There and Then E-Book

Frederic Raphael

• Herausgeber: Lives and Letters
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

We had been instructed to start promptly at six, since the hall was needed again at eight. We pushed through the curtained doorway, like instrumentalists without instruments, and onto the stepped stage. The audience was still coming in. Uncertain of our running time, and with no one to introduce us, I thought we had better start. I got as far as 'Byr- ' when Alan decided he did indeed need his glasses. He delivered his rehearsed ad lib, claiming that his vanity was second only to Byron's, and put on his specs.It is July 1981, and Alan Bates succumbs to a fit of nerves as he and Frederic Raphael attempt to carry off an underrehearsed performance at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. This wry glimpse behind the scenes of the London literary scene sits, in Raphael's notebooks, amid clear-eyed analysis of the riots and social unrest then erupting in Britain's cities under Margaret Thatcher's government. Compulsively readable, by turns mischievous and coruscating, this latest volume of Raphael's reflections casts light on a period that saw the beginnings of a decisive shift in British and American culture. Along the way, there are finely incised pen-portraits of public figures ranging from Shirley Conran to Peter Sellers and from Robert Redford to Mary Whitehouse.

Leseprobe

Frederic Raphael

There and Then

Personal Terms 6

For Beetle, always

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction

1979

1980

1981

Index

About the Author

Also by Frederic Raphael from Carcanet

Copyright

Introduction

In his diaries of the entre-deux-guerres, Evelyn Waugh reports just one remark made by my namesake, Enid Raphael: ‘I don’t know why they call them “private parts”, mine aren’t private.’ Who was she? What became of her? Who knows? How wise she was, possibly, never to say anything else! As prolific as a writer may be, few of his remarks are likely to survive the winnowing of time. A man or woman may compile a ponderous oeuvre and yet remain, so to say, out of cite. This does not entail that none of their works are worthy of posterity’s attention: ‘Remarks are not literature,’ said Gertrude Stein. Indeed; but who can quote (or enjoy) anything much that she wrote, apart from ‘a rose is a rose is a rose’? She did also say of Oakland, California, where she lived as a young girl (and went to Hebrew classes), that ‘there’s no there there’. These tautologous triplets might as well have been her only progeny. Yet her fat aura still sits, as irrevocably sedentary as Whistler’s mother, in today’s Paris; the mature, just slightly rancid, eidolon of Daisy Miller, the American girl who never went home again.

Enid Raphael’s shameless observation was an augury of what has come to pass. With the advent of the internet, and its derivatives, what is now private? There is no veil of modesty between the electronic flasher and publication, whether of erotic images, confessional boasts, wild opinions or asterisked obscenities. The new media truncate language and turn clichés into cute, sometimes cryptic acronyms. Speed being of the essence, any attempt to be original, or even considered, is anachronistic. The response goes before we have time, or inclination, for second thoughts. How many e-mails are read through by the sender? Misprints, omissions and solecisms fly away unchecked. No wonder ‘flout’ and ‘flaunt’ are, according to the latest dictionaries, accepted alternatives.

Today’s reader of e/pistles misses the surge of anticipation which used to accompany the arrival of the post. The individuality of the handwriting on an envelope, and the thickness of its contents, promised, when they did, a ‘proper letter’. Once a letter was opened, hurriedly or with delicious care, the nuances of stationery presaged its quality. Nothing one wanted to read could be written on lined paper. Green ink warned of monomania. The slope of a correspondent’s script, his ability to avoid the slouch of the lines on the page, the use of exclamation marks or underlining, whether or not the pages were numbered, the paragraphing, even the charge of ink on the pen, the blots, the corrections, all such things were silent witnesses which alerted the reader to the character and merit of the sender. Even the way in which the date was inscribed (whether the month was announced in numerals or abbreviated or set out in full) told us something of the letter’s provenance and pretensions.

Part of what was valuable in correspondence was its privacy. The opening of the envelope promised, if you were lucky, something which might confirm what Robert Graves called ‘the meum-tuum sense’. To read other people’s mail was a breach of decency. A US Secretary of State forbade the secret service to steam open the mail of the German and Japanese embassies on the grounds that ‘gentlemen don’t read other people’s letters’. Alec Douglas-Home, I am promised, had the same wincing attitude when, in the early 1970s, MI5 disclosed how they had come on the evidence of widespread Soviet spying in Great Britain.

Somerset Maugham wrote a short story (not The Letter) in which a lonely planter, in Malaya, is so jealous of the many letters which his colleague receives that he buys one of them from him, unopened. The addressee presumes that once it has been read, the letter will later be handed to him for second-hand perusal. When its purchaser insists on keeping it to himself, it is the original recipient’s turn to be murderously jealous. Only Dorothy Parker had the brazenness to claim that, never mind the personality of the sender, the most acceptable letter was one containing the words, ‘Cheque enclosed’.

How many handwritten envelopes does anyone now see on the mat? The chances are that, even if there is one, the enclosure will be mechanically rendered. As for books, whose today are not composed directly on a PC? One freezing Boxing Day, more than forty years ago, my daughter Sarah and I went to visit the poet George MacBeth. He was living in a large rectory in Norfolk with Lisa St Aubin de Téran, whose portrait he wanted Sarah to paint. The damp and cracked walls of their unheated living room were hung with old typewriters. In the 1970s, it seemed idiosyncratic. Most writers today have, whether literally or metaphorically, hung up their typewriters. The last one to be manufactured was produced in 2012.

There was a time when American universities bought up the manuscripts of ranking writers, for flattering fees. Even the least of their obiter scripta were solicited and stored. In the 1980s, it was said to be no very rare sight to come across some solicited celebrity copying out the text of his old novels into an exercise book in order to supply the original manuscripts, convincingly tortured with corrections, and flying balloons with Proustian second thoughts. Did the cleverest of such fabricators amuse themselves by interposing new variant phrases, nicely crossed out, or even heavily obscured, so that PhD students might later have the excited pleasure of decrypting them? In contemporary cases, if we seek an original text, we are likely to find that there is no there there.

Last summer, at what was billed as an academic conference, I gave a misconceived lecture. The overall subject of our symposiastic attentions was Biography. When invited, I took it that we were to consider the topic sub specie aeternitatis: what would a ‘true’ biography be and how could a writer best approximate to it? My unaggressive case was that there were lacunae, even in the best documented lives, which could be filled, or bridged, only by an imaginative reading of what we knew in order to divine what tact or indifference had left unrecorded. No archive, however ample, embraces the quick (or the dark) of a subject’s life. I made a case for something like the intuitive, perhaps sly, precision which a picture-restorer brings to her work. In writing, the choice of tone and vocabulary, even when rehearsing facts, supplies a way of indicating how, in human lives, similar causes have different effects.

I took it that the ‘crisis’ in biography was to do with how literary portraiture might survive in a world of instant Facebookish facsimiles, soundbites and journalistic opportunism. If I was a little fancy, I assumed that was what was expected in the circumstances. It was not. The next speaker, a pale editor from one of the most influential London publishers, was not concerned with truthful depiction or nuance. His notion of a crisis was identical with that of the Chancellor of the Exchequer: a fall in revenue from the mercantile category under review. The suited delegate from the gratin of English publishing was no more than a sales manager in sententious drag. On his pragmatic calculus, profit-and-loss was the only aesthetic. He enlightened us about his anxieties by projecting a flow-chart on the lecture-room wall. It demonstrated perhaps a 0.7 per cent dip in the public appetite for his brand of canned goods. What was worth writing, we were led to suppose, was identical with what the writing was worth to him, Maecenas on the make.

During the lunch break, as we lined up for economic sandwiches and cellophaned salads, the important editor asked me, with demanding deference, whether I would let him have a copy of my lecture; he would like to post it on his company’s website. Having spent a full week composing a paper which I hoped would be erudite enough for the occasion, I saw neither honour nor advantage in supplying free pabulum to a man who had just declared that a sales chart proved how good a book was. ‘Why,’ I said, offering him the dirty end of his own shtick, ‘would I find it profitable to give anything to you?’ Ah, the sweet smell of burning bridges!

On the first available train to London, I resolved never again to play the pundit unless – in conformity with the current ethos – it had a resurgent effect on my economic flow-chart. As we passed through Esher, it occurred to me to wonder when the last published biography was composed in handwriting; and whether it mattered. Does it not? Handwriting refuses the instant scan, the seamless assimilation of a text into the machinery of production. It resists the prompt interpolation of editorial ‘notes’ and the suggested clarifications which give the progeny of Maxwell Perkins the last word in the boa-constricting process of turning a writer’s work into ‘our sort of book’.

Marshall McLuhan achieved instant, if perishable, fame in the 1960s as the prophet of the convergence of advertising, marketing and the arts. His annunciatory essay, The Gutenberg Galaxy, asserted that the means of production affect both the diffusion of ideas and then the ideas themselves. Movable type was, of itself, and whatever the intent, an emancipation and an incentive to vulgarity. Sacred texts, which had been clamped in the cloistered custody of the literate priesthood, became available for general scrutiny, and revision. Demotic versions and scholarly glosses replaced, or supplemented, dogmatic interpretations. As if by itself, print demystified religion.

It is said the Tibetan goddess Tara was once summoned up, in exquisite person, by an old man reciting his prayers to her in eighteenth-century Lhasa. Local theological pundits scrutinised the old man’s text and declared it a faulty translation. They required him to learn and use only the authorised version. From that day forward, the goddess was never seen again. The demand that all texts, trivial or elaborate, be passed through the homogenising medium of the internet entails loss of literary personality. Learning to write no longer has anything to do with having a specific ‘claw’, as Winston Churchill called it, when he reproached a colleague for typing a personal communication.

Who can now afford to disdain the instant legibility (and speed of transmission) which personal computers supply? When it comes to articles, books and scripts, one has little choice. Yet there will always be something about manuscript which cannot be duplicated by mechanical means. The fingers which hold a pen contribute something unique. The medium, whatever it is, deforms or informs the message. To use pen and ink is a form of drawing. Each letter comes without mechanical mediation. The fingers do a kind of thinking; they run on with the line into a gloss, and a gloss on a gloss, quite as if they had access to a reservoir of energy and acquired intelligence which is not available to the typographer. A manuscript is a manuscript is a manuscript.

In the 2012 movie Silver Linings Playbook, personal letters play a significant part in the development of the story. Supposedly written by the hero’s wife, whose affair with one of his colleagues has driven him at least halfway out of his mind, they would certainly have been depicted in handwriting in any film of the last century. Here, the message – when unfolded for the camera – is spelt out in the black legibility of a domestic printer. The intimate letters in Silver Linings Playbook have not an iota of individuality. Their content, supposedly heartfelt, is spelt out in platitudes. The producers took care not to alienate the audience by any unfamiliar usage. In an elevated version of the same nervousness, the editors of New York’s fanciest literary journal, so I am told, tend to query any form of words which might cause the reader to look at it twice. All prose has to conform to the house style; in doing so, as if by chance, it also confirms the house ideology. In journalism, smoothness and abrasiveness become de facto synonyms.

An everyday aspect of depersonalisation can be seen, regularly, on television. When bereaved family members declare their grief in public statements, almost all of them appear incapable of announcing their feelings except in platitudes: all deaths are ‘tragic’ and are certain to leave the survivors ‘devastated’. Quite often, such declarations of anguish are read out, haltingly, from pieces of paper. It is as if, without a menu of clichés, the speaker would not know what he or she was supposed to feel.

While it is understandable that, in cruel circumstances, people should be lost for words or too choked to express them, it is a sign of the times that the most convincing expressions of distress, the most seemingly sincere appeals for a missing person or child to return, or to be returned, quite regularly turn out to be have been uttered by their murderers or abductors. Such appeals are almost always delivered spontaneously, choked with the obligatory tears. Falseness now sounds and looks more authentic than genuine anguish. Electronic media, we are promised, provide a new means of education; and so they do: they have taught people how to lie. Such is the fruit of living in what Plato called a theatrokratia.

What is written, or depicted, on a computer is, in principle, instantly public, whether or not it was intended for publication. The risk of being hacked is an inescapable, not always wholly unwanted, part of the ostentatious narcissism implicit in the addiction to electronic media. Today’s Greta Garbos will never be alone, not least because they do not want to be. The indignation of celebrities swells with the prospect of tax-free damages; but those who live by the media must expect to perish by the same means. The pain caused to famous vanities is not of the same kind, though it culls a higher rate of recompense, as that felt by the family of Milly Dowler and other ‘ordinary’ people.

It is the business, and the pleasure, of the writer to take passage in a boat against the current. The Pharisees are a misunderstood sect. In an age of mass illiteracy, how is there not some virtue in taking care not to be as other men? A true writer does not have a career; he need not solicit votes, or even readers; his duty is to do whatever will incline him to do his best work, even if it means that he does it in obscurity. I persist in writing in my notebooks with pen and ink (even a biro seems to detract from the personality of a text). To some extent, I am enough of an antique Tibetan to fear that if I were to switch to an electronic device, for the sake of speed or legibility, my personal daimon would cease to supervise my verbosity. I do not think that I write better because I write from margin to margin on my squared pages, nor more sincerely, but I do write differently with a pen between my fingers.

I cannot claim that, when it comes to preparing my notebooks for publication, I transcribe my dated thoughts or observations entirely untrimmed. I do, however, try not to do what Bertel Thorwaldsen did when he ‘shaved’ the valuable ancient patina from the fifth-century marbles from the temple of Aphaia on Aegina, when they were on their way to Munich. I limit myself to correcting solecisms and pruning banalities; but I do not doctor my opinions or observations with the benefit of hindsight or in the hope of popularity. The transcription of handwriting does, however, incline me to shorten sentences and to omit the kind of busking which, even in solitary circumstances, can dispose a writer to ramble to the end of the page. I have also cut whatever might cause pain where I should not wish it to do so. For the rest, let the chips fall where they may. As the man said, ‘Ho gegrapha, gegrapha.’

FREDERIC RAPHAEL

2013

1979

19.8.79. G. Steiner, looking like the world’s umpire in a white linen cap, promises that the Swiss have a special unit whose duty, in the event of war, is to maintain a line of communication with the enemy. The Swiss boast an efficient military; but the authorities in Berne discovered that, at the end of World War II, the Japanese were already trying to surrender before the atom-bombing of Nagasaki took place. Later, it was realised they had been petitioning a deaf receiver. Hence the Swiss have resolved never to lose access to whatever powers might come against them, in case at some stage they conclude that they must throw in the towel.

More is decided by referendum in Switzerland than anywhere else. Universal conscription is the sole topic not open to such public question. The Jesuits, G.S. told us, have revived interest in their religion by advertising willingness to provide private space for just such a discussion.

On hearing that Shirley Williams was to be a fellow-guest at Lagardelle, G. tuned himself up with prefatory jibes. When she arrived, her politic deference rolled him over; that she is about to lecture at Harvard procured respect. She also has an imminent TV series and has been recruited by various research institutes and similar dispensers of emoluments. Her ministerial salary continued only one month after Labour’s eviction from power. Divorced and not yet fifty, she proclaims friendship to be the most important thing in her life. She has settled for being one of those bustling aunts who abandon being attractive in favour of being full of beans.

When she was a young MP, on a parliamentary delegation to Brussels, a ‘senior Labour MP’, a notorious coureur, invited her for a drink in his suite after an evening session. He soon dodged into the other room and emerged, fat and unappealing, kilted in a towel. Although staying in the same hotel, she fled into the street, either in panic or because she reasoned that he would not have the nerve to follow her into the open. She ran round a corner of the deserted street into the arms of three Belgian policemen. They accused her of being a prostitute and loaded her into a Black Maria. After she was allowed to go back for her passport, which proved that she was indeed a British MP, the police escorted her, with apologies, to her room. To be taken for an adventuress and a whore on the same night was some kind of an achievement.

A letter from Peter Levi, in reply to a question from me about dialogue in the ancient world. Beetle thought the handwriting on the envelope was that of a nut. Perhaps it was penned in the train. There is something warm as well as troubled there, a hectic ambition for excellence. Such a man implies that to work in the movies is degrading, but P.L. is not above having written a thriller in which he has his ‘worst enemy stung to death by Cretan bees’.

21.9.79. On the way to lunch with Fred Zinnemann, I bumped into Stuart Lyons using the telephone at the Hilton. He told me that Ken and Liz have had ‘a great shake-up’. They have always been a ‘close family’. Tanya, their daughter of eighteen, has been having an affair with Elton John’s manager. She came back to his place one day and found him in bed with another man. Stuart traced tears on his cheeks.

Geoffrey Kirk’s The Nature of Greek Myths. I am somewhat sorry to find it an excellent piece of demystification. G.S.K. claims that the going orthodoxy, which argues for parallelism between myth and ritual, is unjustified. His case is but slightly weakened by scholarly uncertainty about what precisely happened in rituals. Its excellence lies in disentangling drama from religion. The essential feature of Attic theatre was that it was theatrical.

Tragedy played against its affinities with mythology; that was the link between them. The urge to devise prize-winning twists impelled playwrights towards ‘truths’ never mooted until the advent of dialogue and the liberty of impersonation. In Agamemnon, Aeschylus invents slow motion: Cassandra’s predictions prolong the tension preceding the death of Agamemnon (and of herself). Her morbid prescience is more chilling than Agamemnon’s omoi scream or the post mortem report of the messenger.

The centre for the distribution of Grand Marnier is the village of Neauphle-le-Château (Seine-et-Oise), the place of exile whence the Ayatollah Khomeini set out to impress vindictive Puritanism on Iran. The French hoped to benefit from having given him asylum. When he reached Tehran, the stocks of Grand Marnier, along with all alien liquors, were smashed or poured down the drain.

4.10.79. Allingham on Byron: ‘He was a lord and he wrote vulgarly and that is why he was popular’. And why he would be now: there is something modern in B.’s rakish vulgarity. The English, in their solemn moments (of which academic criticism is a repository), cast regular aspersions on self-centredness. The abiding charge against Byron is immodesty: he exposed himself. ‘Poor dear me’ was his abiding topic. No modish dandy, he had to be the fashion rather than to follow it.

B.’s maiden speech to the House of Lords, in defence of the frame-breakers in Nottingham, paraded his dilettantism. His prompt departure on his travels proved that he did not propose to live with the consequences of his trouble-making. Losing his parliamentary virginity too elaborately, he became a now familiar type: the yo-yo man, who plays the toff with the common people and the maverick with the quality. He reconciled his contradictions by being an actor who starred in his own show-off. Hence his emulous admiration for the flashy Edmund Kean, who generated indoor lightning. Regency audiences, like today’s, expected genius to radiate both virtue and vice. Byron was never the type of mannequin that Brummell was; unlike the dandy, he actually did something. Yet since his work vaunts himself, critics have had difficulty placing it. Iconoclast and icon, Byron challenges categorical formalities. He was a kind of revolutionary: the conservative kind.

His fugues and boasts articulated the mutability of human character. When he announced himself ‘Turk, Jew’ and all the rest, he embodied everyone in his one-man band. The desire for reconciliation (especially of Greek with Turk) was his noblest quality. Vulgarity was graced by magnanimity. The lame boy imagined himself straight. His peerage, his eroticism and his exile planked an unsteady platform from which he sought, skittishly, to put a lever under English society. The chanciness of entitlement and wealth (granted by inheriting Newstead) primed his sense of the absurd. The lapsed Calvinist experienced everything as a fall. B. revelled, woefully, in the comedy of physical degradation, baldness and loose teeth. His sense of being damned – which lent fascination to the three executions which he made himself witness in Rome – required that he put as good a face on his own impending end as a gentleman player could contrive. With panache to rival that of Sir Walter Raleigh on the scaffold, B. welcomed the surgeons (‘Come on, you butchers!’) who came to bleed him to death in Missolonghi. His facetiousness has a gallant deposit: it gives heart to fellow-prisoners in the condemned cell which is life.

5.10.79. The scorn with which Plato confronts Aeschylus might be taken, by René Girard, to suggest the former’s dread of his double. The case for social stability was made in dramatic form by Aeschylus; by Plato in philosophical.

7.10.79. How little we hear of the acting qualities of Vivien Merchant now that Harold Pinter has left her! Combining intensity with lack of beauty, she seemed to possess some clever secret, of which H.P.’s departure has docked her. His presence was the secret. How nice that a cricket enthusiast has now selected a woman who boasted that she slept only with the first eleven! I know Harold only from casual encounters and from having supplied him with a small part in Rogue Male. It seems that he held his marriage with V.M. together for as long as he needed it to hold him together.

When the arriviste becomes the lover of a woman who has had many adventures, he believes that he has taken possession of her history, like a nouveau riche who acquires a mature garden.

The Muse. A writer does his best work when confined within a strict marriage to an unglamorous woman; his least good when free of the supposedly falsifying constriction of rectitude. Zola lost his aggravated sense of social horror and pity after he had left his wife for a much younger mistress.

13.10.79. I am waiting to hear of my father’s death. He had a serious infection, brought about by the inept replacement of the catheter which came out last weekend. Now he has pneumonia. He was not expected to survive last night, but did. I have long argued (money my argument) that he should be allowed to spend his last months, or days, in his own home. What has been killing him is exile in that hopeless hospital. I said to Beetle, and it was an involuntary confession, ‘I never really liked him’. But then he once said to me, ‘We love you, but we don’t like you’. He spent more time than he wanted in teaching me the games which he himself enjoyed: bridge and golf. He never cared to learn anything from me, even on topics of which he liked to proclaim my knowledge to others. He had a cold appreciation of the world, the result – was it? – of his humiliating and painful physical condition. Did he regard it as punishment for his sexual misadventure with Molly?

As a boy, I respected him as much as I feared him; as a man, the less I feared him, the more affectionately I behaved. If I came to love him, it was when he was weak and I was rich enough to stand free of his judgment. In the nine years since the accident in which he all but died, I have been careful to allude, with due tenderness, to what we had in common, bridge hands above all. Politics were rarely mentioned; literature never. Cedric was clever and foolish, considerate and obstinate, emotional and cold. He took no joy in nature. When he danced, he honoured the beat, not the music. He wanted Christians to be Christian because he believed, or hoped, that they would then be charitable. As for the ‘truth’ of religion, he was less sceptical than indifferent. He rarely chose to be outspoken. Irony was its only vestige, as when he spoke of Pat Cotter being ‘almost the nicest man in the world’. He became aware too late of missed chances: lying in the hospital, he talked of learning Italian, a language of gestures and flourishes which, at the best of times, he could never have mastered. It will be sad when he is no longer there, brave, dry and resigned. The shameful truth is that he is dying at an inconvenient moment, when I am beginning to move well into the new novel, After the War. Shall I remember all his good qualities when he is dead? I should like to think so; but his virtues are mediocre: never violent or cruel, he encased Irene and me in suburban security. He wanted to be a good man, but he had to deny his own history in order to stay principled. His wish to be ‘right’, in the antique dealer’s sense, turned him into a fake.

16.10.79. About three in the morning, ‘he stopped breathing’. He timed it well; we shall be able to do all that is necessary and be back here at the end of the week. Stee will not miss more school than suits him and I shall be able to give another week to the novel before I head for NYC, San Francisco and LA. The dryness of this report is a reflection of my dry eyes. I cannot weep again for what was pitiful nine years ago and grew pathetic. He hated the Hospital for Incurables, the condition that took him and the circumstances that kept him there. He saw the light dying, but never summoned the force to rage. Death cancels his faults; we are left with a sense of his misfortunes. They began in the 1920s, with naïve belief in Teddy Schlesinger, whose surgical skills would gain him a knighthood, many years after his apprentice ineptitude had wrecked his friend’s life. As a result, Cedric endured frequent surgery and dilatations without self-pity. His consciousness was dominated by his urinary tract. He suffered years of pain and apprehension until Dr Johannsen’s ‘miraculous’ repair of his urethra in the 1950s.

31.10.79. In the Michel Ange Houasse1 show at the Grand Palais: a small painting of the drawing school, a nude model with his hand supported in a deictic gesture by a rope hanging from the raftered ceiling. Another nice image: Goya’s Duchess of Alba, wearing a red sash, attended by a poodle at her feet, wearing a red bow around his left hind-leg.

13.11.79. Cedric was cremated on Thursday, the 18th of October. I never saw the body. I remember him in intensive care in Chertsey, swollen almost beyond recognition, on the night of the accident which tipped him into that long decline. I shed a proper tear when the Rabbi spoke in the little interdenominational set at Putney Vale cemetery. I used to cycle past the gates as a wartime schoolboy. Several people came to the funeral, although little is left of the family. I knew only Margaret Piesse and Jon Kimche, small and frail, soft-spoken, alert and charged with wary vitality (he is, among other things, a Swiss citizen). The Rabbi, David Goldberg, from the Liberal synagogue in St John’s Wood, was an Oxford man (Lincoln, and no friend, it seemed, of John Patrick Sullivan, who was Dean there for a while). He pronounced the Hebrew so that its unintelligible generalities composed a verbal shroud. They rendered death a clean and universal condition; neither blessing nor affliction. I had asked him to remark on Cedric’s habit of loyalty which he did in unaffected style. In private, he had something of the garrulous neatness of Freddie Ayer.

Goldberg was assisted by Mr Foreman, a weighty, bearded person who dealt regularly with funerals. He plays rugger for the Rosslyn Park third team. He told me that they were burying Leslie Grade that afternoon and perhaps overdid his lack of solemnity by observing that that was really name-dropping. He was very British; we were spared the feeling that, en route to Gehenna, Cedric had been delivered into the hands of funny foreigners. Some of the Gentiles in the congregation were so impressed by the beauty of the service that they stole the prayer books, for which they were pardoned by the Rosslyn Park forward. Adie Tutin, now eighty, announced as she got out of the car, ‘I’m next!’ We held a small wake at the flat, served by Beetle. The warmth of the gentle autumn day seemed to see Cedric off – oh those crematorium rollers! – under good, if vacuous, auspices.

13.11.79. Fine weather friends deserve more credit than they get. It is easier to like one’s friends when they fail than when they succeed.

My American trip was less an adventure, more an absurdity; if positive things were achieved, none were achievements. I paid my planned visit to the Bantam offices. I could wish that there was a genuine rapport between me and Peter Gethers. I kept recalling that his mother runs a cookery course at Ma Maison, on Melrose Avenue in LA, the most overrated ‘French’ restaurant in the world. P.G. can hardly be blamed for his mother’s dishes, but it is an uneasy omen so far as taste is concerned. The Bantam fraternity greeted me like the Messiah of the Week. It was, they said, unusual for them to publish an author whom they enjoyed reading.

The State of the Language. A day later, in San Francisco, I told the earnest English Speaking Union audience that the only thing that NY publishers were likely to commission was ‘shit’. The Mark Hopkins hotel, at the top of cable-carless Nob Hill, is a thickset tower. Its cavernous conference room was filled with those prepared to pay over a hundred bucks to listen, for six hours a day for two days, to the ‘presentations’ of a panel of patronising and mostly unamusing experts. The British contingent had flown in thanks to Laker Airways. I met Raymond Quirk in the lobby on the eve of the big day, a neat, correct-looking and furious professor with a Crippen moustache. He had been on his way to a cocktail party in a smart suburb, but ‘the fucking car broke down’.

The conference was opened by Ishmael Reed, a plump, moustachioed black poet, novelist and – what else? – professor. He spoke from a prepared text and at length. He accused and he lamented. His accusations were just and his lamentations righteous; but he was tedious and repetitious. He might have been presenting the treasurer’s report for a very dull club. He was determined to be uncompromising in his demand that black writers be better treated by New York publishers. He lost me and he lost the audience. Finally a note had to be passed to Leonard Michaels, in the chair, from Christopher Ricks, who had secreted himself discreetly below the salt but knew when a pinch was needed.

The next speaker was Richard Rodriguez, a Chicano with a grand mahogany nose and a PhD. Reputed to be one of the most brilliant students his teachers had ever had, he expressed, with controlled passion, the anguish of the deracinated immigrant. Assimilation through school and college had been a process of graduated amputation. The nuns called him ‘Richard’; his parents ‘Ricardo’. He had been persuaded, with patience and generosity, to come over to the side that regarded his family as folkloric anomalies. He had the resigned clarity of someone falsely accused of a crime of which he is certain he will be convicted. It was difficult for an outsider to understand why he took it so signally amiss that Walter Cronkite2 referred to his particular group as ‘Chicanos’ when that is how they speak of themselves. Is it analogous to a Jew’s resentment when he is referred to as ‘a/the Jew’? Rodriguez’s well-phrased statement was oddly moving. Yet he was so isolated in his pain that he evoked more embarrassment than sympathy.

Leonard Michaels was next up. He is a short story writer and a professor of English. He said that when he told strangers of the latter activity, they always said, ‘That was my worst subject’. And often their only one, I imagine, in view of the number of Americans who either study or teach it, or both at once. I sat at the long green-baized table, facing a thousand people, and wondered what the hell I should say when my turn came. Everyone else was equipped with notes and typescripts. Michaels gave the impression that, having come into academic office by administrative mischance, he feared lest one day he would be thrown back on his fictional talent. Pale and petitioning, he was a genteel Philip Roth, with no more than that naughtyish single volume, Going Places, to sustain his reputation and his confidence.

David Lodge, my neighbour, spoke after Ellen Hellerstein, a nervous, rather pretty 27-year-old, much younger than her age and on the verge of intelligent tears. She translates from Yiddish, which she learnt after being exposed to Donald Davie, who encouraged this ‘regional’ interest in her. Lodge is small, dark and Celtic-looking, like a refined J.P. Sullivan. He confessed to a tincture of Jewish blood, among other good things, and talked smart sense, in equally small measure. I was pitched quite promptly into frankness. Meaning no offence, I succeeded in offending Ishmael Reed by talking about Jews in New York publishing and how Jews, the outcasts par excellence, had somehow succeeded in crossing into the other camp. Doubting the value of the subsidies which Reed craved, I remarked that shit was more commonly and more richly commissioned than anything else. My petty impropriety was the first to be uttered during the long, tedious proceedings. When I followed it with a few sketchy imitations, I was accused of being a Shakespearian actor and accorded so rapturous a reception that I considered briefly declaring myself a candidate for the presidency. I asked them, during my number, please not to applaud too quickly and unanimously, since this led me to fear that I might have said the wrong thing. They loved it.

When the discussion was thrown open to the floor, an early speaker was a blind Catholic priest, whom I wished was sighted. I did make a mild, justified attack on the Church in a subsequent symposium (no drinks served), to which he replied with a cloying attempt to combine forthrightness with the all-embracing prayer that we ‘love, live and give’. Raymond gave me his quirky smile.

I asked later what Richard/Ricardo did, since I had lost my brochure. I presumed that he was teaching somewhere. ‘No,’ I was told, ‘he’s a gigolo.’ There was such dignified reproachfulness in his anguish that making love for money seemed an appropriate trade. Locked in articulate solitude, he could escape only by some act of intimate heartlessness. He lacked the muscle to be a pimp, with all the risks involved of keeping his girls and his territory, but the servicing of, presumably, white ladies made whores of them, without requiring him to take a businesslike stake in the world. That so brilliant a man should put himself on the streets (without having to go outdoors) seemed suddenly plausible.

Marina Vaizey looked almost young, still bulging, but with a shiny new face. She was emboldened by the presence of her brother, Peter Stansky, a professor of history at Berkeley; smug, belly-cosy, middle-European, never as slickly mid-Atlantic as her ladyship. Marina’s pretentiousness is on a diet: she works to keep it light. She has achieved the American Jewish female’s dream of being at once career-girl, mother, celebrity (of a negligible kind) and a Lady, if never a princess. We dined with Karlinski and some of the symposiastic audience, including a girl with great tits and the dress to advertise them. Her pneumatic presence passed unspoken comment on the whole middle-aged, middle-American occasion. I was pursued by a nice LA woman, married, who worked for a TV company and looked remarkably like Beetle.

16.11.79. The highlight of the gala dinner, for which I had carried my dinner jacket halfway round the world, was a speech from Alistair Cooke. He performed impeccably, and not a bit better than that. He made some excellent jokes I should certainly always remember, had I not forgotten them. Grey and groomed, he catered to the taste of his audience. There is something depressing about the admiration one cannot withhold from those whom one does not at all admire.

There was a long line at the United Airlines check-in for LA. Only two clerks were on duty. I remarked to my neighbour that this was ‘rather curious’. He said, ‘Oh too rather spiffing, what?’ ‘Listen, mac,’ I said, ‘if you want to make something of it, we can always do that.’ My American accent, praised by Dick Cavett no less ( John Simon would say ‘no fewer’ perhaps), was quite effective. The guy never spoke again until we were past the desk. It took a long time. As well as the rest of his luggage, the man ahead of us was dragging three hunting guns in what looked like individual golf-bags. The clerk was Chinese, slow, correct and inflexible. The guns, he said, had to be checked through separately and could not go on our flight; they would follow later. The big, red-faced hunter had a 150-mile drive after he had landed in LA and asked for the guns to be waved through; who would ever know? The clerk said he would lose his job. The hunter pleaded; he insisted; he appealed. He asked the clerk please to be a good guy, and a pal. The clerk would have liked to be a good guy, and a pal, but the rules were right there in black and white; he could not contravene them in front of the whole airport. The guns had to go separately. The argument was long and so was the queue. The hunter had to yield, but he also had to lose his temper: ‘You stupid asshole!’ A woman called out, ‘We’ve been waiting a long time.’ ‘You can go to hell, lady.’ The hunter stormed away, only to return, soon afterwards, to supervise the loading of his armoury into foam-lined cardboard containers.

Ron Mardigian met me at LAX and lent me his black Alfa Romeo Veloce for my two days in town. ‘Nice car you’ve got,’ someone called out to me when I was on my way to Factor’s for lunch with the Weissbourds on the Saturday. Over hot pastrami, Burt and Kathy were happy at the prospect of their imminent child. K. is not Jewish. The Weissbourd family consoled themselves with the observation that ‘she looks Jewish’. Kathy’s family were equally uneasy, but when they met Burt’s mother, they too were somewhat consoled. ‘Is she Jewish too? She is? Well, she doesn’t look Jewish.’

Ron and Merle live on Las Palmas, down in Hancock Park, the flat area of ‘old’ LA between downtown and Beverly Hills; once an enclave of Wasps, its real estate values are now menaced by prosperous blacks. The house, beige stucco, in no way advertises the talents of Merle, an interior decorator who has her office in a little guest-house across the large bricked patio behind the house; no pool for the Mardigians; they do a lot of power-walking, salutary stones in their backpacks. They are having their bedroom enlarged, so the roof was off a quarter of the house. The builder telephoned on Saturday, when I was waiting for my cab, and asked if they had put plastic on the rafters: it looked like rain. They hadn’t, so he came by a few minutes later, in a Cadillac, to take care of it.

Dinner at Giuseppe’s, the new in-place run by the chef whom Leslie Linder lured away from Scandia for his ill-fated London Club, where you got the best lunch in town, but which was torpedoed by its own pretensions. Leslie insisted on people not coming in unless they were wearing collars and ties; so they didn’t come in. The place now resembles a terracotta-tiled set, tricked out with plush chairs and flocked walls and cute sculpted forms. Giuseppe sat down at our table so often that I should not wonder if Ron had to pay a cover charge for him.

Thanks to Fox, I flew home first-class. My benchmate was Harold Vance, banking consultant, specialist in mergers. He came from Marina del Mar and kept a power boat; nearly sixty, tall, creased and lean, an ex-lieutenant-commander USN and then a professor at Harvard Business School until he decided to get rich. He was flying to Hamburg to merge some people. Aloof, ruthless and conservative, he liked his juniors to wear suits and ties and for the women in the office to sport bras; he didn’t like them to ‘jiggle’. He was used to being obeyed. His sense of responsibility towards his staff was compounded of duty and contempt. A bully who never raised his voice, a proponent of fair play, provided the dice were loaded in his favour, he was certain that Great Britain was ‘finished’, although he liked the English and respected their best brains. British industry was beyond redemption. The US was still the most efficient manufacturing nation. He could promise me that the dollar would recover.

The energy situation was not a serious threat to the future; there was enough gas available in the shale of the state of Colorado alone to last another hundred and twenty years at the present rate of consumption. The problem was ecologically acceptable exploitation and that was being licked right now by a process that could bake the ash into bricks and allow its practical re-use as foundations. As for the mid-East, there was always ‘the 50,000 marines solution’. And what was that? Sending 50,000 marine advisers to Saudi Arabia to maintain oil supplies. What if the Russians would not allow such a neat answer to the Gordian knot? Might not they also have their eye on external sources of energy? ‘That case, we’ll split it with them 50/50.’

Mr Vance made no effort to be amiable, but he was being as amiable as he knew how. Careful with his diet and his investments, he is determined to live as long and as well as he can. He has a sailing and fishing pal who had been dying of cancer but was pulled round by a dietician; he now lives on a diet of ‘squash’. He brings bags of the stuff on board when they go in search of marlin. The squash has to be put in the bilge because it can’t be refrigerated. Vance has two young sons. I suspect that he is one of those men who, capable of stringent premeditation, marry a young wife at the moment when they fear that they themselves are about to be no longer young. One can imagine him running a plan for murder through his Phoenix, Arizona computer in case it could come up with a flaw he had overlooked. He has a ruthlessness from which his own performances are not exempt. Hardness in such a man is a matter of vanity: fucking literally and metaphorically are much the same for him. There is a capitalist class capable of dispassionate brutality.

He likes expensive toys. His tennis racquet, of the latest design, he calls an ‘investment’. He has bought a tract of land down towards San Diego on which he expects to make a killing. What concerns him most, and buoys him, is a conviction that the world’s course can be charted, and influenced. Intelligent guessing and taking prompt advantage of other people’s weaknesses are the means by which to remain his own, and the situation’s, master. To be a capitalist is a continuation of military command by other means. He cannot force young men to join his firm, but once they have, they must observe a quasi-official code of conduct and honour the uniform of an officer of the organisation. Their first duty is to generate trust; how can they deceive people otherwise?

The arts have no interest for him; they demand discrimination and disinterestedness. Unless there is an advantage to be taken, he cannot see the point of anything. He may not have been an anti-Semite, but no one was ever going to take him for a Jew. Yet he was, in obvious respects, the very instance of what the anti-Semite believes a Jew to be: loyal only to his own profit and the cultivation of wealth. He was content for the majority to be committed to rock music, junk food and casual sex. He incarnated perennial values, those of cash.

Across the aisle was a Saudi Arabian broker in the aeroplane business. He complained, at length, of having been searched, twice, at New York, even though he was a brother-in-law of the Crown Prince. He wore a pointed tuft of beard and smoked incessantly. In good English, voice strident with the expectation of deference, he said that he was going to announce his mistreatment to the royal family and that they would arrange for incoming Americans to be humiliated at Riyadh. I advised him not to take it too badly; after all, I wouldn’t be admitted to his country at all, however many times I consented to be searched. Consumed with aggrieved vanity, he ignored my amiable charge. He had told the customs man at Kennedy that he would make sure that he was fired from his job, but it had made no difference. The discovery that there can be functionaries who are not intimidated by well-heeled braggarts was all set to threaten the balance of the world’s economy. Mr Vance shrugged off the Saudi’s threats (this was before the Iranian seizure of the US’s Teheran embassy). Listen, he was never going to send any of his people any place where Americans were not welcome.

To do the right things for the right reasons is no recipe for satisfaction.

Oliver Taplin3 assumes that implicit in Aeschylus’s text is preserved the French’s Acting Edition, in which every exit and entrance is pre-ordained. Even if Aeschylus, as scriptwriter, supplied instructions for every step and syllable, his genius can be expected to evade any singular reading, including his own. Once in rehearsal, he was bound to spot opportunities for improved readings. The actor also has a part to play. A question for O.T.: were tragic actors talented?4 If so, their skill had to affect the meaning, i.e. the playing, of the play.

The tension, heightened by whether Agamemnon will agree to step onto the crimson carpet spread before him by his tempting wife, domesticates sacrilege. Much learned ink has analysed the ‘ritual’ source of Agamemnon’s fatal step on the royal drugget. In practice, through the king’s hesitation before yielding to his wife’s obsequious request, the play creates a moral crisis within its own terms. Aeschylus anticipates Pinter’s hermetic scheme: the ‘meaning’ of a play just is the tension generated on the stage. Since its words and actions have no external sources, the audience is denied the digestive comfort of interpretation.

England is in another retrospective convulsion about ‘security’. 1930s Cambridge is being scrutinised for signs of original sin. I suspect that the Apostles’ homosexuality was less the means by which they were recruited (by impressive older men) than the fuel of their recklessness. They already lived an illicit life. Duplicity had long been both a social habit and an ingredient of their pleasure. To turn Red and deceive the prudish bourgeoisie for moral reasons was an additional spice. The sole visible and audible consequence was the amusing tartness that issued in ‘camp’. What better cover for serious treachery than exhibitionist facetiousness?

20.11.79. The long-faced responses of Anthony Blunt (making a ‘Sir Anthony’ of oneself is already part of the rhyming slang current in the BBC) are enough to convince most people that he has been hounded by prejudice. Nice people liked to believe him when he claimed that he passed secrets to the Russians only when they were our allies against the Germans. Trevor-Roper asked the punctual question: what did Blunt think he was doing between 1939 and 1941, when Russia and Germany were allies and when he already had access to secret material? One might as well ask what the secret service was doing in enlisting him, since – as Hugh Sykes Davies indicated yesterday – he had hardly hidden his Communist sympathies. Did he owe his recruitment to another sympathiser? Philby? It was a petty relief not to hear that any Jews had been involved, but then someone called Samuel Kahane was said to have been the paymaster of the gentleman agents.