11 June. In the evening to the Savile with Mary-Kay for the Hawthornden Prizegiving. I sit between Anthony Quinton and Iris Murdoch and am grateful for the worldliness of one and the unworldliness of the other, Quinton chatting easily and with seeming gusto and also being very funny despite having flown back from Boston that day, while Dame Iris keeps up a constant flow of questions (‘Where do you live?’ ‘Do you drive a car?’ ‘What colour is it?’ ‘Where have you parked?’), a nice purling stream as she tucks into the Savile’s duck, followed by apple sorbet. Others within earshot are Grey Gowrie, Dirk Bogarde and Thora Hird. It’s less daunting than I imagined, and I manage some sort of speech and think the worst is over. But no. Dru Heinz has detailed a dozen of the men to stand up and say a few words about me, or tell a theatrical anecdote. So I sit there while these poor sods – Piers Paul Read, John Bayley, P. J. Kavanagh – all fetch out some theatrical memoir while obligatorily praising my perception, wit, humanity etc., all of them obviously hating it, but no one hating it quite as much as me.
*See pages 498–503.
* See page 29.
*See page 39.
* See page 63.
15 Evening Standard Drama Awards, 1961
16 Camden Town, 1968
17 A. B. with Sir John Gielgud and some of the cast of Forty Years On, Apollo Theatre, October 1968
18 A day Out, Fountains Abbey, May 1972
19 and 20 Miss Shepherd's first van, Camden Town, 1973
21 Habeas Corpus, Lyric Theatre, May 1973
22 Gemma Fripp, George Fenton and A. B., Morecambe, September 1976
23 Our Winnic, Rochdale, 1982
24 Oue Winnic with Innes Lloyd
25 With Kirk wild, Intemsive Care, Bradford, 1982
Nicholas Henderson manages to avoid this indignity by denying he’s been asked to speak, so poor Colin Haycraft is put up in his place. Gowrie talks a little about Blunt, saying that his brother Wilfrid knew nothing of the rumours until stories started appearing in Private Eye. After one particularly pointed story Wilfrid rang his brother and said that, simply for the sake of the family, they should do something to scotch these tales. There was a pause. ‘I think’, said Anthony, ‘I should come and see you.’ Two days later he was exposed.
3 July. After the show [Single Spies] I take A. to pick up Trevor, who’s gone fishing with his friend Martin up Hampstead Ponds. One or two boys are pitched by the dark water, sitting under the obligatory umbrellas (though it’s a warm and cloudless night), and drifting in the water their luminous blue floats. We find Trevor and Martin just as they’re packing up, not having caught anything, and we walk behind them across the embankment, Trevor a gangling, old-fashioned boy in oilskins and all the gear and the woolly cap he insists on wearing, Martin smaller and younger and more of a Cockney. They chat quietly, like two old men coming back from the allotment.
‘Have you caught anything?’ A. asks some other boys who are still pitched by the pond. ‘Yes,’ says one: ‘a cold.’ It’s a joke he probably got from his father.
5 July, A middle-aged couple walking along the cliffs in Wales are ‘brutally murdered’. The dead man’s brother, unable to believe it could have happened to them, says, ‘They were perfect parents, churchgoers, non-smokers’.
12 July. Coral [Browne] rings, having had another operation to remove a tumour from her leg. ‘I tell you, darling, I feel like a fucking sieve. I’ve got a hole under my arm from the last operation and now another hole in my leg. And that’s in addition to the holes that nature gave me.’ I say how brave she is. ‘No, dear – you just have to get on with it. Mind you, I’ve had seven operations for it now, and it just gets boring.’ Then she says how Vincent [Price] has lost a lot of weight but is still insisting on going on some long trip to open an exhibition: ‘But you know Vinny. He’d travel halfway across the United States to open a manhole.’
Says that despite all her radiation therapy and last week’s operation she is looking wonderful. ‘It’s heartbreaking, dear. When I was young and needed to look wonderful I was like something the cat brought in. Now I’m seventy-six and it doesn’t matter I look better than I’ve ever looked in my life.’
Continuing appreciations of Olivier, all of them avoiding the unspoken English question: ‘But was he nice?’
23 July. ‘On comedy Ken Dodd has read Schopenhauer, Wittgenstein, Kant, Malcolm Muggeridge, Stephen Leacock and Freud, though he is always careful not to appear a Clever Clogs’ (today’s Observer). Taking a leaf out of Isaiah Berlin’s book, I suppose.
20 August. Steven Berkoff, who is currently everywhere, is quoted as saying that critics are like worn-out old tarts. If only they were, the theatre would be in a better state. In fact critics are much more like dizzy girls out for the evening, just longing to be fucked and happy to be taken in by any plausible rogue who’ll flatter their silly heads while knowing roughly the whereabouts of their private parts. A cheap thrill is all they want. Worn-out old tarts have at least got past that stage.
22 August. Many drowned in the Thames when, in the early hours of Sunday morning, a dredger runs down a pleasure boat. The circumstances are bad enough – the party in full swing, the huge black dredger tipping the boat on its side before running it down, but this doesn’t stop the reportage from making it worse. ‘Revellers’, says ITN, ‘were tipped into the freezing waters.’ ‘Left struggling in the icy waters of the Thames’ is another report. It was actually one of the hottest nights of the year, and one of the rescued says that the water was warm, only very dirty. One sane girl, whose Italian boyfriend is missing, refuses to give her name to reporters because ‘she doesn’t want to become a news item.’ Undeterred by becoming a news item, Mrs Thatcher, in her capacity as Mother of Her People, circles the spot in a police launch and is filmed bending caringly over a computer screen in the incident room.
27 September. K. has been auditioning extras for his film, including a woman who had put down among her special accomplishments ‘Flirting with Japanese men’. Had this been a joke it would almost certainly have got her the job, but it turns out to be true. She is irresistibly drawn to the Japanese and has learned the language in order to flirt more effectively. Passing Japanese in the street, she will sometimes murmur (in Japanese), ‘I would like to cut your toenails in the warmth of my own home’ – apparently a standard come-on in the Land of the Rising Sun. ‘And does it work?’ asks K. ‘Oh yes. Quite often.’
28 September, Watch a TV programme in which it is said that ambulance drivers undergo a high degree of stress and that en route to a call their pulse habitually rises from a normal 60 to 90. Not en route to a call but slumped in my chair, I check my own pulse. It is 82. Note that after a successful round even show-jumpers now punch the air. Croquet next.
16 October. Trying to write with a bit more precision this morning and to come up with the right word, I remember a machine that used to be in every seaside amusement arcade. A big mirrored drum in a glass case slowly revolved and on it some (not very) desirable objects – cigarettes, lipstick, tins of talcum powder. One slid in a penny that activated a grab which one had to manoeuvre over one’s chosen prize before at the critical moment releasing the grab to grip the object. Except that it never did. Either the grab moved or failed to grip or the drum revolved what one wanted out of reach. That was what happened this morning. The talcum powder, the cigarettes and the lipstick and the world and everything that is the case went on turning, the grab came up with nothing, and I wasted my penny.
4 November. More humbug from Lord Hailsham (apropos the Guildford Four): ‘I cannot see how you can blame the piano if someone strikes the wrong note.’ Then that complacent chuckle. If by piano he means the system of justice, then the metaphor is inaccurate. The ‘wrong note’ (all fifteen years of it) was struck by the police and Crown Prosecution Service – i.e. part of the workings of the piano. The thing that’s wrong with the judicial system is that at the moment it isn’t a piano. It’s a pianola.
13 December. A
n article in yesterday’s Independent says that, fanciful though it may seem, it is now pretty well accepted that a deep crease in the ear lobe indicates a propensity to heart disease. I forget about the article until I am brushing my teeth, then glance out of idle curiosity at my ear lobes, wondering how they could be creased anyway. But mine are, with a definite crease in one and the beginnings of a crease in the other. Of course, as the article says, such creases are quite common and often mean nothing at all, but I go gingerly to bed and today find myself looking at the world in an entirely different light, all the time waiting for the thunderbolt. It could be a punishment for having written a book about Kafka. His ear lobes were one of the few parts of his body that he was happy with; and indeed I have never had any quibbles about mine – or much interest in them. But now all that has changed. I look at ear lobes on the tube; I look at ear lobes on TV. The Archbishop of Canterbury was on tonight, and all I was interested in was his ear lobes. Which I could see. Now I can’t wait for Mrs Thatcher.
Modern Life. I ring A. and Ben answers. I ask A. why he is not at school. ‘Ben. Why are you not at school?’ ‘Asbestos in the art room.’
28 December. A respectably dressed middle-aged woman outside the post office clutches a collecting-box. About to drop a coin in it, I see in the nick of time that it is not a collecting-box but a can of Holsten Pils.
1990
2 January. I seem to be the only Western playwright not personally acquainted with the new President of Czechoslovakia. I envy him though. What a relief to find oneself head of state and not have to write plays but just make history. And no Czechoslovak equivalent of Charles Osborne snapping at your ankles complaining that the history you’re making falls between every possible stool, or some Prague Steven Berkoff snarling that it’s not the kind of history that’s worth making anyway. I wonder whether Havel has lots of uncompleted dissident plays. To put them on now would be somehow inappropriate. Still, he could write a play about it.
Though I like the sound of Havel, I’m put off by the chic of the kind of people who are now flocking to Prague. I suppose revolutions always attract the wrong people. When I was at Oxford in 1956 some smart Balliol undergraduates felt that the Hungarian uprising would benefit from their presence. They sent round an appeal for funds, pointing out that a contingent was going from Cambridge, so it was important that Oxford should not be unrepresented, history for them simply the Boat Race carried on by other means.
28 February. At the National Theatre to discuss a possible adaptation of The Wind in the Willows, I run into Tony Harrison. He talks about Trackers, the play he has written and is directing about two papyrologists who piece together the fragments of a satyr play and then take on the central roles, cocks and all. It is to open first in a warehouse at Saltaire, near Bradford, and Tony had to meet the local press to tell them something about the play, the issues it discusses, and how it relates to subsequent cultural history. The papers came out the next day all more or less saying the same thing: ‘Mucky Play for Bradford’.
17 May. Sitting outside a café in Regent’s Park Road, A. and I see a transvestite striding up the street with a mane of hennaed hair, short skirt and long, skinny legs. It’s the legs that give him/ her away – scrawny, unfleshed and too nobbly for a girl’s. He/ she has also attracted the attention of someone in the snooker hall above the pub, and there’s a lot of shouting. Later, as we are getting into the car, Gary, a young man crippled with arthritis, calls out to A. from the snooker hall. She knows him and asks if it was him that was doing the shouting. ‘Yes,’ he says proudly. ‘You shouldn’t.’ ‘Why?’ he asks. ‘Because’, I put in weakly, ‘it’s a free country.’ ‘No, it isn’t.’ ‘Well you shouldn’t.’ A. says again: ‘I should think about it’ – meaning, I suppose, that if it’s all right to shout at transvestites, next on the list will be cripples with arthritis. This is lost on Gary, who starts to shout at us too. It’s a comic encounter, and the liberal dilemma it poses impenetrable. We mustn’t abuse sexual deviants, but must we also be tolerant of the handicapped who do?
28 May. As I am coming out of the house around six o’clock a young man runs past, half-naked and brandishing a hammer. He is in leather trousers and boots, and his head is shaved except for a little tuft at the back. He pauses outside number 20, at which point, the man in full view, a police car roars up the street. ‘Oh, so it’s not him they’re looking for’ is my reaction, confirmed when a second car hurtles round the corner, past the man and up the street. The young man has run across the road and hidden in the garden of number 64 as a third police car speeds past. An old man who has been observing the proceedings points a shaking hand at the garden where the young man is hiding, but the police car takes no notice of him either. More police cars arrive until there are seven in all, all full of policemen, not one of whom has yet got out to take a look. There is now a lot of high-speed manoeuvring, flashy reversing, zooming and stopping as the rear cars begins to turn round. In the course of this James R. goes over to one of the cars and asks them if they are looking for the man with a hammer, whereupon a policeman leaps from the car and, ignoring the open gate, vaults theatrically over the garden wall of number 64 shouting, ‘Here, we want you!’, and the young man is taken away without a struggle.
The presence of seven cars, and at least twenty policemen, not one of them with the sense just to walk up the street, makes me feel the young man deserved to get away with it. And, hammer or no hammer, I think he wasn’t really a skinhead. Then I realize, absurdly, that what made me think of him as somehow more sensitive, a creature of conviction even, was that little knot of hair at the back.
5 June. R. has won his first ever prize at school. It is for the boy who kept his head in the hole longest while the others threw wet sponges at him.
27 June. To a recording session at the BBC to lay down music tracks for a short film I have written about Proust, 102 Boulevard Haussmann. The Delmé Quartet play extracts from the César Franck String Quartet and the Fauré Piano Quartet, both possible models for the Vinteuil sonata that recurs in À la Recherche. Striking about the musicians is their total absence of self-importance. They play a passage, listen to it back, then give each other notes, and run over sections again. George Fenton, who is coordinating the music, also chips in, but he’s a musician. David H., the director, chips in too, but he isn’t a musician, just knows what atmosphere he wants at various points in the film. In the finish even I chip in, just because I know what I like. And the musicians nod and listen, try out a few bars here and there, then settle down and have another go. Now one could never do this with actors. No actor would tolerate a fellow performer who ventured to comment on what he or she was doing – comment of that sort coming solely from the director, and even then it has to be carefully packaged and seasoned with plenty of love and appreciation. Whereas these players, all of them first-class, seem happy to listen to the views of anyone if it results in them doing a better job.
We are videoing the performance for the benefit of the actors who will play the string quartet in the film, and it transpires that the Delmé Quartet have been videoed once before, by the BMA. The readiness of players in a string quartet to absorb criticism from their colleagues had been noted by doctors, and the BMA video was made to be shown to businessmen as a model for them to emulate. Perhaps it should be shown to Mrs Thatcher.
17 July. Supper with Don Sniegowski and his wife, Barbara, and with David and Maureen Vaisey. They have all recently visited Poland, where they were taken to see the church of the murdered priest Father Popieluszko, which is in the process of being turned into a shrine. Here in the church is the car in which the young priest was driven to his death; here are the clothes he was wearing when he was murdered; and around the walls, as it were the stations of his particular cross, are scenes leading up to the murder. At Christmas the crib is placed in the boot of the car, the Christ-child curled up in the same position as Father Popieluszko was curled up as he was driven to the reservoir to be murdered
. Day by day the devout bring in further relics. David, who began life as a medieval historian, is excited by all this, as it shows exactly how medieval cults must have started: the accumulation of relics, the elevation of the martyr’s life to the status of myth, until finally comes the sanctification, as in due course it will come for Father Popieluszko.
Don, who is American and the son of second-generation Polish immigrants, takes a less detached view, believing that it’s still in the interest of the Church in Poland to foster ignorance and idolatry, and that bigotry will now flourish.
10 August. An invitation from the Vice-Chancellor at Oxford to a fund-raising dinner at Merton. ‘It will be an opportunity’, he writes, ‘to tell you something about the university’s current achievements.’ Since one of the university’s current achievements is the establishment of the Rupert Murdoch Chair in Communications, I feel disinclined to attend, and write back that if the university thinks it’s appropriate to take Rupert Murdoch’s money perhaps they ought to approach Saddam Hussein to found a chair in Peace Studies. [A pained letter eventually came back saying the university had been most careful to ensure the money came from The Times and not from the less reputable sections of the Murdoch empire. A visit to the university Department of Economics would seem to be in order.]
15 August. To Weston-super-Mare. A young couple get on at Reading, returning from a holiday (and possibly their honeymoon) on the Isle of Wight.