Going Up

by Frederic Raphael

  Buck obtained permission to insert the authentic log of a réseau in the south-west at the back of They Fought Alone. It mentioned a little place called Siorac-en-Périgord, where the château was cavernous enough to conceal a clandestine armoury. There is now a supermarket on the other side of the road from the château. We shop there twice a week in the summer months. I only once spotted someone reading They Fought Alone. It was on a tourist bus, on the way to Chichicastenango, in Guatemala, in 1974. He had left it, face down, on the seat during a comfort stop. When he returned I told him that I had written it. He said, ‘Are you Colonel Buckmaster?’ ‘No, no, but I helped him write the book. My name is Raphael.’ ‘Really? So is mine,’ he said. ‘I’m a doctor in San Diego. I run the Raphael clinic. We do all kinds of operations, head to toe. You ever need one, stop by. Need two, I’ll give you a rate.’

  Just before They Fought Alone was published, Buck was pleased to tell me that he had sold an option on the film rights to his friend Sidney Box, for £1. No film was ever made. Was David Tutaev right to suspect that there was some dark aspect to Buck that he was expert at camouflaging, a duplicity that gave an Old Etonian smoothness to both sides of his character? He had done his best to honour Churchill’s command, back in 1941, to ‘set Europe ablaze’, and if that involved making mistakes, or even blunders, he had fought a winning campaign. His good conscience was of a piece with his callousness. Despite Tutaev’s dark intuition, I suspect that I should have been glad to obey Buck’s blue-eyed orders and, if possible, to have been thought well of by him. In the same spirit, for whatever added reasons, I should prefer to be thought good company by Simon Raven than by any of Tom Maschler’s angry young or youngish men. Not long ago, They Fought Alone was cited in the TLS as a documentary source. It has just been reissued as a classic of secret warfare.

  After Lucienne Hill had used her mature flat iron on my juvenile jokes, Lady at the Wheel went into production. Anxious to avoid nastiness, Leslie invited me to attend an audition at the Prince of Wales for a leading lady. One likely candidate was a good-looking young woman called Jean Brampton, who had already played second leads. She came on in a strapless dress with a flared skirt and began to sing, rather well. As she took a deep breath for her final effort, the zip at the back of her dress burst open and her fine breasts tumbled forward. She caught them, one-handed, as she finished the song. ‘Nearly showed the lot,’ she said. Leslie and Billy Chappell thanked her and said they would be in touch. She was not cast. A short while later, disappointed in love, so the papers said, she committed suicide.

  Lady at the Wheel opened at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith. Beetle and I went to the first night, but did not attend the party. Leslie had meant no harm, nor had he done any; he chose to belong to a world that, for all its glamour, had no appeal for me; but it would be untrue and ungrateful to say that he brought me no worthwhile rewards. Bachelor of Hearts was not the kind of movie that I should ever have wanted to write, but it furnished me with that vital commodity, a credit, without which no film career was likely to proceed. For all Miss Hill’s cosmetic expertise, Lady at the Wheel closed after a short run.

  Leslie and Yvonne’s wedding feast took place in the new, smart, red-carpeted Panton Street offices of John Redway and associates, of which Leslie Linder was a joint managing director. I happened to talk to George Baker, then a fashionable young movie actor. He asked me what the party was all about exactly. Leslie had bumped into him in the street and invited him to come. He had no idea what we were celebrating.

  When Paul was a few months old, we drove up to inspect a ground-floor flat in Highgate. Grange Road was wide and unpaved. The flat was in a large, red-brick Victorian house owned by a grey and respectable Miss Pearce. She was keen to have a child around the place. There was little more than a year remaining on the lease, which the outgoing tenants were willing to assign only if we were prepared to buy their furniture. Since we had little of our own, we did not object. It would take most of our money, but we agreed to pay for the rump of the lease, after the nice Miss Pearce promised that she would extend it by several years as soon as it lapsed.

  My blond Heal’s desk fitted handsomely in the window overlooking the rose garden and the slope of wide lawn where Paul moved himself around in his idiosyncratic way. He never crawled, he scooted: one leg under him, the other crooked, he propelled himself like a crab with one hand. I arranged our books on a set of planks supported by bricks (something I had first seen in Jonathan Miller’s Gloucester Terrace house). We settled to a proper, modest life.

  Cassell’s had had no signal success with The Earlsdon Way, but my new best friend, Tom Maschler, who had recently been head-hunted by Allen Lane, made it his business and pleasure to have it accepted as a paperback by Penguin Books. Two years my junior, Tom had a rage to succeed not unlike Leslie Bricusse’s, but he was driven by serious demons. Having fled Berlin with his parents when he was three years old, Tom carried an abiding sense of the horrors he had escaped. His idea of a great writer was Franz Kafka. He was determined to become the most important publisher of serious books in London. He remarked with scorn that the only contemporary writer dealing with Jews in England was C. P. Snow, whose recent novel, The Conscience of the Rich, featured a caricatural eccentric somewhat resembling my great-uncle Jessel. Someone had to do better than that. Inspired, in part, by Tom’s enthusiasm, I bought a wide, spiral-backed notebook and began a novel that would have something in common with the jejune effort I had begun in Ramatuelle, in homage to Maugham’s Of Human Bondage.

  I associated Jewishness with isolation. Beetle’s large family had both insulated her from any such apprehensions and given her keen reasons to escape any demanding community. She saved me from loneliness and dared me to be happy. Paul was the proof of her belief in life. We never considered not having him circumcised; it was done by the Dr Snowman who performed the same service for the royal family. Although I had no sense of obligation to the rites of Judaism, to raise an untrimmed Jew would be to accede to the shame of being one. Dr Snowman did his tailoring, dipped his finger in wine, comforted Paul with it and we all said Mazel tov.

  Curiosity led me to go, several times, to Brick Lane and catch what was left of the air of the East End I was glad not to have come from. With wished-for nostalgia, I bought challah from Grodzinsky’s bakery. On one occasion, I asked for it on a Tuesday. They looked at me, with justice, as if I was some kind of a freak. If so, I had a remedy: I resolved my contradictions and absurdities, in whatever high or low sense, by writing, alone, in all kinds of voices. The prattle of my contradictions and fears rode rapidly down long pages of manuscript dialogue. Willie Maugham’s theatrical facility may well have had a good deal to do with his stammer. Inside his head, he had no hesitation in giving voice to the contradictions and agonies that gagged him in public.

  It is always difficult to continue to work on something with no title. I soon decided to call my new novel The Limits of Love, in homage to Wittgenstein. That love also had its limitations was part of my point. Manor Fields stood for me as a bourgeois Unité d’habitation. Suburban morality, of which the bowler-hatted Mr Love had been the local custodian, was a form of communal cowardice. There had to be a more daring and vital way to live. I thought it was socialism.

  One afternoon, in search of comradeship, I went to the newly opened Partisan Coffee shop in Soho, and sat with a workmanlike mug of coffee, reading The Golden Bough as an advertisement for intellectual company. I left without finding common cause or causerie with anyone. When Tony and Anne Becher came to visit us, I greeted her unguarded admission that she was a Tory with ferocious astonishment. I had, I told her, never before met anyone of my own age who was that much of an antique. She burst into tears. I was sorry, but not chastened.

  When Paul was eight months old, my mother agreed to look after him while I gave Beetle a deserved holiday. Irene was to be a patient and loving grandmother. Whatever had gone cold between us was put right, it seemed, by the affection that she
gave Paul, and he her. For the rest of her life, she made the occasional Freudian slip of calling him ‘Freddie’.

  Beetle and I headed for the Riviera. Parenthood and lack of money made us unadventurous: I booked a full week, with pension complète, at the hotel Florida (two-fronted in the Michelin Guide) in Beaulieu-sur-Mer. The food was not as good as our fat cook’s in Lucca, the ambience petit bourgeois. Monsieur Hulot might well have taken a holiday there. One night, a young woman wheeled a paralysed man into the dining room. They went from table to table with a deck of small watercolour paintings, laying one on each. There was an attendant printed notice. The artist was an ex-inmate of a Nazi concentration camp. The pictures had been painted with a brush held in his mouth. When the tour was completed, the girl came round to collect whatever people were prepared to offer. Several of the diners handed back the cards. I gave the girl a couple of thousand old francs. That night, we went to the casino and won twice as much at boule.

  Beetle was glad to get home and retrieve Paul from Manor Fields. On entering 12 Balliol House, I always developed a bad, and worsening, headache. When first we visited my parents, Beetle had been surprised by Cedric’s habit of picking an argument with me. It irritated him that she almost always sided with me. Cedric was having a miserable time with the stricture that, from time to time, he never knew when, would prevent him from pissing. Within an hour or two, he could be in agony. Various West End specialists affected to know what to do; it was usually painful and provided only temporary relief. No one could cure the condition until my parents went to Sweden, where a Dr Johanssen contrived an operation that excised the scar tissue and set the two ends of the re-severed urethra to grow together naturally. After decades of dread and fear, Cedric was repaired, for a while.

  I was sorry for my parents, but good manners had to cover for the small love I felt for them. I have never been interested in the reasons that analysis might have revealed to be behind my indifference. Might it be that I always resented the fact that my mother never gave me her breast? Or is it that I felt betrayed when she allowed me to be sent to boarding school, even though I know very well that she had little choice? I cannot remember ever being greeted with literally open arms. Cedric was patient in seeking to improve my golf swing, my play of the cards and my tango, but his long concealment of the existence of my half-sister gave his moralising a late whiff of hypocrisy. I did not blame him for his past (no one owes an account of his life to his children), but I might have been spared the advisory humbug. I shall, however, always be grateful for that extra year at Cambridge. I did not hold it against him that he lacked the confidence to guarantee my mortgage. By the time that he had the chance to buy the flat he and Irene had rented for over forty years and needed £1,500 as a down payment, I was making enough money in the movies to give it to him, gladly. As I wrote the cheque, he said, ‘Make it two thousand, if you like.’ I did not.

  The Limits of Love

  XX

  GEORGE GREENFIELD FOUND me a supportive sideline as fiction coach to Cyril Ross, founder and managing director of Swears & Wells, the Oxford Street furrier of choice. In the 1950s, success and the pelts of dead animals went together. Cyril was a small, seemingly mild, tough-minded Jewish entrepreneur with literary ambitions. Perhaps with a subvention to its publishers, he had already brought out one novel. Pirates in Striped Trousers denounced the tactics of a new generation of businessmen who built their fortunes not as Cyril had, on expertise and hard work, but by boarding other people’s vessels and holding them to ransom. Once at the wheel, they stripped the assets, sold off what was left, and proceeded to the next buccaneering episode.

  Cyril would send me his latest, never very long manuscript and I marked it up, circling the clichés, and suggesting improvements in red ink, like some scribal Professor Anderson. My didactic efforts were worth twenty guineas a time. To take delivery, Cyril bought me lunch at Grosvenor House, where my distant, unseen cousins, Sir Benjamin and Lady Drage (Etta) had an apartment. It was a rare opportunity for fresh asparagus and smoked salmon. We did not drink wine with lunch. Cyril told me that Charlie Clore had once threatened to move in on Swears & Wells. ‘Offered me a price for my shares well below their value and gave me twenty-four hours to think about it before he mounted a public, hostile takeover. So what I did was, I issued enough supplementary voting shares to mean I retained a majority, however many Charlie managed to sweep up on the open market. He had to give me best.’

  ‘Did he take it well?’

  ‘Charlie? He doesn’t bear a grudge, he just tells you to watch out. Which I do. Do you want a cigar? Personally I smoke a pipe. Cigars…’ The silence left them to Charlie Clore and his kind.

  Cyril made a habit of good works. ‘Do you remember the Victory Services Club, Fred, in the Edgware Road, during the war?’

  ‘I remember going past it on the bus,’ I said. I had been with my father, who had just pointed out the old Edgware Road Music Hall where he had seen Florrie Ford and Marie Lloyd. Cedric was born in a mansion flat just around the corner. ‘Did you go to the Victory Services Club yourself then, Cyril?’

  ‘I founded it. So happened I owned the property, so I thought why not do something for the war effort? It was for officers mainly. Eisenhower used to go there sometimes, so did Montgomery.’

  ‘And did you meet them?’

  ‘Truth to tell, Fred, I don’t much go for the goyim.’

  The Earlsdon Way must have been remarked in some Jewish circles. I received an invitation to attend a midday Sunday reception, at an address within walking distance of Grange Road, in honour of the Israeli ambassador. Curiosity and vanity led me to the large, double-gated house with a gravel forecourt. In the wide, high drawing room overlooking the rosy back garden, people who seemed to know each other were having drinks and lox with cream cheese. No one spoke to me. I stood for a while and then moved to leave. My host headed me off. I must stay and hear what the ambassador had to say. As he spoke, he was locking the white door to the sunlit room in which we were gathered.

  The ambassador reminded us of the brave work that was being done in Israel and of the gratitude that he felt, and hoped he would have further reason to feel today, for the generosity of people such as those present. Even my very slow coach arrived at why the door had been locked and why the comfortable company had been assembled. After His Excellency had won his applause, my host brought out a list of all those present. He asked each guest, in alphabetical order, how much he was prepared to pledge. Whether by chance or agreed design, the first sums promised were often several thousand pounds. None was less than a few hundred.

  At last, the dreaded moment came when I was named. I lacked the wit to be anything but truthful. ‘I am a writer,’ I said, ‘with a wife and a small child and no more money than we need to live on, if that much.’ As angry as I was humiliated, I walked across the room to the door. My host unlocked it and let me out. It was easier to take indignant action among Jews than elsewhere. Five years later, this incident supplied the basis of a scene in my novel Lindmann, which had a more tragic–comic conclusion than my lame exit.

  American ‘egg-head’ paperbacks had begun to appear in my favourite bookshop, Ward’s in the King’s Road. Stanley Edgar Hyman’s The Armed Vision alerted me, with revelatory force, to how little I knew about the new criticism. Like some instructive hydra, his book had many heads. Kenneth Burke made the biggest impression, along with R. P. Blackmur and Maud Bodkin, the lady with the archetypes. I was so impressed by Burke’s A Grammar of Motives that I solicited John Wisdom’s opinion of it. My modest approach may have carried a tincture of the accusatory ingratiation not unknown among climbing intellectuals. A notorious literary instance was Rebecca West’s assault on H. G. Wells. Her sparky, proto-feminist denunciation of his novel Marriage led, quite shortly, to a perhaps hoped-for sexual subjugation that supplied social promotion at the same time. If I hoped that Wisdom would ask what, in particular, I admired and draw me into some kind of conversation, I was d
isappointed. He returned the book with a brief note, saying that Burke had ‘an interesting mind’; his tone was courteous, but distant. It was as if I had asked Ken Rosewell whether he would care to have a knock-up.

  In recent ratings, Burke has been relegated to a bibulous curiosity. He never had tenure of an impressive chair and was too combative, and versatile, to attract disciples in whose later table of contents he might have had an elevated place. His anatomy of the articulations of philosophical ideas remains unique and suggestive. A performer himself, he read philosophy in a dramatic light, in which scenery and actors play against each other in accordance with the logic of the piece. Wisdom’s posthumous fate has been little different from Burke’s: he hardly rates a footnote from any of the cardinals on whom today’s reputations depend.

  When we saw Ben Gazzara as Jocko de Paris in End as a Man, I wrote a long meta-Burkean essay in which I modernised the notion of the ‘scapegoat mechanism’ of which René Girard has since become the most sophisticated exponent. To reinforce my credentials, I made learned reference to Jane Harrison’s Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, which I never read at Cambridge but which had been republished in an illuminating New York paperback. The Athenian festivals of the Thesmophoria and Thargelia treated selected victims as Calder Willingham did the diabolical and charming Jocko. I sent my double-spaced piece to Forum, a standard-bearer of the new drama, edited by Clive Goodwin. He responded with an effusive letter of rejection. My essay was too elaborate for his pages, but he would be happy to see anything else I might care to write. I did not test his generosity.