Memoirs of a Private Man

  The first character to present himself to me in Angell, Pearl and Little God was the first one named: a stout, greedy, middle-aged lawyer. For years I had had the idea of such a man marrying a pretty shop girl or factory girl less than half his age and then allowing the events to move forward, the tragi-comedy to work its way out, from there. Not an unusual situation in life. Not an unusual situation in a novel. But here again I wanted to see it through the eyes of this mean and unattractive man. The narrating mirror was not going to be quite clear. One would not see Pearl exactly as she was but as Angell saw her. One would also see the rival – as yet a shadowy figure but weekly growing in substance – through Angell’s eyes. The tragi-comedy of Angell’s betrayal would take on another dimension precisely because he was telling it himself. One would see only a third of the picture, and the light cast upon that third would be brighter for the shadow covering the rest.

  But at this stage, not only was I becoming more interested in Pearl, but Godfrey Brown – or Little God – was emerging from the mists and was threatening to monopolize my attention absolutely. At first, just a tough little rowdy on the make, ready to turn any sort of mildly dishonest penny, he shortly changed in my mind to a mechanic respraying stolen cars and handy with his fists, earning a few pounds here and there sparring in the London East End gyms; and from there he gradually developed into a chauffeur and suddenly into a man with a career in boxing and the ability and the ambition to get to the top.

  At this juncture I knew virtually nothing about boxing, but constant visits to the East End of London quickened my interest. Several times I borrowed a seedy raincoat from the Secretary of the Savile Club, wore my oldest trilby, and slouched down to the Thomas à Becket pub in the Old Kent Road, where with a stub of cigarette in my mouth I would prop up the bar; and presently, when folk had got used to me, I would saunter up to the gym upstairs and watch Henry Cooper sparring.

  Then by chance I got an introduction to one of the big fight promoters, Mike Barrett, and he generously opened every door. By this time fascination with the subject itself had taken over from any mere matter of duty-research, and it seemed abundantly clear that I could write a book entirely about the boxing career of Little God. I attended meetings between the various promoters when their protégés were being matched. I went to weigh-ins, sparring bouts, sat behind the scenes in the dressing rooms before and after they went up to fight. I even attended the pay-outs. The world of prizefighting had become much more interesting to me than the world of law offices or even of a pretty girl on the perfumery counter of a big store.

  Yet, since I generally find it a mistake to be diverted from original intentions, I began to write the novel in the first person of Wilfred Angell, middle-aged Bachelor of Law.

  At first it went well. To begin, it is all Angell’s adventures: his consultation with the doctor, his visit to Switzerland, his meeting with and courtship of Pearl. It is fascinating and right to see all this through the slightly distorting eyes of a stout, selfish, greedy man. But very soon I began to appreciate how much I should lose. The drawback as well as the stimulus of the first-person singular narrative is, of course, that the adventures of only one person and the workings of only one mind can be revealed. In this book, one would have had to see Pearl’s adventures with Godfrey only insofar as she told Angell of them. One would have had to see only the boxing matches that Angell went to or such as he might have had related to him by Pearl or Lady Vosper or Vincent Birman, two other characters in the story. After about 25,000 words I stopped for reassessment.

  Now something like this had happened to me once before – in the writing of Marnie. That time I was halfway through the book; it was the first time I had written in the person of a woman; and I found myself gagging at the love scenes in which the narrator was made love to by a man. So I stopped and began again at page one, writing it entirely afresh in the third person and from an omnisicent point of view. And, although one can begin cheerfully enough writing ‘she came down the steps’ instead of ‘ I came down the steps’, it doesn’t go on like that. Whole areas of the book take on an entirely different complexion. So I persevered in this revision, and having rewritten (in longhand, as I do everything) about 45,000 words of Marnie, I stopped and left it alone for a month, and then went back to read it through. And quite clearly the new version was losing enormously in the change. Not merely was the distorting mirror removed but the language lacked the colloquial immediacy of the original. The whole book seemed prosaic where before it had been dynamic.

  So back I went to the original version, reading it, rewriting it here and there until I came again to the troublesome love scenes. But this time I had somehow sunk deeper into the character of the girl, and they went through without let or hindrance. When the book was finished I was convinced – and still am – that the first person narrative was a tremendous gain upon any other possible way of presenting that novel.

  A reluctance, therefore, to change from this method of narrative in Angell, Pearl and Little God is understandable, and it was only after an agony of indecision that I eventually sat down and laboriously rewrote the first 25,000 words in the omniscient third person.

  Again a month’s wait, again a careful reading, again a tremendous sense of loss. Angell’s predicament cried out to be told in the biased first person. Also, even though so differently told from Marnie, [there was in Angell] a loss of colloquial immediacy in the telling.

  So one came to an impasse. Neither way would work. Either way meant giving up so much. After about a further month’s horrible indecision, I decided to leave the first chapters, as told by Angell, in his skin; and then began to tell the next part in Pearl’s skin. This way one still got the urgency of first-person narrative, and still it could be told through the mirror of another personality; it was only that the person changed part way.

  After this it was quite a simple matter several chapters later to switch the personal narrative a third time to Little God. In this way the novel even seemed to gain something, because each time one saw the other characters through a different flawed mirror, thus helping to create them in all three physical dimensions …

  Thus I reached about the halfway mark of the book. After Little God’s piece it was natural to turn to a new long piece by Angell. After Angell, Pearl. This way one could gradually work right through to the climax of the novel and so finish it. It was almost a new idea!

  Again a gap of a month, and I read through what I had written. A new idea? Surely not. It had been used by other novelists before, and never, as far as I could remember, with complete success. What begins as a brilliant device ends as a gimmick. To change the narrator once or twice is perhaps permissible. After that the wheels begin to creak. The author labours to bring it off, and both he and the reader are conscious of the effort.

  After this rejection – and it was ultimate and absolute on my part – I was left once again with the alternatives of either choosing one of the three principal characters and restricting the knowledge and the illumination of character to what he could perceive, thus gaining a little but losing a lot. Or accepting the fact that as this novel had developed, the challenge of the first-person singular could not be taken up, and returning to the omniscient third person, with its loss of idiosyncrasy and immediacy but its enormous scope, its complete lack of blinkered vision.

  So I now scrapped what I had written – all but the 25,000 words in which I had experimented in this style six months before – and from then on wrote the book as it later appeared.

  Although I cannot judge this objectively, the success of the book, and particularly the success of the characters, does give me the impression that possibly this preliminary experimentation, this lighting up of the characters, so to speak, from different angles, helped to give them extra solidity and shape.

  It was an interesting experiment, but I commend it only to those with ample time and endurance.

  In between The Grove of Eagles and Angell, Pearl and Little God I ha
d written two other novels. One, After the Act, based a good bit on my own experiences in France, got marvellous reviews but failed to attract the mass market except in Italy, where it was the choice of Club degli Editore. It did get a specially good press reception in the United States, which attracted an American film-maker called George W. George, who took an option on the film rights, and then a second and then a third but could not get it off the ground. Later a French film company took up two expensive options. When George W. George heard he said, ‘Perhaps only the French can make it.’ But in the end they too gave it up. The other book was The Walking Stick, which was, if one judges solely by financial criteria, the most successful novel I have ever written.

  Long before I was married, a family came to live in Cornwall with a polio-crippled daughter who had the most beautiful face and such a charming manner that I half fell in love with her. Thereafter, as if purging my feelings, lame girls have repeatedly appeared in my novels; Holly in The Merciless Ladies, Rosina Hoblyn in the Poldark books. The Walking Stick finally channelled this vein to its limits, and possibly for that reason had a poignancy that moved readers too. Apart from the two book club choices it got in America and one in Germany, Hollywood took a great fancy to it. When more than one producer wants a novel there is competitive bidding, to the author’s great advantage. Eventually Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer went off with it in triumph. The film they made of it was a failure, but in retrospect this may have been because the way the film was made was ahead of its time. It is now repeatedly shown on television and seems to please viewers. When the book was first published, someone described it as ‘a love story with a “Rififi” middle’, referring to a widely successful French film about a jewel robbery. Eric Till, the director, was, I believe, much more influenced by a Swedish film called Elvira Madigan, and when it came to the robbery in the middle of the film he chose to use the robbery scenes as an explosion of noise and violence instead of the silent and nailbiting tension of the scenes in the novel.

  David Hemmings played the lead and played it very well. In the all-important part of the girl with the walking stick, Till wanted Judi Dench. MGM, typically, insisted on an international name and chose Samantha Eggar. She too did very well, but Judi Dench would have given it an extra dimension.

  A sad postscript here is that when the novel was nearly finished I could not find a title for it. My wife suggested The Walking Stick. Within six months of its publication she needed one herself.

  After the film had been made, MGM gave Jean the walking stick that Samantha Eggar had used. It was a handsome ebony-black stick, but after six months it broke, being made of some composition and varnished over. Like so much in the film world, it was not as real as it seemed.

  BOOK TWO

  Chapter One

  The Walking Stick is the novel with which I again changed publishers.

  I had become somewhat disillusioned with Hodder, partly because of their failure to market Marnie while the Grace Kelly sensation was at its height, but there were other reasons too. When it became known in the publishing world that I was thinking of making a move, four publishers were quick to make approaches. I ended up by moving to Collins, who were not the highest bidder but had a great reputation. I had known Billy (later Sir William) Collins, though casually, for twenty years, and liked him and felt he liked me. I had met him once in New York on the dance floor of a hotel, with one of the new young women writers he was promoting, and he had said to me: ‘I see you’ve moved publishers. If you ever think of doing it again, why not get in touch with me?’ Also I had become friendly with Lord Hardinge, who was then working editorially for Collins, and George, who greatly liked the Poldark novels, took one of them to Billy to read, with the remark that they were, in the popular phrase of those days, ‘ a licence to print money’. Even so, I was on terms of closer friendship with Charles Pick, the head of Heinemann, who had put in the highest bid, and I was far more deeply committed to the thirdbidder, the Bodley Head, whose owner was my closest friend, Max Reinhardt.

  There was no question in the minds of my wife and our two children: ‘Oh, you must go to Max.’

  I was in those days doing very well out of my writing, able to live well and to maintain my family in the style to which I felt they had become accustomed; but I was often ailing, and who was to know if some illness should put me off working for a year or two?

  So I consulted three people: Cyrus Brooks, my agent, Arthur Coleridge, the head of Reader’s Digest in England, and Edmond Segrave, the editor of the Bookseller. At least two of these were totally unbiased. All three were unequivocal: I must go to Collins.

  When I told my children of my decision, they would hardly speak to me for a couple of days. It was in their eyes morally obligatory to go to Max. I agreed with them, which made it worse. I could only tell them I was doing it for their sake as well as my own.

  The move paid off – financially and in other ways. Max took my decision like a true friend, as did Charles. (I was able to offer some other books to Max later.)

  I remained on good terms with Billy and Pier Collins until they died, and similarly with George Hardinge. But in the next twenty years I never got to know Billy any better. He was cheerful, jolly, enthusiastic, just as when I had met him on the dance floor of the New York hotel. Very likeable but slightly unknowable. And soon after I joined Collins, George Hardinge moved to Macmillan.

  But there was an unexpected bonus. I met the Managing Director of Collins, one Ian Chapman, who was among the most distinguished publishers of his generation, and, a few months later, Marjory, his charming wife. We became personal friends and have remained so ever since. I look on them now as my most valued and loving of friends.

  Companioning Jean and me on about three-quarters of our trips to Europe were our two children. Living where we did in a small Cornish village with a cinema, nine excellent tennis courts and a golf course, and limitless cliffs and bathing beaches nearby, to say nothing of their friends, it might have seemed to them that what they left behind could hardly be bettered by what we were taking them to see, but they usually seemed ready for adventure. (Surprise, surprise, they might have taken after their mother.) True, Rosamund looked on foreign food with grave suspicion, and I learned to be able to ask for ham omelette in five languages. So off we went in our big open Alvis, in search of better weather and warmer seas than what we were leaving behind.

  For some reason I cannot now explain to myself, I had a fixation on mountain passes, and up and down and round endless hairpin bends we went, ears cracking, to this col or that in the French and Italian and Austrian Alps or in the Pyrenees. Pleasure was gulped at, culture was more slowly and haphazardly imbibed. Our way of life in Venice must seem vulgar in the extreme: year after year we stayed at the Danieli, and in the morning the children would dash out to buy the ingredients for a picnic, then we would all take the CIGA launch to the Lido, where we had a cabin booked on the Excelsior Palace beach. We would return to Venice about four and take tea in St Mark’s Square. By the time that was finished, most of the museums and churches would be closed or closing. In the fifteen times we visited Venice, its beauties were only partly explored. What is more deplorable is that because Jean and I had been to Venice before the children came, we had ourselves done much of the sightseeing that should have been reserved for them. However, they have seen most of the indoor treasures of the city in their own time. And I have never heard a word of complaint from either of them about the routine we followed when we were all there together.

  The timing of our visit each year to coincide with the Venice Film Festival was not without a serious purpose, and I met a fair number of film stars and producers on the beach of the Lido, and we attended various film premieres. I remember one day on the Lido meeting Dustin Hoffman, and his being very enthusiastic about my novel Angell, Pearl and Little God, which had just been bought by Paramount. ‘I really want to play Little God,’ he said. ‘I’ve never done any boxing, but I’ll gladly learn enough of it to p
lay the part. I don’t know any cockney dialect, but I’ll mug up on that too. But I won’t play with a lousy script.’

  At great expense, Paramount got three scripts, all equally lousy, so the film was never made. It still lies as an asset (so called) in the books of Paramount Pictures.

  One of the scripts was sent to Marlon Brando, with the offer of a million dollars if he would play Angell. He did not bother to reply.

  Travelling abroad with Jean after her stroke (of which more later) was often an anxious business. For long I could not forget the suddenness with which the illness had struck her down in Crete. Who was to say it would not happen again? If she went down to our greenhouse to pick some tomatoes for supper and was five minutes late returning, I would keep an over-keen ear open for the sound of a footstep or awalking stick. If we were deep in the wilds of Brazil surrounded by forest and in downpours of rain, I could not help but keep fingers crossed.

  At times she had an appalling cough – like someone tipping coals, I would say – remnant of her asthmatic days but, according to the best medical opinion, not significant of any illness. I told her that she would earn a fine lot of money dubbing for anyone in a film or TV drama who was supposed to be dying of TB. (Their thin affected little coughs were entirely unconvincing.)

  I remember taking her to Madras and then on to Mahabalipuram. It was pitch dark when we arrived at Madras, and Jean was hustled from the plane in an unsprung wooden wheelchair, pushed by a cheerful careless child who thought that bumping along at speed over a broken roadway was fun. When we got in the old taxi and began to push our way through the ill-lit suburbs of Madras and started on the Stygian twenty-mile trip to our hotel, I said to myself, ‘Are you mad, bringing this ailing, delicate woman all this way to an unknown hotel in an unknown village in the depths of night, miles away from anything but the most unsophisticated medical treatment?’