Going Up (21 page)

The next morning,
de bonne heure
, I tramped back to Lyon station and caught a train to Nice. From there, I took the bus to Juan-les-Pins, where Scott Fitzgerald had had the inspiration that led to
Tender Is the Night
. I went first to my parents’ favourite hotel, Mon Repos. Finding that it was about to close, I walked through the shuttered town to the Hôtel des Voyageurs. My thousand-francs-a-week back room offered a close-up view of the main-line railway. My dreams were torpedoed by shafts of juddering sound, but I had a place to work.

I bought an unlined quarto pad of white marbled paper and a biro and began to write a novel. I had no urgent subject in mind. Mr Maugham said that a writer had to write every day. When dry of material, he had had recourse to writing his own name over and over until he bored himself into invention. I recalled going with Guy Ramsey (he had two complimentary tickets from the
Daily Telegraph
) to see and hear Johnny Ray at the London Palladium. The star’s signature number was ‘Cry’, which he contrived to do at its climax, twice nightly. His other hit, ‘Oh what a night it was, it really was!’, was clearly a gay anthem. It gloried in what was, at the time, a criminal offence.

Guy flinched at the American’s lacrimose emotionalism, but there was something appealing in Johnny’s sorrows. I sat at my marbled pad for a few minutes and then, quite as if I were taking dictation, I began to write about Frank Smith, a Putney greengrocer’s boy who dreams of becoming a star
and, with anguished spontaneity, composes the songs that turn him into one. The characters of Frank’s parents in
Obbligato
owed more than a little to Frank Muir and Denis Norden’s sketches in
Take It From Here
featuring Ron and Eth (‘Oh Ron, here we are out in the country and alone at last! Just you, me and that couple on the verge’). Although I knew little about the greengrocery business, I remembered someone telling me that it was a trick of the trade to put the best of the fruit, which will retain its freshness longest, at the back and along the bottom of the box. Mr Maugham had said that, in order to describe the taste of roast lamb, it was not necessary to consume a whole sheep, but it was a good idea to have eaten a lamb chop.

The showbiz caricatures were based on my brief experience of West End life. Jock Jacobsen had proved that he was offering us the key of some kind of kingdom by sending Leslie and me to see George and Alfred Black, who put on shows at the London Palladium. George or Alfred (it was hard to be sure which was which) had just been to Paris, where he saw a sketch, perhaps in the Folies Bergère, so good that ‘as soon as I saw it, I thought of it’. Perhaps we could do an English version just like the French one, but also, of course, unrecognisable as such. Jock, with his hat on, was depicted in
Obbligato
as Franco Franks, ‘the agents’ agent’. He had a rival called Oscar Hammertoe (his name inspired, I suspect, by a movie director called Orson Kaart in ‘Flook’, Wally Fawkes’s sly strip cartoon in the
Daily Mail
). Another of Franco’s colleagues was ‘Mugs’ Marber, who bought a showy American car and then found he lacked the means to fill the gas tank. Franco Franks said of Frank Smith, ‘Go down Liverpool poss!’ It was the last place in the UK that I could imagine being associated with pop singers.

My brush could hardly have been broader, but I accumulated wordage with daily regularity. I was alone, but not lonely, not when working. I had not written more than a dozen pages before I was certain that, when it was finished, my innocent little book would be published. It was a relief to find a topic other than woeful adolescence, the prejudices of the bourgeoisie
and the misfortunes of the Jews. I laughed at my own jokes quite as if they had been delivered by someone else. Frank’s improvised songs were those of an anglicised Johnny Ray, full of rhyming lamentation and then, as the plot developed, of the joy of true love with the girl of his dreams.

In the afternoon, I walked into Juan-les-Pins and bought
Le Figaro
. Mr Maugham had advised travellers who did not speak the local language to buy a newspaper and, in the privacy of their hotel bedroom, read it aloud. If you had any kind of an ear, you would recognise when you were beginning to sound like a native. The
Librairie
where I bought the paper had a rack of English-language books, among them
My Life and Loves
by Frank Harris, in four field-grey paperback volumes. It was a classic hot book still banned in England, but the Reverend Harper Wood funded its purchase. I was stimulated by the efficiency with which Harris threw women’s skirts over their heads and addressed himself, to cries of outrage and then delight, to applying his head between their legs. From time to time, he emerged to say, ‘Oh you little dear, you!’ before finishing things in a more or less conventional pose.

On my second day in Juan-les-Pins, I summoned the nerve to write to Maugham and ask whether I might visit him up at the Villa Mauresque. His response, in his own handwriting, came almost by return: since my letter was undated, he was not sure whether I was still in the region. He named a possible day for me to visit him, but warned me that his house was somewhat remote. He was not certain how I should get there unless I had a ‘motor bicycle’. Alternatively, I might get to St Jean Cap Ferrat by bus, in which case he would have me met in the
Place St Jean
.

A
MAN IN A pork-pie hat was already sitting on the single stone bench in the little square of St Jean Cap Ferrat. We remained side by side for several minutes and then he said, ‘Mr Raphael?’ His name was Alan Searle. He was Mr Maugham’s secretary. He led me to a grey Citroën. The uniformed chauffeur opened the door and I got into the back. The grey-felted front seats had chromium bars across the top.

Maugham’s signature Moorish talisman was branded on the white gatepost of the long, white villa. The front hall had black and white tiles and a twist of staircase, with an
art nouveau
metal balustrade. Alan Searle took me past an unmistakable Picasso, of a grey dying harlequin, and another big canvas, of a crouching figure, into the bright sun-lit drawing room. Two triple sofas, in blue upholstery, faced each other across a low, lacquered table.

Like the narrator in Maugham’s ‘The Voice of the Turtle’, I waited for my first sight of a legendary man of letters. In the story, the distinguished, bearded man who comes downstairs to meet his deferential caller appears ‘every inch a poet’ (Maugham never feared a cliché), but turns out to be a retired brush salesman. The narrator has called at the wrong house. When a small, brisk man in dark grey flannels and blazer, a Paisley scarf at his
throat, strode into the living room of the Villa Mauresque, Alan Searle said, ‘Here is Mr Maugham.’

I shook the offered brown hand and he sat down next to me on the sofa. I had no sense of being coldly appraised. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘we must see about getting you some tea. Or perhaps he’d prefer a cocktail?’

It was four-thirty in the afternoon. I said, ‘Tea, please.’

A white-jacketed manservant brought tea and
petits fours
badged with candied cherries. After the stale bread in my
pension
, they tasted like manna. For some uneasy reason, I asked for my tea with lemon; Mr Maugham took it the same way. He asked me what I was writing. I said that it might seem a strange thing to do on the Riviera, but I had started a novel about people who lived in Putney. ‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘Old Kipling, whom everyone despises these days, was quite right when he said, “What know they of England, who only England know?” It’s only when you get away from somewhere that you can describe it. You recall the s-salient features and all the irrelevant d-details f-f-fall away.’

When I told him that it seemed that
Lady at the Wheel
might be on in London, he said that he had had to wait ten years to get anything of his on the stage. The last time he had been in London, he had seen
The Boy
Friend
, Sandy Wilson’s skittish pastiche of a 1920s musical. ‘I didn’t enjoy the joke as much as I should, because I stopped going to musical c-comedies in the ’90s of the last century.’

After tea, he told me that I should get a job. That way, I should have some experience of the ‘rough and tumble’ of ordinary life. He started to light a cigarette. The match jumped from between his skinny fingers and fell into a crevice between the blue brocade cushions on the sofa. He was suddenly an old man, flapping at the fugitive ember in elderly panic. I felt pity and affection for him as he recovered his dignity.

He asked me how old I was. I said, ‘Twenty-three.’

Maugham said, ‘You’ve got plenty of time, plenty of time. You won’t go
into the BBC, will you? There was a man called Carn who won the Maugham Travel Award some years back. He went into the BBC and nothing’s been heard of him since.’

He recalled another young writer – was his name Dahl? – a dozen of whose stories he had read recently. The first two were promising, but only three or four of the rest were up to standard. ‘And that’s not enough, you know.’

Not long before, he had called on Max Beerbohm in Rapallo. ‘I was shocked at the change in him. He looked a very old man. He must be eightynine, of course, but he looked about a hundred and fifty. We were all young together, you know, in those far-off days. Do people still read Max?’

I told him that I had read the essays and parodies and that
Zuleika Dobson
was being made into a musical comedy by a Cambridge friend of mine. He nodded. Perhaps he was more concerned about whether we read
him
. He feared that the Edwardians (which he pronounced to rhyme with ‘guardians’) were dying out. Who knew how the fossils would be filed by the new curators of the literary world? Or, he might have added, how the curators would themselves be screened in time future. I did not tell Maugham that his only mention in
Scrutiny
was in a brief, dismissive review of
Don Fernando
, his memoir of youthful travels in Spain (including a visit to a brothel, where the girl was revealed to be so young that he could not continue). Who now regards Frank Leavis and his ‘connection’ as decisive in literary matters?

Maugham was soon to go to London to see his doctor. The ones in the south of France were altogether too casual. ‘They advise me to let nature take its course. At my age, that’s the last thing one wants.’ His journey was necessary because he had fallen over while extinguishing a fire in his garden. His ribs were still strapped up, which did not inhibit him from laughing heartily when I confessed that I was carrying an Old Carthusian tie in case I needed to establish my respectability if I had to call on help from some British embassy.

I told him how much I envied the range of his reading. ‘I’ve had a long
life in which to acquire it. But there are still gaps. Books in Swedish and Portuguese must be rejected at once.’ He received, on average, five manuscripts and some four hundred letters a week. They came mainly from young men and old ladies. ‘They frequently enclose photographs of themselves, but rarely any stamps.’ It seemed an odd grumble when you were sitting in a room hung with paintings by Monet, Pisarro, Manet, Renoir and, if I was right, Boudin.

I mentioned bridge. His appraisal of the top players seemed accurate enough: he particularly liked Kenneth Konstam and declared another famous player, no doubt Boris Schapiro, ‘very rude and unpleasant’. Konnie’s son, Michael (later attorney general of Kenya) played in the St John’s College bridge team under my captaincy. Also an amiable man, he did not have his father’s skills at the table. In 1960, soon after I had published a novel called
The Limits of Love
, Kenneth Konstam’s bridge column in the
Sunday Times
featured a hand in which I and my partner, in one room, ‘sacrificed’ against a certain slam by bidding six hearts, which went a few tricks ‘light’. When we compared scores, our other pair, Michael and his partner, in ‘the other room’, had also – after a bidding mix-up – played in six hearts, unfortunately with only two hearts in each hand, although they held all the remaining aces and kings. Such contracts have been made, but not in this instance. ‘Konnie’ remarked that his son’s performance must have ‘strained the limits of love’.

I told Maugham that I intended to hitch-hike from Juan-les-Pins into Spain. Alan Searle asked how I proposed to get about inside the country. Maugham said, ‘He’ll take the omnibus. You’ll find the people in Spain wonderfully polite and charming. Alan, we must give him some maps and that list of Paradors.’

They had been in Spain recently and ‘stayed at the most expensive places we could find. You see, I have some quite large royalties tied up there and I wanted to spend them while I could. At the end of the trip, I asked for the account. They refused to bring it.’

Alan Searle said, ‘They were so privileged to have Don Guillermo with them that they couldn’t possibly accept any money.’

Maugham asked Searle to be sure to give me a letter to a man who would, he said, ‘open all the doors in Madrid’.

After I had been there an hour, I thought it tactful to take my leave. Maugham said, ‘Would you like to look at the pictures on the way out?’

He led me past an ormolu console, its slab of marble supported on the spread wings of a Napoleonic eagle. I suspected that it was the one that he had invited his brother, Frederick, to admire. The then Lord Chancellor looked at it for a moment and then said, ‘A bit florid, isn’t it?’

In the chequered hallway, Maugham stopped in front of that large canvas of a crouching man. Could I guess who painted it? The name Toulouse-Lautrec came immediately to mind: something about the modelling of the head betrayed his hand. For fear of seeming foolish, or a smart alec, I shrugged.

‘Toulouse-Lautrec,’ my host said, ‘Sir Kenneth Clark is the only man ever to have identified it.’

Sensing that my host might have been disappointed if I had guessed right, I felt a little like the pushy, almost certainly Jewish, Max Kelada, in Maugham’s short story ‘Mr Know-All’, who had a moment of untypical tactfulness when he consented to look a fool in order not to compromise a young woman whose pearls he knew to be the valuable gift of an admirer rather than the cheap souvenir string that she desperately wanted her husband to believe that it was. The story ended, ‘At that moment, I did not entirely dislike Max Kelada.’

The chauffeur took me in the grey Citroën to the village square, where I waited for the bus back to Juan-les-Pins.

I had written no more than a third of
Obbligato
when the manager of the Hôtel des Voyageurs told me that it was about to close for its
fermeture annuelle
. I caught a train to Portbou, on the Spanish border, where the track changed gauge. The wooden carriages of the Spanish train shone
with brown varnish, like those in the newsreels of recruits waving with required cheerfulness as they were hauled away to the Civil War, less than twenty years earlier.

I walked from Barcelona station down to the Ramblas. With small appetite for roughing it, I checked into a staid bourgeois hotel with a rotating door onto the street. After a lunch of dry diced fish doused in old oil, I bought the
Green Guide
to Spain and a primer of the Spanish language and walked towards the centre of the city. It was a sunless afternoon in October. The Plaça Catalunya looked beige. The gantry of an unlit electric advertisement stood on the roof of a high, light-brown building, like a huge spider on black stilts.

Most of the customers on the terrace of the Café Catalan, in the southwest corner of the square, were men. They sat on collapsible brown wooden chairs with hand-holes in their backs. To command the attention of waiters, the customers clapped hollowed palms – once, twice – in peremptory summons. Bossy rings glinted on little fingers. Those soonest served wore sharp shoes and brown chalk-stripe suits, pouting white shirts, narrow, dark, knitted silk ties with gold tie slides, officious moustaches.

A shoeshine boy stopped and pointed at the shoes of a man reading a copy of
ABC
, the monarchist newspaper published in Madrid. Without looking directly at the boy, its reader applied one thick-heeled shoe to the ramp on the sloping lid of his box of equipment. The boy slid a leather shield on each side of the man’s ankle to protect his silk sock from being soiled. The box, with an open compartment for polish and rags, appeared to be made of ebony. The black surface was dotted with many rows of brass nails. I sat down and clapped my hands and ordered
un café
.

A dead tank stood like a beige sentinel in the far corner of the square. Orwell’s Catalonia was an occupied country. I took a little square Renault taxi to Gaudí’s
Sagrada Familia
. I looked and I was amazed, and unmoved, and then I walked back through the city and back to my dull and proper
hotel and studied my Spanish grammar. In the evening, I walked down to the
Barrio Chino
, the district of bars and brothels adjacent to the harbour. Joe Lyde, an Irish jazz pianist who was one of the louche habitués of 5 Jordan’s Yard, had told me that you could have a woman in Barcelona for one and ten pence.

I went into a loud casino, canted barrels in three rows above the zinc bar, and told myself to listen to the conversation of the working men. I understood even less than I might since they were talking Catalan. I drank
una
caña cerveza
and wondered where the women were. I knew that I should be too squeamish to go with one, but I was not above wanting to have, as they used to say, a squint at the menu.

The next morning I took several sheets of my hotel’s finely woven, pale yellow stationery and went back to the Café Catalan, clapped my hollowed hands and ordered a
café con leche
. I wrote and wrote to Beetle, a very long letter, edge to edge four sides of the nice paper. I loved her and I could not wait to see her again and would she marry me? I was looking forward almost more than I could say to seeing her at Christmastime. I hated being without her and I would not let it happen again if I could help it. I told her about the women in their tall black lace
mantillas
as they paraded in the
Ramblas
for the early-evening
paseo
on the arms of their unsmiling husbands and then I told her again how I wished she was with me. Did I say that, woeful as I was, I was learning things that made solitude worthwhile? I doubt it; but I was: for instance, that I did not like myself all that much; I provided myself with a lacklustre companion.

I posted my letter and set out to abate my loneliness by making the rounds of the Gaudí apartment houses, asymmetrical scribbles of ironwork on their bulging balconies. Then I took a dated little Renault cab to the zoo where he had designed the outdoor furniture, stairways and polychrome mosaic balustrades. I cannot recall speaking to anyone during my three days in Barcelona. I heard the sound of my own voice only when I was sitting in
my hotel bedroom reading aloud, as Maugham had prescribed, from the pages of
ABC
. The paper was grey, the headlines rusty red, the reactionary content irrelevant to my slow conquest of the
idioma Español
.

After three days, I took the train to Madrid. The
Green Guide
recommended the
pensión
Argentina, on an upper floor of a tall building in the Calle Alfonso XII. I never discovered which doors Maugham’s letter of introduction might have opened to me because I lost it before I got off the train at Atocha station. The only person who opened any doors for me during my four days in Madrid was the
serreno
who patrolled the street after nightfall with a jangle of keys on his thick leather belt. When you arrived home late, you clapped your hands and he came running. In return for a peseta, he opened the grille across the entrance to the building and shut it behind you.