Walking in the Shade (34 page)

And now a more general comment. It seems to be generally agreed that unpleasant facts about people are more revealing of their real selves than pleasant ones, but why? Nothing is easier than malice, and to find something discreditable about someone needs no more than a good look at him; besides, everyone alive has a root down into the mud: it is the human condition. We are skilled critics of our fellows, clever sniffers-out of moral weakness. Once, to be malicious was considered a fault; now it is applauded. Our current happy phrase ‘dishing the dirt' says more about us than we ought to like: it is diagnostic of our nasty time. And now, if I write: Tom was for years an enterprising, a brilliant publisher; he brought Jonathan Cape from a moribund condition to being the liveliest publishing house in Britain; he found new young authors and cherished and supported them; he fought for books at first patronised or rubbished by reviewers, like
One Hundred Years of Solitude
and
Catch-22
; he has kept his friends loyal to him through thick and thin…but I am sure the reader's eye has slid over these encomiums, waiting to get to the dirt.
The truth
.
*

My complaint now is more general: What happens to these glorious buccaneers when they get old? These youths who entertained us with their exploits? They get respectable: you meet some balding oldster whom you remember for his reckless adventures, and he is lisping away about imaginary youthful conformities, which in fact he would have despised from the bottom of his brave heart.

When
Declaration
came out, Tom Maschler at once became famous, as its originator, and it was described by every newspaper as a manifesto by the Angry Young Men, as if they were a movement or a group. In fact, as I soon found out, they divided into two main groups, with nothing at all in common. The real left wing was Ken Tynan—who had left his dandyish young self behind—and Lindsay Anderson. John Osborne was called a socialist by other people, but I don't think he ever said he was. John Wain might have written
Hurry on Down
, similar to Kingsley Amis's
Lucky Jim
, and to my mind as good, but he was a Young Tory if there ever was one.

I suppose they could all justly have been called angry, because of the state of the nation, but there were also three I thought of as the Metaphysicals, and they were not only not angry but had not even met their left-wing fellows, and in fact rather despised them for their shallow view of life. To call this odd lot of people a group, or a movement, was simply absurd. I asked the Metaphysicals to tea, separately. They were charming. One was Stuart Holroyd, a very young man, whose book
Emergence from Chaos
was in the news. Later he wrote: ‘at twenty-five I had the temerity to publish an account of my own inner life and experience. This was in the late 1950s, when the British press made much of “the angry young men”, and that was probably one reason why I ventured to write autobiographically: all the publicity we had received made us feel that what we had to say was important.' Bill Hopkins had written a first novel,
The Divine and the Decay
, also acclaimed. He died very young. Both these young men were unlike the rest of the contributors, who tended to be combative, and concerned with social mechanisms: they were shy, sensitive, interested in inner experience, and well read in mystical and religious literature.

Colin Wilson had written
The Outsider
, which was acclaimed as a work of great significance, if not genius, by the literary establishment. If there ever was a rising star on the literary horizon, it was Colin Wilson, but then there was a reaction, as if the people who had lionised him were thinking, You aren't going to get away with
that
again. On the whole it is not a good thing for a first book to be wildly praised: there is nearly always an irrational reaction. If that first (good) book of Wilson's was overpraised, then his succeeding books have been unjustly ignored or dismissed. At least two—I haven't read them all—should have been commended. One was
Rasputin and the Fall of the Romanovs
, which rescued Rasputin from his reputation as a sort of hysterical charlatan and put him into the context of a tradition of Russian shamans and healers. The other was
The Great Beast
, about Aleister Crowley, equally balanced and sensible.

So there we all were. The Left-Wing Politicals, very fashionable. The Metaphysicals, unfashionable, but they would be the last word in chic only ten years later. And me, a female and ten years older than any of them.

Briefly and in passing: it is a sad thing that what is written has permanence, whereas what is said is often unnoticed. Something written is reprinted, becomes part of theses. Decades later it is quoted back at you. It is a millstone around your neck, and there is nothing you can do. ‘But you said, on page 123…' I like most of my piece, ‘A Small Personal Voice' in
Declaration
, but emphatically dislike some of it. What is that nonsense I was writing about Camus, Sartre, Beckett, Genet? I am shocked at myself. I wrote nonsense about China and the Soviet Union. I am appalled at my sentimentality when I said that I had never met anyone who would throw the switch that would unleash what we then thought of as The Bomb. It seems to me now that anyone would, given the right programming. Still, it was a piece for its time, all right.

One thing I wrote about in
Declaration
is still true—and more so. I complained about the xenophobia and little-mindedness of Britain. Sometimes, when one has returned from a trip abroad, a session with the newspapers and magazines is like opening a door on to a room full of very clever argumentative schoolchildren. News about one another is considered important. Wars and famines can be raging, governments tottering, but what they are writing about is that one of the children is trying a new hairstyle, or pettishly refusing to have lunch with another. My father used to complain about the parish-pump mentality of Britain, which was why he was eager to leave it in 1919 and in 1924.

The Angry Young Men was a phenomenon entirely invented by the newspapers, the media. It went rolling on, year after year, gathering momentum, and all the time I was amazed no one seemed to notice that in fact they had very little in common. The media are the equivalent of yesterday's scientists, for today's scientists have seen that when they conduct an experiment they are part of it and influence results by their very being; the media can create a story, a scandal, an event, but behave as if they have nothing to do with it, as if the event or the reputation were a spontaneous happening and they haven't influenced the result, or invented it all in the first place. ‘The general interest in…continues and is growing.' Of course it is, since the journalists are fanning the flames, permitting themselves fits of moral indignation, excitement, concern. Meanwhile the public marvel at them.

I repeat: The Angry Young Men was a creation of the media, invented by the newspapers, and never had any basis in fact. But it is no good saying so; a thousand theses have been written and a thousand reputations made, and now people have a vested interest in the thing and it probably will never be allowed to die. When I was in Japan, some professor asked me about the Angry Young Men and their manifesto, and I said they had never existed and it was a newspaper bubble. His face…but I saw on it that he was an expert on this revolutionary movement and the last thing he could bear to hear was that it was all a mirage.

The Angry Young Men (and I) were associated with the Royal Court because of John Osborne and because of the Court's glamour then.

There is a famous photograph of the Royal Court people on some jaunt, on the top of a bus, lovely Mary Ure in front—she was every bit as fascinating as Marilyn Monroe, with the same fragility. The young lions and lionesses are laughing, and every young lion, and most particularly John Osborne (who would shortly marry her) and Tony Richardson, is watching Mary, who has her head back, laughing, but seems a bit panicky, from all the attention. It is a picture of wonderful gaiety, like children on a picnic, when they are overexcited.

A party to celebrate the publication of
Declaration
was planned at the Royal Court, but the management refused to host it, on the grounds that John Osborne had insulted the Royal Family in his piece. “My objection to the Royalty symbol is that it is dead, it is a gold filling in a mouthful of decay.” The venue was switched to the Pheasantry, Chelsea, a great basement room, crammed with directors, politicians, actors, and of course, the contributors, everyone in the news at that time. Aneurin Bevan was there, with his entourage, just back from some conference, where he had allowed his famous fire to be flattened by a prevailing wind, and some of us tackled him and said that now communism had collapsed, he represented much more than the left wing of the Labour Party. He seemed surprised at what was expected of him. He was a politician, and revolution was certainly not on his agenda, whereas I would say that revolution, an abstract, inspirational, and uncompromised revolution, was part of how most people in that room thought. Not if you said to them, Do you think it should be this or that kind of revolution? No, nothing pedantically defined.

The din was incredible, but it was silenced by a loud voice from the top of the stairs that led down into the throng. There stood a young woman, dowdy, with floppy blond hair, a flowery dress—then the height of unchic—and disapproving pale eyes. ‘And who,' she was demanding of her escort, in the ringing tones of her class, ‘and who
are
all those furry little people?' For a good deal of slumming was going on, and the classes were getting a good stir round.

 

The people I was seeing about then came from very different worlds. The bliss of big cities is knowing people who may not care to know each other, and only those who have had to live in the provinces—like Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia—can appreciate the freedom of it.

For a time I saw a good bit of Miles Malleson. He had been in the theatre for forty years, and I loved hearing him talk about it. I went with him to the theatre, and to theatre restaurants, like the Ivy, and to the zoo, for he was a fellow of the Royal Zoological Society. Miles was fond of Peter, and Peter liked the zoo, where he could meet Miles's special animal, but I've forgotten what it was. I have known so many people who have supported tarantulas, sloths, scorpions, apes, and chameleons and they have blurred into a generic Zoo Pet.

We also talked about love, I with reluctance. Miles fancied me, but this was not a sentiment that needed much compassion from me, because Miles was in love with love. A product of the Twenties, he said he was: Free Love had been his emotional education, and he still thought this was the only way to conduct one's life and loves. Miles said he had never felt jealousy, or a need to own a woman, but women were sadly lacking in his largeness of approach. He thought one should be able to tell one's chief loved one about the fleeting fancy that had occupied a charming weekend, but his whole life, said he, had been a repetition of when he had gone ebulliently in to tell his first wife—I think; at any rate, a wife—about such an adventure and she had said, ‘Now that's enough. Out!' Why did women have to be like that? he demanded, really expecting an answer. He said he believed that love between a man and a woman—that is to say, real love—could exist only on a basis of absolute frankness. But frankness caused unhappiness. Well, yes, I said, I had heard similar complaints in my past, but surely this was the basic and intrinsic and terrible dilemma at the heart of love. Why did he think he was going to solve it all, just like that? But he did think so, he still hoped so. He would speak about it in a voice full of the hot grievance of a lifetime. I put him in a story called ‘The Habit of Loving'.

I saw Tom Maschler quite often too. He was rushing about London, seeing everyone, for he operated on a high-octane energy. You don't often meet people like this, who make you realise just how slowly your own wheels revolve in comparison.

The journalist Murray Sayle was in and out of my life. He lived up the road, in Notting Hill Gate, with his wife Tessa Sayle. They had met in Paris, both poor, as everyone was, and had been the right age for that city. She was Austrian, aristocratic, a pretty, sprightly woman, whose chief characteristic then was a love of order. She was the tidiest woman I have ever known, and nothing in their flat was even half an inch out of place. Later, when she could afford expensive clothes, she would take them to pieces and put them together according to her exacting standards. Murray was Australian, affable, easy-going, and carelessly generous with his time. Here was another of those improbable marriages, and it didn't last. Murray lived inside an always evolving epic, populated with outsize characters, one of them Shoulders Moresby. Later I learned that this character actually existed—and exists—and I was disappointed. Sometimes you may hear about a friend's friend for years, until he or she has all the familiar charm of a character in a folk tale, and the last thing you want to hear is that they live in the ordinary light of day. One of the incidents in the saga was when Murray and his mates decided to renovate a boat on the Thames in order to sail around the world; they spent a year of weekends and holidays doing it, needless to say much to the disapproval of their women. At last they set off, accompanied by champagne and speeches. But it was rough in the Channel. They were all seasick, a hazard they had not once thought of. They left the boat in Cherbourg, where it might very well be to this day, and travelled home, not by sea. Surreal adventures of this kind entertained Murray's friends for years. Murray worked for a popular newspaper, like the
Sun
or the
Daily Mail
. One day, having pursued some scandal to its limits, he was sitting on a bench in the park, and as with St. Paul on the road to Damascus, the scales fell from his eyes. These are people I'm doing these terrible things to, he thought. What am I doing? I am supposed to be a lover of humanity. He resigned from the newspaper and came to tell his friends, with all the penitence of a criminal determined to reform.