My private wish was that anti-Semitism could be shown, if not proved, to be nonsensical and, in a revised public language, might be rendered literally unspeakable. I did not disclose this ambition to Tony Becher. He regarded philosophy as an extension of mathematics, in which rhetoric had no place, except in arming scorn for the illogical. I wanted it to supply the muscular intelligence that would confound the barbarians, especially those already within the gates. My curiosity was both purposeful and limited. I never thought of attending the lectures of the thick-legged, brown-stockinged, allegedly knickerless Mrs Braithwaite, whose subject was ‘the logic of a picture language’. She was no picture herself.
We were warned that to become a Moral Scientist entailed, almost certainly, that one would not get a first-class degree. Philosophers were the poor friars of the humanities. Unworldliness did not inhibit unnamed colleagues from ironising on the fact that John Wisdom had not got a first-class degree. ‘But then,’ they would say, ‘he did go and get himself psychoanalysed!’ Wisdom propounded his version of meta-Freudian therapy in a series of nine o’clock lectures entitled ‘The psychology of philosophy’. They had no specific content and he never referred to traditional texts. He brought no books to the podium and rarely resumed the topic he had been dealing with last time, even if he could remember what it was.
A long, domed cranium, flanked by backswept wings of grey hair, like his quizzical eyebrows and hollow whisper, gave Wisdom an air of caricatural sagacity. Each morning, he seemed amazed that there we all were again. Initiates sat in the front row and were primed to offer topics apt for dissection. Wisdom could appear startled by even a planted query. Like a wise comedian, he would gaze at the speaker (often Mr McKnelly, later a parish priest, sometimes Mr Gomme, later a Leavisite professor, occasionally Mrs Gomme, later divorced) and pause, aghast, before responding in a voice at once hollow and carrying, dubious and assured. His words seemed urgent, even pained. They were also calculated to amuse.
Newcomers were not immune to gentle ridicule. When he first attended one of Wisdom’s lectures, Piers Paul Read (a Roman Catholic writer, at Cambridge a decade after me) responded, perhaps too promptly to a request for a ‘metaphysical question’, by proposing ‘Does God exist?’ On Read’s account, Wisdom looked at him with practised dismay and said, in a tone calculated to amuse the cognoscenti in the front row, ‘Oh! I was thinking of something more along the lines of…’ He tapped the desk on his dais. ‘Is this a table?’
Wisdom reacted with affectations of dismay to naïve tourists, who demanded that he define his terms. ‘It depends what you mean by X’ was a sophism made popular by C. E. M. Joad on The Brains Trust. Joad, a professor at Birkbeck, was not held in high esteem in Cambridge. Asked to review one of his books, Russell had responded, ‘Modesty forbids’. Joad fell from radio grace after being convicted of travelling on the London–Exeter railway without a ticket, a boasted habit of his. The publicised fine of £2 in effect ruined him. His name endures if only because his conduct on the tennis court figures in Stephen Potter’s Gamesmanship. He is depicted as demanding a clear call of ‘in’ or ‘out’, even when his return of service had hit the back netting without touching the court. ‘Cyril’ was a Hampstead neighbour of Guy and Celia Ramsey and an unsubtle coureur de femmes. He thought nothing of female intelligence and proclaimed the sex to be good for only one thing.
Russell matched and outlasted him in that regard, but he was wise enough to refrain from loud disdain for women. Russell’s amorous ambitions were not abandoned with age. Legend promises that on one Saturday night, when there was a large party at 5 Jordan’s Yard, an old gentleman knocked on the door, announced to the foreign girl who had opened it that he was Bertrand Russell and asked whether he might come in. Monik or Ilse is said to have advised him to try the old people’s home. This story is either true or untrue and so, in theory at least, it belonged to the realm of the empirical, even though, in practice, there is no way of verifying it. There were, as A. C. Ewing used to say, from the philosophical wilderness in which he grazed (his voice was famously sheepish), more things in heaven and earth than positivists could ever be positive about.
Definitions, Wisdom suggested, were a matter more of decision than of predetermined rigidity. ‘How would I define a good book? Must I?’ There was an anguished pause, then: ‘Good!’ He tasted the word cautiously, as if it were stem ginger. ‘Um, would it help to say, as a definition, that something was good if it added up to an even number?’ One day, again pressed for a definition by some neophyte, he asked if any of us had read David Garnett’s novel Lady into Fox. If not, no matter: the title encapsulated the plot, which was that one day, the wife of a fox-hunting man was transformed into a fox. Wisdom asked us to imagine the transformation, the lengthening of the muzzle, the rust of fur which then appeared on it, the levitation of the ears and the bushing of the tail, possibly. At what point, he wanted to know, would we be forced to say, ‘By George, she’s now definitely a fox!’? Wisdom made Garnett’s story seem more subtle, or macabre, than it actually is. In the novella, the lady turns into a fox with instantaneous abruptness.
Wisdom’s charisma secured the allegiance of his entourage, but it did not travel well. Lacking an impressive bibliography, he had no eminent standing outside Cambridge. In the 1970s, he would be struck off the register of philosophical worthies by Bryan Magee and Bernard Williams, the scrutineers of merit in the television age. If Wisdom’s raising of the eyebrows suggested amazement at human credulity, there was also secret anguish in him. He would not go into a church even for the funeral of his painter wife, Pamela. His hobby was riding horses, though not to hounds. He quit the Moral Sciences faculty before reaching retirement age and accepted a chair in the University of Oregon, where he was reported to be happier than in pedestrian Cambridge. He kept a horse on campus and could leap almost directly from his chair to the saddle.
I discovered Cambridge philosophy to be a talking game which had something in common with amateur dramatics. There was, however, no cynicism in my zeal for therapeutic positivism. I shared what I took to be its aversion to religious beliefs. Wittgenstein’s executors, Peter Geach (who never wore socks) and Miss Anscombe, were proselytising Roman Catholics. After he had died in Dr Bevan’s house in Cambridge, they made sure that the Master, who had indeed been baptised as a child, was given a Roman Catholic funeral.
Although no one was coarse enough to say so out loud, post-war Cambridge philosophy (including the franchised version preached in Oxford) seemed Judenrein. There was nervous symmetry between the admitted wish, common to some extent to both Popper and Wittgenstein, to purge the world of the demons that had bedevilled Europe and an unadmitted desire to be done, in the most refined sense, with the Jews. As Wisdom said of invisible snakes in the lecture room: ‘You can’t see them, but they’re there.’ He meant, of course, that they were not; but then again, there they were. Jewishness was inherent in Wittgenstein’s personal magic. Late in his life, he claimed, or confessed, that his thinking was ‘100 per cent Hebraic’. His attempt to purge the world of false gods was a kind of piety.
I heard the word ‘Jew’ during my first two years at Cambridge only once, when I was taking part in a Mummers’ production of a play called Musical Chairs. Who knows why the committee selected, out of the whole European repertoire, a doleful, dated play that took place in the Romanian oil-fields in the 1920s? Perhaps there was virtue in denouncing the capitalist exploitation of a country whose present plight, under a Stalinist puppet, provoked small indignation from those in happier places. I was cast as an American businessman. Joe Bain played a Mitteleuropan oil-man. At the end of Act One, it fell to him to come in and say, ‘We’ve struck a gusher!’ The phrase was to come in useful when someone in the Whim Café became exaggeratedly effusive.
Musical Chairs was slated both in Varsity and by the usually indulgent critic in the Cambridge Evening News. After the first night, audiences came only to scoff. The disintegration of the production encou
raged me to play for laughs by parodying Jimmy Stewart’s slow delivery. After an applauded exit, I walked around behind the braced flats to get to the green room, while the rest of the cast continued to do their straight stuff. Adjacent to the buckets In Case Of Fire, I was confronted by a small man, known to me, like Horace’s button-holing friend, nomine tantum, only by name, Harry. ‘Brilliant, brilliant! Best impersonation of a Jew I’ve ever seen!’ God help me, I smiled and walked on. Nor did I say anything when, at a party in a Grantchester mansion, I heard my shrill host, a certain Kim Tickell, say loudly, but not in my direction, ‘I will not have my mother’s house turned into a synagogue.’ Accurate memory can be a substitute for action; might that be why so many Jews have written reminiscential books?
I never asked, or wondered, why Tony Becher decided to abandon mathematics, in which he was certain to get a First. If he had demons to purge, he never spoke of them, even when, since his parents were still in India, he came to stay at 12 Balliol House at Christmastime. How could a Gentile have good grounds for being unhappy? Tony revealed himself, in a way, by sudden spasms of grotesquerie. On Boxing Day evening, he, Beetle and I walked down to deserted Putney High Street. At a zebra crossing, Tony elected to imitate Quasimodo, the capering hunchback of Nôtre Dame, and lurched backwards into the only stranger in the street, who happened to be a policeman. I also remember a sherry party in Queens’ College in which one of the guests had left a silver-topped cane leaning against the chimneypiece. When its owner came to reclaim it, Tony called out, ‘Well, aren’t we an affected old thing, then?’ The man said, ‘Not really,’ and tapped the stick against his wooden leg. One day, walking up King’s Parade from a lecture, Tony and I met Karl Miller’s very pretty attachment, Jane Collet. She was wearing a rather bold pair of leopardskin-patterned tights. Tony shrieked at her in a way that seemed at once randy and cruel. I was embarrassed, but I did not say anything.
Sexual desire and frustration went together in 1950s England. When Leslie Halliwell came back to Cambridge to manage the Rex cinema, he had the connoisseur’s taste and the tradesman’s acumen to screen Continental films that could be advertised as enticingly erotic. After his publicity announced an unimpaired view of Hildegarde Neff’s breasts, long queues stretched down towards the Chesterton Road. Lust got what it deserved when the promised nakedness was visible only in a framed portrait of the unremarkable lady. Halliwell graduated once again to become the founder and decisive editor of the Film Guide. Cinematic omniscience warranted him to combine the roles of encyclopaediast and public executioner. He came to react with distaste to all the movies I had anything to do with.
At most times, Tony Becher seemed the very model of an eager-to-please middle-class Englishman. Yet his regular handwriting seemed to be impressed on the page with controlled fury. His Footlights lyrics were more ingenious in their internal rhymes than anyone else’s. He composed them as he might some abstruse mathematical equation. Tony’s heartlessness was declared, without deliberate malice, when Lord Montagu of Beaulieu was convicted of homosexual acts, with a social inferior, and sent to prison. Tony wrote and performed, at the next Footlights Smoker, a timely number entitled ‘Lord Mount-a-Few of Beaulieu’. No one rejoiced in Montagu’s very brief ‘disgrace’, from which he recovered in a sporting, finally triumphant manner; but it offered a cue that Tony’s adroit intelligence could not resist, just as it gave Ken Tynan an opportunity for ostentatious courage in standing bail for Lord Montagu’s journalist friend, Peter Wildeblood. The seeming virulence of Tony’s lyrics had nothing to do with moral outrage. It may have done something to exorcise demons that Tony himself could never quite identify. He later wrote a witty parody of a Lorenz Hart 1920s lyric in a Footlights skit that began ‘In a Graham Greenery / Where god paints the scenery’. It entailed no indignant distaste for popery. In most respects, Tony was a loyal and amusing friend. One of his ancestors had given his name to Becher’s Brook, where he came a cropper.
According to Renford, there was no way I could be ready for Finals after only a single year of full-time attention to Moral Sciences. Conscious of how little I had achieved in my first two years, I was given a virtuous reason to ask my father to extend my Cambridge lease. It would be an unexpected tax on him, even though – thanks to Renford’s solicitations and Howland’s geniality – St John’s offered to extend my scholarship. In one of our man-to-man chats, my father agreed without hesitation. Perhaps he was influenced by the fact that it had been mandatory, in his day, for Greats to require four years of study. I was grateful and surprised. I was given both a chance to further the redemption of the world from metaphysics and a lease of extra time in which to make a mark on Cambridge, though I had no clear idea what it might be.
At the end of my second year, I played Truewit in Ben Jonson’s Epicene in an open-air production, directed by Joe Bain, in the St John’s College Backs. I recall only a line directed at me after I have delivered one of Jonson’s best quips: ‘I do say as good things every day, were they but taken down and recorded.’ I must have controlled my tendency to overact, except in the spirit of the piece, since I was elected President of the Lady Margaret Players, in Joe’s place, for the coming year.
Had I been properly diligent, I should have proposed, as Sullivan always did, to return to Cambridge for the ‘long vac term’. There were no lectures in those mid-summer weeks, but the college and the libraries were open. It was an ideal time for serious study. I had no wish, however, to consign myself to cellular chastity nor did I ever encounter a maître-à-penser sufficiently charismatic to exercise a demanding ascendancy over me. Renford was amusing and amused, informative and diligent, but the current never truly passed between us.
Beetle had been given the name of a landlady in Florence, where we could spend ten cultural days before repairing to the cottage she had discovered to rent on a high hill overlooking Menton, the Riviera town where D. H. Lawrence and Katharine Mansfield had stayed, although not together (he was repelled by her manifestation of the symptoms of tuberculosis, which they had in common).
Florence in August was burnt sienna. Signora Naldi labelled me ‘dormiglione’ on account of my tendency to oversleep. We did the Uffizi and the Accademia and the Ponte Vecchio and the Boboli Gardens and we took the bus to Fiesole to inspect the Roman theatre and remember Boccaccio, but our thoroughness generated no abiding affection for the city. We had lunch one day in a basement buca on the city side of the Ponte Vecchio. When the waiter said, ‘Da bere?’, I said, ‘Acqua minerale, per favore.’ A minute later, a man on the far side of the restaurant whispered something to the waiter, who came to us with a bottle of prosecco beaded with cold. We raised our glasses to the benevolent stranger, but never spoke to him. We had just one ice cream at the famous gelateria Perché No! before taking the train to Ventimiglia and on into France.
The cottage overlooking Menton cost £2 a week. It was at the top of a prolonged zigzag of steps, wide in the early stages, narrower and steeper as we climbed to the high shelf on which the little cottage stood. We made love; we cooked; we read; and, now and again, we played careful cricket on the tight concrete terrace, as if in a net, but without a net, using a slat of wood and a bald tennis ball. There was an outdoor privy and a phallic pump which, after prolonged leverage, drew what we took to be drinking water. The vine over the terrace was thick with ripening grapes. The locals called them ‘framboises’: when they burst, plumply, in the mouth, they tasted of vinous raspberries. Beetle called them ‘sex grapes’. We shopped at the Alimentation down on the main road and toted our supplies up those many steps. One day we met a neighbour coming down who married us with ‘M’sieudame!’
The Communist owner of the cottage had a Penguin library in which we discovered the novels of Rex Warner, an Anglo-Saxon Kafka, more comic than angst-ridden in his allegorical flourishes. The callow hero of The Aerodrome was informed, at one stage, ‘Something rather rotten has happened. Someone’s potted your old man.’ Under Warner’s influence, I began a n
ovel in which I abandoned Maughamian realism and adolescent woes. The protagonist of Mr Fraser’s Ducats was named Sandheim, after a character with whom my father and I had played bridge, several years before, at Mrs Mac’s. Eye-deceivingly swift at shuffling and dealing, the real-life Sandheim was enough of an expert to be a regular collector of the other players’ sixpences. We wondered why so good a player chose to play in such modest company. It turned out that he was a card-sharp. Blackballed in classy circles, he was reduced to swimming with minnows.
In my novel, Sandheim was translated into a businessman under the threat of violence from some rivals whom he has outsmarted by selling them tainted merchandise. He recruits protection in the form of three men who fortify his house and take turns in keeping him under armed surveillance. Their vigilance is so thorough that he never has an unobserved moment with his wife. She becomes more and more ostentatious, delectable, and impatient in her frustration. Sandheim’s protectors grow increasingly overbearing. Quite soon, he is their prisoner, his bullet-proof vest a straitjacket. His wife, who takes to crawling around the living room naked, becomes their common plaything. Sandheim is allowed to watch his protectors enjoy Sandra’s gladly granted favours.
The trio of oppressive hirelings receive calls which, Sandheim is told, promise that his enemies are only waiting for him to take one step out of his house. Required to avoid showing himself at the window, lest someone take a pot at him, he is dressed in his wife’s old clothes and made to bring refreshments when Sandra is being serviced by his loutish friends, who were recruited by my imagination from those snaps on the barbed wire on Wimbledon Common and named after certain Lockites. The last scene in the book, which I planned but never wrote, had Sandheim playing bridge with his parasitic captors. They are all wearing Hitler masks and address him as ‘Sandyjew’.
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