Basil Street Blues (34 page)

Hesketh Pearson wrote to several publishers and gave me a generous quote that could be used on the jacket. It was partly through him that Martin Secker at last offered to bring out the book from his Unicorn Press in the Royal Opera Arcade, allowing me an advance of £25. Though this, to use a phrase of Kingsmill’s, may have ‘looked more like a retreat than an advance’, it was a generous gesture since the money came from his own pocket. Equally generous was the long Introduction Malcolm Muggeridge contributed free of charge. Early in 1964 Malcolm Muggeridge, Hesketh Pearson, Martin Secker and myself lunched at the Café Royal, and Martin Secker was able to report that, following a favourable review in the
Observer
, sales had topped thirty-nine copies.

I had, as Dickens might have said, ‘commenced biographer’.

To the C.O. it was immediately clear that something extra was needed to transform the book into a popular success. His dog knew the dog belonging to a man he believed to be a band leader. From two leads’ distance he suggested interviewing this man and, if his answers proved satisfactory, engaging him professionally for a special launch party. We would have to see our bank managers of course, but it should not be impossible to put on something modestly spectacular. In any business, he explained, some form of advertising, some promotion of good will, was essential. I would be a fool to ignore this. In a spasm of fantastical magniloquence he appeared to be peopling Maidenhead Thicket with literary celebrities such as J.B. Priestley and Daphne du Maurier. He saw them sipping their drinks, moving gracefully around as in some ballet, and putting my book on the map. This plan, or some version of it, was frustrated barely in time by the intervention of a libel action from Dorothy Hopkinson.

Unknown before I came to write about him, Kingsmill has stubbornly remained unknown since the publication of my book in 1964 and the selection from his writings entitled
The Best of Kingsmill
that I brought out six years later. But he had started me on my way. In so far as he wrote biographies himself, Kingsmill had been described as a follower of Lytton Strachey, a categorisation I attempted to refute. So began the pattern of my future work where a significant minor character in one biography develops into the subject of the next.

During the nineteen-sixties and nineteen-seventies I became increasingly absorbed in my subjects’ lives. ‘Writing is a form of disappearance,’ the poet Simon Armitage writes. From my parents I certainly began to disappear. I was like a science fiction character, travelling across time, stretching out and trying to make contact with people I had never met. I travelled on a current of energy ignited by their work, concentrated in their loves and spread around widening circles from their deaths. I was attempting, or so I sometimes felt, to retrieve something from death itself, having been so shocked by my grandfather’s dying. Kingsmill and Strachey, Augustus John and Bernard Shaw became the maverick teachers I never had at a university. I learnt emotionally as well as intellectually: and then there was the archaeological digging up of facts. With these I plotted patterns and contours showing different aspects of cultural and political history between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, and endeavoured to give my answer to a contemporary question: how did we get here?

I led a gregarious and solitary life. My research journeys took me eventually all over the world. Then, back in London, I would shut my door against the world and write for days and weeks in bed. There was no one ‘at his desk’ earlier than I was, I explained to my father, who seemed determined to catch me napping. All this distanced me from my parents, the C.O. and Madam as they now were.

Ignoring the libel action over
Hugh Kingsmill
(which obliged me to utter an apology, pay costs and rewrite some pages on Dorothy Hopkinson), my mother was happy to see me become self-supporting, as a man should be. The sort of career I had chosen was incredible, but then she had never taken any interest in men’s business affairs.
The Sunday Times
’s serialisation of
Lytton Strachey
and
Augustus John
in the late nineteen-sixties and early nineteen-seventies was evidence enough for her that I was properly employed. But her relief could not altogether conceal her wonder that such books could find a single reader.

My father’s attitude was more complicated. When I handed him my
Hugh Kingsmill
, he placed it carefully on a table and asked in a tone of urgency how
Lytton Strachey
was coming along. When I eventually gave him
Lytton Strachey
, he inquired gravely after my progress on
Augustus John
. The public was notoriously fickle, he reminded me, and if I didn’t bring out a book each year, every year, readers would quickly forget about me. ‘Your name has not been mentioned,’ he volunteered after reading an article on contemporary writing in the
Daily Express
. I never saw him open one of my books and he was disparaging about my subjects (Strachey was a queer fish; John completely out of fashion; Shaw a cynic whose bluff had been called). His concern on my behalf was somewhat lowering to the spirits. So I was later surprised to find that, after I returned to London, he would go round the village boasting of my achievements to bewildered neighbours.

During the late nineteen-sixties my parents marked time. My mother, who was still receiving a quarterly allowance from Egon Hessel, lived in a series of rather smart apartments taken on short leases. Over seven or eight years she moved from a flat near Sloane Square to another above Elizabeth David’s shop in Ebury Street overlooking Orange Square, and then to a mansion apartment near Earls Court. The future frightened her and, unlike William Gerhardie, she lived wholly in the present. It was an attractive quality, especially for young people on whom she spent her money – actually Egon Hessel’s money and Kaja’s. ‘I was young, inexperienced, rather gauche,’ my ballet student girlfriend Jennifer writes to me. She had come down to London from Lancashire at the age of twenty and ‘to be plunged into your world of expensive restaurants and clubs, taxis everywhere, apparently wealthy people, fashionably dressed was pretty heady stuff’.

When I think of Ulla I think of champagne. Even her hair, her colouring and a lot of her clothes were the colour of champagne. There seemed a champagne-tinted aura around her… I remember Ulla for her enthusiasms and exuberance – the way she greeted the French onion man in Orange Square like a long lost friend; her childlike delight at purchasing in the Portobello Road two green Chinese vases which were to be converted into table lamps; and an evening at a restaurant called Chez Victor where, having said farewell to Kaja that day she was inclined to sob on the proprietor’s shoulder and had to be restored with champagne cocktails.

In Jennifer’s eyes I was a young man with parents, but no cohesive family. She could discover nothing in common between my father and my mother. Certainly my father had an innate sense of fair play, but he believed that the rules of the game had been unfairly changed at half-time. A vast store of good will seemed locked in some secret chamber within him and no one could find the key. But he was still on the lookout for some woman or business partner who might know where it lay. I would sometimes go for a drink on Sundays and he would whisper over a sherry that he wanted me to meet someone he thought I’d like. There was a high-flyer from Epsom to whom he had given ‘one of your tomes’; there was a lady temporarily down on her luck who worked at Bobby’s of Bournemouth (‘the sort of place your publishers should try to get rid of your stuff’); and there was a woman he had met at the village pub who could type (‘might be rather valuable to you, Michael’). But it was difficult for him to sustain a relationship without money. After the collapse of timber and insolvency of Seamless Floors, he became ‘not exactly dour, perhaps sombre or withdrawn are better words to describe him’, Jennifer writes to me. The three of us would occasionally have lunch in the empty kitchen at his mock-Tudor refuge where he frantically pressed extra helpings on us. As his fortunes went downhill he would give me increasingly elevated advice on how to manage my literary career and issue darker warnings against fecklessness.

The worst of times was beginning for my father, and the best of times for me. The revolution of the nineteen-sixties reached me late, but not too late. The sudden freedom between the sexes, the greater equality too, and the easy atmosphere that allowed us all to resolve many differences into games, came as a wonderful liberation for men as well as women – at least it did for me. A more natural life, with wider emotional horizons, opened up. I moved into it gratefully. To those dead men, my biographical subjects, who had laboured in their fashion for change, and to the living women who transformed my experience of the world, I owe all that I value most. For two or three of the latter I was more than a request stop along their emotional routes. Ideally I had always been ‘one for whom the visible world exists’. In these women’s eyes I recovered my visibility though some habits could not be changed and I remain invisible to myself. Observation and participation grew so involved that I cannot now separate them. Looking out of the window at the multitude of birds, squirrels and cats in the garden I easily forget myself (I am a cat person unlike my family who were all dog people). If I look out of another window I see the men, women and children walking past in the street, all part of a narrative, each with a story, and I follow them in my imagination. I never tire of watching. I watch, therefore I am; I am what I watch; and what I watch entrances me. This has been my exit from myself.

All these new interests carried me further from my family but when matters began to go seriously wrong I was quickly drawn back. I began my biography of Bernard Shaw where he had begun his life, in Dublin, and was abroad in Ireland and the United States for some two years. The change in my parents after I returned in 1977 was striking.

At the start of the decade Egon Hessel’s allowance had suddenly dried up. My mother retreated to a one-room flat in Chelsea Manor Street off the King’s Road where I had written most of my
Lytton Strachey
after leaving Nell Gwynn House. Like my father in Surrey, my aunt at Maidenhead, she looked out on a cemetery. ‘Moved to Daver Court,’ she noted in the account she later wrote for me, ‘where I still am – goodness knows for how long – getting too expensive. Bank owns my flat.’ She made several visits to Stockholm, but Kaja was not well and needed to borrow money herself. ‘Trying to sell my Swedish Pewter this year,’ my mother wrote to me. She also sold pictures and furniture that had belonged to Kaja.

She still had a regular ‘boyfriend’. Jimmy was not sophisticated or wealthy or romantic. But he was kind and had a whacky sense of humour that agreeably bewildered my mother. He protected her from loneliness. But when she met a rather dashing gentleman with a title (who by a coincidence lived on the edge of Maidenhead Thicket) she could not resist one more escapade. It would be fun to escape again and forget her age, her financial worries. It was a short affaire and the only one, I believe, she truly regretted. ‘Wish I had not met him,’ she wrote, ‘as I lost Jimmy then.’

In her late fifties she was obliged to start work. She took a job as a ‘floating supervisor’ at Bourne and Hollingsworth, but left it after one week. Then she started working as an occasional interpreter at business conferences and exhibitions. Her letters to me mention events at the Goldsmiths Hall, Earls Court, Olympia, Grosvenor House, the Hilton Hotel in London and the Metropole Hotel in Brighton. For short spells she was working ‘like billy-ho’. There are photos of her at gift fairs, electrical exhibitions, brewery conferences (‘no free samples’) holding a microphone and wearing the glazed expression I know so well (and struggle myself to conceal at committee meetings) as she translates what is unintelligible in one language into what is accurately unintelligible in another.

Now that she was responsible for herself, my mother’s life grew bureaucratically more complex. I would receive letters from building societies, banks, insurance companies asking me how long Mrs Ulla Nares had been in my service, whether she was on my permanent staff, what the nature of her duties were and the amount of her monthly salary. ‘God help me with the dole!!!’ she exclaimed in one letter. She spent many indecipherable hours at the Inland Revenue headquarters being encumbered with the correct assistance. ‘Am shaking at the knees,’ she wrote to me, ‘but say to myself they are trying to help me. Waterford House seems like my second home by now!’

In the autumn of 1976 she was sixty. I was then abroad and did not particularly notice her birthday. Not that she ever forgot mine. She would write apologising for having no expensive presents or exciting news. ‘I am thinking of you all the time & wish you all the best in the world in every respect. Love Madam.’

Her moods varied. ‘Sometimes I’m glad to be alone & not having to cope with difficult men and their tantrums & whims.’ These men, businessmen from conferences, would still telephone on the off-chance, but she could not pretend to enjoy their company anymore and now avoided them. Nevertheless it was not impossible that an incredible someone might ride up and rescue her. ‘No social life at all,’ she noted. ‘Too old & getting very tired of everything. Waiting for the next exciting thing to happen, but I think time is running out and age has taken its toll – but who knows?’

While I was out of the country I asked my parents to telephone each other. ‘I spoke to your mother a few evenings ago,’ my father reported. ‘She seemed very depressed. It’s understandable as everything is going from bad to worse. She is complaining bitterly that with your departure she has no one to advise her & I have a nasty suspicion that I’ve been selected for the post.’ In fact he had been selected for another post: that of storing her clothes in the spare room of his flat. ‘She arrived down here to collect her winter clothes,’ he notified me later. These exchanges of winter and summer clothes marked their first meetings for almost thirty years.