Writing Home (15 page)

I have kept a sporadic diary since the early seventies. I don’t write it up every day and often not for weeks at a time; I am most conscientious about it when I’m busy writing something else, so that as a rule when work is going well (or at any rate going) the diary goes well too. If there are problems with rehearsals, say, or filming, the diary gets the complaints, but this querulous litany makes for dull and (on my part) somewhat shamefaced reading. So that side of things doesn’t figure much in these extracts, or in the rehearsal or location diaries which are reprinted here.

My diaries are written on loose-leaf sheets – sometimes typed, sometimes in longhand – and a year’s entries make a pretty untidy bundle. The writing is often untidy too; immediacy in my case doesn’t make for vivid reporting, which is why I’ve not had any scruples about improving and editing, though I’ve never altered the tone or the sentiments of what I’ve written at the time.

Most of these diaries were originally published in the
London
Review of Books
, where for reasons of space they had to be compressed, the extracts run together and the gaps between eliminated. What had been a series of jottings became a continuous, if disjointed, narrative. In this version I’ve restored my original spacing, as one of the pleasures of reading diaries, it seems to me, is that they are in bits (titbits with luck) – are like conversations, in fact, even if the conversation is with oneself.
Wanting to hold such a conversation is one reason for keeping a diary; another is that it slows down time.

In the account I have given of Miss Shepherd, who for many years lived in a van in my garden, I describe (in an extract from my diary) how going along in her wheelchair she would seldom lift her feet off the ground and so any Good Samaritan who pushed her found themselves behind a wheelchair continually braked by Miss Shepherd’s slurring, carpet-slippered feet. Particularly as one gets older and time begins to speed up, a diary has the same slurring effects.

Where no place is given the entry was written in Camden Town in London; ‘Yorkshire’ is a village in Craven to which my parents retired and where I still have a house; ‘New York’ is generally an apartment on Thompson Street in SoHo.

Sunday
,
13 January
. A cold, sunny morning, my room smelling nicely of wood and books. A nun passes. Nuns now dress like nurses; gone the voluminous black, the starched coif, the twinkling rosy face; these days it’s a nanny’s uniform in a nasty shade of grey – papal policewomen.

Struggle through the streaming flux of the Sunday papers before beginning the day: cultural events that are about to happen, talents that will shortly startle and never thereafter disappear, and of course money Novelists who with their first novel stumble into a swamp of dollars; actors sitting down at their scrubbed-pine tables to find their income amounts to
£
70,000 a year; playwrights who cannot even calculate theirs.
And the last interview with Goronwy Rees, in which Goronwy talks to Andrew Boyle. Talks to him and wastes some of his presumably precious breath on calling Andrew frequently by name. ‘Yes, Andrew, Burgess did go to bed with Blunt, and in the process, Andrew, Blunt absorbed more of Burgess’s Marxist principles.’ In what process, one wonders? In the process of Burgess putting his cock up Blunt’s arse? To each according to ability (‘Does that feel nice?’), from each according to his means. ‘Now if you did it to me would that help you to grasp the principle better?’

21 January
. To the Serpentine Gallery for an exhibition of photographs by André Kertész. The park is empty, the sun warm, and the Albert Memorial is glinting through the trees. If this were New York I would be revelling in such a morning, but it’s only London. Few people in the exhibition, just one or two students and an old couple discussing the human interest of the pictures. ‘Your pictures talk too much’ a New York picture editor told Kertész. So what can I remember, having left the exhibition half an hour ago? A recruit in the Austrian army writing a letter in a barrack room in 1915. A corner of Mondrian’s house in Paris in the twenties. Washington Square under snow, and a boy holding a puppy’s head towards the camera.

And, while on photographers, Cecil Beaton died on Friday. The obituaries mention his capacity for hard work but not his toughness. The toughness of the dandy.

31 January
. To John Huston’s
Wise Blood
with Ronald Eyre and Jocelyn Herbert. A beautiful film: Huston seventy-five, and yet it seems the work of a young man. His touch is so firm, the spell cast in the first moments when the young soldier is dropped off by the van he has hitched, reaches for his kitbag and seems
about to leave the driver unthanked but suddenly leans in and says, boldly, ‘I’m obliged.’ The town, Macon in Georgia, a battered American small town, shot in bitter, blue sunshine; the hero mad as the figures in Dadd or Fuseli are mad – wide-eyed, bony, possessed.

We have a meal at Bertorelli’s in Queensway, and Ron talks of how there may be a way of doing
Enjoy
in which the furniture is gradually removed during the last part of the second act, and the stage left wholly bare for the final speeches. Then to Jocelyn’s house, where Ron plays some of the tunes her father A. P. Herbert wrote the lyrics for – ‘Bless the Bride’, Other People’s Babies’. The house white and plain with no particular stamp on it, as designers’ houses often are; the walls of the study crowded with photographs of George Devine and the great days at the Royal Court, and two vast models ready for the set of
Galileo
, which Jocelyn is designing for the National. Jocelyn is I suppose sixty-odd, with children and grandchildren, yet she seems a contemporary, with a wonderful regal face, drawling voice and effortless style.

1
February
. To the Roundhouse for the Georgian State Theatre’s
Richard III
. A handful of pickets on the steps hand out pamphlets, saying ‘These will tell you what life in Russia is
really
like’; actually I’d have thought
Richard III
was a pretty fair picture (and certainly of life under Stalin). Seat 71 appears to be missing and I wander about the rows and stumble over Gaia Servadio.

‘You strange man,’ she calls out. ‘Why do we never see you? I so liked your last.’

‘You won’t like my next,’ I say ungraciously, and hurry by.

‘Why are you so
sure
?’ she wails after me.

The audience thick with actors – Ralph Richardson, Richard Pascoe, Ba Leigh Hunt, T. Nunn and co.

The nobles wear long-skirted overcoats, part boyar, part Regency buck, and the whole thing is done at tremendous pace and with great panache. Richmond is big and young and looks straight out of the Liverpool team; the rest are like taxi-drivers. It’s difficult sometimes to assess what’s happening, but it’s easier to take Shakespeare done over like this when it’s in a foreign language. Office chairs are wound in rags and bandages, a café orchestra plays silly lilting melodies, and in the exciting bits there’s a rock accompaniment, the cast striding off the stage at high speed. The actor playing Richard III is hypnotic – all eyes and boots – and gets an enormous ovation at the end, when, as Ron Eyre had told me, one stands without constraint to shout and applaud, though doing so I note that it’s some Russians in the audience who stand first, possibly on cue, and the ecstatic audience is filmed applauding, which makes one think uneasily of the pickets outside.

24 February
,
New York
. Rose, the eighty-two-year-old lady in the apartment next door to K., is ill, maybe dying. Not much more than four feet tall, she has varicose ulcers on her legs, which are thick and stocky and generally bound in loose, telescopic bandages. Now she has taken off the bandages to let the ulcers heal, which they never will, two huge holes in her legs almost to the bone. ‘I’m sick,’ she shouts through the wall, ‘I’m a sick girl.’

In this stronghold of private medicine there is a nurse who comes every day, probably paid for by the church. The doctor from St Vincent’s brings his students, and most days she has a gentleman caller who announces his presence by crooning outside the door ‘Hey there, you with the stars in your eyes’.

‘Aw, quit fooling around,’ shouts Rose through the door. ‘I’m a sick girl. I can’t talk to you. I’m too sick to talk to myself.’

Because she can never remember anybody’s name, K. gives
his friends nicknames and I am Blackie. ‘Bye, Blackie,’ she says and kisses me on the lips, rubbing her head on my chest, which is as high as she comes. Rose de Nisco, who has never been more than three or four blocks from her building, an urban peasant.

‘Pray for me,’ someone has written up in the subway. ‘Sure,’ someone else has added.

6 March
,
London
. I come through Heathrow and in the queue parallel to mine an Indian family is held up at Immigration, the father, thin, dark, with burning eyes, being questioned by a woman so stone-faced she could be at the East German border rather than at Heathrow. There are several sons, looking languid and beautiful, and the mother with a small child in her arms.

‘Who are all these people?’ says the official, jabbing at the passport. ‘I want to
see
all these people.’ Whereupon the father swiftly rounds up his family and marshals them in front of her. She does not even look up.

15 March
. Finish a draft of my piece for the Larkin Festschrift,
Larkin at Sixty
.
*
Parts of it I like and are what I want to say, but I detect a note of Uriah Heep-like self-abasement, which could be taken to denote (and maybe does denote) arrogance. I seem always to be saying ‘What am
I
doing here? I’m not a literary person at all.’

Apropos of this I have just ordered a book I saw reviewed, a translation of Ernest Kris and Otto Kurz’s
Legend
,
Myth and
Magic in the Image of the Artist
, the main point of which is that there is a tradition, in which the artists themselves conspire, of making a painter’s beginnings humbler and less sophisticated than in fact they were. The public liked to believe an artist had no training, that he astonished his elders, who picked out his
skill when he was in lowly or unlikely circumstances. This has always been the case, and K. and K. demonstrate it from many periods.

I suspect this is also true of literature. My contribution to the Larkin book discusses his poem ‘I Remember, I Remember’, in which he recalls what elsewhere he called the ‘forgotten boredom’ of his childhood and Coventry ‘where my childhood was unspent’. He is trying to appear an artist without a past. And so am I in my piece, claiming I had little reading and no literary appreciation until I was in my thirties. This conveniently forgets the armfuls of books I used to take out of Headingley Public Library – Shaw, Anouilh, Toynbee, Christopher Fry. Many of the books, it’s true, I took for the look of them, and lots I didn’t even read, and those I did I’ve forgotten. Still I did read, though without knowing what I liked or was looking for, and certainly umpteen plays, but without ever thinking of becoming a playwright. This was the period from thirteen to sixteen, just before puberty, and I always wipe it from my mind.

23 March
,
Bristol
. This evening Mam is convinced there are people outside the house and that they are waiting to take me away. I get her off to bed but she keeps coming down, anxious to be taken away in my place. At one point she gets outside in the bitter cold, and eventually I go to bed in order to stop her coming downstairs. I drift off to sleep three or four times, but each time she wakes me wanting to know if I am all right. I then put the camp-bed up in her room and sleep at the foot of the bed so as to stop her getting up and wandering about. But my presence in her bedroom now transforms me into Dad, and she keeps saying ‘Walt, why don’t you come to bed?’ The next day she vaguely remembers I spent the night in her room and thinks that something ‘went on’, so that becomes another
reason why there are people outside the house. And so we go on.

1 May
,
Yorkshire
. W. and I walk from Buckhaw Brow over the fells to Smearsett to look at the Celtic wall. I had only read about it in Wainwright, but W. had come across it years ago without being sure where it was. We struck too far north at first, then saw it against the skyline to our right, running for about thirty yards; a thick wall, put together in a different way from the other drystone walls, almost
woven
, and much broader across the top, as if it were some sort of fortification. The thought that it is two thousand years old and more is duly impressive, and I put my hand on it and think conventional thoughts like ‘This wall was new when the census was being taken in Judaea, already ancient when the Normans came,’ and so on. But then so were the unshaped rocks, the earth we are standing on.

We walk to the top of Smearsett, and on to Feizor, where far away to the north-west there is a faint fuming haze that is the sea, which I first saw from here, or from the top of Ingleborough anyway, in 1953, when I was on leave from the Russian course. And for some reason it makes me smile, this glimpse of the sea, just as coming out at night and unexpectedly seeing the moon will make one smile.

17 June
. All morning auditioning at the Queen’s on the set of
The Dresser
, Ronald Harwood’s new play and a much more popular evening than
Enjoy
is likely to be. I hate auditions and all the chat one has to go through; Ron explaining the play, tells the actors (wrongly to my mind) that the action could be thought to take place in their head – a direction that helps nobody. Then there is the putting of them at their ease, the enthusiasm one manages to squeeze out after they have read, all so that these young men can leave, as they are entitled to, with
their self-respect intact. We see nine actors, and by the end of the morning I’m shattered.

I bike to the Royal Academy to look at the Wyeth exhibition, which is unexpectedly crowded, partly with the overflow from the Summer Exhibition but also, I suspect, with people hungry for naturalism. Some of the pictures are wonderfully delicate, particularly an open window with a curtain blowing through done in 1947 and a sexy nude boy. But the crowds in the gallery repel, and as always I wonder what they are there for and what I am there for. The blown-curtain picture is reminiscent of Edward Hopper’s
Evening Wind
, and I come away thinking I like his paintings more, raw and unfinished though they seem by comparison with Wyeth’s. Two myths of America here, though: Wyeth’s rural America, weatherboarded barns, grey New England shores, models who turn their faces from the painter and search across empty fields for unseen visitors; Hopper’s the world of ? pictures, singles bars, lonely people in diners, middle-aged women waiting for love with a drink and a cigarette, bored usherettes, and lonely gas stations.