Thoughts after a heart job: intro
What follows constitutes a kind of autobiography and is, no doubt, impelled by feelings of mortality. It’s November 2015, and after a shaky period, I have another operation in a month, ‘not dangerous’ but you think ‘another operation...’ I’ve enjoyed these outpourings. I have plenty of time to sit and think – am not charging around or even reading much – reading can be tiring in the evenings. And, towards the end of a life anyway, it’s time to get the thoughts, however half baked, into some order.
Memorialise, aware that you are perhaps imposing a pattern. Dirk Bogarde, a great (late career) screen actor, gets an admiring mention at some point, and I listened to some of his memoirs on tape recently, having avoided them when I heard how much he took control of his own life, writing from his diaries and then destroying those diaries. We never learn directly of his homosexuality, therefore. But I was more impressed than I thought I would be – indeed moved by the death of his companion/manager a.k.a. ‘lover'. I take a better playwright than me to task at one point in the essays for a similar attempt at ‘control.’ I loathe PR, though it’s hard to avoid when writing about yourself. As Woody Allen said of masturbation: ‘It’s making love to your favourite person.’ Woody gets a mention in what follows, and so, more surprisingly, does Joni Mitchell, though I don’t quote the stupendous, ‘It’s life’s illusions I recall.’ We go to the grave with various illusions – and one of them might be that our lives are in any way important or significant. I don’t make that claim – it would be stupid to. But I’ve felt impelled lately to set down various memories and ‘portraits’ of people (and no surprise that I’ve had my own portrait painted lately). I knew something was wrong with me a couple of years ago when the portraitist, whom I knew, came calling. I say in my essay about being painted by her that it’s probably an attempt to cheat mortality.
These jottings (will do as a description) were written quite rapidly, among other work, and pretty spontaneously (first thoughts rather than second or third) – and should be treated as an encounter, not a display. Even to my eyes, I’m sometimes ludicrous, self obsessed and occasionally not at all ‘nice’, though I’m reading Steve Jobs’ biography at the moment. 'Nice' is not a word for Jobs and makes you wonder how often if ever niceness and success are combined - I come back to that in Almost Famous. And throughout, all too obviously in these ‘effusions’, I seem concerned with my status as a writer: aware that I’m more, say, Richard Gasquet than the fourteen-time major winning Nadal, and can see that niggles with me, for all the disclaimers. I notice the first essay in the sequence (written a year ago as I came out of recuperation from two heart operations) is called ‘Federer.’ Well, even Nadal in his courteous tributes to the great man, recognises his inferiority (though, ironically, he often beats him). There’s room for more autobiographical writings than those of all-time geniuses - not ghost written, and straight from brain to screen.
I’ve tried to write as freely as I can, censoring only what might hurt other, living, people. I emerge (I tend to find out what I think as I articulate it) as a writer interested, above all, in masterpieces, ambivalent about fame, and not envious, I think - though a little too concerned, perhaps, with success. I’m a Grammar School Boy – that ethos is ingrained. We were trained to be (jargon word alert) aspirational. I’m a Northerner – North of the Trent, anyway, North Midlands more accurately. And I’m gay (have been since about the age of ten) - what my old contemporaries might have called a ‘woofta.’ Gayness features strongly, though I don’t feel as defined by it in day to day life, which is odd. My old History teacher, who stumbled across these essays, wrote to say that he preferred ‘Tommy’ (about my English teacher) to ‘Joe’, about a one-time lover - but that he’d never, of course, considered my sexuality – or thought that I would have the kind of experiences and acquaintance I have since had. That last pleases me a great deal. I didn’t either. I was School Captain, and have many Head Boy characteristics, but I’ve learned unconventionality (I hope) as I’ve grown older. ‘Fess’ Parkin was a young History teacher when I first knew him – the sunny autumn of the Cuban Missile Crisis – and he taught me to think. He’s my ideal reader, I suppose: ‘This is what I am/what I have become.’ I am depressed by those Waterstone biographies with people like Linda Bellingham, Hillary Clinton, and even Julie Walters on their respective front covers, beaming or looking wry or wise. Even worse is any volume (there are, sadly, more than one) by Stephen Fry who looks out at us quizzical and bemused. Avariciously and arrogantly might be more interesting. I think there’s just room here – yes! - for a rant. If he is so fucking clever (Hugh Laurie :‘He’s got a brain the size of Kent’) why doesn’t he go away for five years and write today’s ‘Middlemarch’ rather than hopping from studio to studio, snorting cocaine, and telling us about it? Oh, he’s bi-polar, and don’t we know it. I met him once – he leaned down and was, of course, charming - so please regard these mean and gratuitous remarks as fuelled partly by the fact that he was at my College, taught by someone I knew, liked and respected (he’s dead now), and who rated Stephen. He’s another of these very successful figures I feel I’ve bumped into and had to manoeuvre my way around. I dislike his ubiquity. For somebody who likes solitude I seem to have met a hell of a lot of people much better known than me and they feature in what follows, as pegs on which to hand a narrative, or make a point, or just hang a picture.
One last thought, as a young playwright I was signed by Sheila Lemon, who crops up in the essay ‘Almost Famous’. Sheila then was part of the Peter Crouch agency and all those years ago my fantasy was to arrive at their offices and share a lift with Glenda Jackson, their most famous client. Glenda now lives in Blackheath, in the next house to the one featured in House Sitting, but I have glimpsed her only once, in her garden, from the distance and height of the top room of the Pagoda. Last month, with still some warmth in the sun, I sat outside a pavement café close to Blackheath Station and saw that coming across the pelican crossing next to me was Glenda, clearly an old lady by now, quite slight and vulnerable looking. The only thing to distinguish her as – possibly - an actor or ‘arty’ was a pair of red Converse pumps. I wanted to say, ‘There’s a moment in “Sunday Bloody Sunday” where you meet Peter Finch for the first time (they share a lover in the film) and you make a little wry facial gesture.’ Something like that. It’s magical film acting – and didn’t say it, of course, but felt, in seeing her, that I had somehow come full circle in terms of career and ‘success.’ An oldish chap, with an inadequate heart – metaphorically as well as literally? – glances across at a great actress (who was jaywalking and good for her) who’s pensionable age, and looks it. ‘Golden lads and girls, all must, like chimney sweepers, come to dust.’
What I did with these essays, which shouldn’t be read in any particular order (but hopped around among), is start with a few thoughts and a first line. Except for two of the biggest of them (Coincidences and Bad Company) and one that I re-did for the Royal Literary Fund magazine (Larsing Around) there has been no re-writing. There’s a documentary element emerges at the back of a number of these essays – a particular place, a particular time: ‘Joe’ for starters. I simply wrote the pieces through in an hour or so, only cutting and tidying a bit at the end. I’ve been getting to know who I am, making sense of the society around me – a metropolitan as well as a provincial world – and attempting to build my own way of living, with no clear Grammar School rule book. I half suspect I’ve been limbering up for a novel which may tell deeper truths (though a pack of lies) than biographical writing ever does. And I write about not writing a novel too. And films. And mentors and rivals. Horse racing, visual artists, religion, sex - and illness, which takes me back to the impetus for these essays…
Start with ‘Federer’ if you are so inclined, and then follow the links as you wish.
Memorialise, aware that you are perhaps imposing a pattern. Dirk Bogarde, a great (late career) screen actor, gets an admiring mention at some point, and I listened to some of his memoirs on tape recently, having avoided them when I heard how much he took control of his own life, writing from his diaries and then destroying those diaries. We never learn directly of his homosexuality, therefore. But I was more impressed than I thought I would be – indeed moved by the death of his companion/manager a.k.a. ‘lover'. I take a better playwright than me to task at one point in the essays for a similar attempt at ‘control.’ I loathe PR, though it’s hard to avoid when writing about yourself. As Woody Allen said of masturbation: ‘It’s making love to your favourite person.’ Woody gets a mention in what follows, and so, more surprisingly, does Joni Mitchell, though I don’t quote the stupendous, ‘It’s life’s illusions I recall.’ We go to the grave with various illusions – and one of them might be that our lives are in any way important or significant. I don’t make that claim – it would be stupid to. But I’ve felt impelled lately to set down various memories and ‘portraits’ of people (and no surprise that I’ve had my own portrait painted lately). I knew something was wrong with me a couple of years ago when the portraitist, whom I knew, came calling. I say in my essay about being painted by her that it’s probably an attempt to cheat mortality.
These jottings (will do as a description) were written quite rapidly, among other work, and pretty spontaneously (first thoughts rather than second or third) – and should be treated as an encounter, not a display. Even to my eyes, I’m sometimes ludicrous, self obsessed and occasionally not at all ‘nice’, though I’m reading Steve Jobs’ biography at the moment. 'Nice' is not a word for Jobs and makes you wonder how often if ever niceness and success are combined - I come back to that in Almost Famous. And throughout, all too obviously in these ‘effusions’, I seem concerned with my status as a writer: aware that I’m more, say, Richard Gasquet than the fourteen-time major winning Nadal, and can see that niggles with me, for all the disclaimers. I notice the first essay in the sequence (written a year ago as I came out of recuperation from two heart operations) is called ‘Federer.’ Well, even Nadal in his courteous tributes to the great man, recognises his inferiority (though, ironically, he often beats him). There’s room for more autobiographical writings than those of all-time geniuses - not ghost written, and straight from brain to screen.
I’ve tried to write as freely as I can, censoring only what might hurt other, living, people. I emerge (I tend to find out what I think as I articulate it) as a writer interested, above all, in masterpieces, ambivalent about fame, and not envious, I think - though a little too concerned, perhaps, with success. I’m a Grammar School Boy – that ethos is ingrained. We were trained to be (jargon word alert) aspirational. I’m a Northerner – North of the Trent, anyway, North Midlands more accurately. And I’m gay (have been since about the age of ten) - what my old contemporaries might have called a ‘woofta.’ Gayness features strongly, though I don’t feel as defined by it in day to day life, which is odd. My old History teacher, who stumbled across these essays, wrote to say that he preferred ‘Tommy’ (about my English teacher) to ‘Joe’, about a one-time lover - but that he’d never, of course, considered my sexuality – or thought that I would have the kind of experiences and acquaintance I have since had. That last pleases me a great deal. I didn’t either. I was School Captain, and have many Head Boy characteristics, but I’ve learned unconventionality (I hope) as I’ve grown older. ‘Fess’ Parkin was a young History teacher when I first knew him – the sunny autumn of the Cuban Missile Crisis – and he taught me to think. He’s my ideal reader, I suppose: ‘This is what I am/what I have become.’ I am depressed by those Waterstone biographies with people like Linda Bellingham, Hillary Clinton, and even Julie Walters on their respective front covers, beaming or looking wry or wise. Even worse is any volume (there are, sadly, more than one) by Stephen Fry who looks out at us quizzical and bemused. Avariciously and arrogantly might be more interesting. I think there’s just room here – yes! - for a rant. If he is so fucking clever (Hugh Laurie :‘He’s got a brain the size of Kent’) why doesn’t he go away for five years and write today’s ‘Middlemarch’ rather than hopping from studio to studio, snorting cocaine, and telling us about it? Oh, he’s bi-polar, and don’t we know it. I met him once – he leaned down and was, of course, charming - so please regard these mean and gratuitous remarks as fuelled partly by the fact that he was at my College, taught by someone I knew, liked and respected (he’s dead now), and who rated Stephen. He’s another of these very successful figures I feel I’ve bumped into and had to manoeuvre my way around. I dislike his ubiquity. For somebody who likes solitude I seem to have met a hell of a lot of people much better known than me and they feature in what follows, as pegs on which to hand a narrative, or make a point, or just hang a picture.
One last thought, as a young playwright I was signed by Sheila Lemon, who crops up in the essay ‘Almost Famous’. Sheila then was part of the Peter Crouch agency and all those years ago my fantasy was to arrive at their offices and share a lift with Glenda Jackson, their most famous client. Glenda now lives in Blackheath, in the next house to the one featured in House Sitting, but I have glimpsed her only once, in her garden, from the distance and height of the top room of the Pagoda. Last month, with still some warmth in the sun, I sat outside a pavement café close to Blackheath Station and saw that coming across the pelican crossing next to me was Glenda, clearly an old lady by now, quite slight and vulnerable looking. The only thing to distinguish her as – possibly - an actor or ‘arty’ was a pair of red Converse pumps. I wanted to say, ‘There’s a moment in “Sunday Bloody Sunday” where you meet Peter Finch for the first time (they share a lover in the film) and you make a little wry facial gesture.’ Something like that. It’s magical film acting – and didn’t say it, of course, but felt, in seeing her, that I had somehow come full circle in terms of career and ‘success.’ An oldish chap, with an inadequate heart – metaphorically as well as literally? – glances across at a great actress (who was jaywalking and good for her) who’s pensionable age, and looks it. ‘Golden lads and girls, all must, like chimney sweepers, come to dust.’
What I did with these essays, which shouldn’t be read in any particular order (but hopped around among), is start with a few thoughts and a first line. Except for two of the biggest of them (Coincidences and Bad Company) and one that I re-did for the Royal Literary Fund magazine (Larsing Around) there has been no re-writing. There’s a documentary element emerges at the back of a number of these essays – a particular place, a particular time: ‘Joe’ for starters. I simply wrote the pieces through in an hour or so, only cutting and tidying a bit at the end. I’ve been getting to know who I am, making sense of the society around me – a metropolitan as well as a provincial world – and attempting to build my own way of living, with no clear Grammar School rule book. I half suspect I’ve been limbering up for a novel which may tell deeper truths (though a pack of lies) than biographical writing ever does. And I write about not writing a novel too. And films. And mentors and rivals. Horse racing, visual artists, religion, sex - and illness, which takes me back to the impetus for these essays…
Start with ‘Federer’ if you are so inclined, and then follow the links as you wish.