The principle breaks down, however, when it is applied to Jackie Stewart. Clever and complex enough to run a business empire and a whole racing team of his own, even better at the social round in Monaco than Damon’s father, Jackie Stewart was nevertheless the fully equipped, undistractedly dedicated winning animal. Later on he used the position he had gained by his abilities to transform the sport through placing a new emphasis on safety. It is largely due to him that drivers now walk away from the kind of crash that once killed several of them a season. On various occasions which they forgot instantly but which I treasure as fringe-dwellers always do, I have sat down to dine with four drivers who came back from what once would have been certain death: Niki Lauda, Gerhard Berger, John Watson and Mika Hakkinen. Admittedly I also talked with two who died: Gilles Villeneuve and Ayrton Senna. But they both had accidents so freakish that nothing could have saved them. On the whole, anything that can be done for safety in an inherently dangerous sport has been done, and all because of Stewart. This achievement has rather taken the shine off what he was like as a driver. It should be remembered that when he was in the car the last thing he was thinking of was whether the helicopter was properly fuelled up to take him to hospital. He was thinking of nothing except getting in front and staying there: an aim to which he brought such an intensity of motivation that he has ever since been unable to quell it even when a passenger in a limousine – he is a notorious back-seat driver. Any slow car would become faster when he drove it, but that was not a point he was keen to prove. He took the best machinery by right: the mark of the driver for whom coming first comes first, for whom the sport is a means to an end.
Damon wasn’t quite like that. If he had been, he would have taken his chance with McLaren after Frank Williams let him go. McLaren offered a relatively low basic salary but a bonus for each win. Though the wins would never have been a sure thing, in the McLaren he might have got them. In the Arrows he couldn’t possibly, but he listened to his financial advisers and went for the guaranteed stipend. It made financial sense – with a family to protect against the press, he could not forgo his estate and its upkeep – but it didn’t make racing sense. For the true, compulsive winner, no other kind of sense comes into question. Even for Michael Schumacher, who makes more money than anybody, the money is a tool: if Ferrari had not come through for him with a winning car, he would have left them flat.
In his racing years, Alain Prost was a thinker – ‘the Professor’ was the right nickname – but he never let ratiocination get in the way of winning. Towards the end of his career, when he dealt himself out of a race in Japan because of the heavy rain, it was a sign that he was done with it. Ayrton Senna didn’t live long enough to reach the reasonable moment. He had winning like a disease, and one of the secrets of his mastery was the realisation by the other drivers that he would drive right through them if they didn’t give him room. He thought it was God’s will that he should ram his rival for the championship (it was Prost), remove both Prost and himself from the track, and so, while losing the race, win the championship on points. Schumacher behaved the same way early on, to the cost of Hill among others. Later Schumacher behaved differently, but he still felt the same way. Leaving Nuvolari and Fangio aside, Schumacher is probably the greatest driver we know about, but one of the reasons is that he has so little difficulty imitating an automaton. Even Senna was more complex. At one point Senna interrupted his colloquy with the Almighty and got off with Elle McPherson. The chances of Schumacher doing such a thing are the chances of his being the driver of the next cab you hail.
To my mind, and not just because I am Australian by birth, Jack Brabham was the most interesting of all the drivers because he won championships in a car he had designed – a car that revolutionised the sport. (If you see a list of world-beating Australian expatriates that leaves Brabham’s name out, throw it away: its compiler has no imagination.) But that made Brabham interesting as a driver. As a man, he lived in a motor-racing world. The interest of a man like Damon Hill, when he was still driving, was that he lived in a world bigger than his profession. It can be a handicap. Argentina’s Carlos Reutemann, a Williams driver well capable of pushing the car to its dizzy limit, was such a philosopher that he could walk away, look at the sunset, and decide not to race again. Frank Williams found to his horror that he had hired Diogenes. Damon was never quite like that, but life eventually got into his mind even when he had the hammer down, and when life does that it brings the thought of death with it. You can’t get one of those cars out of second gear unless you feel immortal.
Not that a great driver is reckless. There have been some quite good ones who were, but they moved into the past tense at an early stage. Usually they got fired before they could get killed, or else just never made it into Formula One in the first place. An F1 car costs millions if you count in its share of the development outlay, and the owners never like to see one of them scuffed up without good reason. As a passenger in the front seat of a car you can afford to buy, I have been driven on the road or on an empty track by several of the F1 drivers. Three of them were world champions: Nelson Picquet, Alan Jones and Damon Hill. Derek Warwick’s career was cut short when Lotus reneged on his contract because Senna wanted no rival in the team. (In his last year alive, I missed the chance to be driven by Senna in a Honda NSX: he turned up a day late at Goodwood, and I thought there might be another time.) Warwick drove me on the highway from his hotel to Monza. The following year I watched him at Le Mans driving the Jaguar racing sports car at 240mph on the Mulsanne straight at dead of night, but his driving then didn’t look any faster than how it felt to me that day on the highway. It was like being the narrator in Nicholson Baker’s The Fermata: all the cars we went past seemed stationary. Moss was an education in ordinary English motorway traffic: his little Peugeot threaded between the lorries like a magic bullet through an undulating canyon. On the Adelaide Grand Prix circuit which had been closed down for our appearance, Alan Jones drove me in a Lamborghini Diablo he had never touched before and hated on sight: top gear was the only one he could find except reverse, and I got several chances to study the Armco as we slithered towards it at a hundred plus. Picquet sometimes looked like a madman on the track but on the road he drove as if he wanted to live, so that he could sleep with more women.
What united all the great drivers, when they were driving on an ordinary road with normal human beings, was that they made you feel safe even as the landscape outside the window turned into a smear. They were so in synch with the car that they could let it perform at its optimum while keeping all their attention on the road ahead. I even felt safe with Jones in the Diablo: he had to wrestle the beast, but he knew exactly what was going on. As the great Australian poet Kenneth Slessor wrote about the effect of Captain Cook’s navigational magic on his crew, Men who ride broomsticks with a mesmerist/Mock the typhoon. The same went double for Damon Hill, who gave me the fastest ride of all. After the Hungarian Grand Prix in his championship year, we were hurrying to the airport to catch a private jet to Bulgaria. There was a police motorcycle escort to clear our side of the road so that Damon could keep his foot down. Though I pretended, on the soundtrack of the documentary, that I thought of nothing but imminent death, the truth was more complicated. He was too good at his job to take even the tiniest risk off the track. On the track, he upped the ante, as they all do until the day comes when they want to get up from the game and go home.
It might even have happened to Senna one day. All the talk about how his early death preserved him in his glory is just bad poetry. It isn’t the responsibility of the racing drivers to have our deaths for us. They have their work cut out leading part of our lives for us: the part, deep in our dreams, where the brave not only deserve the beautiful, but become the beautiful. There was a morning in Adelaide when I was crouching beside our camera crew as they got a low panning shot of Senna’s McLaren coming out of the garage. There was traffic in the pit lane so he had to stop for a few seconds right in f
ront of me. While the car yelled with the clutch out, he dipped his yellow helmet to my camera. I could have reached out to tap his visor. He gave me a little wave with the tip of his glove. Then there was the heavy crunch of the clutch coming in on the full eight hundred horsepower, and he was gone in a clap of thunder. It must have been like that at Troy, when Achilles came out of his tent. But Achilles could only fight or sulk. A less classical and therefore more civilised breed of hero, Damon Hill had a full life coming to him, and eventually he chose to lead it. It was his bravest day. Of him I remember a hundred moments. In some of them he was racing, but in most he was being human: playing with his children, putting up with the sponsors, or – perhaps the most characteristic – pointing out, in the most polite possible way, that his team had bungled a pit-stop, cost him the race and quite possibly the championship. There was his flaw on full display: he was reasonable and well-mannered when he should have been shouting and screaming. But he always let the car do that.
Sunday Times, March 18, 2007
Postscript
The above two pieces had their origins in the Formula One era that ended with Michael Schumacher’s retirement. Since then, the big money, which had grown increasingly important, has taken over almost completely. Fernando Alonso, Kimmi Raikkonen and Lewis Hamilton have all been worthy champions, but in each case the car they drove was hard to catch if it started from the front of the grid, and the amount of money needed to get the car into that position was beyond the dreams of a previous generation raised on the thrill of men in close contest. What we watch now is a race between conglomerates. Talent and character still come into it, but only at the margins. The arts, too, can injure themselves through progress, but as long as they leave room for the lonely freelance to come up from nowhere and win the crowd’s favour, they are safe from the blight of a free market tempered by no logic except its own. The parallel between the arts and the sports – one which I have always loved to draw, because the sports, too, belong in the created world – has thus never been exact.
HANDBILLS
GOING ON IN EDINBURGH
Already preparing for my week of solo evenings on the Edinburgh Fringe in August, I check myself out in the mirror. What have I got to offer? Well, physically not a lot. When Hitler conducted a similar self-examination before his next big speech at Nuremberg, he could at least see a pair of sharply focused eyeballs staring back at him, and his moustache had not yet lost its vibrancy. No part of my face remains vibrant. There are veteran quinces with more magnetism. But it won’t matter as long as I can still talk. ‘All I have is a voice,’ said W. H. Auden, who nevertheless could do a pretty good hour on his feet.
Talking solo for an hour on your feet is usually called stand-up, and right there is the first source of fear. The term ‘stand-up’ is reserved for comedians, and nowadays there are hundreds of them, most of them so technically proficient that they can spend fifty-five minutes telling the story of what they had for breakfast while they roam the stage like wild animals. The last five minutes is consumed by the apocalyptic applause of the audience, uniformly hoarse from too much laughter. Gasping people clap until their hands bleed while the stand-up comedian sticks the microphone in his mouth and imitates a blender. I can’t beat that. My only hope is to do something else.
Back in the late 1950s, when I first started paying attention to this kind of thing, there were only about half a dozen people in the world who could just go on and talk. Mostly they sat on a bar stool, so it wasn’t, strictly speaking, stand-up. Mort Sahl, my favourite, just talked about life, but put a twist on it. Eventually he disappeared into the mists of conspiracy theory, but he had already been outflanked by another American, Jonathan Winters, who could use the microphone to imitate a tortoise crossing a freeway. Stand-up took off irretrievably into the realm of pure comedy. The subject mattered less and less, the continuous laughter more and more. You won’t catch me knocking that, but you won’t catch me trying it, either. I want to talk seriously. I just don’t want to get lynched while I’m doing so. How to avoid that is the question.
I started looking for the answer about forty years ago, in Edinburgh. A Cambridge Footlights revue that I had directed was a hit on the Fringe, partly because I had been sensible enough not to include myself in the cast, who were all a lot funnier than I was. Hungry for a share of the limelight, I staged a poetry and jazz show in the afternoons, with all the jazz devoted to backing my poems and all the talking done by myself. In the evenings our venue was packed for the revue. In the afternoons, a thin scattering turned up to hear me. They had their priorities right, but I couldn’t help noticing that when I went off script and improvised, there was a rapport. The rapport was especially intense with a small woman in the third row who wore two overcoats at once and followed me around for several days reciting her own poems to me while running to keep up. I had also, however, got the occasional laugh from the normal people. Nothing to shake the rafters, but still it was heady wine.
The addiction had taken hold, and in subsequent decades I slowly got better at holding an audience just by talking to them. The scariest part is that you can always tell when you aren’t holding them. They start to cough, first individually, then in chorus. Finally they are being conducted by Toscanini. The only way to stave off the coughs is to say something interesting. For that, part of the secret is confidence. You yourself have to believe that what you’re saying is worth the crowd’s time. It’s a hard ask, when you consider that even Mark Antony needed Caesar’s corpse for a prop. The other part of the secret is to pack the line. As on the page, what you say on stage should give value for money, bringing a lot in. I learned something about how to do that when things went haywire in the TV studio and I felt bound to keep the studio audience entertained until the glitch was repaired. A warm-up man usually does that job, but I thought we could save a salary if I did it. To my delight, I found that the audience sometimes relished what the people at home weren’t getting. When I finally left mainstream television at the beginning of the current millennium, I went in search of stage audiences who might feel the same.
One of those audiences was in Edinburgh. At the Pleasance, I did an hour with Pete Atkin, with whom I write songs. He sang the songs and I talked in between. A whole new generation had grown to maturity since I was last on stage in Edinburgh. In the courtyard of the Pleasance, my daughter’s boyfriend was running the World’s Smallest Cinema, which could hold an audience of two people. All the same old mad stuff was happening but most of the people were different, and I wondered, when I went on for the first show, whether time hadn’t left me behind. The audience at Edinburgh, if you can pull them into the tent, is in search of adventure, but there are limits, and we were a pair of old timers neither of whom resembled Russell Brand. Yet things went gratifyingly well. It was no surprise in Pete’s case: he’d been working the clubs for years. But I surprised myself out of my skin. The only man who coughed while I was talking had a genuine case of emphysema. I had no guarantee, however, that I could get away with it all on my own.
Literary festivals supplied some of the evidence that I might. An hour on your feet at a literary festival is usually far removed from stand-up, and most writers very sensibly don’t try to put on a show. If V. S. Naipaul started telling tall stories about Ravi Shankar, you’d be worried. But the opportunity to do something other than a straight reading is always there. Over the course of five years or so I tried to develop the author’s standard hour into a performance. Cheltenham was a good venue for that, but the best of all, once again, was in Edinburgh, at the Book Festival, where an hour in the big tent turned out to be a hot gig, as they say in the trade. Armed with this new knowledge – I won’t call it expertise, because half the time I still didn’t know what I was doing – I undertook a tour of Australia last year, playing a total of thirty solo dates all over the country. Finally I went on alone at the Sydney Opera House. The joint was full and it must have worked, because next day I was still in one piece. To disapp
oint that many Aussies all at once is never wise.
Time, then, to bring the idea back to where it started, under the shadow of Edinburgh Castle while the city teems with ticket-buyers and every spare room in town is a squat for the young and hungry. The only justification for taking some of their limelight is that you, too, are convinced that you are at the start of something. In the afternoons I’ll be hosting conversations on stage with some of the Festival stars, which isn’t quite the cinch it looks, but after twenty years of doing the same sort of thing on television I would deserve punishment if I couldn’t bring if off. In the evenings, though, I’ll be going on alone. And it still feels like the start of something new. For one thing, it’s something the young can’t do, because they haven’t lived long enough to reflect on the experience of growing older. But I’m not just after the sigh of recognition from older people in the audience when I make cracks about how I can’t get out of my front door without forgetting my Freedom Pass. I want to tell the younger generation about how time will happen to them, and they’re lucky if it does. Will they listen? Will they even turn up? Only one way to find out.
Guardian, August 23, 2008
Postscript
Although it sins against chronology, I have put this handbill first in its group because the activity it promotes is the one that makes the others financially possible. If, in these post-television years, I wasn’t going on stage alone at regular intervals, I wouldn’t be able to absorb the costs of doing anything else without eating further into financial reserves which the global financial collapse of 2008 might well have destroyed already. (I can’t be sure: I’m afraid to ring the bank. Will the bank still be there?) The estimable John Sergeant, already a star journalist before he became the Strictly Come Dancing superstar who strictly couldn’t dance, was the first to notice that his appearances at literary festivals would supplement his income if he transferred them to the theatre. In the light of his example, it suddenly became apparent that anyone who could make a show out of pushing a new book was foolish not to go on the road. Under the lights, I gradually learned that if my preliminary remarks were interesting enough, I didn’t even have to read from the book, which could be carried on as a prop and left lying there all evening on the table beside the lectern. It was yet another way of doing stand-up comedy. Stand-up is usually thought of as a young person’s game. The young are better at being shocking, and they can yell for an hour without caving in at the knees. A senior citizen, however, can get some useful mileage out of reflecting on experience, if only because he has more of it to reflect on. If he tries his hand, he might be pleased, as I was, to see quite a lot of young people in the audience. Perhaps they find a shuffling oldster a restful change from being shouted at.