Untold Stories
Still, that wasn’t quite the point. One felt bullied, lectured, remonstrated with, as I’m sure some people felt bullied by the (altogether sillier) Old Crowd. And had Lindsay been lecturing and bullying on behalf of the poor and underprivileged some critics would have given him credit for that, as they give credit to Ken Loach. But in Lindsay’s view class wasn’t the issue but humanity in general.
He affected to despise the press, whatever its complexion, his daily paper generally the Telegraph. But, as Tony Richardson said, ‘he was a sublime and sometimes pugnacious publicist’ and could never resist an interview or an opportunity to sound off, particularly when common sense dictated otherwise. During The Old Crowd, for instance, he was shadowed by Tom Sutcliffe of the Guardian, to whom he held forth on what he saw as the significance of the piece and the shortcomings of television. One article in the lead-up to the showing was entitled ‘The Master at Work’. Had I been a disinterested reader it would certainly have put my back up; as it was, it just filled me with foreboding. Of course, Dennis Potter did the same but he was more skilful at it than Lindsay. So after the pretentious pre-publicity the howls of outrage that greeted The Old Crowd were predictable, though Lindsay wasn’t at all contrite, blaming affronted national pride: ‘The English like to think they like to laugh at themselves. This may have been true once when there was no apprehension that the Sun might one day Set. But it is not true today. The good ship Britannia is waterlogged in a shark-infested sea. Don’t rock the boat.’
I think now, as I thought then, that this was well over the top, even though the play had the bad luck to be screened during the so-called winter of discontent. Still, it was a much better piece than was generally allowed (Clive James and Richard Ingrams making particular fools of themselves), but it wasn’t what viewers had come to expect from me and so was unfamiliar, or too unfamiliar anyway, a little unfamiliarity often an ingredient of success at any rate with critics, as it enables them to buff up on their role as guides to the less discerning public.
None of this, though, takes into account his sheer fun and his pleasure in (and exasperation with) actors. In The Old Crowd the middle-aged couple are determined to hold their house-warming party, come what may. Their furniture has been delayed in transit so dinner has to be eaten off an old trestle table. Without warning the actors, Lindsay had the table jacked-up eighteen inches so that on the actual take Rachel Roberts, Jill Bennett and Co. found themselves trying to behave normally although the dining-table was practically under their chins.
On the other hand, as with the Royal Family, it did have to be his fun. He had no time for the occasional giggles and private jokes that occur when a group of actors are working together for any length of time. Then he was the schoolmaster, once even clambering onto the stage during a performance to stop some silliness of which he disapproved.
Lambert’s book is a memoir of Lindsay, not a full-scale biography, and doesn’t, for instance, go into Lindsay’s finances. I have always understood that he enjoyed an income from one of his aunts, a Miss Bell of Bell’s Whisky (and I sometimes bought it on that account). Certainly there must have been money beyond what he earned in films and in the theatre, which (certainly in today’s terms) amounted to very little. Not that he enjoyed an extravagant lifestyle. His flat was comfortable but plain, overcrowded and shabby. He wasn’t interested in clothes or possessions and meals out consisted in popping down the road to the Cosmo on the Finchley Road. ‘This is good,’ Lindsay would say, tucking into some leathery veal. ‘Nothing fancy about it.’
Where the money went was on supporting a resident cast of lame ducks. Sandy, his schizophrenic nephew; Patsy Healey, who had acted in his short film The White Bus and been depressed ever since. There was his mother and, for a while, his brother’s wife, and he was always on call to counsel and very often to subsidise needy friends and actors who had lost their way. I have had some credit because I gave room in my garden to one social inadequate. Lindsay played host to half a dozen with no credit at all nor, I imagine, much thanks. And he made nothing of it. He was a good, compassionate man presenting to the public a face that was scornful and reproving and hungry for publicity while doing untold acts of private goodness. And if this shows nothing else it proves he can’t have much liked being alone, as he seldom was – how he worked on his scripts in the middle of such domestic chaos is a mystery.
‘I imagine,’ I begin, but ‘I imagine’, ‘I suppose’, ‘possibly’, ‘slightly’ and the kind of qualification that peppers (or unpeppers) everything I write, Lindsay would want struck out. Bold, clear statement was his chosen mode, which perhaps (sic) explains his failure with Chekhov; Lindsay’s preferred ending to Three Sisters: ‘We’re going to Moscow and there’s no perhaps about it!’
Still, David Storey’s Home is nothing if not tentative and he did that superbly. Home is so nebulous on the page that at the time I couldn’t see how Gielgud in particular would ever manage to learn the lines (or the half lines). But it was a wonderful production, as were all Lindsay’s collaborations with Storey, Home, The Contractor, The Changing Room and Life Class still not accorded their due; though the ease with which Storey seemed to write his plays filled me at the time, I remember, with envy and despair.
As he disliked tentativeness and ambiguity so Lindsay also had no time for irony, which he saw as a compromise, a means of having it both ways and thus dear to the English heart. And maybe we do overdose on it, but with more irony (or even some) Britannia Hospital would have seemed less crass and been easier to swallow. (A voice from a French lakeside: ‘But, my dear Alan, why should it be easy to swallow? I didn’t want it to be “easy to swallow” as you put it.’)
There are odd surprises in Lambert’s book. That Lindsay should have had a stab at transcendental meditation and even been given a mantra is understandable because it was done to please Frank Grimes, whom he loved, but that he not only experimented with but appears to have relied on the I Ching seems unlike the man I knew.
Lambert reveals that at Oxford he himself had a fling with Peter Brook, whom I had thought a model of heterosexuality but who seduced Lambert via a silk dressing-gown and Chopin nocturnes on the gramophone. It’s something to be remembered nowadays when the sage of the modern theatre is taking himself too seriously (i.e. quite often), though one can see how turning his back on such fripperies might lead, as with Wittgenstein, to a life of punishing rigour ending up, as it did with Brook and the Mahabharata, literally in the desert. Lambert also reminds us that Barbara Cartland, that calcified gay icon (and dead this very day), did not in the 1950s think pink, and in between writing one novel per fortnight found time to be a harrier of deviants or, as she called them, ‘ghouls of perverted sex’.
Lambert was urged to write this book by Jocelyn Herbert and Anthony Page, even though he misdates Page’s production of Ben Travers’s A Cuckoo in the Nest to 1974 and calls it a success. It was actually done in 1964 and a disaster. I know as I acted in it, lured by the distinction of a cast that included Beatrix Lehmann, Arthur Lowe, Nicol Williamson and John Osborne. Nicol Williamson, who played the lead, was no farceur and seldom wrung a laugh from the audience, whom he chose to intimidate rather than entertain. Very shaky on the words, he would pause lengthily, snarl ‘Yes?’ and stare malevolently at the stalls until the prompt came.
I suppose Lindsay must have seen it (Arthur Lowe was one of his favourite actors) but it would have been with a good deal of heavy sighing, looks of despair to his neighbours and even groans, a visit to the theatre with Lindsay generally something of a pantomime.
In the light of Lindsay’s unrequited affections, I wanted to know if he liked the look of himself. Lambert doesn’t say, though it’s probably in Lindsay’s diary, from which he only sparingly quotes. I would guess that he didn’t, and so not expecting anyone else to either. The great loves of his life map out his career: Richard Harris (This Sporting Life), Albert Finney (Billy Liar), Malcolm McDowell (If …) and Frank Grimes. None of them seems to h
ave come across (if that, indeed, was what he wanted). They were all incorrigibly male and not all were over-blessed with imagination.
Reading this, to me, overwhelmingly sad memoir, I was grateful for Gavin Lambert’s parallel (and much happier) experiences which thread through it. Without them the frustrations of Lindsay’s life would have been unbearable to read. He was like Rattigan’s schoolmaster Crocker-Harris, armoured against feeling and taken to be so by many of his associates but underneath emotionally raw and a lifetime romantic, ‘Can this be love?’ a recurring question. He never seems to have become inured to passion or grown a thicker skin, his last love for Grimes as strong and compulsive (and futile) as his first for Serge Reggiani. Love, as he said himself, was not feasible. Sex might have made it easier, but there’s some doubt if there was much of that. The theatre ought to have made it easier, too. It’s a good production in my experience when people start to fall for one another, director included, but Lindsay tended to fall in love first then do the film or play afterwards, which is rather different.
The fact that all the men Lindsay fell for were straight should have been less of a problem in the supposedly permissive 1960s and 1970s, but it would have been a remarkable young man who could have got past the sarcasm and the banter and the picking you up on every word, actually to dare to lay a hand on him. A remarkable young man or, of course, a rented one, which was still a possibility in the 1970s and, pre-Aids and pre-Murdoch, quite safe, prostitution then a profession with some standards and not, as it became in the 1980s, a subsidiary of tabloid journalism. But with Lindsay such an inveterate romantic it was no more feasible than love, though one could write the scene – his pretended indifference and verbal sparring met with the boy’s professional incomprehension, the shy man’s reserve gradually breaking down as the master becomes the pupil.
That was one way his life might have been better, or at any rate different; the loss of his private income would have been another, if only because the security it offered allowed him to be too choosy. There are theatre and TV directors who do productions on the cab-rank principle, taking whatever turns up next and without making too much of a fuss about it. Lindsay emphatically wasn’t such a director, though some of his choices, William Douglas Home’s The Kingfisher, for instance, might suggest otherwise. Playwrights, for their part, like to think of their plays as events and, if not looming as large in the lives and careers of their directors as their own, nevertheless constituting more than just a job of work or a way of bringing home the bacon.
The plays and films that Lindsay directed were never just jobs; often, as with the productions of Hamlet that he did with Frank Grimes, they were outcrops of his inner life. Even The Old Crowd he made part of his own story by casting old friends like Rachel Roberts and Jill Bennett, and by expanding the script to give more scope to Frank Grimes – none of which was to its detriment.
Still, it’s hard not to feel that had he been directing in the 1940s, say, or under the studio system in Hollywood, he would have had to make two or three films a year, perhaps one of which might have been good. Instead, so much of his life was spent waiting around for films to be set up, working on futile development deals, with years wasted in the process. Had he been making films in the 1940s, too, they might have been war movies, which he revelled in. Das Boot, the submarine epic, he liked very much (‘no shit about it’), and it was one of the videos that lined the shelves in his flat which he was always ready to take down and play, often with a running commentary – MacArthur’s departure in They Were Expendable I got once after asking what ‘epic’ meant.
He wasn’t magnanimous. He was often unwilling to recognise the talents of others, particularly if they were recognised already, and especially if they were English. But he was always wonderfully, uncompromisingly himself. Gavin Lambert ends this sad, loving book with some afterwords, one of which is from Karel Reisz:
One day a man came up to Lindsay and myself in the street and congratulated us on This Sporting Life. He praised it effusively and called it the most important British film in years etc., etc. We thanked him, and then he said, ‘But there’s a scene near the end that I don’t think …’ and got no further. ‘Fuck off!’ Lindsay said, and walked on.
Art, Architecture and Authors
Going to the Pictures
In 1993 I was made a Trustee of the National Gallery at a time when free entry to the nation’s museums and galleries was still a contentious issue, as I hope it no longer is today. While I was a Trustee I gave two lectures: Going to the Pictures, which is about my experience of pictures and galleries in general, and Spoiled for Choice, a lecture to accompany Sainsbury’s Paintings in Schools scheme, when I had to choose four paintings from any gallery in Great Britain. The lectures suffer from want of all the illustrations they had in the lecture theatre but I hope they are of some interest nevertheless.
The Wilton Diptych
The first time I set foot in the National Gallery must have been early in 1957, and I came in to look at this picture, the Wilton Diptych – the two panels painted by an unknown artist in the late fourteenth century for Richard II, who kneels in the left-hand panel, accompanied by a trio of saints: Edmund, King and Martyr; Edward the Confessor and John the Baptist, who together sponsor him into the presence of the Virgin, whose angels in a show of celestial solidarity encouragingly sport Richard II’s badge of the white hart.
It was probably a portable altarpiece and in 1957 it was the only painting in the gallery that I knew anything about. This wasn’t because I had any knowledge or interest in art history, which in 1957 was still something of an academic backwater, frequented so far as undergraduate Oxford was concerned chiefly by Firbankian inadequates and boys from Stowe. I knew about the Wilton Diptych because I was in my last year reading history with Richard II my special subject, and when later that year I took my degree I stayed on to do research, again into Richard II.
The research came to nothing, though humiliating memories of it return on occasions like this when I’m required to lecture. Lecturing is not a natural activity for a playwright, accustomed as one is to diffuse responsibility for one’s words among one’s characters, so that the audience is never quite sure you mean what you say, or you mean what they say. I only ever gave one lecture on Richard II and it was to an historical society in Oxford, the audience a mixture of dons and undergraduates. At the conclusion of this less than exciting paper I asked if there were any questions. There was an endless silence until finally one timid undergraduate at the back put up his hand.
‘Could you tell me where you bought your shoes?’
It was shortly after this I abandoned history and went on the stage.
Dissolve to Boston a few years later where I was on tour with Beyond the Fringe and went one free afternoon to Fenway Court, the museum and former home of the Boston heiress Isabella Stewart Gardner, famously seen in Sargent’s portrait. The house had been kept much as it was in Mrs Gardner’s lifetime and I remember it as being rather dowdy. It may have altered since – I was last there in 1975 – but I hope not, as it’s the kind of museum one felt should be in a museum, as being very much of its time.
Much of Mrs Gardner’s art collection had been put together and bought for Mrs Gardner by the expatriate American – expatriate Bostonian in fact – the art historian and connoisseur Bernard Berenson. Mrs Gardner had died in 1924 but in 1962, when I went round the museum, Berenson himself was not long dead and biographies, diaries and commonplace books were being regularly brought out. So I got rather interested in Berenson, which, in retrospect, I wish I hadn’t, as some of my anxieties about art, which is what a lot of this lecture is about, date back to that time.
Though Berenson later put together a large library of photographs, his study and listing of Italian paintings began before photographic reproductions were widely available. This to some extent dictated his method, though I suspect that with or without photographs Berenson’s method would have been the same. This was, qui
te simply, to look and look and look, and he would stand in front of a painting by the hour together until every detail of it was committed to memory.
At some point in the course of this confrontation Berenson would experience a sense of rapture very like, I imagine, what far more people experience when listening to music. And in this connection it’s no accident that Berenson’s mentor when he came as a young man from Harvard to Oxford was Walter Pater, whose most famous dictum, I suppose, is that ‘All art aspires towards the condition of music.’
I have to confess that I’ve never had a sensation of rapture, or any physical sensation in fact, standing in front of a painting except maybe aching legs or, to quote Nathaniel Hawthorne, ‘That icy demon of weariness who haunts great picture galleries.’ But it does happen; paintings do affect people. Take George Eliot in 1858:
I sat on a sofa in the Dresden Picture Gallery opposite the picture (it was Raphael’s Sistine Madonna) and a sort of awe, as if I was suddenly in the presence of some glorious being, made my heart swell too much for me to remain comfortably and we hurried out of the room.
Well, it hasn’t happened to me, and having read about Berenson I took that to mean that I was lacking something, even if it was only the patience or the stamina to stand long enough looking. And though I later found that in my unfeelingness I was in distinguished company – Bertrand Russell, for instance, Berenson’s brother-in-law, complaining that pictures never made his stomach turn over either – nevertheless I felt I was failing some sort of sensitivity test and I invariably came out of galleries dissatisfied with myself.