The answer was nothing, but I didn’t find that out before trying everything. There was a Howard Hawks season at the National Film Theatre. I took her to see His Girl Friday, one of the funniest films ever made. She sat there like a world champion poker player. Her studied indifference might have had something to do with the way I rolled in the aisle. (Anyone who rolls from side to side in the aisle might be doing so naturally, but to roll up and down the aisle is an affectation.) If that was so, however, why did she agree to go out with me again? And she always said yes to going out, just as she always said no to any form of physical contact. When I asked her if it was the beard she said it wasn’t. Then what was it? One night we went to the Royal Court to hear Lotte Lenya sing Brecht and Weill. Lenya’s voice was in rags from laryngitis and the tube trains arriving and departing under the theatre sounded like a fault in the earth’s crust, but the acrid lilt of ‘Surabaya Johnny’ proclaimed the inexorability of desire. Pandora invited me back to her flat for coffee. I told myself to stay calm and it would all drop into my lap. It did, too: a steaming hot mug of Nescafé. Nothing else. Perhaps it was a tactical error to give her my standard lecture on the evils of capitalism. I gave her the short version – less than three-quarters of an hour – but before it was half over she was saying ‘Really?’ in the middle of each sentence as well as at the end. When I tried to kiss her on the way out I rammed her spectacle frames. It was like being thrown against a windscreen.
History was leaving me behind. John Glenn went into orbit but I stayed earthbound. Britten wrote his War Requiem. Basil Spence built Coventry Cathedral, which briefly held the title of Most Hideous Building in Britain before the new London Hilton pipped it for top spot. The Mariner unmanned space mission left for Venus. The Moulton small-wheeled bicycle appeared on the streets of London, giving the miniskirts of its female riders a further boost towards the belt. When a girl’s tights came towards you on a Moulton, they were making scissor movements at eye level, especially if you were on your knees sobbing with lust. The air was pulsating with libido, but somehow Pandora hadn’t heard the news. I knocked myself out trying to impress her. There is no point trying to impress women – if they are listening to you at all, then they are already as impressed as they are ever going to get – but this fact takes some of us a long time to learn and even then it is easily forgotten in the stress of frustration. Pandora wasn’t impressed with what I knew. An Oxbridge education had equipped her to say ‘Really?’ on those occasions when she was told something she didn’t know already. When Pandora said ‘Really?’ it was like being flicked in the face with a wet, sandy towel. Equally clearly she was not impressed with my looks, clothes or earning potential. No doubt it was out of fairness that she always paid her share, yet her manner implied that she was subsidising a gypsy. So there was nothing left to impress her with except a revolutionary new method of calculating the number of foreign students.
Why this did not impress her mystified me at the time. My formula was a breakthrough in sociologico-statistical methodology comparable to those diagrams by Pareto showing causes and effects all linked up with arrows. With four different coloured pencils I approximated the increment against the asymptotic co-ordinate. The chart looked like Stravinsky’s holograph manuscript of Le Sacre du printemps overlaid by a computer print-out of the Walt Disney Organisation’s payroll. My employer, Mr Niceold Thing - soon, if all went well, to be Sir Niceold Thing – dropped in to see how my work was going and pronounced himself dazzled. ‘But doesn’t this slow everything down terribly?’ he asked. ‘Only,’ I explained patiently, ‘in the initial stages. It takes a few weeks to do the transpositions, but then all you have to do is read off everything in the right-hand column and you get the whole answer in a few minutes.’
He wasn’t as convinced as I was, but he needed to be only half as convinced as I was to be convinced enough. Instead of ordering me to forget the new method and just get ahead with the old one, he retreated looking trustful but worried – never a good sign in a commander. He probably blames himself for what happened and I must say that there are moments when I agree with him. They are weak moments. Pandora, after all, told me outright that I was breaking a butterfly on a wheel, or words to that effect. ‘Making a meal of it, aren’t you?’ Without lifting my head I converted the five Sierra Leone students at the Bradfield Polytechnic into a green Greek gamma with a pink circle around it. ‘Just put down the tea, smart-arse,’ I retorted. It was part of my new plan to relax her with obscene banter. It wasn’t working any better than the old plan, but it wasn’t working any worse either, which made it a potential step forward.
‘Would you like a cake?’ she asked with what sounded like less than total indifference to my destiny.
‘Sticky cake or crumbly cake?’ I riposted, edging the pink circle with yellow.
‘No, not cake. Cake. Cake-Akela. Thought you might be hot.’
I looked up to see that she had brought two bottles of the familiar American beverage in its sensually draped and fluted bottle. This was tantamount to a love-tryst. I followed it up immediately and once more crunched the bridge of my nose into her spectacle frames. If she had not been turning away as I lunged forward with my eyes closed, the hinge where the ear-piece joined the main frame would not have cracked open and spilled the tiny brass pivot. A long way above me as I crawled around looking for it, she kept saying ‘Really’ without the question mark, which made it sound even worse.
Getting her back to the mood of relative abandon in which she had voluntarily brought me a fizzy drink took weeks. My first English summer was now at its blazing height. For an hour on end the sun would shine. In the parks at lunchtime the English males would bare their potato-white bodies to what they had heard described as ultra-violet rays. Pandora appeared in a new range of dresses which apparently she usually wore only when in Cannes or Nice with Daddy. When we walked in Lincoln’s Inn Fields the allegedly pitiless sunlight did nothing to unfreeze her cryogenic face, but at least it silhouetted her legs through the thin gingham so that I could see the shapely shadows heading upwards. When I tore off my shirt, the remnants of my Australian tan made a remarkable impression on her. No impression. None. In desperation I switched back to the indoor approach and took her to see the Lycergus Cup in the British Museum, hoping that the sunlight slanting through its delicate green and pink calyx would touch some deep, repressed, Dionysian impulse in her Apollonian soul. It didn’t.
Not making it with Pandora, I was fatally distracted from the more portentous truth that I was not making it with my job either. By the time the awful facts sank in, it was too late. There was no hope of assembling my multicoloured symbol-scramble into an intelligible order: not in the time available, and probably not within the foreseeable duration of the known universe. Neither was there time to go back and start again with the ordinary method. Somebody normal might just have managed it, but my morale had collapsed. With the parliamentary question only ten days away, I turned up at work, looked obliquely at the chart, sat down and wrote poems. Every time my employer stuck his head through the door, I brusquely assured him that any moment now, with a stroke of a pencil, the scheme would yield its results. Pandora no longer made her daily appearance. Putting my hand on her bottom in the British Museum had been a terminal mistake. She was looking at the Elgin Marbles and for a blessed second I thought that I was feeling them: cool, firm, curved even in their planes. Then her favourite word, only this time with an exclamation mark, echoed through the museum like a polite gun-shot, or a door that had never really been open clicking finally shut.
There was only one honourable course: to go to the boss and make a clean breast of my failure. So I took the dishonourable course. On the third last day before the deadline I did not go to Bloomsbury. I went to Birmingham instead. On the credit side of the ledger – the sole positive entry – may be put the fact that I didn’t do a midnight flit from my digs. Fronting up to the landlady fair and square, I paid her a month’s notice and no arguments. A
committed sherry-drinker who was invariably blotto by eleven in the morning, she failed to recognise me, which made it easier. Toting the cardboard suitcase, wearing the Singapore suit, sweating into the Chelsea boots which already had holes in them, I headed for Euston and the train that would take me north to sanctuary. The ticket cost me the last cash I had, but I was cleaned out in the metaphorical sense only. My soul was heavy with the fluid of a molten spine. After such knowledge, what forgiveness?
7
The Birmingham Decision
Head of the Department of Psychiatric Medicine at the University of Birmingham, Professor William Trethowan had a wife, two teenage daughters, a son in short pants and an unexpected bearded visitor holding a cardboard suitcase. ‘What’s wrong?’ was the first thing he asked. I shrugged. ‘What happened to your head just then?’ was the second thing he asked, but in a detached manner, not pressing for an answer. He had an apparent lack of concern which people in trouble who found concern inhibiting would seek out, so I was far from being the first unannounced runaway to darken his door. At Sydney University, where I had first met him, his house had been a hostel-cum-clinic for highly strung would-be poets. An eminent English doctor of medicine who talked like George Sanders, played jazz trumpet, was generally interested in the arts and had a wife both keep and competent to produce the first Beckett and Pinter plays Sydney had yet seen – it was a challenging proposition for Australian students who were accustomed to a solid show of philistinism even from the Arts faculty. My neurotic but divinely gifted friend Spencer had arrived for dinner at the Trethowans one April night and not left until August.
I can give Professor Trethowan his real name and occupation because there was nothing professional about our relationship even at this, the lowest moment of my life, when I must have so closely resembled one of the case studies that could never be discussed outside his office. When I asked for refuge and time to think, he gave me both freely, plus unlimited access to his precious collection of old Vocalion 78 rpm records featuring Benny Carter. If I had asked to have my confession heard he would no doubt have granted that wish also, but whether from a Protestant upbringing or an innate suspicion of my own theatricality I have never been able to believe in that particular method of purging a sin. In my experience the sin is still there afterwards. Whenever the late and unlamented Albert Speer said ‘I should have known’, I always recognised my weaker self staging a carefully underplayed tantrum in which maudlin exhibitionism palmed itself off as atonement. Of course he should have known. That was his crime: deciding not to. Yet although I could honestly plead innocent to any charges of mass murder, the relative puniness of my transgression did not alter its absolute reprehensibility. For a while I contemplated emigrating back to Australia. At that time an Australian visiting Britain had all the advantages of British citizenship, including the opportunity to emigrate home again at a cost of only ten pounds sterling. Many of my compatriots who ran out of funds and hope used this escape route. Even as I thought of it, a change in the law closed the loophole for good, as if to ensure that I should not outwit my destiny. So there was nothing left except suicide.
As the last of summer strove tenaciously to keep the potted plants alive in the pedestrian areas of Birmingham’s new Bull Ring shopping complex, I would trail my way from one zebra crossing to the next, tour the art gallery, gaze at the Pre-Raphaelites (not as many as in Manchester, but more than enough) and consider the various possible means of my forthcoming voluntary exit. There is something about the Pre-Raphaelites which makes me contemplate self-inflicted death even when my conscience is clear – something to do with the way they managed to predict every shade of lipstick on a modern cosmetics counter. But this time I was definitely, or at any rate pretty seriously, planning to rid the world of my presence. Adopting a mysterious smile which enjoined complicity, I presented my four-volume Nonesuch Shakespeare to the younger daughter and my cherished association copy of Practical Criticism to the elder. I was saying goodbye to the treasures I had laid up on earth. Now nothing remained except the final act. When I sat down to write the letter which would explain this decisive step to my mother, however, I had a lot of trouble with the opening paragraph. It wasn’t easy to hit the right tone.
There was another difficulty. Either I loved life, or I couldn’t take my misery seriously enough. Perhaps there was, and is, a connection. To be incorrigibly ebullient might entail a congenital inability to assess the shambles around us in its correct importance. Since on this occasion the shambles had been wholly caused by me, I could hardly escape being at least shaken. It never came to choosing between the sleeping pills and the slashed wrists, but there was food for deep and severely troubled thought. My first thought, now that I had resolved not to end it all, was of how to get my books back, but on second thoughts I decided to regard their loss as a down payment on the appropriate propitiatory offering to the gods. This matter decided, it began occurring to me that my grand schemes for working by day and writing by night all had a fundamental flaw – my lack of qualifications for working by day. Unless the task was of the simplest and most undemanding, my mind wandered. Even at that stage, after so many years of evidence, I had not yet realised that there could be no task simple and undemanding enough, but at least I now resolved not to take on anything which could not be successfully tackled by a ten-year-old child. I had overestimated the age bracket, but the idea was right.
Another right idea was to negotiate my way back to some sort of institute of higher learning. For the lost soul, the university is the modern monastery. On top of that, it had started to dawn on me that my years as a student at Sydney University had been fruitful in everything except actual study. I needed time to read seriously, and working all day was no more favourable to heavy reading than it was to writing. Also I hadn’t been able to get out of my mind a story my Cambridge friend had told me about the poet Gray. It was to do with his epoch-making switch from one Cambridge college to another. At Peterhouse they had made an apple-pie bed for him once too often, so he had crossed the road to Pembroke. That journey of about twenty yards was, apart from one brief visit to a country churchyard, the biggest thing that ever happened to him. I needed to be somewhere where a twenty-yard walk was an adventure and you could spend your life polishing a single elegy. Dreaming of Cambridge should normally have been an activity on a par with my previous plans to take a flat in Belgravia. But strangely enough I had a possible way in, or up. My capacity for wasting time at Sydney University had attracted the amused attention of the Reader in English, George Russell. Humanely learned in Old English, Middle English and the European Middle Ages generally, he had a lot of information to impart; all of which I managed to ignore. I still recollect with shame how, in a seminar, he opened Ernst Robert Curtius’s European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, raised his hands above it as if he were breaking communion bread, and called it a great book. The shame springs from the fact that twenty years were to go by before I bothered to find out that he was right. But he must have thought I had promise. Every week Françoise and I were invited to his house and there I was gently but firmly introduced to classical music. In return for being allowed to assail George and his wife Isabel with my Thelonious Monk LPs, I was obliged to at least consider the more accessible quartets of Vivaldi. Always I got dead drunk on George’s well-chosen wines. My comportment must have been less brutish than I remember, because he told me – or rather told Françoise, so that she could tell me when I sobered up - to get in touch with him if the day ever came when I wanted to settle down and read seriously, an activity for which he thought I had a considerable, if entirely unexplored, talent. At Pembroke College, Cambridge, they might possibly take me, he ventured, on his recommendation. His own career at the college had been so distinguished, he neglected to add, that even if I turned out to be an utter goof they would still be in profit.
At the time, and for a long time afterwards, I thought nothing of this offer, believing that the cloisters were no framewo
rk for a serious artist. But in Birmingham, living on charity, with autumn crowding glumly in and nothing in view except further proof of unfitness for everyday life, the serious artist was ready to think again. So I composed a densely packed air letter to George Russell begging him to get me in out of the cold. It was a carefully phrased effort, a concentrated masterpiece of the epistolary art, and I sincerely trust that he never kept it. He must have acted on it immediately, because within two weeks Pembroke wrote to offer me a place. They had been just as unquestioningly welcoming to Gray, of course, but with better reason, because although he probably cut no great figure as he came sulking across the road with an armful of his bedding, he at least had a few elegies under his belt.
Thus was I offered on a plate what many native-born Britons have to strive for and often in vain – a fact of which not one of them has ever sought to remind me. God knows what George Russell said. He must have told them I had discovered the lost books of Tacitus, squared the circle and was on the verge of developing a unified field theory. But my assumption that to be given a place would ensure an automatic grant proved incorrect. The responsible authorities wrote to say that I could indeed receive a grant, although only after being resident in London for three years. This meant at least two more years of proving myself unemployable. There was nothing for it except to go back south and begin my sentence, Professor Trethowan and his wife, gracious as always, refrained from cheering aloud when I announced my departure. They merely looked very, very happy, as if a weight had been subtracted from their shoulders and added to their refrigerator, which I had been helping their children empty for too long. If it occurred to me that I had been a shameless free-loader, I merely added the realisation to my burden of guilt, as you might toss an apple-core into a skip full of rubbish. ‘When you finally get to Cambridge,’ said my host in farewell, ‘head straight for the Footlights. It’s your sort of thing, believe me.’ I don’t think, at this distance, that he meant my future was on the stage. I think he meant that it wasn’t in the cloisters; but I prefer to regard this remark as one more instance of his acute psychological insight. The Viennese essayist Friedrich Torberg once poured out his troubles to Alfred Adler, who told him that with so much going wrong he had a right to feel lousy. Torberg immediately felt marginally, but crucially, better. Bill Trethowan had the same knack. He knew I had a bad conscience and he didn’t pretend that it could easily be made good. The gnawing conscience, the agenbite of inwit, helps us know ourselves. Showing an unprecedented measure of dignity, I refrained from putting the agenbite on him for my bus-fare. Instead I took his daughters aside and fixed a price for the books I had already given them. Kisses all round and I was gone, hoping I looked like a devil-may-care vagabond. If only we could really tell what impression we make. Probably there would be no living.