by David Hare
Perhaps because I was bumping my head on the ceiling of my abilities, I found myself increasingly drawn to the cinema. I had entered my first long-lasting relationship, with a wonderfully cheerful Girton history undergraduate, Diane Millward. Diane was one of a group of girls from St Paul’s School in West London, whose enduring mutual friendship was as important to them as any relationship they happened to be in at the time. Not only was Diane herself spirited and funny, she was also part of a circle who understood much more about the world than I did. I got used to their knowing laughter and came to love it. Diane’s uncle Sid had a joke Jewish band called the Nitwits, who enjoyed a small cult following sending up classical music. The warmth and straight talking of Diane’s devout Central European family in Kensington gave me a standard of comparison for my own chillier upbringing, even though they clearly doubted my credentials to be walking out with their Jewish daughter. My enthusiasm for film had led me to become secretary of the Film Society, which had two regular showings a week of films to packed-out audiences of seven hundred. The movies of the recent past and most especially their heroines – Melina Mercouri in Stella, Anna Karina in Vivre sa vie, Anna Magnani in Mamma Roma and Jeanne Moreau in everything – offered us all an intense sense of possibility, an opening out, an airing which seemed all the more moving for being glimpsed from the Fens. So I was more than ready to collaborate with the society’s president, Dick Arnall, who had the ambitious idea of inviting Alfred Hitchcock to Cambridge.
Much to our surprise, Hitchcock came. I read later in a biography that he regarded 1966 as a career low, halfway between the heady days of Psycho and the misery of Family Plot. But if his spirits were poor, he gave no sense of it. Alfred Hitchcock was the first great artist with whom I ever got to spend any length of time. He arrived for lunch at 1 p.m., but wasn’t due to speak until 5.30 p.m. Three or four of us went to the Garden House Hotel, where we fed him slices of cold rare roast beef and baked potatoes and spent the long afternoon listening to everything he could tell us. In 1962, he said, he had sat down with François Truffaut and done twelve hours of interviews about his life’s work, so that perhaps accounted for the fact that his thoughts were in such perfect order. Recent film portrayals have made Hitchcock out to be creepy, but in person he was the very opposite. The impression he gave was of being all-seeing. You could put nothing past him. His flow of courteous good sense resonated particularly with me when he said that likeability was a quality which could not be faked. The public had taken Grace Kelly to their hearts because she was indeed likeable. For all Hitchcock’s efforts, they had rejected Tippi Hedren because she was not. There was, Hitchcock said, only one actor in the world who was so formidably skilled that he could fake on screen a charm he didn’t have in real life. Could any of us guess who it was? Fearing the answer, I replied, ‘Cary Grant.’ Hitchcock smiled, satisfied. ‘Correct.’
The following year, as a deliberate provocation, I invited Michael Winner to show his new film, I’ll Never Forget What’s’isname. A Cambridge graduate himself, he walked furious into an empty hall and muttered to me, ‘I’ve had more at the Hendon Jewish Fraternity.’ I programmed Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures with Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising, for which the society was banned in perpetuity from the science department’s Cavendish Laboratories – not exactly the reaction expected from the most rational faculty in the university of reason. But I was also able to invite the Russian director Grigori Kozintsev, who, to a cheering crowd, showed his version of Hamlet with Innokenty Smoktunovsky. Kozintsev’s elaborately phrased answers to the very simplest questions gave everyone present a chilling sense of the verbal tightrope still walked by Soviet artists. His film also reinforced my growing conviction that the greatest feats of literary criticism were performed by actors and directors, whether on stage or on screen. Never had my formal studies seemed less important. Seasons of René Clair and Kurosawa had so much more to offer.
Problems with our official education had come to a head at the beginning of our final year. When Raymond Williams gathered us together in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s old college rooms to parcel us out for the third time – he intended that I should be taught by a leading campaigner against pornography, who spent his time counting the number of four-letter words in modern novels – we all refused. By pre-arrangement, we staged what amounted to a strike. We told him that we had come to Cambridge to be taught by him, and we were not leaving until it happened. Raymond, I think, was bewildered. He had far more important fish to fry. He was more used to writing about rebellion than to being rebelled against. Since the publication of Border Country, an autobiographical novel which reads today as one of the greatest of the period, his creative work had been his most pressing priority. He was planning a sequence of novels, which he would never live to finish, about the people of Wales, going back to prehistoric times. But he was also under sustained pressure from other socialists to prepare what in 1968 would become the May Day Manifesto, a detailed British call to revolution which Raymond co-wrote and for which he was the chosen figurehead. It would be published, with much to-do, on International Labour Day as a Penguin Special, in red covers. As the historian Eric Hobsbawm later observed, not without a trace of jealousy, it was only in England that you might find the militant left demanding to take leadership from a literary critic.
There was clearly a significant difference of temperament between Raymond’s generation and my own. Although nearly everyone I knew was taking enthusiastic part in the broad student movements of the time – with Diane, I attended the anti-Vietnam demonstration in Grosvenor Square on 17 March 1968 and witnessed the terrifying behaviour of the police – nevertheless we regarded the drawing-up of revolutionary manifestos as a notably unrealistic activity. The Labour Club had renamed itself the Socialist Society, but even so most of us were all too aware – who could not be? – that we were living through a time more marked by the blood of conquest than by the blood of liberation. We all still agreed with E. P. Thompson that Raymond was ‘our best man’, blessed with ‘a stubborn unfashionable integrity’. But we had a more sceptical view towards inflated rhetoric, from whichever direction it came. We thought that our teachers understood little about power and the tenacity of those who have it. Raymond’s dreams of capital overthrown drew strength from his roots in the working class, which most of us lacked. We were one satirical step back from believing that any violent overturning in Britain was likely to be benign. We were also far more roused by the daring and openness of the music, plays, poems and paintings of our time than we were by the deliberations of academics. Raymond lectured on theatre without ever going. He preached revolution as a tenured Fellow at one of the most privileged institutions in the country. Self-aware, Raymond knew more woundingly than we ever could the contradictions of his position. He lived them every day. But he didn’t necessarily enjoy being reminded of those contradictions by a new aggrieved generation of bolshie and, as he saw us, middle-class students, intent on righting a professorial wrong.
The result was an embarrassing stand-off from which perhaps neither side came out very well. Years later, the Senior Tutor of the college admitted to me that our experience of finding Raymond elusive had been replicated many times over with succeeding intakes. He went on to defend our educational neglect by saying that perhaps a college like Jesus should be magnanimous enough to let a great intellectual do what he or she must without insisting on the fulfilment of their formal teaching obligations. ‘Besides,’ he added, ‘we didn’t have his phone number.’
Eventually, Raymond did concede and take me in for a few spotty supervisions, mostly about D. H. Lawrence, towards whom he seemed to feel an identification which bordered on pity. ‘Lawrence, poor bugger, poor poor bugger,’ he kept saying, before turning the conversation to last night’s Dennis Potter play on the BBC. I loved his calming presence, the essential kindness behind everything he thought and said. But I never got close to him. For a second time in my life, the father was absent. The bulk of my fi
nal year’s teaching was done instead by Raymond’s intellectual godson, Terry Eagleton, who at the time was sunk in tortured Catholic introspection, usually involving young women, and all the more moving for being so helpless and sincere. He had recently published articles in Stand magazine arguing that you could not properly be a Christian without being a revolutionary socialist: they were both about transformation, complete and utter. In the mornings, as you arrived, Terry would open the curtains onto a room in which a sense of the night’s long agony palpably lingered. For Terry, the ready Marxist aggro came later. To his credit, at this point he did his best to engage with his students’ common disillusion. He was not much older than us. When I wanted to do a third-year dissertation on Oscar Wilde, it was Terry who warned me that no examiner would take me seriously if I offered a paper on a playwright whom they regarded as frivolous – this in spite of the fact that Terry would in 1989 himself write a play, Saint Oscar, inspired by Wilde’s Irish radicalism. And it was Terry who also tried to untangle the youthful foolishness of my anger. When I was inveighing tediously against Cambridge’s insistence that everything had to be serious to be meaningful, he looked at me kindly and said, ‘David, it’s not seriousness you hate. It’s solemnity. They’re different.’
Tony Bicât, lucky fellow, had been a year above me, so he had already left town in the company of a group of friends who were enraptured by intellectual movements on the Continent. Their talk was of Derrida and Marcuse. Tony was getting by, gigging as a drummer. When student/worker demonstrations broke out in May 1968, the Jesus undergraduates who had left the previous year were free to tear up the cobblestones and throw them at the CRS in Paris while I, still frightened to strike out, was enough of my mother’s son to feel I must fulfil my obligation to sit in a stuffy exam room in East Anglia. Underneath all the impetuosity and scorn, I was still a timid boy, fearful of disapproval, fearful of failure. During the holidays, however, I would spend as much time as I could staying with Tony’s grandmother, who lived in Earls Court Square in a manner, and with furniture, which any pre-revolutionary Russian would have recognised. Unfortunately, robbed of servants in 1917, Babushka had only ever learned to cook one dish, so every night Tony and I would sit down to eat the same meal of Wiener schnitzel, accompanied by an astonishingly pungent onion and tomato salad, and to discuss what on earth we might do with our lives. The options were many. At one point we considered mimicking a French publisher and issuing what were called boîtes – boxes containing objects, drawings, texts and photographs relating to important thinkers of the time. Inevitably, the first one would have been about Godard. We never got as far as the second. But we also talked longingly of working in cinema, without having any practical idea of how we might start. At the Film Society I had invited the head of the BFI production board, the Australian Bruce Beresford, to show us some of his output. But his favoured black-and-white accounts of purposeless folk mooning about in parks did little to make you feel that the UK had such a thing as a vital experimental film culture. Beresford later directed Driving Miss Daisy.
In the hope of employment, I had already fired off a series of letters to British film-makers like Clive Donner and Tony Richardson, who had all been kind enough to meet me. Richardson alarmed me in the Woodfall offices in Curzon Street by offering me a glass of the champagne he was already drinking at 10.30 a.m. His producer wore a figure-hugging Jermyn Street suit with a red paisley pattern on the lining. They offered me a job as fourth assistant on their forthcoming film with Albert Finney playing Che Guevara. But it was never made. The charming Clive Donner was planning a film about Alfred the Great with David Hemmings, which even an impressionable twenty-year-old could see had dog written all over it. By a process of recommendation, I got passed down the line to Associated British Pathé, who accepted me for eight weeks of well-paid employment the moment I left university. I couldn’t believe my luck. Possessing a fabulous library of accumulated footage, a tiny fraction of which, naturally, I had already seen in newsreel theatres on Waterloo and Victoria stations, Pathé were looking for a way of using their languishing archive to make documentaries for schools. In charge of the project was the personable Richard Dunn. In 1988, as Chair of Thames Television, Richard would become the target of Margaret Thatcher and Rupert Murdoch’s co-ordinated fury when, with unruffled eloquence, he defended the airing of the exemplary documentary Death on the Rock, which corrected government misinformation about the way in which three IRA terrorists had been shot by the SAS in Gibraltar. Thatcher, never more dangerous than when proved to be in the wrong, punished Richard two years later by making sure that Thames TV’s franchise was not renewed.
Tony believed that I had hated Cambridge because I thought it resembled the real world – i.e. a series of uptight English institutions – whereas Tony hated it because he knew it didn’t. Why, then, did I make a slapstick attempt to join ITV’s rival, the BBC, as a general trainee? Invited before a kidney-shaped board of dark-suited men and women for one of their coveted fast-track entry positions, I was presented with a series of moral dilemmas which apparently exercised the minds of the Corporation’s finest. I was asked to imagine a situation in which I was directing a broadcast at Heathrow airport for the arrival of the Queen’s plane, when out of the corner of my eye I saw a full jet-load of passengers crash-landing and being incinerated on the opposite runway. What would be my priority be? To turn the cameras and get exclusive, live pictures of a news story? Or to self-censor, in order to spare the audience the sight of living people being burnt to a crisp? I replied that there would be no question. I would cover the news. There was a rustle of shock and discontent. The Chair, who was looking like a snail which had just been salted, asked me whether, in that case, there was anything at all which I would not consider showing on television. Too readily, I replied that of course there was. I hoped to leave it at that. But the Chair persisted, asking to say what that thing would be. I hesitated and said that surely he didn’t want me to say. Oh, but he did. ‘Very well,’ I said. ‘Cripples making love.’
If only I had known it, I had begun what would become an unappealing habit of leaving things before it was time. Because I could see a way out, I took it. As far as Cambridge was concerned, I had, in T. S. Eliot’s phrase, ‘had the experience but missed the meaning’. My restlessness in my last year meant that I spent more and more time jumping onto trains to London, even if the BBC, aghast at the summoning of a physical image they had clearly never before contemplated, were unlikely ever to consider me as suitable officer material. I had put on my beige elephant cord suit from John Stephen in Carnaby Street in April 1967 to go to the 14 Hour Technicolor Dream at Alexandra Palace and had stood disbelieving as Yoko Ono climbed a pair of steps and stood on top, cutting up pieces of paper which covered a naked model. The event, attended by ten thousand entranced young people and featuring as many happenings as bands, was the first swallow of a spring whose weekly rites would be held in clubs like Middle Earth at Covent Garden and the UFO in the Tottenham Court Road. I went many times, often more like an anthropologist than a person. People of my age were beginning to divide, with overlaps naturally, between those who wanted to change the world and those who wanted to have a good time. The interactions between the two tendencies would eventually create all sorts of interesting frictions, as the claim that by doing the second you might thereby do the first grew less plausible with time. But there were also those like me who stood at the side, watching both groups and liking both, and yet not having that necessary sense of utter belonging that I saw on the abandoned faces of the stoned dancers and in the deep convictions of the revolutionaries.
I did join in a few times, particularly when called back to Cambridge to graduate. The Master of the college, a classicist called Denys Page, made a dreadful speech in which he said 1968 had been a year of militant student protest, but that mercifully such protest had not lapped onto the shores of Jesus College. I was among a small but noisy group who booed him heartily. He had the grace to l
ook surprised.
6
Don’t Come
A new phase of my life began in Earlham Street, just off Cambridge Circus, in the summer of 1968. For £15 a week, split three ways, Christopher Hudson, a medical student at St Bart’s called Richard Gillette and I found a room each and a shared kitchen in a tiny apartment on the second floor of Nos 5–7, in a lively market street that ran down to Seven Dials. The Australian owners were going to Ibiza. Inside, you could barely turn round. But the moment you stepped out the door, you had the advantage that you were in the centre of the West End. Soho, still filthy dirty, belonged to the alcoholics and the prostitutes. Men in heavy overcoats swilled Pernod with shaky hands in the French pub, while milk-white girls in slacks, heels and improvised turbans rushed busily from club to club. A filling lunch at Jimmy’s, the Greek basement, was chicken livers and chips. On Sunday mornings, apart from the odd milk-cart, you had the place to yourself. When Tony Elliot visited, notebook and pen in hand, to collect details of the events he was listing in the first ever edition of his new pocket-sized magazine Time Out, he perched on the edge of my bed. There was nowhere else to sit. As the last great smog turned the air thick and wet at the end of the year, I was still sucking down God knows how many cigarettes a day. One morning I woke up with bronchitis, as if a damp cloth were being held over my nose and mouth, and was grateful that the Charing Cross Hospital, housed in the pepper-pot building just off Trafalgar Square, was not far down the road. It was scarcely visible as I approached. A man in the next bed with a collapsed lung was still allowed to smoke a pipe in the designated lung ward, as we all watched Elmer Gantry on one bright colour television shared between thirty. When I woke at 3 a.m. from my opiate sleep to find nurses putting screens round the bed of another man in the very last moments of choking to death, I resolved to give up the cancer-sticks. And did.