by Gully Wells
Twenty years ago I drove the late A. J. Ayer to White Hart Lane to support Tottenham Hotspur. On the way Ayer smoked three cigarettes. For his first butt he disdained, or did not see, the obvious—and butt-infested—ashtray, favoring the naked tape-deck with the fiery remains of his Player. (The tape-recorder itself had been stolen, true, but the empty console had the word PHILIPS clearly stamped on it.) His second butt he squeezed into the base of the hand brake, his third he ground out on the speedometer. The high point came with his third spent match, which, with incredible skill, he balanced on the bare ignition key, where it wobbled for at least three seconds before dropping inexorably to the floor.
The first time I slept with Martin at home, he left in the middle of the night—maybe we thought it might be best if he met my parents over the dinner, rather than the breakfast, table—and the next morning my mother had some advice for me. An enlightened parent, she didn’t care whom I slept with or where (she never tired of talking about the married, fascist, rapist hairdresser) but she certainly didn’t want me getting pregnant, and wouldn’t it be a good idea if I went and saw our friend Dr. Slattery? This struck me as a bit odd, since she had never before shown the slightest interest in helping me unravel the mysteries of sex, or the female body.
But I still wish that my mother had thought to tell me what you are supposed to do when you wake up for the first time in a pool of blood and are due to spend the day at some fancy country club, frolicking in a swimming pool, with a school friend and her very stuffy parents. It was not a pretty sight. Even less lovely was the backseat of their Jaguar, after they had dropped me at home. Why would you let that happen to your daughter? It must have had something to do with her own mother’s neglect, and the way she had learned early on to look out for herself, because nobody else was going to do it for you. She had gone to the drugstore alone, at twelve, to buy a box of Kotex, so why shouldn’t I? As far as Dr. Slattery went I told her not to worry: It had already been taken care of.
FOR CHRISTMAS THE YEAR I went up to Oxford my father gave me a present that was even more fun, and considerably more expensive, than the now-drowned record player. A great believer in the virtue of wholesome outdoor activity (I was never allowed to go to the movies if the sun was shining), he decided to treat me to a skiing vacation in Switzerland. A nice, well-brought-up young man I knew was organizing a chalet party in Zermatt, with some other nice, well-brought-up young people, and invited me to join them. It seemed like a perfectly reasonable idea at the time. How was I to know that it would become totally unreasonable—no, totally abhorrent—within the space of a few months? Of course I had to go, my father had already paid for it, and it was only for a week, and I couldn’t let my friend down, but every time I thought of leaving Martin I would start to cry.
I went to sleep crying the night before I was due to go, I cried in my sleep, I woke up crying, I cried in his car on the way to the airport, and we were both in tears by the time we parted at the gate. The nice young people soon realized that they had a deeply disturbed person on their hands. A couple of the girls, softhearted debs with concerned, blinking eyes and furrowed brows, clucked around offering me hankies and sweets, telling me they knew just how I felt (how could they possibly? how could anyone?). The men busied themselves organizing tickets, being bossy to hapless brown porters, hauling clanking piles of skis about, and steered well clear of the loony. Lost in grief, I huddled in my seat on the plane and cried some more. Things did not improve once we arrived at our cozy chalet. I kept the softhearted deb who was sharing my room awake all night with my sobbing, refused to go skiing, and sat in the chalet crying. The next day I called Martin and said I was coming home, and started to pack, dizzy with joy. When my friends returned from their fun-packed day on the slopes, the loony was dancing about, laughing. The men looked nervous, the girls genuinely relieved, and when I told them I’d be flying back to London in the morning, they all looked extremely happy.
There he was at the airport, standing at the gate; I ran into his outstretched arms and burst into tears. I told him I was never ever going to leave him again, and I never did. We drove straight back to Kingsley and Jane’s sprawling house in north London, where we holed up in unlawful, unmarried bliss for the next couple of weeks. Martin once described Lemmons, as the house was called, as “a citadel of riotous solvency.” And that it was. The marble-shelved larder, the size of a small kitchen, looked like a corner of Harrods Food Hall, stuffed with whole hams, pork pies, homemade jams, sausages, Stilton in pottery jars, rounds of cheddar, confit de canard, pâté en croûte, and row upon row of chutneys, pickled onions, and gherkins. These last three items had to be stocked in industrial quantities because Kingsley ate them with everything. Jane was a truly gifted cook, but whatever she made—ethereal blanquette de veau, sublime risotto with wild mushrooms, juicy magret de canard, spicy Sicilian bouillabaisse—Kingsley’s plate would always be piled high with his palate-annihilating pickles. In addition to the larder, the freezer was packed full of frozen delights—haunches of venison, more kinds of ice cream than Howard Johnson’s (served with heavy cream and liqueurs)—and an enormous cupboard off the kitchen was similarly stocked with an array of drinks that would have put the bar at the Curzon cinema to shame.
Like my mother, Jane was married to a man who did nothing but sit in his study all day long and scribble. And like my mother, as the years passed, she became increasingly angry with the same man she had once been crazily in love with. Kingsley (like Freddie) had never learned to drive, so Jane was the chauffeur, housekeeper, chef, gardener, and household accountant; and once she had taken care of all of that, she too sat down to scribble, producing a series of very good novels and short stories. But on Sunday mornings, when it came down to the choice between standing at the kitchen sink peeling potatoes with Jane, or going to the pub and getting pissed on laughter and alcohol with Martin and Kingsley, I went with the boys.
Nearly forty years later I still feel ashamed, but what else was a spoiled and selfish twenty-year-old to do? The trouble was that there were just too many potatoes to be peeled, because the house was constantly full of people, which was what made it so much fun. In addition to the permanent ménage—Jane’s brother, Colin, always called “Monkey”; Sargie, a painter; and Jane’s desiccated mother, who rarely (thank Christ) left her room—there were endless weekend guests. Kingsley and Jane loved to entertain in the true meaning of that word. It went way beyond the delicious profligacy of her cooking and his skills with the corkscrew; it was about sitting down at a huge round table and knowing that whatever else happened, the next few hours were absolutely guaranteed to be entertaining. It was just like being at home, only better—much better—because I was with Martin. We spent the rest of the Christmas vacation in the “citadel of riotous solvency,” recovering from the “hell of Zermatt” (what our new friend Christopher Hitchens would call a “tumbrel” remark, as in the cart that dragged poor misunderstood Marie Antoinette to the guillotine) until it was time to go back to Oxford.
L’Été
THAT SUMMER MARTIN AND I WENT to stay with Serena in Polly’s castle in Italy. About fifty miles north of Rome, Rocca Sinibalda had belonged to Polly’s extraordinary mother, Caresse Crosby, who had converted it into an “artist’s colony” (like many rebellious Americans with generous trust funds who fled to Europe between the wars, Caresse had been mad about artists), and now that her mother was dead, it was Polly’s. Actually “extraordinary” does not even begin to do justice to the wild decadence—and ultimate tragedy—of Harry and Caresse Crosby’s life together. They had both been born into haute Boston society—van Rensselaers, Lowells, Peabodys—but when they fell in love they knew it was their destiny to run away, to leave behind that repressed, dreary, philistine world forever.
Paris was where they belonged. What did it matter that Caresse was already married with two children, and that their families were horrified? In Paris, Harry would be liberated, and his true genius as a poet would final
ly be realized. They would live in a hôtel particulier on the rue de l’Université, with their whippets, Narcisse and Clytorisse, where they would entertain other artists of his caliber, like James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Hart Crane, and Ezra Pound. They might even start a small press and publish their new friends’ work on handwoven paper, with special inks from Japan and illustrations by Cocteau or perhaps Picasso. It was pure madness. And yet some part of the dream came true. The Black Sun Press did publish all those writers and artists (as well as Proust), the books were exquisite, and the Crosbys’ parties were legendary. The genius thing was less easily acquired—no matter how impressive the account at J. P. Morgan.
Although Harry was serious about his poetry, and knew that a great talent should never be squandered, there were just too many distractions—the bar at the Ritz, cocaine, a pretty girl walking down the rue de Rivoli, opium, an impromptu expedition to Venice, absinthe. Like Lord Henry in The Picture of Dorian Gray, he believed it was imperative to give in to temptation, otherwise an artistic soul would surely atrophy for lack of stimulation. Happily that was never Harry’s problem. The opium was supposed to unleash his imagination—just as it had done for Coleridge and Baudelaire—but as De Quincey pointed out, “If a man whose talk is of oxen, should become an opium eater, the probability is that (if he’s not too dull to dream at all)—he will dream of oxen.” Harry’s dreams and poetry unfortunately never transcended their mad but still oxlike nature. Yet when it came to a night out on the town, there was nobody more inspiring than Harry Crosby. Every summer in Paris, when the art schools packed up for the year, the students and anybody else who was around would celebrate at a huge, bacchanalian party called the Four Arts Ball. In 1926 the theme was the Inca, and Harry came up with one of his typically brilliant ideas. He rubbed red ocher all over his body and, dressed only in a loincloth, wearing three dead pigeons around his neck, he set off with his beautiful wife, Caresse—topless, in a turquoise wig—for the ball.
In 1929 Harry—comparing himself to Icarus—took up flying, which rather satisfyingly combined his twin obsessions with death and the sun. He was punishing his body with oxlike quantities of drugs and alcohol, his fragile grasp on reality became increasingly frayed, and his lifelong fixation with suicide began to take over. He started to look around for a woman who loved him enough to follow him to “the undiscover’d country from whose bourn no traveller returns.” He found her in the newly married Josephine Bigelow. (Caresse had already declined to jump from the twenty-seventh floor of the Savoy-Plaza Hotel in New York with him.) The day after his wife’s refusal he received a note from his mistress, which ended with the words “Death is our marriage.” On December 10 he borrowed a friend’s apartment in the Hotel des Artistes on West Sixty-seventh Street, where he shot Josephine and then—a couple of hours later—turned the gun on himself. The revolver had a golden sun engraved on its handle.
Devastated, Caresse published various posthumous editions of Harry’s oeuvre and eventually moved to Italy, where she died forty-one years later. Which is how Martin and I came to be in a pinball arcade in Rome in the summer of 1970. Unencumbered by anything as dull as a guidebook, or a single word of Italian, or any desire to waste our time gawking at Roman ruins or the Vatican, we headed straight for the Eternal City’s tawdry underbelly. Billiards, pinball, cocktails, bar football—what more could we have asked of the one day we had in Rome? Enchanted by our degeneracy—it felt like going to a dirty movie on a sunny day—I eagerly followed my guide into this exciting new world. The improbable combination of dazzling intellect and a profound nostalgie de la boue—he could have been Harry Crosby, but with more brains and less craziness—has always been one of Martin’s most endearing, and enduring, characteristics. And one that I quite naturally found irresistible.
Rocca Sinibalda—the setting for Martin’s most recent novel, The Pregnant Widow, in which the hero, Keith (Martin), spends the summer with his pots-and-pans girlfriend, Lily (me), “34-24-34,” and, quite understandably, lusts after her tall and lubricious friend Scheherazade, “37-23-33” (Serena)—grew straight up out of the rock like some monstrous medieval prison. This is how he describes it:
So here was the castle, its battlements kept aloft on the shoulders of the four fat-girthed giants, the four towers, the four terraces, the circular ballroom (with its orbital staircase), the domed pentagonal library, the salon with its six sets of windows, the baronial banqueting hall at the far end of the implausibly and impractically long corridor from the barnyard-sized kitchen, all the antechambers which receded, like facing mirrors, into a repetitive infinity. Above was the apartment (where Oona [Polly] spent almost all her time); below was the dungeon floor, half submerged in the foundational soil, and giving off the thinnest mist of what smelled to Keith like cold sweat.
Way, way down below, the village curled around the base of its massive windowless walls, and the only approach was up a steep, narrow ramp that really should have had a rusty portcullis at the top, but didn’t. The gate opened onto a cobbled courtyard, with four Rapunzel towers, and in the main building, an endless enfilade of enormous frescoed rooms culminated in a terrace that jutted out, like the prow of a ship, where we would sit at dusk and watch the swallows swirling around in the sky beneath us. When Caresse had bought the castle it apparently came complete with a title—Principessa—and staying there, I kept thinking of my mother’s favorite line in the hymn “All Things Bright and Beautiful”—“the rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate.” “Jesus Christ, no wonder the English can’t escape their goddamn class system, if they sing songs like that.” Yet she herself had never been averse to the odd weekend in a castle. It was extremely confusing. So much simpler to be like Polly, who knew precisely on which side of the moat she belonged. But since Martin and I would soon be huddled within the all-too-genuine peasant walls of La Migoua, surely a girl was allowed a few days of innocent fun in this palatial citadel?
A few days stretched into more than a week, and then it was back to Rome for more pinball before catching a creaky, sweaty train for Toulon. At La Migoua, instead of our romantic bedroom in one of the Rapunzel towers, Martin and I occupied a corner of Freddie’s study. The ground-floor window gave us a panoramic view of Francette’s terrace, where she took her breakfast—coffee, Gauloise, and lots of shouting at Sorgue—and the plywood door, which had never closed properly, was all that separated us from the raucous early-morning and late-night chaos of the kitchen. Never lazy when it came to his work, Freddie would read Nick a rousing chapter of Lucky Luke—“Dad, I told you to talk in English”—around seven, and then liked to be at his desk tackling the foundations of empirical knowledge no later than eight thirty. Sexy, semi-somnolent lingering in bed was not an option. In any case we had to get ready to go to Bikini Beach.
At Rocca Sinibalda we had been a long way from the Mediterranean, so the question of Martin’s seaside wardrobe had not arisen. Used to seeing him in his ubiquitous velvet “strides,” diaphanous shirts, and snakeskin boots—or naked—I had never really thought what he’d wear while lounging on one of Monsieur Maurice’s blue-and-white-striped “mistresses.” Since it was much too hot for velvet and Martin was way too cool for sneakers, here’s what he came up with: snug little pale blue shorts, a chiffon flower-patterned shirt, unbuttoned, and the snakeskin boots, unzipped and flapping about to let the breezes in. Heaven. Apart, that is, from the boiling, red Mount Etna of a “big boy” (as he called them) suppurating on the side of his nose; but I can’t imagine that was what set Freddie off. Normally the most mild mannered of men, he exploded when he saw Martin standing in the kitchen: “You cannot possibly go out dressed like that. That is not what one wears to the beach, or anywhere else, for that matter!”
A little odd coming from somebody whose own anything-but-snug pale blue underpants were, at that very moment, extending a good three inches from the top and bottom of his “shorts.” Maybe he was just fed up with us sleeping in his study. Martin ignored the outburst and
, declining to debate the Wykeham Professor of Logic on the topic of beachwear, we climbed into the back of the car, along with Nick and his inflatable crocodile, a plastic bag full of buckets and spades, an air mattress, some filthy towels, and the picnic basket.
Even though the French refused to come around to the notion of collecting garbage—the dreaded Bandol dump was still an inescapable part of our lives—they were very good at delivering letters. Every morning, you could hear the postman down in the valley, approaching on his farting motorized bike, and by the time he rounded the corner we would all be out on the terrace hopping about with excitement. Since we had no telephone, letters were our only link to the outside world. (Being French, Francette had, through her connections at la mairie, managed to get a telephone installed in her vertical shed, but we were allowed to use it only in the most extreme emergencies.) That summer I noticed that Freddie was unusually happy to see Monsieur le Facteur, greeting him by name, and he even assumed the role of Monsieur’s assistant, handing out the letters with his very own hands. It was quite touching to watch him wrestle with the intractable elastic bands on the package of mail, and then deliver each envelope to its recipient with a cheery smile on his face. He must have decided that this was the one household task that he could master.
The night after the beach-wardrobe assault, Freddie came up with a new plan of attack and challenged Martin to a game of chess. Dinner was over, the marble kitchen table had been cleared—except for the ashtrays and wine bottles—and the chessboard was brought out. Neither of the players was smiling. They each lit another cigarette, filled their wineglasses, and settled down to plot how best to kill the man on the other side of the table. Did I understand the moves? Of course not. But I could see very clearly what was going on. Freddie reached nervously for his silver chain, the one he twiddled whenever his ferocious concentration went into overdrive, and Martin’s right hand started shaking with an almost imperceptible tremor. Their eyes never left the board. As I bustled about—doing the dishes, emptying ashtrays—the only sounds I heard were an occasional groan, or yelp of victory, and whichever one of them had just lost would say in a perfectly reasonable voice, “I think we should have one more game, don’t you?” How could the winner refuse? And then the whole murderous testosterone-fueled battle would begin all over again. I have no recollection of how many games they played, or which of them walked away triumphant in the end. But I suspect they were both convinced that they had put the arrogant little shit/vain old geezer in his place, and that the vexed question of who was the grand master had been settled in an entirely satisfactory manner.