by Amis, Martin
The extraordinary impact of Room at the Top is getting no easier to explain. One wonders what sort of shape the late Fifties imagination must have been in to get itself captured by such a modest and unsophisticated book. Its reception, at any rate, succeeded in putting it about that John Braine's views were worth listening to, and a period of exultant self-advertisement in the media had begun. With that indifference to contradiction which was always to serve him well, Braine presented himself as an unspoilt Northerner, bluff, honest and definitively working class, while at the same time gloating impetuously about his new-found wealth. 'I always travel first-class. I always stay at a good hotel,' he told interviewers in 1958, confessing, more frankly, to Robert Pitman: 'What I want to do is drive through Bradford in a Rolls-Royce with two naked women on either side of me covered in jewels.' Braine saw the film version of Room at the Top several nights running, and wept every time.
Perhaps the most rollicking chapter of Braine's public career came a couple of years later, after a visit to the Soviet Union in 1960. Still based at Bingley, Braine went East in a typically two-tier capacity: to be a guest of Alexei Surkov and the society of Soviet authors, and also to blow as much of the frozen Russian royalties of Room at the Top as he could on a quick package tour. In March of that year he had contributed a 'peace message' to the Daily Worker ('My Golden Dream -To Finish With War'): 'It's absurd', he had said, 'to regard the Soviet Union as our enemy ... I have no fear of the Soviet Union, neither am I frightened of communism' - which so impressed staff-writer Monty Meth that he urged Braine to write a best-seller which would 'rally thousands more to the cause'. Braine did what he could, anyway, with an open letter to Surkov in Tribune that December. It is fascinating to see here the note of painless credulity which Braine was later to revile in others: praising the USSR's cultural awareness and 'genuine idealism', Braine wrote, 'Of course, I don't know anything about the forbidden areas - rocket bases, and so on. I presume they exist in your country as they certainly do in mine.' And when John Wain, who had also paid the USSR a visit, suggested in the Observer that Soviet publishers were not given an entirely free hand by the state, Braine cleared the matter up. 'Rubbish,' he explained. 'Russian publishers choose books on merit.' Their only criterion, he reported, was 'whether the public will want to read them'.
Braine being Braine, though, there were many less considered disclosures in the popular press. 'Russia is the place to make money, if you're a writer,' he said; the food, too, was 'infinitely superior to ours', the shops 'full of stuff for him to spend his Moscow roubles on. In the same piece the interviewer teased Braine about his poor film-rights deal for the money-spinning Room at the Top (only £5,000). 'It's just agony,' Braine admitted. 'Night after night I twist and turn in misery thinking of it.' Money was, as always, never far from Braine's thoughts at this time. The film rights of his second novel, The Vodi, for which he had forecast a deal of 'perhaps £100,000', were not taken up. Possibly as a result of this, Braine agreed to write a sequel to his first best-seller; the rights of Life at the Top were duly sold for about £45,000, implanting in the novelist a deep and enduring hatred of income tax.
Meanwhile, of course, Braine was involved in campaigning for CND, a commitment that appeared to do little for his argumentative sobriety. For a while he gamely toured the country making speeches, but disillusion soon claimed him. As early as 1961 he resigned, apparently 'convinced', that the organisation would be made illegal within a year. What Braine took to be the futility of CND membership further embattled his sense of the political realities: 'I can see little difference between Khrushchev, Kennedy, De Gaulle, Macmillan, Adenauer ...' 'They're all mad,' he decided, later amending the verdict to 'they're all filthy homicidal maniacs'. Clearly, if you've resigned yourself to ineffectiveness, it ceases to matter what you say.
Braine's heart, at least, was still in the right place at this stage, though the about-turn wasn't far in the distance. In 1960 he had affirmed in the Daily Worker that the 'main hope for peace lies with the Labour and trade union movement', and four years later he was prepared to elaborate the point in an election piece for the Sunday Citizen. It was to be his last statement as a socialist.
Having been born and bred in the industrial North, there's never been any choice for me politically, It's always been socialism or nothing. And by nothing I mean complete political apathy, a complete and savage concentration upon my own material advancement.
Prophetic words, some might say. In retrospect, Braine adduces two main causes of his disaffection from the Left — a liking for capitalism as it was revealed to him by a tour of the US, and the 'we are all guilty' response to the Moors Murders; but only something basic to Braine's psychology could explain the helter-skelter that his political thinking subsequently became. It was heralded — or confirmed — by his removal from Bingley to the Surrey stockbroker belt, a personal defection that he had always loudly resisted. He could never leave the North, he told the Daily Express in 1958, because the South was dirty, expensive and people wouldn't recognise him in the streets. Smartening up his motives for the Daily Worker, he had said that he would regard it 'as a kind of betrayal to live cut off from the working class'.
In 1966 the move happened - as did much else. The same year he was volunteering the information that 'when pacifists go on about the wickedness of war, I feel I want to go out and kill somebody'. The following year he joined the West Byfleet and Pyrford Conservative Association, and a year later said his 'Goodbye to the Left' in no uncertain fashion with a Monday Club pamphlet, electioneering in the press meanwhile for the Tories' 1970 campaign; unless the Conservatives won, he argued with his usual prescience, it would be the last election we'd see this century. Around this time, too, he denounced the 'absolutely consistent left-wing bias' of the BBC, called Kennedy 'the worst president the US ever had' and Luther King 'a trouble-maker and a very stupid man', welcomed the Pope's encyclical on contraception, observed that African freedom fighters were 'not fit to live', agitated for the restoration of hanging (it was 'squeamish and heartless' to resist it), and championed corporal punishment —
'Oh, I think flogging is an admirable thing,' he'll now tell you.
No defector could have retraced his steps more ploddingly.
Nowadays Braine's socio-political thinking is a veritable rumpus-room of prejudice and obsession. Retributive punishment, he believes, is sanctified by a reading of the Bible. (When asked about the biblical creed of forgiveness, he says: 'Let God forgive them. It's his métier, not mine.') Young Socialists, in Braine's view, are 'only in it for the money', trade unions wish 'to lay the country open to communist invasion', foreign aid is 'a waste of time and money', and Enoch is a 'dangerous Leftíe'; 'Down with Oxfam!' is his parting salute.
Braine has a name for what has happened to him: it's called 'growing up'. As a young man, he saw himself facing a largely right-wing Establishment; now he thinks that the Establishment has defected, has gone Left, while he has remained more or less where he was, adjusting his views only to meet the improvement in his social standing. And yet the 'savage' self-advancement which, in 1964, he posited as the only alternative to socialism will not do as a description of his present concerns (anyone who regards him as a ban vivant should have a look at the 'office' where he writes, a tiny hovel behind Boomerang Taxis in Woking's Chertsey Road). Braine is a meritocrat, and sees his own career as a moving tribute to that system, which in some senses it is. Ultimately, Braine's political statements have always been a personal business, a rhetoric thrown out by his own needs and anxieties. His outbursts may continue to be punitive and flailing, but his nature, as all who know him confirm, has remained generous, docile and quite without malice.
And he is an innocent. The level of artistic sophistication to which he aspires is well illustrated by his absurd 'handbook', Writing a Novel (and, more endearingly, by his Desert Island Discs choice, which included Plaisir d'Amour, Goodnight, Irene and Land of Hope and Glory). From Room at the Top on he has b
een an able, lower-middlebrow chronicler of the workings of sex and money, with a good eye and a passable ear. But what he has never been is a realist. Lord Soper once asked Braine about his views on America, shortly after the novelist had returned from his 1964 visit. Braine replied that, despite its many imperfections, he had found it a wonderfully free and democratic land. 'All right if you're not black,' said Soper. Braine was puzzled, indignant, and finally triumphant: 'But, you fool - I'm not' was his clincher. After recounting the anecdote Braine will glare at you for several seconds, nodding intently. It is futile to argue with such people, and ridiculous to be worried by them. Braine will adorn the Right just as he adorned the Left - noisy, opinionated, and not at all dangerous.
Postscript: On his last Christmas Day, Braine ate lunch at a Community Centre, in the company of indigents. All but the last months of his last years were spent in a murky bedsit: narrow cot, wobbly table, one knife, one fork. Among his last public appearances was a visit to the Newcastle Literary Festival: fortified by a hearty breakfast, many cigarettes, and much gin, he rounded off an incoherent hour-long address to a gathering of nine or ten people by reducing himself to tears as he read the closing lines of Room at the Top .. . His later fiction devolved into a uniquely transparent form of wish-fulfilment, or self-therapy, in which the novelist hero hobnobs with celebrities, gets recognised wherever he goes, and is assured by his mistress that — on top of all this — he has the body of a young boy. It was vanity publishing in the fullest sense: he had lost his audience. Awarded a modest grant by the Writers' Benevolent Fund, Braine (it is said) behaved as if he had just won the Nobel Prize. He was not self-pitying; he persisted with delusion; he continued to care about the literary canon (Flaubert, Dostoevsky) and remained convinced of the security of his place within it.
CARNIVAL
Most Notting Hill homeowners simply leave town for the Carnival weekend. Long-sufferingly they decamp to some Home County or other (at least their cars will be safe) and return on the Tuesday, when it's all over. They expect their houses to be gutted, torn down - they expect a heap of rubble with a mumbling brother or two sorting through the wreckage. It's never like that. W11 is still standing. Street life goes on.
'Carnival', as we call it, here on the Front Line, has given me good times and given me bad times. It once nearly killed me, for instance: ten minutes of authentic mortal terror (to which I shall duly return). But its scattered pleasures are not easily found elsewhere; and even its torments are memorable.
If you are a writer, then the weekend can be confidently written off. You park the car somewhere in Acton and stroll home through the surging crowds of police officers. No non-neighbour can come and see you, and you can't go and see them. At midnight the children will still be pulsing to the various street parties and roof parties and windowsill parties up and down the block. For months the rap-rhythm lingers in my head. It goes like this: a fashy bashy cashy dashy lashy mashy pashy. Fashy wha, fashy wha. A fashy bashy cashy dashy lashy mashy pashy. And so on. In your head. There are also unforgettable miracles of scansion. For example:
I took my problem to the EEC, The European Economic Communitee . . .
But don't mock the rap-artist: envy him. A rap-artist is definitely the thing to be. As well as the affection, reverence and erotic perks traditionally due to the musician, he is also accorded the status of poet, philosopher, dissident and redeemer. Nobody ever had it so good.
Early on Tuesday morning I will walk the mile from the house to the flat where I work, through the sodden silence, the eviscerated rubbish bags, the billions of lager cans like cartridges spent in a new kind of urban war. And most of that lager is still around: the briny tang tickles your throat. But by Wednesday all signs of the debauch have been hosed off the street. With relief the little manor returns to normality — to the settled randomness and rancour of everyday life.
Where are these Carnival pleasures I mentioned? They exist, even though they do pall as you get older — as you get more conspicuous out there, the bourgeois raver (or street anthropologist), bobbing along to the music with one hand holding your beer can and the other crushed to your wallet. Carnival is for the young, the brave, the self-destructive, the smashed, the light-fingered, the fleet-of-foot. But its freedom and expressiveness remain hard to duplicate. Your body responds to it before your mind does. There is candour. Life seems to come out of doors.
If I am going to have a carnival, though, I do want a carnival, not a ten-acre tourist trap, not a venture in free enterprise, and not an over-invigilated flea circus. This year (1989) Carnival is apparently scheduled to succumb to Thatcherism, or better say to Maggification, since no ism will answer to the chaos of short change and short measure that will always characterise the Carnival small trade. You used to be able to buy food through people's kitchen windows. Now the five-quid hotdog will duly give way to the punnet of strawberries and the split of Pomaine.
Already, today, the police will be showing their 'presence'. Carnival is a big item in their PR calendar — the perfect lab for the latest policing theories. A more-or-less hard-edged interaction will occur, and this is inevitable, because the West Indian spirit resists supervision especially when it is at play. Here, the media have only two ways to go: either it's riots and looted shops, or else it's a black lady dancing in a bobby's hat. The reality is stealthier and more inhibited: a pyjama party, overseen by uniformed step-parents.
It was in 1985 that Carnival nearly killed me. That year the attendance took an exponential leap, and all the new multitudes seemed suddenly to coalesce around me as I inched down Westbourne Park Road. The human jam was soon a gridlock, then a screaming scrum. I felt that death was coming nearer, borne by a fatal surplus of life. But it eased. The police had closed off so many streets, 'in case of emergency', that they almost choreographed another Hillsborough, right there on Portobello.
But the football comparison prompts a sure argument for Carnival's right to exist, and to be fully funded. I like football and used to go to it until I realised that such congregations are entirely dedicated to ugliness: ugly voices, ugly looks, ugly thoughts. The Carnival crowd is at least trying to be about the opposites of these. Think of the misery that descends on the environs of a football ground, not once a year but once a fortnight. Think, with due pity and terror, of the dead and the near-dead on the Sheffield terraces. This is what society will let its people go through, in their search for a good time.
Evening Standard, 1989
ANTHONY BURGESS
'NIGEL BURGESS - Agent Maritime' said the dynatroned tape on the door, halfway up the narrow rue Grimaldi, Monte Carlo. Cunning old Burgess, I thought as I pressed the button. The modest alias seemed typical of this well-known loner and maverick, adept of imposture and verbal disguise — the man who once lost a book-reviewing job for praising his own pseudonymous novel. That Nigel was perfect. . .
'Who?' asked the voice from the grille. 'No, we're ship-insurers, mate. You want the writer. Four doors down.'
Anthony Burgess is sixty-three, an asymmetrical, floppy-shirted figure, with a cap of greying hair swiped forward over his brow like a sub-editor's eye-shade. 'I'm in a bad way,' he had said on the telephone. 'Can't walk. Can't eat.' But he appeared to be in resilient, even combative shape when we strolled from the apartment block to his local café — and began a five-hour lunch. He was hailed by the waiters and gruffly bantered with them in his mumbled French. (Burgess is, of course, practically omnilingual: 'Yes, I read all the Romance languages,' he admits, 'plus Russian, Indonesian, Gaelic, Swedish, a few others.' When Burgess met Borges, they chatted in Anglo-Saxon.) He talked straight English to me, however, and was throughout far more approachable than the manic erudition of his prose would lead one to expect. I found him warm, entertaining and highly responsive, quite without the Great Writer's delphic glaze.
The null if sparkling principality of Monaco seemed an odd place for him to end up. It would, for instance, be hard to imagine Burgess asking Bjorn Borg
or Ringo Starr round for the evening. 'No,' he says, 'there isn't much company here — though I did meet Frank Sinatra at Princess Grace's recently. A very curious man. Luckily I've quite lost my gregariousness. Never had much. Monte Carlo is over-policed but clean and safe, and it leaves you alone.'
Burgess's last two points of exile were Malta and Italy. Malta was full of bridge-playing admirals and retired squadron-leaders — and full of censors. 'They waited at the airport every morning with felt pens and scissors, ready to deface the Daily Mirror.' One day some books sent to Burgess for review were confiscated; the new Doris Lessing had attracted the censors' attention. 'I went along to the post office and upended a desk over two officials. I knew I had to leave.'
He misses Italy, where he had a flat in Rome and a house in Bracciano. 'For me, Italy is the only country in the world.' But then he was tipped off that his son Andreas, now sixteen, was next on the local kidnap roster. 'They thought: Burgess, he write Naranya Mecanica, must have lots of money. We moved straight out to the next state - Monaco.'
These days, Burgess has got lots of money, owing to his cross-cultural screenplays, film-scores and such things as his 'telejesus' collaboration with Zeffirelli ('terrible, terrible man') and Lord Grade ('very ignorant, incredible the depth of it, but gets things done'). And now, too, his spectacular novel Earthly Powers has been sold to America for something like half a million dollars. 'Oh, I've been technically a millionaire for some time now. It doesn't make much difference to anything, after a point. One still minds. For instance, I take it you're paying for this lunch?'