Slipstream

PAN BOOKS

Why write about one’s life? Because of the times one has lived through, the people met and known and loved? To show how interesting, virtuous, or entertaining one has been
or become? Or to trace one’s inward journey – whatever kind of evolution there has been between the wrinkled howling baby and the wrinkled old crone?

Writers speak of their art as being important to them as their chief means of communication with their readers. I have found that writing is often my chief means of communication with myself. I
write to find things
out
, as much as, and sometimes more than, to tell them to other people. In a way, an autobiography seems to me like a household book of accounts – what has been
acquired, to what purpose has it been put, was too much paid for it and did it teach you anything? How much has been learned by experience? Have patterns of behaviour and responses changed? Have I
discovered where I am useful and useless, how I am nourished and starved? Have I tried to change those faults and weaknesses in me that are open to alteration? Have I learned to accept
realistically what is immutable?

This sort of questioning is sometimes dubbed self-absorbed and indulgent. I think much damage has been done to people by this edict. There is a sharp line between self-absorption and taking
responsibility for what and who one is. Without the latter, it’s easy to assume that everything simply happens to one, and the result, an unselfish victim emerges. One needs to be
on
this fine line, not
either side of it, and like every other endeavour in the world, this requires a good deal of practice.

Speaking as a very slow learner, I feel as though I have lived most of my life in the slipstream of experience. Often I have had to repeat the same disastrous situation several times before I
got the message. That is still happening. I do not write this book as a wise, mature, finished person who has learned all the answers, but rather as someone who even at this late stage of
seventy-nine years is still trying to change, find things out and do a bit better with them.

Richard ADDINSELL (1904–1977) Composer, pianist. Famous for the ‘Warsaw Concerto’, featured in the film
Dangerous Moonlight
. He composed songs for Joyce
Grenfell, whom he frequently accompanied at the piano.

Barley ALISON Editor, founder of the Alison Press. She was Saul Bellow’s British publisher for many years.

Michael AYRTON (1921–1975) Painter and illustrator. In the 1960s he began a third career as a novelist. His books include
The Maze Maker
and
The Midas
Consequence
. Wrote monographs on Hogarth and Pissarro. His wife Elisabeth was a cookery writer.

Sybille BEDFORD (1911– ) German-born novelist and biographer. Her novels include
A Legacy
and
Jigsaw
. She wrote the first biography of Aldous Huxley, who
was a close friend.

Lesley BLANCH (1907– ) Travel writer and biographer. Her book
The Wilder Shores of Love
was an international bestseller in the 1950s. She also wrote an invaluable
cookbook,
Around the World in Eighty Dishes
.

(Herbert) Jonathan CAPE (1879–1960) Noted publisher whose career in books began as an errand-boy for Hatchards, the London bookshop. He founded the publishing house that
bears his name with G. Wren Howard in 1921. Ernest Hemingway and T. E. Lawrence were among his first authors.

Pablo CASALS (1876–1973) Spanish cellist whose legendary performances of the Bach cello suites are captured on disc.

Marc CHAGALL (1887–1985) French painter and illustrator, born in Russia. Angels and demons feature in his paintings and drawings. His work includes twelve stained-glass
windows for a synagogue in Jerusalem and the decorations for the ceiling of the Paris Opera House.

André CHARLOT (1882–1956) French showman and impresario who staged revues and musicals in London in the 1920s and 30s. Noël Coward and Beatrice Lillie were
among his protégés.

Charles Blake (CB) COCHRAN (1872–1951) Showman who promoted boxing matches as well as revues and musical plays. He brought the illusionist Houdini to London in additon to
Sarah Bernhardt and Eleanora Duse. He staged Coward’s
Private Lives
and
Bitter Sweet
.

George COLE (1925– ) Actor best remembered for his role as Arthur Daley, the devious used-car salesman in the television series
Minder
.

Norman COLLINS (1907–1982) Novelist and pioneer of British television. He founded Associated Television in 1955, after being controller of BBC Television from 1947 to
1950. His most famous novel
London Belongs to Me
was made into a successful film.

Ivy COMPTON-BURNETT (1884–1969) Novelist, much influenced by such classic dramatists as Euripides and Sophocles. Her novels are set in Victorian country houses, complete
with servants. They are possessed of a mordant humour even as the inevitable tragedy unfolds. Her books include
A House and Its Head
and
The Mighty and Their Fall
. She was made a Dame
in 1967.

Cyril CONNOLLY (1903–1974) English critic and editor. With Stephen Spender he founded
Horizon
, a small literary magazine
that reflected
Connolly’s own iconoclastic and mordant attitudes toward contemporary society. He also used his critical gifts as a long-time book reviewer for the
New Statesman
and the
Sunday
Times.

Harold CRAXTON (1885–1971) Pianist, accompanist and teacher. One of his sons, John, became a respected painter.

Clemence DANE (real name Winifred Aston) (1888–1965) Novelist and playwright, whose play,
A Bill of Divorcement
, was a huge and controversial success in the 1920s.
Lifelong friend of Noël Coward.

John DAVENPORT Brilliant and belligerent literary journalist. He reviewed fiction for the
Observer
.

Frances DAY (1907–1984) Actress and singer. She played the title role in Cole Porter’s
Dubarry Was a Lady
in London in 1942. In the 1960s she launched a new
career as a TV personality under the name Frankie Day, claiming to be her own daughter.

Sergei Pavlovich DIAGHILEV (1872–1929) Russian ballet impresario and founder of the Ballets Russes. He commissioned three of Stravinsky’s greatest scores, and
employed the young Picasso as a set designer.

Ruth DRAPER (1884–1956) American solo performer who wrote and acted her own brilliantly observed, and often acerbic, sketches. Her earliest admirer was Henry James and
her last the singer Kathleen Ferrier.

Norman DOUGLAS (1868–1952) Author and travel writer. Worked at the British Foreign Office and as a diplomat in Russia and Italy. He published sixteen books including his
only popular success the novel,
South Wind
(1917). His other books include travel writing and works of autobiography. He was always reticent about his homosexuality in his writing.

Isadora DUNCAN (1878–1927) American dancer and choreographer whose many and varied lovers included Isaac Merrit Singer, the inventor of the sewing
machine.

Elaine DUNDY (real name Elaine Rita Brimberg) (1921– ) American novelist, author of
The Dud Avocado
. First wife of the theatre critic Kenneth Tynan.

John FERNALD (1905–1985) Theatre director and head of RADA (Royal Academy of Dramatic Art) in the 1950s.

Romain GARY (1914–1980) French novelist, explorer and diplomat. His books include
The Roots of Heaven
and
Lady L
. He was married to Lesley Blanch and then
to the American actress Jean Seberg, who committed suicide. Gary also died at his own hand.

Henry GREEN (pen name of Henry Vincent Yorke) (1905–1973) Novelist. His highly original books include
Living
,
Loving
and
Party Going
. Now regarded by
many as the greatest writer of fiction in English of his time.

Joyce GRENFELL (1910–1979) Actress, broadcaster and solo performer. She achieved fame as the goofy games mistress in the film based on Ronald Searle’s St
Trinian’s books and drawings. She toured the world with her show
Joyce Grenfell Requests the Pleasure
from 1954 onwards.

Joan HEAL (1922–1998). Actress, but best remembered for her brilliance in the intimate revues of the 1950s and 60s.

(Julia) Myra HESS (1890–1965) Pianist who organized chamber music concerts at lunchtime in the National Gallery throughout the Second World War. Her most famous recording
is of a transcription of a chorale setting from Bach’s Cantata No. 147, known as ‘Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring’. She made a historic recording of Beethoven’s Sonata in
E Major, Opus 109 in 1954. She was made a Dame in 1941.

Balliol HOLLOWAY Actor and theatrical manager at Birmingham and Stratford-upon-Avon.

Seth (real name James) HOLT (1923–1971) After a brief career as an actor, he worked as assistant editor on the famous Ealing comedies of the 1940s and 50s. (His
brother-in-law, Robert Hamer, directed
Kind Hearts and Coronets
.) He then became a film director of frustrated and intermittent brilliance. His films include
A Taste of Fear
(1964)
and the macabre
The Nanny
(1967) starring Bette Davis.

Ronald JEANS (1887–1973) Lyricist and revue writer who collaborated with Noël Coward on
London Calling!
in 1924. Wrote songs and sketches for popular stars of
the 1930s and 40s, including Jessie Matthews.

Tamara KARSAVINA (1885–1978) Ballerina, who wrote one of the great theatrical memoirs,
Theatre Street
.

Edmund Mike KEELEY (1928?– ) American translator, with Philip Sherrard, of the poems of Constantin Cavafy.

Louis KENTNER (1905–1986) Concert pianist, who regularly played at the Proms in the 1950s.

Aram Ilich KHACHATURIAN (1903–1978) Armenian-born Russian composer, who achieved popular success with his ‘Ritual Fire Dance’. He wrote the score for a
ballet,
Spartacus
(1954).

Terence KILMARTIN (1922–1991) Literary editor of the
Observer
for three decades. Along with D. J. Enright, he worked on a revised edition of the Scott-Moncrieff
translation of Proust.

J. W. (Jack) LAMBERT (1917–1986) Literary journalist and broadcaster. Literary editor of the
Sunday Times
in the 1960s and 70s.

Benn Wolfe LEVY (1900–1973) Playwright and screenwriter. Wrote the dialogue for Alfred Hitchcock’s first talkie
Blackmail
. His
play
Clutterbuck
was a success in 1946. He was married to the acclaimed actress Constance Cummings.

Lydia Vasilievna LOPOKOVA (1892–1981) Russian ballerina who danced with Nijinsky in
The Firebird
. She married John Maynard Keynes, the economist, in 1925, and
dedicated her life to him when he became seriously ill. She did much to promote the cause of ballet in Britain.

Ernest LUSH (1929–1988) Pianist and accompanist, notably for Kathleen Ferrier.

Olivia MANNING (1908–1980) Novelist, best known for the two trilogies
The Balkan Trilogy
and
The Levant Trilogy
, which were both adapted for television. She
famously pleaded poverty and her friends were surprised to learn at her death that she was rich to the tune of several hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Denis MATTHEWS (1919–1988) Pianist and broadcaster. He gave the first performance of Edmund Rubbra’s ‘Piano Concerto’. In later years he was Professor
of Music at Newcastle University.

Reginald MAUDLING (1917–1979) Conservative MP for Barnet, 1950–79. Chancellor of the Exchequer 1962–4, Home Secretary 1970. He resigned from the Cabinet in
1972 due to his involvement with a corrupt businessman, John Poulson, over a contract for a proposed hospital in Malta.

Carson McCULLERS (1917–1967) American novelist. First published in 1936. She married Reeves McCullers, a serviceman and aspiring writer. The marriage was a tempestuous
one, marked by homosexual relationships on both sides, separations and reunions, divorce and remarriage, alcoholism and suicide attempts. Reeves died in 1953 from an overdose of alcohol and
barbituates, an apparent suicide. Carson McCullers’ life was a mixture of emotional unhappiness and bad health, but with luminous talent she drew upon her empathy and experience to compose
resonant,
ballad-like stories about the inner lives of marginal, often physically scarred characters who were tormented by loneliness, most famously in
The Heart Is a
Lonely Hunter
.

Noel MEWTON-WOOD (1922–1953) Australian pianist and composer, most admired for his interpretations of Hindemith, Busoni and Bliss. He comitted suicide following the
untimely death of his male lover. Benjamin Britten’s Canticle 111 ‘Still Falls the Rain’ is dedicated to his memory.

Nina MILKINA (1919– ) Russian-born concert pianist, long resident in England. She made her first public appearance in Paris at the age of eleven. She was commissioned by
BBC Radio to play all of Mozart’s piano sonatas in the 1950s. In her heyday she was regarded as one of the finest interpreters of Mozart.