Going Up (15 page)

I heard the word ‘Jew’ during my first two years at Cambridge only once, when I was taking part in a Mummers’ production of a play called
Musical Chairs
. Who knows why the committee selected, out of the whole European repertoire, a doleful, dated play that took place in the Romanian oil-fields in the 1920s? Perhaps there was virtue in denouncing the capitalist exploitation of a country whose present plight, under a Stalinist puppet, provoked small indignation from those in happier places. I was cast as an American businessman. Joe Bain played a Mitteleuropan oil-man. At the end of Act One, it fell to him to come in and say, ‘We’ve struck a gusher!’ The phrase was to come in useful when someone in the Whim Café became exaggeratedly effusive.

Musical Chairs
was slated both in
Varsity
and by the usually indulgent critic in the
Cambridge Evening News
. After the first night, audiences came only to scoff. The disintegration of the production encouraged me to play for laughs by parodying Jimmy Stewart’s slow delivery. After an applauded exit, I walked around behind the braced flats to get to the green room, while the rest of the cast continued to do their straight stuff. Adjacent to the buckets In Case Of Fire, I was confronted by a small man, known to me, like Horace’s button-holing friend,
nomine tantum
, only by name, Harry. ‘Brilliant,
brilliant! Best impersonation of a Jew I’ve ever seen!’ God help me, I smiled and walked on. Nor did I say anything when, at a party in a Grantchester mansion, I heard my shrill host, a certain Kim Tickell, say loudly, but not in my direction, ‘I will
not
have my mother’s house turned into a synagogue.’ Accurate memory can be a substitute for action; might that be why so many Jews have written reminiscential books?

I never asked, or wondered, why Tony Becher decided to abandon mathematics, in which he was certain to get a First. If he had demons to purge, he never spoke of them, even when, since his parents were still in India, he came to stay at 12 Balliol House at Christmastime. How could a Gentile have good grounds for being unhappy? Tony revealed himself, in a way, by sudden spasms of grotesquerie. On Boxing Day evening, he, Beetle and I walked down to deserted Putney High Street. At a zebra crossing, Tony elected to imitate Quasimodo, the capering hunchback of Nôtre Dame, and lurched backwards into the only stranger in the street, who happened to be a policeman. I also remember a sherry party in Queens’ College in which one of the guests had left a silver-topped cane leaning against the chimneypiece. When its owner came to reclaim it, Tony called out, ‘Well, aren’t we an affected old thing, then?’ The man said, ‘Not really,’ and tapped the stick against his wooden leg. One day, walking up King’s Parade from a lecture, Tony and I met Karl Miller’s very pretty attachment, Jane Collet. She was wearing a rather bold pair of leopardskin-patterned tights. Tony shrieked at her in a way that seemed at once randy and cruel. I was embarrassed, but I did not say anything.

Sexual desire and frustration went together in 1950s England. When Leslie Halliwell came back to Cambridge to manage the Rex cinema, he had the connoisseur’s taste and the tradesman’s acumen to screen Continental films that could be advertised as enticingly erotic. After his publicity announced an unimpaired view of Hildegarde Neff’s breasts, long queues stretched down towards the Chesterton Road. Lust got what it deserved
when the promised nakedness was visible only in a framed
portrait
of the unremarkable lady. Halliwell graduated once again to become the founder and decisive editor of the
Film Guide
. Cinematic omniscience warranted him to combine the roles of encyclopaediast and public executioner. He came to react with distaste to all the movies I had anything to do with.

At most times, Tony Becher seemed the very model of an eager-to-please middle-class Englishman. Yet his regular handwriting seemed to be impressed on the page with controlled fury. His Footlights lyrics were more ingenious in their internal rhymes than anyone else’s. He composed them as he might some abstruse mathematical equation. Tony’s heartlessness was declared, without deliberate malice, when Lord Montagu of Beaulieu was convicted of homosexual acts, with a social inferior, and sent to prison. Tony wrote and performed, at the next Footlights Smoker, a timely number entitled ‘Lord Mount-a-Few of Beaulieu’. No one rejoiced in Montagu’s very brief ‘disgrace’, from which he recovered in a sporting, finally triumphant manner; but it offered a cue that Tony’s adroit intelligence could not resist, just as it gave Ken Tynan an opportunity for ostentatious courage in standing bail for Lord Montagu’s journalist friend, Peter Wildeblood. The seeming virulence of Tony’s lyrics had nothing to do with moral outrage. It may have done something to exorcise demons that Tony himself could never quite identify. He later wrote a witty parody of a Lorenz Hart 1920s lyric in a Footlights skit that began ‘In a Graham Greenery / Where god paints the scenery’. It entailed no indignant distaste for popery. In most respects, Tony was a loyal and amusing friend. One of his ancestors had given his name to Becher’s Brook, where he came a cropper.

According to Renford, there was no way I could be ready for Finals after only a single year of full-time attention to Moral Sciences. Conscious of how little I had achieved in my first two years, I was given a virtuous reason to ask my father to extend my Cambridge lease. It would be an unexpected tax on him, even though – thanks to Renford’s solicitations and Howland’s
geniality – St John’s offered to extend my scholarship. In one of our man-to-man chats, my father agreed without hesitation. Perhaps he was influenced by the fact that it had been mandatory, in his day, for Greats to require four years of study. I was grateful and surprised. I was given both a chance to further the redemption of the world from metaphysics and a lease of extra time in which to make a mark on Cambridge, though I had no clear idea what it might be.

At the end of my second year, I played Truewit in Ben Jonson’s
Epicene
in an open-air production, directed by Joe Bain, in the St John’s College Backs. I recall only a line directed at me after I have delivered one of Jonson’s best quips: ‘I do say as good things every day, were they but taken down and recorded.’ I must have controlled my tendency to overact, except in the spirit of the piece, since I was elected President of the Lady Margaret Players, in Joe’s place, for the coming year.

Had I been properly diligent, I should have proposed, as Sullivan always did, to return to Cambridge for the ‘long vac term’. There were no lectures in those mid-summer weeks, but the college and the libraries were open. It was an ideal time for serious study. I had no wish, however, to consign myself to cellular chastity nor did I ever encounter a
maître-à-penser
sufficiently charismatic to exercise a demanding ascendancy over me. Renford was amusing and amused, informative and diligent, but the current never truly passed between us.

Beetle had been given the name of a landlady in Florence, where we could spend ten cultural days before repairing to the cottage she had discovered to rent on a high hill overlooking Menton, the Riviera town where D. H. Lawrence and Katharine Mansfield had stayed, although not together (he was repelled by her manifestation of the symptoms of tuberculosis, which they had in common).

Florence in August was burnt sienna. Signora Naldi labelled me ‘
dormiglione
’ on account of my tendency to oversleep. We did the Uffizi and the
Accademia and the Ponte Vecchio and the Boboli Gardens and we took the bus to Fiesole to inspect the Roman theatre and remember Boccaccio, but our thoroughness generated no abiding affection for the city. We had lunch one day in a basement
buca
on the city side of the Ponte Vecchio. When the waiter said, ‘
Da bere
?’, I said, ‘
Acqua minerale, per favore.
’ A minute later, a man on the far side of the restaurant whispered something to the waiter, who came to us with a bottle of
prosecco
beaded with cold. We raised our glasses to the benevolent stranger, but never spoke to him. We had just one ice cream at the famous gelateria
Perché No!
before taking the train to Ventimiglia and on into France.

The cottage overlooking Menton cost £2 a week. It was at the top of a prolonged zigzag of steps, wide in the early stages, narrower and steeper as we climbed to the high shelf on which the little cottage stood. We made love; we cooked; we read; and, now and again, we played careful cricket on the tight concrete terrace, as if in a net, but without a net, using a slat of wood and a bald tennis ball. There was an outdoor privy and a phallic pump which, after prolonged leverage, drew what we took to be drinking water. The vine over the terrace was thick with ripening grapes. The locals called them ‘
framboises
’: when they burst, plumply, in the mouth, they tasted of vinous raspberries. Beetle called them ‘sex grapes’. We shopped at the
Alimentation
down on the main road and toted our supplies up those many steps. One day we met a neighbour coming down who married us with ‘
M’sieudame
!’

The Communist owner of the cottage had a Penguin library in which we discovered the novels of Rex Warner, an Anglo-Saxon Kafka, more comic than angst-ridden in his allegorical flourishes. The callow hero of
The Aerodrome
was informed, at one stage, ‘Something rather rotten has happened. Someone’s potted your old man.’ Under Warner’s influence, I began a novel in which I abandoned Maughamian realism and adolescent woes. The protagonist of
Mr Fraser’s Ducats
was named Sandheim, after a character with
whom my father and I had played bridge, several years before, at Mrs Mac’s. Eye-deceivingly swift at shuffling and dealing, the real-life Sandheim was enough of an expert to be a regular collector of the other players’ sixpences. We wondered why so good a player chose to play in such modest company. It turned out that he was a card-sharp. Blackballed in classy circles, he was reduced to swimming with minnows.

In my novel, Sandheim was translated into a businessman under the threat of violence from some rivals whom he has outsmarted by selling them tainted merchandise. He recruits protection in the form of three men who fortify his house and take turns in keeping him under armed surveillance. Their vigilance is so thorough that he never has an unobserved moment with his wife. She becomes more and more ostentatious, delectable, and impatient in her frustration. Sandheim’s protectors grow increasingly overbearing. Quite soon, he is their prisoner, his bullet-proof vest a straitjacket. His wife, who takes to crawling around the living room naked, becomes their common plaything. Sandheim is allowed to watch his protectors enjoy Sandra’s gladly granted favours.

The trio of oppressive hirelings receive calls which, Sandheim is told, promise that his enemies are only waiting for him to take one step out of his house. Required to avoid showing himself at the window, lest someone take a pot at him, he is dressed in his wife’s old clothes and made to bring refreshments when Sandra is being serviced by his loutish friends, who were recruited by my imagination from those snaps on the barbed wire on Wimbledon Common and named after certain Lockites. The last scene in the book, which I planned but never wrote, had Sandheim playing bridge with his parasitic captors. They are all wearing Hitler masks and address him as ‘Sandyjew’.

Beetle and I resumed living as we had in Ramatuelle, with the unspoken assumption,
de part et d’autre
, that we were together for good. One night, we went to a poetry reading that we had seen advertised in the café where
we sometimes bought an ice cream. The poet was a tall, very white American. One of his poems was entitled ‘Nude by the Side of the Sea’. I knew, from the first line he declaimed, that he had no hope of fame, and little of publication. There was something gallant in his starchy elocution.

I could not imagine being any happier than we were in the cottage, until the drinking water from the pump had dysenteric consequences. When I reverted to infantile helplessness, Beetle dosed me with chapters from
Winnie the Pooh
, which happened to be on our red landlord’s shelves. By the time we had to leave, I was still so weak that Beetle toted the much heavier of our suitcases down the hill. She did it again after we had taken the bus to Toulon and had to walk down the hot platform to the train that would take us north.

F
OR MY THIRD academic year, which began in October 1952, John Sullivan had prevailed on me to share rooms in ‘the Wedding Cake’ (New Court) with another classicist, Bryan Moore, who had just gained a First in the first part of the Classical Tripos. He was tall, brushed his teeth with thoroughness, kept his brilliantined hair short back and sides, snored quietly on the far side of our quite large common bedroom, wore a tie slide, well-pressed grey flannels and a blue blazer. He had no visible girlfriend and no conversation. His smiling propriety, his meticulous scholarship and his clean collars rendered him beyond reproach. I could not stand the sight of him.

Beetle had found a new job as one of Victor Gollancz’s secretaries. V. G. was probably the most famous, certainly the most flamboyant London publisher. His yellow-jacketed volumes were badged with puffs extracted from his friends, many of them more or less reformed veterans of the Left Book Club. His handwritten advertisements for the Sunday press knew no reticence: ‘Reprinting before publication’ was a common, underlined rubric. He gave Beetle a new nickname, ‘Sheba’, in honour of her black hair, bright dark eyes and, perhaps, her regal refusal to be intimidated. When enraged, V. G. was known to sit at his desk and drum his feet on the floor and yell
at his underlings. His version of Judaeo-Christian socialism did not pacify his spleen, nor inhibit him from long lunches at Rules, in Maiden Lane, or at the Savoy Grill; but it did impel him, soon after the foundation of the state of Israel, to launch an appeal on behalf of ‘the Arab brethren’, an early, far-sighted and no doubt futile attempt to close the breach between Israel and her neighbours.

V. G. never shouted at Sheba. He found her so attractive that he disclosed to her that he had a secret alter ego – unless it was an
alterum id
– called Moses. Moses stood for the return of the repressed and shameless Jew. His caricatural form was an animated version of V. G.’s nose. When out of England, Victor required his secretaries to write him letters about what was happening during his absence. Beetle turned duty into insolent pleasure by making Moses the co-author of her letters. She did it with enough Gogolesque flair for V. G. to tell her that she should be a writer. If ‘darling Daphne’ – Daphne du Maurier, author of
Rebecca
and
Jamaica Inn
– could write bestsellers, why not Sheba?

Now accredited Moral Scientists, Tony Becher and I went regularly both to John Wisdom’s lectures and to those of Charlie Broad, whose chair was in Moral Philosophy. Broad was bald, short, pear-shaped and unwrinkled. In his venerable sixties, his shining head and uncreased face gave him the appearance of a brilliant baby. Like the much younger Hugh Trevor-Roper, and unlike most writers, Broad regarded the index as part of the text of a book and composed (or supervised) his own. For both the historian and the philosopher, that last rift too had to be loaded with ore, or irony. In the index of Broad’s most famous, early book,
Five Types of Ethical Theory
, one entry reads ‘Church of England, the author’s respect for’. Broad also divulged sympathy with the racial preferences of the late Adolf Hitler. What this amounted to, in harmless holiday practice, was an appetite for young Nordic men, a taste that he indulged, so far as anyone knew, only on discreet Scandinavian excursions. Wittgenstein had had similar blond inclinations.

In contrast with Wisdom, Broad lectured with prepared precision. He repeated everything he said, in a way which suggested that we take careful note. I still have manuscript pages of transcriptions of his account of Berkeley’s theory of perception. Only when the bishop’s own arguments had been rehearsed, twice, did Broad say, ‘I shall now list seventeen objections to this theory, I shall now list seventeen objections to this theory.’ I wrote them all down. I am sure that they were cogent and coherent. I cannot remember one of them.

Broad entered and left Mill Lane, with Kantian promptness, but he did not socialise with his audience. It was a surprise when, one day later in the year, he crossed Tony Becher and me in Trinity Street and said, ‘Hullo,
boys
!’ It did not occur to me to wonder whether he had been waiting for us or, more particularly, for Tony, whose appearance honoured the Aryan prescription. A week or two later, Broad again intercepted us as we returned to St John’s, and invited us to dine with him one evening in Trinity. We were served, by a college servant, with a modest meal and a decanter of wine, followed by port. Our conversation had no heavy philosophical ballast. If there was even the mildest amorous motive for his invitation, his interest must have been in Tony; but he treated me with undifferentiated courtesy and I did my best to amuse him. Can he have held serious Hitlerian views? It seemed evident that he could not recognise a Jew when he saw one.

Broad had the unassertive pride of the solitary. His prose was ironic but without flourish. He was both opinionated and broad-minded. He deplored Bertrand Russell’s pacifism in 1914; he also campaigned against Bertie’s eviction from his Trinity fellowship. Broad’s logic allowed room for a certain amusement at the consequences of rigour: rational in his professional stance, he also held the presidency of the Psychical Research Society. This was less because he believed in ghosts than because he took it that, if a case of psychokinesis could be verified, it would offer evidence that the mind could affect the physical world at a distance. Such an occurrence, of which
no example was recorded during his tenure, would justify the notion of a mind–body duality.

Was Charlie Dunbar Broad at all fazed by the publication, in 1949, of Gilbert Ryle’s
The Concept of Mind
, in which the author established, to his own satisfaction at least, that there was no ‘ghost’ in the human machine? He gave no sign of it. Yet in Ryle’s seemingly solemn opinion, everything attributed by philosophers of mind to premeditation could be accounted for, fully, by taking note of our practical conduct. A man’s intention to go out was established by his putting on his coat, not in the light of some shadowy mental motivation. Ryle was the demon barber of Oxford philosophy; Ockham’s Razor was plied with stringent dexterity. In his hands, it cut down a veteran regiment of misconceived obfuscations. Quick to adopt Ryle’s jargon, we began to spot ‘Category Mistakes’ in all kinds of philosophical (and social) contexts.

How many readers suspected Ryle of being engaged in straight-faced provocation? Wittgenstein’s biographer Ray Monk, now professor of philosophy at Southampton, maintains that he has never understood how to recognise a Category Mistake. At the time, Ryle’s arguments appeared as elegant as their conclusions were counter to common sense. In the 1950s, a printed text, from a reputable publisher, carried scriptural authority. Accordingly, we subscribed to Ryle’s view that to have an idea ‘just was’ to pick up a pencil and write down a series of words. Yet who genuinely doubted the possibility of a mental rehearsal of the merits and consequences of an action before public enactment showed that we had made a decision to do something, or not? J. L. Austin, the supreme Oxford philosophical instance of commonsensical sophistication, would say that he had never met a determinist who, in his day-to-day life, showed any genuine sign of believing that there was no such thing as free will. Would Ryle have denied that he ever put his mind to a problem?

When he came to give a lecture in Cambridge, his notoriety ensured a
full house, though it did not procure an overflow. He preached with the solemn air of an unfrocked cardinal. At one point, he adverted to a logical instance, in which
p
was suspected of being the cause of
q
, or perhaps
vice versa
. He developed his argument about the similarities of these two putative entities by referring to the ‘
q
-ness of
p
and, if you will, the
p
-ness of
q
’. No low smirk disturbed the gravity of the occasion. We assumed Ryle to be too unworldly even to be aware of the base pun he had uttered. In fact, he was a witty Oxonian paronomasiast; Ryled, as it were, by his Christ Church friend Hugh Trevor-Roper’s penchant for riding to hounds, he observed that his colleague suffered from ‘chronic tally-hosis.’

Ryle must have known precisely how to twit puritanical Fenlanders with base allusions. It may well be, however, that he was a sexual virgin, as A. J. Ayer reported him in his autobiography. Ayer, who carried his sexual reputation on his fly-leaf, so to say, claims to have asked Ryle – while on a railway journey – whether, if obliged to declare his preference, he would sooner go to bed with a male or female. Ryle is said to have opted, after thought, for the former. Was
The Concept of Mind
a premeditated joke at the expense of Russell’s classic
Analysis of Mind?
If so, Russell had his revenge on Ryle when, in 1959, Ernest Gellner’s
Words and Things
was not deemed suitable for review in
Mind
, which Ryle edited. Russell made a loud fuss about the Oxonian’s censorious refusal even to acknowledge the existence of a critic of the analytic school. I was slightly shocked when Tony Becher, then within the loop of philosophical insiders, blamed the hoo-ha on ‘that old trouble-maker Russell’.

In Cambridge, I went less often to the theatre than to the movies, especially at the Arts Cinema, where they showed Cocteau’s
Orphée
and
Le
Sang d’un Poète
and Jacques Becker’s unforgettable
Edouard et Caroline
. Daniel Gélin’s winning last line, to his unhappy wife,
‘J’ai envie de toi
’, has not been lost on me. I did go to the ADC to see an original play by John Barton. Peter Hall must have recognised how easily rather grand persons
(Barton was a minor aristocratic Old Etonian) could be enrolled into eminent lieutenancy. Barton’s play was a neo-romantic whimsy in the style of a prosaic Christopher Fry, whose versatile plays were fashionable on Shaftesbury Avenue until Ken Tynan put a match to their preciosity in order to foster the new ‘socialist’ drama, which rarely had Fry’s linguistic resource. I remember only one of Barton’s high-flown lines: ‘With a wild cry the last March earl flung himself into the watery weir.’ Or does that confuse Barton’s play with Henry James’s last, absurd attempt to find fame and fortune in the theatre? Asked why he thought his play had not been a success, sincerity disposed H. J. to be unusually monosyllabic: ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I tried so hard to be
base
.’ Barton’s subsequent play-making was limited to scissors-and-pasting Shakespeare’s historical dramas.

Early in our third year, Tony Becher went to audition for the Cambridge University Footlights. The all-male club was notorious for its members-only, dinner-jacketed ‘Smokers’. Two or three times a term, initiates pitched camp in the large upstairs room of the Dorothy Café, where they solicited each other’s laughter and applause with spoofs, songs and drag acts. The best, polished and thoroughly rehearsed, were eligible for inclusion in the annual May Week revue, which took place, of course, in early June. It was a certificate of sophistication to imitate the clipped delivery and internally rhymed ingenuity of Noël Coward.

Fearful of being asked to sing, I funked accompanying Tony. A few days later, he came to the rooms I shared with the impeccable Bryan Moore, bringing with him a nicely dressed, smooth-faced, pale-eyed, light brown-haired young man who, he said, wanted to meet me. In only his second year at Caius, Leslie Bricusse was already secretary of the Footlights, of which Peter Firth was now president. Bricusse had overtaken me without even knowing I was there. I noticed that his spectacles were not of Bryan Moore’s National Health, horn-rimmed variety. They had been selected, not wished upon him. Becomingly dressed, in no specific style, he spoke in no specific accent.

Leslie’s announced ambition was to compose musical comedies, in the style of the shows by Rodgers and Hammerstein, Cole Porter and Irving Berlin, which were dominating Broadway and London’s West End. Since there was no CU Musical Comedy Club, Leslie proposed to found one. For its first production, probably in a year’s time, he intended to write the lyrics and most of the music; the Footlights’ director of music, Robin Beaumont, would do the rest.

In search of a collaborator to write ‘the book’, Bricusse had asked Peter Firth who wrote the best dialogue in the play competition that Hugh Thomas had won the previous year. So what did I say to writing a musical comedy with him? And, by the way, why was I not yet a member of the Footlights? When I told him that I was averse to auditions, Leslie said, ‘For goodness sake! Consider yourself a member! It’s no big deal. This musical comedy idea, are you interested?’

‘What is the idea exactly?’

‘That’s what I’m here to find out.’ It came with a nice Kolynos smile. ‘Your play, what was that about?’

‘Suburbia,’ I said. ‘What we’re all trying to get away from.’

Leslie said, ‘What do you say we go and see Hugh Thomas, see if he has any ideas?’

‘You don’t need my permission to go and see Hugh Thomas.’

‘I want you on board, you and your dialogue, of course!’

We went to Queens’ to call on Hugh. Even in private, he had a public way of talking. Already highly placed in the Union, he was a major scholar in History on his way to further distinction. He listened, curly-haired head appraisingly tilted, as Leslie explained that we were open to any ideas he might have about a plot. Hugh wondered whether it might not be droll to place the whole thing somewhere in the Balkans. Leslie wiped his glasses, looked at me and then at Hugh and said, ‘The Balkans. That’s a thought. Why?’

‘Doesn’t it furnish grounds for … satirical fantasy? In view of the present situation.’

Leslie said, ‘For instance?’

‘Conflict between folkloric specificity and Communist indoctrination.’

‘How would that … fit into a musical comedy exactly?’

Hugh said, ‘You could have half the chorus consisting of youth leaders and a contrapuntal set of … fairies.’

‘Fairies?’

‘Balkan fairies, local spirits, they have a whole range of them in those parts. Think of Dracula.’