Ticks and Crosses E-Book

Frederic Raphael

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

Beschreibung

The fourth volume of Frederic Raphael's notebooks, Ticks and Crosses covers the years 1976 to 1978 with the sharp wit and provocative intelligence that made the earlier books an acclaimed success. Raphael observes the inner workings of film studios with the cool acuity of a classicist; he records his thinking on philosophy, Jewishness, and Greece ancient and modern, with the tough irreverence of a Hollywood operator. Among the pleasures of Ticks and Crosses are an account of a farcical summer afternoon spent floating down a French river on a lilo in the company of Shirley Williams; an alarming trip up the wrong (and by no means dormant) volcano in Guatemala; meeting Nabokov; taking part in Any Questions with Enoch Powell... The eminent are caught off-guard; aphorisms sparkle, and throughout, Raphael's love of French life and culture, his delight in the human comedy of social life, illuminate his unfolding chronicle.

Leseprobe

Frederic Raphael

Ticks and Crosses

Personal Terms 4

For Stephen, with much love

Contents

Title PageDedicationIntroduction197619771978IndexAbout the AuthorAlso by Frederic Raphael from CarcanetCopyright

Introduction

In one of his transports of bibulous lamentation, Kingsley Amis remarked that writing was a miserable, lonely trade. I have never minded the loneliness, which in my case has been offset by the pleasures of a long marriage. What could be more delightful than never to have disputatious colleagues, never to be subject to office politics, never to wonder if one was going to catch Gladys’s cold or be cornered in another lunch with captious Colin? Yet the writer is certainly a tradesman hedged by threats of disappointment (bad reviews) or disaster (the inability to make a living). Without a private income, he enjoys a fragile independence, dependent on finding a market or a patron. ‘Will they like it?’ is a recurrent question. He remains, to some extent, an eternal examinee, craving applause or honours. However grand or abstruse his answers, he is forever sitting papers, after which he waits for his marks and is promoted or relegated by forces he can never control.

Affectations of indifference to critical opinion are nearly always bravado: malice may be common, and injustice not unknown, and both must be sometimes endured; but it takes a rare spirit to be exhilarated – like Albert Camus’ Meursault, in L’Étranger – by the prospect of howls of execration. The only form of writing which exempts its author from fear of a bad reception is whatever is composed for his eyes only. My notebooks were not written merely because what was said in them would remain immune to criticism, but they have been filled, for more than fifty years, with private scribblings which I never expected would be seen by anyone else; when they issued in self-pity, or in self-importance, I hoped as much. I tried not to bore myself, but I had no fear of boring others: I could say what I wanted to say without fearing accusations of cruelty, self-indulgence or effusiveness.

It was only after decades of accumulation that I realised that my sketch-books, as it were, might be of interest to others. The realisation was hardly original: whether intended for publication or not, writers’ notebooks, like their letters, are often among their most enjoyable legacy. Herzen, Dostoyesvky, Henry James (I particularly relish his lists of possible names for fictional country houses), Henry de Montherlant, Somerset Maugham, George Seferis, André Gide, Drieu la Rochelle have all proved the pleasure to be found in fragmentary compositions.

It is nice to imagine that, without the pressure of editors or producers, a man writing only for himself might contrive a private idiom, richer in nuance, more daring in expression, than the well-rubbed public language. Wittgenstein’s prolonged arguments with himself, and others, about ‘private languages’ admitted the temptation, but denied the possibility, not of a code, nor of secret meanings, but of a language somehow truer or more apt than that spoken at large. Had I contrived a lingo impervious to understanding or translation by anyone else, how should I be able to understand it myself? My cahiers were privately written, but privacy is not of their essence. In many cases, they are filled with notes for books, stories or films and, on other pages, with attempts to make things clear in my own eyes: English is the best language available to me in which to talk, even to myself, though I do sometimes mutter, or posture, in French.

There is no paradox in the fact that what was never intended for them is now being edited for others to read. However, once this happens, exemption from other people’s judgements has to lapse. In editing my notebooks, I become my own ‘other’, as critical cant has it, and am tempted to cut my more callow utterances, to curtail solecisms and to leave my hobby-horses in their stables. Broadly speaking, I contrive to be my own cosmetic surgeon. On the other hand, since I have never entirely trusted a writer who affects to observe the world from a stance of immutable maturity, I have not excised all my naïvetés.

The title Ticks and Crosses derives from the curt critical practice of my friend, the late Guy Lee. Guy was my patient supervisor at Cambridge at a time when I should have been honouring scholarly obligations, but spent too much of my time in undergraduate skittishness. He was, and remained, an exemplary don, never seduced by the hope of wider fame or of the television celebrity which, more than fifty years ago now, came to Glyn Daniel, another Fellow of St John’s, who chaired the television quiz Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, in which archaeologists tried to divine the provenance of some arcane ancient artefact. Sir Mortimer Wheeler’s roguishly upturned moustache (the objective correlative of his amorous reputation) and rare knowledge promoted him into a national figure. The programme was the first symptom of the emigration of scholarship to a new world of media fame and, in not a few cases, fortune.

Guy was neither emulous nor envious. His progress in the Tripos had been interrupted, after a First in Part One, by the outbreak of war. He served for five years, part of the time stationed in Iceland, which was not his first choice of posting, but where he learnt the language. On his return to St John’s, he prepared to sit for Part Two of the Classical Tripos, but the college was short of competent young Fellows, so it was suggested that he not trouble himself with Part Two (in which he was bound to get the necessary First), but become the teaching Fellow which he remained for some sixty years. He never acquired a doctorate and he was never lured by foreign professorships.

Guy published many learned papers and translated Latin poetry with precise authority. His version of Ovid’s Amores was quite free: as much ‘imitation’ as translation. But when he came to Virgil’s Eclogues, Tibullus, Catullus and especially Horace, he agreed with Vladimir Nabokov that it was not the translator’s office to improve the original: one should simply convey its meaning with as much accuracy and self-effacement (not always Nabokov’s first quality) as the despised ‘pony’. Guy matched Horace’s metre and, where he could, his word count. He never deviated from the constriction piety imposed on fancy. He was one of those leather-elbowed English gentlemen whose modesty was his only form of ostentation.

After leaving Cambridge, I suffered a belated crisis of conscience with regard to the Classics and sought, too late, to repair the holes in my knowledge. My interest was revived more by books such as Jane Harrison’s Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (unknown to me in Cambridge) than by classical texts. I was a ready convert to the modern vice of giving more attention to opinions than to the dusty demands of philology. I flinched from that dread pair of twins, Liddell and Scott, Lewis and Short, whose dictionaries I still keep on an adjacent shelf.

I began to make a practice of translation only in the 1970s when I returned to the idea of writing a novel about Catullus. By way of preparation (and postponement), I made translations which, I liked to think, would give a new ‘squeeze’ – in the epigrapher’s sense – to the Catullan canon. I excused my exaggerations under the rubric of free association. In the middle of my scribbling (using a pencil made my excesses look provisional), I met Kenneth McLeish, then a schoolmaster at Bedales, and invited his comments. Chastened by his thoroughness and enthusiasm, I invited him to become my collaborator.

When our version was complete, we sent it to Guy Lee for his supervision. Neither cruel nor kind, he was specific and authoritative. He put ticks and crosses in our margin, and seldom needed to explain why. Two decades later, he revealed, in his own translation of Catullus, how he thought the job should be done, which was by no means the way Ken and I had done it. Recently, my old friend, that great and versatile scholar Peter Green, happily toujours vert, has done his version, different again. No one who has not had the pleasure of classical friends can guess at the generosities that can fly between them without the expectation of any reward but thanks. Classicists are the recusants of today’s educational creed based on science and utility. Unwilling to let go of the antique world which constantly changes form and sense as it is reinterpreted and reread, their greatest reward is the esteem of their peers, even if their greatest pleasure lies, at least sometimes, in puncturing them.

Kenneth McLeish and I collaborated on a number of translations down the years, until his death in 1998. Guy Lee was often our sounding board; his notes always rang true, whether on Aeschylus or on a fat fragment of Valerius Flaccus (of whose entire Argonautica my friend David Slavitt has made an excellent modern translation). Just before his death, Ken and I were planning a version of Petronius’s Satyrica. I was nervous of my competence to proceed without him, but determined to try. In the world of the Classics, the living and the dead continue their conversations. I hoped that the shade of John Sullivan, the best scholar of our time at Cambridge and one of my first friends in St John’s, would smile when I settled to work on Petronius, whom he had translated with his usual verve. I liked to imagine that I should have John’s imprimatur, but I did not consult his version when composing my own.

When I had finished what turned out to be very hard work, I sent my manuscript to Guy Lee. I had tried to be true to Petronius’s Latin, but I had not always resisted anachronistic glosses nor salacious exaggeration (no more had Petronius himself). After a quite short time, my version came back with Guy’s typically laconic marks on it: ticks and crosses. One tick signified approval, but two sounded in my mind’s ear like an ovation. A cross demanded correction; two crosses a retour aux sources, in a literal sense. I re-worked the text, in the hope of having to bear no more crosses next time, and eventually sent it again to Guy. This time, he did not employ his usual notation: instead, he sprinkled my margins with Latin adverbs, of which lepide, wittily, was not the least pleasing. When Guy praised one’s work, it was tempting to believe that he meant every word, from bene to optime.

Since this volume, the fourth of Personal Terms, derives its title from my grateful memory of Guy’s editorial stigmata, I like to imagine that he would find things in it to enjoy, though they would almost certainly not include the amiable references to himself. If I have culled the contents from what may seem a narrow compass of years, I have, in fact, been quite aggressive in cutting what were, as it happened, the very fat notebooks of the late 1970s. Like Catullus, I applied the principle of variatio: the way he arranged his poems (if it was indeed he who did it) goes to show that light and shade are better than unrelieved levity or solemnity. Federico Fellini advised as much when he said that a movie was like a circus: one should be careful never to follow a dog act with a dog act.

1976

15.6.76. On our way up to the St John’s SCR, Guy Lee and I met Howland, my quondam tutor. After operations for arthritis on both hips, the Olympic shot-putter is shrivelled and reduced. The same crinkled face smiles at the world, but from lower down, skin banded tightly around the domed skull. He has suffered, but remains good-humoured; as if he knew no better. He has all the qualities of a charming man, save that he cannot be serious. Guy saluted him as ‘Bede’, a title earned at school, where he was venerably industrious. Howland was prompt to show knowledge of the Senior Tutor’s remark in The Limits of Love: ‘So you want to starve in a garret with the best people.’ There were those (he meant Renford) who have neither forgotten nor forgiven the fictional use I made of them. Memories, like teeth, are long in College.

Renford Bambrough was my supervisor when I began to read Moral Sciences. I depicted him as Thornton Ashworth in my novel The Limits of Love (1960). It was meant to be an affectionate portrait, but he did not read it that way.

Guy was touched by my recent tribute to his Tibullus in the ST at Christmas. Echoing Peter Green after I thanked him for his 1958 review of The Earlsdon Way, I told him that it was the least one could do for one’s friends. Guy said that it was more than any other academic would do.

George Watson, a bibliographer now in the English faculty, contrived to meet us on our way both into and out of the SCR. He was suffered to accompany us to my car, in which I had left Hermann Broch’s The Death of Virgil, having brought it over for Guy, who is unlikely to enjoy it. Watson had an adhesive desire for conversation and coffee; Guy no inclination to accommodate it. At the bottom of his staircase, he said, ‘Freddie and I are going upstairs to talk about Catullus. You wouldn’t understand a word.’ Watson departed sans un mot. We went up and had coffee, G. and I; Catullus was never mentioned.

Guy thinks well of Renford as a lecturer; he may talk in very long sentences, but they have a way of coming out. Renford will end up being Master; Dean at present, he bides his time for apotheosis. Guy has no grand ambition, but takes pleasure in being on the College Council, which sits in judgement on issues such as whether to allow a college teacher to give up his duties (or to keep his rooms) on receiving a university appointment. Though no one ever says as much, decisions often depend on a man’s popularity. Guy’s modesty within the system renders his support of it guileless. He confesses that he still does not find it easy to read Latin without fear of misunderstanding.

Cambridge recalls a time when I seemed to be all of one piece, more thoroughly English than I have been since. Howland remembered that I had been between two recruiting sergeants; I chose the one with the less peremptory shout. Should I now feel more at home if I had spent two years serving the Queen in some regimental backwater? I might have enjoyed it, and have a better conscience, with a pip instead of a chip on my shoulder, but would I now be any more British? And am I any less?

Since I had a British father, but was born in Chicago, of an American mother, I had dual nationality until 1954, when I had to choose whether to be available for call-up by Uncle Sam or by Her Majesty. The Korean war had just ended, so I received word from President Eisenhower that he had noted my availability, but did not require my services; an offer I elected not to refuse.

I had driven over early to Cambridge to be in good time for my lecture to the British Council summer school for European academics. On the previous Saturday, while retyping it for the third time, I had a stammering phone call from Ian Scott-Kilvert, the organiser. The unfortunate foreigners had already been preached almost to death by those curates of the higher word, Bernard Bergonzi and Raymond Williams. I offered, with alacrity, to abandon my prepared text and rely on extempore nerve.

The Sullivans’ cocktail in Clare Hall, which is built on the Herschel Road site where Tony and Anne once lived. When we stayed the weekend, they would resign their double bed to us. Now J.P.S. advertises the imminent fracture of their ménage. After all his time in the US, has he forgotten how long English marriages can contrive to hobble? Renford was un-present, as was Guy Lee. Christopher Ricks and John Gross – the former with a pretty New Yorker, the latter middle-agedly alone – arrived late, bearing the stubs of hotter tickets, and stayed long enough only to seem impolite. The occasion lacked lustre, if not lust, of an unkindled kind; a clerisy without faith, save in accuracy, and with more pettish pride than arrogance, academics suffer from chronic envy. There was an admixture of Americans: a crew-cut Wisconsin Professor of Classics who stumbled and glided like a senile trouper; a white-pantsed Professor of Painting from Buffalo, towing a girl who wanted to study architecture. What did she think of the split-level television set of a room? It opened onto a tight terrace lined with parked benches, where one could imagine candidates dawdling for interview or hijack victims being invigilated by long-focus cameras, while waiting to be blown up, or to auction their stories.

Sullivan has a grey-white-black beard slung under his roundish face; shavings under giftware china. Asked whether he will ever come back to the UK, he announces, ‘They couldn’t afford the fare’; a boast grooved with use. He regards a Becher divorce without regret or partiality: he is concerned only that his friends be happy. Divorce is his specific for all mésalliances. Childless, he lives in a world of alcoholic maturity: to procure one’s own pleasure is the abiding honesty. Modifying Aristotle’s CV, he drinks, he fucks, he works. Scholarship the spine that keeps him together, he is vertebrate with publications. His new book, on Propertius, bristling with bromides, requires a reader sufficiently dated to be scandalised by the no longer scandalous. Geoffrey Lloyd, sly and forthright all in the same unorthodontic smile, promises that J.P.S. is taken seriously in circles where the Classics gyrate, whereas Peter Green, though a dozen times more interesting, will never be.

Professor Jones. He has the envious complacency of those who resent not having more appetites for which to solicit satisfaction. Our life in the Périgord – and especially Stee’s happy situation at the local school – appeared so pleasant to him that he was quick to dig pitfalls and then warn of their dark possibilities. He has the sketchy profile of someone whose private life survives only in the interstices of public activity. Dons have personal histories as executives have country cottages: they would like to spend more time there, but alas…

Pierrette. The kind of Frenchwoman who agreed early not to look young, and so contrives never to look old.

Sullivan seemed largely liked: the college secretary was so skittish in her greeting that she literally fell over herself on the way up the minimalist stairs. The lady steward – so generous with her embrace that she all but shed her sari – was loud and crude; Medusa was surely more fetching, though never more carrying. Sullivan rode her tackles like a trialist on his best behaviour. She was, he explained, a useful ally: she could arrange buffets and similar services with rare economy. The motif of money ran through this intelligent gathering like the cross-bar on a pound sign.

19.6.76. Gathered in the Old Library at Pembroke, sixty or more European academics, bright enough to be bored by Bergonzi, but with little to contribute to general conversation. John Spencer, the Oxonian Leeds professor who introduced me, with a gush of credentials, had one of those rugged faces that belong to men who go for hikes, and drinks, in all weathers. His unripe fruitiness suggested ancestors in the Church. He narrowly escaped being flattened when a heavy leather screen, folded back to reveal coffee, fell slap between us. Afterwards, I was surrounded by enough rhubarbing enthusiasm to suggest that I had not railed in vain. A bright-eyed Czech girl, in a floral dress, was vivid with questions, asked and unasked. George Steiner said later that she was one of the bravest people he had ever met, though never why.

Cambridge may be a spiritual home, but I have only to come into practical contact with its inhabitants to find myself uneasy. Rather than Charterhouse, it is my old school; I roll up to display how far from the tree an apple can fall.

In Earlier Episodes. Saul Nathan is a solicitor specialising in tax. He assists others to avoid laws with which he prefers to comply. Conformity is his kind of irony. His leisure is consumed by family, pro bono legal work and playing bridge. His wife, ex-Catholic, has had a love affair. Has Saul been entirely faithful? He has been entirely discreet.

In the late 1960s, H.M.G. asks him to go to Rhodesia to press Ian Smith’s regime into honouring a reprieve granted by the Privy Council in London to three Africans under sentence of death. Never doubting that he will fail, Saul agrees to stay in Salisbury till the morning of the executions. He has a sense of lightness at being granted diplomatic immunity in a totalitarian state. Privileged pariah, marooned in his hotel, he telephones up-country ‘friends’ whom he once met on a bridge cruise, when they promised him a ‘top time’ if he was ever in Rhodesia. Informed of the purpose of Saul’s mission, the man puts him down as a ‘kaffir-loving Jewboy’.

The night before the men are due to die, he walks the streets and is solicited by a grinning black whore. He feels an urge to kill her, for her smile. Does she ever whip people? ‘You bet, boss.’ Her stripes do not please. He asks her to stop. He walks back to the hotel and washes and lies down. He wakes at seven. The men are due to be hanged at eight. At the fatal hour, he comes, as the black men do at the end of their ropes.

This episode is preliminary to a 1970s mission undertaken to save an old school ‘friend’, Guy Fielden, from a black dictator’s condemned cell. Meanwhile, Saul (with Roy Carn, his Gentile partner) has won a place in the England bridge team for the Olympiad, after a cheating charge sidelines a better pair. Having played no part in the accusation, he feels pleased shame at having profited from it. Years before, Guy Fielden benefited from Saul’s disqualification (by a very Christian headmaster) from candidature in the ‘closed’ scholarship which took Guy to Oxford in Saul’s place.

Guy’s going to the bad at Oxford was a Christian conceit. Gracing the devil with more qualities than God, he looked up to decadence. He and Saul were drawn, from different quarters, to similar alienation. Guy envies what Saul endured when Saul was derided as ‘Hooky’ Nathan. Now, by seeking to save a man who did nothing to help him, Saul can put a small trump on Guy’s voyeurism.

Saul’s sexual malaise appears to be his wife’s fault, but has he not in some way chosen her to disappoint him? His mind grows the dark things he dreads and dreams to do to her. If only – instead of cooking such good meals, keeping such neat accounts, playing the suburban hostess – she would poison him, or disgrace herself he (and she) might have an excuse for violence – and liberation.

Saul has a devoted secretary, Jewish or foreign. When he discovers that his wife is betraying him, he displaces his aggression. Louise suffers from his pitiless politeness. There is something fabricated both in his generosities and in his rectitude. His conduct is worthy, but conceived in contempt. Alienation makes Saul falsely good; Guy falsely bad.

An unFreudian slip by Giscard, reading from a prepared script at the commemoration of Verdun. Speaking of Pétain, he said that he hoped that his avenir – quickly corrected to souvenir – would be as a hero of the battle. Pétain’s ghost haunts the ranks of Giscard’s less palatable pals.

How I love the grand style! Oh to be a truly, monumentally dull writer!

Wittgenstein: ‘If my remarks do not bear a stamp which shows that they are mine, I do not wish to lay any further claim to them as my property.’ Freud: ‘If your remarks bear a stamp which suggests they might be mine, they are mine.’

Some winners never need to be devious: they outflank the opposition by frontal attack.

15.7.76. It is tempting to read into Virgil the art of the public homosexual, less victim of ruinous passions (was Dido his dumped boy?) than dependent on acclaim and advancement. His work lacks private parts. If Lucretius had no place for romantic love, he did regard Venus as a primordial force (hence St Jerome’s spiteful story that he died from a toxic love potion?) and dismissed the delusive glamour of fame and fortune. His hatred of war was made more honourable by his confession of the Schadenfreude that comes of watching bloodshed in the arena. Yet even without war, he knew that fear of death dominates men’s minds. Its elimination is the honest purpose of his poem. Virgil, by contrast, has the artfulness of imposture: what a liberation to be commissioned to fake it!

17.7.76. Visitors. We thought that P. and D. were coming to Lagardelle for a few days. My letter said, ‘You won’t stay long, will you?’ But they will have been here eight days. We went to lunch at Daglan. I insisted on calling for the not large bill. P. is a generous guest, however, and proposed that we play tennis to determine who paid. The game was close, but he won. If I was annoyed at losing, it had nothing to do with the money. However, one can imagine a story in which the match is played, but the host, who would gladly have paid the bloody bill, is so displeased – after a dubious line call – that he wishes that he had never asked these people to stay in the first place.

19.7.76. George Steiner re John Updike: ‘He’s a millionaire’, and then, as if he had sold him short, ‘He’s a millionaire many times over.’ He regards U. as the best ‘young novelist in the Flaubertian tradition’. ‘How well he writes!’ he cries, those dollars gilding every appreciative phrase.

G. has visited the Kinsey Institute and been shown their classy erotica. ‘Every single great cinéaste has made a pornographic film,’ he said. ‘Buñuel, Renoir… I saw the Buñuel. Astonishing!’ All the great artists likewise. They challenged him to propose an exception. Millais? They produced a pornographic version of the Angelus. ‘The fascinating question was, was it done before or after the public version?’

21.7.76. Perched on Archimedes’ platform, Steiner lacks the seismic lever. When I insisted that life was in some aspects essentially comic, he dissented abruptly. A funny-looking man will not accept that the human condition cannot be understood without a sense of its absurdity. He remains upset that Cambridge will not embrace him. Only so manifest a foreigner could fail to see why he is not at home.

The current Olympic games give a doleful, handsome indication of what a new culture is likely to be. Even world records are so fugitive that their holders become mere instances – quickly surpassed – of an accelerating trend. The admiration we gave last night to the gymnasts is a tribute to what looks to be innocent energy and enthusiasm. Yet are these children much more than performing animals? They look happy in their applauded bondage, but their nationalised parade exemplifies pampered slavery.

Samuel Marcus was driving back to London with Tom Maschler after some seminar at Norwich, a few years ago. Tom told S.M. that although well regarded in some quarters, he had not really made the big breakthrough. (To how many people has T.M. made the same concerned remarks?) Tom wondered whether the problem could possibly be that S.M. was rather, well, uptight. He hoped that his comments would be taken in the friendly spirit in which they were offered, but what S.M. needed was to relax. Had he ever been to an orgy? No. Then he must be one of the last people in London who hadn’t. Tom himself did not go often, but every now and again he did, just to unwind. He would inform S.M. when he next heard of a pleasant orgy. ‘One thing though,’ he added, ‘you must bring your own bathrobe.’ ‘At that,’ S.M. told me, ‘I cracked up.’

24.7.76. School Rules. The two main rival houses to be called Athenians and Spartans; lesser fry Corinthians, Thebans, etc. Begin perhaps with a New Bug’s examination (or did If begin so?) How strange that the screenplay (eventually transmitted as School Play) should be commissioned, instantly, by J. Cellan-Jones! When he was appointed Head of Plays, my agent proclaimed Jim a ‘Bohemian Welshman with six children’ who wore open-toed sandals (he didn’t mention the socks). I remembered him as one of the leaders of the Lockite Jew Bait. On a high shelf in his study, he had an obese volume of Shaw’s Plays and Prefaces. It always looked to be about to fall on his head.

In the canteen at Elstree, he declared that he had hated Charterhouse and had not understood a word of his medical texts, though he must have satisfied some examiner of something in order to arrive at St John’s. As he jockeyed his tray onto the crowded table, I was holding out my hand and kept it out in spite of the extra time it took him to jostle a safe landing for his plastic lunch. Was I congratulating him, promising that all was forgiven (hence not forgotten) or proposing an amnesty? I can still hear him telling the joke about the man who fell asleep on the synagogue steps and woke up with a heavy jew on him. A rule for writers: never forget what you affect to forgive.

Charterhouse made it systematically impossible to get to know anybody. The drift of the school was towards falsification, the dwindling of hope, the refrigeration of feeling, the subversion of personality by office. Its politics were based on dividing and ruling, on rendering illicit all emotions, particularly tenderness. Nothing was officially accepted that was not cruel. The general loathing of the place was greater than any individual was liable to guess; each of us thought that his own sense of isolation and inadequacy was unique and that he must secrete his dissidence for fear of attracting the scorn of the happy mass. What better expressed Carthusian insecurity than the Jew Bait? It was the perversion of a popularity contest: the rabble elected a quarry to personify its own alienation. Outsiders choose an outsider – preferably one who threatens to achieve some kind of percée beyond their own compass – and, by excluding him, give themselves a distinction in common. My nastiest persecutor was Robin Ewart Gladstone, a direct descendant, I was told, of the great William. Can it be that he took me for the reincarnation, mutatis mutandis, of Disraeli and unloaded on me all the anti-Semitic bile which his antecedent had had to repress?

In the arts, executives are the hirelings of patronage. To like or trust such people is to like and trust oneself too little.

Whatever happened to Bryce Cottrell? The fun of looking in Who’s Who for old school-fellows is a harmless vice, and vanity: James Rennie, who was second in the VIth to Bryce, is there. Yet Cottrell was the very type of a certain kind of success: at once domineering and servile, outstanding and unexceptional. How can he not now be rich and famous? Yes, he was gauche; he lacked physical charm; he had the clumping tread of ambition. But he clumped in step with authority; the cleverest boy in the school saw himself only as part of the system: has he disappeared into some official hole: detective, spy-master?

In fact, Bryce Cottrell was a stockbroker and, later, philanthropist. James Rennie became a parliamentary draughtsman, said to be the most nervously taxing activity in which to win no public renown. Both men died in 2006.

27.7.76. Martin Bamford’s annual thrash in the Lot. We drive south, against long shadows, into a golden, green landscape with the expectation of social pleasures which are rarely realised. Two years ago, we began with Bolly; this year it was sangria (made from Spanish wine), with spirits for the serious drinkers, not least the short-armed, bearded buffoon from Château Connard and his tight-lipped wife; thirty-something, the emotional menopause has cooled her blood.

Martin has the charm of a man who is determined to be his own woman. He entertains his friends as if they deserved the best, but who are they? They dress up as if for amateur dramatics: where else, today, would you find men wearing neck-squares? They might be out of Noël Coward, save that they lack repartee. There is nothing to discuss with them except the wine business. The women are marooned in shrewishness: flirtatious without desire, they are reproduction 1930s furniture. The bad years at Bordeaux are coming to an end; in any case, the châteaux had suffered less than the negociants from the recession and the affaire Creuze when, early in the 1970s, one of the grandest of Bordeaux brokers was accused of adulterating and mislabelling vintage wines. Some prices fell by as much as two-thirds, but the man from Château Palmer, as shiny as an antique of dubious provenance, said that he had suffered least, since his stuff was of top quality; yet even he was glad to see the back of the last three years. What they all needed was a really disastrous vintage, but – like Michel Queyroux, who could not vote for Mitterrand, though he believed his election in the national interest – the winos cannot conspire to procure what they all crave.

Byron’s twisted foot and his indirect accession to a famous title were the head and tail of a life that must have seemed no more consequential than the flip of a coin. Shelley’s Promethean themes, while in tune with his poetic preoccupations, prefigure his own nephritic agonies. He chose as his Hero the mythical figure who suffered from the same vulture he did. How nice the chiasmic mimesis which induced Polidori to sprain his ankle and the chance it gave Byron for a transference of self-pity by doctoring the lame doctor! For and Against Lord B. is a crux as entertaining as Pieter Geyl’s For and Against Napoleon, B.’s ‘little pagod’. Beetle and Sarah do not like B. one bit; Paul and I do. There is something irresistible in his alternating currents: from the same source he might distil self-knowledge into scornful satire or into succulent sentiment.

The couple lavish on their child the competing affection they fail to offer each other. She denies that she regrets abandoning her PhD when she met ‘Monsieur’. The bitterness of the boast that she surrendered her destiny to his suggests how unconditionally it was enforced.

The actor’s wife. She knows that she has not been invited for her sake, but for his. Since she does not love him, she has divorced her identity from his: she takes no pleasure in reflected glory. Independence leaves her suspended in a proud void.

17.8.76. Jonathan Miller to Tom Conti: ‘You only missed one thing in your portrayal of Freddie: the pirhana-like ferocity of the man when crossed.’

18.8.76. Oh the tremulous timidity of the man, in his forty-sixth year, when faced with a change of routine! I have finished the Byron script (his Lordship, as usual, dominated the company) and was telephoned last night by Burt Weissbord, who promises to arrange my ticket to fly to LA at the beginning of September. I dread the glamorous prospect. I shall sit alone in hotel bedrooms waiting like a lover, but only for loveless telephone calls. Why do I go along with these people? I may not require luxury, but I do like comfort; such is the modesty of the spoiled. It kept Byron at the Villa Diodati and it holds me here.

The Villa Diodati is now a private house. We got in by a timely fluke: I noticed a digital watch in the window of the horologist at The Reserve and, recalling Stanley Donen’s Zurich invitation, ‘Let’s buy some watches’, went in. The shop was a booth with a cubicle at the end, four feet above the level of the counter. A man crouched at a desk up there, a safe behind him. When unfolded, he proved tall, bespectacled and smooth. We talked first in French (his accent was indifferent) and then it turned out that he was English. He had lived in Geneva for fourteen years. He found it hard to believe that I was not French; I spoke it better than any Englishman he had ever heard. Ta. The children thought he had taken a fancy to me. I thought not: when have I ever been attractive to homosexuals?

Cameron de la Bère was six feet six of swank creamed with provincial subservience. He knew the son of Madame Wascher, owner of the Diodati, because they were both members of Geneva’s Société Littéraire, a group given less to letters than to bridge. It was a highly delicate matter not merely to get me into the villa but even to decide at what hour to broach such a thing. Madame Wascher was Belgian, but very distinguished and very rich. ‘You know what these people are!’

By the next morning contact had been made: we might visit the grounds but could not enter the house unless we were able to wait until Tuesday (it was Friday); the lady had weekend guests. She would like to give a cocktail for us, but that would mean waiting until after the gratin had broken up. I opted for the exterior only. Cameron wrote the password on one of his personal cards in his sloping left-handed fist.

I expected sentries, but the gates were wide open. We drove down the grey drive to a cobbled court behind the tall, rather narrow, box of the house. It seemed to have only three floors, including the mansarde, but when we walked down to the garden, another was accessible. The door was opened by an aproned maid. The medicated interior might have been designed to calm the clients of a good abortionist. I said, ‘Mademoiselle Brissioli…?’

The maid went down steps to what seemed like the cellar and returned with a tall, thin, carefully coiffed old woman of no more than thirty, a Jamesian female with a polished brown complexion to which neither flesh nor blood had made recent contribution. She did not demand our ticket, nor was the house sociable with international guests. We were shown through double doors into the drawing room. Its appearance has changed since Byron was the (very brief) tenant. An American (ah these Americans!) bought the place after the war, when everyone’s back was turned, and ripped out the Byronic authenticity for speculative reasons. In Geneva, the centre of European speculation, such opportunism is, of course, reprehensible. Only the little stove in the corner of the dining room is an untouched vestige of the old style.

The first floor was once a single room; the terrace running along two sides afforded a vista of lake and city. It is still shaded by the sloping canopy to be seen in nineteenth-century prints. The dining room had the supplied elegance of the rich man’s table and the rich wife’s interior decorator. One wall was floor-to-ceiling display cabinet, filled with porcelain, no doubt as valuable as it was lacking in colour or charm. The drawing room was narrowed by the insertion of the dining room. There was no blue in the afternoon, but the place was silvered by the skid of sunshine on the lake.

Mlle Brissioli pointed out a cheap, lifeless print of Lord B., plump and rubicund, ostentatiously at work on the Diodati terrace. En bon homme de lettres, Cameron had confessed that he did not much like B.’s ‘novels’. The secretary took us quickly into the garden, though she made no objection to my photographing the interior: either they are well insured or nothing is of great value. The grounds were policed by a bristling terrier, with much bark, and by three small, portly black dogs of the pedigree ugliness which the rich favour. They might have been descendants of Cerberus, Siamese triplets separated at great expense by a veterinary genius. They yapped and waddled on spindly limbs that came out at each corner of their shining oblong bodies, like the legs of a japanned bed.

The gardens were filled with a nurseryman’s delivered blooms. Down towards the lake was a small swimming pool, pitched on the green grass like an unwanted turquoise brooch on a jeweller’s baize. The skinny secretary (narrow, creased heels on tall awkward shoes) indicated the pool as another anachronism. Byron, she told us, had shocked the Genévois ‘toujours Calvinistes a l’époque’. The idea of his lordship so excited her that I told her that Byron had in fact lived a life of remarkable chastity while at the Villa Diodati. It was the women who went hunting. She made a wry face. How the shadow of her absent mistress fell across her! What propriety was enjoined by the prospect of her weekly wage! Had some youthful scandal landed her in this discreet obligation? Was she Swiss? She had lived in Switzerland for a long time, she said; she was Swiss now. One could imagine that she was the daughter of some Nazi, spirited into La Suisse as a baby or in the womb of a fugitive mistress and that Mme Wascher’s wealth… There is no end to credible unlikelihoods. Didn’t the Swiss banks build their post-war prosperity on money which Jews and Nazis deposited and which neither were ever able to reclaim?

The house by the lake, with its air of enriched serenity, was a Swiss translation of the world of Raymond Chandler, where all confidence is a function of trickery and where no neat, aseptic secretary to a rich lady lacks some festering soreness. The vacuous villa, all seemly comfort and regulation richesse, was pregnant with bastard possibilities. How strong, in such places, the sense of being in a trap! The rich have baulked appetites which seem to convey readiness to become victims: they would then have the chance to experience real feelings, if only panic or dismay. They are always waiting for something; all their hedges – albeit set with electronic traps – are convenient with gaps. There was no sign, in all that foursquare solemnity, that anyone had ever enjoyed themselves there since the moment of B.’s departure. It was Claire Claremont’s peculiar misfortune that she had to seduce him (again) in such a devitalised climate.

I made no note of my silly loss of, of all things, a cuff-link in the driveway of the Villa Diodati. Prompted by the elaborate protocol of the visit, I put on a Harvie and Hudson shirt that needed links. The only ones I had were gold and initialled; a gift from my parents on my twenty-first birthday. I cannot recall how one fell undone or why I did not look for it more thoroughly. Did I fear seeming uncouth in front of Mlle Brissioli? I rang later to ask if it had been found; if so, it was not returned.

The Lion d’Or at Cologny. We ate a two-star meal and watched the fireworks with which Genevans annually excite themselves. It was like dining, fairly well, on the eve of a bloodless coup or during an air raid without raiders or casualties. At the next table, a gross family of Levantines dined on whisky and fish. They sent back a gratin dauphinois in favour of a plate of ‘French fries’ which turned out to be game chips of the kind you can buy at Migros in a cellophane packet.

When I was in Montreux to see Nabokov, the headline of the local paper found nothing more dramatic to capitalise than a false fire alarm. Switzerland! Three nights and a few meals at the Reserve cost more than a thousand dollars. Good old MGM! If only we had enjoyed it. I bought a watch from Cameron de la Bère, lest he think that I was going to make use of him and then let him down. I now have two watches. For two-timing?

Borges has a story about two brothers who become rivals for the attentions of a prostitute, whom they buy from the brothel and kill, since she has become a source of enmity between them. Set in the pègre of Buenos Aires, the story lacks resonance through being narrated in a folkloric tone. I should prefer a bourgeois version in Peronist Argentina, in the style of Gordon Meyer, with all the dusty frustrations of a pair of figli di papa. Their mother might buy them the prostitute because her sons’ rivalry was becoming a social scandal.

Nabokov’s spite has justice: Borges’s texts are too small for his reputation. When I was with him, V.N. compared Ficciones to the houses along the main street of an Arizonan ghost-town where you walk up the steps and open a genuine door, expecting a substantial interior, and step directly through into the desert on the other side.

A wandering couple murder their child (perhaps the victim of some congenital agony) and can conceal their deed only by moving from country to country: if they never acquire residential status, they need never figure on the rolls of any investigating agency. I remember with terrible clarity – as if of some cardinal misdeed – burying the afterbirth, when Sarah had been born, adjacent to the raspberry canes in East Bergholt. The soft thing – whatever it was – had been wrapped in a brown-paper parcel by Nurse Bray, a large and amiable lady who all but panicked at the last moment and sent for Dr MacBride. I loitered outside the door, like a jealous, prurient man in a hotel corridor. Which doctor told me that he did not approve of men being present when their wives gave birth? Peter Snell? Maybe. I’m glad I was there when Stee was born. How else witness the ultimate conjuring trick, the escape to make Houdini look second-rate? The room contains four people. No one comes in and suddenly there is a fifth.

Cornfeld and Stonehouse. The failure to punish such men, our indifference whether they are punished at all, underlines the human appetite for credulity. Stonehouse becomes a parody of a tragic figure: adulterous husband, speculating socialist, dead and alive, he enacts the duplicitous fantasies of the mean, sensual man. As for Cornfeld, by dissipating the religiosity that made God and Mammon seem partners, especially in architectural style (we lower our voices in banks as in churches), he abolished the tax previously paid in piety. Hence his fall, amid the pneumatic cushions of his mistresses and his subtracted wealth, became more joke than outrage, despite the joke being at the expense of those who laughed at it. Since he had never been sanctimonious, but merely vulgar and dishonest, he did not become a target for the hatred of those whose faith had been shattered: investors always knew him to be a scoundrel; they had relied on it. Like a magician, he is applauded for so neatly picking the punters’ pockets and bows out with the takings.

20.8.76. Evelyn Waugh’s resurgent reputation suggests that the British have had enough of the present. Since the end of the war, they have had the illusion that the world looks up to them. Victory kept them taking curtain calls, even after the audience ceased to cheer. Enoch Powell has embarrassed the liberals because his views have proved awkwardly popular, not only with reactionaries but even (especially) with the dockers. In their pride, the British affected to create an empire of equal citizens. It gave them a moral warrant for establishing themselves in any part of the globe that took their fancy or was too weak to resist their incursions (Petronius said the same of the Romans). In the war, the British were saddled with advocating F.D.R.’s quartet of freedoms. Their decline in power has made it convenient to canvass for friendship under the guise of offering it. Decline has made them the merchants of their past: they retail their history and their literature, which – hence Waugh revisited – is nearly all reactionary. D.H. Lawrence proclaimed the virility of the working class, and the impotence of toffs, but he fantasised a renovated aristocracy which would deal savagely with those who challenged its supremacy or his bloody metaphysics. John Osborne was taken for the revolutionary obituarist of a clapped out England, but those who dared to think Alison’s father the most sympathetic character in Look Back in Anger discovered that the author took the same view. English prose is cut on the bias. Its strength is in its irony. The shadow grows stronger than the substance.

Liberal philosophy, from Beveridge to Jenkins, lacks important literary endorsement, unless Forster is important. Egalitarianism is a political, not an artistic, pose. Decency has no rhetoric and is rarely much fun. The resurrection of Waugh is symptomatic of a society tired of faking liberality. Ronald Butt in The Sunday Times suggests that the Social Revolution has come to its end: the British have had their fill (or all they can afford) of ‘Socialism’. Limping after The Observer, Harry Evans serialises for the second time the diaries of an alcoholic snob who is proclaimed as ‘the best writer of his generation’. Stylishness and prejudice are high-born twins.

Waugh’s scowl matches the furious nostalgia of the present. Funny violence appeals to the repressed rage in today’s England. The Fabian ethos – cliquish in private, in public philanthropic – has become a bore. Waugh’s decrying the Conservative government of 1951–64, because it had ‘failed to put the clock back by a single minute’, is of a piece with the frustrations of those who again deplore the way things are going. In inglorious times, there is antinomian elegance in refusing to go with the flow. Writers of quality distrust tides in the affairs of men and decline ostentatiously to catch the fortunate wave. Waugh long ago disembarked from the one-class ship on which we have accepted common rations and dreary destinations. Now Idi Amin proves the validity of Black Mischief; the degradation of the Press, grovelling for readers, declares the merit of Scoop; the British are suffering from a Pinfold epidemic: nightmares in which they are accused, and accuse themselves, of being no better than Jews and Blacks and oiks of one kind and another. Gagging on the diet of hypocrisy which the liberal conscience has foisted on them, they go for a second serving of the derision with which Waugh greeted ‘progress’.

Hilary and Helge Rubinstein were coming over for the day on Sunday. Since they holiday en masse, there would be seven of them as well as nine of us (including assembled Bedalians). Among the Rubinstein adherents were Shirley Williams and her man, Tony King, a professor of politics at Essex. We were amused by the advent of Mrs Williams, whom we met briefly twenty years ago, when the Rubinsteins and the Williamses shared a house. Beetle was senior to Shirley at St Paul’s, but remembers the whispers attendant on the presence of the already famous Catlin girl.

We went into Sarlat early and trawled the market. By 11.15 we were home again. I then drove to Daglan with Paul to buy bricks to make a barbecue for the chickens we had bought at Parunis. He was eager and delightful. I dreamed a few nights ago of a physical fight with him. When I woke, I could not work out why. He has imported his friends with insistent generosity, but he has been a good companion all summer. We all worked hard (save Sarah, deep in a biography of Piaf). When Ipswich won their opening match 3-1, having been one down at halftime, the omens seemed set fair.

After weeks of sunshine, Sunday dawned grey and overcast, but while we worked at fruit salads, potato salad, salads of all kinds, the sky cleared. After P. had clipped the hedge around the pool, Paul and Joshua Losey took the mobylettes to go into Belvès for the bread and two strawberry tarts commanded from Firmin Premier. The tarts came back severely fractured; jigsaw skills were needed to reconstitute them.

The guests arrived soon after one; amiable and numerous. I shook hands with the whole galère (‘Like a politician’, observed Professor King, rather than like a Frenchman, as I imagined) and coaxed them to the pool while there remained sunshine to fill it. S. Williams was dumpy and hunched with apprehensions of duty. I ran up and down for bottles, glasses and openers and made headmasterly efforts to assimilate all the newcomers’ names. Becky Williams was alone in the crowd, dressed and intending to remain so, while others prepared to plunge. I opened some hock and found a ready throat in Prof. King, who remained vigilant for Bacchus throughout the day and the long evening.

I forced myself into conversation with the yellow-topped Becky whom I took for only thirteen. In fact, she is fifteen; schoolgirl hair, alarmed eyes. Beetle told me later that Shirley had been offered the Foreign Office but had turned it down for Becky’s sake. Bernard W. had called the Rubinsteins before they left for France, asking them to care for the girl; which had been his office, maybe, while Shirley was at the House. Did he weary of playing the mother and depart?

Becky is at Godolphin and Latimer, which she quite likes but, since it is about to go independent, she will be forced to leave after ‘O’ levels. Might it be better if S.W. had accepted the Foreign Office and rented herself a personable nanny, allowing her daughter to continue at her present school? Shirley is so principled that she must be governed by reason, even if it is unreasonable. She had been to Mass before coming to us. The sermon was about the new schism threatening the Gallican church. The curé had followed the Roman line, with modernising piety, but with a hint of suspicion that the Latinisers were the vessels of the True Cross. Duty bound, he defended modernisation by analogy with the pruning of tomato plants from which withered members had to be removed.