He showed me his almighty scar, barely healed (what advances in surgery since then), and we talked of this literary matter and that. It was a time in his life when his standing as a poet was not as high as it had been, or would be later. Earlier in the winter I had been to a series of lectures at Exeter given by a professor of poetry (I cannot remember what academic faculty he was attached to but he was a young man with his finger, as you might say, on the fashionable pulse), and his theme in one of these lectures was the way in which the new generation of poets had almost totally rejected the old. The only two poets excepted from this anathema and whom they wholeheartedly admired, he said, were W. B. Yeats and Robert Graves.
Thinking this would please him, I told him what the professor had said; but Robert was so insulted that his name should be linked with W. B. Yeats that he was distinctly huffy about it, and talk was rapidly switched.
Perhaps there is a lesson to be learned from this.
After a week or so in Majorca we went by sea to Ibiza (the only way then), accompanied by a young Pole called Casimir Stamirski, a friend of Robert’s, who shortly after we arrived introduced us to a big young man from the States called Irving. He seemed to be a typical husky all-American: frank, friendly and fit. Only when we were having a meal with him and I went into his bathroom did I see his medicine chest stuffed with pills. (But maybe this is typical too.) On our second meeting he told me he had written a novel and could I possibly read it and tell him what I thought.
I cursed under my breath. Reading other people’s would-be novels in typescript when on holiday is my idea of hell. But I could hardly refuse, and when I read the book I was very impressed. It owed much to Hemingway, but it was a good novel in its own right, tense, terse and tough. I had it sent to Doubleday with a letter of strong recommendation. They turned it down. More fools they, I thought. And sure enough it was later published with considerable success.
Over the following years we kept in touch. Twice I wrote letters of recommendation for him to obtain a Guggenheim scholarship. (Whether anything came of these I never heard.)
The next thing I heard of him was when he was charged with having forged an autobiography of Howard Hughes and sold it to a publisher as genuine. He was found guilty and sentenced to some years in prison.
It was a sort of fame for Clifford Irving at last, no doubt, but hardly what he was seeking.
Incidentally, some years later I met Casimir Stamirski in London, and, since he had an encyclopedic knowledge of the sleazier nightclubs of London, he was very helpful to me when I was writing The Tumbled House.
The Green Flash is worth an extra word or two.
As mentioned earlier, I met Gregory Peck’s mother-in-law while
we were living in the South of France and was much taken with her
good looks, intellect and brilliant sophistication. I badly wanted to
use her in a novel, but somehow she would not come alive in any
circumstances in which I put her.
Floating around in the same creative jelly, as it were, came an idea from some other source – I can’t remember what – of a young man who falls in love with a much older woman who disguises her real age until she has an illness and quite suddenly looks old. The young man, still young, is bereft. She is still alive, and his memory of her as she was is too potent for him to take other women – on a serious plane – in her place.
These two ideas wanted to come together but I could not decide how. It seemed important that the two chief characters should be in the same world, she senior to him. I was not interested in the commercial world or banking. The film world and the theatre, law, medicine, art, literature, all were thought through, and none seemed to fit the bill, especially where her predominance in her profession was needed for the purposes of the novel. The one calling which seemed to provide absolutely the right ambience was perfumery. Here all the grandes dames of the world of fashion paraded: Chanel, Rubinstein, Arden, Lauder, there was no end to them.
So I proceeded on those grounds. Knowing virtually nothing of the subject, I had to do a lot of research both through books and in the field. I got an introduction to Desmond Brand, the then managing director of Helena Rubinstein, and he put everything I asked for at my disposal. I visited the works, the testing laboratories, the big commercial suppliers, the shops, the beauty salons. Desmond Brand was a very down-to-earth character. He emphasized the commercial, no-nonsense side of the business, but was willing enough to utilize the mystique, the romantic advertising, the bally-hoo that has grown up around the whole subject of perfumery.
I absorbed it all, thought it through again and again – then gave it up. However one treated it, the whole perfumery business seemed to me too light, too trivial for the setting of what had to be – however it eventually turned out (novel, thriller, or whatever) – essentially a sombre story. I gave it up for a year or more. I can’t remember what, if anything, I did in the meantime.
Nor can I remember at what stage it was in my struggling with this obstinate novel that I met a man in Terrigal Bay, New South Wales, one wet and dismal morning. Jean and I had flown to Athens, Nairobi, Johannesburg, Cape Town, with a week there, and later taken ship for Australia. In our innocence or ignorance we had imagined these ten days to Perth, followed by calls at Adelaide and Melbourne before coming in at dawn under the famous Sydney Bridge, would be through sunlit seas with flying fish and dolphins, and agreeable days sunbathing by the swimming pool. Instead, we were in the Roaring Forties, with strong cold winds, grey scudding skies and unquiet seas. Furthermore, this was a cruise ship, and though Italian, full of West Germans, English and French taking a round-the-world trip; and, as possibly could have been foreseen by no one, leaving Europe in January, had filled itself with differing kinds of influenza which had cross-bred on the way. When we joined her at Cape Town most of the crew, including the captain, had been down with it and most of the passengers were either recovering or sickening. With the weather so stormy that it was not possible to stay in the open air for more than a few gusty minutes, one spent nearly all one’s time in one’s cabin or the staterooms, where the airconditioning relentlessly pumped around the active bacteria. I was the first to go down and sneezed and coughed and sweated through the last half of the voyage and carried the uncomfortable remnants with me as far as Sydney.
Jean, it seemed, was immune, and stumped and staggered her way off to play bridge with various people while I lay in the cabin. February is not the best time to visit Sydney, and we arrived in the middle of a great heat wave: ‘One hundred and three in the shade,’ screamed one newspaper, ‘and to hell with celsius.’ We were given a wonderful time by Collins and various associated friends, but in the middle of it the influenza viruses at last overcame Jean’s resistance and she went down with a succession of high fevers which, together with the various ailments she carried about with her as a matter of course, raised anxieties about whether she could continue the trip as planned.
Our immediate plan, made in England, was, after ten days in Sydney, to hire a car and drive along the coast as far as Terrigal Bay and then Salamander Bay. The weather pursued us to Terrigal Bay. Intense heat, which made a number of factories in Sydney close down, was accompanied by strident winds. When we arrived there we were determined to bathe; but no sort of protection from the sun could survive on the beach in that gale, so all we could do was to undress in the bedroom of our hotel, tug at the front door until it came open (to slam violently behind us as soon as we had been blown through) and stagger onto the beach, plunge into the warm sea and immediately, to avoid sunstroke, stagger back to the protection of the hotel.
This was the last day of the heatwave. Overnight the temperature dropped from 102 º to 52º and all the next day, and for the next six days, lashing rain fell. (At the next place, Salamander Bay, which was a motel, water was running down the inside walls of our bedroom when we arrived. Not the ideal habitation for a woman whose temperature was slightly exceeding that of Sydney
when we left.)
Terrigal Bay is – or then was – really little more than a group of hotels and motels and shops and dwelling houses arranged round the rather splendid bay where one may, one hopes, bathe and sunbathe at one’s leisure. When it is raining there is virtually nothing to do. Jean, with a true sense of the priorities, decided to have her hair done. While she was in the salon I sat in the bar and got into conversation with another Englishman, similarly stranded, though I never learned what had brought him there in the first place.
When Jean emerged from her salon an hour and a half later and came up to me I smiled at her vaguely and, not at all vaguely, gestured her to make herself scarce. The man was telling me his life story.
It was such an extraordinary story that I should have gone straight upstairs afterwards and written it all down. Stupidly I did not, but enough of it remained in my memory, and some of it was riveting.
One of the problems of life is that truth is so much stranger than fiction that when one uses it as fiction it seems too bizarre to be true. Among a number of things he told me was that when estranged from his wealthy wife he was invited to her birthday party at the Dorchester Hotel, and he went along feeling this to be the first move towards a reconciliation. When he got there he found all the other eighteen guests were men, and they were all homosexuals.
This scene appears in The Green Flash. I hope it convinces. The character of David Abden in the novel owes something to that meeting in Terrigal Bay, but it derives from other men as well. Many have thought him a finely drawn character. Many have disliked him.
So after eighteen months or so I returned to the idea that only a book using the perfumery business as its basis would be suitable for the novel I wanted to write. When I rang Desmond Brand and told him, he was pleased and surprised to hear from me again. In the meantime I had despaired of doing anything with it at all, and had strenuously considered a variety of other stories which might be developed. I would get so far with this or that idea but then across their path would come the story of Shona and David. It blocked the way completely for anything else I hoped to write. I had to get it out of my system.
There were infinite problems, other characters looming, other incidents log-jamming the way ahead. Because of the growth of another character, I had to study fencing and went to fencing schools to see people at work, consulted a master fencer. Scotland featured in it largely, and I did not know the social life and habits of the sort of class from which David Abden derived. The seedy and criminal side of the perfumery world became involved, and Scotland Yard consulted, and the courts. So it went on. But the mere mechanics of research were simple and easy compared to the battle between the characters and the manoeuvring of events so that the characters should have full play.
When I delivered the typescript to Collins their response was more than enthusiastic. Ian Chapman, then still chairman, took the typescript to Venice and rang me from there telling me that this was the novel he had been waiting twenty years for me to write. He said: ‘I hope you’ll write much more, of course, but if you never wrote another word, this is it.’ Others were equally delighted, including Sam Vaughan, the chief editor of Random House in New York. So all the barometers were set fair.
The first wobbling of the high-pressure system came when the editor who dealt with Random House paperbacks said she did not want it for their own paperback division. And the book’s eventual reception both in England and America was mixed. It was well reviewed and pleased a lot of people. I had letters from semi-friends and acquaintances who had never written to me before, other authors among them, and who seemed to see in this book what I had hoped readers would see. But a mass of ordinary readers did not care for it. It was never a big seller even by my standards.
Do I regret this? Of course. Very much. Sales are not all that important; but quite a number of my own personal friends did not like it. Nobody has ever been able to tell me why. The nearest I have ever come to solving this mystery was when a retired film producer friend of mine (who was a tremendous admirer of the book) sent it to a young director friend of his who happened to be one of the successful men of the moment. The director replied to the effect that this was a fine novel but he would not want to make it into a film because the hero was such a shit.
A number of women, especially young ones, have hinted at the same opinion, and one day I made a detailed inventory of David Abden’s misdeeds. He is a boy who when he is ten is being bullied by his drunken father and hits his father with a poker and accidentally kills him. This guilt, part conscious, part subconscious, stays with him all his life: he turns to petty crime until he meets Shona and from there on, resentfully, grudgingly, rebelliously, chooses to go straight. Tragedy haunts him and he is involved in another accidental killing; but all through his life his bark is worse than his bite. Having been very much against the police, he comes to work for them. Joining forces with Shona and becoming her lover is all a calculated form of self-advancement, but he finds himself in the end working genuinely for the perfumery business and genuinely unable to separate himself from this older woman whom he finds he truly loves. He is a character, one would think, who seems to merit sympathy rather than dislike.
For many readers it works this way, but for many more it does not.
After the Act is another book which didn’t take off in any general way, but I understand why this is and accept it. It is one of my favourite novels. The Green Flash still puzzles me. My publishers assure me that it will continue to make its way in the world.
The origins of Stephanie, published in August 1992, go back, as usual, a long way. For a good many years I have known two men, both now elderly, who while vastly different in most ways, have one thing in common: they were ‘ war heroes’. One of them had been parachuted into France, blew up bridges, fought with the Maquis, was captured and tortured, and later was involved in action in North Africa and the Far East. Yet for all the time I had known him, he was the gentlest of men. The other was in the Parachute Regiment, fought with great bravery and the utmost recklessness all through the war and – it is said – ran himself into further debt every leave because he did not expect to survive. He is not now such a gentle man as the first but is quiet, courteous and shy.
It seemed to me that both these men illustrated a peculiar paradox: that for a short time a human being can become a trained killer, and then when that short term is over, can return to the fold, sober, law abiding, reliable, as if nothing had happened. (These are not ordinary soldiers, where the change is not so extreme, but the real killers.) And I put to myself the question: if in later life a situation should arise when violence was again justifiable – not in another war but in their own lives – would they briefly revert to what they had been in their youth?
For some years also I have had a club friend who is the chief police surgeon at Heathrow and deals exclusively with the smuggling of drugs. We talked a lot. Chiefly he talked and I listened. I began to study the drug question, interviewed people, trying to see all around it. On one of my frequent visits to India I happened to meet a drug dealer in Bombay. So it all began.
In the course of the writing I came to use only one of my war-hero friends; the other turned into the man I call Henry Gaveston, who came from a different source altogether. I intended there should be quite a lot of humour in this book, chiefly in the conversations between the two men, but this perished because the novel as it eventually evolved was not suitable for it.
This, as I hope readers will have realized, has not been intended as a chronological memoir. Somewhere along the line – it must have been early 1983 – I was awarded an OBE in the New Year’s Honours List.
It was a very pleasant surprise, and I much appreciated being appreciated.
The day the awards were made was sunny but cold. Buckingham Palace was as usual warmly welcoming and magnificent, everything arranged in the most precise detail. The band played its soothing, elegant tunes. The only discordant note came from a tall elderly man n
ext to me who, having received his medal, looked down at it and observed: ‘It says here for god and empire. Well, I know the Empire’s dead. I’m not sure, but I wonder a bit about God.’
Whatever else, wit at least survives. Recently I was in the Savile Club and got into conversation with two other old men. We fell to discussing prices before and during World War II, and where we were accustomed to stay when we were in London.
The first man said: ‘ I always went to one of the Waverley group. They were good value and comfortable.’
‘ Yes,’ I agreed. ‘ I usually stayed in Bloomsbury too. The Lincoln Hall. It was Blitzed during the war.’
Third man said: ‘I always stayed at the Cumberland.’
First man gave a guffaw. ‘Oh, that was known as the Tart’s Hotel. You only had to ring …’
‘ I always took my wife there,’ the third man said stiffly.
The first man raised an eyebrow. ‘Did you have to pay corkage?’
I have called this book Memoirs of a Private Man, for this is always what I have wanted to be. In the early days the press were not interested in me, but later sometimes they very much have been, and I have always been intensely uncomfortable under their scrutiny and tried to duck whatever I could.
My second publisher once said to me that if I wanted to avoid publicity I had chosen the wrong profession.