Going Up

by Frederic Raphael

  Beetle and I resumed living as we had in Ramatuelle, with the unspoken assumption, de part et d’autre, that we were together for good. One night, we went to a poetry reading that we had seen advertised in the café where we sometimes bought an ice cream. The poet was a tall, very white American. One of his poems was entitled ‘Nude by the Side of the Sea’. I knew, from the first line he declaimed, that he had no hope of fame, and little of publication. There was something gallant in his starchy elocution.

  I could not imagine being any happier than we were in the cottage, until the drinking water from the pump had dysenteric consequences. When I reverted to infantile helplessness, Beetle dosed me with chapters from Winnie the Pooh, which happened to be on our red landlord’s shelves. By the time we had to leave, I was still so weak that Beetle toted the much heavier of our suitcases down the hill. She did it again after we had taken the bus to Toulon and had to walk down the hot platform to the train that would take us north.

  IX

  FOR MY THIRD academic year, which began in October 1952, John Sullivan had prevailed on me to share rooms in ‘the Wedding Cake’ (New Court) with another classicist, Bryan Moore, who had just gained a First in the first part of the Classical Tripos. He was tall, brushed his teeth with thoroughness, kept his brilliantined hair short back and sides, snored quietly on the far side of our quite large common bedroom, wore a tie slide, well-pressed grey flannels and a blue blazer. He had no visible girlfriend and no conversation. His smiling propriety, his meticulous scholarship and his clean collars rendered him beyond reproach. I could not stand the sight of him.

  Beetle had found a new job as one of Victor Gollancz’s secretaries. V. G. was probably the most famous, certainly the most flamboyant London publisher. His yellow-jacketed volumes were badged with puffs extracted from his friends, many of them more or less reformed veterans of the Left Book Club. His handwritten advertisements for the Sunday press knew no reticence: ‘Reprinting before publication’ was a common, underlined rubric. He gave Beetle a new nickname, ‘Sheba’, in honour of her black hair, bright dark eyes and, perhaps, her regal refusal to be intimidated. When enraged, V. G. was known to sit at his desk and drum his feet on the floor and yell at his underlings. His version of Judaeo-Christian socialism did not pacify his spleen, nor inhibit him from long lunches at Rules, in Maiden Lane, or at the Savoy Grill; but it did impel him, soon after the foundation of the state of Israel, to launch an appeal on behalf of ‘the Arab brethren’, an early, far-sighted and no doubt futile attempt to close the breach between Israel and her neighbours.

  V. G. never shouted at Sheba. He found her so attractive that he disclosed to her that he had a secret alter ego – unless it was an alterum id – called Moses. Moses stood for the return of the repressed and shameless Jew. His caricatural form was an animated version of V. G.’s nose. When out of England, Victor required his secretaries to write him letters about what was happening during his absence. Beetle turned duty into insolent pleasure by making Moses the co-author of her letters. She did it with enough Gogolesque flair for V. G. to tell her that she should be a writer. If ‘darling Daphne’ – Daphne du Maurier, author of Rebecca and Jamaica Inn – could write bestsellers, why not Sheba?

  Now accredited Moral Scientists, Tony Becher and I went regularly both to John Wisdom’s lectures and to those of Charlie Broad, whose chair was in Moral Philosophy. Broad was bald, short, pear-shaped and unwrinkled. In his venerable sixties, his shining head and uncreased face gave him the appearance of a brilliant baby. Like the much younger Hugh Trevor-Roper, and unlike most writers, Broad regarded the index as part of the text of a book and composed (or supervised) his own. For both the historian and the philosopher, that last rift too had to be loaded with ore, or irony. In the index of Broad’s most famous, early book, Five Types of Ethical Theory, one entry reads ‘Church of England, the author’s respect for’. Broad also divulged sympathy with the racial preferences of the late Adolf Hitler. What this amounted to, in harmless holiday practice, was an appetite for young Nordic men, a taste that he indulged, so far as anyone knew, only on discreet Scandinavian excursions. Wittgenstein had had similar blond inclinations.

  In contrast with Wisdom, Broad lectured with prepared precision. He repeated everything he said, in a way which suggested that we take careful note. I still have manuscript pages of transcriptions of his account of Berkeley’s theory of perception. Only when the bishop’s own arguments had been rehearsed, twice, did Broad say, ‘I shall now list seventeen objections to this theory, I shall now list seventeen objections to this theory.’ I wrote them all down. I am sure that they were cogent and coherent. I cannot remember one of them.

  Broad entered and left Mill Lane, with Kantian promptness, but he did not socialise with his audience. It was a surprise when, one day later in the year, he crossed Tony Becher and me in Trinity Street and said, ‘Hullo, boys!’ It did not occur to me to wonder whether he had been waiting for us or, more particularly, for Tony, whose appearance honoured the Aryan prescription. A week or two later, Broad again intercepted us as we returned to St John’s, and invited us to dine with him one evening in Trinity. We were served, by a college servant, with a modest meal and a decanter of wine, followed by port. Our conversation had no heavy philosophical ballast. If there was even the mildest amorous motive for his invitation, his interest must have been in Tony; but he treated me with undifferentiated courtesy and I did my best to amuse him. Can he have held serious Hitlerian views? It seemed evident that he could not recognise a Jew when he saw one.

  Broad had the unassertive pride of the solitary. His prose was ironic but without flourish. He was both opinionated and broad-minded. He deplored Bertrand Russell’s pacifism in 1914; he also campaigned against Bertie’s eviction from his Trinity fellowship. Broad’s logic allowed room for a certain amusement at the consequences of rigour: rational in his professional stance, he also held the presidency of the Psychical Research Society. This was less because he believed in ghosts than because he took it that, if a case of psychokinesis could be verified, it would offer evidence that the mind could affect the physical world at a distance. Such an occurrence, of which no example was recorded during his tenure, would justify the notion of a mind–body duality.

  Was Charlie Dunbar Broad at all fazed by the publication, in 1949, of Gilbert Ryle’s The Concept of Mind, in which the author established, to his own satisfaction at least, that there was no ‘ghost’ in the human machine? He gave no sign of it. Yet in Ryle’s seemingly solemn opinion, everything attributed by philosophers of mind to premeditation could be accounted for, fully, by taking note of our practical conduct. A man’s intention to go out was established by his putting on his coat, not in the light of some shadowy mental motivation. Ryle was the demon barber of Oxford philosophy; Ockham’s Razor was plied with stringent dexterity. In his hands, it cut down a veteran regiment of misconceived obfuscations. Quick to adopt Ryle’s jargon, we began to spot ‘Category Mistakes’ in all kinds of philosophical (and social) contexts.

  How many readers suspected Ryle of being engaged in straight-faced provocation? Wittgenstein’s biographer Ray Monk, now professor of philosophy at Southampton, maintains that he has never understood how to recognise a Category Mistake. At the time, Ryle’s arguments appeared as elegant as their conclusions were counter to common sense. In the 1950s, a printed text, from a reputable publisher, carried scriptural authority. Accordingly, we subscribed to Ryle’s view that to have an idea ‘just was’ to pick up a pencil and write down a series of words. Yet who genuinely doubted the possibility of a mental rehearsal of the merits and consequences of an action before public enactment showed that we had made a decision to do something, or not? J. L. Austin, the supreme Oxford philosophical instance of commonsensical sophistication, would say that he had never met a determinist who, in his day-to-day life, showed any genuine sign of believing that there was no such thing as free will. Would Ryle have denied that he ever put his mind to a problem?

&n
bsp; When he came to give a lecture in Cambridge, his notoriety ensured a full house, though it did not procure an overflow. He preached with the solemn air of an unfrocked cardinal. At one point, he adverted to a logical instance, in which p was suspected of being the cause of q, or perhaps vice versa. He developed his argument about the similarities of these two putative entities by referring to the ‘q-ness of p and, if you will, the p-ness of q’. No low smirk disturbed the gravity of the occasion. We assumed Ryle to be too unworldly even to be aware of the base pun he had uttered. In fact, he was a witty Oxonian paronomasiast; Ryled, as it were, by his Christ Church friend Hugh Trevor-Roper’s penchant for riding to hounds, he observed that his colleague suffered from ‘chronic tally-hosis.’

  Ryle must have known precisely how to twit puritanical Fenlanders with base allusions. It may well be, however, that he was a sexual virgin, as A. J. Ayer reported him in his autobiography. Ayer, who carried his sexual reputation on his fly-leaf, so to say, claims to have asked Ryle – while on a railway journey – whether, if obliged to declare his preference, he would sooner go to bed with a male or female. Ryle is said to have opted, after thought, for the former. Was The Concept of Mind a premeditated joke at the expense of Russell’s classic Analysis of Mind? If so, Russell had his revenge on Ryle when, in 1959, Ernest Gellner’s Words and Things was not deemed suitable for review in Mind, which Ryle edited. Russell made a loud fuss about the Oxonian’s censorious refusal even to acknowledge the existence of a critic of the analytic school. I was slightly shocked when Tony Becher, then within the loop of philosophical insiders, blamed the hoo-ha on ‘that old trouble-maker Russell’.

  In Cambridge, I went less often to the theatre than to the movies, especially at the Arts Cinema, where they showed Cocteau’s Orphée and Le Sang d’un Poète and Jacques Becker’s unforgettable Edouard et Caroline. Daniel Gélin’s winning last line, to his unhappy wife, ‘J’ai envie de toi’, has not been lost on me. I did go to the ADC to see an original play by John Barton. Peter Hall must have recognised how easily rather grand persons (Barton was a minor aristocratic Old Etonian) could be enrolled into eminent lieutenancy. Barton’s play was a neo-romantic whimsy in the style of a prosaic Christopher Fry, whose versatile plays were fashionable on Shaftesbury Avenue until Ken Tynan put a match to their preciosity in order to foster the new ‘socialist’ drama, which rarely had Fry’s linguistic resource. I remember only one of Barton’s high-flown lines: ‘With a wild cry the last March earl flung himself into the watery weir.’ Or does that confuse Barton’s play with Henry James’s last, absurd attempt to find fame and fortune in the theatre? Asked why he thought his play had not been a success, sincerity disposed H. J. to be unusually monosyllabic: ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I tried so hard to be base.’ Barton’s subsequent play-making was limited to scissors-and-pasting Shakespeare’s historical dramas.

  Early in our third year, Tony Becher went to audition for the Cambridge University Footlights. The all-male club was notorious for its members-only, dinner-jacketed ‘Smokers’. Two or three times a term, initiates pitched camp in the large upstairs room of the Dorothy Café, where they solicited each other’s laughter and applause with spoofs, songs and drag acts. The best, polished and thoroughly rehearsed, were eligible for inclusion in the annual May Week revue, which took place, of course, in early June. It was a certificate of sophistication to imitate the clipped delivery and internally rhymed ingenuity of Noël Coward.

  Fearful of being asked to sing, I funked accompanying Tony. A few days later, he came to the rooms I shared with the impeccable Bryan Moore, bringing with him a nicely dressed, smooth-faced, pale-eyed, light brown-haired young man who, he said, wanted to meet me. In only his second year at Caius, Leslie Bricusse was already secretary of the Footlights, of which Peter Firth was now president. Bricusse had overtaken me without even knowing I was there. I noticed that his spectacles were not of Bryan Moore’s National Health, horn-rimmed variety. They had been selected, not wished upon him. Becomingly dressed, in no specific style, he spoke in no specific accent.

  Leslie’s announced ambition was to compose musical comedies, in the style of the shows by Rodgers and Hammerstein, Cole Porter and Irving Berlin, which were dominating Broadway and London’s West End. Since there was no CU Musical Comedy Club, Leslie proposed to found one. For its first production, probably in a year’s time, he intended to write the lyrics and most of the music; the Footlights’ director of music, Robin Beaumont, would do the rest.

  In search of a collaborator to write ‘the book’, Bricusse had asked Peter Firth who wrote the best dialogue in the play competition that Hugh Thomas had won the previous year. So what did I say to writing a musical comedy with him? And, by the way, why was I not yet a member of the Footlights? When I told him that I was averse to auditions, Leslie said, ‘For goodness sake! Consider yourself a member! It’s no big deal. This musical comedy idea, are you interested?’

  ‘What is the idea exactly?’

  ‘That’s what I’m here to find out.’ It came with a nice Kolynos smile. ‘Your play, what was that about?’

  ‘Suburbia,’ I said. ‘What we’re all trying to get away from.’

  Leslie said, ‘What do you say we go and see Hugh Thomas, see if he has any ideas?’

  ‘You don’t need my permission to go and see Hugh Thomas.’

  ‘I want you on board, you and your dialogue, of course!’

  We went to Queens’ to call on Hugh. Even in private, he had a public way of talking. Already highly placed in the Union, he was a major scholar in History on his way to further distinction. He listened, curly-haired head appraisingly tilted, as Leslie explained that we were open to any ideas he might have about a plot. Hugh wondered whether it might not be droll to place the whole thing somewhere in the Balkans. Leslie wiped his glasses, looked at me and then at Hugh and said, ‘The Balkans. That’s a thought. Why?’

  ‘Doesn’t it furnish grounds for … satirical fantasy? In view of the present situation.’

  Leslie said, ‘For instance?’

  ‘Conflict between folkloric specificity and Communist indoctrination.’

  ‘How would that … fit into a musical comedy exactly?’

  Hugh said, ‘You could have half the chorus consisting of youth leaders and a contrapuntal set of … fairies.’

  ‘Fairies?’

  ‘Balkan fairies, local spirits, they have a whole range of them in those parts. Think of Dracula.’

  ‘Dracula,’ Leslie said.

  ‘For instance.’

  Had the success of his Venetian extravaganza convinced Hugh of the merits of theatrical whimsy or was he, in his measured fashion, ‘sending us up’? I listened with unamazed bemusement to his far-fetched fancy. Leslie temporised with the politeness that, I would discover, enveloped all his responses.

  After we had recrossed Queens’ mathematical bridge to Silver Street, Leslie said, ‘Youth leaders and fairies? Perhaps he was joking.’

  I said, ‘How can we ever know the mind of another?’ It amused me to watch my remark pass over Leslie’s head.

  I had no wish to write a musical comedy and little sense that Bricusse and I had much in common. Pitched into one more exam, however, I felt the Pavlovian impulse to come up with winning answers. Leslie impersonated Opportunity. He had a practical worldliness not to be found in my Johnian contemporaries. With no doubt about what he wanted to do, he was confident that it could, and would, be done. There was enticing proof of his useful nerve in the casual way in which he had nodded me into the Footlights. Intellectual condescension and vulgar ambition set me to join him on the low road with a brisk step, while never quite losing sight of the high road.

  The Footlights proved to be composed of wits whose repartee was not always unanswerable. New members were treated to a seminar in lyric writing by Peter Tranchell, a queer (as we used to say) music don from Trinity, famous for his outrageousness: ‘It’s springtime and we’re feeling ourselves again’ was his kind of quip
. He had his skittish aspect, but he was also capable of serious musical compositions. His advice about lyrics was very practical. It was always, but always, better, he told us, to put the unlikelier part of a rhyming couplet first: ‘The vice squad wrangle / In the nice quadrangle’ rather than the other way about. What sounded effortful one way sported a neat and fitting cap the other.

  The Trinity chaplain, Simon Phipps, had been responsible for a number of instantly classic Footlights numbers, in particular ‘Can anyone think of an Original Sin? / Can someone please tell me where to begin?’ He too played the part of the old pro in assessing the merits of callow lyricists. He was known to be one of Princess Margaret’s favourite, or at least regular, escorts. When she visited his rooms to meet some of his friends, HRH received the call of nature. The enchanting sound of the princess and her pee came clearly to the privileged auditors from the adjacent jakes. Phipps may also have been the author of a particularly brilliant solo number in which a camp odalisque was discovered on stage and sang a lament that began, ‘There is not a man / On my Ottoman and there hasn’t been one for weeks’. She looked back wistfully on the days when ‘They came across the Bosphorus / And didn’t even toss for us’.

  Tony Becher and I were soon writing and performing numbers for ‘Smokers’. Two or three of our pieces seemed likely to make the cut to be included in the May Week revue at the end of the year. Leslie sometimes chose to add finishing touches, and his persuasive name, to our efforts. Thanks to the little play that I had tapped out in those last three days in Ramatuelle, I had been beckoned into the company of a character who could elevate my Cambridge fortunes and transform, if not determine, my future.

  Leslie was reading French at Caius, where he had a nice ground-floor set of rooms. I never noticed any French books on his shelves nor did I ever catch him in the process of writing an essay or preparing for a supervision. He gave himself no clever airs; he knew where he was going and, he told me, he wanted me (and my dialogue) to go with him. It was up to me whether or not to share the luminous staircase to paradise which, like Louis Jourdan in Vincent Minnelli’s An American in Paris, he was all set to climb, with a new step every day. He had, I was sure, never heard of Wittgenstein (though he could, no doubt, have contrived a rhyme for him). Whatever kind of a Francophone he was, he carried no trace of Gallic sérieux. As for Sartre’s idea of art, I doubted whether Leslie had ever read La Nausée, or even heard of it.