Going Up

by Frederic Raphael

  ‘Really?’ I said. ‘And why would that be?’

  Robertson said, ‘You did by far the best audition for the Yank, by far. We all thought so.’

  I said nothing; quite eloquently, I thought.

  ‘Don’t take it personally, will you? But we finally concluded that, good as you were, the part needed an experienced actor. So … we’ve plumped for Peter Firth.’

  I said nothing, again.

  Robertson said, ‘I hope you’ll come and see the play.’ I looked at him, as I had at George Turner when he denied me Oxford, and did not trust myself to speak without anger or tears, or both. I sniffed at the tall, fair, prefectorial prig and then I walked to Jordan’s Yard, hoping there might be a bridge game that night. Over thirty years later, when Toby had become a shiny, bald character actor, he had a smallish part in a radio piece of mine, The Daedalus Dimension, which took place in ancient and modern Crete. I was pitilessly considerate in my brief comments on his performance.

  Hugh Thomas’s triumph occasioned the epiphany of Mark Boxer, freshest of freshmen. Mark designed a primary-colourful, unrealistic set. His Venice à la mode was a three-dimensional Mondrian. Boxer’s transatlantically sourced, unEnglish chic announced the end of the austere spirit that had accompanied rationing and National Service. No one was sure where Master Boxer had come from; but there was no doubt that he had arrived, or that he was going places. He announced himself, in the Whim café and the Copper Kettle and wherever else the gratin queued for coffee and doughnuts, by the shrill reach of his greetings. Everyone wondered where he acquired those slim, dark, over-long jackets, single slit at the back, extra bone button on the cuff. With his blanched, narrow face and springing dark hair, he looked like a pen-and-ink caricature of an Edwardian masher. Poised between cad and dandy, he impersonated what Stephen Potter typified as a master of ‘One-Upmanship’. Mark soon epitomised Cambridge smartness. He did as little as possible as well as it could possibly be done.

  I presumed, from his freshness, that Boxer had spent the war in the US. He was, in fact, at Berkhamsted, a mundane, but co-educational, English boarding school. His knowledge of American magazine layout and Madison Avenue advertising techniques indicated a prescient sense of the style that would soon dominate London. Ken Tynan had been similarly quick to spot the imminent Americanisation of the post-war world. Ken’s punctual, puncturing theatrical reviews, in the Evening Standard and then in The Observer, were spiced with quips that smacked of George S. Kaufman, Alexander Woollcott and George Jean Nathan. Ken was at no marked pains to credit their readily convertible coinage. His early book He Who Plays the King embraced a reference to the brief stage career in which he was cast as the Player King to Alec Guinness’s Prince, to no loud acclaim. Was he aware of John Mason Brown’s line in which it was said of some unhappy actor, ‘He played the king as if someone had just played the ace’? John Mason Brown was a New York drama critic regularly featured on the BBC radio’s Transatlantic Quiz, which was broadcast seemingly live, with the realistic waxing and waning of voices (brilliantly imitated, in due season, by Kingsley Amis) as they sighed back and forth on the transatlantic cable. Lionel Hale was quizmaster in London, Alistair (ci-devant Alfred) Cooke in New York.

  Mark Boxer hid his origins in the open; the unique, he seemed to suggest, needed no precise provenance. He appeared to have the key to some atavistic box of tricks, dodgy and delicious and not without a false bottom. The shrill laugh suggested bisexuality, but made no promises. Mark was never boring because he made no effort to entertain; other people were there to entertain him. The shriek of his greeting, or its lack, told them whether they were in or out. We were never friends, but Mark did look at me, and I at him, as if we had some unspoken affinity: it suggested that we were both getting away with (and from) something, and I was pretty sure what it was. The last time I saw him, shortly before he died, of a brain tumour in 1988, it was at the wheel of his car in the Cromwell Road. In a characteristic show of brave egotism, he got out of his car, left the door open, and came to embrace me, unhurriedly, while the traffic complained.

  Typical of Boxer’s minimalism was the early resection of his first name, by a single letter. After Cambridge, he soon become Marc the Tatler cartoonist, later the first editor of the Sunday Times colour magazine, and – second time around the marital merry-go-round – the husband of elegant Anna Ford, the ladylike newscaster. His advent as editor of Cambridge’s literary magazine Granta, which Leavisites such as Karl Miller had made serious to the point of tractarian, converted that publication into something more like Oxford’s Isis, in which Ken Tynan had figured as an ‘Isis idol’.

  Karl had established himself, very soon after he arrived at Downing, as the ruling literary pundit. Solemn and laconic, he was wise enough to offer no evidence of being either a poet or a candidate for prosaic publication. Brevity was all his wit. He avoided being judged by sitting in prompt, often negative, judgement on others. Once instated as editor of Granta, he was Cambridge’s literary centurion: he bid some come; others he waved away to cheap prints such as Varsity. Those whom he selected were liege men who did not fail to endorse the accuracy of his taste. Nor did he lack female acolytes such as the ‘giggling armful’ Claire Delavenay, who later chose Nick Tomalin as a likelier, perhaps comelier, candidate for clever matrimony.

  Nick became President of the Union and was soon a boy wonder on Fleet Street. He was one of the first English journalists to report on the Vietnam War. His article ‘Zapping Charlie Cong’ made such an impact that, a few years later, in 1973, Harry Evans, then editor of the Sunday Times, persuaded him to cover the war that had just broken out between Israel and the Arabs. Nick was killed on the Golan Heights by a Syrian heat-seeking missile, which struck the vehicle in which he was sitting while others took a roadside leak. Harry then appointed Claire literary editor of the Sunday Times.

  Dressing self-importance as an austere, lifelong duty, the mature Karl Miller assumed the sighing supremacy of the man who cut and distributed laurels. He gave the rudiments of a pulpit to the various editorial chairs that he occupied as the pontifex maximus of British letters. He saved and he damned and there was, as the Aberdonian preacher said to Byron, ‘No hope for them as laughs.’ Karl’s capacity for sitting in judgement was unlimited. When, in due time, he reviewed The Double Helix, James Watson’s account of his and Crick’s Nobel Prize-winning discovery, with a little unacknowledged help from Rosalind Franklin, of the structure of DNA, Miller confessed that he was unqualified to evaluate the description of their activities in the laboratory. He was, however, able to confirm the accuracy of the account of the scientists’ lunches in the courtyard of the Eagle (a Cambridge pub adjacent to the Cavendish), since he had eaten Scotch eggs there himself during the same period.

  Karl’s public sponsor was Noel Annan, the tall, bald young Provost of King’s who had secured his own early elevation to high places by joining himself, closely, to experienced climbers. Annan did little significant academic work, but he was the pundit to consult, and impress, when it came to the North Face of English academic ascendancy. He advised a friend of mine, whose father was a well-known publisher, to abandon the study of Geography – of all things! – before it damaged her prospects beyond repair. After Dear Noel introduced her to Edmund Leach, she went on to achieve the smart distinction of a First in Anthropology.

  As Annan’s protégé at King’s, Boxer gave off a licensed whiff of sulphur. His dark, unblinking glance promised access to diabolical improprieties. Had some latter-day Lord Queensbury accused him of ‘posing as a sodomite’, his shrillest laugh might well have welcomed the soft impeachment; secret straightness was more to be concealed than his aptitude for outrage. Narcissism was a convenient posture; it required the pursuit of nothing deeper than a polished surface in which to verify his allure. His cartoons enhanced the fame of those whom they lampooned. The leading Cambridge actress, who had a clever voice, very short legs and a plain, bloodless face, was caricatured as a sex symbol ca
ptioned ‘Dudy Foulds, the well-known animal lover’. While there were several more attractive females in the register (Margaret Baron in particular), Dudy’s primacy was crowned, her illusions of stardom sustained, by Marc’s barbed generosity. There was no more desirable promotion than to figure in his pillory. I was not yet among those who did so, but when he became editor of Granta in the following year, I made bold to submit a short story about a Chelsea novelist who blamed his infidelities on the obstinate fidelity of his wife. Mark said he loved it and promised to publish (and illustrate) it.

  In the issue previous to the one in which my story was to appear he printed a poem in which God was portrayed by one Stephen de Houghton as a tired old man, incapable of managing his unruly creation. The poem, no more than a naughty exercise, was deemed blasphemous by the university authorities. Despite a plea in mitigation by Morgan Forster, who was permanently encased in King’s and whose reputation as our greatest living novelist became more and more unassailable as the decades passed during which he published few books and no fiction at all, the Vice-Chancellor ordained that Mark be sent down. Not since Shelley was dismissed from Oxford, for publishing a provocative squib entitled The Necessity of Atheism, had either of the great universities acted with such draconian piety.

  Theatrical and literary Cambridge staged a show of indignation. Boxer became the smartest martyr ever to be sentenced to catch the London train. Blasphemy was established as a staging post on the way to fame, for the poem’s publisher, if not for the poet. Thanks to Noel Annan’s emollient diplomacy, Mark’s sentence was reduced, at the last moment, to precisely one week’s rustication during May Week. This was intended to ensure that he could play no pseudo-messianic part in the college’s May Ball.

  Despite the negotiated brevity of his imposed absence, Boxer’s departure was accompanied by a procession of his supporters, complete with pipes and drums, down King’s Parade all the way to Cambridge station. It was as close to a political demonstration as Cambridge ever came during my time there. I watched, from the window of the Copper Kettle in King’s Parade. The mock funeral was organised by David Stone, a square-jawed boxing blue, whose devotion was as superfluous to Mark’s redemption as it was ruinous to his own prospects. Having dived in to save someone in no danger of drowning, Stone neglected to turn up several of his Tripos papers, failed his exams and was sent down without exciting any show of reciprocal solidarity. He became the manager of a group of south London local newspapers. Soon after I had come down, I met him outside Stamford Bridge. He offered me a job writing up Chelsea FC’s home matches. He died soon afterwards.

  In their officious determination to make an example of Mark, the university authorities forgot that May Balls went on into the early hours. Since his period of exclusion ended on the stroke of midnight, the resurgent exile was within his swiftly claimed rights to make a spritzy entrance while revellers and their girls were still doing the valeta and whatever other dances Acker Bilk or Nat Temple and his orchestra were there to purvey. The small, lasting consequence of Mark’s brief, not very bruising fall from grace was that he was barred from resuming the editorial chair of Granta, to which Karl Miller was promptly restored. Shortly afterwards, he informed me that my short story was not suitable for publication.

  VIII

  TONY BECHER AND I went to the last public lectures given by ‘Bertie’ Russell in Mill Lane. In all eyes but his own, he had been superseded, as the emblematic great philosopher, by his quondam pupil Wittgenstein. The biggest lecture room was thronged beyond its large capacity. Microphones had been rigged to carry the great man’s words to the frustrated crowd outside. Not flattered to be viewed as the paragon of intellectual antiques, Russell regarded us with baleful hauteur. After delivering his lecture, with Whiggish precision, he said, ‘I suspect that some people have come here for the wrong reasons. Accordingly, next week’s lecture will be twice as difficult.’ I have never again heard the word ‘accordingly’ used in colloquial speech. Tony and I returned, early, for the more difficult second lecture. As Russell may have calculated, it attracted a greater audience than the first.

  My appetite for the new philosophy was excited by the notion that, by demystifying language, it would puncture prophetic pretentiousness and render void the confident Christian promise that He would come again. Religion and ideology would cease to sanction the forces of reaction. The existence of God could not be disproved, but His dominion could be shown to be superfluous to any useful explanation of the world (as ‘phlogiston’ was to combustion). The Jews, I liked to presume, would lose their millennial miasma.

  In due time, Ayer’s ‘Verification Principle’ was shown to be an unreliable measure of the truth of a proposition, not least because it could not itself be verified; but I was quick to assimilate it into my idea of fiction. I have never quite relinquished the idea that whatever was said in a novel should, in principle, be available to the senses: dialogue and accurate description, even of imaginary events, allow the reader to impersonate experience and to assess the honesty, if not the truth, of a story. Nouns and verbs are good, adverbs and adjectives suspect; speech is audible and plausible, or not; the stream of consciousness carries too much mud and too much confectionery.

  Renford Bambrough’s recommendation of Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies chimed sweetly with my appetite for iconoclasm. During a wartime professorship in New Zealand, Popper had learned ancient Greek in order to be sure that he fully understood what Plato meant to say, the better to dismantle his political thought. His diligence did not inoculate him against accusations, by prim classicists, of having misconstrued the original text. It was overenthusiastic to blame antique sources for unfortunate events in the present century. Master Popper could be forgiven for denouncing modern ideologues, but to arraign Plato, as the fons et origo of totalitarianism, was tantamount to blasphemy. Popper’s polemic opened a second front against both Friedrich Hegel and his nemesis Karl Marx. Schopenhauer was cited to back the case against the prolific Hegel, one German against another. It was a relief to be told that Hegel, the voluminous trimmer, was not worth reading. As for Heidegger, did he merit so much as a mention among philosophy’s guilty men?

  Popper, like Wittgenstein, made no direct reference to what was later labelled ‘the Holocaust’. Philosophical ‘systems’ in general were ripe for disparagement; but in the 1950s, no proper noun had yet been allotted to the systematic extermination of six million Jews, on a warrant primed by the Catholic Church and seconded by Martin Luther and, by implication, Karl Marx, in his reference to the Jews as a race of ‘hucksters’. Of Jewish origin, Popper had been raised as a Protestant. Agnosticism allowed him, as if in accordance with a universal scientific rule, to discount all religious doctrines and vanities. The only respectable alternative to ‘holistic’ ideologies of all kinds was ‘piecemeal social engineering’. Open societies should rectify their flaws in a case-by-case, consensual manner. The greatest treason of the clerks was to seek to cook humanity’s books in line with a priori recipes.

  After the war Popper was translated to a professorship at the London School of Economics. He became persona non grata in Wittgensteinian circles, as a consequence of a notorious fracas at the Moral Sciences Club in Richard Braithwaite’s rooms in King’s in 1946. In heated dissent from Popper’s paper, which had announced that, while discounting old-style metaphysics, he did believe that there were such things as universal moral laws, Wittgenstein snatched and brandished the poker from the fireplace. Popper observed that one instance of such a law was that people should not threaten visiting lecturers with pokers. Wittgenstein then stormed out of the room. Popper was never invited to the Moral Sciences Club again. Cambridge myth had it that Wittgenstein had had the better of the exchange. The fortune that he had renounced still served to gild his halo. The unadmitted comedy was that both philosophers had donned ersatz personalities – the sublime, eccentric Cambridge genius and London University’s leading Doctor of Science – but their antagonism
could be read as an instance of ‘the return of the repressed’. The spat was decidedly unEnglish, but hardly unprecedented in conflicts between ex-Viennese and (though no one said as much out loud) ex-Jewish vanities.

  The neo-Wittgensteinian form of argument that Renford Bambrough advocated was known as ‘therapeutic positivism’. Wittgenstein had come to consider metaphysical convictions as essentially neurotic: they could not be refuted, but they might be cured. The recommended treatment was to refrain from aggressive confrontation (however tempting recourse to the poker might be). Like Freud’s neurotic, the metaphysician was to be encouraged, by sympathetic attention, into disclosing more, and more, of the ‘reasoning’ that lay behind his ideas. He might then come to see for himself that they were at odds with practical experience and that some absurd private logic had beguiled him into conjuring up self-contradictory and/or irrational chimeras. Because there were lions, it did not follow that there had to be unicorns. As any number of egotists have argued, reason is the sovereign cure for egotism.

  Renford told us how, on one occasion, Wittgenstein had met his disciple John Wisdom one day and asked him how his meeting had gone with a certain philosopher. Wisdom confessed that it had been an exasperating encounter. Wittgenstein said, ‘Perhaps you made the mistake of disagreeing with something Casimir said.’ Casimir Lewy, another refugee (although I never cared to guess it), was a Trinity philosopher who set himself such high standards that, not unlike Wittgenstein, he was rarely disposed to publish his work. Rigour made him an implacable opponent. Wisdom, who succeeded, with at least a show of reluctance, to Wittgenstein’s professorial chair, brought Anglo-Saxon humour to a dour discipline. His skittishness did not always find favour among the purs et durs of the Moral Sciences faculty. Under his quirky aegis, philosophy offered a combination of recherché comedy, salutary high-mindedness and coterie conceit.