Go Figure
'Right' said Fred (the great removal day)
I remember coming out of a house with a friend, my early days in London. It was a posh area, Bryanston Square, north of Marble Arch, and she was pretty posh, cut glass accent. Someone was passing whom she knew, and she called out from the steps: ‘Charles, how are you?’
‘Much, much worse..’ was the (drawly) reply.
I can report, after the previous batch of essays, ‘Thoughts After a Heart Job’ that I am now much, much better. Those essays were written when I thought I was on my way out, or at least coming to terms with the fact that my time was limited. (It still is, of course.) I wasn’t playwriting much and the essays filled a gap. I wanted to get a down a few memories and, then, as I got better and resumed my proper job, I thought that was it for me as ‘essayist.’
But, lately, a journalist friend sent me a collection of J.B. Priestley’s essays, as if to encourage me (or warn me off). And my best University friend, a cynical fellow, told he’d read them ‘twice,’ though couldn’t resist, in his usual accusatory fashion, questioning, ‘Why did you write them?’ Answer: I found them fun to do and enjoyed coming clean about (what I think is) myself. A young playwright pal of mine found them ‘pretty interesting’ and promptly recommended them to his pals on line. An old teacher from school thought one of them ‘the best hatchet job’ he’d read (which pleased me no end. A+ eh?). And, though I’d a few doubts about exposing some of my resentments/ insecurities/prejudices, and noticing any amount of name dropping, I thought, ‘No, I’ll let them stand.’ They are for those people who, particularly when a play is broadcast, find their way onto the website (which I think of in terms of a country church, the door creaking open very occasionally to some - I like to think – discerning visitor). I am never going to trend or go viral…. And none of this matters.
The impetus for what follows is that I’ve just moved - desk now set up in my new study, books more or less in place - to Canterbury, a place I’ve known pretty well over the years. It’s a late Victorian house (‘Clarence Terrace’ it says outside) on a quiet road within the City walls, within the sound of Cathedral bells. It will do me (as my mother might say) and is almost certainly my last move. ‘Ooh, don’t say that,’ said the removal man, Dan. But I’m 70, just turned. You don’t need to be an actuary…
And last Friday, April 28th, 2017, I went back up to my home town for my (grammar school) Old Boys’ Dinner – all grey haired blokes - and my former history teacher (see above), now well into his eighties, wondered: ‘Aren’t you writing any more of those essays of yours? I used to enjoy them.’ A school contemporary of mine, whom I didn’t know well, revealed he was responsible for filleting them (rather expertly) for the Old Cestrefeldians’ website. (Another guy there, older than me, had first sought permission, which I’d given, on the proviso that he left out the sex, which occasionally features. ‘No, just the school material,’ he said, making me reflect on some of the sex while still at school, and which I’ll maybe get on to when I’m much too old to care.) Another contemporary of mine, (‘I couldn’t get on with it at all,’ he said of my last radio play) rang me last year, having come across one of the essays, ‘Joe’, about a boyfriend of mine, about which he was also critical: ‘We’ve all got tales like that to tell,’ he said, before describing a threesome I would be very happy to read if he chose to set down in print. But it’s me who’s the professional writer and I’ve learnt, over the years, that it’s stuff you’re not ‘supposed’ to write which people most enjoy/lap up. Weakness and inanity is always readable – the opposite of those pious round robins at Christmas or Graduate News Letters. I once composed an antidote to the latter for my cynical (University) pal mentioned above, at what might be politely described as a ‘crossroads’ in our respective lives. I’ll stick to his initials: ‘PC, having left his wife, is living with a woman in Kennington, and Steve Wakelam, on recently coming out as gay, has just contracted crabs.’ Well, E.M. Forster I was pleased to learn on reading his letters at King’s, Cambridge once got crabs, and needed to write to his buddy, J.R. Ackerley, for help. Ackerley sent some cream and Forster, who lived with his mother, had to hang around the front door, waiting to intercept the postman. And the mighty Tolstoy, whom I’ve also written about, once surprised Chekhov by asking: ‘Were you dissipated as a youth? Were you a fornicator? I was.’ A little bit of dissipation, I trust , even degradation or self-loathing may creep into these missives. But what essays offer, as opposed to the writing of a more organised fiction or drama, is the opportunity to set things down just as the mood takes you. To ramble a bit - why not?- even repeat myself (I’ve used the Forster anecdote elsewhere on this site, I know). But they’re my routines. And: ‘Better a good sermon twice than a bad sermon once,’ as a character, based on a real life priest, said in one of my radio plays. Occasionally, I wander into what seems like a definite statement, aware, all the time, that most of what passes for reasoned argument is only a dressing up of prejudices, or whims, which may - and do - change. ‘I do not portray being,’ the essayist, Montaigne, said. ‘I portray passing.’ So I think my tastes – in literature, film, TV – even men – will get plenty of air time. I sent the draft of one of these early essays to a school pal, of great decency; he thinks me ‘raffish’ (is that just the right side of unprincipled?). He was worried I was giving too much away, particularly about my liking for handsome young men. ‘If others examined themselves attentively as I do, they would find themselves, as I do, full of inanity and nonsense’: Montaigne again. I won’t say it’s important to write down what occurs, but I think it’s the name of the game with this particular bout of essay writing, more free form and less economical than previously. What it amounts to is that I’ve felt the need – compulsion - lately to come to terms with things, while also realising that it’s an occupational hazard of the introvert to imagine his feelings are as interesting to others as himself. But nobody needs to read on or ‘buy one get one free.’ People can skip about among the essays. I intersperse with tales - sometimes of the famous - to keep folk alert. And a diary element is creeping in, I notice. I kept a full diary when I turned forty, to set down what I felt and did at that time: 1987. I’m not so interested in the diurnal detail any more but, above all, do want to try to catch the – to me – still rather strange experience of being old.
I’m settling down, not charging round as in what I like to think of my glory days in London. Some days the most exciting event here is the appearance in the garden of the robin. That said, I did awake earlier this week with my tee shirt soaked in blood. I now have a convenient dentist, at the end of the road, and the problem was rapidly solved by Georgios, my new dentist. I’d had an extraction; I take a blood thinner; the healing process had misfired. While stitching my gum, Georgios, to my great surprise (mouth agape, I was temporarily incapable of speech), said to his assistant: ‘Mr Wakelam is rather famous, Amanda.’ I’d filled in a form recently on joining the practice - your occupation and so on - and I can only imagine Georgios had looked me up. After swilling out my mouth, I was able to say I was flattered, wasn’t famous, (see ‘Almost Famous’ ) but had friends who were and I didn’t come into their category. But I’ve been assessing all that for some time, not least the limits of my abilities. I’ve sometimes wished, over the years, for a bit more success (Federer wants one more Wimbledon) but am grateful – a word that happily keeps occurring - for my longevity as a writer. While aware this self-assessment is like the police investigating themselves there’s an important independent reviewer element in whoever chooses to read these notes, and a number of plays available to listen to (‘Answered Prayers’ and ‘A Dose of Fame,’ about E.M.Forster, the briefest - and best?) and one film I’m fond of : ‘Angel Voices.’ Looking at the list of works gives me a certain satisfaction in numbers and that I have made a living writing more or less what I want.
My first published piece as a writer (the School Magazine; I was 12) began like this -
‘“Are you sure it does not hurt?” asked my mother, as I prodded at one of my back teeth with my finger.”’
Which is not quite as I wrote it. The original line read, I recall: ‘as she prodded at one of my back teeth with her finger.’ I was persuaded to change it by my English teacher, Tommy Kershaw, editor of the school magazine. I write about him under ‘Tommy’. He thought it read oddly. But it was what my mum did, and about the only truthful thing about my first excursion into print. It doesn’t scream budding writer, I have to say. I can’t imagine the observation ‘As it always does before a dentist’s appointment the molar ceased to ache’ came from my childhood brain. The essay, almost certainly , like most of my stuff over the years, needed work (or in that case Tommy’s ‘help’) to hit print. But there it is: I was underway as ‘S.E. Wakelam 3HC’. And near sixty years on, am still going, with (most of) my own teeth, good health recovered (with some mother’s little helpers), a new house and little garden, a fair bit still to be sorted and not much else happening otherwise, for which I am now grateful. Been there, done it, am now thinking about it. There’s a new play; a novel some considerable way written. The writing of these essays has usefully infected my attempts at prose. They’ve freed me up, corsets off.
The pieces will be intermittent , thoughts begun, perhaps - as this morning - in the bath (that lingered).That essay ‘Impure Drama’ is full of – are they prejudices or preferences? Though nothing so pretentious as a writing manifesto, it becomes, as with a fair bit of this kind of material, a sort of apologia. But ‘I change my mind, my mood, my feelings all the time’ (Montaigne again – or maybe me adapting him). ‘Nothing in life need be taken seriously,’ is him, definitely. They’re my feelings too. And don’t look for ‘balance’ in these notes: this is not the BBC at Brexit time. In the essay ‘Going Forward,’ I drift away – the way gay men do – with a few hankerings about young men, while having, at the same time, a good knock at yoof’s linguistic litter. I’m proud to be a pervert, as commonly understood. The now Director of the Royal Court Theatre once excoriated me for saying, in her hearing, that I fancied the (then) Guardian’s TV critic. ‘Cakes and ale’ is my response to that puritanism. I am a bit less happy to be a pedant. But even Will Carling, thirty years on from battling the tweed jacketed RU hierarchy, is admitting now to being an old fart. I’ve been without the pangs of love for over a decade, and am inclined to what seems to me harmless fantasy. The painter, teacher and connoisseur of young men, Keith Vaughan sternly drew up for himself a list of ‘Love Lessons for the Over Forties,’ chief amongst them:
‘Don’t look for Romance…That belongs to the tentative, the immature, the fresh and the young. From you they look for experience and the masterful possessor, or the friend and confidant. You achieve nothing by sharing their indecisions, doubts, shyness, awkwardnesses. Offer them support, the strong arm, the marble brow.’
There’s been more of the marble brow over the last thirty or so years than I would ideally have liked. I don’t feel myself as tragic - less Ibsen, who, in old age, fell for young women - than Chekhov, who has a lighter touch with these matters and features more than once. What I like about Chekhov is his reserve, his irony, obliqueness – and his avoidance for most of his life of dependent (in his case, female) relationships.
But these preferences/bugbears/ obsessions will no doubt emerge. So ‘Pass the samovar’ (or whatever you do with samovars) and let’s begin.,,,
POSTCRIPT
(There’s a double time scale about the last couple of paragraphs above. I’ve revised them on completing what turned out to be over a dozen essays.)
(April and October 2017)
‘Much, much worse..’ was the (drawly) reply.
I can report, after the previous batch of essays, ‘Thoughts After a Heart Job’ that I am now much, much better. Those essays were written when I thought I was on my way out, or at least coming to terms with the fact that my time was limited. (It still is, of course.) I wasn’t playwriting much and the essays filled a gap. I wanted to get a down a few memories and, then, as I got better and resumed my proper job, I thought that was it for me as ‘essayist.’
But, lately, a journalist friend sent me a collection of J.B. Priestley’s essays, as if to encourage me (or warn me off). And my best University friend, a cynical fellow, told he’d read them ‘twice,’ though couldn’t resist, in his usual accusatory fashion, questioning, ‘Why did you write them?’ Answer: I found them fun to do and enjoyed coming clean about (what I think is) myself. A young playwright pal of mine found them ‘pretty interesting’ and promptly recommended them to his pals on line. An old teacher from school thought one of them ‘the best hatchet job’ he’d read (which pleased me no end. A+ eh?). And, though I’d a few doubts about exposing some of my resentments/ insecurities/prejudices, and noticing any amount of name dropping, I thought, ‘No, I’ll let them stand.’ They are for those people who, particularly when a play is broadcast, find their way onto the website (which I think of in terms of a country church, the door creaking open very occasionally to some - I like to think – discerning visitor). I am never going to trend or go viral…. And none of this matters.
The impetus for what follows is that I’ve just moved - desk now set up in my new study, books more or less in place - to Canterbury, a place I’ve known pretty well over the years. It’s a late Victorian house (‘Clarence Terrace’ it says outside) on a quiet road within the City walls, within the sound of Cathedral bells. It will do me (as my mother might say) and is almost certainly my last move. ‘Ooh, don’t say that,’ said the removal man, Dan. But I’m 70, just turned. You don’t need to be an actuary…
And last Friday, April 28th, 2017, I went back up to my home town for my (grammar school) Old Boys’ Dinner – all grey haired blokes - and my former history teacher (see above), now well into his eighties, wondered: ‘Aren’t you writing any more of those essays of yours? I used to enjoy them.’ A school contemporary of mine, whom I didn’t know well, revealed he was responsible for filleting them (rather expertly) for the Old Cestrefeldians’ website. (Another guy there, older than me, had first sought permission, which I’d given, on the proviso that he left out the sex, which occasionally features. ‘No, just the school material,’ he said, making me reflect on some of the sex while still at school, and which I’ll maybe get on to when I’m much too old to care.) Another contemporary of mine, (‘I couldn’t get on with it at all,’ he said of my last radio play) rang me last year, having come across one of the essays, ‘Joe’, about a boyfriend of mine, about which he was also critical: ‘We’ve all got tales like that to tell,’ he said, before describing a threesome I would be very happy to read if he chose to set down in print. But it’s me who’s the professional writer and I’ve learnt, over the years, that it’s stuff you’re not ‘supposed’ to write which people most enjoy/lap up. Weakness and inanity is always readable – the opposite of those pious round robins at Christmas or Graduate News Letters. I once composed an antidote to the latter for my cynical (University) pal mentioned above, at what might be politely described as a ‘crossroads’ in our respective lives. I’ll stick to his initials: ‘PC, having left his wife, is living with a woman in Kennington, and Steve Wakelam, on recently coming out as gay, has just contracted crabs.’ Well, E.M. Forster I was pleased to learn on reading his letters at King’s, Cambridge once got crabs, and needed to write to his buddy, J.R. Ackerley, for help. Ackerley sent some cream and Forster, who lived with his mother, had to hang around the front door, waiting to intercept the postman. And the mighty Tolstoy, whom I’ve also written about, once surprised Chekhov by asking: ‘Were you dissipated as a youth? Were you a fornicator? I was.’ A little bit of dissipation, I trust , even degradation or self-loathing may creep into these missives. But what essays offer, as opposed to the writing of a more organised fiction or drama, is the opportunity to set things down just as the mood takes you. To ramble a bit - why not?- even repeat myself (I’ve used the Forster anecdote elsewhere on this site, I know). But they’re my routines. And: ‘Better a good sermon twice than a bad sermon once,’ as a character, based on a real life priest, said in one of my radio plays. Occasionally, I wander into what seems like a definite statement, aware, all the time, that most of what passes for reasoned argument is only a dressing up of prejudices, or whims, which may - and do - change. ‘I do not portray being,’ the essayist, Montaigne, said. ‘I portray passing.’ So I think my tastes – in literature, film, TV – even men – will get plenty of air time. I sent the draft of one of these early essays to a school pal, of great decency; he thinks me ‘raffish’ (is that just the right side of unprincipled?). He was worried I was giving too much away, particularly about my liking for handsome young men. ‘If others examined themselves attentively as I do, they would find themselves, as I do, full of inanity and nonsense’: Montaigne again. I won’t say it’s important to write down what occurs, but I think it’s the name of the game with this particular bout of essay writing, more free form and less economical than previously. What it amounts to is that I’ve felt the need – compulsion - lately to come to terms with things, while also realising that it’s an occupational hazard of the introvert to imagine his feelings are as interesting to others as himself. But nobody needs to read on or ‘buy one get one free.’ People can skip about among the essays. I intersperse with tales - sometimes of the famous - to keep folk alert. And a diary element is creeping in, I notice. I kept a full diary when I turned forty, to set down what I felt and did at that time: 1987. I’m not so interested in the diurnal detail any more but, above all, do want to try to catch the – to me – still rather strange experience of being old.
I’m settling down, not charging round as in what I like to think of my glory days in London. Some days the most exciting event here is the appearance in the garden of the robin. That said, I did awake earlier this week with my tee shirt soaked in blood. I now have a convenient dentist, at the end of the road, and the problem was rapidly solved by Georgios, my new dentist. I’d had an extraction; I take a blood thinner; the healing process had misfired. While stitching my gum, Georgios, to my great surprise (mouth agape, I was temporarily incapable of speech), said to his assistant: ‘Mr Wakelam is rather famous, Amanda.’ I’d filled in a form recently on joining the practice - your occupation and so on - and I can only imagine Georgios had looked me up. After swilling out my mouth, I was able to say I was flattered, wasn’t famous, (see ‘Almost Famous’ ) but had friends who were and I didn’t come into their category. But I’ve been assessing all that for some time, not least the limits of my abilities. I’ve sometimes wished, over the years, for a bit more success (Federer wants one more Wimbledon) but am grateful – a word that happily keeps occurring - for my longevity as a writer. While aware this self-assessment is like the police investigating themselves there’s an important independent reviewer element in whoever chooses to read these notes, and a number of plays available to listen to (‘Answered Prayers’ and ‘A Dose of Fame,’ about E.M.Forster, the briefest - and best?) and one film I’m fond of : ‘Angel Voices.’ Looking at the list of works gives me a certain satisfaction in numbers and that I have made a living writing more or less what I want.
My first published piece as a writer (the School Magazine; I was 12) began like this -
‘“Are you sure it does not hurt?” asked my mother, as I prodded at one of my back teeth with my finger.”’
Which is not quite as I wrote it. The original line read, I recall: ‘as she prodded at one of my back teeth with her finger.’ I was persuaded to change it by my English teacher, Tommy Kershaw, editor of the school magazine. I write about him under ‘Tommy’. He thought it read oddly. But it was what my mum did, and about the only truthful thing about my first excursion into print. It doesn’t scream budding writer, I have to say. I can’t imagine the observation ‘As it always does before a dentist’s appointment the molar ceased to ache’ came from my childhood brain. The essay, almost certainly , like most of my stuff over the years, needed work (or in that case Tommy’s ‘help’) to hit print. But there it is: I was underway as ‘S.E. Wakelam 3HC’. And near sixty years on, am still going, with (most of) my own teeth, good health recovered (with some mother’s little helpers), a new house and little garden, a fair bit still to be sorted and not much else happening otherwise, for which I am now grateful. Been there, done it, am now thinking about it. There’s a new play; a novel some considerable way written. The writing of these essays has usefully infected my attempts at prose. They’ve freed me up, corsets off.
The pieces will be intermittent , thoughts begun, perhaps - as this morning - in the bath (that lingered).That essay ‘Impure Drama’ is full of – are they prejudices or preferences? Though nothing so pretentious as a writing manifesto, it becomes, as with a fair bit of this kind of material, a sort of apologia. But ‘I change my mind, my mood, my feelings all the time’ (Montaigne again – or maybe me adapting him). ‘Nothing in life need be taken seriously,’ is him, definitely. They’re my feelings too. And don’t look for ‘balance’ in these notes: this is not the BBC at Brexit time. In the essay ‘Going Forward,’ I drift away – the way gay men do – with a few hankerings about young men, while having, at the same time, a good knock at yoof’s linguistic litter. I’m proud to be a pervert, as commonly understood. The now Director of the Royal Court Theatre once excoriated me for saying, in her hearing, that I fancied the (then) Guardian’s TV critic. ‘Cakes and ale’ is my response to that puritanism. I am a bit less happy to be a pedant. But even Will Carling, thirty years on from battling the tweed jacketed RU hierarchy, is admitting now to being an old fart. I’ve been without the pangs of love for over a decade, and am inclined to what seems to me harmless fantasy. The painter, teacher and connoisseur of young men, Keith Vaughan sternly drew up for himself a list of ‘Love Lessons for the Over Forties,’ chief amongst them:
‘Don’t look for Romance…That belongs to the tentative, the immature, the fresh and the young. From you they look for experience and the masterful possessor, or the friend and confidant. You achieve nothing by sharing their indecisions, doubts, shyness, awkwardnesses. Offer them support, the strong arm, the marble brow.’
There’s been more of the marble brow over the last thirty or so years than I would ideally have liked. I don’t feel myself as tragic - less Ibsen, who, in old age, fell for young women - than Chekhov, who has a lighter touch with these matters and features more than once. What I like about Chekhov is his reserve, his irony, obliqueness – and his avoidance for most of his life of dependent (in his case, female) relationships.
But these preferences/bugbears/ obsessions will no doubt emerge. So ‘Pass the samovar’ (or whatever you do with samovars) and let’s begin.,,,
POSTCRIPT
(There’s a double time scale about the last couple of paragraphs above. I’ve revised them on completing what turned out to be over a dozen essays.)
- Federer did win Wimbledon. The new play was a success. ‘Past Master’, said one critic; ‘expert stuff,’ ‘gentle,’ ‘meditative,’ ‘clever’. So that’s all right then and which cheers me as the novel I’d hacked some considerable way into has been abandoned, for now at least. I hold on to the fact that there’s salvageable material, and indeed – in the bath this morning – was considering a switch of emphasis. At seventy, by no means rich but without financial pressures, I can afford to tackle stuff that may never see the light of day. Every writer I know – with the exception of (Sir) David Hare – is wracked with doubt and uncertainly and ditches stuff.
- But, throughout the summer, the essays kept being posted. What surprised me was that they became, increasingly, an account of a sentimental education, prompted without a doubt by its being 50 years since Homosexual Law Reform. I wrote the last essay three weeks ago, enough distance to see that I continue to wonder if a close relationship is a surer route to happiness, though it’s work, I seem to conclude (for better or not), has given me a sense of personal value. And for all my worm in the bud niggling I’m grateful – that word again - for that.
(April and October 2017)