indifference: condemned men sentenced first to listen to the padre. Marie Löhr who, if she is still alive, must be in her nineties, nodded sternly when I chided them for their lack of discipline; she set an example by always arriving first for rehearsals.

Marie had been a jeune première on the Edwardian stage. She remembered watching the Grand Fleet sail out of Portsmouth harbour in 1914. While on tour, we were in Southsea when Bulganin and Khruschev sailed home from their less than triumphal tour of Britain. We asked Marie whether we should wave or not. She thought that, on balance, we should: they had been our guests.

Leslie Bricusse and I had been hired to save Jubilee Girl, which was already on the road, by Al Kaplan, who had written the music. Leslie and I had written a musical at Cambridge. Lady At The Wheel, though derided by the intellectuals, had a remarkable public success. Later, Leslie, as President of the Footlights, brought our May Week show, Out of the Blue, to London, where we had had a triumphant season (thanks, not least, to Jonathan Miller). Lady At The Wheel was revived, and revised, and was about to be put on (and soon taken off) in the West End when Al Kaplan acquired our services.

Jubilee Girl was probably beyond saving. The knowledge that Al had put something over £25,000 of ‘his own money’ into the production gave us no sort of an anxious conscience: those who disposed of such sums could expect no sympathy. In fact, though Al had inherited Canadian millions, the money was almost certainly his wife’s (she was a grand-daughter of one of the founders of Marks and Spencer’s).

My memories of Jubilee Girl are occluded by shame. How did I have the effrontery to claim that I could rewrite, and direct, a failing musical on the hoof? I did not shirk the work, but I lacked the muscle for it. Al Kaplan did not blame me; he blamed Leslie, whom he had first greeted as ‘my boy’. I was the sidekick who had played the honest donkey; Leslie was, in Al’s disenchanted eyes, the unproductive lion. Many years later (it must have been in 1969 or 1970) Al Kaplan telephoned The Wick. I was not there. He told Beetle that he had read the then unproduced script of A Severed Head, which I originally wrote for John Schlesinger in 1965, and wanted to make the film. Al was both flattering (‘The best script ever written’) and menacing: if I didn’t help him get the rights, the film would never be made; he would see to that. When he called back, I told him, sorry, but I had no control over the script: Columbia owned it. I had learned in the meanwhile that he had been associated with Woodfall (John Osborne and Tony Richardson’s company). He had phoned from Italy, and it was there that he committed suicide shortly afterwards. Unfortunately, he did not prevent A Severed Head from being produced a few years later.

Robin Midgley. At Cambridge, I heard that he agonised over the Catholic faith he was about to lose (i.e. had already lost). He then grew a beard and has stayed behind it ever since, rather like the mayor of Mijas who went into hiding when he was a young man and dared not emerge until old. Robin has an unfrocked air, as if emancipated from shackles he now misses.

We left Langham for Leicester in the dark, Stee’s cot on the roof, chilly regret in our hearts. Mrs Southgate, our regular help, had left us ten days earlier in abrupt, melodramatic style. She once broke the foot off an eighth-century BC Persian pot which I liked very much. Without apology, she walked out, but – like the pot – consented to be glued back in place after a spot of proskynesis (on my part). This time, she was aggrieved by our having asked her neighbour to wash up one Saturday and Sunday when our intention had been to spare her.

Mabel is embittered by what she still craves: the demands of a real ‘madam’. She is nostalgic for the youthful subjection she enjoyed when the mistress thought to buy her with a cheap Christmas gift, and expected to be served night and day. The old toffs had their world; she had hers. We tried to pass a plank across the social divide, and then fell into it.

I parked the Mercedes in a puddled yard, whose guardian would call me ‘Squire’ for the next twenty days, and walked down a wide, one-way road to the theatre. It was a greyish-black concrete cultural pillbox that might have been made of roasted Weetabix. Bill Naughton’s Alfie was the current production.

The actors were sitting in the café up some steps to the right of the Box Office. They had the resigned air of those who are often called but from whom few are chosen. ‘Anyone working?’ There was a sighing murmur: I had cheated them by arriving on time. I threw over them that hurried gulp of the eyes which tries to look at a group all at once. I remember Donald Burton with his Dunhill cigarette-holder, his black and white nylon zip-jacket, his torpid alertness.

In the auditorium, Midgley showed us the model of the set. The reading began, everyone très compétent, a question mark against only Gordon Tanner, Robin’s late ‘choice’ for Big Daddy and the only ‘American’ in the company (he was actually Canadian). Tanner wore a mackintosh and a little felt hat and walked with a jaunty shuffle. His face was brick-coloured, eyes anxious and guiltily hung with droops of turkey-red skin like the bobbles that run down when an amateur paints his own window-sills. His reading had the right truculence, but he was unable to follow the lines in the text. If he raised his eyes from the page, he couldn’t find his place again.

In the afternoon, I asked what they thought the play was about, how true, and how melodramatic. Tanner emerged from his isolation – he had gone off by himself for lunch – and said that Big Momma was like his own mother, still hauling herself around sustained by memories of being Belle of the Ball in the deep South. It was disturbing, the contempt he revealed, like a goitre, for the old, indomitable woman who still haunted him with her European trips and her repulsive vitality.

Later he asked – with that attention to detail which often indicates, in actors and others, an incapacity to face the central issue – whether he should allow his whiskers to grow. Big Daddy was supposed to be sixty-five, which Gordon himself was not, ‘even though I may look it’. Big Daddy did not come in till Act II; I need not yet worry about him.

Midgley had booked us into the Carlton Hotel on the Loughborough Road. Thinly painted, as if the undercoat had had to serve as overcoat as well, it stood behind a broad, suburban pavement. A sign ‘OPEN’ dangled lopsidedly in the glassed, curtained doorway.

The new Mercedes stood out in front of the drab digs. The owner said, ‘I like your car.’ It probably cost more than his hotel. Our room was at the top of the building. Beads of water actually ran down the walls. I left Beetle and Stee guiltily. By the time I returned, she had booked us into the ‘Abbey Motor Lodge Hotel’, to which we removed the next morning.

The owner of the Carlton was about fifty; dyed black hair and a pale, subterranean face. Midway between an undertaker and his corpse, his withered smile was both pitiful and pitying; the dark suit would have looked better on a dummy. He asked at lunch-time whether we would like a ‘three-course meal’ at six p.m. In for a penny, in for five and sixpence. Thin, glutinous soup with lumps of plastic vegetable in it; cremated chops, mixed veg.; rather good sponge pudding. The other guests – commercial gentlemen or mechanicals in Leicester on some assignment – ate gladly.

The owner, with his wizened Celtic smile, told me that he worked for many years for Mecca. Then he had a chance to buy this place and had to make the big decision. He had a young family, but he had been married before. His first wife, and their grown-up son, was in Australia; just as well because imagine if they kept bumping into each other.

The owner’s new children’s seaside holiday the previous summer lasted half an hour, on a Tuesday. They drove from nine in the morning to somewhere on the East Coast, played on the sand for thirty minutes and then – ‘Oy, back in the car’ – were home by five, when the help left.

‘You should’ve seen this place when I got it,’ he said. The previous owners had been Poles (not that he had anything against Poles), but it was in a disgusting state. Husband and wife had had terrible rows, terrific. No carpets anywhere; people came and found nothing ready, dreadful. The wife had had her ‘brother’ living in the house. When her husband died, she upped and married the ‘brother’ within forty-eight hours. By the by, he wasn’t complaining but he had expected us the previous night. Rightly: we should have been there to see Alfie, but I wanted to give myself another day to get over the flu. He had turned away thirty or forty people, he said, who wanted our room. Yet the whole of our floor was deserted on the one night we stayed. The bed was narrow and the springs so domed we could not stay in it together. I slept in a narrow cot under the window.

The Abbey Motor Lodge Hotel (which cost us more in a week than I was paid in three) was a soft pleasure. At dinner with us on the Friday night, Midgley said that he did not believe in giving actors direct instructions. The trick was to make them believe that they had had all the ideas themselves. I consoled myself by thinking that a dull man hardly needed much self-control to prevent himself from bursting out with inventive intelligence.

On Monday, when we resumed, Sonia (the Cat) ‘dropped the book’ without any great show. The others – always excepting Gordon Tanner – were all appearing in Alfie, as well as rehearsing an Old Tyme Music Hall. G.T. had been little called until Wednesday, when we reached Act II again. He had, however, been visited in the Midland Hotel by Denise D., the ‘consummate artiste’, as she described herself, who played a minor role and told Midgley that I was ‘lovely to work with’. Having gone to help Gordon with his lines, she found him in the lavatory; she made this sound somewhat sinister.

When she proposed a cup of tea, he said, ‘I don’t drink tea’. She said she was just passing and again suggested a cup of tea together. ‘I don’t drink tea. Did Mr Raphael ask you to come here?’ ‘No.’ But would he like her to hear his lines? ‘Did Mr Raphael ask you to come here?’

On Wednesday, he managed the ensemble opening not too badly. He dried when it came to longer passages. At lunch, Carmen Silveira said to me, ‘I think we’ve seen it, darling. This is how it’s going to be when we open.’ When I reported this to Robin, he was between penitence and irritation. He confessed that he had never seen G.T. work, nor spoken to anyone with experience of him. Would I give it twenty-four hours? That afternoon, I worked alone with G.T. We were in the Mission to the Deaf (cold and appropriate). I fed G.T. the lines one at a time. The colder it grew, the darker the omens. Sonia came in; I let G.T. go, telling him that the words had to be licked, very soon.

S. and I worked well together; I did not find her attractive, she may not have found me so; but we were both attracted by the ease of our rapport. Robin arrived to tell me that G.T.’s last reputable credit was fifteen years ago. A replacement could not be found before Monday. Robin assured me that he would take care of the ‘unpleasantness’.

When B. and I were having our Bloody Marys before dinner, Gordon Tanner walked into the bar. He wore his mackintosh and his aged felt hat. ‘Hullo, pal.’ Beetle made herself tactfully scarce. Tanner said no, he had not seen Robin. He had just come to say that he just didn’t seem to be able to ‘get the hang of this guy’. However hard he tried, he just couldn’t ‘seem to get the words into the old noggin’. The timing of his resignation – I pressed him to a drink to celebrate the gentlemanly course of things – was so opportune that I feared an explosion if he went back to the Midland Hotel and found Midgley waiting to sack him.

I went to call Robin. As I entered the booth, I noticed a man with a rigid jaw, in a lank overcoat, push through the unmanned entrance to the hotel. R. said he would be right round. I came back to where Tanner was sitting. Beetle was on the other side of the lounge, annotating the MS of my novel. The rigid-jawed stranger came up from the lower level of bedrooms, among which was ours. Pursued by the haggard Buttons who was usually at Reception, he went straight up to Beetle and began speaking in a low voice. I was with Gordon and hardly noticed until I heard an aggressive note. I went and, Lytton Strachey-like, interposed my person.

B. told me later that the man had approached her as soon as he came in. He asked whether she knew Leicester well. No. How about Coventry, Birmingham or Northampton? Northampton she was too honest to deny: she had spent happy wartime schooldays there. So where was the restaurant, where could he get something to eat? She pointed the way. He ducked down the stairs in the opposite direction. Fetched back by the brave boy, he guessed that B. had given the word. ‘You told them,’ he flung at her. ‘Why did you have to do that?’ When we pulled him away, he charged up the stairs towards the bar. The headwaiter, Mario, a self-consciously hard man, bundled the madman out of the place. You could imagine the thud as he hit the pavement, and the dusting of Mario’s hands.

Meanwhile Gordon Tanner sat sipping his half of bitter. Closet alcoholics ask only for modest drinks. The most touching moment in rehearsal had come when Brick asked, ‘Have you known many drinking men?’ and G.T. had to reply, ‘I have known a fair number of that species.’

He reminisced about great actors he had worked with. He dwelt on Wilfred Lawson and Trevor Howard. Gordon’s wife, who was supposed to join him for the weekend, was a successful business-woman. She wrote ‘courses’ for businesses, how to do this or sell that. She was often the only woman in a whole convention of men. He had to go along as escort. His first marriage had been a wartime affair. He had not been abroad a year before it ended. ‘You’ve heard of those Dear John letters. You hear about them but I can tell you, it’s quite something else to get one of ’em.’

Alone with Robin and me, he told us how Wilfred Lawson had ‘pretended’ to be a drinker in order to ‘keep up his reputation’. They had been in The Wooden Dish, directed by Joseph Losey. On the last day of rehearsal, they had a run-through. Lawson was ‘assing about’. Losey came to the front of the stalls and said, ‘Either do the thing properly or go home.’

Lawson said, ‘I think I’ll go home,’ and walked out of the theatre.

They all wondered whether he would make it for the train-call next morning, ‘But Wilfred was there.’ What did G.T. think of Losey? ‘I don’t know much about him, except that he’s untalented.’ G.T.’s euphoria was marred only by fear of what his agent would say: ‘He’s going to tear my head off.’ He used to have Al Parker, but now it was some nonentity called Harold.

Gordon had been in The Devil’s Disciple with Trevor Howard. They had a scene in which, every night, T.H. would flick out his tie. One night, tired of this unrehearsed exaggeration, G.T. wore a bow tie. T.H. caught hold of the ends and pulled. ‘I went purple in the face, y’know? Damn near strangled me.’ You became an actor because if you didn’t like yourself, it gave you the chance to be someone else. We parted with bogus declarations of regret. Robin had already found a substitute.

I had one magic, cold afternoon, in the Mission, with Donald and Sonia. She had been tight with him at first, bursting out when he said that he felt she was annoyed with him for ‘not giving her enough’. She had heard that story before, she snorted; it always made her furious, that kind of mock-modesty. When she forgot a line, she would exclaim ‘Fart!’, as if it were the crudest thing she could think of.

Donald. His father was on the Halls as Billy Burton. He has a certain idea of himself (‘Me Gauloises, me cigarette holder’) and constantly alludes to his sexual needs and successes. ‘I told them if I don’t get me SEX regular, I get bad-tempered, but I haven’t had it yet.’ After rehearsals in the Mission, we played snooker on its uneven table. He subscribed to Time/Life’s Wonderful World series and was a Sci-Fi addict, very impressed by Arthur C. Clarke’s Profiles of the Future (in which we are promised intelligent hybrid animals who will literally do the domestic donkey work). Every single prediction made by scientists had been, Donald assured us, ‘fantastically conservative’. A Harley Street man had once announced that rail travel was impossible: anyone travelling at over forty miles an hour would be asphyxiated. The future would be here a lot sooner than we think. The crucial question was whether we would be able to fuck at eighty.

Since there is an infinity of galaxies, there must, he said, be other worlds. Given an infinity of instances, there must be an infinite range of living things, literally every possibility you can think of. Is there a fallacy here, I wondered, for instance the assumption that the universe, as it were, speaks English, that it is has a verbal, not a numerical, notation? No, not at all.

The vigour of Donald’s opinions is endearing. He has written a play, about a moon station, which everyone likes and no one has offered to do. The speeches are too long. But that is how scientists speak. He knows a number, including one who has ‘invented anti-gravity, the fucking man has actually invented anti-gravity, and nobody wants to know’.

‘What does he want them to do?’

‘Back him. The cunt wants money to go on with his experiments.’ Donald said of his cock, ‘It’s done everything except stab shit.’

‘Pleasures to come,’ Bob Cartland said.

‘Mac’ is married and has a son, Simon, whom they sent to Frensham Heights, a progressive school we turned down for Paul. Simon was bright, but suddenly contracted his ambitions, then he gave up school entirely and became a hippy. Communication with his father broke down. The boy has been living rough, has had VD, is addicted to the cult of experience. Recently he found a job: grave-digger, at sixteen pounds a week.

As opening night approached, I told the cast that time was short. ‘In future, therefore, you can continue to laugh at my jokes, but I shall stop laughing at yours.’ They took it well. The lighting supremo was a fat Canadian with an unlit complexion. He was indefatigably lethargic: it was impossible either to exhaust him or to bring him to life. Only once did I venture to overrule him. I wanted very little light at the end of Act II. ‘That’s the minimum really,’ he said. ‘Then take it all out,’ I said.

Alone that week (Beetle had suffered enough hotel life with a two-year-old, but would be coming to the opening), I went to see He and She at Cinecenta. The atmosphere was rosy with salacious expectation. Bolognini’s titles were seen over images of bourgeois life, at the turn of the century, sculpted in funereal marble. The stippled stone reproduced exactly the forms of crinolines, shoes, bowler hat, umbrellas: the hard ghosts of an inflexible society. It might have been the Trieste of Svevo. Among the frozen shades, more solid than reality, Larry Harvey and Sylva Koscina were less substantial than the stones through which they walked. Clever! The provincial audience had little appetite for Italian ironies; a squad of Archie Rices, they had come to see Sylva’s tits.

The first D.R., a ‘tech’, had only a few glitches: no hanger for Sonia’s dress, not enough liquor in the bottles. On Tuesday we had an audience. We held the curtain for a party of Russians from the university; they were awaited with indulgent awe. The performance went well. We seemed hardly to need Wednesday’s D.R., but Bob could do with another work-out. I spent the morning going over my novel and ordering modest flowers for the female dressing room. The D.R. – for which, unwisely, I allowed them to dispense with make-up – began lumpishly and got worse; Carmen missed an entrance entirely. Someone had been talking audibly, at length, on the telephone. After Act II, I called them all down and gave them my iciest tones. Carmen was so mortified she forgot a line in the third act. I embraced her forgivingly afterwards.

The only person to react badly was Denise, with whom I had had a spurious Jewish affinity since day one. On the Monday she had given me a fat paperback on The Theatre, ‘something to dip into’ during the tense days to come. Sweet! I failed to recognise a demand for attention (when an actress thinks of you, you are advised to think of her). Now suddenly she accused me of having my ‘nose in the book all the time’. ‘Denise…’ ‘No, I’ve been watching you,’ she said, sounding more and more like Portnoy’s mother. ‘I don’t like any kind of sneaking and spying,’ I quoted at her from the play. She was irked that I had failed to appreciate some new ‘interpretation’ she had lent to her small part.

I should have remembered an early experience in rehearsal for a TV drama, in the days when I wrote three or four ‘plays’ a year for ATV. An actor came up to me and asked me whether I thought that the hydrogen bomb really represented a threat to the future of the human race. I answered with a lot of on the one hand, and then again on the other. I had given him, he said, a lot to think about. Another actor sidled up to me and said, ‘May I say something? When an actor asks whether you think that the future of the human race is threatened by atomic weapons, the required answer is, “I think you’re giving an absolutely wonderful performance.”’

I bought the whole cast a Chinese dinner after the last, successful D.R. It cost all of a fiver. They were amazed by my generosity. It is a long time since I ate with people so glad to fill their stomachs.

55 BC. The crowd booed Pompey for murdering the elephants in his triumphal games. The elephants came to the pickets surrounding the arena and scanned the audience with baleful eyes, craving fellowship from the spectators.

The Producer. His frigidity is tempered by fervent left-wing convictions. Beneath the ice is a charge of violence and resentment. He cannot forgive his parents for his happy childhood. He thoroughly enjoyed his Public School; he had a wonderful time at Oxford. He was deprived of nothing. How can a man with such a history not be scarred for life?

‘You’d think that woman would relent.’ Mr Starling, the taxi driver who often takes us to and from Colchester station, bought a Ford Zephyr in partnership with his wife. Even under guarantee, it never went right. The days it spent off the road cost Mr S. money. He put the mileometer back in order to stay inside the guaranteed mileage, but even that has now been exceeded. Every breakdown costs the full amount and deprives him of income. It makes him hate his wife. ‘I had a thousand pounds put by, but that’s all gone now. I spent twenty-two pounds ten yesterday. I don’t know where it’s going to end.’

Mrs Southgate once told us that, during the 1930s, the Hunt Lunch used to take place on the village green at Stratford St Mary. One day, they had just sat down to a table laden with goodies when word came that the Jarrow hunger marchers had reached the outskirts of the parish. The hungry-as-hunters gentry were not shamed. As the marchers came within range, they pelted the ragged men with rolls.*

May 1970. A dinner given by Bill Frankel, of the Jewish Chronicle at the Athenaeum for Dr Nahum Goldmann, the president of the World Jewish Congress. I could not escape a certain feeling of taboo-breaking as I went up to the steps of what my father always regarded as the penetralia of the English establishment. Once inside, I might have been in a skimpily staffed South American hotel in a boom town that no longer boomed.

I sat next to Tom Wiseman, who looked haunted and exhausted, and Jack Gewirtz, the buttery Lit. Ed. of the JC. Brian Glanville, with whom I had kicked a football in the park that afternoon, winked at me. David Spanier was next to Tom. Arnold Wesker – in the centre of the table – looked like someone auditioning for the part of Jesus in an Arts Council production of the Last Supper. Long-haired, face messianic with gentle vanity, he made it seem that this whole occasion had been arranged in his honour.

Gewirtz – in his physical thirties, but his spiritual sixties – trotted out the old arguments about Judaism’s seminal place in the ‘Judaeo-Christian tradition’ and about the need for a theological sanction for morality. Whether it was possible to be good without God was a question of which we wearied in first-year Moral Sciences.

Tom said he had no use for organised religion, but the sense of the mystery of existence, the spiritual longings of men, impressed him with the need for belief, not in God in the accepted sense but in some immaterial principle. No cue for a song there.

Goldmann was a shrivelled old man with a crippled nimbleness of mind and eye. Frankel was an ageless Anton Walbrook, slyly intoning ‘Tournent, tournent mes personnages…’ The dinner was sublimated kosher: melon (‘I hope it’s from Israel,’ Gewirtz said; I hoped it was ripe), sole cardinal (Judaeo-Christianity creeping in), broccoli au gratin, apple pie, coffee.

Arnold cannot but seek to make any association reflect his personality. He breathes upon it, buffs and polishes, and looks for his own image in it. He wore a blousy blue shirt with unbuttoned sleeves and a little jacket, like an undesirable midshipman. You feel ashamed not to love him; he does want it so. He is forever announcing the goodness to be found in us, if only we would swallow his pills. The charm he seeks to exercise is rendered ludicrous by an inability to gauge the effect of his embraces. He is a dwarf who insists on measuring himself against giants. You can imagine him murmuring, ‘Nearly there!’ (to encourage the giants).

Goldmann’s after-dinner message was plain and pessimistic. If a settlement with the Arabs, and the Palestinians in particular, was ever to take place, then – logically – it must be closer, but that was the only sense in which hope could be expressed. The policy of the Israeli government was to have no policy. Its survival depended on a coalition of irreconcilables; at the first peaceful opportunity, it would disintegrate.

Goldmann is not popular in Israel; he is said to have opposed the formation of a state in the first place. He has quite easy access to Arab contacts; they do not hesitate, however cautiously, to get in touch with him. He told of nocturnal rendezvous and unofficial dialogues. The Egyptians are the main problem, and the main hope: they have no important common frontier with Israel and their main concentrations of population are remote from Gaza. As for the refugees, they are mostly a Jordanian issue, and it is easier to make contact with Amman than with anywhere else. How hopeful it all began to sound!

As Professor Bernard Lewis was to reveal, at length, the Arabs are more reasonable in secret than it is politic to appear in public. The Israelis fail to reckon with the political complexities of the Arab countries. They strike at them as if they had single heads and all they do is turn them into hydras. If they ever did have a single head, they have grown several under the sword.

Life is full of Gordian knots, and hacking Alexanders wanting in greatness.

David Spanier and I had had a silly spat in the hall of the Athenaeum after the dinner. I wrote and asked him to have tea. He said that would be ‘naice’ (he works for The Times) and invited us to dinner. Finally, he and I arranged to have lunch. He booked it; I paid. He wanted to explain to me the crucial importance of Israel, which I had failed to appreciate at the dinner. I expected some inside story of how Israel was a bastion of freedom and its defence the duty of all good men. David had had a we-insiders tête-à-tête with Professor Lewis; journalism had made him familiar with the famous. He was half an hour late. I had crossed to the Chelsea Bookshop and bought some Graham Greene short stories (very poor most of them) to pass the time.

At close quarters, I found that David’s schoolboy pariahdom had metamorphosed into ponderous courtliness. So what was the importance of Israel? It was that since 1967 he had felt completely different about being a Jew. And? And when he considered the sneers and insults he had endured, he was filled with Zionist pugnacity. Let anyone say again the things that he had heard said in the officers’ mess when he was in the army and he would pick up a bottle and break it over the slanderer’s head. D.’s personal history (albeit not unusual, or unaffecting) supplied a thin reason for Israel’s cause to be absolutely demanding.

What whispers from the diplomatic coulisses had I hoped for? What secret codicils to the General Will? D. offered only the genial fable of a once frightened rabbit now blessed with a snarl.

Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew, who cannot find his rest until the Second Coming, finds a fixed abode, at last, in the concentration camp. It is there that Christ comes again, in a cattle truck. He gives another chance to all the Jews who were never converted to see the Truth of His message. He is then gassed. This time, the Nazis kill God – without recognising him – and, involuntarily, liberate the Jews from their curse. The State of Israel follows. The Jews cease to wander, but their state is unsupported by notions of divinely-sanctioned sovereignty to which the Second Killing has put an end.

Jack Lambert told me of Willie Maugham lunching alone at a window table at the Garrick (a magazine open on one of those truncated music-stands which avoid your soiling the text). Young Jack watched fascinated as that jawbone, so notorious for cracking down on asses, masticated the club meal. Afterwards, by chance (as the ambitious always say), Jack was standing next to W.S.M. in line for the cashier. The Master turned to Jack and found only an unknown young man, who waited for some viperish aperçu. After a moment’s rumination, Willie announced with mordant clarity, ‘I’m p-paying my b-bill.’

Last summer I lunched at the Reform with Spencer Curtis-Brown, who had heard that I might be a suitable biographer for W.S.M. I had been told that he had a ‘hold’ over Liza Maugham, but this proved false. There were no ‘papers’ since Alan and Willie had spent wicked evenings destroying everything a publishing scoundrel might wish to find. There were no revelations, and without them there could only be a rehash. We let it go. Then, this June S.C.-B. called and asked if I should be interested in writing a film of Cakes and Ale. Would we come to dinner and discuss it? We met him at the Bull in Long Melford; he would guide us from there to Glemsford.