Going Up

by Frederic Raphael

‘Only, I know someone who has a house in the south, right on the sea. Costa del Sol they call it. Empty all winter. If I ask her, Anna’ll be glad to let you have it for next to nothing probably.’

  ‘I can probably manage that.’

  ‘You can live down there on £10 a week, easy. And I can come and visit you. How’s the new book going?’

  ‘Fine. The Limits of Love, I’m calling it.’

  ‘Until you think of something better. Do you want me to talk to Anna? You can write our success book while you’re down there.’

  ‘If I can’t think of anything better to do.’

  ‘Do it right and I can get you a bit of money.’

  ‘We’re going to the south of France in September. If your friend’s place is free after that…’

  ‘Everything’s free at a price,’ Tom said. ‘Put that in our success book.’

  ‘Roughly speaking,’ I said, ‘money and success are synonymous.’

  ‘See what I mean?’

  ‘The S Man speaks.’

  ‘The S Man. There’s our title.’

  ‘My title.’

  ‘Same thing, right? I’ll talk to Anna, but I’m sure it’ll be OK.’

  The Trouble with England

  XXI

  IN THE EARLY summer of 1959, Tom invited me to a meeting, in Berwick Street, with some of the modish young people from whom Granada TV wanted to cull ideas for a discussion programme with a controversial edge. Doris Lessing, Arnold Wesker, Ken Tynan, Stuart Holroyd, Lindsay Anderson and other candidate iconoclasts from the index of Tom’s Declaration were supplemented by Karl Miller, Nick Tomalin and Edna O’Brien. We sat at a long shining blond table in a beige room, as if for a game of verbal poker. People established their outspokenness-for-hire by saying ‘fuck’ a lot. A few years later, Ken would come out with the ‘f’ word on television and a terrible repetitiousness would be born.

  The occasion was supervised by a Granada producer whose ambitions and anxieties were buttoned in the same lightweight grey suit. Although many of those present were, or had been, married, the going view was that sex was the one form of free enterprise in favour with the company. Having just finished the first draft of The Limits of Love, I had the nerve to confess that my new novel advertised the merits of marital fidelity. Doris Lessing’s Circean smile was kind enough only to suggest that I could not be as callow as I made out. Karl Miller allowed it to be known that, when first married to Jane Collet, the beautiful girl at whose leopardskin tights Tony Becher had pointed a shrieking finger on King’s Parade, he had been surprised to discover that a married man could feel sexual desire for another woman. The indication was that he was now disposed to put Leavisite maturity behind him. I left the meeting with no great wish to go over the top with the up and coming.

  John Sullivan invited me to come up to Oxford and dine in Lincoln College, where he was now the Dean. His duties included supervising the moral welfare of the college’s undergraduates. He introduced me to W. W. Robson, an English don with small respect for the new fiction. ‘One thing you can say for Wain and Amis,’ he remarked (not for the first time, perhaps), ‘they do have quite a good sense of humour; except for Wain.’ Trust a don to allow for a semi-colon in his dialogue. Robson added that Amis had lifted two of his best jokes and put them in Lucky Jim. Perhaps because twice bitten, he cracked none in my presence.

  Academic mimesis had impelled John to mantle his Liverpudlian accent in Oxonian overtones. The panelled and candlelit setting conditioned dialogue and manners. If Robson (in those days, initials were more commonly remembered than first names) was radical in politics, he was polite in society; he too admired Kenneth Burke and the New Critics. I suspected that, while my conversation might make him smile, my fiction would be met with severity. Emulation and odium often go together among intellectuals. The two classical scholars whom I knew best, Sullivan and Peter Green, had a certain mutual esteem, but no true friendship. In those days, reviews in the Times Literary Supplement were unsigned. When one of John Patrick’s early books was favoured with a long, not wholly laudatory article, he was convinced that Peter was its author. As a result, he was not wholly displeased by Peter’s decade-long failure to secure any tenured position. In truth, Peter assured me, the article at which Sullivan took durable offence was not his work at all. The TLS abandoned the principle of contributors’ anonymity in the 1980s, though with little diminution of the resentments they were liable to excite.

  I acquired an admirer in Robert Gutwillig, an American editor who happened to be in London and wrote to me after reading The Earlsdon Way. Under flattering pressure, I gave him a chunk of the typescript of The Limits of Love to read. His response was that, with suitable editing, it might well have a future in America. He was going back soon, possibly to a commanding chair as fiction editor of Playboy. Hefner was eager to expand his magazine’s readership beyond those who opened it only to the double-breasted centrefold. Bob’s four-sided, single-spaced letter promised that he could help me to be a better writer.

  Tom Maschler reported that Anna Freeman-Saunders would be happy to let us have her beach-front cottage in Fuengirola, a few kilometres west of Málaga. We bought a roof-rack in preparation for loading all our portable goods into and onto PLD 75. Confident that he would be able to extract the fat advance we needed, I gave George Greenfield the revised manuscript of The Limits of Love. George had been a pupil and admirer of Frank Leavis at Downing, where he got a double first in English. His lengthy, single-spaced scrutiny of The Limits ended by saying that, despite many good scenes, he had to be honest: in his view, the book had ‘not quite come off’. Agents often feel that they must prove their critical acumen, as much for the sake of their own vanity as with the expectation of being listened to. I asked George to send the manuscript to Cassell’s as it stood.

  Like George, Desmond Flower had won the MC in the war. He was grown up. Cassell’s was a family business; Desmond was as much a solid merchant as any kind of a literary man. He said right away that he liked the book very much; it had the makings of a bestseller. He had only one practical comment, which he hoped I would take seriously: it was a bit long.

  I said, ‘I’m not cutting anything about the things that really matter to me and need saying. About the Jews, I mean.’

  ‘Why ever should you?’

  ‘And I don’t think the sex is overdone either.’

  ‘No more do I. I could have done with more of it if anything.’

  ‘What is it that you’re objecting to exactly then?’

  ‘Six hundred and twenty pages,’ he said, ‘this manuscript.’

  ‘Because it says what I became a writer to say. At last.’

  ‘Here’s what I suggest: take it home with you and cut ten words from every page. You’ll be surprised how easy it is to do.’

  It was the best advice that any young writer is ever likely to have been given. Hemingway’s hints to other writers are often self-inflating, but his trim example still stands: what lasts best has the least fat on it. The lean shaft goes in deepest. After I did as Desmond Flower requested, the book was put into production, to be published in the summer of 1960. I avoided triumphalism when I told George Greenfield of how things had gone. He seemed genuinely pleased by Desmond’s enthusiasm. It might well get a £200 advance. After I suggested that I might write a thriller, if he could get me some money, he came up with another offer from Odham’s, my ghostly second home. They were updating a perennial bestseller, Tales of Tragedy and Horror. If I was willing to do some 2,000- or 3,000-word pieces on things such as the Nazi treatment of the Jews, the Tay Bridge disaster and the sinking of the Arandora Star, it would put some money in my pocket. I armed myself with a skimpy library and added it to our baggage.

  Not long before we were due to quit Grange Road, Bernard Levin wrote an article in The Spectator in which he was happy to declare that there was no longer any anti-Semitism in Britain. Renown had converted yesterday’s Taper into today’s Doctor Pangloss. I sent him the c
uttings that Beetle had culled during her spell at the Appointments Board in Cambridge a few years earlier. His secretary called and asked me to come and see him in Gower Street, where The Spectator then had its offices. In person, Levin was small, with black curly hair, tallowy white face, thick glasses and an unpromising handshake. He regarded me with more suspicion than solidarity. I told him that Beetle was uneasy at having the cuttings published (she had liked Jack Davies), but that the prejudice was so blatant and so systematic that she had agreed that Levin should see them. He asked me what I did and, only somewhat belittled, I informed him that I had written a couple of novels. He seemed to suspect that I was more trouble than I was worth. I left 69 Gower Street composing an involuntary account of Master Levin in the style of the Appointments Board’s Philip Sinker: ‘An unattractive, indoorsy sort of chap with, I fear, the rather oily black curls one associates with Talmudic scribes…’

  Once Levin had read the cuttings, he became fiercely engaged with the scandal, and more friendly: he wrote to me that Lord Rothschild ‘s’intéresse’ and that secretarial heads were likely to roll in the wake of his polemic in The Spectator. He would keep me posted. And so he did; until he did not. Journalists rarely persist with causes that turn out to be lost, however just they may be. More than fifteen years later, Levin was at a party given by Jack and Catherine Lambert, at the time when my television series, The Glittering Prizes, was causing a stir. It was the first invitation of any kind from Jack and Catherine since they had stayed with us five years before. Levin came up to me and said, ‘What does it feel like to be the most talked-about person in London?’

  I said, ‘I was just going to ask you, Bernard.’

  At the same party, John Vaizey was kind enough to tell me that he had been at a party of our one-time neighbour, the publisher George Weidenfeld’s, the previous week. Eager to see the next episode of my series, he made an excuse to leave Chelsea Embankment early: he had work to do. Weidenfeld said, ‘I know exactly why you’re going home. If you really want to see Freddie Raphael’s play that much, it’s on in the bedroom.’

  As an agent, Leslie Linder was always warm, optimistic company, but tenacity was never his first quality: he went from one thing to another, eager for jam, less happy when expected to cut bread and butter. I had a call from his young assistant, Richard Gregson. A couple of old Hollywood hands were in town and they wanted someone to rewrite a script entitled Damon and Pythias. Since it was based on an old Greek story, I was a natural to do the job. Richard had been in the Merchant Navy and was, for a while, a tea-taster in Borneo. His brother was the handsome young actor Michael Craig, whom the J. Arthur Rank publicity department often portrayed stripped to the waist. He had had to change his name because there was an established British movie actor called Michael Gregson. Richard’s brother made enough of a splash as a movie actor to be summoned to Binkie Beaumont’s presence as a possible theatrical leading man. Binkie was sitting at his desk, in shirt, tie and jacket, when Michael was shown in. They talked for a while and then Binkie stood up to reveal that he was naked from the waist down.

  John Redway had a new young assistant, Gareth Wigan, who had been one of our hosts when Out of the Blue was in Oxford, before we opened at the Phoenix Theatre. Not many years later, Gregson and Wigan parted company from John Redway and associates. Representing John Schlesinger, Brian Forbes, Leslie Bricusse and others, they became the most energetic and influential film and TV agents in London.

  Vestigial virtue drove me to check scholarly sources for the original story of Damon and Pythias. My Oxford Companion disclosed that Damon was a Pythagorean philosopher in the time of the fourth-century BC tyrant of Syracuse, Dionysius. When his best friend Pythias (more properly Phintias) was condemned to death, Damon stood surety for his friend while the latter left Syracuse to settle his affairs. Pythias returned to the city and redeemed his friend’s pledge. Dionysius was so moved by the mutual trust of the two men that he pardoned Pythias. It would be nice to suppose that he then made friends of them both.

  Sam Marx had been the long-serving script consultant for MGM. He had figured, in no prominent position, in the credits of any number of lionised movies. Now that he was retiring, the grateful management had given him a picture to produce, along with his friend Sam Jaffe, who had been an executive and then became a successful agent. His clients included Stanley Kubrick. I went to see the Sams in their suite at the Dorchester Hotel. Sam Marx would never have tolerated any screenwriter composing a scene that involved three people of whom two had the same name. One Sam apostrophised the other with repetitive rapidity. They were polite and they were friendly. They had little doubt that I was the man they wanted. I had even been to Sicily.

  The fat screenplay was handsomely duplicated. They already had their deal to make the movie, but both Sams considered that the script needed some work. I should take it to this room they had booked for me at the Grosvenor House, read it, and tell them what I thought. They would fix for me to have coffee. I said that I should as soon take the script home with me, sooner. The thing was, the Sams said, they had a schedule, and the Grosvenor House was not far away. ‘Nor is home,’ I said. ‘I’ll call you in a few hours. Promise.’

  As I stood up, Jaffe said, ‘Fred, one thing we want you to be clear about. This is the story of two friends, the greatest friendship between two men the world has ever seen, that’s our story, that’s what we want to tell: two guys who’d do anything for each other, don’t let’s lose sight of that for one moment.’

  Sam Marx said, ‘And listen, Fred, one more thing before you go, we’ve been doing some thinking about our two characters, so: one thing to bear in mind when you’re reading the script: the way we see it today, where it says Damon, that’s Pythias…’

  ‘And where it says Pythias…’

  ‘That’s Damon. Bear that in mind, Fred, will you, please?’

  ‘Oh and Sam, we had one more thing, Fred: our two guys, yes, they’re friends, and yes, they’re Greek, but they absolutely must not be, you know what I’m trying to say … Greek friends.’

  I had already had some small experience of rewriting a script. When I was working with Leslie, a Pinewood producer called Jo Janni was about to go into production with a script entitled The Big Money. We were solicited by Olive Harding, the script controller who had given us that two-picture deal, to put some late ginger into it. Ian Carmichael was the star. He drove to Chelsea Embankment in his olive-green Ford Consul convertible, the badge of his 1950s success, and told me the sensible things that he thought needed doing. I remembered seeing him in drag in a West End revue. He sat at the piano with an arm full of bangles that kept slipping down over his fingers as he played and he had to raise them, one after the other, and shake the bangles up his arm again.

  Leslie Bricusse must have been busy elsewhere (he was a juggler who would be ashamed to have only one ball in the air) when I was deputed to go and see Jo Janni in his flat in Burton Court, across from the Royal Hospital in Chelsea. Some years later, when we were working together on Darling, he asked whether I remembered the first thing I ever said to him.

  I said, ‘Probably, good morning, sir.’

  ‘No,’ Jo said, ‘the first thing you said was “What do you want to make this piece of shit for?”’

  ‘And what did you say?’

  ‘I don’t know. But I do know that I agreed with you.’

  Leslie and I had done our best to put some new old jokes in the script, which was to be directed by the perky John Paddy Carstairs. His knockabout inventiveness had been exercised to good box-office effect on Norman Wisdom movies. J. P. C. had a sideline as the British mutation of Raoul Dufy. Leslie showed the diplomatic taste to add one or two of Paddy’s daubs to his collection. Our cosmetic work on The Big Money was received with pleasure by Ian Carmichael and with dismay by the picture’s production manager, who said it was unprofessional: by changing the scene numbers, we had dislocated his budget. Did we not know that if a scene was cut, you had to p
reserve the numerology by marking it as deleted? One lives and learns in the movies, often things of very small interest.

  Damon and Pythias was trite, witless and overlong. Experience proves that there is one infallible way of being hired as a rewrite man. You make a damning list of the places where a script does not work, but you emphasise that, if your prescribed course of treatment is followed, a good idea can be brought to fruition. After I had chopped the script with a constructive hatchet and suggested a few unsubtle ways in which it might yet be a hit, I was clutched, like any life-saving straw. Sam and Sam offered me a ten-week guarantee of £200 a week for ten weeks. It was more tempting than a round-table discussion with Karl Miller and kindred cultural monitors, but I declined the commission.

  The offered rate rose to £300, then to £400 a week. Even then I could not bring myself to cash in on the skill with which I had made myself delectable to the two Sams. Despite our poverty, I was set on going to Spain and doing only, or almost only, the kind of fiction I had always intended. I threw away my long spoons and made a silent resolve never again to sup with celluloid devils. Damon and Pythias was eventually made and released, to no recorded ovation, in 1962. It is not only the mills of God that grind slowly.

  Until Miss Pearce broke her word, I had assumed that when what my father called ‘Christians’ gave their word they would keep it. We left Grange Road for the south of France in a heavily loaded car, but without heavy hearts. Paul, never slow to be displeased, was always happy when we were on the road. Before we set out, I sent the complete manuscript of The Limits of Love to Bob Gutwillig. He told me that, if I adopted the radical changes he was planning to propose, he might find me a good publisher in the US.

  I cannot recall how much money, in traveller’s cheques, we had with us. Penury did not inhibit us from making our rendezvous with Joan and Baron at the classy La Petite Auberge at Noves, not far from Avignon. It had three stars in the Michelin, but dinner cost only £3 or so. Baron was now keen to give Joan the luxury that Marxist austerity had denied her. While we were having drinks, M. Lalleman, the young patron, brought us menus in the garden. Beetle and I had been together for almost ten years, so I was careful to ask whether certain dishes contained garlic, to which I knew her to be allergic. Lalleman chose to tell me that I would never keep my wife if I sought to impose my tastes on her diet. I responded as Aeneas did, when abused by Dido, by stammering and being prepared to say many things. I could wish that I had risen to Guy Ramsey’s ‘Remember which side of the counter you’re on’, whatever the French for that might be, but I merely glared at him. I have never known any other restaurateur, of whatever starry status or bold address, talk to a customer as Lalleman did to me that bright evening.