Going Up (34 page)

Acquaintances called out, ‘Good morning’, as we passed. Brendan responded, ‘
Bonjour, bonjour
.’

The public bar in the Railway Hotel was a brown-black dust hole with sagging leathered benches. A Spaniard was waiting for Brendan. ‘I waited from twelve to three yesterday. You arranged to meet me.’

‘Couldn’t make it.’

‘You arranged to meet me.’

‘Couldn’t make it. Give me a drink, Rosie.’

Whiskey gents in green bowler hats came in and slapped Brendan on the back. A stranger bumped into him and said, ‘Sorry’.

Brendan tugged down his sagging white sweater. ‘We’ll excuse it this time, but next time: WATCH OUT!’

Very pink and clean, he rambled and then said something perfect, if
not often quotable. He gave obscenity a Yeatsian tang. We took a taxi back to do the interview, which he knew himself too well to believe I would ever get if we stayed in the pub. As we reached the Mill House, the other tenant was mowing the triangle of lawn. Behan said, ‘Look at that cunt.’

He did his best to be coherent when I asked him questions he must have endured a dozen times. Afterwards, he gave me a copy of
Borstal Boy
. I asked him to dedicate it to Paul. The pen slurred across the paper. The words ‘To Paul with love from his dad’s friend Brendan’ were encoded in dangling scribble.

Having parted from Leslie Bricusse and his promise of fame and fortune, I worked steadily at
The Limits of Love
. Beetle neither expected riches nor seemed to crave them. There we were, secure in Highgate remoteness, with Paul, and a garden. It did not occur to us that we might live anywhere but in England. We saw John and Dudy Nimmo and a few other people, but I made no purposeful contacts in the literary world. I took solace in the silent conversation of the authors whose works I collected from the London Library by the under-armful, before going to play bridge. Occasionally I would see Hugh Thomas in the Reading Room. One evening, as we walked along Jermyn Street, he looked in the window of the Cavendish Hotel. A white-whiskered gentleman was having tea. Hugh said, ‘That’s old Lord Sandwich! Let’s go in and talk to him.’

I said, ‘I can’t. I don’t know him.’

‘Neither do I. Come on.’

We walked through bottle-glassed doors into the lounge. Sandwich looked up as if he had all but expected us. Hugh explained that he was a historian and would be very grateful to have an experienced statesman’s view of the pre-war policy of non-intervention in Spain. Sandwich was amiably forthcoming. Perhaps he was glad of the company. He did not go so far as to offer us tea.

I did join the PEN club, where Celia Dale/Ramsey was a regular. What had appeared desirable and exclusive at a distance was revealed as a kind of women’s institute for both sexes. The papers given at the meetings might have stocked the herbaceous border in a garden of prim remembrance. At the AGM, I proposed that the intellectual standard be raised. Angus Wilson, whose recent novel,
Anglo-Saxon Attitudes
, had been scathingly appreciative of the moral values on which the British continued to vaunt themselves, sided with me against Richard Church, for whom literary refinement and descriptions of wild flowers were indivisible. Church derided me, nicely, as ‘our stormy petrel’, but my storms were limited to teacups.

Angus and I concocted a list of more high-browed speakers. Among them was Andor Gomme, John Wisdom’s star pupil who had defected sideways to Frank Leavis and was now an accredited academic. He arrived with a stack of flagged volumes and delivered himself of a long sermon, serviced with dry and laughter-free quotations. If he had been less thoroughly prepared, he might have been twice as effective.

Since we had little money, Beetle and I decided to have a shared holiday with her sister Joan and her now ex-Communist husband. In March, Baron Moss and I set off in his Armstrong Siddeley Sapphire to find a suitable villa to rent in September, when the prices came down. His period of unquestioning devotion to the party had come to an end when Khrushchev, taking advantage of the West’s divisions over Suez, marched into Hungary, deposed and murdered Imre Nagy and installed János Kádár as the new face, or two faces, of Mátyás Rákosi. The recapture of Budapest dispelled the illusion of serious change that had been augured, optimists liked to think, by Khrushchev’s 1953 denunciation of Stalin, whose pitiless legate he had been in Ukraine, during the punitive famine of the 1930s. In unpro-claimed atonement, Khrushchev formally assigned the Crimea to Ukrainian administration, although it remained under the
de facto
control of Moscow.
Who imagined that it would ever be anything else? We were stalled in the era of ‘containment’. Doris Lessing, John Berger and Lindsay Anderson, and who all else with their hearts on ostentatiously rolled-up sleeves, still had little doubt that the Soviet Union, with modifications, represented the desirable future of mankind.

Baron’s decision to quit
The Worker
was not the result of political disillusionment. Joan had eased the limitations of their life on £6.10s a week by getting a job at J. Walter Thompson’s in Berkeley Square and she had also served notice on him. Neither her ability nor her beauty passed unremarked at the office. She had endured Baron’s ideologically justified infidelities with patient anguish. Now it was his turn to be anguished. Although Joan’s admirer was a married Roman Catholic, with conventional scruples, the fear of losing her was enough to transform Baron from apparatchik to entrepreneur. Adopting his own new economic programme, he started an advertising agency. Backed mainly by East End old boys who had made good, the petrol station owner Gerald Ronson among them, Baron Moss and Associates prospered sufficiently for him to acquire the large black car in which he and I drove south.

There was no friction between us, nor any brotherhood. He had left the party but could not step outside its frame of reference, even for fun. He was reluctant to admit that Stalin could have acted other than he did. Since the Nazis had been the predictable incarnation of the last stage of capitalism, the Holocaust was as much a proof that Lenin had been right as that something uniquely appalling had taken place. The notion that history had an inexorable logic made him almost complicitous even when its laws had savage consequences. We never talked about his marriage and he showed small interest in what I knew or in what I was writing. Jews we might both be, or be said to be; I had no sense that we were two of a kind.

When Baron was at the wheel of his Armstrong Siddeley Sapphire,
I watched the road in quiet apprehension. Very early in our trip, he accelerated into some loose gravel and the big car swivelled right round in the empty road. After that, I took over as often as I could. It gave me a good excuse not to talk. We drove to Nice and then all along the Riviera. After a day or two of futile inquiries, we found a feasible flat-roofed modern villa to rent in Le Canadel, a village on the outskirts of La Napoule. There was direct access to a sandy beach. The rent was £100 for the month.

We decided to drive on westwards and loop north, on the narrow curl of highway through the depopulated Languedoc, notorious for swarms of summer mosquitoes. After getting lost on some short cut, we ran low on petrol. I imagined being marooned, like Evelyn Waugh’s victim-hero in
A
Handful of Dust
, and obliged to spend lonely days and nights trying to enjoy Baron’s monotonous company. In imminent danger of running dry, we emerged on the main road, not far short of a Shell station. We stopped overnight in Carcassonne, which happened to be
en
fête
. Masked crowds were hitting each other with playful cardboard batons in some dimly remembered printennial rite. We had the worst cauliflower soup I have ever tasted in a hotel in the walled city and then went up a sagging staircase to another joyless shared room.

Baron saw in the guidebook that our route north needed scant deviation in order to embrace a visit to the caves at Lascaux, On our way to Montignac, just before crossing the Dordogne, we drove below the château of Siorac-en-Périgord, where some of Buck’s people had stored arms and ammunition. At Lascaux, in those days, visitors could take the wide, slow lift down into the original prehistoric caves that two boys, out with their dogs, had fallen into not twenty years earlier. No travel supplements had prepared us for the luminous darkness in which our small party of tourists walked the narrow walkway past the bright bent murals with their brown and yellow freight of arrow-pierced mammoths and deer. The restaurant at Sergeac, where Baron and I had lunch, was
run by a farmer. He had a private museum of prehistoric relics. After
confit de canard, pommes Sarladaises
, he led us into one of his fields, scuffed the ploughed earth with his boot and handed me a fang from a sabre-toothed tiger.

On my return to Highgate, I thought it time to confirm that our landlady was ready to formalise our promised new lease. Paul’s large dark stare had charmed her and we had been becomingly discreet in our habits. My only bohemian excess was to have painted the peeling kitchen door dark blue. I went upstairs with confidence and came down in dismay. Miss Pearce had no complaint about our tenancy, but her sister Mrs Knights had just been widowed. She could not evict the long-resident schoolteacher who lived on the top floor; we had to move out. I made bold to remind her that, taking her at her word, we had spent our savings on furniture we could not take with us, since we had nowhere to go and could not now afford to find anywhere else. She was very sorry. And, by the way, would I please paint the kitchen door its original colour?

Tom Maschler came one evening to babysit for us while we went to dinner with the Nimmos. He walked into the living room just as I was locking one of the drawers in my desk. ‘What’re you doing that for?’

‘I don’t like people reading my notebooks.’

‘What makes you think I’d do anything like that?’

I said, ‘What’s the matter? Aren’t you interested?’

I told him that we were about to be evicted and would soon have nowhere to live. I needed to make some money. He said, ‘Success, what do you think about it?’

‘I wouldn’t mind some.’

‘I’ve got this idea for a book.’

‘You and Dale Carnegie,’ I said.

‘That was … about how to get ahead by being nice, wasn’t it?’

‘And that’s not your way?’

‘Why are you like this?’

‘Good question. The bad answer is, we’ve got to move out of here. Our nice landlady’s broken her word. I don’t know what we’re going to do.’

‘I can make a few notes. You can take it from there.’

‘Take what?’

‘This book about how to get on in today’s world.’

‘I wish I knew.’

‘Follow me. You do know actually, you just don’t think it’s nice to do it. Have you thought about living somewhere else?’

‘I just told you, we’re going to have to.’

‘Not in England. Spain. What do you think about Spain?’

‘I like Spain. I don’t like Franco. Not a hard club to get into, right?’

‘Only, I know someone who has a house in the south, right on the sea. Costa del Sol they call it. Empty all winter. If I ask her, Anna’ll be glad to let you have it for next to nothing probably.’

‘I can probably manage that.’

‘You can live down there on £10 a week, easy. And I can come and visit you. How’s the new book going?’

‘Fine.
The Limits of Love
, I’m calling it.’

‘Until you think of something better. Do you want me to talk to Anna? You can write our success book while you’re down there.’

‘If I can’t think of anything better to do.’

‘Do it right and I can get you a bit of money.’

‘We’re going to the south of France in September. If your friend’s place is free after that…’

‘Everything’s free at a price,’ Tom said. ‘Put that in our success book.’

‘Roughly speaking,’ I said, ‘money and success are synonymous.’

‘See what I mean?’

‘The S Man speaks.’

‘The S Man. There’s our title.’

‘My title.’

‘Same thing, right? I’ll talk to Anna, but I’m sure it’ll be OK.’

The Trouble with England

I
N THE EARLY summer of 1959, Tom invited me to a meeting, in Berwick Street, with some of the modish young people from whom Granada TV wanted to cull ideas for a discussion programme with a controversial edge. Doris Lessing, Arnold Wesker, Ken Tynan, Stuart Holroyd, Lindsay Anderson and other candidate iconoclasts from the index of Tom’s
Declaration
were supplemented by Karl Miller, Nick Tomalin and Edna O’Brien. We sat at a long shining blond table in a beige room, as if for a game of verbal poker. People established their
outspokenness
-for-hire by saying ‘fuck’ a lot. A few years later, Ken would come out with the ‘f’ word on television and a terrible repetitiousness would be born.

The occasion was supervised by a Granada producer whose ambitions and anxieties were buttoned in the same lightweight grey suit. Although many of those present were, or had been, married, the going view was that sex was the one form of free enterprise in favour with the company. Having just finished the first draft of
The Limits of Love
, I had the nerve to confess that my new novel advertised the merits of marital fidelity. Doris Lessing’s Circean smile was kind enough only to suggest that I could not be as callow as I made out. Karl Miller allowed it to be known that, when first married to Jane Collet, the beautiful girl at whose leopardskin tights Tony Becher
had pointed a shrieking finger on King’s Parade, he had been surprised to discover that a married man could feel sexual desire for another woman. The indication was that he was now disposed to put Leavisite maturity behind him. I left the meeting with no great wish to go over the top with the up and coming.

John Sullivan invited me to come up to Oxford and dine in Lincoln College, where he was now the Dean. His duties included supervising the moral welfare of the college’s undergraduates. He introduced me to W. W. Robson, an English don with small respect for the new fiction. ‘One thing you can say for Wain and Amis,’ he remarked (not for the first time, perhaps), ‘they do have quite a good sense of humour; except for Wain.’ Trust a don to allow for a semi-colon in his dialogue. Robson added that Amis had lifted two of his best jokes and put them in
Lucky Jim
. Perhaps because twice bitten, he cracked none in my presence.

Academic mimesis had impelled John to mantle his Liverpudlian accent in Oxonian overtones. The panelled and candlelit setting conditioned dialogue and manners. If Robson (in those days, initials were more commonly remembered than first names) was radical in politics, he was polite in society; he too admired Kenneth Burke and the New Critics. I suspected that, while my conversation might make him smile, my fiction would be met with severity. Emulation and odium often go together among intellectuals. The two classical scholars whom I knew best, Sullivan and Peter Green, had a certain mutual esteem, but no true friendship. In those days, reviews in the
Times
Literary Supplement
were unsigned. When one of John Patrick’s early books was favoured with a long, not wholly laudatory article, he was convinced that Peter was its author. As a result, he was not wholly displeased by Peter’s decade-long failure to secure any tenured position. In truth, Peter assured me, the article at which Sullivan took durable offence was not his work at all. The
TLS
abandoned the principle of contributors’ anonymity in the 1980s, though with little diminution of the resentments they were liable to excite.

I acquired an admirer in Robert Gutwillig, an American editor who happened to be in London and wrote to me after reading
The Earlsdon Way
. Under flattering pressure, I gave him a chunk of the typescript of
The Limits of Love
to read. His response was that, with suitable editing, it might well have a future in America. He was going back soon, possibly to a commanding chair as fiction editor of
Playboy
. Hefner was eager to expand his magazine’s readership beyond those who opened it only to the double-breasted centrefold. Bob’s four-sided, single-spaced letter promised that he could help me to be a better writer.

Tom Maschler reported that Anna Freeman-Saunders would be happy to let us have her beach-front cottage in Fuengirola, a few kilometres west of Málaga. We bought a roof-rack in preparation for loading all our portable goods into and onto PLD 75. Confident that he would be able to extract the fat advance we needed, I gave George Greenfield the revised manuscript of
The Limits of Love
. George had been a pupil and admirer of Frank Leavis at Downing, where he got a double first in English. His lengthy, single-spaced scrutiny of
The Limits
ended by saying that, despite many good scenes, he had to be honest: in his view, the book had ‘not quite come off’. Agents often feel that they must prove their critical acumen, as much for the sake of their own vanity as with the expectation of being listened to. I asked George to send the manuscript to Cassell’s as it stood.

Like George, Desmond Flower had won the MC in the war. He was grown up. Cassell’s was a family business; Desmond was as much a solid merchant as any kind of a literary man. He said right away that he liked the book very much; it had the makings of a bestseller. He had only one practical comment, which he hoped I would take seriously: it was a bit long.

I said, ‘I’m not cutting anything about the things that really matter to me and need saying. About the Jews, I mean.’

‘Why ever should you?’

‘And I don’t think the sex is overdone either.’

‘No more do I. I could have done with more of it if anything.’

‘What is it that you’re objecting to exactly then?’

‘Six hundred and twenty pages,’ he said, ‘this manuscript.’

‘Because it says what I became a writer to say. At last.’

‘Here’s what I suggest: take it home with you and cut ten words from every page. You’ll be surprised how easy it is to do.’

It was the best advice that any young writer is ever likely to have been given. Hemingway’s hints to other writers are often self-inflating, but his trim example still stands: what lasts best has the least fat on it. The lean shaft goes in deepest. After I did as Desmond Flower requested, the book was put into production, to be published in the summer of 1960. I avoided triumphalism when I told George Greenfield of how things had gone. He seemed genuinely pleased by Desmond’s enthusiasm. It might well get a £200 advance. After I suggested that I might write a thriller, if he could get me some money, he came up with another offer from Odham’s, my ghostly second home. They were updating a perennial bestseller,
Tales of Tragedy and Horror
. If I was willing to do some 2,000- or 3,000-word pieces on things such as the Nazi treatment of the Jews, the Tay Bridge disaster and the sinking of the
Arandora Star
, it would put some money in my pocket. I armed myself with a skimpy library and added it to our baggage.

Not long before we were due to quit Grange Road, Bernard Levin wrote an article in
The Spectator
in which he was happy to declare that there was no longer any anti-Semitism in Britain. Renown had converted yesterday’s Taper into today’s Doctor Pangloss. I sent him the cuttings that Beetle had culled during her spell at the Appointments Board in Cambridge a few years earlier. His secretary called and asked me to come and see him in Gower Street, where
The Spectator
then had its offices. In person, Levin was small, with black curly hair, tallowy white face, thick glasses and an unpromising handshake. He regarded me with more suspicion than solidarity. I told him that Beetle was uneasy at having the cuttings published (she had
liked Jack Davies), but that the prejudice was so blatant and so systematic that she had agreed that Levin should see them. He asked me what I did and, only somewhat belittled, I informed him that I had written a couple of novels. He seemed to suspect that I was more trouble than I was worth. I left 69 Gower Street composing an involuntary account of Master Levin in the style of the Appointments Board’s Philip Sinker: ‘An unattractive, indoorsy sort of chap with, I fear, the rather oily black curls one associates with Talmudic scribes…’

Once Levin had read the cuttings, he became fiercely engaged with the scandal, and more friendly: he wrote to me that Lord Rothschild ‘
s’intéresse
’ and that secretarial heads were likely to roll in the wake of his polemic in
The Spectator
. He would keep me posted. And so he did; until he did not. Journalists rarely persist with causes that turn out to be lost, however just they may be. More than fifteen years later, Levin was at a party given by Jack and Catherine Lambert, at the time when my television series,
The Glittering
Prizes
, was causing a stir. It was the first invitation of any kind from Jack and Catherine since they had stayed with us five years before. Levin came up to me and said, ‘What does it feel like to be the most talked-about person in London?’

I said, ‘I was just going to ask you, Bernard.’

At the same party, John Vaizey was kind enough to tell me that he had been at a party of our one-time neighbour, the publisher George Weidenfeld’s, the previous week. Eager to see the next episode of my series, he made an excuse to leave Chelsea Embankment early: he had work to do. Weidenfeld said, ‘I know exactly why you’re going home. If you really want to see Freddie Raphael’s play that much, it’s on in the bedroom.’

As an agent, Leslie Linder was always warm, optimistic company, but tenacity was never his first quality: he went from one thing to another, eager for jam, less happy when expected to cut bread and butter. I had a call from his young assistant, Richard Gregson. A couple of old Hollywood hands
were in town and they wanted someone to rewrite a script entitled
Damon and Pythias
. Since it was based on an old Greek story, I was a natural to do the job. Richard had been in the Merchant Navy and was, for a while, a tea-taster in Borneo. His brother was the handsome young actor Michael Craig, whom the J. Arthur Rank publicity department often portrayed stripped to the waist. He had had to change his name because there was an established British movie actor called Michael Gregson. Richard’s brother made enough of a splash as a movie actor to be summoned to Binkie Beaumont’s presence as a possible theatrical leading man. Binkie was sitting at his desk, in shirt, tie and jacket, when Michael was shown in. They talked for a while and then Binkie stood up to reveal that he was naked from the waist down.

John Redway had a new young assistant, Gareth Wigan, who had been one of our hosts when
Out of the Blue
was in Oxford, before we opened at the Phoenix Theatre. Not many years later, Gregson and Wigan parted company from John Redway and associates. Representing John Schlesinger, Brian Forbes, Leslie Bricusse and others, they became the most energetic and influential film and TV agents in London.

Vestigial virtue drove me to check scholarly sources for the original story of Damon and Pythias. My
Oxford Companion
disclosed that Damon was a Pythagorean philosopher in the time of the fourth-century BC tyrant of Syracuse, Dionysius. When his best friend Pythias (more properly Phintias) was condemned to death, Damon stood surety for his friend while the latter left Syracuse to settle his affairs. Pythias returned to the city and redeemed his friend’s pledge. Dionysius was so moved by the mutual trust of the two men that he pardoned Pythias. It would be nice to suppose that he then made friends of them both.

Sam Marx had been the long-serving script consultant for MGM. He had figured, in no prominent position, in the credits of any number of lionised movies. Now that he was retiring, the grateful management had given him a picture to produce, along with his friend Sam Jaffe, who had been an
executive and then became a successful agent. His clients included Stanley Kubrick. I went to see the Sams in their suite at the Dorchester Hotel. Sam Marx would never have tolerated any screenwriter composing a scene that involved three people of whom two had the same name. One Sam apostrophised the other with repetitive rapidity. They were polite and they were friendly. They had little doubt that I was the man they wanted. I had even been to Sicily.

The fat screenplay was handsomely duplicated. They already had their deal to make the movie, but both Sams considered that the script needed some work. I should take it to this room they had booked for me at the Grosvenor House, read it, and tell them what I thought. They would fix for me to have coffee. I said that I should as soon take the script home with me, sooner. The thing was, the Sams said, they had a schedule, and the Grosvenor House was not far away. ‘Nor is home,’ I said. ‘I’ll call you in a few hours. Promise.’

As I stood up, Jaffe said, ‘Fred, one thing we want you to be clear about. This is the story of two friends, the greatest friendship between two men the world has ever seen, that’s our story, that’s what we want to tell: two guys who’d do anything for each other, don’t let’s lose sight of that for one moment.’

Sam Marx said, ‘And listen, Fred, one more thing before you go, we’ve been doing some thinking about our two characters, so: one thing to bear in mind when you’re reading the script: the way we see it today, where it says Damon, that’s Pythias…’

‘And where it says Pythias…’

‘That’s Damon. Bear that in mind, Fred, will you, please?’

‘Oh and Sam, we had one more thing, Fred: our two guys, yes, they’re friends, and yes, they’re Greek, but they absolutely must not be, you know what I’m trying to say … Greek friends.’

I had already had some small experience of rewriting a script. When
I was working with Leslie, a Pinewood producer called Jo Janni was about to go into production with a script entitled
The Big Money
. We were solicited by Olive Harding, the script controller who had given us that two-picture deal, to put some late ginger into it. Ian Carmichael was the star. He drove to Chelsea Embankment in his olive-green Ford Consul convertible, the badge of his 1950s success, and told me the sensible things that he thought needed doing. I remembered seeing him in drag in a West End revue. He sat at the piano with an arm full of bangles that kept slipping down over his fingers as he played and he had to raise them, one after the other, and shake the bangles up his arm again.