‘David too was enthusiastic for teaching Islamic Russians to use American missiles. That was the consensus of the Peace Garden. Only Teller seemed opposed. We could say he showed the greatest prophetic wisdom of the afternoon.’
‘Yes, you could’, she says.
‘The talk turned to one of David’s favourite causes of the time, SDI, the Strategic Defence Initiative, a sky full of American satellites that would destroy nuclear warheads. David loved to draw diagrams to show how it would work, with lines and triangles linking continents from space. If you look long enough around you there will be dozens of these, probably on the back of Messalina’s Positions.’
Miss R stays still.
‘His problem was Margaret, who wanted to please Reagan, wanted US arms spending, particularly that part spent in Britain, but did not want any shield that stopped British nuclear missiles being our “independent deterrent”.’
‘Teller did not care about Britain’s deterrent which he knew was not independent anyway. He agreed with Reagan, that this “Star Wars” shield should be developed, built, deployed and its protection shared with the Soviets; neither rival need then fear obliteration by the other.’
‘Bukovsky said that this was idealism at its most dangerous, an absurd risk. Teller thought that Gorbachev was a man with whom business could usually be done, that Margaret Thatcher was right in her assessment of him in 1984. Bukovsky did not.’
‘Neither man thought that Margaret Thatcher was more than a booster of business. She never wanted to see defence in space. All she wanted was the diagrams and the dreams, British profits to back a President’s fantasy. The Prime Minister was a woman who dreamt – as she slept – as little as she possibly could. Teller laughed at his own joke.’
‘David wanted to agree with them all – with his distinguished guests and with their masters whose dissonant spirits hung behind the Buddahs. This became harder as the afternoon in the garden wore on. Sweating around his neck and wiping his forehead with a giant red handkerchief, he suggested that ‘Thatcherite ideology’ might form common cause between them.’
‘Teller sniffed and said the West had no surviving ideology, that this absence was, in fact, it strength, since it could not fight an ideological war, always the worst kind. Bukovsky sniffed too, saying that Margaret Thatcher had no ideology and that to pretend otherwise was a self-deception.’
‘David’s one thought for the afternoon was dismissed. Ronnie was then rash enough to say that, from everything that he had heard in Downing Street, SDI would not work anyway, that, however many of our missiles we fired at theirs, one thermonuclear intruder would always get through. It was a “Maginot Line in space”.’
‘This brought down upon himself a direct assault from the two scientists. Ronnie was even more rash to defend himself by citing Mrs Thatcher as the scientist from whom he had heard that then heretical view. This provoked yet more abuse, this time on the Prime Minister herself whose contribution to science (if not her fellowship of the Royal Society), said Teller, was in ‘the chemistry of whipped ice cream’.’
Miss R laughs loudly as though in a group of friends.
‘There was a hush at this offence to local proprieties. We could suddenly hear wood pigeons and the hum of distant farm machinery. The Buddhas of Coldham Hall were not used to hearing David’s “lady” described in this way.’
‘Nor was another of the silent guests, the young MP, Michael Portillo, David’s protégé of the time who took Anthony Berry’s seat in parliament after the Brighton Bomb. For David he was long the Thatcherite most likely to succeed, the most worthy of his money and support. This was not, however, a subject to dislodge the higher arguments of the foreign guests.’
‘Discussion of Margaret’s future, high in all our minds, was postponed for later. When the British side gathered again that evening in the gallery of the Gunpowder Plotters, the choice of a new Tory chairman, the virtues of the new Poll Tax, and the means by which our host might have a bigger public presence at the forthcoming Tory conference, were discussed before the main course.’
Miss R stiffens as though she has heard something she has not wanted to hear. ‘Who won the great “Peace Garden debate?” she asks mockingly.
‘Our ice-cream chemist was absolutely right about SDI. But Teller was the winner in the verbal battle that afternoon. The Father of the H-Bomb was a veteran of Washington lobbying and an astonishingly successful advocate for the billion dollar shield. He began the afternoon as an old man, with trousers twisted round his belt and a long stick, and ended it with the vigour he deployed upon US presidents. Bukovsky began with icy passion but ended by agreeing to be a warm-up act for David at a Party Conference rally.’
‘What?’
‘Yes, while matters of higher principle swirled around his statues, this “Freedom Rally” was the most present problem in David’s mind. Ronnie was trying every possible means to stop it happening at all, fearing that the Tories could look, ‘quite unfairly, of course’, like Fascists. His stated reason was that it could be hijacked by the French National Front leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who was also on his way to the Tories’ post-election triumph by the sea. David said that he would stop Le Pen coming. He had friends in Paris who would do that for him.’
‘Ronnie lay back with me in the grass, observing that the whole event was like Bernard Shaw’s play, Heartbreak House, recalling a production from his theatrical youth, “all those dynamite-destroying psychic rays, bombs in a country house garden, the ship of England heading to the rocks, 1919, a fantasia in the Russian manner on English themes”. Michael Portillo smiled but this was another subject that David did not want. He suspected Ronnie now and he suspected me and he especially suspected any comparison to a play he did not know.’
‘It was upsetting enough to him that Margaret Thatcher, in the greater scheme of the world, was minor and irrelevant. He was content to write her off himself but he did not want two of his American heroes saying that she had never mattered very much. It took a long and elaborate dinner before his own mood lightened and he began to talk about a private play that he could produce next time upon his own Tudor stage, some work in which he might himself have an appropriate role.’
‘Seneca’s plays were for small, discriminating audiences. Was there one suitable for Coldham? Or would he have to write a play? He was full of plans for who and what should follow the Thatcher era, the “who” being ideally Michael and the “what” including a much larger role for himself, on stage and off. His benefits were still to come.’
27.7.14
When Miss R arrives today, I am checking some TLS proofs. While she waits, she picks up a copy of a novel by Beryl Bainbridge, Winter Garden (1980), a black comedy about a trip by British Council intellectuals to the USSR.
‘Woodrow loved that one’, I look up and tell her. ‘It is about very complicated adultery.’
She continues reading.
‘He surrounded himself with the latest books. He always liked to keep up with novelists and publishers, even with the “useless literati” whose members he blamed for his own early rejection as a short-story writer and for the cold reception of his plays.’
‘How did the literati think of him?’
‘Badly. Mrs T was a talisman. Woodrow wore her initials on his sleeve. That was enough.’
‘Woodrow held a special personal grudge against Winter Garden’s publisher, a one-time friend of Frank and full member of the literati called Colin Haycraft. This was not because Colin was a man of the Thatcher-hating Left (he was not) but because he entertained many men and women who were, and more precisely because he was Beryl Bainbridge’s publisher and was not, in Woodrow’s view, behaving well.’
Miss R rubs a plastic-ringed finger over the Winter Garden’s grey onion-domed cover.
‘Why would anyone ever have bought something so dull?’
This was a view that Woodrow often uttered himself. I can see what he meant (and what Miss R means today) although the
grey-and-black of this and many of Beryl’s books never bothered me when I began to collect them.
This one stars a man who takes a fishing rod when he accompanies his mistress to Moscow, an accessory that he has added in the hope that his wife will believe he is in Scotland. There are predictable consequences in Soviet-era baggage halls and bars. Miss R reads several pages, laughing from time to time. She seems just about to read a passage aloud (what worse fate than to be read aloud to when one cannot escape, thought Seneca) when she asks a question instead.
‘How about you? Were you with the literati then too?’
‘No, not exactly, although in that summer of 1987 I was on the list for Colin Haycraft’s most famous literary party, the one in which we celebrated the 200th anniversary of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall.’
‘Appropriate?’
‘I didn’t think so at the time but, yes, the Thatcher foes were out in force that night. They sniffed generous alcohol and like-minded company. Declining and falling made the perfect accompaniment.’
Miss R makes a note in her Seneca book.
‘This was not the main intention’, I say. ‘It was not a political party. Colin almost always put classics first. Beryl put fiction first, particularly when she was with Woodrow, who rarely allowed anyone to criticise his beloved Margaret. But it was a literary party and in those days that meant politics too.’
‘After 1987 Margaret divided more than she had ever done, demanding loyalty, dispersing hatred, discouraging any mixture of the two, encouraging her enemies despite herself. This was nothing so unusual for the end of an imperial reign, said Colin coolly, who was himself dressed as Gibbon for the evening.’
‘Curiously, I can now see Woodrow there with him, bow-tied and with a toga on his shoulder, even though I am sure he was not. He could not have borne the knowing sneers that his “lady” was “on her last legs”. Nor would he have liked hearing Beryl, his other lady in the room, relate a “rough trade” one-night-stand with the musician, George Melly.’
Miss R looks curiously across the room and into the sky.
‘Woodrow would most definitely not have felt at home on Gibbon night’, I repeat. ‘But if he had been there, he would not have been alone in hostility to Colin, an “acquired taste” not acquired by a good many people, including many of his guests.’
‘Beryl’s publisher, possibly her lover too, was a much too showy classicist for ease, even more likely to quote Latin than Kingsley Amis was, and also, as Woodrow argued from his own experience as a publisher, an exploiter of Beryl, whose best-selling novels for the Duckworth Company supported many a low-selling work on Cicero and Seneca, a tradition that went back to Virginia Woolf.’
‘Woodrow even warned me that Colin was not a man whom I should meet. He only knew one thing about him, he said untruthfully, and that was that his father had been an army officer murdered by his own men, a story for tragedy, its own truth uncertain. He asked if maybe I could find out more.’
‘I said that I would, but without sincerity. At that time I was in some awe of Colin, who was a bit of a boaster but the greatest independent publisher of books about Greece and Rome, a bit of a showman but for more than twenty years the face, body, brain (and Woodrow-like bow-tie) of Duckworth, promoter of his novelist wife Alice Thomas Ellis as well as of Beryl, Alice’s friend (and often non-friend). On good days, I held the hope that one day Duckworth might publish a book of mine.’
‘Colin impressed Frank because he was a model for anyone who likes to see the world through ancient eyes, one of those rare men who inhabited antiquity as though it were his house. It sometimes seemed as though he inhabited antiquity all the time.’
‘No modern publishers, even publishers of the classics, sprinkle the promotion of their books with sparks of Seneca, judging such displays pretentious, elitist – or, more likely, impossible. Colin was not afraid of anything like that, not even of being deemed superficial. There was virtue, something neither to be hidden nor denied, in a light covering of Latin and Greek. It was central to his sense of himself – a flamboyant, fancy bow-tied example of the keys to his ancient home.’
‘Colin was too like Woodrow for either’s comfort. As a seller of books he was happy enough to be called pretentious, if that was the price he had to pay. He could ape the “ape in purple”, he used to say, challenging visitors to note what he meant, that he did not mind being likened to one of antiquity’s fake philosophers identified only by their coloured cloak. He enjoyed the simian wordplay of aping the ape, quoting the words in Greek and reminding everyone that A. E. Housman had used them too.’
‘And he liked to tell his life story in classical quotation – from Aristotle, tutor to Alexander the Great, to Ausonius, tutor to the Emperor Gratian, the not very great. He strode through Latin and Greek from Mediterranean schooldays to Wellington to Oxford to a start in publishing when his task was to condense Gibbon’s Decline and Fall for modern readers, missing out, as he said, most of the Decline.’
‘This was maybe the version that my friend V had in her box room. She was sometimes very authoritative about Gibbon.’
Miss R has put down her Winter Garden and picked up her SENECA notebook. She waves for me to continue, like a football referee playing the ‘advantage rule’. It is getting late. The office outside is empty.
‘In that summer of 1987 Colin was at the height of his powers as a gentleman bohemian in a publishing age that was beginning to reject both. He hosted his party to celebrate Gibbon’s centenary by dressing as his hero and reading aloud, to a hundred or so of his friends and neighbours.’
‘Memory of this is as fresh as anything in these memories. There we all were on a cold summer night, almost three decades ago, in a tiny, liberal enclave of Camden, the part belonging to playwrights and grand pianos, not ecstasy and bondage trousers. Colin stood high against the London sky, slimmer than Gibbon, disguised in frayed eighteenth-century frock coat and buckled shoes, less fastidious in attire than his hero but consumed by his part. Inside we had the words of Gibbon and outside the police sirens sounded.’
‘In Colin’s garden the mood was political, literary, elegiac. Outside it the noise was of sullen opposition to what the electorate had just decided, stone-throwing, the defiance of keys against the sides of costly cars.’
‘Down beneath the speaker’s podium, there were political commentators talking about Thatcher and Gibbon, variously speculating on which evil Emperor she resembled the most. A fashionable playwright was playing the textual critic of Gibbon, talking about whether “date” or “fate” was correct in Colin’s speech and when both alternative readings would apply in Downing Street. Grand lady book reviewers were talking about Gibbon and the sexual preferences of the Princess of Wales, the subject that was just beginning to be a party subject at this time – and about how much Latin was required to be a gentleman – in the 1780s, 1880s and the 1980s, in Gibbon’s day, in Trollope’s and in their own.’
‘Ferdinand Mount, a future editor of the TLS, a rare friend to Margaret Thatcher on this Gibbon night, was fending away discussion of a piece about her in the latest issue. The TLS classicist and controversialist, Mary Beard, was there too although I did not know her then. The mother of a Tory MP was complaining that anti-Thatcherites had trashed her son’s car.’
‘Away from politics, Beryl and the Booker Prize were the subject of bibulous debate. The chairman of judges in 1986 had been the poet Anthony Thwaite, the most likely candidate in London, it was said, to choose Kingsley’s book about drunken old men who took an hour at least to dress themselves in the morning. In 1987, the chair was another of Woodrow’s female favourites, P. D. James – and there would doubtless soon be a well-spoken lady winner, perhaps even a writer of detective tales. That was how prizes worked. Poor Beryl, dry, thin and laughing with her Liverpudlian vowels, would win when someone like her was in charge. No one was quite sure who or when that might be.’
‘Woodrow deemed Beryl a teller of old-fashioned
stories, the kind that he had promoted (and written) in the 1940s. He liked most her early books whose themes were a better past, darkness, childhood hauntings and cautious adultery. He was fascinated by the story of her father, plunged into rage and poverty by the depression of the 1930s. He liked Winter Garden. He never saw her more Booker-suited later novels, Master Georgie (a Crimean war story shortlisted and beaten by Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam in 1998) and According to Queeney (her account of the last years of Dr Johnson).’
‘When he was with Beryl, or talking about her, Woodrow could play the Senecan role of the literary man for whom politics was a secondary pursuit. This was a conceit but a pleasant and sometimes useful one. He often praised her ribald remarks about trade unions in The Bottle Factory Outing (1974). He joked about her odorous cats and lavatories. He was generally contemptuous of Colin, who taught Beryl’s children Latin, whose father’s fate remained a mystery and whose business acumen was not so very different from his own, similar too, he noted, to that of the classical hack in Beryl’s Watson’s Apology (1984) whose translations earn between £5 and nothing but still keep him from holidaying with his about-to-be-murdered wife.’
This was the time when I seriously began wondering whether I should try myself to sell Colin a book. I had a long neglected project on Cleopatra. Beryl was muttering something about Bernard Shaw and Cleopatra – and resting her ashtray on the back of a stuffed buffalo. Maybe this was my chance. Maybe Colin could help. Maybe he would have done but I never asked him.
29.7.14
Down below us, just inside the gate, there is a single small triangle of grass.
‘So that was where you used to have your lunch.’
‘Some of us, I suppose. Sometimes. Not me. Not very often.’
The Senecans Page 15