Inside a Pearl (27 page)

Julian and I quickly established a truce of not reading each other's books, which was a relief, though on the sly I've read half a dozen of his novels and admired them.

He and Pat did everything perfectly. They took turns cooking—he did the salad and she the main course and the pudding. They had me and my partner, Michael, to dinner with the painter Howard Hodgkin and his very camp partner, the music writer Antony Peattie. Howard said that he regretted that England's culture was more literary than visual, though he has collaborated with at least two writers, Julian and Susan Sontag. A late bloomer, Howard was an abstractionist whose canvases, at least to his mind, often commemorated specific encounters with friends.

Like Philip Roth, Julian has very intense friendships with women, notably Hermione Lee, who was one of his first readers, Judith Thurman, and Lorrie Moore. Like me, he's attracted to brainy, ardent women, people like Dorothea in
Middlemarch,
though not so gullible.

He also had a laddish side. He has an immense snooker table that fills one whole room of his North London house. But Julian is not a natural wit like Martin Amis, nor does he share Martin's fascination with low life. Julian is a headmaster's son and has that gooseflesh, underloved, boarding-school look, complete with the horsey face and long, blue nose. He's the most British man I know, and I always felt my highly colored American ways were somehow cheap and glaring in his eyes.

I liked the English and I think they liked me. I was better known in Britain as a writer than anywhere else, and of course that was agreeable. And yet I wasn't a caustic éminence grise like Gore Vidal but rather a pudgy, easygoing but witty guy like millions of others. It was always very exhilarating for me in England. They had so many newspapers and I was always being asked to do a column about “My Hero” (James Merrill), my five favorite books about New York, or some other ephemeral subject. I was on lots of book-chat shows on the radio, where I tried to keep up with the fleet-footed English talkers and eschew American ponderousness. Three times I was on the hourlong TV arts program
The South Bank Show
. When I was in England it was thrilling to be able
to speak my own language, or some version of it. When I spoke French I felt I was a rat in a maze, guided by a single point of light in the right direction but constantly going down blind alleys and having to retrace my steps (
rebrousser le chemin
), whereas in English I could just babble and occasionally astonish even myself with what came out of my mouth.

Nigella Lawson has become such a symbol of glamour, the domestic goddess of television, that it feels presumptuous to claim friendship with her. When I met her, she worked as an editor for the
Spectator
. I was enough older than her and her friends that I played the role of an eccentric uncle. Nigella was very extravagant. I always stayed in Durrants Hotel behind the Wallace Collection off Marylebone High Street, and Nigella (who was named after her father, Nigel Lawson, Mrs. Thatcher's chancellor of the exchequer) once filled my room at Durrants with a giant bouquet of blue nigellas, a flower sometimes called “love in a mist.”

Later she was the deputy literary editor of the
Sunday Times
. I remember writing a review for her comparing Joe Orton to Oscar Wilde, both of them living out their homosexuality in North Africa. Of course I recognized there were differences—Orton was working class and Wilde, I said, was upper class. Nigella called me in Paris and asked if I'd change upper class to upper middle class. I'd forgotten that these nuances meant so much to Brits.

Her mother, a famous beauty, divorced her father and married the philosopher A. J. Ayer, the popular author of
Language, Truth and Logic
. He had been married previously to a woman called Dee Wells, someone I met once at a dinner party given by Natasha Spender, shortly after Stephen Spender's death. After the early death from cancer of Nigella's mother, Ayer remarried Dee Wells.

Nigella has sold hundreds of thousands of cookbooks, which contain her airy, lighthearted remarks. She has always rejected the term “professional cook.” She's had her share of tragedy. Her mother died in her forties, her sister, Thomasina, died in her thirties of breast cancer, and her husband, John Diamond, a journalist, died of throat cancer. I can remember eating with them in Nobu in New York. His meal had to be ground into a liquid he could ingest through his
tracheotomy. Nigella said that given the amount of cancer in her family, she was virtually placing a curse on her two children. Once John, who was reduced to writing everything he wanted to say in conversation, heard a maddening voice chattering away on the radio—and he realized it was his own voice in a rebroadcast of an old program. Now he said he regretted the years of what he called wasting his words. Nigella once invited my partner Michael and me over for a lamb roast in her kitchen, where the star guests were Stephen Fry and Salman Rushdie. Before publishing his second novel,
Midnight's Children
, Salman had worked in advertising at Ogilvy & Mather as a copywriter and he told us that his great triumph at the firm had been a slogan for a cream cake: “Naughty but Nice.”

Fry wasted no time in rejoindering, “You could launch a slimming product: ‘Cut-wah Out-wah the Fatwa.'”

We all looked around to see if Salman would laugh at this impudence—and he did.

It was especially dramatic since Salman was still in hiding.

I was spending a lot of time going back and forth between Paris and London in 1989, the year I was a judge for the Booker Prize—when we crowned Kazuo Ishiguro's
The Remains of the Day
. Nigella was my date for the dinner, and her father had resigned from Thatcher's Tory government that very day. Nigella had earlier created a scandal by revealing she voted Socialist. The Anglo-French journalist and literary biographer Olivier Todd was seated next to Nigella and he grilled her for a quote about her father for
L'Express
.

To keep Todd from harassing her, I said, “We have much bigger news—we're getting married.” I was happy that night because not only did Ishiguro win but Sybille Bedford, the only gay writer in the competition (and the author of the sterling
A Legacy
, a much earlier book), was on the Booker shortlist for her latest,
Jigsaw
—and I got to meet her. She was already seventy-eight and had her arm in a sling.

A decade and a half later, when my book
My Lives
came out in London, Nigella attended the launch party and created a giant stir. By that time John Diamond was dead; she had moved in with Charles Saatchi nine months after John died, and eventually married him.
Though she was criticized for her “haste,” I defended her. I'd taken up with someone new a year after the death of my French lover, Hubert Sorin. In each case, Nigella and I had been a caregiver during a long illness. We'd had plenty of time to say our farewells during an illness that was inevitably fatal. And I, at least, was lonely and terrified and in need of affection.

Alan Jenkins, an agile poet who wrote beautiful verses about unhappy loves and about his nautical father, was the deputy editor of the
Times Literary Supplement
and a dear friend. MC adored him for his good humor and excellent French. He was always a star at my dinner parties. And he visited me more than once in Paris. I was always careful to have a bottle of J&B Scotch around, which did not go untouched, but Alan was the kind of drinker who blossomed conversationally and became a lot of fun, like so many of the English. When I'd been a drinker, I was an alcoholic.

Alan was just a bit of a drunk, which seemed appropriate for a poet. I felt that his poetry was underrecognized, partly because he was a powerful editor—a fate shared by Howard Moss, the poetry editor of the
New Yorker
, whose work was also neglected because people were afraid of looking as though they were currying favor.

I stayed with Alan more than once in London. People were always speculating about which lovely, intelligent girl he'd marry, but he kept hesitating and then, exhausted, the various girls would move on—which would provoke a new storm of his lovelorn poetry. When I broke up with the younger writer Christopher Cox, the composer Virgil Thomson (his friend and boss), told him that I'd always be restless and unhappy in love. It's what I wrote about. Was Alan also a perennial bachelor because he wrote about love?

Alan had a winning Harry Potter schoolboy look, his eyeglasses smudged and crooked, his longish curls confused into a great mop, his preppy clothes rumpled. The one thing that didn't go with this nerdy collegiate image was his beautiful tenor speaking voice, a poet's arresting tones as persuasive as a good cello. Where one might have expected a high squeak or sudden adolescent crack, one got instead this lyrical instrument, ideal for reading his kind of verse, which was at once social
and deeply felt—a lesser version of James Merrill's poetry and voice without Merrill's sham mysticism.

And although he was often genuinely unhappy in love (it wasn't a pose), Alan was always gallant and plucky. Some days, it seemed, he'd turn sour with disappointment and grief, all the more striking in such a resolutely cheerful man. He was quick to express his agreement, nodding furiously at anything one said. An utterance felt delightfully collaborative with Alan. His years of working at the
TLS
had given him a familiarity with every domain of intellectual endeavor, but he was never professorial, possessing an urbanity usually missing among American intellectuals and artists. I remember an elegant luncheon in Paris that the
TLS
gave in the late 1990s to celebrate its French connection at Drouant (where the Goncourt jury holds its annual luncheon)—hallowed ground for literary people. There I met the very suave and elegant essayist Marc Fumaroli, the author of
Trois Institutions Littéraires
and a star of the Academie Française.

One evening in London, Alan invited Michael and me to dinner with Marie Colvin, the well-respected war reporter and Alan's best friend and confidante. She wore a black patch over the eye she'd lost in Sri Lanka. Marie worked for the
Sunday Times
of London, but was an American from Long Island. She and Michael talked about Yemen, where he'd been stationed in the Peace Corps. He'd been a teacher there and although he'd enjoyed his year there, it was dull, basically bureaucratic stuff. Marie had once slipped into Yemen, as she told us, by dhow (a small sailing vessel) across the Red Sea from the Horn of Africa. In the next moment she was talking about Proust, training her cool good eye on each of us. And indeed her memory was Proustian, full of adventures and assignments in many exotic locales, and held together by a network of rich associations. Nor did she for one moment seem cynical. She hadn't happened onto her career, according to any of the flood of obituaries and accounts in the press by her colleagues and admirers following her death—she'd chosen it, and though she'd seen terrible things and reported on them soberly, she laughed and had the kind of optimism that I suppose all journalists witnessing daily horrors need to keep going. She was credited with saving the lives of fifteen
hundred women and children in a compound in East Timor. Later, after the start of the events known collectively as the Arab Spring, she was killed in the crossfire when the Syrian government began pushing back against its rebels.

Alan's friend and former
TLS
colleague Alan Hollinghurst was another person who'd once negatively reviewed my work before we met, which didn't keep me from reviewing his first novel,
The Swimming Pool Library
, in the
Sunday Times
, calling it the best gay book yet written by an Englishman.

When I finally met Alan, he struck me as someone rather dignified, but with a slyly frivolous side. Alan's favorite writer was and is Ronald Firbank, a taste we share. Alan had written his Oxford thesis on Firbank.

Alan knows everything about architecture, one of his specialties at the
TLS
, and he's one of the few people I know who thinks London is more beautiful than Paris—it certainly has more varied extant architecture from more different periods. It's true that what gives Paris its unity—the uniform look of Haussmann's apartment buildings, the orientation of streets radiating out from monuments like the Arc de Triomphe, and the repetition of its street furniture and Wallace fountains—can make it dull to the historical connoisseur. As anyone who's read his novels knows, Alan has a Proustian fascination with titles and stately homes, although, like Proust, he is also critical of snobbism. I envy him his flat in Hampstead; everything in it peaceful, beautiful, and neatly organized. Now the definition of the professional novelist (especially since he won the Booker Prize for
The Line of Beauty
), he's arranged his life so that he has to do nothing but write his next perfectly phrased and carefully considered narrative—usually over the course of five or six years. Perhaps he's the most consistently polished writer in the UK today. Unsurprisingly, he doesn't travel much.

And yet like so many Englishmen, he's intrigued by France and its literary classics. He's translated several of Racine's plays.

Although most educated French people say they prefer “English” to “American English,” they can rarely understand Brits, who gargle and swallow their words and let their sentences trail off. Alan is a great
mumbler and quietly and drily camp (there's no reliable French equivalent to “camp”). One time Alan and I gave a reading together in Brighton. He was hoarse and said, “I'm terribly sorry, but I seem to have done something facetious to my uvula.”

No French person would understand why that was funny.

Once I was invited to give a talk for Amnesty International at the Sheldonian Theatre. I was so nervous about speaking at Oxford that I asked to be accompanied by my English editor at the time, Jonathan Burnham, the same Jonathan who couldn't bear overly disciplined French gardens and who was my handsome, clever, well-dressed, and ambitious sometime boyfriend. The man who was supposed to introduce me was an Oxford don of French language who years before had been Jonathan's “moral tutor” at Oriel College. Because Jonathan kept sobbing over boys, he'd been sent down for a year by this moral tutor—who was flanked in his office by portraits of his wife and daughters.