I suppose I was on the way up. There was a very weird landlord, a man called Hector Freeman. He’d been a sort of car salesman in Mexico. He was a flamboyant Freemason and he chose his tenants rather carefully. Friends of mine recommended me as a possible lodger. I went with Hector to the pub, the Pier. It’s turned into the Warehouse now.
You saw Peter Ustinov. The Sitwells. Lady Colefax. Dame Sybil Thorndike. The Pier was frequented by the old intelligentsia of Chelsea.
I met Orson Welles once – with Monica, in Rome. I was overwhelmed. We spotted him looking at jewellery in a window. Whilst I was asking Monica what I should say to him, I turned back and he was gone. Like Harry Lime. I’d seen Moby Dick in the theatre. One of the most amazing productions ever. A small stage but Welles suggested the scope of the thing much better than John Huston in his film. I remember one marvellous line: ‘They’re making hay under the Andes, Mr Starbuck.’ Welles was mesmerizing.
Citizen Kane was our 9/11 moment. I remember the premiere, it had a qualitative change on my thinking. Welles became a sort of god figure, unfortunately. He was a one‐off. He is no template of how to do things. He ended up extremely badly. He was always sitting around with that man who made terrible films. What was his name, Johnny Depp? No, that’s right: Ed Wood. They met when Welles was just sitting in cafés writing scripts, trying to raise money.
I was disenchanted with Soho when I met Henry. In the Pier Hotel. All the Chelsea mandarins were lolling about – with the great Henry. Dregs and real dregs. I had the studio flat in Oakley Street. Hector Freeman said, ‘Let’s go to the Pier.’ And here is Henry. An extremely distinguished‐looking Jewish man. Like a great composer, a huge brow. Hector introduced me to Henry. ‘What’ll you have?’ I said. We drank and we chatted away. ‘Another?’ Then we bought – it must have been me, Henry never had any money – a bottle of wine. I really couldn’t tell you if Monica was there.
We went back to Henry’s room. I think he had already published his first book, Scamp. He never really made a living. But he was writing still. I said, ‘What are you doing?’ He said, ‘I’ve just won a prize. Somerset Maugham has given me £500.’ It was for Scamp. Henry said, ‘Soho people don’t like it.’ He meant Maclaren‐Ross. But Somerset Maugham liked it. He much preferred it to Kingsley Amis, actually. Lucky Jim, he hated that book. He didn’t care for Amis at all. Maugham thought Henry was a good storyteller – which he was. And he could do colourful characters. He had great warmth. Henry was warm. He loved listening to what you had to say. He was very approachable, but he didn’t like wasting his time on doing practical things.
We talked about his experiences, which were much like mine. He came from an extremely orthodox Jewish family in Hackney. He seemed to be part, not only of a family, but of a community. Almost like Amishes. They didn’t go outside. Hackney, one small part of Hackney, was their cosmos.
Henry like myself had been groomed for stardom – and he had broken away. He’d gone into the Air Force, where he was respected. He’d done a lot of literary courses. The people there said, ‘Don’t waste your time in the forces, have a go at writing.’ Someone told him that the best way to learn to write was by being a clerk. You had to compose reports, stick to the facts. Henry said, ‘I followed the advice. When I had a spare moment in the office, I would write bits and pieces and read them out at lunchtime and see who laughed at which passage.’ He said, ‘I was quite surprised. They liked my stuff. They found it interesting, episodes I thought nothing of. The bits I liked they found highfalutin and boring.’
He said, ‘I saw an article in the paper by John Lehmann, who was very highbrow but who remarked that such ideas had nothing to do with the sort of work he wanted to publish.’ He wanted to build up a popular following. ‘I’m looking for the picaresque,’ he said. ‘John Wain. Or Saul Bellow. I’m looking for something that’s on the edge, a little bit sexy. Topical.’
Henry had got his gratuity from the Air Force. ‘I was spending all my time in Soho,’ he said. ‘Living it up as far as I could. Drinking. Courting the girls. I’d come from this very stuffy orthodox Jewish background. I found Soho life fascinating and I thought other people would want to hear about it. So that’s what I wrote. And I remembered John Lehmann.’
William Plomer was the reader at Cape. Ian Fleming owed his existence to Plomer. Everybody thought Bond was bloody awful rubbish, but Plomer said, ‘Yes, but that’s what we’re looking for.’ I think Henry met Plomer and, by way of that, Lehmann. Lehmann was just starting. Henry was one of his first authors: along with Gore Vidal, Paul Bowles, Dos Passos, Raymond Queneau, George Barker. Not a bad list.
Then Willie Maugham started this prize thing. The money had to be spent outside England. He thought the country was going to the dogs. So parochial.
Maugham didn’t have much to do with the actual choice. He wasn’t even on the election committee. I remember Henry saying, ‘I’ve got to go and see the old boy in a couple of days, he’s got a suite at the Ritz.’ I said to Henry that I’d like him to sign my own copy of Scamp. So he came round and I asked, ‘How did you get on with Maugham?’ He said, ‘Oh, marvellous. He asked if I wanted tea or whisky. I said whisky.’ Maugham said, ‘That’s right, good show! I’m going to have both.’
We warmed to one another. We chatted. Henry said, ‘Let’s go up to Soho, old chap.’ I introduced him to all those people. The documentary people I’d been living with for five years. We came out of the pub. ‘We don’t want to spend much time with people like that,’ he said. ‘They only talk about one thing, this bloody film business.’ He took me into another pub, I think it was the Wheatsheaf. There was another crowd, William Sansom and so on. Hogarth Press. Very literary – but modern, up to date. It was around the time of the Festival of Britain, everybody was into the arts. A lot of BBC people too.
Henry got some money, momentarily. Everybody thought he was the chap to know. He was quite well reviewed with his first book. There was talk of a film. That never happened.
Henry got caught up with a man called Adrian Seligman, a buccaneer, quite extraordinary. He was part of the banking family, they were island hoppers. Adrian knew people like Patrick Leigh Fermor, Crete and so on. SOE stuff. We were all unemployable. But Adrian managed to get a job in public relations, assistant to the governor of Cyprus, Lord Harding. The actual PR officer was Lawrence Durrell. Island people, beach people. Henry Miller. Adrian set up a firm called Engineering in Britain. They issued a magazine. Henry wrote an article for them. This would be a decade after Scamp, around 1964.
You couldn’t say that’s what Henry was doing, freelance journalism. You couldn’t ask. He wasn’t a man who did things. He just ran out of ideas. He used to talk about it. I should have learnt more from him, I didn’t take him seriously. I think he had an interior purpose. He hated to be known, he was a very secretive man.
He took a non‐Jewish pseudonym for his book. I remember, in my studio flat, this very sort of Hatton Garden chap came around. He had a set of sacrificial knives, which he used for circumcision or cutting animals’ throats. A butcher. I was there with Henry, chatting away, when he jumped up. He said, ‘This is my brother.’ The brother said, ‘I’ve come to get him to go home to Hackney.’ Henry said, ‘We have this every week. He comes to see me to persuade me to go home. It’s useless.’ The brother said, ‘Your father is getting quite old and ill. I think you should come and talk to him.’
The family thought Henry was in Sodom and Gomorrah. They wanted him back to do his job. He was the eldest son. But he didn’t want to know. They didn’t leave him alone. The brother came every week.
Henry said, ‘What can I do?’ I think he kept on the move. I got married in ’52. We moved into a small house in Christchurch Street, still in Chelsea. I don’t recall Henry ever coming there, but I think he must have done. You change your house, you change your pub. Henry didn’t like the Surprise. Which was what you might call our watering hole.
The Surprise was where I saw William Burroug
hs. Henry was there too. That’s the most fascinating thing, those two meeting. What put Henry against Burroughs – he was pro‐Burroughs at the time – was that Bill was short of cash and borrowed a pound.
Henry was also there, a couple of years later, when Burroughs came back. They were not so very different. They were both renegades. Myself also. I think Henry was surprised at the honour of the thing, the punctiliousness of Burroughs in returning the loan. I was anxious to get Bill on tape. Very engaging fellow, no doubt about it. Patrician, old style: Emerson. Monica adored him. He had this extreme capacity for alcohol which I found very impressive.
I asked Burroughs if he’d be taped. ‘Oh yes,’ he said, because he liked making recordings very much. He liked those old machines. He came round that evening. Henry had been in the pub. He was actually quite drunk, which was unusual. He wasn’t a particularly heavy drinker. He didn’t mind drunks, but he found them rather boring. As soon as he was bored, he would go. But that night he was blotto and Burroughs was fidgeting around with the tape‐recorder.
Henry said, ‘We’ll both say something about ourselves on tape.’ Burroughs said, ‘Mr Lyne wants me to talk.’ I said, ‘That’s right. I can hear you any time, Henry.’ Henry said, ‘My friends are always telling me about Burroughs. So I’d like him to know what I think.’ And Burroughs said, ‘I’d like very much to know what Mr Cohen thinks.’
I was in a complete state of nerves, I could sense the mounting needle beneath what they were saying. I knew Burroughs as a personality, but I wanted to hear him talk: that voice, the delivery. I knew Henry too. The groundswell of tension was building up. I got a tremendous coughing fit. They were talking at each other, sniping backwards and forwards, with great politeness and froideur. Henry said, ‘What friends of mine do you know and where do you meet them?’ Henry was telling Burroughs that I went occasionally to Pruniers in St James’s Street. They talked a lot about Madame Prunier. Henry liked Madame Prunier.
And Monica said, ‘For god’s sake, I can’t stand any more of this. I want to go drinking with Bill. He likes drinking, don’t you, Bill?’ And Burroughs said, ‘I do.’ Henry said, ‘I’m off.’
Whenever I saw Henry after this, he would say, ‘How’s your chum Burroughs getting on?’ In a very scathing way. I didn’t thereafter socialize with Henry very much. He dropped in one day to the offices of EIBIS (Engineering in Britain Information Services), which were located above the Jack Swift betting shop in Swallow Street, just behind the Piccadilly Hotel.
Did you ever come across Peggy Guggenheim? She had a spectacular sister, Hazel. Their mother was a Seligman. They linked the two great families of New York, the Seligmans and the Guggenheims. Peggy and Hazel considered themselves to be poor, their old man was between fortunes. He only had a couple of million. The sisters rubbed along, but they had to work. Hazel became an artist. That’s a portrait of me by Hazel on the wall. Adrian Seligman was very fond of Hazel.
And look at this too: it’s a photograph of Graham Cutts in a boat. We made films together. After the Expressionist cinema of the 1920s, Cutts was a big name and Hitchcock was his first AD, his assistant director. The most eminent of the silent directors of the time, Cutts was with Michael Balcon. He made a film called Woman to Woman in 1923. It was written by Hitchcock. It’s disappeared. A masterpiece. It’s mentioned in Truffaut on Hitchcock, look it up. Cutts always had trouble, films had to be made around the availability of his mistresses.
Seligman would only employ first‐rate authors. His office was on the edge of Soho. I used to go to my old watering holes occasionally. One of those days, it must have been around 1965, I met Henry. He was with a very attractive woman. I think he’d been knocking about with her for quite a long time. She was very Gentile, very county. Enormously devoted to him, in a distant kind of way. She didn’t like being associated with Soho or drink. Or the people who were around.
I said, ‘How are you going?’ Henry said, ‘Rather well. She’s got a lot of money. She wants to get married. She’s got a house, with hunting and that kind of thing. I go down there. My family have cut me off, they don’t want to see me again.’
He said, ‘I can’t go on. I really don’t have anything to do.’ I said, ‘Look, are you still writing?’ And he produced this article. I said, ‘That’s exactly the stuff we want. Why don’t you come round to the office and talk to Adrian?’ Henry said, ‘I don’t know. I can’t go into an office.’
Adrian had an open‐plan design, ahead of its time. He was very laid back, but he was a great stickler for prose style. And for delivery to deadlines.
We went round. Monica was there. Hazel was there. It all developed into a party atmosphere. We decided to carry on to the Studio Club, which was just opposite.
I said, ‘I think Henry would be a good writer.’ And Adrian said, ‘What has he written?’ I said, ‘A picaresque novel and a book about Hackney.’ Adrian said, ‘Good god! I can find twenty people to write picaresque novels about Hackney. I want someone who writes dull‐as‐ditchwater technical material.’ Henry said, ‘I’ll give it a go.’
He turned up for about a month, I suppose. He changed. He became incredibly absorbed in getting it right. He was always asking, ‘What do you want and how do you want it?’
At the end of the month, Adrian said, ‘We ought to have a party.’ I said, ‘What are we celebrating?’ He said, ‘Henry’s departure. He’s a marvellous writer, but it’s taken him months to write two short pieces. It’s not his fault. This is not his cup of tea.’ That was about the last I heard of Henry.
This takes me back to the period in Oakley Street when I was thinking about writing novels myself. Henry said, ‘You’ll have to learn how to do it the same way that I did. You know about films. I know nothing about films but I do work for Metro‐Goldwyn‐Mayer.’ He said, ‘I’m a reader for MGM books. They like to keep a blanket coverage of all novels published in Britain.’ They had an office in Golden Square. There was a woman called Mrs Vaughan who swam around, a PR lady, Korda era, she was in charge.
The pay was minimal, but it was regular. You had to read two or three novels a week. And comment on them in detail. It did teach you to do that sort of thing quickly. Monica would type the reports for me. I was able to do them with the minimum of engagement. Peter Watling, Mrs Vaughan’s assistant – who was homosexual before the days when people were gay – was very fretful with me. He said, ‘You’re not really trying, Douglas.’ He knew me quite well. He’d been a preparatory schoolmaster. He said, ‘You despise this job, don’t you? It’s your business to find merit, not demerit. Unless you give me something, it’s no go.’
I said, ‘You could give me something worthy of being liked.’ He said, ‘Here’s one. But I won’t tell you which of the bunch it is.’ There was a novel by a man called Ernst Jünger. He was greatly admired, a military figure. Clean, you might say, he wasn’t a Nazi. He has come back into fashion now. He writes absolutely superbly. He wrote one around the Second War called The Fort.
Watling put this Jünger in my bundle and he also gave me I Was Monty’s Double – which seemed to me a grotesque concoction. I read the Jünger with enormous attention. I put my back into it. And I said the other had absolutely no hope at all.
The next day Watling called me in. He said, ‘You’re at it again, Douglas. You’re just trying to annoy me, aren’t you? There is nothing in your choice, it’s impossible. And in my view Monty’s Double would be absolutely perfect.’
It was that kind of job. I used to go up once a week to collect the books. Sometimes I’d see Henry. And he’d say, ‘It’s a terrible choice, this life.’ I think he hit the bottle a bit. We used to go to a club called the Caves de France. It was quite close to the Colony Club. And the Mandrake. And the Gargoyle. It was quite a nice pub crawl. It was pretty obvious that Henry was in a downward spiral. He wasn’t pissed, but he was pretty worn. He hadn’t a lot of cash and he found the situation difficult. His friend Elizabeth insisted on being with him at all times. I don�
��t think she drank. They were unhappy occasions.
The man who knows everything about Henry’s final years is his accountant. But he’s dead now. When I first met Henry, he said to me, ‘The one thing you must have, old boy, is a good accountant. Come along with me and meet Leslie Periton.’ The story is rather odd. Periton was one of the most charming men I ever met, but he was lowly – in class origin. Unlovely Slough. He didn’t get an education worthy of his talents. But he got apprenticed very early to an established firm. He was extremely clever. In those days it was very difficult to break through the class barrier.
The accountancy firm, A. T. Shenhalls, specialized in top‐flight artists: Terence Rattigan, Benjamin Britten. Those kind of people. Periton was handling big and important accounts and being paid an articled clerk’s wages. He was also given the job of taking on authors who might be successful. Who weren’t anything at the time. That, ultimately, was Henry.
A. T. Shenhalls had a jealous working relationship with the rather bloated Winston Churchill. He was always being mistaken for Churchill. One of his clients was Leslie Howard, the actor. Gone with the Wind, all that. Howard was a great promoter of British cinema. He had a date with some film‐makers in Portugal, Lisbon. They were going to do a big deal, there was money knocking about. He decided to take Shenhalls along with him. And for some reason which has never been explained the plane was shot down. Howard was killed and so was Shenhalls. The theory was that Shenhalls had been mistaken for Churchill.
Shenhalls ran all these accounts, Rattigan, Britten, Howard. Nobody else in the office knew anything about it – except Periton. And Periton, sensibly, saw a serious opportunity and said, ‘Right, I want to be a partner.’ So they made him a partner on his own terms. He was now an important and likeable man. Rather unusual, that, in an accountant.
Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire Page 49