Writing Home (38 page)

With the exception of
Habeas Corpus
, all these plays are too long – well over an hour each way, which is all I can ever take in the theatre – and in performance they should be cut. As Churchill said, ‘The head cannot take in more than the seat can endure.’

A few years ago a stage play of mine,
The Old Country
, was running in the West End. The central character, Hilary, played then by Alec Guinness, is an embittered, ironic figure living in the depths of the country. Visitors arrive, and in a small
coup de
théâtre
halfway through the first act the audience suddenly realize that the country is Russia. Hilary is a traitor, a former Foreign Office official now in exile. At the end of the play he is induced to return home and face the music.

The play had some success, with Hilary being understandably, though to my mind mistakenly, identified as Kim Philby. Indeed soon after the play opened the
Daily Telegraph
correspondent in Moscow found himself sitting next to Philby at the opera and mentioned the play. The spy said he’d been told about it, but that it didn’t sound at all like him. This wasn’t surprising, since if I’d had anybody in mind when writing the play it was not Philby but W. H. Auden, the play seeming to me to be about exile, a subject that does interest me, rather than espionage, which interests me not a bit. Still, Philby or Auden, the play ran, and who was I to complain? It should perhaps be said that this was a couple of years before the unmasking of Professor Blunt and the great spy boom.

During the run of
The Old Country
, as happens, friends and well-wishers would come round after the performance to greet Alec Guinness, often with personal reminiscences of Philby and
of his predecessors, Burgess and Maclean. Hints would be dropped as to the identity of spies still ensconced in the upper reaches of the Foreign Office or the Diplomatic, and when I next dropped into the theatre I would be given a précis of these titbits, though necessarily at second hand. I remember feeling rather out of it; I may not be interested in espionage, but I am a glutton for gossip.

Happily, I did get to hear one story at first hand. Coral Browne came to the play, and afterwards Alec Guinness took us both out to supper at the Mirabelle. I mention the restaurant only because the mixture of Moscow drabness and London
luxe
was a part of the telling of the tale, as it is a part of the tale told. It was over a meal very like the one that concludes
An Englishman
Abroad
that Coral told me of her visit to Russia with the Shakespeare Memorial Company in 1958, and the particular incidents that make up this play.

The picture of the elegant actress and the seedy exile sitting in a dingy Moscow flat through a long afternoon listening again and again to Jack Buchanan singing ‘Who Stole My Heart Away?’ seemed to me funny and sad, but it was a few years before I got round to writing it up. It was only when I sent the first draft to Coral Browne that I found she had kept not merely Burgess’s letters, thanking her for running him errands, but also her original notes of his measurements, and even his cheque (uncashed and for
£
6) to treat her and one of her fellow-actors to lunch at the Caprice.

I have made use of Burgess’s letters in the play, but another extract deserves quoting in full. His first letter, dated Easter Sunday 1959, begins: ‘This is a very suitable day to be writing to you, since I also was born on it … sprung from the womb on April 16 1911 … to the later horror of the Establishment of the country concerned.’ Coral had apparently urged him to visit Paul Robeson when the singer visited Moscow:

There is some irony in these remarks, particularly with regard to Paul Robeson, when one recalls a quip of Burgess’s in happier days. When he was sent to Washington as Second Secretary at the British Embassy his former boss, Hector McNeil, warned Burgess to remember three things: not to be too openly left-wing, not to get involved in race relations and above all not to get mixed up in any homosexual incidents. ‘I understand, Hector,’ said Burgess. ‘What you mean is that I mustn’t make a pass at Paul Robeson.’

I have put some of my own sentiments into Burgess’s mouth. ‘I can say I love London. I can say I love England. I can’t say I love my country, because I don’t know what that means,’ is a fair statement of my own, and I imagine many people’s, position. The Falklands War helped me to understand how a fastidious stepping-aside from patriotism could be an element in the make-up of characters as different as Burgess and Blunt. Certainly in the spy fever that followed the unmasking of Professor Blunt I felt more sympathy with the hunted than with the hunters. In the play it is suggested that Burgess was a spy because he wanted a place where he was alone, and that having a secret supplies this. I believe this to be psychologically true, but there is a sense too that an ironic attitude towards one’s country and a scepticism about one’s heritage are a part of that heritage. And so, by extension, is the decision to betray it. It is irony activated.

In his essay ‘The Well of Narcissus’ Auden imagines Narcissus not as young and beautiful but as fat and middle
aged. Drunk, he gazes at himself in the glass, and says, ‘I shouldn’t look at me like that if I were you. I suppose you think you know who I am. Well, let me tell
you
, my dear, that one of these days you’re going to get a very big surprise
indeed
!’ That seems a fair description of Burgess’s character, and one not unfamiliar to the people among whom he was to end up. ‘He exemplified that favourite type in the classical Russian novel, the buffoon; the man always playing the fool, not only for his own amusement and love of exhibitionism, but also with the object of keeping everyone in the dark as to his own inner views and intentions.’ Not Burgess, but the poet Yevtushenko as described by Anthony Powell.

In the play Burgess says, ‘I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.’ The remark was actually made by the Oxford aesthete Brian Howard. The contradictions in the Cambridge Burgess turned him to treachery, the Oxford Howard to art. Howard’s drunken, outrageous behaviour flouted convention much as Burgess’s did, but with a conventional excuse: he was a failed writer. Burgess had no ambitions in that department, and, diplomacy being a less crowded field than literature, his failure turned out more of a success. As a second-rate poet or novelist, not a Second Secretary at the Washington Embassy, Burgess would have seemed, if not commonplace, at any rate not unfamiliar. He would also have been much easier to forget.

So far as the general issues in the play are concerned, I find it hard to drum up any patriotic indignation over Burgess (or any of the so-called Cambridge spies for that matter). No one has ever shown that Burgess did much harm, except to make fools of people in high places. Because he made jokes, scenes and most of all passes (though not at Paul Robeson), the general consensus is that he was rather silly. It is Philby who is always thought to be the most congenial figure. Clubbable, able to hold
his liquor, a good man in a tight corner, he commends himself to his fellow journalists, who have given him a good press. But of all the Cambridge spies he is the only one of whom it can be proved without doubt that he handed over agents to torture and death.

Auden’s name keeps coming up. Burgess wasn’t a close friend, but the night before he left the country in May 1951, and before it became plain that he would have to go the whole hog and accompany Maclean, Burgess thought of lying low with Auden on Ischia. There would have been a nice appropriateness in this, secret agents and sudden flight being potent elements in Auden’s poetic myth (‘Leave for Cape Wrath tonight’). However, the projected visit didn’t come off. On the crucial evening Auden, then staying with Stephen Spender, failed (or forgot) to return Burgess’s call. And this omission was also appropriate. Auden’s poetry in the thirties often sounded like a blueprint for political action, but set against subsequent events some of his verse rang hollow. Or so Auden began to think while in America during the war. Burgess ‘running naked through Europe’ and turning up on Ischia would have been like a parody of early Auden, a reminder of a poetic past, some of which Auden was anxious to forget, or at any rate re-edit. Burgess on Ischia would have been an artistic as much as a social embarrassment. Though that too would make a nice play.

I have taken a few liberties with the facts as Coral Browne told them to me. The scene in the British Embassy, for instance, did not occur; but since the Shakespeare Company were warned by the British Ambassador to ‘shy away from that traitor Burgess, who’s always trying to get back to England’ it seemed no great liberty.

When I wrote the script I had no idea where it would be filmed, and while I included some exterior shots I kept them to a minimum, thinking that, without going abroad, Moscow-like
settings would be hard to find. In the event the film’s designer, Stuart Walker, came up with some very convincing locations in Glasgow and Dundee, enabling John Schlesinger to open up the film and include many more exteriors. We see the outside of the theatre (Caird Hall, Dundee) and the front of the British Embassy (back of Glasgow Town Hall), and the final shot of the film, vaguely described by me as ‘Moscow streets’, has Burgess strolling in his new togs across the Suspension Bridge in Glasgow, luckily in a snowstorm.

Searching for locations educates the eye. The Suspension Bridge on Clydeside doesn’t look particularly Russian in itself. What makes it seem authentic is a long Georgian building on the far bank of the river, which is in the very back of the shot. This building happens to have been painted in two shades of pink in a way that maybe looks more like Leningrad than Moscow but which certainly suggests Eastern Europe. The exterior of Burgess’s flat was filmed at Moss Heights in Glasgow, an early post-war block of flats, and the interior was built in the small concert room at the Caird Hall. The magnificent marble staircase of the British Embassy is in Glasgow Town Hall, but when Coral Browne leaves the two young diplomats and goes down the staircase she travels five hundred miles between frames, as the room in the Embassy is actually at Polesden Lacey in Surrey.

A poignant exchange occurs as Coral and Burgess are coming away from Burgess’s flat and he casually enquires whether she had known Jack Buchanan, whose record he has been playing her. ‘Yes,’ says Coral. ‘We nearly got married.’ Burgess gives her a second look, not sure that she isn’t pulling his leg. She isn’t. It had come out casually in conversation with Coral just before we started filming. Slipped in right at the end of the sequence it focuses what has gone before, both of them listening to a record that to Burgess means something general and to Coral someone
very particular. It’s the kind of coincidence which, had it been invented, would have seemed sentimental.

It was pointed out, appropriately in the
Daily Express
, that it was not in Coral’s dressing-room that Burgess was sick, but in that of Michael Redgrave next door. This is true and was part of the story as Coral originally told it to me, Redgrave having called her in to help clean up an Englishman who was being sick in his room, but without introducing him. In an article about the Moscow visit in the
Observer
in 1959 Redgrave mentioned Burgess coming round, but did not mention him being ill. The kernel of our film is the meeting in the flat, and, wanting to centre the story on Coral and leave Hamlet out of it as far as possible, I transferred the incident entirely to her dressing-room. In Sir Michael’s autobiography,
In My Mind’s Eye
, which came out in 1983, after the film had been made, he recalled the incident as it actually happened, which might suggest that Coral had plagiarized the story. She hadn’t. I had rearranged it for dramatic reasons.

There was only one point in the interpretation of the script where John Schlesinger and I differed, and that was at the conclusion of the scene in the pyjama shop. Snobbish though I’d made the salesman, I felt he did have a point and that the balance of the scene ought in the end to go his way. When he revealed that the shop was Hungarian I wanted the tone of the scene to change and for it suddenly to cease to be about snobbery and to reveal real issues. The film is set after all in 1958, only two years after the Hungarian uprising. John felt that an audience would not grasp this. We argued and left it open until the last moment, when I deferred and gave the scene a jokier ending. On reflection I still think I was right and that those Mayfair scenes should end on a sourer note. But it was an amicable disagreement, and our only one on what to make was a very enjoyable film.

An Englishman Abroad
was transmitted in 1983. In
A Question of
Attribution
(1988) I wrote about Anthony Blunt and a suspect Titian, put the plays together as a double bill under the title (suggested by Simon Callow)
Single Spies
, and they were put on at the National Theatre and later at the Queen’s. Although the preface I wrote for
Single Spies
in 1989 was substantially the same as the one printed here for
An Englishman Abroad
, I note that it ended more harshly. The five years that separated the two plays were also the prime of Mrs Thatcher, and my attitudes had hardened: