Even as We Speak (34 page)

After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Knowing a little bit more about the technicalities now, in the opera house I have become, if no less easy to please, at least a bit harder to fool. For a
tired tenor to transpose a high note downward isn’t as heinous as Mike Tyson biting the other guy’s ear off to get out of the fight early, but it isn’t honest either. From here
on, I’ll know when to sit on my hands. Let us, however, not kid ourselves, dear boy: those singers up there can really sing. They’re doing it for a living, and all I’m doing is
dreaming aloud. But at least the dream is no longer confined to the interior of my head. My current practice number is ‘Fenesta che lucide’, a funeral song in dialect variously
attributed to Bellini and to that prolific Italian composer Ignoto. Grittily catchy as a dirge from
The Godfather
, plangently lovely beyond all measure, it laments, in phrases that pulse
like pent-up weeping, the death of the singer’s sister. Whether or not I have truly mastered its haunting melody, people certainly look haunted when I sing it. I sing it in the street, like
Mario Lanza yodelling as he toddled in
The Great Caruso
. Heads turn.

And even the most deeply buried dream of all has come true.
I have sung the duet in the restaurant with the pretty girl
. When Frank Johnson and Petronella Wyatt took me to lunch at
Simpson’s in the Strand for the purpose of inveigling me into writing this suicidally inadvisable piece, the subject came up of which show songs were harder than operatic arias. I suggested
Cole Porter’s ‘So in Love’, which bristles with lethally placed examples of the most awkward sound to sustain beyond a quaver, the long ‘i’ diphthong. In that
blackberry-stained
mezzo
voice of hers which is so much more enchanting than her politics,
la
Wyatt began to sing it, and after the first stanza I joined in,
pianissimo
but
con amore
. As our last notes faded away, the whole restaurant burst into applause. It might have been because I had stopped singing, but I like to think it was a tribute to our joint
impact – just as I like to think that Mr Johnson’s twitching smile throughout the performance was a sign of envy rather than embarrassment, and that he pulled his jacket over his head
only because the beauty of what he heard was too much for him to bear.

Spectator
, 19 December, 1997

In the restaurant on top of Ajax mountain at Aspen, Colorado, my wife and I had just started eating lunch when Barry Humphries suddenly appeared beside us and said that Peter
Cook had died the day before. I hadn’t known, and hated not having known, guilty that I had enjoyed the previous evening’s dinner. I ate my lunch but didn’t taste it. Later on I
was glad that it was a fellow comic writer, one of my masters, from whom I had found out that another of my masters was no longer with us. It fitted the way that Peter’s influence worked. He
got used early to the adulation of a wide public and eventually decided that he could do without it: long before the end, fame had to chase him far harder than he chased it. But among his fellow
practitioners his lustre was undimmed, unequalled and unchallenged, a large part of the binding force that joined them even as their individual ambitions forced them apart. Just as the astronauts
riding up on their rockets all worshipped Chuck Yeager, the jet pilot who never joined them in space because he flew too well with wings, so the media millionaires all knew that Cook was the
unsurpassable precursor who had done it all before they did, and done it better. Indeed his superiority was easier to take after he ceased to exercise it. In his last years, when he sat at home
reading newspapers while defying alcohol to dull his brilliant mind, he was a cinch to love. Early on, when we were all struggling to get started and he was effortlessly up there dominating the
whole picture, to feel affection for him took self-discipline. Admiration was too total. You couldn’t write a line without imagining him looking over your shoulder, not very impressed.

To imagine him doing that was particularly easy if you were coming up to Pembroke College, Cambridge, which I did in 1964. His legend haunted the place with an intensity unrivalled even by that
of Ted Hughes. The poet, after all, had only begun to practise his art there. But the comedian was already the leading man in his field before he went down. I thought, perhaps incorrectly, that I
could write poetry of my own without worrying too much about Hughes. But there was no question of doing comedy without worrying about Cook. When Eric Idle drafted me to assist him in producing the
Pembroke Smoker in the Old Library, he made it clear to me that the tradition begun by Cook had to be kept up, even if it was unlikely that our concert would emulate Cook’s in forming the
basis of a West End hit revue. Cook created
Pieces of Eight
while still
in statu pupillari
. He had two revues running in the West End before he sat the Tripos. At the
porter’s lodge, so the story went, his accountant was told to wait because a Hollywood producer had not yet left. Stories about Cook grew with the telling, but only because of the magnitude
of the initial impetus. It would be our task, Idle informed me, to be worthy of his example, at least to the extent of not perpetrating a disaster. Together we built a stage out of beer crates.

In subsequent years, when I had installed myself as perennial sole producer of the Pembroke Smoker, I always had Cook’s damnably precocious originality in mind to keep me humble. When
Germaine Greer did her famous Striptease Nun routine, or her sensational rendition of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ in which her mouth moved out of synchronization with the words while the
audience fell thrashing out of their chairs, I would stand proudly in the wings, confident that he would have approved. I only wished that I could have been as confident about my own efforts. Most
of them were comic monologues, and none of us ever delivered one of those without remembering who had been on before us. That tiny beer-crate stage could feel as big and lonely as a Roman
arena.

We had all felt his influence long before that, of course. With mingled envy and awe I had memorized the whole of the
Beyond the Fringe
LP, including the liner notes, the year I arrived
in London. But in Pembroke those four indecently gifted young people started to become real, simply because I could hear the exemplary echo of Cook’s footsteps on the flagstones. He was
practically a physical presence, although strangely enough he was the last of the quartet that I actually met in real life, and it was more than twenty years later before I experienced the delights
of his conversation. When I finally did, it immediately became apparent why he was producing less for the public. It was because he was lavishing it on his life. He gave it away to his friends. In
an hour of casual talk he spilled out enough wit and perception – in him the two things were uncommonly near allied – to keep anybody else going for a whole television season. That was
the cruel fact which so few of his obituarists, even at their most laudatory, could bring themselves to face: he wasn’t just a genius, he had the genius’s impatience with the whole idea
of doing something
again
. He reinvented an art form, exhausted its possibilities, and just left it. There is always something frightening about that degree of inventiveness. Leonardo used
to scare people the same way, by carving in ice, painting on a wet wall, or just never getting around to creating any more of the masterpieces that everyone – wise after the event –
knew that he was capable of. But he knew that better than they did. Cook,
mutatis mutandis
(he couldn’t paint, but then Leonardo couldn’t imitate Harold Macmillan), was in the
same case. He didn’t lose his powers. He just lost interest in proving that he possessed them.

In a television special called
Postcard from London
I filmed a conversation with Cook and we did a good deal of incidental chatting while the magazines were being changed. More
recently, in his last years, I had the pleasure of his company when he sweetly agreed to descend from his mountain fastness and become the most adventurous guest in every season of my weekly talk
show. On screen he was invariably magisterial, but off screen he was even better than that. Most good speakers husband their resources, especially when it is getting late. Few of them will play to
an audience of one. He would give his whole wealth without hesitation. I wish we had spent more time talking about the Dear Old College but it didn’t work out that way. In my experience, he
wasn’t much of a one for reminiscence, and he wasn’t kidding about his profound indifference to Establishments of all types. It would be sentimental to suggest that Pembroke, or even
Cambridge, formed him. It would be truer to say that he formed them – to the extent, at any rate, of providing one of those periodic injections of concentrated intelligence which our
venerated institutions depend on for their continued vitality. He did the same for the whole country. A supreme master of the language that unites this nation, he was the laughter in its voice:
sceptical, critical, yet always joyful, revelling in the verbal heritage which for him was the tradition that really mattered. (It was a pity that he never read from
The Anatomy of
Melancholy
, because there are whole stretches of it which you would swear he wrote.) If his college ever puts up a statue to him, it should be rigged to speak, as a reminder that the
illustrious roster of Pembroke poets which began with Spenser surely included Peter Cook.

Pembroke Magazine
, 1995

The music business being what it is, it’s practically impossible to quote a song lyric without paying through the nose. But I can quote this one for free because, about
thirty years ago, I wrote it. ‘Perfect moments have a clean design,’ sang Pete Atkin last week, launching the first stanza of his opening number at the Everyman Theatre during the
Cheltenham Literary Festival. ‘Scoring edges that arrest the flow/ Skis cut diamonds in the plump of snow/ Times my life feels like a friend of mine.’ Pete was centre stage,
accompanying himself on guitar, and the pretty melody already held his audience breathless: not an empty seat in the place, and not a sound except from him.

Feigning casualness in my chair at stage left, I arranged my weary eyelids to yield an appropriate aperture for conveying serious humility while simultaneously counting the house. Terraces of
angelic people went up into the sky like the final scene of Dante’s
Paradiso
, and not one of them was eating popcorn. Would they all still be there after an hour and a half of this
stuff? Worry about that later: so far, so good. It was a perfect moment.

Much of the perfection lay in its unexpectedness. Until very recently, I had thought that the hundred or so songs James and Atkin wrote between the late Sixties and late Seventies had been
consigned irretrievably to the same warehouse as the Sinclair C5, the Sony Watchman, Albert Finney’s record album and Naomi Campbell’s novel. For the forgotten fad, there is always a
place in nostalgia. For the bright idea that never catches on in the first place, there is nothing that lingers except the disappointed sigh of its creator. At the time when Atkin and I were active
as songwriters, young men wore sideburns, flared trousers and round-tip Paisley-pattern shirts with a high content of polyester. If any of that hideous kit ever comes back, it will be because there
was too much of it for the embarrassed folk memory to burn. Some young pretender to John Galliano’s crown will find a heap of his father’s quondam glad-rags in the back of the broom
cupboard and get the idea that what was popular once might be popular again.

But our songs were never popular in that sense. Hundreds, and then thousands of people liked them, but not millions. The Atkin albums – there were six of them all told – achieved
respectful reviews and even respectable sales: if I had published collections of poetry that sold in those figures I would have been a happy man. People who bought the albums rarely got rid of
them. As the years went by, their resale price went up and up: they are notoriously hard to find second hand. The trouble was that in the years when they were coming out they were hard to find
first hand. Record company executives didn’t know how to classify what we were doing, and the shops didn’t know where to put it in the racks. Pop? Rock? Jazz? Folk? All too often we
were filed under Easy Listening, which was the last thing we were. Whichever way you sliced it, by music business standards we were a minority interest. And in a mass medium, the penalty for being
a minority interest is the kiss-off, usually without hope of resurrection.

When Lazarus emerged from the tomb, none of his friends wanted to hear about what it felt like to come back to life. They wanted to hear about what it felt like to be dead. Did it hurt? Well,
yes it did. We put ten years of effort into trying to break through, and it all ended with a funeral bell. After that, there was a Clive James compulsively active in several fields of various
repute and there was a Pete Atkin with an increasingly important career in BBC radio, culminating with his magisterial production of
This Sceptred Isle
, a hit series whose collected
earnings on audio tape – none of which go to him – will contribute a large chunk to Sir John Birt’s retirement package. There was a James and there was an Atkin, but there was no
more James and Atkin. There was a him and a me, but there was no more us.

Over the last twenty years I have spent as little time as possible wondering what became of us, because the sense of loss was too piercing. ‘I Wonder What Became of Me’, a miniature
masterpiece by Johnny Mercer and Harold Arlen, was one of the Broadway show tunes that Atkin and I found we shared an admiration for when we first started to write together. It was a downbeat,
near-suicidal song, and so, it would turn out, were a lot of ours. We were always careful to crank out the occasional jollified show-stopper to avoid the possibility of our listeners hanging
themselves, but on the whole we, and especially I, inclined towards melancholy. My favoured thematic area at the time was the absurdity of love in a world dedicated to destruction, and quite often
I wasn’t even as funny as that. Pete would make even a death threat sound like a murmur of desire, but there must have been times when he looked at one of my sketches for a lyric and wondered
whether it might not have been better tackled by Captain Nemo sitting at his pipe organ near the bottom of the Atlantic.