It began, largely at Martin’s initiation, as a sort of end-of-the-week clearinghouse for gossip and jokes, based on the then-proximity of various literary magazines and newspapers. Reliable founding attendees included the Australian poets Clive James and Peter Porter, Craig Raine (T.S. Eliot’s successor as poetry editor at Faber and Faber), the Observer’s literary editor Terry Kilmartin (the re-translator of Scott Moncrieff’s version of Marcel Proust, and the only man alive trusted by Gore Vidal to edit his copy without further permission), the cartoonist and rake and dandy Mark Boxer, whose illustrations then graced (for once the word is quite apt) all the best bookcovers as well as the Times’s op-ed page. Among those bookcovers were the dozen volumes of Anthony Powell’s masterwork and among Mark’s aesthetic and social verdicts the one I remember being delivered with the most authority was his decided and long-meditated conclusion that: “It’s the height of bad manners to sleep with somebody less than three times.” (Once, planning a party with Martin and myself, he had completed the formal task of inviting all those who simply had to be asked, and exclaimed with relief and delight: “From now on, we should go on the basis of looks alone.”) The critic Russell Davies, the then-rising novelists Ian McEwan and Julian Barnes, James Fenton and Robert Conquest when they were in England, Kingsley when he wasn’t otherwise engaged with yet more lavish and extensive lunches, and your humble servant help to complete this dramatis personae. There were no women, or no regular ones, and nothing was ever said, or explicitly resolved, about this fact. Between us, we were believed to “control” a lot of the reviewing space in London, and much envious and paranoid comment was made then, and has been made since, to the effect that we vindicated or confirmed Dr. F.R. Leavis’s nightmare of a conspiratorial London literary establishment. But I can only remember one occasion when a book was brought along to lunch (to be given to me, so that I could “fill in” for some reviewer who had failed at the last moment), and I truly don’t think that this “counts.”
Time spent on recollecting our little Bohemia confirms three related but contrasting things for me. The first was the pervasive cultural influence of Philip Larkin. The second was the importance of word games and the long, exhaustive process that makes them both live and become worthwhile. The third was the gradual but ineluctable rise of Margaret Thatcher and her transatlantic counterpart Ronald Reagan. These, then, will be my excuses and pretexts for “letting in daylight upon magic,” as Walter Bagehot phrased it.
Unspoken in our circle was quite a deep divide between Left and, if not exactly Right, yet increasingly anti-Left. Fenton and I were still quite Marxist in our own way, even if our cohort was of the heterodox type that I tried to describe earlier. Kingsley had become increasingly vocally right-wing, it often seeming to outsiders that he was confusing the state of the country with the condition of his own liver (but please see his diaries of the time to notice how cogent he often still was). Clive and Martin had been hugely impressed — as who indeed had not? — by the emergence of Alexander Solzhenitsyn as a moral and historical titan witnessing for truth against the state-sponsored lie. In between, men like Terry and Mark found it difficult to repudiate their dislike for a Tory Party that had been the main enemy in their youth. Robert Conquest was and still is the most distinguished and authoritative anti-Communist (and ex-Communist) writing in English, but if this subject was excluded, his politics tended toward something fairly equably Social Democratic in temper. He and I agreed that the Moscow Olympics should be boycotted after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and of course it was he who noticed that some of the aquatic events were being held in the Baltic states, the Russian annexation of which had never been recognized by the post-Yalta agreements that defined the Cold War. At the last lunch I ever attended before emigrating for the United States, a toast was raised to Bob’s impending fourth or was it fifth marriage. “Well,” he replied modestly, “I thought perhaps ‘one for the road.’ ” Philip Larkin wrote gloomily to Kingsley that the new Texan spouse would probably make their old friend move permanently to America, “as Yank bags do.” And so indeed it proved. Elisabeth — or “Liddie” — is a bit more than the “other half”: she is a great scholar in her own person and the anchor of one of the most successful late marriages on record. Once Martin and I had also married Americans, she printed a T-shirt for all concerned that read “Yank bags club.”
I learned appreciably from registering the crosscurrents that underlay this apparently light but really quite serious lunch. Our common admiration for Larkin, as a poet if not as a man, arose from the bleak honesty with which he confronted the fucked-up — the expression must be allowed — condition of the country in those years. It was his use of that phrase — “They fuck you up, your mum and dad,” as the opening line of his masterly “This Be the Verse” — that put him outside the pale of the “family values” community. At one of my first encounters with Martin, when we discovered a common affinity for the man, I put my own main emphasis on his poem “Going, Going,” which was a non-lachrymose elegy for the seaside and countryside of England, increasingly vandalized and paved and polluted by a combination of plebeian litter-louts and polluting capitalists. The poem had actually been commissioned by the Tory government of Edward Heath, to accompany the publication of a “White Paper” on the environment, but had then been censored because of a verse about the greedy businessmen who filled the estuaries with effluent. Larkin’s innate pessimism, his loyalty to the gritty northern town of Hull (where lay the provincial university that employed him), and his hilarious interest in filth of all kinds were attractive to all of us: likewise his very moving, deliberate refusal of the false consolations of religion (beautifully captured by his “Aubade” and “Churchgoing”) on which not even Kingsley disagreed. However, Larkin’s pungent loathing for the Left, for immigrants, for striking workers, for foreigners and indeed “abroad,” and for London showed that you couldn’t have everything.
From Larkin’s own emphatic use of it, a common-enough idiom, that of the “fool,” was also evolved so as to try and make it as capacious as Kingsley’s variation on the ordinary word “good.” Thus there were of course, and as ever in English, plain fools and damn fools. But trying extra hard to be stupid could get you “bloody fool,” and real excellence and application in the willful led to the summa of “fucking fool.” This last title corresponded to Orwell’s definition of something so simultaneously dumb and sinister that only an intellectual could be capable of uttering it. One lunchtime attempt to draw up a “Fucking Fools’ First Eleven” of current greats attracted various nominations, John Berger being unanimously chosen as captain.
As for the word games, just bear with me if you would. Try, first, turning the word “House” into “Sock.” OK: Bleak Sock, Heartbreak Sock, The Fall of the Sock of Usher, The Sock of Atreus, The Sock of the Seven Gables, The Sock of the Rising Sun . . . This can take time, as can the substitution (a very common English vulgarism) of the word “cunt,” for the word “man.” Thus: A Cunt for All Seasons, A Cunt’s a Cunt for All That, He Was a Cunt: Take Him for All in All, The Cunt Who Shot Liberty Valance, Batcunt, Supercunt (I know, I know but one must keep the pot boiling) and then, all right, a shift to the only hardly less coarse word “prong,” as in The Prong with the Golden Gun, Our Prong in Havana, Prongs without Women, Those Magnificent Prongs in Their Flying Machines, and so forth. These and other similarly grueling routines had to be rolled around the palate and the tongue many a time before Clive James suddenly exclaimed: “ ‘A Shropshire Cunt.’ By A.E. Sockprong.” This symbiosis seemed somehow to make the long interludes of puerility worthwhile.
Clive was in some ways the chief whip of the lunch and would often ring round to make sure that there was a quorum (though I noticed that whenever Martin was away his enthusiasm waned a bit, as did everyone else’s). He needed an audience and damn well deserved one. He beautifully illustrated my Peter De Vries point by having an absolutely massive following on television while slaving until dawn i
n Cambridge to produce gem-like essays for no-readership magazines like the New Review or, as his later anthologies of criticism and poetry have amazingly proven, for no immediate audience except himself: a fairly exacting one at that. His authority with the hyperbolic metaphor is, I think, unchallenged. Arnold Schwarzenegger in Pumping Iron resembled “a brown condom stuffed with walnuts.” Of an encounter with some bore with famous halitosis Clive once announced “by this time his breath was undoing my tie.” I well remember the day when he delivered his review of Leonid Brezhnev’s memoirs to the New Statesman and Martin read its opening paragraphs out loud: “Here is a book so dull that a whirling dervish could read himself to sleep with it . . . If it were to be read in the open air, birds would fall stunned from the sky.” One could hear his twanging marsupial tones in his scorn for this world-class drone and bully (whose work was being “published” by the ever-servile and mercenary tycoon Robert Maxwell, one of the Labour Party’s many sources of shame). Clive had given up alcohol after a long period of enjoying a master-servant relationship with it, in which unfortunately the role of the booze had been played by Dirk Bogarde. He thus threw in money only for the food part of the bill, until one day he noticed how much the restaurant charged for awful muck such as bitter lemon and tonic water. At this he moaned with theatrical remorse: “I owe you all several hundred pounds!” But not all was geniality and verve: the only rift in the Friday lute came when Clive took huge exception to Fenton’s review of his (actually quite bad) verse-play about the rise of Prince Charles. The expression complained of, I seem to recall, was “this is the worst poem of the twentieth century.” The ensuing chill went on for a bit.
Ygael Gluckstein, the theoretical guru of the International Socialists, whose “party name” was Tony Cliff, used to tell an anecdote that I came to regard as an analogy for this sort of wordplay. Rosa Luxemburg, our heroine in the struggle against German imperialism (and the woman who had told Lenin that the right to free expression was meaningless unless it was the right of “the person who thinks differently”) had once satirized the overcautious work of the German reformists and trade unionists as “the labor of Sisyphus.” Whenever she approached the podium of the Social Democratic conventions before 1914, and before they proved her right by siding with the filthy kaiser on the crucial vote for war, she would be jeered at as she moved her lamed body toward the platform, and catcalled as “Sisyphus” by the union hacks. “So maybe Sisyphus was wasting his time,” Gluckstein would say, hesitating for emphasis: “But maybe from this he still got some good muscles!”
If this historico-materialist point could be adapted for literary weight-training purposes, I would feel compelled to place on record the marginal question of the Tupper family. Everything depended, in this otherwise undistinguished imaginary dynasty, on your nickname. Thus, you might be an overeager salesman known to his colleagues as “Pushy” Tupper. You might even be a pedantic and donnish fellow saddled with the tag of “Stuffy.” The opium-addict “Poppy” was about as far as most of us were prepared to last on this short-lived expedition, but Robert Conquest, the king of the limerick (and the dragon slayer of the Stalinoid apologists) always thought that if a job was worth doing it was worth doing well. He went off and brooded, and came back with Whirly, the helicopter pioneer, as well as the two hopeless boozers Whisky and indeed Rye Tupper. Ought one to blush, and to admit that some of these went straight into print as the questions-and-answers of the New Statesman weekend competition? Well, so did other things no less trivial that are now the stuff of New Yorker profiles, such as new equivalents for the old phrase “cruising for a bruising.” (“Angling for a mangling,” “aiming for a maiming,” “strolling for a rolling” and — my own favorite — “thirsting for a worsting.”) There was also the time that competitors were asked to submit a paragraph of a Graham Greene parody: Greene himself entered under a pseudonym and placed third. More demanding still was the restless quest, again chiefly led by Conquest, to inscribe the names of obscure and lowly, unenviable, and ultimately poorly rewarded occupations. Thus: one employed as a disciplinarian of last resort in a turbulent kitchen: “Cook-sacker.” As a disciplinarian of last resort in an ill-run lunatic asylum: “Kook-socker.” As the man in the bottling plant who keeps things moist: “Cork-soaker.” As a sectarian pyromaniac in the Scots wars of religion: “Kirk-sacker.” As one who has the lonely task of interrupting boat races by leaning over the bridge to snatch up the steersman with rod and line: “Cox-hooker.”
Simple “versified filth” — Amis senior’s crushing condemnation of most popular limericks — was not allowed.*
One of Kingsley’s letters from this period may show the way things were tending, and certainly makes me remember the atmosphere as it then was. He is writing to Robert Conquest on 7 April 1977:
The swing to the right here is putting the wind up the lefties. At the Friday lunch the other day they, chiefly Hitchens and Fenton, were saying that chaps were getting fed up about stuff that may not be Labour’s fault, but is associated with them rather than the Tories: porn and permissiveness generally, comprehensivization, TUC bosses, terrorism, and the defence run-down.
In cultural-political terms that’s much as I remember it myself: an expiring postwar Labour consensus, increasingly dependent upon tax-funded statism yet actually run by the union-based, old-line right wing of the Labour Party machine. “A Weimar without the sex,” as I once tried to phrase it at the time. Except that in the rest of society there was sex aplenty, with the hedonism of “the Sixties” almost officially instated as dogma, and the slow, surreptitious growth of this consensus to the then unguessed-at status of “correctness.”
There could have been no bad time to meet him, but this in retrospect seems to have been the perfect moment to become acquainted with Ian McEwan. It was Martin who brought us together (Ian having succeeded him as the winner of the Somerset Maugham Award). By then, “everyone” had been mesmerized by Ian’s early collections of short stories, First Love, Last Rites and In Between the Sheets. Met in person, he seemed at first to possess some of the same vaguely unsettling qualities as his tales. He never raised his voice, surveyed the world in a very level and almost affectless fashion through moon-shaped granny glasses, wore his hair in a fringe, was rail-thin, showed an interest in what Martin used to call “hippyish” pursuits, and when I met him was choosing to live on the fringes of the then weed-infested “front-line” black ghetto in Brixton. “What he wrote, you could see,” as Clive James put it when using Ian’s character in a novel, and when it came to fiction he seemed to have contact with other, remoter spheres. (He could and still can, for example, write about childhood and youth with an almost eerie ability to think and feel his way back into it: a faculty that many superb writers are unable to recruit in themselves.) I was sitting at my New Statesman desk one afternoon when the telephone rang and a strange voice asked for me by name. After I had confirmed that it was indeed me, or I, the voice said: “This is Thomas Pynchon speaking.” I am glad that I did not say what I first thought of saying, because he was soon enough able to demonstrate that it was him, and that a mutual friend (make that a common friend) named Ian McEwan had suggested that he call. The book of still another friend, Larry Kramer’s ultrahomosexual effort Faggots, had been seized by the British Customs and Excise and all the impounded copies were in danger of being destroyed. Mr. Pynchon was somewhere in England and was mightily distressed by this. What could be done? Could I raise an outcry, as Pynchon had been assured by Ian I could? I told him that one could protest hoarsely and long but that Britain had no law protecting free speech or forbidding state censorship. We chatted a bit longer, I artlessly offered to call him back, he laughingly declined this transparent try-on and faded back into the world where only McEwan could find him. (Ian seemed to be able to manage this sort of thing without ever boasting of it: he also formed a friendship with the almost-impossible-to-find Milan Kundera.)
From this you may surmise that Ian was not part of any p
ronounced drift to the political or cultural Right. But nor was he someone who had stopped reflecting at approximately the time of Woodstock. His father had been a regular officer in a Scottish regiment. He had a serious working knowledge of military history. His love of the natural world and of wildlife, leading to the arduously contemplative hikes about which we teased him, was matched by an interest in the “hard” sciences. I think that he did, at one stage in his life, dabble a bit in what’s loosely called the “New Age,” but in the end it was the rigorous side that won out and his novels are almost always patrolling some difficult frontier between the speculative and the unseen and the ways in which material reality reimposes itself. When not talking with penetration about literature and music, he was in himself an acute register of the stresses, cultural and moral, that were remaking the old British political divide.