Basil Street Blues (13 page)

Ronald Stent, alias Rudi Stensch, was rounded up during the panic of June 1940 and, along with thousands of other German Jews and people of alien origin, interned on the Isle of Man. He had plenty of time to reflect on his half-dozen years with the Holroyds. They had introduced him to a segment of British society to which few refugees had such easy access. ‘Its upper-class lightheartedness and devil-may-care attitude was in such contrast to my own background,’ he wrote, ‘and the fraught surroundings from which I had escaped.

My education into a would-be Englishman was really an amalgam of what the Holroyds showed me, and what I learned from Speakers’ Corner; my spelling of English had always been better than that of the Old Etonian Basil; my vocabulary over the years was enriched by the Daily Telegraph crossword puzzles; but my accent I could never shed.

Ulla, alias Sue, had also become anglicised and was more adept at shedding her accent, though she still made mistakes such as ordering ‘two whitebait’ for supper at the ‘fishmongler’. She no longer had a housekeeper, though I had a new Scandinavian nurse, Nanny Tidy, who was so ferociously tidy and had such emphatic views on hygiene that my parents were seldom allowed to touch me. ‘She was much too strict,’ my mother admitted, ‘but I was only nineteen and had to take her advice.’

The war threatened my mother with what seemed to her a more terrible internment than any imposed on ‘enemy aliens’ on the Isle of Man. Against the rising note of the first air-raid warnings, Basil announced that it would be too dangerous for them to go on living in London. He had given up the lease of their flat in Latymer Court and they were moving down to the safety of Norhurst, his parents’ new house in Maidenhead. My mother realised that he was thinking of my safety, and perhaps also of hers, but she objected to being informed of decisions in which she had no part. My father insisted on treating her like a child. ‘He never really told me anything,’ she wrote.

So the three of us moved down to Norhurst ‘lock, stick and barrel’, as my mother wrote. ‘Disaster!’ she added dramatically. ‘
End
really of life.’

At the beginning I was no different from anyone who wants to write poetry, novels and plays. Being a solitary child, books soon became my friends and the means by which, from the privacy of my bedroom, I travelled all over the world and off to other worlds in my imagination. I much preferred these voyages to actual journeys, full of anxiety and incomprehension, I was obliged to make with my parents.

I also liked having stories read aloud to me. My Aunt Yolande would take on this duty, reading to me beside the Aga cooker in the kitchen. She read from a thick, tattered, black-boarded volume with drawings which she had loved in her own childhood. It was full of the adventures of a racy girl called Mathilda. I could not get enough of her exploits and, when we had gone through them all, I craved to hear them just once more, every one of them, and then all over again from the beginning to the end – if only they would never end.

During the war my aunt drove a library van round prisoner-of-war camps in the Home Counties. She was then approaching forty and it was her first job. She often used to take me, aged six or seven, on these exciting expeditions to our enemies. I remember wondering whether they ever escaped. They never did, apparently, and I picked up the notion that my aunt’s choice of thrillers, romances and detective fiction, held them captivated behind the friendly barbed wire.

I owe much of my early interest in books to my aunt. Though I never actually caught her reading – she read in bed at night, she let it be known, and seldom slept – she was one of those people who are said never to be without a book. Her bedroom was her library – even her bed rested on books. Books were part of our furniture at Norhurst. We used them for propping open doors, supporting windows, balancing tables, reaching things, and also lining the air-raid shelter.

Some years later I joined the new public library at Maidenhead. I lived like a lord there – like little Lord Fauntleroy – with a trained staff and a parade of authors lined up alphabetically before me on the shelves. It was a handsome building in a town not noticeable for its architectural events, and in due course it became my university.

My Aunt Yolande soon grew curious about this place. She herself patronised the private lending library at Boots the Chemist in the High Street where she could pick up a bestseller with her toothpaste and soap. Eventually, her curiosity growing, she followed me to the public library at the end of the town. What she saw amazed her. It was like a palace. Abandoning Boots she became a new member, though she never lost the habit of lightly roasting the books she borrowed in a medium oven for the sake of the germs. Many cautious booklovers did this, and you could tell the most popular volumes by passing the palm of your hand along the spines and bindings and sensing the residual heat from middle-class Aga and Rayburn cookers.

That library became my club, my home from home, my place of recreation and learning. It was a democratic place – we were of all sorts, ages and conditions. And it was here, sometime later, I came across my first biographies:
The Life of Oscar Wilde
by Hesketh Pearson, and Hugh Kingsmill’s
Frank Harris
. From Hesketh Pearson I eventually learnt something about the craft of non-fiction storytelling. I read Pearson’s biographies in my ’teens to find out what was going to happen next in the past. He didn’t take you into the recesses of history, but brought his characters – Walter Scott, William Hazlitt, Henry Labouchère, Tom Paine – into the present so that they seemed to fill the bedroom where I was reading. He didn’t bother with dreary documentation, but relied on good anecdotes, skilful use of quotation, pen portraits done in primary colours and with solid underlying draughtsmanship. It was exhilarating stuff.

From Hugh Kingsmill I learnt about the business of serious comedy. His
Frank Harris
was a small masterpiece, it seemed to me, of poetic irony. What F.R. Leavis was for many of my generation, Hugh Kingsmill became to me. He was my guide. He belonged to no school of writers, no literary group or movement. He was an isolated figure as I felt myself to be. And I had found him for myself. Kingsmill divided the world not into men versus women, not by colour or class, not geographically or by politics: in short not by any of the usual categories. He saw the world as being occupied by two species of human beings: men and women of will who sought unity by force if necessary (and so often it was necessary): men and women of imagination who could detect a harmony underlying the discord of our lives and used it as their compass. He identified the real struggle in modern times as being fought out between these two species of human being over the battleground of public opinion. But all of us were composed of will and imagination, and were tempted to externalise the enemy within. The charting of these impulses was the main theme in his biographies of Samuel Johnson, Charles Dickens, D.H. Lawrence and Matthew Arnold.

The early influences of Pearson and Kingsmill propelled me towards becoming a biographer. But there were other causes too. The books at Norhurst – volumes of Andrew Lang and Winston Churchill; also dusty romances by Rhoda Broughton and Marie Corelli (which Adeline had devoured long ago) – did not appeal to me. I loved the adventures of Rider Haggard and Conan Doyle, and was astonished when my grandmother told me that Conan Doyle’s historical novel
Micah Clarke
was the finest work of fiction ever written. This was especially strange because Doyle’s re-creation of seventeenth-century puritanism had originally been rejected by publishers because ‘it has next to no attraction for female readers’. The book first came out when Adeline was fourteen, and perhaps she remembered her father reading it in Ireland.

It was my grandfather’s opinion that literature had flourished in the age of Shakespeare and pretty well come to an end in the twentieth century, though he granted special status to a few remarkable men who happened to write such as Winston Churchill, Lawrence of Arabia and an American homosexual nutritionist called Gayelord Hauser who, at an advanced age and on a diet of cider vinegar and black molasses, hazelnuts and soy bean oil, was said to have enjoyed an affaire with Greta Garbo. On account of his deep knowledge of Hauser, Fraser was, we all maintained, ‘better than any doctor’. We seldom bothered to call in the family practitioner Dr Flew (whose full name, I believed as a child, was Dr Influenza) unless one of the dogs was off colour. But though he had this reputation for learning, Fraser seldom read anything except, with trembling indignation, the newspapers. It was not the author but literature itself that had died in our house. It had been ingeniously recycled into a batch of doorstops, makeweights and steps up to the tops of cupboards.

‘What shall we do with the boy?’ my grandparents would ask, and everyone would turn and stare at me. There seemed no answer to the question. Other people, the people I read about, had narrative, it appeared to me, while I hovered in a vacuum. Inevitably I began absorbing the pace and condition of my grandparents, which is to say the regime of seventy-year-olds when I was still seven or eight. It was an odd form of precocity, a jump from early childhood straight into second childhood. Having compensated with book-adventures for the compulsory inactivity in Maidenhead during the war (like living at the dead centre of a storm), I later went one stage further by stepping from my own life into other people’s where there seemed to be so much more going on.

But before I thought of taking up biography I tried composing verse, the influence of which veered drastically between Wordsworth and T. S. Eliot. The effect of this upon my father was extraordinary and, by the beginning of the nineteen-fifties, we found ourselves collaborating on a history of the world in verse. I was very much the junior partner in this herculean enterprise which, in its heroic hexameters, extended over a hundred closely-typed foolscap pages. We put a light blue cover on it, sent it off to the publishers Faber & Faber, and waited. And waited. After a long dazed silence, and in response to our eager telephone calls, we eventually received a report which, though congratulating us on our quixotic stamina, concluded that the satire was not sufficiently satirical for publication – a statement that, as we pored over it, struck us as worthy of the Delphic Oracle. Later on I showed our
oeuvre
to the writer and artist Colin Spencer who thought our best chance of success lay in running it as a hilarious serial, illustrated with cartoons, in
Punch
. But by that stage my father and I were moving along very different avenues of literature.

I was hardly out of my ’teens when I began writing a novel largely in the historic present which I had picked up from reading Joyce Cary, though the mood was intended to be Chekhovian, and my patterns of writing were partly derived from the novels of Patrick Hamilton who had brought fame to Maidenhead with his thriller
Hangover Square
. I worked on my novel for a long time but could find no way of ending it. A first draft in a thick exercise book marked ‘Ideal Series’ peters out after 110,000 handwritten words. A second version, this one typed, appears to reach some sort of exhausted conclusion on page 626.

My father, seeing what I was up to, soon joined me in fiction-writing, polishing off four or five full-length unpublished novels and several unpublished short stories. This was all the more remarkable since over this period he had a full-time job as a salesman which involved a good deal of motoring round the country, leaving him only a few evenings and some weekends for novel-writing. But he was growing to dislike his work and, feeling apprehensive over the future, hoped that this book-writing business might rescue him. He acquired a literary agent who liked what he wrote, but sadly never a publisher.

Only one of his novels, an 80,000-word typescript called
The Directors
, survives. It is competently done rather in the manner of C.P. Snow. But since it describes the business world he was anxious to escape, and is rather full of bank managers and solicitors discussing delivery schedules and production returns over dinner, it did not make for glamorous reading. However, it is rather well-plotted and with some editorial pruning, some helpful advice, might have been published. Its weakness is that the men are somewhat undifferentiated and speak with the same voice – which is my father’s voice. The women are of two sorts: those who, in their roles of wife or secretary, protect and mother their immature charges; and those who wreak havoc either by their addiction to sex or by provoking unquenchable sexual appetites in the men. Sexual excess rather than business chicanery is the villain of
The Directors
.

My own novel, the incompetencies of which struck one good-natured publisher as marks of originality, was largely autobiographical. It described my grandparents’ life at Norhurst, my parents’ marital exploits, and my own limping attempts to become a writer. But since I seemed unable to harness these first two subjects to the advancement of the third, I eventually put the manuscript away and turned to what in due course would emerge as a biography of Hugh Kingsmill. Then, coming across the manuscript in the mid-nineteen-sixties, I suddenly saw how I might carve out the first quarter of this spacious family saga and make it a self-contained novella covering twenty-four hours of family life, which I called
A Dog’s Life
. Once I had accomplished this I sent the typescript to William Heinemann Ltd, the publishers that were about to bring out my
Lytton Strachey
. My typescript went to the editorial manager, Roland Gant, who was himself a novelist and a translator from the French. ‘This is a difficult novel to describe,’ he wrote in his report.