Going Up (29 page)

He knew very well that I did not. I raged and I daresay I tried to weep. I threw a few things around. Beetle said soothing words and I was not soothed. We got in the car and drove along the Great West Road. It was palliative to be behind the wheel, the master of my silly fate. We got as far as Bath, had a six o’clock cup of tea, and then we drove back to Chelsea Embankment. When I next spoke to Alan, he offered £50 for me to rewrite the book. I scowled and sulked and rehearsed being dead for a day or two. Then I went and typed up the few handwritten chapters still in my notebook. Copying and improving them gave me the thrust to go on into the long section of which I had no trace whatever. I reproduced it pretty well word for word, even after taking care to put two carbons in the machine.

When John Sullivan abandoned Oxford, and his first wife, to seek his academic fortune in America, he was prompt to acquire a new worldly vocabulary. One of his favourite transatlantic phrases was ‘When the going gets tough, the tough get going’. I have never been tough, but I have always been determined to keep going. After six weeks of sour, laborious days, I was able to deliver the top copy of the rewritten version of
The Earlsdon Way
to Alan Maclean. Might it possibly be that his briefcase was abstracted by someone from MI5 who spent futile weeks trying to decode my enigmatic text?

I took the second carbon copy of the rewritten novel to Manor Fields on the next evening when we went to see my parents. I imagined that my
mother would feel at home with my recension of Sinclair Lewis. On our next visit, she handed the manuscript back to me and said, ‘You’ll do better.’ She must have taken the uncomely Lesley Keggin to be a portrait of herself. It cannot be denied that the problem that Mrs Keggin had with her shoulder duplicated one of Irene’s regular complaints; but in fact my grey and proper character was based on a nice Mrs Broke with whom I sometimes played bridge in the Crockford’s two-shilling room. Years later, I discovered her to be the not entirely conventional mother of Richard Broke, the script editor who was assigned to
The Glittering Prizes
. My father’s only pronounced reaction to
The Earlsdon Way
was to report that Dan Keggin, at Wimbledon Park gold club, was amused by my purloining his name for my hero.

Alan Maclean took his time in reading the rewritten manuscript. Then his secretary rang to ask me to have lunch with him and his colleague ‘Auntie Marge’. I left Chelsea Embankment, in my second-best Adamson’s suit, brightened black shoes, St John’s College tie and with warranted misgivings. Simpson’s in the Strand was garrulous with suited businessmen having what was then habitually called ‘a spot of lunch’. Trolleyed joints of roast lamb and beef rolled among them as they inhaled the fumed mahogany atmosphere.

After Alan had crossed the carver’s palm with silver, he told me that they admired much of the writing, but
The Earlsdon Way
was ‘not a Macmillan book’. Social realism, in which the local Conservative Party was held up to ridicule, was not the species of light-heartedness that Jack Squire had promised that I was good for. Auntie Marge hoped I didn’t mind them saying so, but I should never make any friends if I went on writing in this fashion. I told them that I had not become a writer to make friends, but to tell the truth, however much it might hurt people. I could imagine the shade of George Turner shaking his head: some people never learn.

I stayed for profiteroles and then I went and phoned George Greenfield (careful not to press button A before someone answered). He had already spoken to David Farrer at Secker & Warburg, where his client Brian
Glanville was an established author. When they came through, Secker’s readers’ reports were so enthusiastic that George could hardly understand why Farrer elected not to take the book. He sent it across Red Lion Square to Desmond Flower at Cassell’s, who soon offered a £100 advance. I had a new publisher.

Over one of our irregular three-and-sixpenny lunches at Schmidt’s in Charlotte Street, I told my new friend Tom Maschler how pleased I was. He looked unimpressed: no one who mattered was published by Cassell’s. ‘No? What about Robert Graves?’ Tom said, ‘What about him?’ Maschler had had the alert wit to commission, and was about to publish, a collection of polemic essays entitled
Declaration
, to which he supplied a modest introduction. I had got to know him too late to be a candidate for inclusion. The collection was loudly bruited as the manifesto of the Angry Young Men. Doris Lessing was an honorary member of their fraternity. For politic publicity purposes, the contributors were taken to share some coherent sense of outrage and purpose. The watchword of their parade was ‘By the left, quick march’. What they did undoubtedly have in common was militant self-righteousness. Legend insists that Kingsley Amis was a contributor; in fact, showy Oxonian self-deprecation disposed him to decline Maschler’s solicitation to join the dance.

Ken Tynan, Lindsay Anderson, John Wain, Stuart Holroyd and Colin Wilson rallied to Tom’s 5,000-word call. Lindsay Anderson’s essay was entitled ‘Get Out and Push’; but what he, and the others, pushed was mainly their own bandwagon. John Osborne’s was already rolling, thanks largely to Ken Tynan. Osborne had given resentment emblematic form in Jimmy Porter, the anti-hero of
Look Back in Anger
. The play, starring Kenneth Haigh and Mary Ure, owed its delayed triumph and abiding mythological status to Ken’s advocacy. As it was about to close, he announced that he could never love anybody who did not think it a masterpiece. Osborne’s fame was established. By the 1970s, he and Tynan had become rancorous
enemies. They exchanged regular, well-publicised paper punches in available publications.

While impersonating Jimmy Porter, Ken Haigh seemed bound for stardom; but he never achieved it. Failure to find sustained favour sat heavily on him. Some time later, Nigel Stock, a mild character actor, never out of work, had a small part in a film I wrote. He told me that he used to go to Lord’s in the afternoon; the Large Mound stand was a nice quiet place to smoke his pipe and learn lines. One day, he was aware of Ken Haigh sitting behind him. Between overs, Ken leaned forward, heavy hands on the white slats of Nigel’s seat. ‘Tell me something, Nige, honestly: why is it people don’t like me?’ Stock put his script on his knee, took his pipe from his mouth, and said, ‘Probably because you’re such a cunt, Ken.’

Tom Maschler was now the non-playing captain of those who advocated a menu of new Jerusalems. Colin Wilson was the manifestly prodigious genius. He had come to public attention in corduroys and a roll-topped orange sweater, straight from sharing a sleeping bag with a woman called Valerie (many girls were in those days) on Hampstead Heath. Her father was widely reported to be looking for Colin with a horsewhip.
The Outsider
was acclaimed by both grand masters of the Sunday press, Philip Toynbee and Cyril Connolly.

Colin’s autodidacticism was primed by the literary savvy of his namesake. Angus Wilson, then a librarian at the British Museum, armed the young unknown to amaze the pundits by his cull of Continental sources, from Herman Hesse, whose Steppenwolf was the archetypal outsider, to Nietzsche, Camus and Sartre. At the height of Colin’s fame, I interviewed him, not without a trace of Cambridge philosophical condescension, for BBC radio. He was more bemused than besotted by the publicity. I envied him his orange cable-stitched, roll-top sweater more urgently than the feathers in his cap. Beetle knitted me a duplicate for my birthday. The author of
The Outsider
flamed briefly in the forehead of the morning sky and then,
after the publication of his second, clumsier collage, was reduced to the ranks of has-beens.

Deserted by the smart critics whose want of cosmopolitan literacy he had exposed (they would not otherwise have saluted the originality of his notion of outsiderdom), Colin fell as summarily as he had risen. He accepted relegation from genius to crank with such good grace that it doubled for eminence. As if stalled almost at the peak of his Icarian ascendancy-cum-fall, he scarcely changed, in appearance or wardrobe, over the years. Living in Cornish seclusion, he wrote many more books, about violent crime, sexual aberration and the supernatural, some enjoyable, some scabrous, all artlessly dotty. In the late 1980s, after I had congratulated him on something he had written, he took me to a meeting of the Savage Club where ‘Brother Savages’ sang salty songs.

The Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square was the centre of Ken Tynan’s smart hopes for a new kind of drama that involved socialism, sexual liberation and his own bandmasterly supervision. George Devine, an earnest, plain, middle-aged actor of small charisma, was the Royal Court’s presiding dramaturge. He was seconded, in the back office, by Oscar Lowenstein, a small, anxious person whose knees literally knocked together when I went to see him about a play of mine for which he expressed impotent enthusiasm: in the new, no longer oligarchic theatre, George made all the creative decisions.

Aspirant writers were encouraged to attend rehearsals at the Royal Court. I dropped in one day to see Tony Richardson directing George Devine, who was on his knees, in a canine position. Tony Richardson, the Oxonian equivalent of Peter Hall, though in a higher social register, was standing over the temporarily four-footed actor, chin in one hand. He considered the matter and then he said, ‘You don’t feel like growling at all, do you, George?’ I walked out into Sloane Square and along the King’s Road to Ward’s Bookshop.

In the 1970s, we rented a house from Tony Richardson in King’s Road, off Sunset Boulevard. It had a good many David Hockney paintings, of swimming pools, with and without boys. They hung high in the lee of the advertised ‘cathedral ceiling’. Tony Richardson’s last film job, in 1989, was to direct a version of Hemingway’s
Hills Like White Elephants
, one of a trio of ‘Tales of Seduction’. In the same triad, I directed Elizabeth McGovern and Beau Bridges in my adaptation of Mary McCarthy’s
The Man in the
Brooks Brothers Shirt
, which won the Ace Award for the Best Film on Cable TV. I never had occasion to speak to Tony Richardson, who was dying of Aids at the time. My award was lost in the mail.

Almost immediately after Leslie and I collected our last monthly stipend from the Rank Organisation, we were approached by a Pinewood producer, Vivian Cox, who proposed that we write a movie about Cambridge. His idea was that it should be like
The Guinea Pig
, in which the juvenile Dickie Attenborough had made his name as an oikish outsider given a place at a posh public school. Vivian had been a hockey Blue (and international), played rugger for Wasps, and drove a white Aston Martin. During the war he had gone into action, as Flag Lieutenant to Vice-Admiral Bruce Fraser on
HMS Duke of York
, during the sinking of the German battle-cruiser
Scharnhorst
. A connoisseur of good wines, Vivian was a hard-working
bon vivant
(he told me that ‘bon viveur’ was not a genuine
locution française
) and an eager patron of Michelin-starred restaurants, especially his friend Raymond Thuillier’s Baumanière at Les Baux-de-Provence. Thuillier had not become a chef until he was over fifty and now had three stars.

Since Leslie’s and my two-picture contract had just lapsed, Jock Jacobsen had to negotiate a new deal, for another nice fee, for us to write
Bachelor of Hearts
. The cinema was, it appeared, an indulgent Maecenas. In due time, our original working-class ‘guinea pig’ was transformed to accommodate Hardy Kruger, the young German star of a recent hit,
The One That Got Away
. Sylvia Syms, the English cinema’s principal
jeune première
after
Jean Simmons, had defected unpatriotically to Hollywood with Stewart Granger, was cast as a rather better-looking Girton girl than any I had seen pedalling along the Cambridge streets. When Vivian took us to meet her, Leslie kissed her hullo with West End ease. Lacking his smooth cheek, I held out my hand.

Some thirty years later, I wrote a play,
From the Greek
, a modern version of
Oedipus Rex
, set in New Mexico, which Jonathan Lynn commissioned and was to direct. He approached the mature Miss Syms to play the part of my Jocasta. She did not refuse him; but said that she would like to meet me, again. As I leaned towards her, I was greeted with an outstretched hand. ‘I remember the last time we met,’ she said, ‘and you refused to kiss me.’ I suspect that she took some pleasure in declining the part that went to Maxine Audley, who had also been a great beauty. She told me that, in her youth, if she saw a man she fancied, she would say to herself, ‘I’ll have a bit of that’ and was rarely denied.

When, at length,
Bachelor of Hearts
was greenlighted, Vivian gave a dinner party for Leslie and me in his Curzon Street
garçonnière
. As he opened a celebratory bottle of 1945 Château Margaux, he told us how, during the Great War, an Englishman and a Frenchman shared a dug-out. They had one bottle of a rare and delicious vintage, which they swore that they would not open until victory came. On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, the Englishman reached for his corkscrew. The Frenchman took the bottle from him as he prepared to pour it. ‘
Non, non, mon cher ami! Pas si vite! D’abord on en parle un peu
.’

Hardy Kruger had been fourteen years old when the war ended. Like other young Germans of his age, he had already been recruited into the Hitler Youth. That he was cast in our movie excited little indignation. Tom Wiseman, the much feared
Evening Standard
showbiz columnist, was an exception. As a small boy, he had fled Vienna with his mother in 1938; his father remained behind. After living dangerously, and profitably for a while,
Wiseman senior was arrested and murdered. As our movie was about to come out, Tom went to interview Hardy in his hotel suite and grilled him on his service to the Nazis. Hardy defended himself on the plausible grounds that few young persons in his position could have resisted the patriotic call. Tom was not easily mollified, but had to concede that Hardy was no sort of impenitent ex-Nazi. As the meeting ended, quite amicably, Hardy’s wife, who had overheard their long conversation, said to Tom, ‘Mr Viseman, so far as ze Germans and ze Jews vere concerned, vy don’t we ve just agree zat zere were mistakes on both sides?’