Anatomy of Restlessness (3 page)

‘I've always wanted to go there,' I said. ‘So have I,' she added. ‘Go there for me.' I went. I cabled the
Sunday Times
: ‘Have Gone to Patagonia'. In my rucksack I took Mandelstam's
Journey to Armenia
and Hemingway's
In Our Time
. Six months later I came back with the bones of a book that, this time, did get published. While stringing its sentences together, I thought that telling stories was the only conceivable occupation for a superfluous person such as myself. I am older and a bit stiffer, and I am thinking of settling down. Eileen Gray's map now hangs in my apartment. But the future is tentative.

 

Sometime in 1944, my mother and I went by train to see my father aboard his ship, the
Cynthia
, a US minesweeper which had been lent to the British and had docked in Cardiff Harbour for a refit. He was the captain. I was four years old.

Once aboard, I stood in the crow's nest, yelled down the intercom, inspected the engines, ate plum pie in the ward-room; but the place I liked most was my father's cabin – a calm, functional space painted a calm pale grey; the bunk was covered in black oilcloth and, on a shelf, there was a photograph of me.

Afterwards, when he went back to sea, I liked to picture my father in the calm grey cabin, gazing at the waves from under the black-patent peak of his cap. And ever since, the rooms which have really appealed to my imagination have been ships' cabins, log cabins, monks' cells, or – although I have never been to Japan – the tea-house.

Not long ago, after years of being foot-loose, I decided it was time, not to sink roots, but at least to establish a house. I weighed the pros and cons of a whitewashed box on a Greek island, a crofter's cottage, a Left Bank
garçonnière
, and other conventional alternatives. In the end, I concluded, the base might just as well be London. Home, after all, is where your friends are.

I consulted an American – a veteran journalist, who, for fifty years, has treated the world as her back yard.

‘Do you really like London?' I asked.

‘I don't,' she said, in a gruff and cigaretty voice, ‘but London's as good as any place to hang your hat.'

That settled it. I went flat-hunting—on my bicycle. I had but five requirements: my room (I was looking for a single room) must be sunny, quiet, anonymous, cheap and, most essentially, within walking distance of the London Library – which, in London, is the centre of my life.

At house agents, I talked to fresh-faced young men who might have had carnations in their buttonholes. They smiled politely when they heard my requirements, and they smiled contemptuously when they heard how much I had to spend. ‘The bedsitter', they said, ‘has vanished from this area of London.'

Beginning my search to the west, I visited a succession of studio conversions, each more lowering than the last, all outrageously priced. I had visions of being ground down by mortgage payments, or by yakking children on the next floor landing. Finally, I explained to a friend of solid Socialist convictions my reasons (which seemed to her perverse) for wanting an attic in Belgravia.

I wanted, I said, to live in one of those canyons of white stucco which belong to the Duke of Westminster and have a faint flavour of the geriatric ward; where English is now a lost language; where, in the summer months, men in long white robes walk the pavements; and where the rooftops bristle with radio antennas to keep the residents in touch with developments in Kuwait or Bahrain.

It was Sunday. My friend glanced down the property columns of the
Sunday Times
; her fingers came to rest beside an entry, and she said, ironically, ‘That is your flat.'

The price was right; the address was right; the advertisement said ‘quiet' and ‘sunny'; but when, on Monday, we went to view it, we were shown a room of irredeemable seediness.

There was a beige fitted carpet pocked with coffee stains. There was a bathroom of black and bilious-green tiles; and there was a contraption in a cupboard, which was the double bed. The house, we were told, was one of two in the street that did
not
belong to the Duke of Westminster.

‘Well,' my friend shrugged. ‘It's the kind of flat a spy would have.'

It did, however, face south. The ceiling was high. It had a view of white chimneys. There was an Egyptian sheikh on the ground floor; and outside an old black man in a djellabah was sunning himself

‘Perhaps he's a slave?' said my companion.

‘Perhaps,' I said. ‘Anyway, things are looking up.'

The owner agreed to my offer. I went abroad and learned from my lawyer that the flat was mine.

On moving in, I had to call my predecessor over one or two minor matters – including the behaviour of the phone.

‘Yes,' he agreed. ‘The phone is rather odd. I used to think I was being bugged. In fact, I think the man before me was a spy.'

Now, once you suspect your phone of being bugged, you begin to believe it. And once you believe it, you know for certain that every bleep and buzz on the line is someone listening in. On one occasion, I happened to say the words ‘Falkland Islands'; on another, ‘Moscow' and ‘Novosibirsk' (I was planning a trip on the Trans-Siberian Railway), and, both times, the phone seemed to have an epileptic fit. Or was it my imagination? Obviously it was. For when I changed the old black Bakelite model for something more modem the bleeps and buzzes stopped. I lived for some months in seediness before starting to do the place up.

Very rarely – perhaps never in England – I've gone into a modem room and thought, ‘This is what I would have.' I then went into a room designed by a young architect called John Pawson, and knew at once, ‘This is what I definitely want.'

Pawson has lived and worked in Japan. He is an enemy of Post-Modernism and other asinine architecture. He knows how wasteful Europeans are of space, and knows how to make simple, harmonious rooms that are a real refuge from the hideousness of contemporary London. I told him I wanted a cross between a cell and a ship's cabin. I wanted my books to be hidden in a corridor, and plenty of cupboards. We calculated we could
just
make a tiny bedroom in place of the green bath. The room, I said, should be painted off-white with wooden Venetian blinds the same colour. Otherwise, I left it to him.

I came back from Africa a few months later to find an airy, wellproportioned room, rather like certain rooms in early Renaissance paintings, small in themselves but with vistas that give an illusion of limitless space. I bought a folding card table to write on, and a tubular chair, which, when not in use, could live out on the landing.

Then I bought a sofa.

Long ago, I used to work for a firm of art auctioneers; and from time to time I still sneak into Sotheby's or Christie's – if only, hypocritically, to congratulate myself on my escape from the ‘mania of owning things'. One morning, however, on a trip to the London Library, I looked in on a sale of French furniture at Christie's – and there was no escape.

I saw the kind of sofa you might see in a painting by David. It had rigorous classical proportions and its original pale grey paint. It was stamped by the firm of Jacob-Desmalter and its stretchers were covered with inventory marks from the Château de Versailles – from which one could gather that it had been made for the apartment of the Empress Marie-Louise. Fortunately for me that morning, M. Mitterrand had been elected President of France, and the Paris dealers were not in a buying mood.

Obviously such an object should be upholstered in blue silk damask with gold Napoleonic bees. But the sofa arrived from the upholsterers covered in muslin; and since the chances, either of paying for the damask or of getting it back downstairs, are so remote, the muslin will have to remain.

As for other furniture—although the room needed none—I already had an old French chair, of the Régence, in its original but bashed-up condition. And I had a birchwood table and stool—of the kind my mother used to call ‘Swedish Modern'.

I used to see this furniture, sometimes, in the flats of Jewish refugees in Hampstead or Highgate – people who had arrived in London in the late thirties with nothing in their luggage, except their clothes and perhaps a Klee or Kandinsky. It is, of course, designed by Alvar Aalto, and was marketed in London before the war by a firm called Finmar. It was the cheapest modem furniture one could buy: my mother remembers paying five shillings for the stool when she furnished her own one-room flat in 1936.

In my ‘art-world' days I was a voracious collector, but only a few pieces remain. Sold the Egyptian relief Sold the Archaic Greek torso. Sold the fifth-century Attic head. Sold the Giacometti drawing. Sold the Maori carving, which once formed part of Sarah Bernhardt's bed. They were sold to pay for books, or journeys, or simply to eat, during the years of pretending to be a writer.

I cannot regret them. Besides, in my late twenties, I was sick of things; and after travelling some months in the desert, I fell for a kind of ‘Islamic' iconoclasm and believed, in all seriousness, that one should never bow before the graven image. As a result, the things that survived this iconoclastic phase are, for the most part, ‘abstract'.

I still have, for example, a hanging of blue and yellow parrot feathers, probably made for the back wall of a Peruvian Sun Temple and supposed to date from the fifth century AD. In 1966, I saw a similar piece in the Dumbarton Oaks collection and, on returning to New York, went to see my friend John Wise, who dealt in pre-Columbian art in a room in the Westbury Hotel.

John Wise was a man of enormous presence and a finely developed sense of the ridiculous.

‘I'd give anything for one of those,' I said.

‘Would you?' he growled. ‘How much money have you got in your pockets?'

‘I don't know.'

‘Empty them, stupid!'

I handed him about $250—and he handed me back $10 with an equally grumpy ‘I suppose you eat lunch.' He then called his assistant to unroll the textile onto the floor.

‘Lucky sod!' he called out, as I walked away with it under my arm.

I also have a sheet of Islamic Kufic calligraphy, from the eighthcentury Koran—which has a certain talismanic value for a writer, in that Allah first cut a reed pen and with it he wrote the world. There is an Indian painting of a banana tree; a Sienese fifteenthcentury cross in tempera and gold; and a gilt-bronze roundel from a Japanese Buddhist temple. Other than that, I have a small collection of Japanese
negoro
lacquers, which once belonged to a German called Ernst Grosse.

Grosse was the Keeper of Japanese Art in the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum in Berlin before the war. Before that, I believe, he lived in the Daitoku—ji in Kyoto. With his friend Eugen Herrigel, the author of
Zen and the Art of Archery
, he was one of the few westerners to appreciate what the Japanese call
wabi
; that is to say ‘poverty' in art. My favourite possession is a round box, which surely represents the rising sun, dates from the thirteenth or fourteenth century, and has belonged to a succession of famous tea masters. The story goes that the monks, who made this lacquer, would paint it in a boat moored out on a lake, for fear the dust would spoil the final coat.

Lastly, I have one contemporary sculpture: a fibreglass wallpiece the colour of watermelon, by John Duff. Three times I had gone into houses full of works by famous names; and each time the only work that really grabbed me was by a ‘strange man called Duff. He had once been a surfer and was a student of Zen.

‘I have to see this Duff,' I said, and when, finally, I walked into his studio in Chinatown, I knew, for certain, that this was the ‘real thing'.

I don't do much writing in my room. For that, I need other conditions and other places. But I can think there, listen to music, read in bed, and take notes. I can feed four friends; and it is, when all is said, a place to hang one's hat.

 

Those of us who presume to write books would appear to fall into two categories: the ones who ‘dig in' and the ones who move. There are writers who can only function ‘at home', with the right chair, the shelves of dictionaries and encyclopaedias, and now perhaps the word processor. And there are those, like myself, who are paralysed by ‘home', for whom home is synonymous with the proverbial writer's block, and who believe naively that all would be well if only they were somewhere else. Even among the very great you find the same dichotomy: Flaubert and Tolstoy labouring in their libraries; Zola with a suit of armour alongside his desk; Poe in his cottage; Proust in the cork-lined room. On the other hand, among the ‘movers' you have Melville, who was'undone' by his gentlemanly establishment in Massachusetts, or Hemingway, Gogol or Dostoevsky whose lives, whether from choice or necessity, were a headlong round of hotels and rented rooms—and, in the case of the last, a Siberian prison.

As for myself (for what that's worth), I have tried to write in such places as an African mud hut (with a wet towel tied around my head), an Athonite monastery, a writers' colony, a moorland cottage, even a tent. But whenever the dust storms come, the rainy season sets in, or a pneumatic drill destroys all hope of concentration, I curse myself and ask, ‘What am I doing here? Why am I not at the Tower?'

There are, in fact, two towers in my life. Both are mediaeval.

Both have thick walls, which make them warm in winter and cool in summer. Both have views of mountains, contained by very small windows that prevent you from getting distracted. One tower is on the Welsh border, in the water meadows of the River Usk. The other is Beatrice von Rezzori's signalling tower—in her idiomatic English she calls it a ‘signallation tower' – built in the days of Guelph and Ghibelline and standing on a hillside of oak and chestnut woods, about twenty-five kilometres east of Florence.