Clean-shaven, in a freshly laundered check shirt, hacking jacket with double vents, often with a patterned silk waistcoat, sometimes with a bow-tie, Leslie was a spruce advertisement for himself. His name was both exotic (of Belgian provenance, he told us) and easy to pronounce. His desk carried his silver-framed photograph in subaltern’s uniform, but I never heard him use barrack-room language. He knew many jokes, almost all of them of transatlantic provenance, none risqué. Luck, which doubled for good management, had led to his evacuation to North America. He had not only survived the war, like the rest of us; he had given it a miss. By the time he returned from Hamilton, Ontario, to Pinner, Middlesex, he had already learned to drive, a rare accomplishment among insular contemporaries. He brought to Cambridge a precocious transatlantic desire for fame and fortune. Cole Porter, Ira Gershwin and Lorenz Hart were his models; his lyrics were the fruit of diligent mimesis. All were distinguished by an indispensable something called ‘a Middle Eight’.
I cannot recover from memory’s sediment why we elected to set Lady at the Wheel in the south of France; perhaps because it lent itself to Leslie’s neat rhymes: ‘Here we get sand in our sandals / Here we get scanned in our scandals’ and witty puns: ‘They were never incompatible / He had … income / And she was pattable’. The Monte Carlo Rally, then a much publicised annual event, furnished opportunities for a comically guttural German, a silly-ass English gentleman (Leslie came up with the name Sir Roland Butter) and a couple of Americans, one a handsome driver, the other a lugubrious, finally golden-hearted tycoon. The only character drawn from life was called Britannia, a comic, middle-aged Cassandra who wandered around making predictions that no one cared to hear. My parents had told me of such a female who haunted the beach at Juan-les-Pins where they spent two weeks every summer at a little hotel called Mon Repos.
My role as book-writer was to accommodate Leslie’s and Robin Beaumont’s musical numbers between as many laughs as I could contrive to put in the mouths of our confected characters. The hero had to be Pete, because Leslie had already composed a song entitled ‘Pete, y’know’ (he was ‘kinda sweet, y’know’). For some similarly lyrical reason, the female lead, who drove the ramshackle English entry, which won the rally, came to be called Jinx Dando. How could a classical scholar lend himself to such a lowbrow project? With the greatest of imitative ease, since Leslie laughed gladly at my jokes and had none of Toby Robertson’s condescension. His ambitions lay beyond Cambridge: the places he was going had much brighter lights and he had every intention of seeing his name in them. It was up to me whether I came along.
Bricusse père was said to be ‘in charge of distribution’ for Kemsley Newspapers (he supervised the loading of printed copies into the vans that carried them to the far corners of London). Leslie’s contacts in Fleet Street were good enough, his salesmanship and samples plausible enough, for him to be commissioned by Kemsley’s Sunday Graphic to supply a weekly ‘box’ of funny verses, an English travesty of the New Yorker-ish style of Ogden Nash, one of whose imitable couplets ran ‘When you shake the ketchup bottle / None’ll come and then a lot’ll’. Like the famous American gagster Goodman Ace, who wrote for Bob Hope and other seemingly spontaneous comics, Leslie did not hesitate to ape his betters, whether they knew it or not. On his shelves were two fat anthologies of jokes collated by Bennett Cerf, from which he extracted regular plums, as well as the Noël Coward and Cole Porter songbooks.
Tony Becher’s contributions to our Footlights number were quick proof of his rhyming facility. He was also recruited by Leslie, as his uncredited journalistic collaborator (a double byline would have compromised Leslie’s standing with the editor). Tony never told me what his share of the take was, but he was glad of it. Leslie was a piper who promised such cheerful rewards that it would have been churlish, if not self-defeating, not to follow his lead. Between teatime sessions in his rooms (Leslie always had a ready supply of milk chocolate P-P-P-Penguins), I did not at all abate my enthusiasm for the therapeutic treatment of humanity’s metaphysical delusions.
Tony and I went together, in our gowns, to Renford Bambrough’s supervisions. We read and then discussed our essays in a serious, sociable way and at untimed length. Renford seemed not to find either of us more able than the other, but there was an unadmitted competition to impress him. Tony showed knowledge; I preferred wit. Well-read as Renford might be in modern philosophy, there was something of the truant classicist about his involvement in it. While he need have had no motive other than intellectual honesty for embracing the universalism that our programme of subservience to science implied, it may be that, just as I hoped to apply an incidental purge to old ideas (anti-Semitism the oldest), Renford wanted to put provincialism behind him. He never spoke of his parents nor of the north. He was a version of what C. P. Snow, in his sequence of then current novels, Strangers and Brothers, had called ‘a New Man’. Renford combined academic and collegiate ambitions with a touch of levity. As things turned out, he had more than we knew in common with the character of Jago, in Snow’s best novel, The Masters. When first proposed as Master of St John’s, he was deemed too young; some two decades, later, his candidature failed because he was considered too old. After all that time, he had to settle, unhappily, for proxime accessit.
An American graduate student called Norwood Russell Hanson sometimes sat in on our discussions. His presence introduced a measure of solemnity. Hanson challenged glibness with unsmiling severity. A philosopher with a mission, he wore a flying jacket and had the air of someone just in from one dangerous flight and apt for another. He had been a Golden Gloves boxer and a marine fighter pilot during the war in the Pacific. He shot down pat or pert answers with a sure aim. He had also played trumpet to professional standards. He went on to do innovative work in the philosophy of science and had several books in gestation when he was killed, in 1967, while piloting his own plane. The heartless rumour was that the advocate of careful scientific planning had failed to check how much fuel he had before taking off.
In an essay on C. L. Stevenson’s pioneering notion of ‘Persuasive Definitions’, I dropped the conventional, neutral style and quoted Macaulay’s 1833 speech on the Emancipation of the Jews. He had the nerve to declare that ‘the Jews’ had been unjustly typified by their degradation. What contingency had forced upon them had then been taken to be their essential, immutable character. I alluded not only to Jean-Paul Sartre’s unlikely recommendation to Jews that they embrace the identity that others wished upon them (they alone were debarred, however well-meaningly, from the self-determination that Sartre regarded as the morally imperative prelude to human emancipation from Bad Faith), but also to T. S. Eliot’s dismissive description of Macaulay as a stylist contaminated by ‘journalism’. What seemed an aesthetic judgement carried persuasive baggage: to define Macaulay as journalistic enabled the sainted Tom to disparage liberal arguments in general without meeting any of them in particular. Macaulay’s 1833 speech was, I claimed, a proleptic counterblast to Eliot’s 1933 lecture After Strange Gods.
I refrained from saying that Eliot’s speech, which his many defenders continue to pass off as an aberration due to personal stress, had coincided with Hitler’s accession to power and was of a piece with the contemporary anti-Semitism preached by Charles Lindbergh, Father Coughlin and Henry Ford. How many of Eliot’s admirers have chosen to notice that the speech delivered at the University of Virginia was also congruent with the restrictive admission policy of Harvard University during the presidency of A. Lawrence Lowell at the time that Eliot was a student under his waspish aegis? Eliot’s standing in Cambridge critical circles was still paramount, despite the falling away that Frank Leavis and his censorious ‘Connection’ had detected in his recent work. If it disturbed my companions that I even alluded to so vexed and embarrassing a topic as ‘the Jews’, they were decent enough not to show it.
I was as easily seduced into seriousness by therapeutic positivism as into frivolity by Leslie Bricusse. I discovered that ‘
Lezzers’ had a knack for finding female company, if for no salacious purpose. He talked of ‘dating’ girls and was very aware of their statistical details, but he was unlikely to commit the faux pas of one of his Caius friends, Stanley P., who pulled out his handkerchief during a social occasion and exploded a packet of Durex into his tutor’s wife’s lap. L. C. B. set out to enrol a company of pretty girls, preferably of 36–19–36 dimensions, who could sing and dance (or at least ‘move’).
Hardly any Cambridge theatrical females had, or needed, such attributes. Dudy Foulds’s literary intelligence earned her the lifelong envy of her peers and her articulate personality made her Peter Hall’s leading lady for all seasons; but she was no Cyd Charisse. When she happened to come to a Jordan’s Yard Sunday lunch, I approached her to play the Cassandran part of Britannia; but she declined. More than thirty years later, when Claire Tomalin was the literary editor of the Sunday Times and Dorothy Nimmo had been hailed as a poetic genius by Craig Raine, I suggested that Claire offer ‘Dudy’, as we still called her, a book to review. I knew her to be alone and destitute. Claire chose to remember that when they were involved in Dr Leavis’s ‘common pursuit’ (of first-class degrees), Dudy refused to share her trenchant, clever essays with other Newnhamites.
Leslie’s plans were so confidently laid that it was a form of election to be invited to share them. His lyrics and their sentiments might have what John Sullivan called ‘the inevitability of a popular song’; but that was precisely what they were designed to be, the more popular the better, in conformity with very good models. What Ovid had been to me, ‘Cole’ was to Leslie (the two versifiers had ‘Let’s Do It’ as their common theme). Leslie had no urge to be well regarded in smart undergraduate circles. I doubt if he ever spoke to Peter Hall or recognised Karl Miller if he saw him. The Footlights and the Musical Comedy Club, of which he assumed the presidency, took most of Leslie’s efficient time. He never pretended that they were anything but rungs on the ladder to an extra-mural, post-Cambridge paradise. How different, in moral terms, was Sullivan’s determination to be a scholar from Leslie’s to become the king of Shaftesbury Avenue and, if possible, the president of Old Broadway?
I first met Brian Marber, who came up to St John’s in my third year, when he was sitting in Leslie’s rooms, seeking entry into the Footlights. Brian was short, light brown-haired, thick-chested and wore high-sided (handmade) black boots. He made no secret of being a Jew and had no reticence when he detected another. He was unimpressed by my notion that philosophy would be a cure for anti-Semitism and, at the same time, dissolve the peculiarity that set Jews apart. He had been in the Jewish house at Clifton, lived in Abbey Lodge, adjacent to Regent’s Park, owned a great many suits and knew how to drive. An unlikely athlete, he was a very able fencer and was soon in the university squad, later its president. It was traditional for presidents of half-blue sports to be admitted on the nod to the Hawks’ Club. Although he was clean in his habits, the committee chose not to nod at Brian.
He had in common with another Johnian of his year, Jonathan Miller, the supposedly typical Jewish talent for solo mimicry and clowning. Even as a freshman medical student, Jonathan contrived to have a full waiting room. I saw him first in his first-floor ‘set’ in the Wedding Cake. I was in a deputation of the Gaiety that sought to enrol him in the cast for a ‘college revue’ which, when it happened, included prolonged imitations of The Goon Show’s ‘Bluebottle’, as played by Peter Sellers. He was sitting on the floor, aflame with ruddy curls, barefoot, in blue jeans and a circle of admirers.
Already vested with a reputation for precocious polyvalence, Jonathan was known to have appeared on comic radio broadcasts for which he wrote and performed monologues in a variety of accents, most memorably those of the poetic cricket commentator John Arlott and the naturalist Brian Vesey Fitzgerald. His father, Emanuel Miller, was a psychoanalyst; his mother, Betty, an authority on Keats. Jonathan seemed not to need friends, but was readily accessible to admirers. His hermetic habits never inhibited him from retreating into any available limelight.
Marber was a north London Jew of a thicker stripe. His father was a wholesale clothier, of Belgian provenance. He devised a routine in which an anglepoise lamp, bent and held in a variety of postures, was his only, versatile prop. There was something unnerving in his acceptance of and pleasure in being a Jew. That he was reading economics seemed to announce mercenary interests with unnecessary loudness. His friend Trevor Chinn had been with Brian in the Jewish house at Clifton. They lacked the wariness, hardly distinct from cowardice, with which Charterhouse had saddled me. They had no apprehension of being thought crude, even when they told low jokes. One of Brian’s was about the mouse whose obsessive ambition was to make love to an elephant. When, at last, he succeeds in mounting her, the elephant twitches at some vexatious bird. The mouse says, ‘Not hurting you, am I, darling?’ I winced at the Cliftonians’ brashness, and envied it. Chinn’s father owned Lex Garages. Trevor was so eager to be done with academic life that he abandoned King’s without taking a degree in order to hasten his entry into the real, lucrative world. Trevor was at the helm of Lex Garages when, in the financial crisis of 1974, the shares fell to 17p. If I had had the mercantile wit that is supposedly the badge of all our race, I should have ventured a modest sum on them and been able to, as Guy Ramsey used to say, ‘clip coupons’ for the rest of my life.
My final bow in college theatricals was in December 1952, when I was persuaded by Joe Bain to play Samson in Samson Agonistes in St John’s college chapel. Vanity was the spur that prompted me to learn the hundreds of magniloquent lines in which Milton dressed his heroic alter ego. I learned them during one weekend in Jordan’s Yard, with Beetle ‘hearing’ me, over and over again. Giles Gilbert Scott’s chapel was a tall and heavy example of Victorian Gothic revival architecture. The college’s celebrated choir had to contend with the worst acoustics in Cambridge. When I started to rehearse, Milton’s words recoiled to muffle the next lines I had to say. To increase the volume served only to augment the echo.
Joe Bain supplied the solution: spoken softly, but with distinct clarity, the consonants winged the words. The key was to give each syllable distinct weight, bite and emphasis. Emotion and credibility depended less on how the actor felt inside than on getting the stresses right. Make the consonants as punctual and pointed as possible: get the words right, enunciate them cleanly, and keep the voice up at the end of the line and you could dispense with Stanislavskyan ‘preparation’. Charlie Chaplin always insisted that precision and economy of gesture conveyed emotion without any need for an actor actually to be emotional. Art follows accuracy.
We performed Samson Agonistes only three times, but the production attracted large audiences. I was flatteringly reviewed, in a pretentious fly-sheet, by a visiting pundit from the ranks of Tuscany. Thanks to Bain, Milton’s words did the work of conveying tragic pathos. At one performance I had an experience not uncommon, I have discovered, even among experienced professionals. Running smoothly along Samson’s sonorous lines, I became conscious that much further up ahead, but coming closer, was a black hole into which a set of verses had fallen, as if in the Tay Bridge disaster. I continued fluently, and with no loss of pace or confidence, towards the abyss, hoping that as I got closer to it, I might retrieve the lost passage. I did not. When, however, I reached the lapsed segment, I managed, with scant hesitation, to accelerate, leap across the rupture and resume the words that lay on the far side.
The only other person with me on the altar steps was Harold Cannon, a stolid Philistine, who had to interject a line or two, leaning on his spear, in the section that had slided into Avernus. When I gave him his next cue, he came up with the few words that he would have spoken in the middle of the section that I had elided. I had to retreat, and repeat myself, with furious emphasis. With a Punic frown, he gave me the subsequent cue and on we went to the end, which coincided with the conclusion of my career in the straight theatre.
I wrote th
e ‘book’ of Lady at the Wheel in the Easter vacation. It was a relief from communing with great minds to create trivial characters whose principal purpose was to ease the way from one of Leslie’s numbers to the next. The plan was to stage the musical near the beginning of the following academic year. Meanwhile, in his role as secretary of the Footlights, Leslie’s business was to select a cast and material for the 1953 May Week revue. As his adviser, I found myself by chance promoted, as I had been in the corps at Charterhouse. Like the House Platoon, the Footlights had its ‘O Group’ and I was a member. It so happened, though we never cared enough to guess it, that Peter Firth, the president, was undergoing a spiritual crisis and did not regard the selection of material for the revue as a summum bonum. My abiding ambition was to be a published novelist. I might have chosen a more subtle model than Mr Maugham, hardly a more instructive one. The writer’s business, he said, was to build up an oeuvre: you spied on the world and compiled your reports without embroidery. In my notebooks, I concentrated on noticing what was done and said by those around me rather than indulge in introspection. Why people did things was better discovered by close observation of language and gesture than by seeking to detect the ghost in their machinery. Writing things down induced clarity. Fingers had their own way of thinking. Inspiration did not prime but follow practice: solvitur sedendo.
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