Basil Street Blues (32 page)

My flat cost £3 a week. The extra money from the army paid for my first few months. My grandparents had also given me some money, attempting to do so secretly but, colliding on the landing at Norhurst, the notes flapping on to the floor followed by their cries of distress and exasperated accusations, the transaction had been well advertised.

It was easy to live cheaply in the early nineteen-sixties; but it was difficult to earn money. From the
Twentieth Century
magazine I eventually received a commission to review an anthology of Oxford and Cambridge writing called
Light Blue, Dark Blue
. I worked on this piece for weeks, revising it intensely – a comma here, a semi-colon there – and at last sent in a review that some months later was published. This was my first writing to be printed. The following year a cheque arrived for a little under £1. Here was success. But could I afford success?

I had notions of supplementing this income with some profitable plagiarism. Taking the hint from an episode in one of Anthony Powell’s novels, I went off to the British Museum’s newspaper library at Colindale and looked through a number of stories in women’s magazines which, I had heard, paid their contributors well. I copied down one that seemed to me very characteristic, then brought it up to date by changing the names of the characters, the speed and make of the cars, the brand of the breakfast cereals and so on before sending it to the magazine that had originally published it twenty-five years ago. I hoped they would be grateful for this made-to-measure contribution. But their letter of rejection, which allowed me genuine promise, decided that the story (which involved a flirtation between a husband and his sister-in-law) was a little too risqué for them.

Though I took one or two odd jobs, it was really the C.O. who made the writing of
Hugh Kingsmill
possible. Early in the nineteen-sixties, he decided to pay me an allowance of £8 a month, and persuaded both my mother and Kaja to do the same: £288 a year (equivalent to some £3,000 in the late nineteen-nineties). This allowance dwindled as the fortunes of its contributors went downhill, the C.O. silently withdrawing after a year, my mother giving up after almost two years, and my grandmother in Sweden carrying on for some three years. But it was enough.

The reason my father offered for this generous arrangement was that I appeared to be ‘wasting my time with the right people’. By this he meant two of Kingsmill’s friends, Hesketh Pearson and William Gerhardie.

I had written to Pearson in 1958, and over the next half-dozen years received continual encouragement from him. He would invite me over to supper with his wife Joyce or take me out to the theatre (it was with him that I saw my first Bernard Shaw productions). He also wrote to editors on my behalf so that I could get some reviewing and lent me whatever Kingsmill manuscripts and books he possessed. After his death in 1964, Joyce Pearson told me she thought I had replaced to some extent the son of his first marriage who had been killed in the Spanish Civil War. They had quarrelled over politics on their last meeting, and Hesketh was close to suicide for months afterwards. Perhaps, twenty years later, his goodness to me was a means of reconciliation with his son. Certainly he helped me in ways my father was in no position to do and, without alienating my father, became something of a father figure to me. By an act of imaginative generosity, his assistance was to go on after his and Joyce’s death, when his library and copyrights came to me.

Literature was a very tangible affair to Pearson, belonging more to the open air than the study, and reflecting what he saw around him, the people and the landscape he loved. He had once been an actor and knew some of Shakespeare’s plays by heart. He was also a man of dramatic opinions. One day, when someone suggested to him that Shakespeare was rather overrated, he stopped the taxi they were travelling in and obliged the man to continue his journey on foot. He was some fifty years older than I was, but we spoke easily, without any sense of a difference in age. Books were not something behind which he sheltered: they were part of his life and he helped to make them part of mine. After cheerless days of doubt, I would come away from an evening with him full of the enthusiasm and vitality he communicated.

Hesketh Pearson described himself as ‘a hero-worshipper who likes to take his heroes off their pedestals and get to know them as fellow men’. What I picked up from his biographies was not so much his technique, which derived from his career on stage, as what Graham Greene called his ‘sense of life going on all the time’. I admired his ability to tell a story; I shared the endless fascination with human nature from which all his Lives sprang; and I benefited from his gusto and geniality. He was a man without qualifications, an amateur in the sense that he wrote his biographies for love rather than a
curriculum vitae
, who showed me what possibilities might lie ahead and gave me the confidence to follow his example by going my own way.

Kingsmill, like many lonely people, compartmentalised his life, so it was not surprising that his two closest friends over twenty-five years should have met each other only once. William Gerhardie was utterly unlike Pearson, and the most eccentric person I have ever met. Both shared a love of literature and landscape, but whereas Pearson in his direct and upright manner would set off on long vigorous walks in the footsteps of Johnson and Boswell and other favourite characters, his head teeming with lines from Shakespeare and his own explosive phrases bursting with alliterations and assertions, Gerhardie would stay immovably indoors dreaming of what might lie beyond the curtained windows. ‘It’s a lovely day,’ a friend remarked one morning. ‘Is it?’ he replied eagerly, remaining seated with his back to the window.

In the nineteen-twenties his novels
Futility
and
The Polyglots
had made him, in the words of Arnold Bennett, ‘the pet of the intelligentsia and the darling of Mayfair’. He was taken up by Katherine Mansfield and Edith Wharton, H.G. Wells and Evelyn Waugh. ‘To those of my generation Gerhardie was the most important new novelist to appear in our young life,’ wrote Graham Greene. And Olivia Manning concluded: ‘He is our Gogol’s
Overcoat
. We all come out of him.’

One of the many articles on Gerhardie in the nineteen-thirties was prophetically subtitled: ‘Success: and How to Avoid It’. At this avoidance he became adept. By the nineteen-sixties he could boast of being the most celebrated unknown writer in Britain. He wrote every day but had published almost nothing since 1940 beyond a list of teasing titles in
Who’s Who
(an ironical tragedy called
English Measles
for example, and a lyrical comedy entitled
The Private Life of a Public Nuisance
). His background was unorthodox. The son of a British cotton manufacturer settled in Russia, he had been brought up in St Petersburg and being identified as the dunce in the family, sent to England in his ’teens to be trained for a commercial career. During the First World War, equipped with a monocle and a huge sword bought second-hand in the Charing Cross Road, he was posted back to Russia on the staff of the British Military Attaché. When the war was over, he turned up at Worcester College, Oxford, where he wrote a brilliant little book on Chekhov. But by the mid-nineteen-thirties, at the age of forty, he had left the world of travel and adventure, the society of Mayfair and, beginning a career of philosophical speculation, set himself up as a hermit in central London.

William was a good portly man whose figure tapered down to a pair of delicate feet. An amused expression and rosebud mouth, together with his bald head and pink skin, gave him the appearance of a decadent cherub. His eyes protruded in the manner of some tropical fish. He sometimes wore, over his pyjamas, a shiny grey suit and colourful bow tie. I would visit him occasionally at his block of flats in Hallam Street. Whatever time of day you arrived, you were required to ring the night bell, then take the lift to the fourth floor and hammer at his door until you heard him begin to fiddle languidly with the bolts and chains. After a loud exchange of passwords, the door opened and you stepped into the dark guided by William’s silhouette. ‘This is the gold room,’ he would announce with a spectacular gesture, flinging wide an inner door to what appeared like the opening of a coal mine. The floor was crammed with shoe boxes, paper bags and the odd mattress, all bulging with his writings. William moved, despite his arthritis, athletically among the debris. Books were everywhere, but there were no bookshelves except by his bed. A pile of brocade cushions supported him at his typewriter which was itself supported by a tower of empty egg cartons.

Hospitality was a risky business. The flat was freezing and the armchairs, resting on empty coffee jars, slumped to the floor as you sat in them. William shopped by telephone from Selfridges and seemed to live mostly on Coca-Cola and meringues, with the odd sausage thrown in at weekends. But for guests he would go out of his way to prepare something special: a drink of tepid water and raspberry jam called ‘All’s Well’ because, he assured you, ‘it ends well’. Few of us got that far. Gerhardie connoisseurs took picnics in order to avoid his prize speciality ‘Sherryvappa’, a subtle combination of sherry and evaporated milk. After drinking this, you had to be a true friend to come again. The fact was, he did not really want callers. He would insist reluctantly on shaking your hand as you arrived, and then ostentatiously and elaborately washing his own hands. He did not want you going to his lavatory, sitting on his furniture, touching things, breathing his air, seeing what he had written and finding yourself unable to resist making off with his ideas. He could not wait for you to go and, when you did go, would hold you at the door squeezing promises from you to come again.

Gerhardie’s early novels, written under Chekhov’s influence, explored the comedy of time deferred; his later books, written under Proust’s influence, investigated the phenomenon of time regained. He had reached a point of looking into the future with a sense of nostalgia, as if impatient to convert it into the past. Time present remained a fleeting problem. As the solution to its banality, its physical awkwardness, he had hit on the telephone. The telephone avoided problems of actual contact, time could be extended almost indefinitely into the future and then to some extent recaptured with another call. Once we spoke for seven hours on the telephone, and I had two meals during our conversation. Another time I played him a Wagnerian opera down the line. Though he was a very funny man, there was often pathos in his stories. He would be telling an amusing story, suddenly interrupt himself with a cry of ‘Oh God!’, and then continue with the story. You could telephone him if you were in trouble at any time – three or four in the morning – all time was the same to him. But he was not understanding if you happened to be in a hurry. Once, in desperation, I exclaimed: ‘William! I must go! The building is in flames!’ But he went on speaking about
The Polyglots
. I noticed, too, how much better I felt if I telephoned him when I was ill – and how exhausted I was at the end of our calls some other times.

I suppose I was flattered that someone who had been taken up by Katherine Mansfield and H.G. Wells should now be taking me up. Unlike Hesketh Pearson, Gerhardie also wanted something from me. He wanted me to take my admiration for his novels like a torch into the future, and light up understanding among a new generation of readers. This I tried and failed to do by writing ten prefaces to a collected edition of his work in the early nineteen-seventies and then, a little more successfully perhaps, by editing with my friend Robert Skidelsky his posthumous book, the ingenious
God’s Fifth Column
, in the early nineteen-eighties. Finally I wrote my valediction in
The Dictionary of National Biography
, in the ‘Missing Persons’ volume of which I also wrote tributes to Hesketh Pearson and Hugh Kingsmill.

The world that William Gerhardie opened up for me was a very unEnglish one without straight lines of cause and effect, where moral certainties are ironically undermined, where comedy thrives as part of tragedy, where progress comes unpredictably and secret lines of communication lie between opposing forces.

According to his biographer Dido Davies, Gerhardie dreamed of possessing all the comely women in the world in a ‘cumulative consummate kiss’. His preoccupation with hygiene modified, but did not curb, his obsessive seduction of women. He had picked them up working in shops, strolling in the park, walking home in the streets from their offices, anywhere. Dido Davies herself was one of the girls, then in her ’teens and sometimes with her mother, I met at William’s flat. He behaved to her as he did to every girl who visited him. ‘Isn’t it extraordinary how she resembles Goethe’s Mignon?’ he would ask. ‘Do you find her attractive?’ Then, turning to her: ‘Come out here into the centre of the room. Why not stand on that table so that this young genius can see you better? And now turn round. What calves!’ With obvious pleasure, he would run the palms of his hands lightly up her legs. ‘And what fine breasts too, don’t you think?’ he would add with rich appreciation.

Though these performances were outrageous and embarrassing, I noticed that the girls themselves took a benevolent attitude to William. They giggled a lot but did not feel threatened and were never frightened. For all their shyness, they were not displeased. Everything that was objectionable seemed to have been harmlessly dissolved.

If Hesketh Pearson was a father figure to me, William Gerhardie played the part of a wicked uncle. How was my love life? he immediately wanted to know. My stammering replies did not satisfy him, so he introduced me to his great-niece Jackie, a beautiful dancer who led me into the world of ballet at the time of Nureyev’s arrival in Britain and introduced me to the music of Prokofiev.

I could afford to take Jackie out to supper once a fortnight. I would count up to a hundred before telephoning her and try to sound casual. But when we met I had almost nothing to say. I always prepared a few amusing things to tell her, hoping to hide behind these anecdotes, but to my dismay they tumbled out in the first few minutes and then I came to a halt. Twenty-six silent suppers a year were more than Jackie could face, so she made arrangements with one or two of the other dancers at her digs in Earls Court to go out with me in rotation. To waiters at the bistros and coffee houses we ate in, I must have appeared a regular ladies’ man. Eventually one of these ballet girls, Jennifer it was, listening to some music in Nell Gwynn House after supper, grew impatient with my lack of initiative. So she got into bed, my bed, while I was in the bathroom, and so I followed her in. After ten minutes or so in the dark, she asked: ‘Is that all?’ ‘I don’t know,’ I answered truthfully.