Going Up (33 page)

When Paul was eight months old, my mother agreed to look after him while I gave Beetle a deserved holiday. Irene was to be a patient and loving grandmother. Whatever had gone cold between us was put right, it seemed, by the affection that she gave Paul, and he her. For the rest of her life, she made the occasional Freudian slip of calling him ‘Freddie’.

Beetle and I headed for the Riviera. Parenthood and lack of money made us unadventurous: I booked a full week, with
pension complète
, at the hotel Florida (two-fronted in the
Michelin Guide
) in Beaulieu-sur-Mer. The food was not as good as our fat cook’s in Lucca, the ambience petit bourgeois. Monsieur Hulot might well have taken a holiday there. One night, a young woman wheeled a paralysed man into the dining room. They went from table to table with a deck of small watercolour paintings, laying one on each. There was an attendant printed notice. The artist was an ex-inmate of a Nazi concentration camp. The pictures had been painted with a brush held in his mouth. When the tour was completed, the girl came round to collect whatever people were prepared to offer. Several of the diners handed back the cards. I gave the girl a couple of
thousand old francs. That night, we went to the casino and won twice as much at
boule
.

Beetle was glad to get home and retrieve Paul from Manor Fields. On entering 12 Balliol House, I always developed a bad, and worsening, headache. When first we visited my parents, Beetle had been surprised by Cedric’s habit of picking an argument with me. It irritated him that she almost always sided with me. Cedric was having a miserable time with the stricture that, from time to time, he never knew when, would prevent him from pissing. Within an hour or two, he could be in agony. Various West End specialists affected to know what to do; it was usually painful and provided only temporary relief. No one could cure the condition until my parents went to Sweden, where a Dr Johanssen contrived an operation that excised the scar tissue and set the two ends of the re-severed urethra to grow together naturally. After decades of dread and fear, Cedric was repaired, for a while.

I was sorry for my parents, but good manners had to cover for the small love I felt for them. I have never been interested in the reasons that analysis might have revealed to be behind my indifference. Might it be that I always resented the fact that my mother never gave me her breast? Or is it that I felt betrayed when she allowed me to be sent to boarding school, even though I know very well that she had little choice? I cannot remember ever being greeted with literally open arms. Cedric was patient in seeking to improve my golf swing, my play of the cards and my tango, but his long concealment of the existence of my half-sister gave his moralising a late whiff of hypocrisy. I did not blame him for his past (no one owes an account of his life to his children), but I might have been spared the advisory humbug. I shall, however, always be grateful for that extra year at Cambridge. I did not hold it against him that he lacked the confidence to guarantee my mortgage. By the time that he had the chance to buy the flat he and Irene had rented for over forty years and needed £1,500 as a down payment, I was
making enough money in the movies to give it to him, gladly. As I wrote the cheque, he said, ‘Make it two thousand, if you like.’ I did not.

The Limits of Love

G
EORGE GREENFIELD FOUND me a supportive sideline as fiction coach to Cyril Ross, founder and managing director of Swears & Wells, the Oxford Street furrier of choice. In the 1950s, success and the pelts of dead animals went together. Cyril was a small, seemingly mild, tough-minded Jewish entrepreneur with literary ambitions. Perhaps with a subvention to its publishers, he had already brought out one novel.
Pirates in Striped Trousers
denounced the tactics of a new generation of businessmen who built their fortunes not as Cyril had, on expertise and hard work, but by boarding other people’s vessels and holding them to ransom. Once at the wheel, they stripped the assets, sold off what was left, and proceeded to the next buccaneering episode.

Cyril would send me his latest, never very long manuscript and I marked it up, circling the clichés, and suggesting improvements in red ink, like some scribal Professor Anderson. My didactic efforts were worth twenty guineas a time. To take delivery, Cyril bought me lunch at Grosvenor House, where my distant, unseen cousins, Sir Benjamin and Lady Drage (Etta) had an apartment. It was a rare opportunity for fresh asparagus and smoked salmon. We did not drink wine with lunch. Cyril told me that Charlie Clore
had once threatened to move in on Swears & Wells. ‘Offered me a price for my shares well below their value and gave me twenty-four hours to think about it before he mounted a public, hostile takeover. So what I did was, I issued enough supplementary voting shares to mean I retained a majority, however many Charlie managed to sweep up on the open market. He had to give me best.’

‘Did he take it well?’

‘Charlie? He doesn’t bear a grudge, he just tells you to watch out. Which I do. Do you want a cigar? Personally I smoke a pipe. Cigars…’ The silence left them to Charlie Clore and his kind.

Cyril made a habit of good works. ‘Do you remember the Victory Services Club, Fred, in the Edgware Road, during the war?’

‘I remember going past it on the bus,’ I said. I had been with my father, who had just pointed out the old Edgware Road Music Hall where he had seen Florrie Ford and Marie Lloyd. Cedric was born in a mansion flat just around the corner. ‘Did you go to the Victory Services Club yourself then, Cyril?’

‘I founded it. So happened I owned the property, so I thought why not do something for the war effort? It was for officers mainly. Eisenhower used to go there sometimes, so did Montgomery.’

‘And did you meet them?’

‘Truth to tell, Fred, I don’t much go for the
goyim
.’

The Earlsdon Way
must have been remarked in some Jewish circles. I received an invitation to attend a midday Sunday reception, at an address within walking distance of Grange Road, in honour of the Israeli ambassador. Curiosity and vanity led me to the large, double-gated house with a gravel forecourt. In the wide, high drawing room overlooking the rosy back garden, people who seemed to know each other were having drinks and lox with cream cheese. No one spoke to me. I stood for a while and then moved to leave. My host headed me off. I must stay and hear what the
ambassador had to say. As he spoke, he was locking the white door to the sunlit room in which we were gathered.

The ambassador reminded us of the brave work that was being done in Israel and of the gratitude that he felt, and hoped he would have further reason to feel today, for the generosity of people such as those present. Even my very slow coach arrived at why the door had been locked and why the comfortable company had been assembled. After His Excellency had won his applause, my host brought out a list of all those present. He asked each guest, in alphabetical order, how much he was prepared to pledge. Whether by chance or agreed design, the first sums promised were often several thousand pounds. None was less than a few hundred.

At last, the dreaded moment came when I was named. I lacked the wit to be anything but truthful. ‘I am a writer,’ I said, ‘with a wife and a small child and no more money than we need to live on, if that much.’ As angry as I was humiliated, I walked across the room to the door. My host unlocked it and let me out. It was easier to take indignant action among Jews than elsewhere. Five years later, this incident supplied the basis of a scene in my novel
Lindmann
, which had a more tragic–comic conclusion than my lame exit.

American ‘egg-head’ paperbacks had begun to appear in my favourite bookshop, Ward’s in the King’s Road. Stanley Edgar Hyman’s
The Armed Vision
alerted me, with revelatory force, to how little I knew about the new criticism. Like some instructive hydra, his book had many heads. Kenneth Burke made the biggest impression, along with R. P. Blackmur and Maud Bodkin, the lady with the archetypes. I was so impressed by Burke’s
A Grammar of Motives
that I solicited John Wisdom’s opinion of it. My modest approach may have carried a tincture of the accusatory ingratiation not unknown among climbing intellectuals. A notorious literary instance was Rebecca West’s assault on H. G. Wells. Her sparky, proto-feminist
denunciation of his novel
Marriage
led, quite shortly, to a perhaps hoped-for sexual subjugation that supplied social promotion at the same time. If I hoped that Wisdom would ask what, in particular, I admired and draw me into some kind of conversation, I was disappointed. He returned the book with a brief note, saying that Burke had ‘an interesting mind’; his tone was courteous, but distant. It was as if I had asked Ken Rosewell whether he would care to have a knock-up.

In recent ratings, Burke has been relegated to a bibulous curiosity. He never had tenure of an impressive chair and was too combative, and versatile, to attract disciples in whose later table of contents he might have had an elevated place. His anatomy of the articulations of philosophical ideas remains unique and suggestive. A performer himself, he read philosophy in a dramatic light, in which scenery and actors play against each other in accordance with the logic of the piece. Wisdom’s posthumous fate has been little different from Burke’s: he hardly rates a footnote from any of the cardinals on whom today’s reputations depend.

When we saw Ben Gazzara as Jocko de Paris in
End as a Man
, I wrote a long meta-Burkean essay in which I modernised the notion of the ‘scapegoat mechanism’ of which René Girard has since become the most sophisticated exponent. To reinforce my credentials, I made learned reference to Jane Harrison’s
Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion
, which I never read at Cambridge but which had been republished in an illuminating New York paperback. The Athenian festivals of the
Thesmophoria
and
Thargelia
treated selected victims as Calder Willingham did the diabolical and charming Jocko. I sent my double-spaced piece to
Forum
, a standard-bearer of the new drama, edited by Clive Goodwin. He responded with an effusive letter of rejection. My essay was too elaborate for his pages, but he would be happy to see anything else I might care to write. I did not test his generosity.

Reduced to becoming the favourite ghost of Odham’s Press, I was glad
to have the money that came from rewriting the memoirs of Captain Bill Fell, a small, lean, creased New Zealander who was a wartime submariner and then, with the casual versatility of the British in those days, became a salvage expert. The typescript of
The Sea Shall Not Have Them
gave a bald, self-deprecating account of his steady nerve as he manoeuvred a mini-submarine under the protective netting at the mouth of an Italian harbour in order to torpedo enemy warships at anchor and then escaped the way he had come. The publishers were more excited by Bill’s role in the aftermath of the Suez operation. He had spent several months helping the French clear the wrecks that the Egyptians had sunk in the canal. The chief French officer was known to his British colleagues as ‘Captain Arnchers’, in honour of his comic way of saying ‘anchors’. Bill had no solemn views about the merits of the Suez operation. He noted only that when it became clear that the whole thing was a humiliating fiasco, the French officers had wept tears of shame and rage. The British shrugged and got on with the job in hand.

Now a confident cosmetician of gallant prose, I supplied Bill’s book with a leaven of nautical dialogue of the kind that first seasoned Noël Coward’s
In Which We Serve
and was recycled in
The Cruel Sea
. ‘Steady as you go’ was a staple line. When Bill read my aerated rendering of his adventures, he said, ‘I can’t stomach it. I’d sooner not have it printed.’ I quite understood, I told him; but that was the journalistic salvage operation I had been hired to do. He sighed, made a few corrective excisions and the book was published.

The Sea Shall Not Have Them
was my last ghostly effort, although George Greenfield did persuade me to read the manuscript of a man whose name on the title page was a triply hyphenated mixture of aristocratic ingredients (Montagu and Scott among them). He arrived for lunch, at my invitation, in a blue suit and Old Etonian tie. Before becoming, among other plausibly improbable things, a Russian Orthodox monk
(he claimed to have known Rasputin), he had been Anthony Eden’s fag-master at Eton. He even claimed to have beaten him, as Quintin Hogg did the young Freddie Ayer. The prolonged ingenuity of my guest’s life story might have furnished an entertaining picaresque novel, but it was soon established that he was, in effect, his own ghost. There was something almost heroic in the trouble he had taken over the costume and the cover story, which had secured him a mediocre lunch and a glass of club wine.

Tom Maschler called to say that he had tickets for Beetle and me to go and see the second play in Arnold Wesker’s trilogy (the first,
Chicken
Soup With Barley
, had warmed critical hearts).
Roots
was being premiered at the new theatre in Coventry. Tom suggested that I drive the three of us up there. We arrived in time to go to the cathedral to see the Graham Sutherland crucifixion, which graced the high altar. The figure of Christ, on a yellow background, if I remember rightly, was embraced in a set of elongated brackets, quite as if He Himself were somehow optional in the appreciation of the pictorial scheme. I saw the work as that of an artisan who had been commissioned to serve a myth in which he could not bring himself to believe. The restoration of the cathedral seemed to be part of a campaign, more rhetorical than faithful, to reinstate the Christian ideology that furnished the Holocaust with a warrant for anti-Semitism. The painting was a flamboyant advertisement for a faith in which no one could ever again honestly believe.

In Wesker’s play, Joan Plowright, who had displaced Dotty Tutin in Larry Olivier’s affections, played Beattie, the provincial, politically unfledged girl enlightened, uplifted and bedded by the young Jew who had the map that led to the new Jerusalem. The third play in Arnold’s trilogy would indeed be
I’m Talking About Jerusalem
, not quite the same one to which I had been asked to subscribe in that big house in Highgate. Born in the East End, Wesker was the latest prodigy to be promoted by the Royal Court Theatre.
Roots
received an ovation. It seemed that the audience’s applause
wished for some kind of secular deliverance. Their craving led them to deny that history had no promises to keep. The tinkerbell of socialism was kept alight by bourgeois applause.

We went round afterwards and were introduced to Arnold’s mother. She was the living, foreign-accented evidence of how far he had already come from his roots. Arnold himself paraded so earnest a mission to bring joy to all that it would have been graceless not to embrace him, even as one looked at one’s watch. A messiah who encouraged rather than scolded, he offered revolution without bloodshed, renaissance without birth pangs, salvation without The Bomb. Marching hopefully, especially from Aldermaston, became a way of arriving, and hooking up, for many of his generation. I chose to walk alone.

We went to the Unity Theatre to see Brendan Behan’s
The Quare
Fellow
. Its success exemplified Joan Littlewood’s method of building an ensemble of improvisations on original ingredients. Whoever the author, Joan directed the current piece in such a way that she put a Marxist mark and her own brand name on it. Like
Roots
, Behan’s play had its roots in autobiography. Its author had been a teenage member of the IRA and was sent to borstal for his activities in the UK and later served a long term in jail in Eire. His play was anti-capital punishment (the Quare Fellow was the one in the condemned cell), anti-capitalist and anti-British. It found a ready audience of those who were ready to believe, as Wesker proclaimed, that there was a way of stepping free of one’s shadow while still retaining one’s roots. Brendan was food and, more particularly, drink for the press. My BBC producer was happy to issue the usual army surplus W/T (wireless telegraph) equipment for me to go and interview him. Tom Maschler, who had access to as many people, if never the same ones, as Leslie Bricusse, accompanied me to Blackheath. If we got to Brendan early in the day, there was a chance that he would still be coherent.

The Mill House, where he lived with his wife, who, like the heroine of
Roots
was called Beatrice, was a heavy white building behind a triangle of lawn. Behan, in unbuttoned shirt, baggy grey trousers, no shoes, was on the telephone, watching his pink toes as he talked about a lecture that Christina Foyle wanted him to deliver. ‘What’s wrong with this fuckin’ thing? I can’t understand a word the woman’s saying.’ Barrel-chested, with curly sandy hair, a sweet wet mouth, he resembled an inflated baby, just off the breast. ‘Have some whisky. It’s all right, it’s embassy whisky, duty-free.’ Beatrice, big-eyed and freckled, brought glasses and poured with a tried, tired hand. She had the put-upon dignity of Dylan Thomas’s martyred widow, Caitlin, who had recently sold her ‘leftover’ life dearly.

Brendan proposed that we go first to the pub. ‘We’ll have a couple of drinks and then we’ll do the interview, don’t you worry.’ He grabbed me by the genitals and gave them a friendly squeeze. ‘Come on, boy.’ On our way, he pressed half a crown into a neighbour’s baby’s hand as it lay in its pram. ‘If she grips it, that’s good luck. She gripped it! See that? She gripped it. That’s good luck.’