Memoirs of a Private Man (36 page)

‘Never seen it. Never heard of it.'

‘And then there was
Night Without Stars
,' I hastened on. ‘That was a fairly successful novel, and it was filmed.'

‘Never seen it, never heard of it,' he said.

‘And there was
Fortune is a Woman
. That was a book club choice in America, and it was also filmed, by Columbia.'

‘Never seen it, never heard of it,' he said, finally consigning me to literary oblivion.

At this stage Kean, the porter, appeared on the scene. ‘Got a taxi for you now, Mr Harding. Sorry for the delay.'

He helped Gilbert into the hall, and as the big man was so unsteady I took his other arm.

We got him to the taxi, and I was helping him in when he grasped my arm and pulled me in after him.

‘Come home with me. I want to talk to you.'

Glass in hand, I went with him.

I did not suppose he was specially interested in me, but he desperately wanted not to be left alone; and later friendly meetings confirmed this. So long as he was projecting this personality he had built up, and he had people to listen to him and to accept it, he could believe in it himself. Under all his bombast was a searing selfcontempt, both for what he was and for his way of earning a living. Such self-contempt was undeserved, but you couldn't reason with him about it.

He was in fact a very clever man, and in some ways a very worthy one. Always rebellious, but often rebellious on behalf of people he felt were not getting treated properly, his Vesuvius-like exterior deceived others into supposing he was always looking for trouble. When the drink was in him this was largely true; it was the characteristic that made him famous. But there were those at the Savile who deliberately tried to get a rise out of him and provoke the row they thought it clever to incite. I remember Tony Halsbury (the third Earl) coming into the club one day and, seeing Gilbert sitting by himself, he went up and said:

‘ Gilbert, you're a Catholic.' (Knowing him very well to be a fairly recent and zealous convert.) ‘Tell me, did the Virgin Mary in your opinion use contraceptives? Otherwise, why did Jesus not have a clutch of little brothers and sisters?'

There was an inevitable blow-out, but it was not of Gilbert's seeking.

After that first meeting, he was always particularly courteous to me – and I use the word intentionally, for that was what he was. He admired creative people and despised critics, and this may have been the reason – apart from the fact that he recognized I liked him and took no notice of his brusqueries. Only once or twice, as he was much sharper than most people in the club, I saw him look at me resentfully when I refused another drink. He was conscious that I wasn't going along with him. But he never said anything.

I always found it rather fun to be with him; it was like being with an explosive uncle.

I wish I could say the same about Malcolm Arnold, a true creator in the way Gilbert never was. As a young man Malcolm was delightful, brimfull of talent, laughter, clownish jokes, a musician to his fingertips, unique. But that alas in his later years has all changed. I try to avoid him.

Thinking of Malcolm Arnold, I recall a splendid summer evening at the Savile organized by Gavin Henderson, in which a brass ensemble played wonderful music on the raised terrace behind the club. Malcolm played the trumpet, Jimmy Edwards the tuba.

It was a quiet warm London evening, the sun just setting, and as the music began one window after another slid or screeched open as people in the back rooms of the surrounding houses put their heads out to listen. It was like a film by René Clair.

Apart from schizoids, my allergy for people of unpredictable moods is deep-rooted. My Uncle Tom, as has already been said, was one such. There have been others. My own temper, which can be volatile, rises sharply when I encounter someone who, either by accident or design, is imposing his gloom upon a company or a household. Life to me is too short, and people who spoil it unnecessarily for others are despicable. Even people who, while blameless during the rest of the day, are morose at breakfast irritate me. One does not need to be the life and soul of the party. It's just another day to be lived, and if one is not ill or deeply worried by some outside circumstance, to be savoured from the start.

There are people too whom I describe as psychological bedwetters, who are for ever making little puddles of trouble that they think they can't help.

Life is too short to waste
In critic peep,
Quarrel or reprimand, or cynic bark,
Twill soon be dark.

One of the more prominent members of the Savile when I first joined was Richard Graves. A tall, good-looking, austere man with a long and distinguished career behind him – he had been the last British mayor of Jerusalem – he would sit in his favourite corner of the Sandpit, as the ‘core' room of the club is called, and regard new members who passed by – and old ones as well – with a cool and dispassionate eye, sometimes of approval, frequently not. He was known to the wits as ‘Graves Supérieure'.

For some reason he came to approve of me fairly quickly, and when he heard we were going to Majorca to help Jean recover from a bout of pneumonia he said: ‘You must meet my brother, Robert. I'll write to him and tell him about you.'

It was March 1st when we flew over, and all the French countryside was spattered with snow. In Palma the policemen wore greatcoats, white helmets and gloves; our excellent small hotel overlooking the sea, in what now I suppose is called Palma Nova, was run by a Belgian couple who fed us well but failed to cope with the heating of a house built primarily to keep out the sun. We shivered among the white stone pillars and walls, and presently went to see the Poet, who was staying in a four-storey house in the town. He put his head out from a third-floor window, looking exactly like the Emperor Vespasian, and trumpeted to us to come up.

We had a merry meeting, in the middle of which Beryl, his wife, abruptly took Jean off to a ballet class that her daughter was attending – though remarking in passing that there was little chance of her daughter succeeding, as under Franco the tutu was forbidden in Spain. (Shades of yesterday!) I was left to bear the brunt of Robert's erudite conversation, which dealt chiefly with two books he had just written called
Greek Myths
and
Homer's Daughter
. Knowing little about Greek mythology or history, except for some detailed amateur delving into the Trojan Wars, I appropriately floundered. However, this did not seem to matter, and we parted good friends. We met then at irregular intervals through the years when he was at the Savile – not as a member but as the guest of Selwyn Jepson – but much later I heard he had come to England for a prostate operation, so I went to Hampstead to call on him at the house where he was recuperating.

He showed me his almighty scar, barely healed (what advances in surgery since then), and we talked of this literary matter and that. It was a time in his life when his standing as a poet was not as high as it had been, or would be later. Earlier in the winter I had been to a series of lectures at Exeter given by a professor of poetry (I cannot remember what academic faculty he was attached to but he was a young man with his finger, as you might say, on the fashionable pulse), and his theme in one of these lectures was the way in which the new generation of poets had almost totally rejected the old. The only two poets excepted from this anathema and whom they wholeheartedly admired, he said, were W. B. Yeats and Robert Graves.

Thinking this would please him, I told him what the professor had said; but Robert was so insulted that his name should be linked with W. B. Yeats that he was distinctly huffy about it, and talk was rapidly switched.

Perhaps there is a lesson to be learned from this.

After a week or so in Majorca we went by sea to Ibiza (the only way then), accompanied by a young Pole called Casimir Stamirski, a friend of Robert's, who shortly after we arrived introduced us to a big young man from the States called Irving. He seemed to be a typical husky all-American: frank, friendly and fit. Only when we were having a meal with him and I went into his bathroom did I see his medicine chest stuffed with pills. (But maybe this is typical too.) On our second meeting he told me he had written a novel and could I possibly read it and tell him what I thought.

I cursed under my breath. Reading other people's would-be novels in typescript when on holiday is my idea of hell. But I could hardly refuse, and when I read the book I was very impressed. It owed much to Hemingway, but it was a good novel in its own right, tense, terse and tough. I had it sent to Doubleday with a letter of strong recommendation. They turned it down. More fools they, I thought. And sure enough it was later published with considerable success.

Over the following years we kept in touch. Twice I wrote letters of recommendation for him to obtain a Guggenheim scholarship. (Whether anything came of these I never heard.)

The next thing I heard of him was when he was charged with having forged an autobiography of Howard Hughes and sold it to a publisher as genuine. He was found guilty and sentenced to some years in prison.

It was a sort of fame for Clifford Irving at last, no doubt, but hardly what he was seeking.

Incidentally, some years later I met Casimir Stamirski in London, and, since he had an encyclopedic knowledge of the sleazier nightclubs of London, he was very helpful to me when I was writing
The Tumbled House
.

The Green Flash
is worth an extra word or two.
As mentioned earlier, I met Gregory Peck's mother-in-law while
we were living in the South of France and was much taken with her
good looks, intellect and brilliant sophistication. I badly wanted to
use her in a novel, but somehow she would not come alive in any
circumstances in which I put her.

Floating around in the same creative jelly, as it were, came an idea from some other source – I can't remember what – of a young man who falls in love with a much older woman who disguises her real age until she has an illness and quite suddenly
looks
old. The young man, still young, is bereft. She is still alive, and his memory of her as she was is too potent for him to take other women – on a serious plane – in her place.

These two ideas wanted to come together but I could not decide how. It seemed important that the two chief characters should be in the same world, she senior to him. I was not interested in the commercial world or banking. The film world and the theatre, law, medicine, art, literature, all were thought through, and none seemed to fit the bill, especially where her predominance in her profession was needed for the purposes of the novel. The one calling which seemed to provide absolutely the right ambience was perfumery. Here all the grandes dames of the world of fashion paraded: Chanel, Rubinstein, Arden, Lauder, there was no end to them.

So I proceeded on those grounds. Knowing virtually nothing of the subject, I had to do a lot of research both through books and in the field. I got an introduction to Desmond Brand, the then managing director of Helena Rubinstein, and he put everything I asked for at my disposal. I visited the works, the testing laboratories, the big commercial suppliers, the shops, the beauty salons. Desmond Brand was a very down-to-earth character. He emphasized the commercial, no-nonsense side of the business, but was willing enough to utilize the mystique, the romantic advertising, the bally-hoo that has grown up around the whole subject of perfumery.

I absorbed it all, thought it through again and again – then gave it up. However one treated it, the whole perfumery business seemed to me too light, too trivial for the setting of what had to be – however it eventually turned out (novel, thriller, or whatever) – essentially a sombre story. I gave it up for a year or more. I can't remember what, if anything, I did in the meantime.

Nor can I remember at what stage it was in my struggling with this obstinate novel that I met a man in Terrigal Bay, New South Wales, one wet and dismal morning. Jean and I had flown to Athens, Nairobi, Johannesburg, Cape Town, with a week there, and later taken ship for Australia. In our innocence or ignorance we had imagined these ten days to Perth, followed by calls at Adelaide and Melbourne before coming in at dawn under the famous Sydney Bridge, would be through sunlit seas with flying fish and dolphins, and agreeable days sunbathing by the swimming pool. Instead, we were in the Roaring Forties, with strong cold winds, grey scudding skies and unquiet seas. Furthermore, this was a cruise ship, and though Italian, full of West Germans, English and French taking a round-the-world trip; and, as possibly could have been foreseen by no one, leaving Europe in January, had filled itself with differing kinds of influenza which had cross-bred on the way. When we joined her at Cape Town most of the crew, including the captain, had been down with it and most of the passengers were either recovering or sickening. With the weather so stormy that it was not possible to stay in the open air for more than a few gusty minutes, one spent nearly all one's time in one's cabin or the staterooms, where the airconditioning relentlessly pumped around the active bacteria. I was the first to go down and sneezed and coughed and sweated through the last half of the voyage and carried the uncomfortable remnants with me as far as Sydney.

Jean, it seemed, was immune, and stumped and staggered her way off to play bridge with various people while I lay in the cabin. February is not the best time to visit Sydney, and we arrived in the middle of a great heat wave: ‘One hundred and three in the shade,' screamed one newspaper, ‘and to hell with celsius.' We were given a wonderful time by Collins and various associated friends, but in the middle of it the influenza viruses at last overcame Jean's resistance and she went down with a succession of high fevers which, together with the various ailments she carried about with her as a matter of course, raised anxieties about whether she could continue the trip as planned.