On the Shelf
John Wain and I remembered we had enjoyed dancing ‘when we were young’. Surely it goes without saying we were not thinking of ourselves as much more than young. I was not yet forty, he about that, I think. We took ourselves to the Jazz Club in Oxford Street, where Humphrey Lyttleton played his saxophone with his band, and found that all the young things were being very kind to these oldsters, who really had no right to be there. We jogged sedately about, inhibited by the tolerant but humorous stares, and then danced our way to the edge of the dancing floor—and off and out to drink coffee and to lick our wounds.
Salutary Occasion
John Berger had decided it was a bad thing that writers met only writers, painters painters, architects—their own kind. He was right. There should be a central meeting place, as existed in Paris, where there were cafés one could go to, knowing that there could be found artists, writers, thinkers. But not for the first time—and I am sure not the last—we all came up against the size of London, which can never be like Paris, so much more compact and centred, and the Dôme and the Flore and the Deux Magots ten minutes away. And then, in London, there were the licensing hours, for pubs closed at eleven. But John decided it was worth a try. He hired the large room over a pub a minute away from Oxford Circus—surely central enough—and invited a great many different kinds of people, to break down those incestuously defined barriers. Everyone was there. The place was full, it buzzed, it jumped, it vibrated. What a good idea, we all thought, how clever of John Berger to have thought of it, and of course there must be many more such occasions. And then John called us to order and made a speech. It was a good cause of some kind, political. At once it was observed that the painters, having exchanged looks, were making for the door. They went first, as people remarked, ‘They always did have good sense.’ And then the others left, one by one and in groups, while John spoke bravely on. What was the good cause? Who knows now, who cared then, for we were leaving. ‘Not again,’ people were saying. ‘We’ve been here before, too often.’ And so ended a brave attempt; but if politics had not intruded, we would all be there yet….
The Social Life of the New Left
This was lively. They created a new café, as energetic as ours had once been and enjoyed themselves painting and doing it up, and intended it as the centre of the new political life, but idealistic thoughts are no substitute for a business sense, and it went bust. There was Jimmy the Greek, who served cheap and abundant food in a vast basement restaurant in Frith Street, full of the new comrades, day and night discussing politics—and Jimmy’s is there still. Various cheap places were being hired to house The New Left Review and associated organisations, and these were all being painted by the faithful, and a very good time they all had. Just as we did. In these places, and in the coffee bars and in the cheap restaurants, the new youth sat about, talking. Talking is what one does most of in a New Dawn. I took no part in all this, but Clancy did, and I heard how things were going on through him.
In 1957 my mother died. This is what happened. Having failed to find a home with me, and back in Southern Rhodesia, she stayed with this and that old friend, but knew this could not be her future. She then informed my brother that she would come and live in Marandellas (now Marondera again), so as to be near him. She proposed to devote her life to him and his children: ‘What else am I good for, if not to be of use to others?’
My mother was in a decent and comfortable retirement place. She had a little garden. Nothing wrong with these arrangements—which she made herself. But she had nothing to do. She was a vigorous seventy-three. She played bridge and whist in her afternoons and evenings—she was an excellent player—and tried to persuade herself that she was usefully occupied. Really, she was waiting for a summons from her son: Monica is finding everything too much; please come and live with us and take over the children.
And then she had a stroke. Into her room came the priest—she was Church of England—to administer Extreme Unction. She tried to raise herself, tried to say No, no, no—with her thickened tongue—and fell back and died. She could have lived another ten years, if anyone had needed her.
I was grief-struck, but this was no descent into a simple pain of loss, but rather a chilly grey semi-frozen condition—an occluded grief. As usual I pitied her for her dreadful life, but this rage of pity was blocked by the cold thought: If you had let her live with you she would not have died. I drifted about the flat, returned to my very earliest self, the small girl who could see how she suffered but was muttering: No, I won’t. Leave me alone. Clancy was intermittently there, and was kind. His feelings for his mother, whom he pitied and feared, enabled him to understand mine. The emotions I could not out of honesty allow myself, like simple tears, were expressed for me in blues music. For some weeks, or months, I listened to nothing else. ‘St. James Infirmary’, ‘St. Louis Woman’…Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, others…I cannot hear them now without covering my ears or switching whichever machine it is off. Listening, I was thinking, At what point during this long miserable story of my mother and myself could I have behaved differently? Done differently? But I had to conclude that nothing could have been different. And if she returned to life and came to London and stood there, brave, humble, uncomprehending—‘But all I want is to be of use to others’—then I would say, and be, exactly the same. So what use grief? Pain? Sorrow? Regret?
It was a bad slow time, as if I were miles under thick cold water. Peter knew that his grandmother had died, but why should he care about an old woman who had been there for a while and then left? There are deaths that are not blows but bruises, spreading darkly, out of sight, not ever really fading. I sometimes think, Suppose she were to walk in now, an old woman, and here I am an old woman…how would we be? I like to think we would share some kind of humorous comprehension. Of what? Of the sheer damned awfulness of life, that’s what. But most of all I think that I would simply put my arms around her…Around who? Little Emily, whose mother died when she was three, leaving her to the servants, a cold unloving stepmother, a cold dutiful father.
The New Left was not the only manifestation of young politics. The other was the Royal Court Theatre, now seen as a little theatrical golden age, under the benevolent aegis of George Devine. True, but it was a time of young, talented, clever young men, mostly from the north, mostly working class, and intending to make their mark. Which they have done, every one, for soon they were working in the highest levels of opera and theatre—and film. Then they were mere sparrows to George Devine’s eagle, except for Tony Richardson, who in fact ran the theatre for a while. He was full of irreverence for the established order, like all the young men of the New Left. He was shortly to make the films which put new life into British cinema, Look Back in Anger, A Taste of Honey, Tom Jones, The Charge of the Light Brigade. Meanwhile he was the Royal Court’s cutting edge. He was a tall, bony, handsome young man, who had evolved a camp drawling style, full of darlings—da-h-ling—which probably began as a parody, a style, but took over, as styles so often do. Tony Richardson’s strength came from being the very essence of The Outsider, both in situation and in temperament. Not middle class, not southern English, but with the directness and lack of cant of the northern English, he took a good, long, cool look at cozy middle-class London and soon was dominating any scene he was part of. Now when I look back at the people in and around the Royal Court, he is the one that stands out most, and they were a quite extraordinarily gifted lot.
The Court was more than a lively theatre, with a brave history, where everyone of talent wanted to work. Its atmosphere, its ambience, was so strong that for a while it was more like an informal community. Around it grew workshops and ‘happenings’ of the kind which would be commonplace in the sixties. What need was it then, in the second half of the fifties, expressed by large numbers of people, all young or at least not old—some of them actors and dramatists but some not even working in the theatre—to spend whole evenings, weekends, being Trees, Walls, Rivers
, or delineating Anger, Pity, Love, Compassion, and so forth? Some of these sessions were not unlike what one reads of Victorian drawing rooms, with their tableaux and charades. One house where this sort of thing went on was Anne and Peter Piper’s* on the river at Hammersmith, a wonderful fragile house, with pillared verandahs, giving it the air of a ship adrift on the tides. It was full of beautiful daughters, of all ages, so that it was impossible to be in it without dreaming that Renoir might return and paint the whole lot of them. While I—and Peter—loved visiting the Pipers, I cannot say I enjoyed the charades, neither there nor at the Court, despite its heady atmosphere. I did not like the togetherness, the family, the ‘we against them’—the tribe; I had had enough of all that to last my life. I knew it would soon blow apart, for it always does, but it was charming while it lasted. And for a while I was a Royal Court writer. ‘Oh, you’re one of our writers,’ they would say, giving me good seats, but meanwhile I brooded over betrayal: you made me a promise and didn’t keep it.
I had written a play, about that time when the youth were certainly not interested in politics. For me, after years of political refugees, survivors of concentration camps, of the refugees from the communist countries, to hear some languid youth murmur, ‘I’m afraid I have no time for politics’—it was painful. Kenneth Tynan was the exemplar of the time, for he was a dandy, wearing peacock clothes to annoy his elders, inspired by Max Beerbohm and Wilde. My lot were shocked and disturbed, for we thought, if you are not ‘politically conscious’, then you get what you deserve—Hitler, at least. That some of the most politically conscious generations in history had got Stalin was not a thought we could yet accommodate. So that was the background to Each His Own Wilderness, that and watching a friend of mine, a communist, being harassed by her non-political son, week in and week out, for months, about her politics. Then she gave up politics, and he, overnight, became extremely, not to say violently political—everything he had criticised her for being. Even while I was writing it everything had changed, and Kenneth Tynan headed the new wave. I sent this play to the Royal Court, which meant to Tony Richardson, and was invited to lunch by him and by George Devine, who both enthused about the play. ‘Just as good as Look Back in Anger, da-h-ling,’ drawled Tony. Some prescient imp spoke out of me when I said, ‘But you might change your minds.’ I was assured by both men, with a thousand promises, that this could not happen. Months passed, and I dared write to ask what had happened to the run I had been promised, and got a letter from George Devine, beginning: ‘There are still some things we like about your play.’ Tony Richardson had gone to work in the States, and it was he who had admired the play. His successor as George’s mentor was Lindsay Anderson, who was rigidly left-wing, and he did not approve of it and had told George not to do it. Instead of a run, the play was put on at the Court for a Sunday night, John Dexter directing.* He was then still unknown, unsure of himself but not of his talent, was already a wonderful director. The Royal Court’s Sunday Nights for a time drew packed houses. The play got good reviews. Had it been given a run, it would have done as well as many others, but it was unfashionable not only in subject but also in form. The Court despised the well-made play. They loathed their predecessors, Noël Coward, Terence Rattigan, Anouilh, particularly Priestley. One had only to mention them to hear the sound which is the equivalent of the noisily pulled lavatory chain.
Does it have to be thus? I mean, that a new efflorescence of young talent must despise its predecessors? Many are the New Dawns that I have seen, and all of them are engineered by young people who have to hate their elders. And looking back at my dawn, remembering the vigour of my contempt for those who went just before me, I feel discouraged, know why it is so—but persist in wondering: Surely it doesn’t have to be like this? For it is a wicked waste, this cycle, the new energies leaping up, demolishing what went before…then slowly realising they may have been too hasty and learning to salute people who are only themselves a generation or so back. Meanwhile they are being rubbished by their successors. A sad, bad, stupid cycle.
The new plays given a run by the Court were mostly shapeless, not to say anarchic, and badly needed cutting. Few have survived. But to cut and shape and prune seemed to these innovators an insult to creativity. (This was not true of Arnold Wesker’s plays, John Osborne’s, or Shelagh Delaney’s).
I don’t want to make any great claims for Each His Own Wilderness. It was a nice little play, nothing special. It sometimes gets put on again. To see what it lacked, just think of Waiting for Godot, or Genet’s plays, or Sartre’s. Long after, when Tony Richardson came to see me, visiting London, he said, ‘That was a good play.’ He felt bad about what had happened. And he did something generous. He asked me to write a script of Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust for a thousand pounds. By then I understood enough about the film world to know that this film might never be made, and certainly not as I had written it, and only later understood that Tony was using this way to give me some money. My experience of Tony, about whom harsh things are sometimes said, was that he was kind, thoughtful, generous by instinct, apart from being very clever.
I saw Look Back in Anger with Miles Malleson and could not have had a more appropriate companion. Miles was distressed by the play, but he was far from being some old fuddy-duddy. Now we take Ibsen, Chekhov, Molière, for granted, but then theatre managers were wary of them. Miles had sometimes made new translations, put pressure on the managers, and acted in these plays. He saw himself as having been in the avant-garde all his life, a comparable figure to George Devine. But that night, in the feverish, uneasy audience, the young shouting enthusiasm, the older generation unhappy, Miles kept saying, ‘But bad manners isn’t social criticism.’ Miles was a socialist, but not far from communist; perhaps he was a communist, I don’t know. I met a daughter of his at the National Theatre not long ago, and she assumed my friendship with Miles was that of two old Party warhorses, but I never heard anything like the party line from Miles. Jimmy Porter, with whom so many young men identified, I thought was infantile and as self-pitying as the youths who killed themselves because of Werther. Miles saw him as the equivalent of a fart let off in the face of respectability, and as useful.
Why was Jimmy Porter so angry? There are two deaths in that play. One was his father, dying from the Spanish Civil War, which had made so many Britons ashamed of their government, and the other was an old working-class woman who was a survivor of the hungry, threadbare, grimed-with-poverty thirties. I identified with that anger. Yet the older people were demanding, What was Jimmy Porter—or John Osborne—so angry about? Surely that was what he—or they—were angry about. Acres of print then occurred about the reasons for that anger.
In 1951 had appeared Angry Young Man, the autobiography of Leslie Paul, a distinguished man of letters whose life and publications fill two fat columns in Contemporary Authors. I’ve never met anyone who has read this book, but its title probably inspired Osborne’s title. The phrase was in the air. When at the Royal Court the publicity people were thinking of how to draw attention to Look Back in Anger, they said, to John Osborne ‘I suppose you are an angry young man?’ And fed it to the press. As we all know, to our sad cost, the press cannot let a good thing go, and for years every appearance of new talent was hailed as an ‘angry young man’. ‘Angry Young Men.’ An astonishing phenomenon, journalists: you’d think they would sometimes try for a little originality. Recently we have seen the same thing with John Major, who was described early on in his premiership as ‘grey’. For years, and until recently, John Major has inspired journalists to add ‘grey’. Like so many programmed rats. Mrs. Thatcher: handbag.
And now enter Tom Maschler, very young—twenty-three—handsome, and ambitious, who arrived in my flat with the demand that I write a piece for a book he planned, called Declaration. I said I hated writing think pieces. He said reproachfully that his whole future depended on this book. I later discovered that this was how we all agreed: we could not withstand Tom’s need. Besides,
he had approached Iris Murdoch—he said—and she had said no, and he had to have a woman in it: I could not let him down. This is how I became an angry young man.
Tom was very much a war victim. His parents had come as refugees from Vienna when he was six, and if this was not bad enough, they separated when they arrived. His mother got a job as a cook in a big house in the country. Tom, having been a young princeling in Vienna, was a cook’s son. He became the leader of a gang of delinquent youths, and about his exploits he was very funny and somewhat boastful. He also complained that being rescued by being sent to a Quaker school had ruined him by giving him a moral sense, because otherwise he would have become a second Onassis. His short career in the army had not been a success: he was not the only young man I knew who, outraged that anything so crass could happen to him, simply lay on his bed and refused to get up. He had been a tour guide—this was at the beginning of this kind of tourism. His knowledge of languages and his charm made him a success. All kinds of adventures went on, one being the smuggling of coffee across frontiers. (Good real coffee was a treasured commodity.) I, taking Peter to Spain, had been invited to take across a parcel of coffee for our engaging young tour guide; those were innocent days. Tom decided to be a publisher, got a job at five pounds a week at André Deutsch, and was now in McGibbon and Kee, a very junior figure. He proposed to become the best publisher in Britain, but he had to make a start. This book, Declaration, would be the start. Tom did become the best, certainly the most visible, publisher in Britain. He had a nose, a flair, an instinct. He showed his flair in whom he chose for Declaration. What we had in common was that we were visible at the time; we were ‘names’ with an aura of success or promise.
While waiting for the publication of Declaration, Tom became friends with us all. Some of us gave him advice. Since he wanted to be a publisher, then it would be a good thing if he read some books. Interesting that we all came up with roughly the same list of twenty books. He should also try to read a newspaper a day, for while he might not be interested in politics, he should know what was going on. Well, all right, then: if he didn’t want to read newspapers he must get someone to tell him the news.*
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