by Nick Webb
Subsequently the name of the universe’s worst poet was changed to Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings (note the initials) and that now appears in all but the very first edition of Hitchhiker’s. After Hitchhiker’s was published, Paul Johnstone wrote to Pan Books objecting to the gratuitously hurtful insult to his literary talents.* 43
To the alarm of his friends, family and publishers, Douglas did have a tendency to put private jokes into his work.* 44 It amused him, spared him the agony of cudgelling his brains to invent something ex nihilo, and—in all innocence—he thought that either people would not notice (unlikely) or that they would be amused. The improbability drive, for instance, in Hitchhiker’s, published a friend’s real Islington phone number as it lurched its sickening way towards so-called normality. That number rang and rang.* 45 In the case of the dire poetry, I am sure he did not intend any unkindness to Paul Johnstone. Just occasionally, Douglas’s emotional intelligence—to steal Daniel Goleman’s useful term—was not as sparkling as his high intellect.
The most famous advice in the entire canon—“Don’t Panic”—was something his mother, Janet (a nurse, don’t forget), was wont to say quite often. Yet more characteristic utterances of his mum are attributed to the censorious alternative personality of Eddie, the shipboard computer. “Right! Who said that?” and “It’ll all end in tears” are expressions which to this day the Adamses cannot hear without an inner chortle.* 46
Meanwhile at Brentwood in 1968, the next Adams sighting is in the school’s Winter Theatricals. Douglas played Julius Caesar in Shakespeare’s tragedy. Brentwood stage productions were nothing if not ambitious. Griff Rhys Jones appeared in the same play as a mere servant to Octavius.
Caesar, you will recall, gets murdered about halfway through the play. That may have been a blessing, for Douglas was not one of the world’s natural thesps, even though he loved to perform. He was so big and clumsy that there was always the fear that he would fall off the edge of the stage by mistake. (Even his mum said of Douglas running that it was best to be charitable and not talk of it at all.) He spoke Shakespeare’s verse with understanding and intelligence, but his stage timing was off.
History does not record a review of Douglas’s acting, but one can’t help imagining him being stabbed by lots of schoolboys in togas, and then falling with the slow grace of a combine harvester toppling from a bridge. In the following year’s Winter Theatricals his imposing stage presence was exploited in a role for which a certain disjointed other-worldly quality was an advantage. He played the ghost of Hamlet’s father in a production featuring Anthony Jacques as Hamlet and Griff Rhys Jones as Rosencrantz.
The Christmas House Dinners were another opportunity for the stagestruck. Lesley Hall, the daughter of Micky “Henry” Hall, remembers Christmas vividly in her piece in The Best of Days?:
House suppers were always a highlight of the year. A huge Christmas tree was erected in Old Big School and house residents and invited guests were entertained with musical interludes, comic sketches and the odd play . . . I remember the Hare Krishna movement infiltrating one such performance, courtesy of Douglas Adams. I had not come across anything like it before and thought both the concept and the individual rather weird. I accept now that it is OK to be weird.* 47
Despite not doing all that well in his A Levels, in 1970 Douglas won an Exhibition to St. John’s College, Cambridge. The setback with his A levels he attributed to having met Helen,* 48 his first girlfriend, with whom he was deeply in love, in an Economic History class. However, Douglas blagged his way into Cambridge largely on the basis of an essay on the rise of interest in religious poetry. This had enabled him to perform that trick of the clever but desperate student of taking what little he could remember and wrenching it into a whole new critical perspective, thereby pretending that a great body of knowledge (in reality forgotten or never learned in the first place) had been discarded as a matter of intellectual policy. In this case he recalled some religious poetry he had sung in the choir, much of it from Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno (in college he went on to study this strange poet in more detail). He added a pinch of Gerard Manley Hopkins to a good portion of William Blake, the wild pet of the supercultivated (as T.S. Eliot called him), whose revolutionary verse has—among its many qualities—the virtue of being memorable. Then he managed to work in some Beatles lyrics, all of which were engraved on his heart.
Decades later, when he was awarded that very British accolade of an appearance on BBC Radio Four’s Desert Island Discs, he told Sue Lawley that his essay was egregious bullshit. In fairness to the academics at St. John’s it was probably dazzlingly clever egregious bullshit with more than a sediment of genuine insight. St. John’s happened also to be the college from which his father had graduated, but it is unlikely that this was much of a factor for the admissions committee though it may have loomed larger in Douglas’s mind.
When he won a place at St. John’s on the strength of his brilliant essay, Douglas was certainly aware of his long ancestry of formidable Scottish doctors, and said that he had toyed with the idea of studying medicine. Fortunately his father had broken the line. Douglas was rather fastidious and the thought of peering up the diseased sphincters of the public all his life filled him with dismay; emotionally he certainly would not have been tough enough. Besides, he always knew that his talent was for writing. On the page he was staggeringly good. It was as if his fierce intelligence had nowhere to hide when he was faced with an exam on a topic that he knew demanded no invention. He performed just as remarkably when he took a test paper for the Philosophy and Literature course at the University of Warwick. Indeed, the admissions tutor there, M.M. Warner, wrote to him—clearly in response to a letter from Douglas—to say that his paper was one of two outstanding ones in the year, and that he certainly would have been offered a place.
His school days had given him a sound education and the beginnings of a useful network (Griff and Wix, for example, stayed in touch). Cambridge, with its beauty, the society of the brightest and the best, and its ready-made matrix of contacts that would make a Freemason sick with envy, was to change his life utterly.
THREE
St. John’S, Smokers, Networks and Friends
“Like all the really crucial things in life, this chain of events was completely invisible to Ford Prefect and Arthur Dent . . .”
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
In the full, panting tabloid sense of the term, the 1960s did not really start in 1960, nor did they waft to a close in 1970. History is not as neat as our decimal notation. The Vietnam War was still going, and in May 1970 US forces invaded neutral Cambodia in an attempt to deny the Vietcong access through that country. “Interdict” was just one of the era’s many bullshit words that attempted to lend a spurious sense of precision to a bloody and chaotic conflict. That same month, the National Guard shot dead four American student protesters in Ohio’s Kent State University. Nixon and Kissinger, after a bombing campaign in North Vietnam the devastating scale of which is still not widely understood, agreed a ceasefire in 1972. It was signed in early 1973 and the Fall of Saigon, watched in palsied fascination on telly all over the world, followed in 1975.
The hippy movement—if anything as uncoordinated and woolly could be said to be a movement—was already in retreat. Roland Barthes, the French intellectual, was keen to inform us about the semiotics of clothes. In 1968 flared jeans, bandannas (God help us), and those appallingly whiffy Afghan coats, that somehow we wore without laughing, sent a whole range of signals about politics, social change, attitudes to soft drugs and so on. However, by 1970 it was possible to buy a designer hippy suit—all white—and wear it to Royal Ascot.* 49 At some indefinable moment such gear had ceased to be a sandwich board bearing a message about societal change, and had become fancy dress.
When Douglas went up to Cambridge in 1971, Intel had only just made the first integrated circuit on a silicon chip, so there were no personal computers for Douglas to buy even if he
could have afforded one. He had taken on a series of twit jobs which, as Neil Gaiman observes in Don’t Panic, later served him well in potted biographies on dust jackets.* 50 But there was something important he had to do before going up to Cambridge, something urgent that every restless young man, yearning to feel grown-up and a bit wicked, knew he had to achieve. It was a deed that leaves young blokes feeling as if they’d lived the blues, tunnelled out from a Kerouac novel, sung rambling-on songs through their noses, endured the romance of the bleak, and generally suffered a bit. It was a rite of passage, and one destined to be an essential part of the great canon of anecdotage that surrounded Douglas like an ornate herbaceous border.
No, not sex. It was less fun and much more unhygienic. Hitchhiking around Europe—even to its very edges in Istanbul.
Hitchhiking was far more common in the sixties and seventies than it is now. These days a hitchhiker is regarded as a potential psychopath fully equipped with a delusional system and a twelve-inch Sabatier in the outside pocket of his squillion-litre orange rucksack. Every motorist is an amateur rapist or nutter seizing the opportunity for random malice. These fears are largely nonsense, but we live in un-innocent times. The only hitchhikers routinely spotted on the roads of Britain are stern men in tweedy jackets who have just been delivering somebody’s new Jaguar and have the red, trade number-plates under their arms to prove it. But thirty years ago hitchhiking was an accepted means of getting about, especially for students and the less well-off. The fact that you could spend a day being poisoned and half-drowned on the Einfahrt of some rain-lashed Autobahn was part of the mythology and the appeal of hitchhiking.
Douglas later confessed that he had told the story of getting the idea for Hitchhiker’s so often that he could no longer recall whether it happened the way he said it did, or whether he was just remembering his many retellings—in which case he would have to trust himself and accept that at some point his original Ur-account had a basis in fact. Most of you will have had a similar experience with a favourite yarn, and you have to be quite tough-minded to be sure that you know whether it really happened or whether repetition, and the desire that it jolly well ought to have happened, have induced conviction. We live in linear time (unlike a dog, happy creature, that seems to inhabit an eternal present). Memory on the other hand is not sequential; you can’t count backwards to find the moment when you learned the name of the capital of Chad. Memories seem to be stored using a variety of mysterious principles, so that you have to circle around and around, through misty clouds of association, before you can relocate some missing piece. It is easy to persuade yourself of the truth of something for which the only evidence is a strong urge to believe.
Douglas had a repertoire of anecdotes that he used to great effect on the promo circuit and at conventions and conferences. He always told these stories in exactly the same way, right down to the comic hesitations as he appeared to rummage around his cortex for exactly the right word. Before you scoff, this is not something to elicit cynicism, but admiration. Douglas was a frustrated performer with a perfectionist streak. The appearance of effortless wit is not effortless at all. He liked to entertain, and if he had polished a yarn to the point where it could not be improved he felt he owed it to his listeners to treat them to the best version. The danger of this approach is that a kind of unreality about the original experience creeps up on the teller.
The bare bones of the anecdote are these: hitching round Europe in the summer of 1971, between school and university, with guitar, full of yearning, sap and whatnot rising, looking for adventure, Douglas arrives in Innsbruck,* 51 consumes a bit too much of that sneaky Austrian beer, and lies in a field looking at the stars.* 52 In his bag is a copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Europe by Ken Welsh.* 53 Hmm, thinks Douglas. Someone ought to write that book on a larger scale. I know! The whole galaxy. Wow.
He always claimed he never imagined that he would be the one to do it.
Happily, Douglas survived the rigours of the road, and the apocalyptic scenes you can witness in the gents of the cross-Channel ferries when the early autumn gales are blowing, and got back to England in good time for Ron and Janet to drive him to his room in college (D1 in Cripps Court) for the start of the Michaelmas term. He was to read English under the direction of Hugh Sykes Davies and Dr. George Watson, the latter remaining a friend after Douglas graduated.
Janet recalls that the first person he met was Nick Burton, a scion of the house of Burton, the high-street tailors, who was to share some rather splendid rooms with Douglas in his third year. Nick was 6’4" tall. Douglas and he just grinned at each other, near as damn it eye-to-eye, with that heady mix of emotions that marks leaving home properly for the first time.
Cambridge was—and is—beguilingly beautiful, a paradise of exquisite buildings and civilized traditions, a veritable theme park of education. St. John’s College is the largest in the town. It was founded in 1511 by Lady Margaret Beaufort, the mother of Henry VII, a monarch known to generations of schoolchildren for being miserable, Welsh, greedy and having a Chancellor, Morton, who invented a fiscal rather than physical Fork. St. John’s reminds all visitors that it is a place of work, and not a museum, but you might be excused for thinking otherwise. The college is a delight. From its Tudor gatehouse you pass through what seem like endless courtyards handsomely faced in grey stone, all on an intimate human scale, with windows looking inwards onto lawns so perfect you can scarcely believe that they are vegetable and not extruded from a machine in Allied Carpets. Where the college reaches the river, it hops over with a romantically soppy replica of Venice’s Bridge of Sighs, and then continues with more courtyards, accommodation and tutorial rooms on the other bank.
Of course, academic standards are rigorous; doubtless students manage to get fraught and desperate even in this blissful environment, but, compared to the average blocky, wind-blown university campus, St. John’s is fairyland.
At the time the university was not strenuously political. The economy was not as forgiving as in the previous decade, and the students of the seventies were by and large getting their heads down and working. They were no longer angry, only a bit miffed.
Douglas was not politically radical in any conventional sense, for he was far too intellectually subversive to trust any set of ideas organized enough to be called an ideology. Later in life he wrote with polemical zeal about conservation, but he seldom ventured explicitly into Politics (with a capital “P”), though the reader can often sense him shaking his huge head at human folly, as if saying to himself “dumb, dumb, dumb.”
Douglas’s short story “Young Zaphod Plays It Safe” is as strident as he ever got about matters as parochial as the hierarchical arrangements on our local planet. It is a little beauty, by the way: Zaphod and two creeps from the Safety and Civil Reassurance Administration are on a salvage mission to recover a fearsome cargo from a starship wrecked by its captain’s foolish diversion to collect a lobster dinner. Unfortunately, one of the creatures in the ship’s hold has escaped. It’s a charming but simple hominid that is one of the most dangerous creatures that ever lived because there is nothing that it will not do if allowed, and nothing that it will not be allowed to do. It’s called a Reagan.* 54
Cambridge is famous for many things—including, but, as the lawyers say, not limited to, academic excellence, Ludwig Wittgenstein, astronomy, exquisite but irritating novels about spoilt gits, privilege, parties, pubs, pleasure, punting, spies, and Footlights. Of these, pubs, parties, pleasure and Footlights featured largely in Douglas’s life.
Footlights, or more properly the Cambridge Footlights Dramatic Club, was born in 1883 and given its name by a Mr. M.H. Cotton. At first the atmosphere in the club was bracing—quite foreign to that naughty aura of sophistication with which it was later associated.* 55 It wasn’t until 1924 that the format settled down into the revue style for which it became famous as a showcase for bright young talent. A large share of famous names in writing and acting first trod the boards
in Footlights revues. Performers in those early years included Norman Hartnell, Cecil Beaton, the actors, Jack and Claude Hulbert, and Malcolm Lowry, author of Under the Volcano. Film was used for the first time in 1931; a recording was issued in 1932, and in that year there were women in the cast. The 1933 revue was called No More Women.
Many of the best people in British theatre are Footlights graduates. They were known as the Oxbridge Mafia, even though Cambridge had a far bigger influence than Oxford (which boasted Alan Bennett as a notable exception). The 1954 Footlights revue, with Jonathan Miller, Leslie Bricusse, Frederic Raphael and John Pardoe, transferred to London, as did many other productions from 1963 onwards. Michael Frayn and Joe Melia performed in the late 50s as did Bamber Gascoigne, Timothy Birdsall, Eleanor Bron, John Bird and Peter Cook. Even David Frost. By the sixties the escapees from the club formed a thunderous roll-call of names that were to dominate the revue scene for a generation. Trevor Nunn, Humphrey Barclay and Clive James all directed, and the actors included John Cleese, Graeme Garden, Miriam Margoyles, Bill Oddie, Graham Chapman, Eric Idle, Tim Brooke-Taylor, Russell Davies and many others who went on to be strategically placed in theatre, telly and other media. Footlights’ first big success was in 1963 when its revue, much adapted for its new venue, transferred to London under the name Cambridge Circus. Theatre producers and TV scouts started to attend Footlights shows on a regular basis. The annual show turned, by degrees, into an audition for Shaftesbury Avenue and, almost invariably, the Edinburgh Festival. In response, the club exerted itself to put on shows of ever greater professionalism.