Letters to Verges/2
26 July
OUT OF BOUNDS
Just back in Kent after a week-long tour of the North, Chesterfield included – but mainly North Yorkshire, looking for a place to stay, while working at Leeds. One was spectacular – Sutton Bank – but a bit lonely. Another belonged to my (Derbyshire) cousins, neat, ordinary but large flat above a shop, ex-post office on the outskirts of Ripley, great views of Crich and hills - and cheap. Decision time is not yet – will need to come back again; my pal in Ampleforth, away in Ireland, has a little house I use while searching. I like that Thirsk neck of the woods but am inclining to Derbyshire, though it’s further from – and the wrong side of – Leeds. Not Chesterfield, couldn’t go back. It’s altered too much: that Sixties carving out parts of the centre of the town, all the car parks. I passed the old Grammar School in the car, looking to right and left at the junction with the road – forgotten its name – to Hurst House, where we gravitated as Sixth Formers. Early Victorian (?), grand, attractive out of bounds lawn - there was a lot that was out of bounds. At the back of a lot of this (correspondence) is what we might call Chesterfield – how we responded to it, how it formed us.
A funny thing happened yesterday. After a meal with my cousins at that gay run pub-resto I got up early to head down to London for my usual long summer house sit in Blackheath – good friends of mine. Arrived at ten, installed myself, shower, do my washing. Notice washer is full and am puzzled. So is dishwasher but I clear that, thinking they’ve left in a rush. Much food in the fridge. I start on a pork pie – very upmarket one – along with salad for lunch, pour a glass of Sancerre and read papers, tearing a page out which might be useful. And then my friends walk through the door. I was a week early for the house sit.
….Got a new radio commission – Mrs. Tolstoy, wife of the great man, Woman’s Hour 5 part serial. I did a Woman’s Hour about the second Mrs. Hardy that went down well. If that was more neutral tones this is more tumultuous, red and black - to quote a novel I’ve never got through (Tolstoy was influenced by its battle sequence). And I remember beginning ‘Charterhouse of Parma’ with great enthusiasm a few years ago when I was living in France a lot. I was reading French literature almost exclusively (in English) in an enjoyable high minded way, attempting to get into the culture. Stendhal wrote ‘La Chartreuse de Parme’ (sounds better in French) in something like two weeks and the first hundred pages are terrific but then it seems to become almost random plot. I’m always interested in how writers write: Simenon turning out Maigrets in less than two weeks, no messing about. He had to work himself up into an anxious state before starting, I gather (‘I will fail with this one…’). And Balzac would write for days and nights on end in dressing gown, fuelled by tobacco and coffee… and died early, I note.
I’ve a choice of houses these dog days, and from my premature house sit, I went on to my Canterbury friends’ place. I’d said I’d call in, anyway, to water their garden if necessary. There is at these times competition for what I laughingly call my services. I’m clear about this. I’ve been house sitting for my friends in Blackheath for over a quarter of a century. I fit the rest of the offers – a number of them regular and predictable - round them. Think of it like a more modest version of the Queen’s yearly round, though mine in August is Blackheath rather than Balmoral. I have my own place to go to these days, but like the variety – and familiarity. There’s a nice little garden in Canterbury, and because it was all last minute, no one knows apart from the owners, my friends, that I’m there (which suits me). Yesterday, however: a knock on the door – a lad asking for the daughter of the house, who’s away doing a summer job in Brighton, while she’s at what they all call Uni. I used to fancy this lad when he was around the house and I was living there for a time. He was much changed, clothes and appearance, and I didn’t recognise him at the door. He’s in a band now and stylish. He’s called T. Now I’d heard that last year his dad, with whom he lived - just the two of them - had died. My heart went out to him but didn’t know him well enough to ring. He came in for a cup of tea and we moved away from the bland fairly fast. I said, ‘You’ve had a hard time.’ I know about dead dads - mine died when I was 15. A few tears from T and, I think, a useful chat – unexpected. On leaving he said it was a meeting meant to happen. Needless to say I still fancied him and I’m the same age as his dad.
I’m popping back to Folkestone from here (a pretty drive) to clear out some things ready for my move North. It was wonderful to see all my stuff come out of storage a couple of years ago, but my sentimentality over items of furniture that belonged to my parents and other (often Chesterfield) memorabilia has faded. The flat in Folkestone on three levels accommodated it all easily, and, having found it, I’m reluctant to give the place up. At the top is an extensive roof terrace with a view of the sea. Folkestone reasonably sunny and en fete: will miss it, though prefer it quieter, off season, waves battering the harbour wall, Meryl in ‘French Lieutenant’s Woman’ etc.
30 July
HAPPY FAMILIES
Reading ‘Anna Karenina’ again, after forty years, for the Tolstoy serial. Magnificent - though I fail to understand the appeal of that opening sentence, which I always get the wrong way round. Are all happy families alike? – you tell me. I’ve no idea. I don’t understand families so don’t write about them. I had a period as a child when I wanted a brother but it didn’t last long. My closest friend is, I sometimes think, like an elder brother to me – i.e. annoys me from time to time. He’s a bit older than me by fourteen months and quite likes being ‘protective.’ He and his wife have four kids. I like staying with them at Christmas, but three days is enough. When I went off to my bedroom last year to read while everybody was watching telly, my pal, when I came down, said, ‘Where were you? What were you doing?’ I have this nightmare vision at Christmas time of thirty million people on sofas in front of big screens. Suffocating - I could never watch ‘The Royall Family.’ I suppose it’s why I like tennis and horse racing – I’m not a team player. No idea how you continue to support Sunderland. I’m a vague Arsenal fan – I lived near the stadium for a time, and had a bit of a yearning for Dennis Bergkamp. I knew some people who were friends of Tony Adams and would quiz them for any snippet about the great Dutchman. He and Adams once shared a car journey together to some match, Cardiff maybe, or up North – Bergkamp having a fear of flying. All I got, via Adams, was that he found Dennis ‘an enigma.’ Thanks, Tony.
When I lived in Highbury, on warm days my windows would be open, and you could smell dope as Arsenal supporters made their way from Stoke Newington, where they could park more easily, to the match. I went once with Tony Adams’ friend to a match at Highbury. There was a no smoking ban, but he said at the end of the game you get a distinct whiff of joints being lit up. Right on cue – a tedious draw against a cloggy Bolton – marijuana filled the air. It doesn’t happen at Spurs. My Blackheath friend, Spurs fan and season ticket holder, took me to a match – against Arsenal, as it turned out. The atmosphere was more macho. The great Dennis was coming to the end of his career and there he was right in front of me. ‘Don’t fucking cheer when they score,’ my friend hissed as the match started. It was a two all draw, so honour was squared. I’m a bit bemused still that I’m old enough to be the father of footballers I’ve fancied who are hanging their boots up.
Oh, my friend the Arsenal fan once told me that there was some guy who comes round with a boot full of porn VHS tapes for the players (this was the Nineties). I kind of imagined him distributing them – largesse into eager hands – but I presume he sold them, car boot sale-like. Well, players have a lot of time on their hands, though Adams says that Arsene forbade their looking at the ‘adult’ channels when in hotels abroad. Thought it saps their energy for the game ahead. It’s no wonder, Keith, I’ve never made it as a top class sportsman…
Keith had admitted to not having got through more than the first pages of ‘War and Peace’ and asked advice.
2 August
VAST READING GAP OF SHAME
…You must have another go at ‘War and Peace’. The Penguin edition is fine. A great deal of the original was written in French anyway so no English translation is ever going to get those shadings.
My friend D was reading your e mail over my shoulder at his house last night. ‘I’ve never had an e mail that long,’ he said, interestingly. He’s a GP. We had a fling together at a cemetery in Sheffield on a midsummer night near thirty years ago. (‘The grave’s a fine and private place, though none. I think, do there embrace.’) Our embraces (not quite the word for it), though thrilling, were never to be repeated and he’s lived with M for near all those subsequent years. They’re now hitched and are now my closest gay friends. I use their little house in Northern France as a home from home (see ‘The House in France’). There’s another to add to this list of ‘fucked and stay friends’. He’s called E, straight, married and, as he now lives in Hastings, I mosey along, skirting the Romney Marsh, to meet him in Rye, or he comes with me to watch Spurs (his team) when I get free tickets from the owner of the house I type this from. I like the fact that we’re two supporters who have had it off.
My Ampleforth pal, who – despite being his mother’s darling (‘She’d wash my face flannel and pick up my clothes every day’) – hasn’t a gay bone in his body. He was a professional footballer for a time, when, as an apprentice, it was his turn to skivvy and clean boots. I taught him English Lit. A Level at night school after he packed in football. He lived in the next village in Yorkshire to me and I would give him a lift back from yet another of those mining villages (where the Night School was). When he told his mother I was gay she said, ‘I know.’/ ‘How do you know?’/ ‘He said he liked my curtains.’ Though we never got it together, that attraction of mine – he’s a handsome feller - has settled over the years into a close friendship. He became disillusioned with football – tales of bullying, getting his balls blacked and so on; was an individual player at a time when the team ethos was at its apogee – Don Revie, Billy Bremner and that brutal Leeds outfit. From playing for Sheffield Wednesday he’s become a classicist and a reader of philosophy (for pleasure). When conversation flagged once in a pub I said, ‘I’ve never read the Odyssey, J. Should I?’ And got an account of the story that saw us down our pints and had the tables near us listening – Homer weaving his magic - in silence. He’s also a horse racing pal, more knowledgeable than me. I was in San Francisco twenty years ago. It was Derby Day and, allowing for the eight hour time difference, rang him (am happy to say that because of my journalist friend, Simon Hoggart, then stationed in the States, the phone call, thanks to the Observer, was free: I think I had to enter in a code to start). Instead of the simple result, J. took me through the race, keeping me in suspense, Nashwan sweeping through to win. He’s done me a recent work favour. While staying at his place in Ampleforth I picked up an old Penguin Classic ‘Essays of Montaigne.’ Never read them before. Looks like I’ll be writing a play for Radio 3 about Montaigne soon.
I’m impressed with anyone who can spell Aschenbach with confidence in an e mail (Keith had mentioned ‘Death in Venice’). Thomas Mann once wrote that he would renounce his reputation for a glance from a good looking waiter. Saw the film: Bogarde overdoing it rather, as Mahler/Aschenbach, late in his career signalling to the world where he – Dirk – had been ‘at’ all these years.
Right, got back to Blackheath at eight this morning, washing in the machine, read paper, e mail, washing out of machine and onto line down the garden, and now trip for supplies from Blackheath Farmers’ Market. ‘Always keep on top of your washing’ – my strong advice to the house sitter. My mobile, which arrived by post while I was house sitting was instantly accessed some years ago by Tom, the son of the house there. I’ve known Tom since he was a little boy (‘Steve kick ball over roof’) – he’s now thirty. Adept at these things, he changed the ring tone quietly. I went down that morning to the Farmers’ Market, where amongst all the middle class Blackheath matrons in a queue for upmarket, (presumably) wholesome pricey bread, my phone rings. Only rather than a ring it now loudly announces: ‘Steve, pick up the fucking phone.’ I’ve kept the message, though turning down the volume, despite occasional embarrassment on buses etc. (though why I bother bothering I’ve no idea. Folk say what they fucking well like at top volume on fucking buses and trains these days). When I was a kid, walking with my dad, and heard the famous four letter word mentioned by a couple of workmen, my dad said, ‘Take no notice. It’s pit language.’
Piece about William Trevor in the Observer today. My Ampleforth pal, J., who spends a lot of time in Ireland, is a big fan. And Trevor’s ‘The Ballroom of Romance,’ dramatised on television in the Seventies, was among one or two other ‘Plays for Today’ at that time that made me want to be a TV writer - loving, sad, not much happens, or seemingly so. Trevor (I was interested to read) works on a number of stories, novels – ideas. Says every now and again, metaphorically, he gets one of them out from under the bed to see if it’s come on, developed shoots. Though he writes novels, I’m not sure they are good as his shorter stuff. I suspect I’m short winded as a writer, though both ‘Mrs. Tolstoy’ at an hour and a quarter and the Montaigne, probably an hour and a half, aren’t exactly squibs. And I like finishing one topic/area of interest - Russia at the end of the Nineteenth Century, total immersion for a few months – and then it’s France, the Valois and Henri IV. I’m not writing a PhD – don’t have the stamina – just soaking up enough stuff to make the world I’m writing about convincing, the odd striking fillip of detail etc. though I once came a cropper with ’a little touch of cobalt blue’ in a play about a Sixteenth Century Venetian painting. No one noticed, and a monk pal of mine – the Prior at the monastery I stay at each year – singled it out as very evocative. But I’d boobed. Writing about Vermeer a few years later (it’s on the Listen section of the website: ‘Two Men from Delft’) I realised cobalt blue wasn’t invented (compounded?) till the end of the Eighteenth Century. Bogus erudition. I like the remark – do you remember it? - about that News of the World newspaper editor from your time, the vigorously Cockney Derek something: ‘Derek thinks that “erudite” is something you get from B and Q.’
11 August
NOEL ROAD
I’ve just returned on a wonderfully humid August night from my old pal Nina Bawden’s, whose name appears on the walls of the tube at Angel, a dramatization of ‘Carrie’s War’ being in the West End at the moment. She’s frail now, but I remember the old formidable Nina. I adapted a couple of her novels for TV and lived at her house for probably two years of my life while she and her recently retired husband, Austen, travelled the world. After the Potter’s Bar crash (where Austen was killed and Nina severely injured) I then lived with her for a time. It wasn’t easy but I remain fond (see ‘Nina’) and the wine and food are always good. I know the house, as a number of others, intimately. There was a new novel by her old friend and rival, Penelope Lively (Lively’s ‘Moon Tiger’ pipped Nina’s ‘Circles of Deceit’ for the Booker) beside her as she sat in her familiar chair by the window in her upstairs sitting room that looks out on the flat across the road where Joe Orton met his end. I once played Scrabble with the two novelists (didn’t win but didn’t come last) and later walked Lively back over the other side of Upper Street: she was nervous about walking home in the dark alone. Nina tonight doubted the urgency of Penelope’s new novel. And I can’t help noting that knocking around with the North London literati distance me from ‘Chesterfield’ (more down to earth?), though Nina, who can have something of a grande dame manner, was a Grammar School girl herself. Both grammar school Joan Bakewell and Sue Lawley famously changed their accents at University. I did for a bit, failing to notice that at the time of Mick Jagger, everyone was heading down market. When I got back from University and went to pick my mum up from the Co-op, where she worked, one of the other assistants said, ‘Oh, doesn’t he talk nice..’ Nina - Ipswich but cut glass - is struggling with her own novel about a house sitter, which she will never finish. I like to think I have something to do with that….
When I was not so confident with my own writing some years ago Nina two floors downstairs in that tall house was knocking out a novella length polemic, ‘Dear Austen,’ about the train crash, which I recommend and which she part dedicated to me. I advised on the start of a chapter, which she bridled at initially. Two days later: ‘You were right about that first sentence.’ But it’s impossible to believe she will ever write another fiction after that autobiographical blast. Hence, perhaps, that remark about ‘urgency.’ But she battles on, boats against the current.
Piece about seagulls on the ‘Today’ programme this morning. After a few years in Folkestone won’t miss them. (They only arrived in English seaside towns in the Twenties. Previously nested on cliffs). And in another e mail will follow up on what you asked for about ghostly experiences or, more interesting, out of the ordinary experiences. You’re going to get a bit of religion from me before too long. Tolstoy converted to Christianity in mid-life - decided to live out Christ’s teachings. This is the basis of the drama I’m writing – there’s much comedy in it.
Keith was on holiday in Dorset with his eight year old grandson, Dan, and had responded by text. Maybe knowing that he wouldn’t reply immediately, at least by e mail, encouraged me in the following. I remember wondering to send it or not.
12 August
BEATIFIC
… Just to say that I share Dan’s distaste for short sleeved shirts. Please tell him that I rather admire sleeveless tee shirts on hunks, being something of a body hair fetishist.
You now know as much as you need to know of the porn tape flickering in my brain. But on May 7th, 1995, I was on my unhurried way from the cottage (‘roses over the door’) in Kent I once mentioned to you, cycling to my friends in Canterbury. It was a Sunday morning. I paused to rest for a few minutes leaning on a gate by a field in countryside – it’s the back of Whitstable, Blean woods, close to Mount Ephraim Gardens - and I suddenly lost the person I was and was caught up into something stupendous, the universe suddenly a harmony. I remember surfacing after what was probably only a minute or two and being relieved to be me again. Now, of course, I want the experience again. It was beyond imagining and probably beyond inducement. I hope so because I see it, possibly foolishly, as something arriving from the outside. What convinces me about the experience was that I didn’t know what had happened at first, though I knew something had happened – and cycled on. I didn’t mention it to my friends though when I did, later that summer, they said they knew, that I seemed in some way ‘transformed’ (their word). A filly of Dick Hern’s won the One Thousand Guineas that afternoon, and I watched that, cycled back that evening, and for months had a feeling of utter confidence and relaxation. I started reading after a time about these things and barely stopped for years. It’s what they call the Beatific Vision. I’m not a rationalist: I’m in the imagination game - but this was too good for my imagination. I’ve taken E (when it was worth taking) and it beats that: a different order of things. When I first talked about it a few months later to a priest pal of mine I burst into tears. Now, I go to monasteries – or one in particular – once a year for a week. I can’t get on with the Church of England, for all the usual reasons, though have tried. I enjoy Canterbury Cathedral for evensong and that’s about it.
What I like about the Resurrection stories is that the disciples and women didn’t know what they were seeing at first. It’s an experience that changed me: I decided to let it. You were changed, I presume, by love and marriage. It gave me confidence to sell my flat and go a wander. ‘And all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well..’ My writing went into abeyance. I read masses of theology and then the new work started coming through – a great deal of biographical stuff.… My saints are secular saints: Flaubert, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Forster etc. I particularly liked writing about Hardy whose principled lack of belief almost qualifies as a form of faith.
And, fear not, Keith, the porn tape still flickers in the brain…
Keith was (I was to learn) an atheist, but also, as a polite and sympathetic man, took his time in weighing up what to say about this. But, at house with a supa dupa Apple computer – and on my own a lot – I was ‘into’ this form of autobiographical writing (this is me after forty years) starting with what was on my mind that day and heading backwards at the flick of a switch to what someone called ‘the distant shores of the past’. I’d heard, recently, of the death of a guy who had meant a lot to me at Cambridge.
19 August
WEYMOUTH
.. Fantastic picture in the Graun of Weymouth Sands, that big crescent of 18th (?) century houses round the bay. I barely know Dorset but visited a couple of years ago when beginning work on the Thomas Hardy serial for Radio 4. It had a good title, ‘What I think of my Husband’, which I think sold it to the BBC. Much enjoyed the research – hence a visit to his cottage at Bockhampton, now done up to Marie Antoinette standards. His grandmother was ironing when she heard the news of the French Revolution and later feared Napoleonic invasion. Via Miss Thody (our ancient landlady in Cambridge) we probably skip back in three great leaps to that time – hello, Jane Austen (another Dorset fan)…
I’ve been in London mainly, but had a day in Folkestone on Monday. Boxing up, I found an old set of ‘Plays and Players’ and a selection of theatre programmes. I’d started at Cambridge occasionally getting down to London to see plays I badly wanted to see – remember one memorable summer Saturday where I saw the National company in ‘Much Ado’ – Maggie Smith, Robert Stephens, Albert Finnie, Derek Jacobi in a Zeffirelli production, glorious, with Sicilian town band. That evening it was Peter Hall/ Harold Pinter ‘The Homecoming,’ for the RSC at the Aldwych. Stage writing’s never been quite my thing, but I haven’t been short of stimulus, from our old school plays on. The theatre memorabilia, programmes, ‘Plays and Players’ emerged from out of storage a year or so ago and resonate. They date from that time in the late Sixties and Seventies where I wanted to join that actor-y world. Reading the mags, getting distracted rather than getting on with clearing, I noticed the amount of actresses (in particular) who’ve disappeared professionally (I mention one or two) and spotted other careers on the rise. In the programme notes for the Bergman ‘Hedda Gabler’ with Maggie Smith I find a play-worthy account of Ibsen (my age now) becoming infatuated with a young woman aged 18. Now, why do I find that so interesting?
Yesterday I took a trip to Islington to see John Burgess, who used to be the assistant to Peter Gill at the National Theatre Studio, and remembers me - though not me him - from Cambridge. He showed me a programme of the ‘Othello’ I was in at the end of my second year in the Cloister Court at Queens’ I was surprised to see I was credited with being Production Assistant i.e. Associate Director. Our Desdemona went on to TV fame for a time, John told me: I’d no idea of that. Sad to note that the director Iain Wright, and one of the cast, have since died. I can’t have been much of an assistant to Iain, whose death I heard of through seeing his photograph – then realising it accompanied an obituary - in the Queens’ Bulletin. It shocked me: he was so handsome and sparky, remained so. He was a Double First (seemingly effortlessly) determinedly ‘cool’, not at all the dogged, head down swot. He was another of my heroes, though I incurred his wrath when, during ‘Othello’ rehearsals, I skived off one day to see the Derby with friend Pete. But I was only playing Rodrigo, a lick and a spit of a part. I’d wanted, badly, to play Iago, and auditioned strongly, but he – wisely – settled for someone more in the Frank Finlay sergeant-major mode. It’s that time in your life when you think you can do anything and I’m comedy, mainly, a gadfly (with glum bits), a bit of a flibbertigibbet – Rodrigo gets me. I played him a touch (maybe a lot) camp. Don’t know if folk drew conclusions – but I was an actor in real life, too, and gave a passable impression of being straight.
The following year it was my turn to direct. Iain was still round in Cambridge starting his PhD, which he never completed - a couple of subjects for books were mentioned along the way (one on Forster I remember) but he never got round to publishing anything. I had picked ‘Winter’s Tale’ as the play to direct and he badly wanted to play Leontes, but I had someone more suitable lined up and cast him as Autolycus. He went sulky for a bit, threatened to not take part at all. Conceded, as I knew he would. He loved acting and those Cloister Court productions – was a fine Prince Hal, where I’d played opposite him (would you believe?) as his father, the dying King. He was excellent as Autolycus, sprightly. We remained pals for years till he de-camped to a Professorship in Australia. The last communication I had with him, just before he started his new life, was a blank Christmas card (I recognised the writing on the envelope). He had married (lucky woman, I thought) a very nice, shy, Australian, Penny, a bit older than him. They lived on Parker’s Piece – I passed the house every morning on my walk into King’s while researching the Forster play in Cambridge early this year. There was a step son and they had a daughter. But I also learnt in the Queens’ obituary that his marriage had broken down out in Australia.
A daft detail: he wore jeans with a dark blue shade I admired – as so much else about him. Could never get that shade (but did inherit his rooms in Fisher, T1). He was Sixties stylish, left wing, but, above all, a scholar and enthusiast, a great teacher I would imagine – he loved literature, and to me, once, came up with a theory about the origins of ‘Twelfth Night,’ on the basis of some document discovered while he was Librarian at Queens’. I would have loved to have told him about the Forster play. Always thought I would see him again sometime.
I said to John Burgess on our table out in the Islington street (having given him the copies of ‘Plays and Players’ I mentioned to you) that we’d all be forgotten in thirty years and, while I was pleased enough with my CV, I wouldn’t be troubling the greats. He let this go but there were what looked like tears in his eyes. As we parted he said, ‘Look, your dialogue is almost – I say, almost – as good as Caryl Churchill’s. You’ve got at least one very good stage play in you.’ Through the years John has nudged me on, given me a helping hand, got me back into radio, where he directed two plays of mine. He gave me an intro into the National Studio and tutoring younger playwrights. Tipped me off about the Royal Literary Fund posting. In person, he’s waspish, but I wouldn’t have survived without him. I enjoy our meetings, on Upper Street generally, sitting outside, he with orange juice, me with something with a little more kick.
The context of my bout of downbeat realism was those people who featured in those Seventies ‘Plays and Players’ – actresses in particular. Where are they now? I mentioned one to John and he said, ‘Oh, she lives near me. I saw her on the bus the other day with her grandchildren.’
York Races for me on the TV this week. Tears in my eyes as ‘Sea the Stars’ was led in to prolonged cheers on Tuesday. Not often you hear that. He was 4-1 on, so it’s not the punters talking through their pockets.
Up North in the next week or so to house hunt. This is my fault. I told the Literary Fund that I’d work more or less anywhere – I applied within a month or two of finding the Folkestone place, imagining I was still completely fancy free, and the Leeds job means I can do more or less what I want in terms of writing with no money worries for the next two years. It’s a price worth paying. But don’t want to shift: I’ve found a proper berth in Folkestone.
Keith clearly, as it turned out, preferred matters of flesh to that of the spirit. He wasn’t inclined to pursue my numinous (nebulous?) e mail confession- and I was probably relieved to be on safer ground. What interested him much more as a film buff was the obvious gay sensibility of the sister publication to ‘Plays and Players’: ‘Films and Filming’ ….but he was to get another epiphany from me.
20 August 2009
SOMETHING FOR THE WEEKEND
Now there I was, trying to raise our sights to the mystical sublime. ‘Films and Filming’ we now realise was run by wooftas, never so happy to insert a glimpse of pube into the august journal. I heard Alan Bennett recently describing the cabinet minister, Andy Burnham’s, dark hair – presumably on his head – as ‘Pasolini-like’. Bet Bennett sneaked into cinemas showing Film and Filming’s favourite auteurs, Pasolini and Warhol. I certainly did in Sheffield at that now defunct cinema where you headed out from the Hole in the Road to Attercliffe. Saw ‘Flesh’ there, maybe ‘The Arabian Nights’ as well.
My parents never appeared naked in front of me, so I blame my mum and dad (Philip Larkin like) for what follows. Very early on at the Grammar School, I’m aged eleven and, coming from out of the gym to the showers, there’s a sixth former soaking himself, solo. Wonderful athlete’s body, some chest hair, and bush. If I didn’t know I was attracted to men by then there was no doubt after that. What I did know was to keep quiet about it, and wouldn’t have mentioned anything except my friend Chris had also admired this Adonis. Walking back from school that night, Chris said (innocently) something about the sixth former (M. or B.J. Price, if memory serves). Didn’t have my worries, in short, about ‘revealing’ what I already knew – or suspected – I was. The two of us had a fight soon after that and stopped accompanying one another to school. He left Chesterfield a little later, one of these lads who just came and went during your school career. Years later, I’m at a party at the National Theatre Studio and John Burgess says, ‘Stephen, have you met Lindsay Anderson?’ Lindsay filmed that kind of gym epiphany in ‘If’ where the young school tart watches Richard Warwick on the high bars. Lindsay’s posthumously published diaries are quite sad; he was almost morbidly attached to a young actor called Frank Grimes, whose handsome face peered out at me last night from these one of these old copies of ‘Plays and Players.’
Our school – public school style – had six houses. Below the Sixth form you were meant to wear caps on the way to and from school. The houses had Latin tags, apart from – for some reason – Lingard, which I refer to finally. Keith had just written movingly about the early death of a friend of his, a fellow pupil I didn’t know well. The young man – G - had been an ordinand. I seem to go on a bit of a riff before saying what I ‘ought’ to feel.
23 August 2009
HIGH MINDED
Not thought of G for half a life, dark, gangly, musical, Foljambe – peculiar how you remember your peers by their (arbitrary) Houses. I got my dad to lie so I got in my preferred house, Lingard (name appealed and its red stripe). He filled in a form to say a ‘cousin’ had been in Lingard. This is because I had – still have – definite views on which houses were preferable. Lingard is tops (natch), then Large, you will be glad to know (Keith’s house: colour purple) - then Foljambe and Heathcote - with Bradley beyond the pale. No strong feeling about Clarke. I loved the scarves that came out in late autumn, have one of those snapshot memories of coming back from school along our lane in black blazer, house tie, a white shirt, and, cap perched impudently on the back of the head, and scarf. Now you will tell me that G was blond, not in Foljambe (dark blue) and in, God help us, Bradley (light blue) – not a proper house (never won anything). ‘Loyal Je Suis’!! (which was Lingard’s oddly French motto).
I think of the parents of G, have been thinking anyway lately of the high mindedness of our parents’ generation. We share a great deal of it. The obverse of this worthiness was a certain narrow mindedness, a censoriousness. It died a death as a dominant factor in politics with Thatcher’s Governments, lingers on with Tebbit and backwoods Tories. I thank God for the Sixties – we know its limitations and stupidities. But that premature death of an only son must have tested the G’s faith, which I hope held up.
Even that image of a Lingard cap, tipped on the back of the head, is underpinned with sex and yearning for a lad in Lingard, a teenage idol of mine, four years older. The first time I found myself in his company I was twelve, speechless. Knew what I wanted. Your account of G puts these feelings into severe perspective. In the ‘Observer’ today there’s a long interview with the dancer, Michael Clark. When, in 1985, we were rehearsing at the Riverside Studios, Hammersmith, the young Michael Clark walked through the foyer. He’d be 24. I’ve never seen a more beautiful man, near perfection – looks, movement – at the peak of his early success. Five years later I’m waiting for a bus on Shepherd’s Bush Green to roll me down the Goldhawk Road from the BBC to where I was then living in Chiswick. A wasted but recognisable figure then crosses the road and asks me if this is the bus to the Chiswick High Road, He was gaunt and with (what I knew even then) was a heroin pallor. Clark was on his way to the Sadler’s Wells rehearsal room there, and in no fit state. I went upstairs on the bus and he downstairs. Wish I’d attempted some kind of conversation and sat next to him but there was nothing you could do: he was out of it. Wasn’t surprised to learn a few years later he’s blown the choreography game and was in a form of rehab. Golden lads. G wasn’t ‘golden’ – few of us are – but he sounds, from your account, very decent. ‘High minded,’ ‘decent’ – there’s a lot to be said for that old Grammar School ethos. And, maybe irrelevantly, ‘Gay News’ (a lifeline to me in the Seventies when it arrived through the letter box in a plain brown envelope - W.H. Smith’s refused to stock it) developed a huge – high minded – literary section, almost TLS like. Now the required reading for gay men is BOYZ (mag), very lively, many pages of small ads with cocks. I’ve not missed an ‘l’ out there – that’s ‘small ads with big cocks’.
Keith and I had the same digs while at Cambridge, he two years after me. I had suggested these digs (on Marlowe Road, Newnham village) to my successor as Head Boy, Chris Pountain, when he came up to Queens’. He had, in turn, done the same for Keith. Our landlady was the ninety (plus) year old Miss Thody. Keith, a much kinder man than me, had got to know the old lady quite well.
24 August
MARLOWE ROAD
Miss Thody, born during one of Disraeli’s administrations. Did you have the set of rooms or the back single? Was it me who put you on to her? Bad system that at Queens’ to put people out the first year. I remember crying after two weeks of term I was so homesick. JW, the owner of this house I’m back at in Blackheath, when first at Fitzwilliam, used to relieve his loneliness by going to the cinema every afternoon. I shared those digs with a lad I always just kind-of got on with - he arrived just ahead of me that October day, so got the (better deal of) two rooms. We were both doing History. He was pleasant, a bit boring, I thought – I remember him scuttling off to lectures (we never went together – I never wanted to be seen with him). It’s ‘Pride and Prej’ - you make decisions about people almost straight away. But - needs must - I knocked round with a few boring types that first term. I’ve got a mental image of walking round Cambridge Market Square one damp Sunday evening with a Welshman, both of us in sports jackets (dressed as for a production of ‘Look Back in Anger’ and a look I later ditched). I think he was disappointed I dropped him: he was a nice lad, a scientist, quite pretty, blond, straight. Even if you’re not lonely you need company in case you look lonely. It was only at the end of term, right at the end, that I came across the guy who would become my closest friend. We both got drunk at the Bats’ (Queens’ Dramatic Society) party – after ‘Luther’ (I was the lead; he was fourth monk - I’ve never let him forget this disparity) on some mulled warm red wine with herbs - never had it before, thought it was great: another University learning experience. We clicked, getting pissed. I set off on my bike back to Marlowe Road at two or three in the morning. Did I climb out of college? Must have done. I kept falling off my bike, couldn’t work out why I was on the road – good job there were fewer cars in those days. I’d established at some point with Miss Thody, who liked to get to bed early, that I intended sometimes to be out after eleven, even if it didn’t suit her, and I think I was the first of her lodgers to be given a key. Whether she heard me being dry sick down the lavatory I’ve no idea, but my house mate, whose bedroom was next door, did, he told me, amused. I managed to struggle to another audition at Trinity the following day, beginning to branch out into the wider Cambridge Dram. Soc. world. That evening in hall I heard that my new pal – out in digs near the station - was too ill to come in. And – in one of the best moves of my life – I cycled out on a December night, the fag end of term, to visit him. He was in a sorry state, in dressing gown and socks in front of a gas fire in what seemed to me to be dismal digs on a terraced street. I may have got dates and occasions mixed up but the way I remember it we listened to the Troggs’ ‘Wild Thing’ on his (‘Dansette?’) record player. A friendship formed. I went back home to Chesterfield that Christmas and couldn’t wait to get back to Cambridge, bored at home and probably showing it. I had an aim in view - to change subjects, to English from History, another sharp move (– see ‘Tommy’) and that first week back, when they were wondering whether to let me make the switch I remember reading Thomas Mann’s ‘Buddenbrooks’ in that back room at Miss Thody’s. I got to within about twenty pages of finishing it when the news came through that, yes, I’d be reading English. Never finished the book. It was ‘King Lear’ etc. from then on. Coincidentally, Pete, my new friend, had decided on a change from Engineering to Economics. He also, early that term, joined Cambridge ‘Varsity,’ whose editor he later became. And I got the part I’d auditioned for (first choice dropped out) but would realise fairly soon that though I was maybe more than an OK actor there were a number of other student actors a lot hungrier than me - who wanted it more. I started, sensibly, to scale down the acting, so, Keith, ‘I will never play the Dane!’
Pete had found his metier, and went straight on to Fleet Street. Shy and awkward to begin with (we might not have got on otherwise) he grew in confidence that key second term. I don’t think I’ve seen anything like his transformation. If he’d been a Christian (neither of us were at the time) you’d say he was born again. We shared rooms the second year – T1 in Fisher, now transformed into the Porter’s Lodge - but I wanted a single room in the third (he had to shack up with someone he found less amenable and reminds me of this ‘rejection’ occasionally in the presence of his kids, who love any such tales). I knew what I wanted by then - my own space: it’s the way I’ve lived ever since, the future in the instant, if I could have seen it. Living on my own reading Eng. Lit – feeling I wanted to be a writer, though did fuck all about it at Cambridge except for the little matter of studying the greats. When I was getting going as a writer a few years out of Cambridge I had the nous to read their juvenilia: ‘Scenes from Clerical Life’ not ‘Middlemarch’; ‘The Cossacks’ not ‘W and P.’ Their masterpieces were inhibiting.
It was the end of the August holidays, the football season was just beginning. Keith, catching up, had quizzed me on my revelation in the showers at school.
25 August
BUSH
Thrilled you’re on ‘Anna Karenina’. Your dropping the little lad off (Keith’s grandson) made me think of Anna’s feelings about her son. I find I sympathise much more with Karenin in that novel now - so handing over young Dan must be a wrench….
… And it’s the bush, mate. Anything else, like the ant lines up to the navel, is also welcome. Underarm hair gets me going as a kind of symbol of what’s down under. Dusky Fabregas gets me, though he’s already passed his prime (I’m talking ‘gay’ here: I mean in terms of looks) and wouldn’t say no to quite a few of Arsene’s pixie outfit….well, at least my fantasies are legal.
I’m reminded that a few years ago at this same time I was here in Canterbury. Very hot weather so headed out in the evening to Whitstable and Herne Bay. As I parked my car, window down, there was a strong smell of dope from the next car: two youths, bare chested. One, accepting the joint, skinny, beautiful, raised his arms above his head in pleasure. Dark hairy patches. Am still in thrall to the image. It can’t have been just Vronsky’s personality appealed to Anna…
A cheerful cheque (in fact two) had arrived.
26 August
MAGWICH
A friend of mine in the States left me a small dollar legacy when he died a few years ago. Six or so beneficiaries: he was unmarried. The final check (as they call it) arrived here this week. It’s a decent but not life changing amount. Went to the bank this morning and realised the letter said ‘checks’. Two cheques dropped out – the other a nice further little amount, making it £13k in total at present rates. What moved me was that the second (unseen) cheque was from my friend’s pets’ account. He’d left money to make sure his poor old cats were OK. I presume they are – or dead. He used to take one of them a walk; it trotted beside him as he went out for a stroll on the boardwalk in Ocean Grove, New Jersey. Anybody meeting – or listening – to him would imagine he was English, but was South African, in fact, had been Head of British Information (a Foreign Office outfit) in New York, where I had met him. He was a squash partner of my friend Pete, who had gone out to be America Correspondent for the now defunct London Evening News. I’d gone to meet Pete for lunch and my first encounter with my (half a lifetime later) benefactor Ian - unembarrassed, bollock naked, ginger – was in the changing rooms. He was already middle aged – we were young men – though Pete needed to point this out: he looked years younger. My mother had come over to New York with me, and I remember his being lovely with her. A Northern working class woman, pretty, polite, under-confident, she was an unusual sight in Manhattan. She’d sit in the window, having brought her knitting, looking down on Broadway from Pete’s 32 floors up West Side apartment. I moved away from home shortly after we got back from that trip and found a Christmas card had come from Ian: a surprise (have still got it: a line drawing of New York). It took me some time to reply but we kept up a regular if occasional correspondence. In the mid Eighties, visiting Simon Hoggart in Washington, I went up on Amtrak (romantic) to stay with Ian on a long weekend trip to New York. ‘Success suits you,’ Ian said - I was working a great deal in television at the time. I heard some tale from a neighbour of his (he lived in Greenwich Village) of his ‘house mate’ dying through (though it sounds unlikely) an adverse reaction to Aspirin. I never asked Ian about this and he never mentioned whoever the guy was, though there were a number of campy and theatre film books in the apartment that I assumed belonged to his house mate. But I don’t think Ian himself was gay, or perhaps - Edward Heath like – had decided not to be. He gave me warnings about the bathhouses (it was AIDS time) and made a fuss of waiters – both male and female. His love was his cats, and I looked after four of them that weekend, while he went off on a visit somewhere. In retirement, when he came annually to London, he would contact me and take me for a meal – where I would always (unsuccessfully) make an effort to pay - and he would go off to see what I now realise were his other beneficiaries, one or two god children maybe. He once asked me if I would help him bump himself off if he became seriously ill. I said I was sorry, I couldn’t, and it was never mentioned again. He had prostate cancer finally but died, I later heard (he didn’t tell me he was seriously ill) full term without any assistance. What I remember are his letters and cards where he would scribble over every available surface in a big, untidy hand. He had a lovely, if old fashioned, resonant voice, had wanted to be an actor, admired my choice of trade, knew the value of money, and was eventually aware – I didn’t need to tell him – that I’d had a hard time after my period of ‘success.’ So left me more than a bob or two for a rainy day. He didn’t encourage any great feelings of fondness in me – maybe wouldn’t have wanted that: he kept people at a distance with a lot of showy good humour - a bit lonely, I think. I’m grateful to him and that kindness and respect to my old mum.
30 August
BROWNIE POINTS
I write - the Sunday morning dead hour – at H’s in Canterbury. The back door, a sliding glass door, refuses to lock so I’m person-ing the fort till they get back. I should be in Folkestone, then London, but it’s given me a chance to put off a couple of pleasant but routine social do’s while earning a few brownie points as the dedicated house sitter – a good excuse as I’ve had a week, magical quiet days, people still on holiday - time out of mind, reading mostly all the day: Lawrence of Arabia or Lawrence after Arabia (a project that never developed). Our national hero liked to get whipped but I’m most interested in his desire for a form of oblivion after events in the desert and his disavowal of the subsequent Middle East carve up. For pleasure I’m reading a biography of Elizabeth Taylor, the novelist. It arrived via Amazon the other day. I gave H my stock of Taylor novels last Christmas – now, green backed, looking very good on her shelves. I adapted one of Taylor’s short stories for television and met her daughter at a Virago party (where I might have been the only male present) – her mother, Elizabeth, died in ’75. So far as I knew the novelist lived a respectable life in Reading but it turned out she had a ten year lover and a couple of abortions. The daughter, apparently, would have preferred it if the middle class Buckinghamshire persona had been maintained. She has her limitations as a novelist (no propelling narrative) but paragraph by paragraph she’s as good as anyone – and a great short story writer. I’m now going to read a novel of hers I’ve not read – maybe her masterpiece – ‘A Game of Hide and Seek’. That’s the plan for today.
Yes, the Levin bits go on rather – but I love him (Tolstoy) tearing up the rules of what a novel should do. It’s him of course, near autobiography, though doesn’t include his debauchery with peasant women. Sticks to the latest agricultural improvements. Do you think Anna herself works? I sometimes wonder. He altered his conception of her more than a few times. Vronsky and Stiva and Kitty and Karenin are clear. I get down to ‘Mrs. Tolstoy’ next week – the contract has come through and will find the Levin bits useful for Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy’s house – or one of them.
I’ve been thinking how much I’ve benefited from H’s break up with her first husband. She’s aware of that too – the unexpected result….it’s an Elizabeth Taylor subject, the kind of short story or play I’ll never write. Can’t really do present day – ‘ordinary’ – anymore. I watched Kenneth Lonergan’s ‘You Can Count on Me’ on DVD again this last week: Laura Linney, Mark Ruffalo. That’s the kind of thing I’d most like to write, but don’t. Some of this may be due to the fact that it’s a hell of a lot easier to get a play commissioned with a subject people know something about, Tolstoy or Thomas Hardy, than wandering in to pitch with a: ‘Well, it’s about a guy between two friends as their marriage breaks up… er, though the tone’s lightly comic…’ So here I am with the (near) tragedy of the Tolstoys. But there’s wild comedy there in the disparity between the two of them. Makes me laugh, anyway.
Right. Breakfast, walk, read.
OUT OF BOUNDS
Just back in Kent after a week-long tour of the North, Chesterfield included – but mainly North Yorkshire, looking for a place to stay, while working at Leeds. One was spectacular – Sutton Bank – but a bit lonely. Another belonged to my (Derbyshire) cousins, neat, ordinary but large flat above a shop, ex-post office on the outskirts of Ripley, great views of Crich and hills - and cheap. Decision time is not yet – will need to come back again; my pal in Ampleforth, away in Ireland, has a little house I use while searching. I like that Thirsk neck of the woods but am inclining to Derbyshire, though it’s further from – and the wrong side of – Leeds. Not Chesterfield, couldn’t go back. It’s altered too much: that Sixties carving out parts of the centre of the town, all the car parks. I passed the old Grammar School in the car, looking to right and left at the junction with the road – forgotten its name – to Hurst House, where we gravitated as Sixth Formers. Early Victorian (?), grand, attractive out of bounds lawn - there was a lot that was out of bounds. At the back of a lot of this (correspondence) is what we might call Chesterfield – how we responded to it, how it formed us.
A funny thing happened yesterday. After a meal with my cousins at that gay run pub-resto I got up early to head down to London for my usual long summer house sit in Blackheath – good friends of mine. Arrived at ten, installed myself, shower, do my washing. Notice washer is full and am puzzled. So is dishwasher but I clear that, thinking they’ve left in a rush. Much food in the fridge. I start on a pork pie – very upmarket one – along with salad for lunch, pour a glass of Sancerre and read papers, tearing a page out which might be useful. And then my friends walk through the door. I was a week early for the house sit.
….Got a new radio commission – Mrs. Tolstoy, wife of the great man, Woman’s Hour 5 part serial. I did a Woman’s Hour about the second Mrs. Hardy that went down well. If that was more neutral tones this is more tumultuous, red and black - to quote a novel I’ve never got through (Tolstoy was influenced by its battle sequence). And I remember beginning ‘Charterhouse of Parma’ with great enthusiasm a few years ago when I was living in France a lot. I was reading French literature almost exclusively (in English) in an enjoyable high minded way, attempting to get into the culture. Stendhal wrote ‘La Chartreuse de Parme’ (sounds better in French) in something like two weeks and the first hundred pages are terrific but then it seems to become almost random plot. I’m always interested in how writers write: Simenon turning out Maigrets in less than two weeks, no messing about. He had to work himself up into an anxious state before starting, I gather (‘I will fail with this one…’). And Balzac would write for days and nights on end in dressing gown, fuelled by tobacco and coffee… and died early, I note.
I’ve a choice of houses these dog days, and from my premature house sit, I went on to my Canterbury friends’ place. I’d said I’d call in, anyway, to water their garden if necessary. There is at these times competition for what I laughingly call my services. I’m clear about this. I’ve been house sitting for my friends in Blackheath for over a quarter of a century. I fit the rest of the offers – a number of them regular and predictable - round them. Think of it like a more modest version of the Queen’s yearly round, though mine in August is Blackheath rather than Balmoral. I have my own place to go to these days, but like the variety – and familiarity. There’s a nice little garden in Canterbury, and because it was all last minute, no one knows apart from the owners, my friends, that I’m there (which suits me). Yesterday, however: a knock on the door – a lad asking for the daughter of the house, who’s away doing a summer job in Brighton, while she’s at what they all call Uni. I used to fancy this lad when he was around the house and I was living there for a time. He was much changed, clothes and appearance, and I didn’t recognise him at the door. He’s in a band now and stylish. He’s called T. Now I’d heard that last year his dad, with whom he lived - just the two of them - had died. My heart went out to him but didn’t know him well enough to ring. He came in for a cup of tea and we moved away from the bland fairly fast. I said, ‘You’ve had a hard time.’ I know about dead dads - mine died when I was 15. A few tears from T and, I think, a useful chat – unexpected. On leaving he said it was a meeting meant to happen. Needless to say I still fancied him and I’m the same age as his dad.
I’m popping back to Folkestone from here (a pretty drive) to clear out some things ready for my move North. It was wonderful to see all my stuff come out of storage a couple of years ago, but my sentimentality over items of furniture that belonged to my parents and other (often Chesterfield) memorabilia has faded. The flat in Folkestone on three levels accommodated it all easily, and, having found it, I’m reluctant to give the place up. At the top is an extensive roof terrace with a view of the sea. Folkestone reasonably sunny and en fete: will miss it, though prefer it quieter, off season, waves battering the harbour wall, Meryl in ‘French Lieutenant’s Woman’ etc.
30 July
HAPPY FAMILIES
Reading ‘Anna Karenina’ again, after forty years, for the Tolstoy serial. Magnificent - though I fail to understand the appeal of that opening sentence, which I always get the wrong way round. Are all happy families alike? – you tell me. I’ve no idea. I don’t understand families so don’t write about them. I had a period as a child when I wanted a brother but it didn’t last long. My closest friend is, I sometimes think, like an elder brother to me – i.e. annoys me from time to time. He’s a bit older than me by fourteen months and quite likes being ‘protective.’ He and his wife have four kids. I like staying with them at Christmas, but three days is enough. When I went off to my bedroom last year to read while everybody was watching telly, my pal, when I came down, said, ‘Where were you? What were you doing?’ I have this nightmare vision at Christmas time of thirty million people on sofas in front of big screens. Suffocating - I could never watch ‘The Royall Family.’ I suppose it’s why I like tennis and horse racing – I’m not a team player. No idea how you continue to support Sunderland. I’m a vague Arsenal fan – I lived near the stadium for a time, and had a bit of a yearning for Dennis Bergkamp. I knew some people who were friends of Tony Adams and would quiz them for any snippet about the great Dutchman. He and Adams once shared a car journey together to some match, Cardiff maybe, or up North – Bergkamp having a fear of flying. All I got, via Adams, was that he found Dennis ‘an enigma.’ Thanks, Tony.
When I lived in Highbury, on warm days my windows would be open, and you could smell dope as Arsenal supporters made their way from Stoke Newington, where they could park more easily, to the match. I went once with Tony Adams’ friend to a match at Highbury. There was a no smoking ban, but he said at the end of the game you get a distinct whiff of joints being lit up. Right on cue – a tedious draw against a cloggy Bolton – marijuana filled the air. It doesn’t happen at Spurs. My Blackheath friend, Spurs fan and season ticket holder, took me to a match – against Arsenal, as it turned out. The atmosphere was more macho. The great Dennis was coming to the end of his career and there he was right in front of me. ‘Don’t fucking cheer when they score,’ my friend hissed as the match started. It was a two all draw, so honour was squared. I’m a bit bemused still that I’m old enough to be the father of footballers I’ve fancied who are hanging their boots up.
Oh, my friend the Arsenal fan once told me that there was some guy who comes round with a boot full of porn VHS tapes for the players (this was the Nineties). I kind of imagined him distributing them – largesse into eager hands – but I presume he sold them, car boot sale-like. Well, players have a lot of time on their hands, though Adams says that Arsene forbade their looking at the ‘adult’ channels when in hotels abroad. Thought it saps their energy for the game ahead. It’s no wonder, Keith, I’ve never made it as a top class sportsman…
Keith had admitted to not having got through more than the first pages of ‘War and Peace’ and asked advice.
2 August
VAST READING GAP OF SHAME
…You must have another go at ‘War and Peace’. The Penguin edition is fine. A great deal of the original was written in French anyway so no English translation is ever going to get those shadings.
My friend D was reading your e mail over my shoulder at his house last night. ‘I’ve never had an e mail that long,’ he said, interestingly. He’s a GP. We had a fling together at a cemetery in Sheffield on a midsummer night near thirty years ago. (‘The grave’s a fine and private place, though none. I think, do there embrace.’) Our embraces (not quite the word for it), though thrilling, were never to be repeated and he’s lived with M for near all those subsequent years. They’re now hitched and are now my closest gay friends. I use their little house in Northern France as a home from home (see ‘The House in France’). There’s another to add to this list of ‘fucked and stay friends’. He’s called E, straight, married and, as he now lives in Hastings, I mosey along, skirting the Romney Marsh, to meet him in Rye, or he comes with me to watch Spurs (his team) when I get free tickets from the owner of the house I type this from. I like the fact that we’re two supporters who have had it off.
My Ampleforth pal, who – despite being his mother’s darling (‘She’d wash my face flannel and pick up my clothes every day’) – hasn’t a gay bone in his body. He was a professional footballer for a time, when, as an apprentice, it was his turn to skivvy and clean boots. I taught him English Lit. A Level at night school after he packed in football. He lived in the next village in Yorkshire to me and I would give him a lift back from yet another of those mining villages (where the Night School was). When he told his mother I was gay she said, ‘I know.’/ ‘How do you know?’/ ‘He said he liked my curtains.’ Though we never got it together, that attraction of mine – he’s a handsome feller - has settled over the years into a close friendship. He became disillusioned with football – tales of bullying, getting his balls blacked and so on; was an individual player at a time when the team ethos was at its apogee – Don Revie, Billy Bremner and that brutal Leeds outfit. From playing for Sheffield Wednesday he’s become a classicist and a reader of philosophy (for pleasure). When conversation flagged once in a pub I said, ‘I’ve never read the Odyssey, J. Should I?’ And got an account of the story that saw us down our pints and had the tables near us listening – Homer weaving his magic - in silence. He’s also a horse racing pal, more knowledgeable than me. I was in San Francisco twenty years ago. It was Derby Day and, allowing for the eight hour time difference, rang him (am happy to say that because of my journalist friend, Simon Hoggart, then stationed in the States, the phone call, thanks to the Observer, was free: I think I had to enter in a code to start). Instead of the simple result, J. took me through the race, keeping me in suspense, Nashwan sweeping through to win. He’s done me a recent work favour. While staying at his place in Ampleforth I picked up an old Penguin Classic ‘Essays of Montaigne.’ Never read them before. Looks like I’ll be writing a play for Radio 3 about Montaigne soon.
I’m impressed with anyone who can spell Aschenbach with confidence in an e mail (Keith had mentioned ‘Death in Venice’). Thomas Mann once wrote that he would renounce his reputation for a glance from a good looking waiter. Saw the film: Bogarde overdoing it rather, as Mahler/Aschenbach, late in his career signalling to the world where he – Dirk – had been ‘at’ all these years.
Right, got back to Blackheath at eight this morning, washing in the machine, read paper, e mail, washing out of machine and onto line down the garden, and now trip for supplies from Blackheath Farmers’ Market. ‘Always keep on top of your washing’ – my strong advice to the house sitter. My mobile, which arrived by post while I was house sitting was instantly accessed some years ago by Tom, the son of the house there. I’ve known Tom since he was a little boy (‘Steve kick ball over roof’) – he’s now thirty. Adept at these things, he changed the ring tone quietly. I went down that morning to the Farmers’ Market, where amongst all the middle class Blackheath matrons in a queue for upmarket, (presumably) wholesome pricey bread, my phone rings. Only rather than a ring it now loudly announces: ‘Steve, pick up the fucking phone.’ I’ve kept the message, though turning down the volume, despite occasional embarrassment on buses etc. (though why I bother bothering I’ve no idea. Folk say what they fucking well like at top volume on fucking buses and trains these days). When I was a kid, walking with my dad, and heard the famous four letter word mentioned by a couple of workmen, my dad said, ‘Take no notice. It’s pit language.’
Piece about William Trevor in the Observer today. My Ampleforth pal, J., who spends a lot of time in Ireland, is a big fan. And Trevor’s ‘The Ballroom of Romance,’ dramatised on television in the Seventies, was among one or two other ‘Plays for Today’ at that time that made me want to be a TV writer - loving, sad, not much happens, or seemingly so. Trevor (I was interested to read) works on a number of stories, novels – ideas. Says every now and again, metaphorically, he gets one of them out from under the bed to see if it’s come on, developed shoots. Though he writes novels, I’m not sure they are good as his shorter stuff. I suspect I’m short winded as a writer, though both ‘Mrs. Tolstoy’ at an hour and a quarter and the Montaigne, probably an hour and a half, aren’t exactly squibs. And I like finishing one topic/area of interest - Russia at the end of the Nineteenth Century, total immersion for a few months – and then it’s France, the Valois and Henri IV. I’m not writing a PhD – don’t have the stamina – just soaking up enough stuff to make the world I’m writing about convincing, the odd striking fillip of detail etc. though I once came a cropper with ’a little touch of cobalt blue’ in a play about a Sixteenth Century Venetian painting. No one noticed, and a monk pal of mine – the Prior at the monastery I stay at each year – singled it out as very evocative. But I’d boobed. Writing about Vermeer a few years later (it’s on the Listen section of the website: ‘Two Men from Delft’) I realised cobalt blue wasn’t invented (compounded?) till the end of the Eighteenth Century. Bogus erudition. I like the remark – do you remember it? - about that News of the World newspaper editor from your time, the vigorously Cockney Derek something: ‘Derek thinks that “erudite” is something you get from B and Q.’
11 August
NOEL ROAD
I’ve just returned on a wonderfully humid August night from my old pal Nina Bawden’s, whose name appears on the walls of the tube at Angel, a dramatization of ‘Carrie’s War’ being in the West End at the moment. She’s frail now, but I remember the old formidable Nina. I adapted a couple of her novels for TV and lived at her house for probably two years of my life while she and her recently retired husband, Austen, travelled the world. After the Potter’s Bar crash (where Austen was killed and Nina severely injured) I then lived with her for a time. It wasn’t easy but I remain fond (see ‘Nina’) and the wine and food are always good. I know the house, as a number of others, intimately. There was a new novel by her old friend and rival, Penelope Lively (Lively’s ‘Moon Tiger’ pipped Nina’s ‘Circles of Deceit’ for the Booker) beside her as she sat in her familiar chair by the window in her upstairs sitting room that looks out on the flat across the road where Joe Orton met his end. I once played Scrabble with the two novelists (didn’t win but didn’t come last) and later walked Lively back over the other side of Upper Street: she was nervous about walking home in the dark alone. Nina tonight doubted the urgency of Penelope’s new novel. And I can’t help noting that knocking around with the North London literati distance me from ‘Chesterfield’ (more down to earth?), though Nina, who can have something of a grande dame manner, was a Grammar School girl herself. Both grammar school Joan Bakewell and Sue Lawley famously changed their accents at University. I did for a bit, failing to notice that at the time of Mick Jagger, everyone was heading down market. When I got back from University and went to pick my mum up from the Co-op, where she worked, one of the other assistants said, ‘Oh, doesn’t he talk nice..’ Nina - Ipswich but cut glass - is struggling with her own novel about a house sitter, which she will never finish. I like to think I have something to do with that….
When I was not so confident with my own writing some years ago Nina two floors downstairs in that tall house was knocking out a novella length polemic, ‘Dear Austen,’ about the train crash, which I recommend and which she part dedicated to me. I advised on the start of a chapter, which she bridled at initially. Two days later: ‘You were right about that first sentence.’ But it’s impossible to believe she will ever write another fiction after that autobiographical blast. Hence, perhaps, that remark about ‘urgency.’ But she battles on, boats against the current.
Piece about seagulls on the ‘Today’ programme this morning. After a few years in Folkestone won’t miss them. (They only arrived in English seaside towns in the Twenties. Previously nested on cliffs). And in another e mail will follow up on what you asked for about ghostly experiences or, more interesting, out of the ordinary experiences. You’re going to get a bit of religion from me before too long. Tolstoy converted to Christianity in mid-life - decided to live out Christ’s teachings. This is the basis of the drama I’m writing – there’s much comedy in it.
Keith was on holiday in Dorset with his eight year old grandson, Dan, and had responded by text. Maybe knowing that he wouldn’t reply immediately, at least by e mail, encouraged me in the following. I remember wondering to send it or not.
12 August
BEATIFIC
… Just to say that I share Dan’s distaste for short sleeved shirts. Please tell him that I rather admire sleeveless tee shirts on hunks, being something of a body hair fetishist.
You now know as much as you need to know of the porn tape flickering in my brain. But on May 7th, 1995, I was on my unhurried way from the cottage (‘roses over the door’) in Kent I once mentioned to you, cycling to my friends in Canterbury. It was a Sunday morning. I paused to rest for a few minutes leaning on a gate by a field in countryside – it’s the back of Whitstable, Blean woods, close to Mount Ephraim Gardens - and I suddenly lost the person I was and was caught up into something stupendous, the universe suddenly a harmony. I remember surfacing after what was probably only a minute or two and being relieved to be me again. Now, of course, I want the experience again. It was beyond imagining and probably beyond inducement. I hope so because I see it, possibly foolishly, as something arriving from the outside. What convinces me about the experience was that I didn’t know what had happened at first, though I knew something had happened – and cycled on. I didn’t mention it to my friends though when I did, later that summer, they said they knew, that I seemed in some way ‘transformed’ (their word). A filly of Dick Hern’s won the One Thousand Guineas that afternoon, and I watched that, cycled back that evening, and for months had a feeling of utter confidence and relaxation. I started reading after a time about these things and barely stopped for years. It’s what they call the Beatific Vision. I’m not a rationalist: I’m in the imagination game - but this was too good for my imagination. I’ve taken E (when it was worth taking) and it beats that: a different order of things. When I first talked about it a few months later to a priest pal of mine I burst into tears. Now, I go to monasteries – or one in particular – once a year for a week. I can’t get on with the Church of England, for all the usual reasons, though have tried. I enjoy Canterbury Cathedral for evensong and that’s about it.
What I like about the Resurrection stories is that the disciples and women didn’t know what they were seeing at first. It’s an experience that changed me: I decided to let it. You were changed, I presume, by love and marriage. It gave me confidence to sell my flat and go a wander. ‘And all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well..’ My writing went into abeyance. I read masses of theology and then the new work started coming through – a great deal of biographical stuff.… My saints are secular saints: Flaubert, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Forster etc. I particularly liked writing about Hardy whose principled lack of belief almost qualifies as a form of faith.
And, fear not, Keith, the porn tape still flickers in the brain…
Keith was (I was to learn) an atheist, but also, as a polite and sympathetic man, took his time in weighing up what to say about this. But, at house with a supa dupa Apple computer – and on my own a lot – I was ‘into’ this form of autobiographical writing (this is me after forty years) starting with what was on my mind that day and heading backwards at the flick of a switch to what someone called ‘the distant shores of the past’. I’d heard, recently, of the death of a guy who had meant a lot to me at Cambridge.
19 August
WEYMOUTH
.. Fantastic picture in the Graun of Weymouth Sands, that big crescent of 18th (?) century houses round the bay. I barely know Dorset but visited a couple of years ago when beginning work on the Thomas Hardy serial for Radio 4. It had a good title, ‘What I think of my Husband’, which I think sold it to the BBC. Much enjoyed the research – hence a visit to his cottage at Bockhampton, now done up to Marie Antoinette standards. His grandmother was ironing when she heard the news of the French Revolution and later feared Napoleonic invasion. Via Miss Thody (our ancient landlady in Cambridge) we probably skip back in three great leaps to that time – hello, Jane Austen (another Dorset fan)…
I’ve been in London mainly, but had a day in Folkestone on Monday. Boxing up, I found an old set of ‘Plays and Players’ and a selection of theatre programmes. I’d started at Cambridge occasionally getting down to London to see plays I badly wanted to see – remember one memorable summer Saturday where I saw the National company in ‘Much Ado’ – Maggie Smith, Robert Stephens, Albert Finnie, Derek Jacobi in a Zeffirelli production, glorious, with Sicilian town band. That evening it was Peter Hall/ Harold Pinter ‘The Homecoming,’ for the RSC at the Aldwych. Stage writing’s never been quite my thing, but I haven’t been short of stimulus, from our old school plays on. The theatre memorabilia, programmes, ‘Plays and Players’ emerged from out of storage a year or so ago and resonate. They date from that time in the late Sixties and Seventies where I wanted to join that actor-y world. Reading the mags, getting distracted rather than getting on with clearing, I noticed the amount of actresses (in particular) who’ve disappeared professionally (I mention one or two) and spotted other careers on the rise. In the programme notes for the Bergman ‘Hedda Gabler’ with Maggie Smith I find a play-worthy account of Ibsen (my age now) becoming infatuated with a young woman aged 18. Now, why do I find that so interesting?
Yesterday I took a trip to Islington to see John Burgess, who used to be the assistant to Peter Gill at the National Theatre Studio, and remembers me - though not me him - from Cambridge. He showed me a programme of the ‘Othello’ I was in at the end of my second year in the Cloister Court at Queens’ I was surprised to see I was credited with being Production Assistant i.e. Associate Director. Our Desdemona went on to TV fame for a time, John told me: I’d no idea of that. Sad to note that the director Iain Wright, and one of the cast, have since died. I can’t have been much of an assistant to Iain, whose death I heard of through seeing his photograph – then realising it accompanied an obituary - in the Queens’ Bulletin. It shocked me: he was so handsome and sparky, remained so. He was a Double First (seemingly effortlessly) determinedly ‘cool’, not at all the dogged, head down swot. He was another of my heroes, though I incurred his wrath when, during ‘Othello’ rehearsals, I skived off one day to see the Derby with friend Pete. But I was only playing Rodrigo, a lick and a spit of a part. I’d wanted, badly, to play Iago, and auditioned strongly, but he – wisely – settled for someone more in the Frank Finlay sergeant-major mode. It’s that time in your life when you think you can do anything and I’m comedy, mainly, a gadfly (with glum bits), a bit of a flibbertigibbet – Rodrigo gets me. I played him a touch (maybe a lot) camp. Don’t know if folk drew conclusions – but I was an actor in real life, too, and gave a passable impression of being straight.
The following year it was my turn to direct. Iain was still round in Cambridge starting his PhD, which he never completed - a couple of subjects for books were mentioned along the way (one on Forster I remember) but he never got round to publishing anything. I had picked ‘Winter’s Tale’ as the play to direct and he badly wanted to play Leontes, but I had someone more suitable lined up and cast him as Autolycus. He went sulky for a bit, threatened to not take part at all. Conceded, as I knew he would. He loved acting and those Cloister Court productions – was a fine Prince Hal, where I’d played opposite him (would you believe?) as his father, the dying King. He was excellent as Autolycus, sprightly. We remained pals for years till he de-camped to a Professorship in Australia. The last communication I had with him, just before he started his new life, was a blank Christmas card (I recognised the writing on the envelope). He had married (lucky woman, I thought) a very nice, shy, Australian, Penny, a bit older than him. They lived on Parker’s Piece – I passed the house every morning on my walk into King’s while researching the Forster play in Cambridge early this year. There was a step son and they had a daughter. But I also learnt in the Queens’ obituary that his marriage had broken down out in Australia.
A daft detail: he wore jeans with a dark blue shade I admired – as so much else about him. Could never get that shade (but did inherit his rooms in Fisher, T1). He was Sixties stylish, left wing, but, above all, a scholar and enthusiast, a great teacher I would imagine – he loved literature, and to me, once, came up with a theory about the origins of ‘Twelfth Night,’ on the basis of some document discovered while he was Librarian at Queens’. I would have loved to have told him about the Forster play. Always thought I would see him again sometime.
I said to John Burgess on our table out in the Islington street (having given him the copies of ‘Plays and Players’ I mentioned to you) that we’d all be forgotten in thirty years and, while I was pleased enough with my CV, I wouldn’t be troubling the greats. He let this go but there were what looked like tears in his eyes. As we parted he said, ‘Look, your dialogue is almost – I say, almost – as good as Caryl Churchill’s. You’ve got at least one very good stage play in you.’ Through the years John has nudged me on, given me a helping hand, got me back into radio, where he directed two plays of mine. He gave me an intro into the National Studio and tutoring younger playwrights. Tipped me off about the Royal Literary Fund posting. In person, he’s waspish, but I wouldn’t have survived without him. I enjoy our meetings, on Upper Street generally, sitting outside, he with orange juice, me with something with a little more kick.
The context of my bout of downbeat realism was those people who featured in those Seventies ‘Plays and Players’ – actresses in particular. Where are they now? I mentioned one to John and he said, ‘Oh, she lives near me. I saw her on the bus the other day with her grandchildren.’
York Races for me on the TV this week. Tears in my eyes as ‘Sea the Stars’ was led in to prolonged cheers on Tuesday. Not often you hear that. He was 4-1 on, so it’s not the punters talking through their pockets.
Up North in the next week or so to house hunt. This is my fault. I told the Literary Fund that I’d work more or less anywhere – I applied within a month or two of finding the Folkestone place, imagining I was still completely fancy free, and the Leeds job means I can do more or less what I want in terms of writing with no money worries for the next two years. It’s a price worth paying. But don’t want to shift: I’ve found a proper berth in Folkestone.
Keith clearly, as it turned out, preferred matters of flesh to that of the spirit. He wasn’t inclined to pursue my numinous (nebulous?) e mail confession- and I was probably relieved to be on safer ground. What interested him much more as a film buff was the obvious gay sensibility of the sister publication to ‘Plays and Players’: ‘Films and Filming’ ….but he was to get another epiphany from me.
20 August 2009
SOMETHING FOR THE WEEKEND
Now there I was, trying to raise our sights to the mystical sublime. ‘Films and Filming’ we now realise was run by wooftas, never so happy to insert a glimpse of pube into the august journal. I heard Alan Bennett recently describing the cabinet minister, Andy Burnham’s, dark hair – presumably on his head – as ‘Pasolini-like’. Bet Bennett sneaked into cinemas showing Film and Filming’s favourite auteurs, Pasolini and Warhol. I certainly did in Sheffield at that now defunct cinema where you headed out from the Hole in the Road to Attercliffe. Saw ‘Flesh’ there, maybe ‘The Arabian Nights’ as well.
My parents never appeared naked in front of me, so I blame my mum and dad (Philip Larkin like) for what follows. Very early on at the Grammar School, I’m aged eleven and, coming from out of the gym to the showers, there’s a sixth former soaking himself, solo. Wonderful athlete’s body, some chest hair, and bush. If I didn’t know I was attracted to men by then there was no doubt after that. What I did know was to keep quiet about it, and wouldn’t have mentioned anything except my friend Chris had also admired this Adonis. Walking back from school that night, Chris said (innocently) something about the sixth former (M. or B.J. Price, if memory serves). Didn’t have my worries, in short, about ‘revealing’ what I already knew – or suspected – I was. The two of us had a fight soon after that and stopped accompanying one another to school. He left Chesterfield a little later, one of these lads who just came and went during your school career. Years later, I’m at a party at the National Theatre Studio and John Burgess says, ‘Stephen, have you met Lindsay Anderson?’ Lindsay filmed that kind of gym epiphany in ‘If’ where the young school tart watches Richard Warwick on the high bars. Lindsay’s posthumously published diaries are quite sad; he was almost morbidly attached to a young actor called Frank Grimes, whose handsome face peered out at me last night from these one of these old copies of ‘Plays and Players.’
Our school – public school style – had six houses. Below the Sixth form you were meant to wear caps on the way to and from school. The houses had Latin tags, apart from – for some reason – Lingard, which I refer to finally. Keith had just written movingly about the early death of a friend of his, a fellow pupil I didn’t know well. The young man – G - had been an ordinand. I seem to go on a bit of a riff before saying what I ‘ought’ to feel.
23 August 2009
HIGH MINDED
Not thought of G for half a life, dark, gangly, musical, Foljambe – peculiar how you remember your peers by their (arbitrary) Houses. I got my dad to lie so I got in my preferred house, Lingard (name appealed and its red stripe). He filled in a form to say a ‘cousin’ had been in Lingard. This is because I had – still have – definite views on which houses were preferable. Lingard is tops (natch), then Large, you will be glad to know (Keith’s house: colour purple) - then Foljambe and Heathcote - with Bradley beyond the pale. No strong feeling about Clarke. I loved the scarves that came out in late autumn, have one of those snapshot memories of coming back from school along our lane in black blazer, house tie, a white shirt, and, cap perched impudently on the back of the head, and scarf. Now you will tell me that G was blond, not in Foljambe (dark blue) and in, God help us, Bradley (light blue) – not a proper house (never won anything). ‘Loyal Je Suis’!! (which was Lingard’s oddly French motto).
I think of the parents of G, have been thinking anyway lately of the high mindedness of our parents’ generation. We share a great deal of it. The obverse of this worthiness was a certain narrow mindedness, a censoriousness. It died a death as a dominant factor in politics with Thatcher’s Governments, lingers on with Tebbit and backwoods Tories. I thank God for the Sixties – we know its limitations and stupidities. But that premature death of an only son must have tested the G’s faith, which I hope held up.
Even that image of a Lingard cap, tipped on the back of the head, is underpinned with sex and yearning for a lad in Lingard, a teenage idol of mine, four years older. The first time I found myself in his company I was twelve, speechless. Knew what I wanted. Your account of G puts these feelings into severe perspective. In the ‘Observer’ today there’s a long interview with the dancer, Michael Clark. When, in 1985, we were rehearsing at the Riverside Studios, Hammersmith, the young Michael Clark walked through the foyer. He’d be 24. I’ve never seen a more beautiful man, near perfection – looks, movement – at the peak of his early success. Five years later I’m waiting for a bus on Shepherd’s Bush Green to roll me down the Goldhawk Road from the BBC to where I was then living in Chiswick. A wasted but recognisable figure then crosses the road and asks me if this is the bus to the Chiswick High Road, He was gaunt and with (what I knew even then) was a heroin pallor. Clark was on his way to the Sadler’s Wells rehearsal room there, and in no fit state. I went upstairs on the bus and he downstairs. Wish I’d attempted some kind of conversation and sat next to him but there was nothing you could do: he was out of it. Wasn’t surprised to learn a few years later he’s blown the choreography game and was in a form of rehab. Golden lads. G wasn’t ‘golden’ – few of us are – but he sounds, from your account, very decent. ‘High minded,’ ‘decent’ – there’s a lot to be said for that old Grammar School ethos. And, maybe irrelevantly, ‘Gay News’ (a lifeline to me in the Seventies when it arrived through the letter box in a plain brown envelope - W.H. Smith’s refused to stock it) developed a huge – high minded – literary section, almost TLS like. Now the required reading for gay men is BOYZ (mag), very lively, many pages of small ads with cocks. I’ve not missed an ‘l’ out there – that’s ‘small ads with big cocks’.
Keith and I had the same digs while at Cambridge, he two years after me. I had suggested these digs (on Marlowe Road, Newnham village) to my successor as Head Boy, Chris Pountain, when he came up to Queens’. He had, in turn, done the same for Keith. Our landlady was the ninety (plus) year old Miss Thody. Keith, a much kinder man than me, had got to know the old lady quite well.
24 August
MARLOWE ROAD
Miss Thody, born during one of Disraeli’s administrations. Did you have the set of rooms or the back single? Was it me who put you on to her? Bad system that at Queens’ to put people out the first year. I remember crying after two weeks of term I was so homesick. JW, the owner of this house I’m back at in Blackheath, when first at Fitzwilliam, used to relieve his loneliness by going to the cinema every afternoon. I shared those digs with a lad I always just kind-of got on with - he arrived just ahead of me that October day, so got the (better deal of) two rooms. We were both doing History. He was pleasant, a bit boring, I thought – I remember him scuttling off to lectures (we never went together – I never wanted to be seen with him). It’s ‘Pride and Prej’ - you make decisions about people almost straight away. But - needs must - I knocked round with a few boring types that first term. I’ve got a mental image of walking round Cambridge Market Square one damp Sunday evening with a Welshman, both of us in sports jackets (dressed as for a production of ‘Look Back in Anger’ and a look I later ditched). I think he was disappointed I dropped him: he was a nice lad, a scientist, quite pretty, blond, straight. Even if you’re not lonely you need company in case you look lonely. It was only at the end of term, right at the end, that I came across the guy who would become my closest friend. We both got drunk at the Bats’ (Queens’ Dramatic Society) party – after ‘Luther’ (I was the lead; he was fourth monk - I’ve never let him forget this disparity) on some mulled warm red wine with herbs - never had it before, thought it was great: another University learning experience. We clicked, getting pissed. I set off on my bike back to Marlowe Road at two or three in the morning. Did I climb out of college? Must have done. I kept falling off my bike, couldn’t work out why I was on the road – good job there were fewer cars in those days. I’d established at some point with Miss Thody, who liked to get to bed early, that I intended sometimes to be out after eleven, even if it didn’t suit her, and I think I was the first of her lodgers to be given a key. Whether she heard me being dry sick down the lavatory I’ve no idea, but my house mate, whose bedroom was next door, did, he told me, amused. I managed to struggle to another audition at Trinity the following day, beginning to branch out into the wider Cambridge Dram. Soc. world. That evening in hall I heard that my new pal – out in digs near the station - was too ill to come in. And – in one of the best moves of my life – I cycled out on a December night, the fag end of term, to visit him. He was in a sorry state, in dressing gown and socks in front of a gas fire in what seemed to me to be dismal digs on a terraced street. I may have got dates and occasions mixed up but the way I remember it we listened to the Troggs’ ‘Wild Thing’ on his (‘Dansette?’) record player. A friendship formed. I went back home to Chesterfield that Christmas and couldn’t wait to get back to Cambridge, bored at home and probably showing it. I had an aim in view - to change subjects, to English from History, another sharp move (– see ‘Tommy’) and that first week back, when they were wondering whether to let me make the switch I remember reading Thomas Mann’s ‘Buddenbrooks’ in that back room at Miss Thody’s. I got to within about twenty pages of finishing it when the news came through that, yes, I’d be reading English. Never finished the book. It was ‘King Lear’ etc. from then on. Coincidentally, Pete, my new friend, had decided on a change from Engineering to Economics. He also, early that term, joined Cambridge ‘Varsity,’ whose editor he later became. And I got the part I’d auditioned for (first choice dropped out) but would realise fairly soon that though I was maybe more than an OK actor there were a number of other student actors a lot hungrier than me - who wanted it more. I started, sensibly, to scale down the acting, so, Keith, ‘I will never play the Dane!’
Pete had found his metier, and went straight on to Fleet Street. Shy and awkward to begin with (we might not have got on otherwise) he grew in confidence that key second term. I don’t think I’ve seen anything like his transformation. If he’d been a Christian (neither of us were at the time) you’d say he was born again. We shared rooms the second year – T1 in Fisher, now transformed into the Porter’s Lodge - but I wanted a single room in the third (he had to shack up with someone he found less amenable and reminds me of this ‘rejection’ occasionally in the presence of his kids, who love any such tales). I knew what I wanted by then - my own space: it’s the way I’ve lived ever since, the future in the instant, if I could have seen it. Living on my own reading Eng. Lit – feeling I wanted to be a writer, though did fuck all about it at Cambridge except for the little matter of studying the greats. When I was getting going as a writer a few years out of Cambridge I had the nous to read their juvenilia: ‘Scenes from Clerical Life’ not ‘Middlemarch’; ‘The Cossacks’ not ‘W and P.’ Their masterpieces were inhibiting.
It was the end of the August holidays, the football season was just beginning. Keith, catching up, had quizzed me on my revelation in the showers at school.
25 August
BUSH
Thrilled you’re on ‘Anna Karenina’. Your dropping the little lad off (Keith’s grandson) made me think of Anna’s feelings about her son. I find I sympathise much more with Karenin in that novel now - so handing over young Dan must be a wrench….
… And it’s the bush, mate. Anything else, like the ant lines up to the navel, is also welcome. Underarm hair gets me going as a kind of symbol of what’s down under. Dusky Fabregas gets me, though he’s already passed his prime (I’m talking ‘gay’ here: I mean in terms of looks) and wouldn’t say no to quite a few of Arsene’s pixie outfit….well, at least my fantasies are legal.
I’m reminded that a few years ago at this same time I was here in Canterbury. Very hot weather so headed out in the evening to Whitstable and Herne Bay. As I parked my car, window down, there was a strong smell of dope from the next car: two youths, bare chested. One, accepting the joint, skinny, beautiful, raised his arms above his head in pleasure. Dark hairy patches. Am still in thrall to the image. It can’t have been just Vronsky’s personality appealed to Anna…
A cheerful cheque (in fact two) had arrived.
26 August
MAGWICH
A friend of mine in the States left me a small dollar legacy when he died a few years ago. Six or so beneficiaries: he was unmarried. The final check (as they call it) arrived here this week. It’s a decent but not life changing amount. Went to the bank this morning and realised the letter said ‘checks’. Two cheques dropped out – the other a nice further little amount, making it £13k in total at present rates. What moved me was that the second (unseen) cheque was from my friend’s pets’ account. He’d left money to make sure his poor old cats were OK. I presume they are – or dead. He used to take one of them a walk; it trotted beside him as he went out for a stroll on the boardwalk in Ocean Grove, New Jersey. Anybody meeting – or listening – to him would imagine he was English, but was South African, in fact, had been Head of British Information (a Foreign Office outfit) in New York, where I had met him. He was a squash partner of my friend Pete, who had gone out to be America Correspondent for the now defunct London Evening News. I’d gone to meet Pete for lunch and my first encounter with my (half a lifetime later) benefactor Ian - unembarrassed, bollock naked, ginger – was in the changing rooms. He was already middle aged – we were young men – though Pete needed to point this out: he looked years younger. My mother had come over to New York with me, and I remember his being lovely with her. A Northern working class woman, pretty, polite, under-confident, she was an unusual sight in Manhattan. She’d sit in the window, having brought her knitting, looking down on Broadway from Pete’s 32 floors up West Side apartment. I moved away from home shortly after we got back from that trip and found a Christmas card had come from Ian: a surprise (have still got it: a line drawing of New York). It took me some time to reply but we kept up a regular if occasional correspondence. In the mid Eighties, visiting Simon Hoggart in Washington, I went up on Amtrak (romantic) to stay with Ian on a long weekend trip to New York. ‘Success suits you,’ Ian said - I was working a great deal in television at the time. I heard some tale from a neighbour of his (he lived in Greenwich Village) of his ‘house mate’ dying through (though it sounds unlikely) an adverse reaction to Aspirin. I never asked Ian about this and he never mentioned whoever the guy was, though there were a number of campy and theatre film books in the apartment that I assumed belonged to his house mate. But I don’t think Ian himself was gay, or perhaps - Edward Heath like – had decided not to be. He gave me warnings about the bathhouses (it was AIDS time) and made a fuss of waiters – both male and female. His love was his cats, and I looked after four of them that weekend, while he went off on a visit somewhere. In retirement, when he came annually to London, he would contact me and take me for a meal – where I would always (unsuccessfully) make an effort to pay - and he would go off to see what I now realise were his other beneficiaries, one or two god children maybe. He once asked me if I would help him bump himself off if he became seriously ill. I said I was sorry, I couldn’t, and it was never mentioned again. He had prostate cancer finally but died, I later heard (he didn’t tell me he was seriously ill) full term without any assistance. What I remember are his letters and cards where he would scribble over every available surface in a big, untidy hand. He had a lovely, if old fashioned, resonant voice, had wanted to be an actor, admired my choice of trade, knew the value of money, and was eventually aware – I didn’t need to tell him – that I’d had a hard time after my period of ‘success.’ So left me more than a bob or two for a rainy day. He didn’t encourage any great feelings of fondness in me – maybe wouldn’t have wanted that: he kept people at a distance with a lot of showy good humour - a bit lonely, I think. I’m grateful to him and that kindness and respect to my old mum.
30 August
BROWNIE POINTS
I write - the Sunday morning dead hour – at H’s in Canterbury. The back door, a sliding glass door, refuses to lock so I’m person-ing the fort till they get back. I should be in Folkestone, then London, but it’s given me a chance to put off a couple of pleasant but routine social do’s while earning a few brownie points as the dedicated house sitter – a good excuse as I’ve had a week, magical quiet days, people still on holiday - time out of mind, reading mostly all the day: Lawrence of Arabia or Lawrence after Arabia (a project that never developed). Our national hero liked to get whipped but I’m most interested in his desire for a form of oblivion after events in the desert and his disavowal of the subsequent Middle East carve up. For pleasure I’m reading a biography of Elizabeth Taylor, the novelist. It arrived via Amazon the other day. I gave H my stock of Taylor novels last Christmas – now, green backed, looking very good on her shelves. I adapted one of Taylor’s short stories for television and met her daughter at a Virago party (where I might have been the only male present) – her mother, Elizabeth, died in ’75. So far as I knew the novelist lived a respectable life in Reading but it turned out she had a ten year lover and a couple of abortions. The daughter, apparently, would have preferred it if the middle class Buckinghamshire persona had been maintained. She has her limitations as a novelist (no propelling narrative) but paragraph by paragraph she’s as good as anyone – and a great short story writer. I’m now going to read a novel of hers I’ve not read – maybe her masterpiece – ‘A Game of Hide and Seek’. That’s the plan for today.
Yes, the Levin bits go on rather – but I love him (Tolstoy) tearing up the rules of what a novel should do. It’s him of course, near autobiography, though doesn’t include his debauchery with peasant women. Sticks to the latest agricultural improvements. Do you think Anna herself works? I sometimes wonder. He altered his conception of her more than a few times. Vronsky and Stiva and Kitty and Karenin are clear. I get down to ‘Mrs. Tolstoy’ next week – the contract has come through and will find the Levin bits useful for Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy’s house – or one of them.
I’ve been thinking how much I’ve benefited from H’s break up with her first husband. She’s aware of that too – the unexpected result….it’s an Elizabeth Taylor subject, the kind of short story or play I’ll never write. Can’t really do present day – ‘ordinary’ – anymore. I watched Kenneth Lonergan’s ‘You Can Count on Me’ on DVD again this last week: Laura Linney, Mark Ruffalo. That’s the kind of thing I’d most like to write, but don’t. Some of this may be due to the fact that it’s a hell of a lot easier to get a play commissioned with a subject people know something about, Tolstoy or Thomas Hardy, than wandering in to pitch with a: ‘Well, it’s about a guy between two friends as their marriage breaks up… er, though the tone’s lightly comic…’ So here I am with the (near) tragedy of the Tolstoys. But there’s wild comedy there in the disparity between the two of them. Makes me laugh, anyway.
Right. Breakfast, walk, read.