Going Up (16 page)

‘Dracula,’ Leslie said.

‘For instance.’

Had the success of his Venetian extravaganza convinced Hugh of the merits of theatrical whimsy or was he, in his measured fashion, ‘sending us up’? I listened with unamazed bemusement to his far-fetched fancy. Leslie temporised with the politeness that, I would discover, enveloped all his responses.

After we had recrossed Queens’ mathematical bridge to Silver Street, Leslie said, ‘Youth leaders and fairies? Perhaps he was joking.’

I said, ‘How can we ever know the mind of another?’ It amused me to watch my remark pass over Leslie’s head.

I had no wish to write a musical comedy and little sense that Bricusse and I had much in common. Pitched into one more exam, however, I felt the Pavlovian impulse to come up with winning answers. Leslie impersonated Opportunity. He had a practical worldliness not to be found in my Johnian contemporaries. With no doubt about what he wanted to do, he was confident that it could, and would, be done. There was enticing proof of his useful nerve in the casual way in which he had nodded me into the Footlights. Intellectual condescension and vulgar ambition set me to join him on the low road with a brisk step, while never quite losing sight of the high road.

The Footlights proved to be composed of wits whose repartee was not always unanswerable. New members were treated to a seminar in lyric writing by Peter Tranchell, a queer (as we used to say) music don from Trinity, famous for his outrageousness: ‘It’s springtime and we’re feeling ourselves again’ was his kind of quip. He had his skittish aspect, but he was also capable of serious musical compositions. His advice about lyrics was very practical. It was always, but always, better, he told us, to put the unlikelier part of a rhyming couplet first: ‘The vice squad wrangle / In the nice quadrangle’ rather than the other way about. What sounded effortful one way sported a neat and fitting cap the other.

The Trinity chaplain, Simon Phipps, had been responsible for a number of instantly classic Footlights numbers, in particular ‘Can anyone think of an Original Sin? / Can someone please tell me where to begin?’ He too played the part of the old pro in assessing the merits of callow lyricists. He was known to be one of Princess Margaret’s favourite, or at least regular, escorts. When she visited his rooms to meet some of his friends, HRH received the call of nature. The enchanting sound of the princess and her pee came clearly to the privileged auditors from the adjacent jakes. Phipps may also have been the author of a particularly brilliant solo number in which a camp odalisque was discovered on stage and sang a lament that began, ‘There is not a man / On my Ottoman and there hasn’t been one for weeks’. She looked back wistfully on the days when ‘They came across the Bosphorus / And didn’t even toss for us’.

Tony Becher and I were soon writing and performing numbers for ‘Smokers’. Two or three of our pieces seemed likely to make the cut to be included in the May Week revue at the end of the year. Leslie sometimes chose to add finishing touches, and his persuasive name, to our efforts. Thanks to the little play that I had tapped out in those last three days in Ramatuelle, I had been beckoned into the company of a character who could elevate my Cambridge fortunes and transform, if not determine, my future.

Leslie was reading French at Caius, where he had a nice ground-floor set of rooms. I never noticed any French books on his shelves nor did I ever catch him in the process of writing an essay or preparing for a supervision. He gave himself no clever airs; he knew where he was going and, he told me, he wanted me (and my dialogue) to go with him. It was up to me whether or not to share the luminous staircase to paradise which, like Louis Jourdan in Vincent Minnelli’s
An American in Paris
, he was all set to climb, with a new step every day. He had, I was sure, never heard of Wittgenstein (though he could, no doubt, have contrived a rhyme for him). Whatever kind of a Francophone he was, he carried no trace of Gallic
sérieux
. As for Sartre’s idea of art, I doubted whether Leslie had ever read
La Nausée
, or even heard of it.

Clean-shaven, in a freshly laundered check shirt, hacking jacket with double vents, often with a patterned silk waistcoat, sometimes with a bow-tie, Leslie was a spruce advertisement for himself. His name was both exotic (of Belgian provenance, he told us) and easy to pronounce. His desk carried his silver-framed photograph in subaltern’s uniform, but I never heard him use barrack-room language. He knew many jokes, almost all of them of transatlantic provenance, none risqué. Luck, which doubled for good management, had led to his evacuation to North America. He had not only survived the war, like the rest of us; he had given it a miss. By the time he returned from Hamilton, Ontario, to Pinner, Middlesex, he had already learned to drive, a rare accomplishment among insular contemporaries. He brought to Cambridge a precocious transatlantic desire for fame and fortune. Cole Porter, Ira Gershwin and Lorenz Hart were his models; his lyrics were the fruit of diligent mimesis. All were distinguished by an indispensable something called ‘a Middle Eight’.

I cannot recover from memory’s sediment why we elected to set
Lady at the Wheel
in the south of France; perhaps because it lent itself to Leslie’s neat rhymes: ‘Here we get sand in our sandals / Here we get scanned
in our scandals’ and witty puns: ‘They were never incompatible / He had … income / And she was pattable’. The Monte Carlo Rally, then a much publicised annual event, furnished opportunities for a comically guttural German, a silly-ass English gentleman (Leslie came up with the name Sir Roland Butter) and a couple of Americans, one a handsome driver, the other a lugubrious, finally golden-hearted tycoon. The only character drawn from life was called Britannia, a comic, middle-aged Cassandra who wandered around making predictions that no one cared to hear. My parents had told me of such a female who haunted the beach at Juan-les-Pins where they spent two weeks every summer at a little hotel called Mon Repos.

My role as book-writer was to accommodate Leslie’s and Robin Beaumont’s musical numbers between as many laughs as I could contrive to put in the mouths of our confected characters. The hero had to be Pete, because Leslie had already composed a song entitled ‘Pete, y’know’ (he was ‘kinda sweet, y’know’). For some similarly lyrical reason, the female lead, who drove the ramshackle English entry, which won the rally, came to be called Jinx Dando. How could a classical scholar lend himself to such a lowbrow project? With the greatest of imitative ease, since Leslie laughed gladly at my jokes and had none of Toby Robertson’s condescension. His ambitions lay beyond Cambridge: the places he was going had much brighter lights and he had every intention of seeing his name in them. It was up to me whether I came along.

Bricusse
père
was said to be ‘in charge of distribution’ for Kemsley Newspapers (he supervised the loading of printed copies into the vans that carried them to the far corners of London). Leslie’s contacts in Fleet Street were good enough, his salesmanship and samples plausible enough, for him to be commissioned by Kemsley’s
Sunday Graphic
to supply a weekly ‘box’ of funny verses, an English travesty of the
New Yorker
-ish style of Ogden Nash, one of whose imitable couplets ran ‘When you shake the ketchup bottle / None’ll come and then a lot’ll’. Like the famous American gagster
Goodman Ace, who wrote for Bob Hope and other seemingly spontaneous comics, Leslie did not hesitate to ape his betters, whether they knew it or not. On his shelves were two fat anthologies of jokes collated by Bennett Cerf, from which he extracted regular plums, as well as the Noël Coward and Cole Porter songbooks.

Tony Becher’s contributions to our Footlights number were quick proof of his rhyming facility. He was also recruited by Leslie, as his uncredited journalistic collaborator (a double byline would have compromised Leslie’s standing with the editor). Tony never told me what his share of the take was, but he was glad of it. Leslie was a piper who promised such cheerful rewards that it would have been churlish, if not self-defeating, not to follow his lead. Between teatime sessions in his rooms (Leslie always had a ready supply of milk chocolate P-P-P-Penguins), I did not at all abate my enthusiasm for the therapeutic treatment of humanity’s metaphysical delusions.

Tony and I went together, in our gowns, to Renford Bambrough’s supervisions. We read and then discussed our essays in a serious, sociable way and at untimed length. Renford seemed not to find either of us more able than the other, but there was an unadmitted competition to impress him. Tony showed knowledge; I preferred wit. Well-read as Renford might be in modern philosophy, there was something of the truant classicist about his involvement in it. While he need have had no motive other than intellectual honesty for embracing the universalism that our programme of subservience to science implied, it may be that, just as I hoped to apply an incidental purge to old ideas (anti-Semitism the oldest), Renford wanted to put provincialism behind him. He never spoke of his parents nor of the north. He was a version of what C. P. Snow, in his sequence of then current novels,
Strangers and Brothers
, had called ‘a New Man’. Renford combined academic and collegiate ambitions with a touch of levity. As things turned out, he had more than we knew in common with the character of Jago, in Snow’s best novel,
The Masters
. When first proposed as Master of St John’s, he was
deemed too young; some two decades, later, his candidature failed because he was considered too old. After all that time, he had to settle, unhappily, for
proxime accessit
.

An American graduate student called Norwood Russell Hanson sometimes sat in on our discussions. His presence introduced a measure of solemnity. Hanson challenged glibness with unsmiling severity. A philosopher with a mission, he wore a flying jacket and had the air of someone just in from one dangerous flight and apt for another. He had been a Golden Gloves boxer and a marine fighter pilot during the war in the Pacific. He shot down pat or pert answers with a sure aim. He had also played trumpet to professional standards. He went on to do innovative work in the philosophy of science and had several books in gestation when he was killed, in 1967, while piloting his own plane. The heartless rumour was that the advocate of careful scientific planning had failed to check how much fuel he had before taking off.

In an essay on C. L. Stevenson’s pioneering notion of ‘Persuasive Definitions’, I dropped the conventional, neutral style and quoted Macaulay’s 1833 speech on the Emancipation of the Jews. He had the nerve to declare that ‘the Jews’ had been unjustly typified by their degradation. What contingency had forced upon them had then been taken to be their essential, immutable character. I alluded not only to Jean-Paul Sartre’s unlikely recommendation to Jews that they embrace the identity that others wished upon them (they alone were debarred, however well-meaningly, from the self-determination that Sartre regarded as the morally imperative prelude to human emancipation from Bad Faith), but also to T. S. Eliot’s dismissive description of Macaulay as a stylist contaminated by ‘journalism’. What seemed an aesthetic judgement carried persuasive baggage: to define Macaulay as journalistic enabled the sainted Tom to disparage liberal arguments in general without meeting any of them in particular. Macaulay’s 1833 speech was, I claimed, a proleptic counterblast to Eliot’s 1933 lecture
After Strange Gods
.

I refrained from saying that Eliot’s speech, which his many defenders continue to pass off as an aberration due to personal stress, had coincided with Hitler’s accession to power and was of a piece with the contemporary anti-Semitism preached by Charles Lindbergh, Father Coughlin and Henry Ford. How many of Eliot’s admirers have chosen to notice that the speech delivered at the University of Virginia was also congruent with the restrictive admission policy of Harvard University during the presidency of A. Lawrence Lowell at the time that Eliot was a student under his waspish aegis? Eliot’s standing in Cambridge critical circles was still paramount, despite the falling away that Frank Leavis and his censorious ‘Connection’ had detected in his recent work. If it disturbed my companions that I even alluded to so vexed and embarrassing a topic as ‘the Jews’, they were decent enough not to show it.

I was as easily seduced into seriousness by therapeutic positivism as into frivolity by Leslie Bricusse. I discovered that ‘Lezzers’ had a knack for finding female company, if for no salacious purpose. He talked of ‘dating’ girls and was very aware of their statistical details, but he was unlikely to commit the
faux pas
of one of his Caius friends, Stanley P., who pulled out his handkerchief during a social occasion and exploded a packet of Durex into his tutor’s wife’s lap. L. C. B. set out to enrol a company of pretty girls, preferably of 36–19–36 dimensions, who could sing and dance (or at least ‘move’).

Hardly any Cambridge theatrical females had, or needed, such attributes. Dudy Foulds’s literary intelligence earned her the lifelong envy of her peers and her articulate personality made her Peter Hall’s leading lady for all seasons; but she was no Cyd Charisse. When she happened to come to a Jordan’s Yard Sunday lunch, I approached her to play the Cassandran part of Britannia; but she declined. More than thirty years later, when Claire Tomalin was the literary editor of the
Sunday Times
and Dorothy Nimmo had been hailed as a poetic genius by Craig Raine, I suggested that Claire offer ‘Dudy’, as we still called her, a book to review. I knew her to be alone
and destitute. Claire chose to remember that when they were involved in Dr Leavis’s ‘common pursuit’ (of first-class degrees), Dudy refused to share her trenchant, clever essays with other Newnhamites.

Leslie’s plans were so confidently laid that it was a form of election to be invited to share them. His lyrics and their sentiments might have what John Sullivan called ‘the inevitability of a popular song’; but that was precisely what they were designed to be, the more popular the better, in conformity with very good models. What Ovid had been to me, ‘Cole’ was to Leslie (the two versifiers had ‘Let’s Do It’ as their common theme). Leslie had no urge to be well regarded in smart undergraduate circles. I doubt if he ever spoke to Peter Hall or recognised Karl Miller if he saw him. The Footlights and the Musical Comedy Club, of which he assumed the presidency, took most of Leslie’s efficient time. He never pretended that they were anything but rungs on the ladder to an extra-mural, post-Cambridge paradise. How different, in moral terms, was Sullivan’s determination to be a scholar from Leslie’s to become the king of Shaftesbury Avenue and, if possible, the president of Old Broadway?