The musical phase now began. Like Françoise a born teacher, Nick was one of those opera fanatics with the gift of putting you on rather than off. In Australia I had discovered jazz because nobody at Sydney University could very well escape it. Classical music had come to me later and piecemeal. On swimming parties to Avalon with the Bellevue Hill mob at weekends, I had acquired their taste for such stirring stuff as Haydn’s trumpet concerto and Beethoven’s Seventh. In London I had become intimate with Beethoven’s Ninth in the manner already related. More happily, Joyce Grenfell had taken me to the Festival Hall to see the Borodin Quartet play Beethoven’s late quartets and Klemperer conduct Bach’s Brandenburg concertos. I say ‘see’ rather than ‘hear’ because I couldn’t take my eyes off the Borodin cellist’s tapping foot or Klemperer’s right index finger, especially the latter. As the old master sat there in his wheelchair, it was the only part of him that could still move.
But these were scattered experiences and no trained voice had been involved save Söderström’s in Capriccio, heard intermittently through the machine-gun beads of my companion at Glyndebourne. Nick gave me an immersion course, starting with two scenes in Der Rosenkavalier: the Presentation of the Silver Rose and the last act trio. From the first day of this exposure, the bathroom rang to my imitation of Sena Jurinac, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Teresa Stich Randall. Lacking the vocal equipment to impersonate any of these women singly, I compromised by providing a vigorous pastiche of all three singing together. Pleased instead of panic-stricken at what he had wrought, Nick moved on to Verdi. From an old set of Trovatore the gold-rush chest-voice of Zinka Milanov reached to thrill me. Wagner was introduced through Lotte Lehmann and Lauritz Melchior singing the love duet from Tristan. Next came Wotan’s farewell and the magic fire music from Die Walküre, conducted by Knappertsbusch, whose always-advancing quietness I was taught to value above the vertical clamour of Solti’s complete Ring, released on Decca that very year. My prejudice against Solti – justified, I still believe, in the case of Wagner – was to remain fervent for years afterwards, until the lyrical flow of his Eugene Onegin made me think again. But prejudices were part of the enthusiasm, just as jealousy is part of passion. I went opera mad, and all because of Nick. He knew where to drop the needle – an especially important qualification in the matter of Wagner, with whom it is an invariable rule that the most immediately accessible bits are never at the edge of the disc.
Then there was Mozart. ‘Lisa della Casa,’ Nick would say, lying back in a winged chintz-covered chair with his eyes closed and his fingertips together, ‘is a bear of very little brain, but you have to remember that so was Wolfgang’s wife.’ And at that moment, on the highlights record drawn from the wonderful old Erich Kleiber set of Le nozze di Figaro, the lady in question would sing the first notes of ‘Dove sono’ for the tenth time on the trot. I wallowed like a hippo. It was a mud-bath in concentrated beauty. One doesn’t love literature, said Flaubert. Though he said so because he was re-inventing it and the labour hurt, he would have been right anyway. Music we can love.
But the gramophone was merely an adjunct. The main means of instruction was the opera house itself. We were in the amphitheatre or the gods at Covent Garden almost every night. The nights we weren’t, we were at Sadler’s Wells, getting into training with the English version for something that would show up in the real language at the Garden later on. Nick was in no doubt about the Englishing of a foreign opera: it was strictly a leg-up for getting to grips with the original, in which the language was not just inseparable from the melody but formed its living spine. During the intervals of Falstaff we would adjourn to the bar so that Nick could discuss with his friends how Tito Gobbi or Geraint Evans was handling the big challenge. Nick’s friends called each other ‘love’ a lot but they were all omniscient, so I assumed that they had good reasons for booing Galina Vishnevskaya at several points during Aida. Later on, however, I started to wonder whether it hadn’t been because she was showing too much leg.
Because Nick’s friends were queer without exception. Or, rather, with one exception: me. Whether through innocence or an opportunistic disinclination to complicate such a rich source of free enlightenment, I failed for a long time to rumble Nick’s true sexual allegiance. The young sailors who arrived at midnight and disappeared into his bedroom would reappear at breakfast. Perhaps he was picking up extra money teaching a workers’ extension course. Noises of wrestling came through the wall at night. Perhaps he was practising judo. At long last I realised why Nick wore such a forced smile when Robin came to call. Indeed it was Robin who told me. She also told me how unfair I was being. It wasn’t just because I had nothing with which to pay the rent that I was getting away with paying no rent. Nor did all those tickets for Covent Garden grow on trees. Even when you sat so high in the gods that the stage looked like a postage stamp crawling with ants, it still cost a lot of money to be present on the night Birgit Nilsson kept drilling Brünnhilde’s climactic notes right through the middle while Valhalla, which was supposed to fall, got caught in the scrim up which the Rhine, in the form of projected green light, was supposed to rise. She sang like a train coming while the set malfunctioned all around her. It was heroic art and it all had to be paid for. Nick was allowing himself to be taken advantage of, but I was still taking advantage. Once again it was time to move on.
Yet I was moving on with two acquisitions that would serve me well. One was an awakened love for the exultant human voice. The other was a reinforced tolerance for homosexuality. Previously I had never been against it, but had shared the usual delusion that it must be some sort of disease. After living with Nick and receiving the benefit of his knowledgeable, critical, yet wholeheartedly dedicated love of music, I came to believe that it was a necessary and valuable part of life. Two of my great heroes, Proust and Diaghilev, would have convinced me eventually. Proust’s article about Flaubert, or that marvellous essay by Diaghilev in which he takes Benois to task for the deficiency of his historical view, would have been enough to persuade me that there is a quality of intellect, a generous precision of humane judgment, which, so far from being damaged by inverted sexual proclivities, is probably enhanced by them. But the job had already been done by a not always happy, always smiling school-teacher who so munificently showed me where to find, at the start of the second side of the Beecham set of La Bohème, the duet in which Victoria de los Angeles and Jussi Björling celebrate the beatific prospect of going to bed together. I still find it difficult to believe that Nick and his sailors felt the same way, but to believe otherwise would be an impertinence. Some people are different from the rest of us, and so are the rest of us.
14
Back to Square One
Homosexuality was not Dave Dalziel’s problem. Many people called him mad, but nobody ever called him queer. You would have been able to tell he had arrived in England just by how the girls at Melbury Road went starry-eyed. They stopped giving each other haircuts copied from Mary Quant advertisements and started making group appointments at the hairdresser. Dalziel, for as long as I cared to remember, had drawn women like mosquitoes to a sleeping man. It wasn’t because he was good-looking, although he was. It wasn’t because he cleaned his nails and dressed in spruce clothes, although he did. It was because he was obsessed. Dave Dalziel was movie mad. He was determined to be a film director, although there had been no Australian film director since Charles Chauvel, mainly because there was no Australian film industry. Very well, an Australian film industry would have to be created.
Meanwhile Dalziel was in Europe to learn more about the craft of his art. He had a short-subject script to shoot and a rich friend, Reg Booth, who would finance the project at the price of being allowed to star. Actually Reg was rich only in comparison to the rest of us, so the money had to be deployed with great care. Dalziel worked all day on preparing this movie. In what spare time he had he saw other movies. He breathed, ate and slept movies. As a consequence, women went silly about him, It was because he ha
d no time to be silly about them. The rest of us chased women and looked foolish doing it. He let them chase him and looked fine. I would have hated him for it if he had been less good company, but if you allowed for his occasional patch of near insanity he was too funny to pass up. Like all truly entertaining talkers he rarely told jokes. He just had a way of putting things. There was a big party on the top floor at Melbury Road to mark the official end of summer. Dalziel suddenly materialised and addressed me as if we had parted only the day before.
‘I hear you’ve been living with a horse’s hoof’ he drawled. It emerged that he and Reg had just taken a flat in Warwick Road, on the other side of Kensington High Street, and were looking for a third man to share the rent. ‘Here’s your chance to play Harry Lime. Also we need someone to keep the landlady quiet, who is a MONSTER. How would you like to slip her the pork sword?’
He always talked like that. The metaphors were so mind-boggling that you found yourself doing what he wanted. A dominant personality doesn’t have to believe in its own will. All It needs is the inability to recognise the existence of anybody else’s. My suitcase and several string-handled paper shopping bags full of books were downstairs in the hall. Dave, Reg and Robin helped me carry them to Warwick Road, although Robin, to my annoyance, clearly would have been glad to carry the whole lot just to be near Dave. Reg won’t mind my saying this, because many times in the following year we bent elbows at the pub for the specific purpose of discussing Dalziel’s demoralisingly unfair share of charm, which we were agreed gave rise to, or was possibly even caused by, grave simplicities in the brain. Reg also won’t mind my saying that his script was no world-shaker. Even as I moved into the Warwick Road flat, principal photography was about to begin. From the way Mrs McHale, the middle-aged and bitterly irascible landlady, stood permanently by the staircase with her arms folded, you could tell that a top-floor flat with three heterosexual young Australian men in it was already well beyond the limits of what she would ordinarily be prepared to put up with. If her lips had been any more pursed they would have fallen off. You could also tell, from the way she tapped her prominently veined and sinewed foot, that she thought the young men had too many visitors even in normal circumstances – especially female visitors, whose presence necessitated her taking up an invigilating position on the landing outside our flat so that she could make frequent unannounced entrances through the door compulsorily left open. In the week before the camera turned on page one of the script there were a lot more visitors of both sexes. Mrs McHale’s foot became a blur. Young actresses auditioning as extras arrived in miniskirts which Mrs McHale clearly regarded, not without reason, as tantamount to nudity. Men with silver boxes full of hired equipment and tea-chests full of scavenged props endangered the threadbare carpets and crappy wallpaper which Mrs McHale cherished as if the Victoria and Albert Museum could be restrained from appropriating them to its collection only by armed force. We called her Hearty McHale, in the way that a wrathful deity is given nicknames to make it less awful. What she was calling us was beyond guessing, but at the annual World Landladies’ Rally in the Munich beer hall she would no doubt have plenty to say when her turn came at the banked microphones. They get like that,’ said Dave wisely, ‘when they don’t get enough of the veal dagger.’
Applying listlessly for jobs during that period, I had plenty of spare time to help with the movie, and for acting as substitute focus-puller while playing a small part I got ten pounds for each week of the fortnight it took to shoot. The film, written by Reg with additional dialogue by Dave, was a mystery about an unnamed man, played by Reg, who works as a hit-man for the Organisation and then finds out that the Organisation is trying to eliminate him, etc. Called The Man from the Organisation, it would have been the least mysterious mystery in the world if not for my focus-pulling, which gave some of the shots – the really vital ones, too expensive to be done again – an extra quality of ambiguity. Yet my acting was precise, even pedantic. In the key scene where I impersonated a passer-by in the street who turns to look at the seriously wounded hero, I walked the prescribed eighteen paces, paused for the three seconds required, and turned looking puzzled, exactly as instructed. Next day’s rushes showed how exact I had been. You could see me silently counting to eighteen, moving my lips as I counted to three, and then looking as if I had been asked to expound Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. ‘You’ll have to do it again tomorrow unless we can get George C. Scott,’ said Dave, making a note. ‘Asking you to play someone you’re not is like asking King Kong to play the Moonlight Sonata.’ He was right. In later years my acting has improved, if only in the sense that I have got better at being myself.
During that hectic fortnight I learned a little about filming and a lot about Dalziel. I could see now that he wasn’t always mad. Sometimes he was just concentrating. When he ignored what you were talking about and started a new conversation in the middle of your sentence, it was because he hadn’t heard you. He attacked one crisis after another without any sign of artistic temperament. In sharp distinction to the rest of us, he didn’t behave like an artist at all. He behaved like a truck-driver who has to get a load of perishable goods to a certain destination by a certain time. His creative resources were considerable, but invisible because fully committed. There was nothing left over with which to pose. Perhaps the logistic demands of his medium had matured him early. In my own medium, which makes few practical demands beyond the securing of an adequate supply of stationery, coming down to earth takes longer. But here again, and as usual, it was probably a matter of personality. Dave was simply the way he was. Once his single-mindedness had looked like dementia. Now it looked like obduracy. It didn’t take a prophet to realise that one day it would look like talent.
Photography completed, The Man from the Organisation moved into what Dave called its post-production phase. In other words work stopped completely while they figured out how to pay for the editing. Reg was no longer rich and had to get a job as a driver with a luxury hire-car firm. This came in handy for allaying the spleen of Hearty McHale, because when Reg temporarily parked a Daimler or a Bentley in front of the house she got the idea that at least one of us was in funds. Reg spoiled it all one evening by forgetting to take off his cap. Dave, with characteristic practicality, had already arranged a short-term job in a Hammersmith builder’s yard called Cornwall’s Erections. He had underestimated, however, the physical labour involved. At sunset he would come reeling home too tired to wash off the grime. Usually there was some adoring woman who had been hanging around with no other aim in life beyond swabbing the caked dirt off his shoulders and bowed neck. When there wasn’t, Reg and I took over. Even with these emollient side-benefits the job was clearly another case of Dalziel’s extraordinary dedication to the task in hand. It made me feel queasy about borrowing money from him. Most of what I had earned from filming was already owed, which induced an anxiety that made me smoke more. Nor could it be denied that Warwick Road was situated less in Kensington than in Earls Court. I was back to where I had started, except lower down. Winter was almost upon us and I felt like the pariah of the pack. Even Robin, most generous of attendant angels, was looking at me with a curled lip.
Luck landed me my best job yet. A long, insane letter I had written to Penguin Books suggesting that they publish my collected works – I had left it unclear whether these as yet existed – won me an interview with one of their junior editors, a sleepily bright PhD type in her late twenties. Called Leslie, she immediately sussed that I was a bull artist but kindly suggested I might lower my sights and apply for a newly created menial job which would involve looking after the file of authors’ photographs. Two heavily academic Pelicans had recently been published, written by Professor J. M. Thompson and Professor L. N. Thompson respectively. L. N. Thompson’s photograph had ended up on J. M. Thompson’s book and vice versa. One of them had been nice about it but insistent. The other had been merely insistent. The cost of stripping the covers off both editions and star
ting again had been very large, hence the decision to put the matter beyond doubt. Coached by Leslie, who advised the Singapore suit and my disintegrating but respectable pair of Chelsea boots with the chisel toes, I put in for the job and actually got it. I didn’t tell them that I would be going up to Cambridge the year after next or even next year if I could swing it. Perhaps I was calculating that Penguin would go into liquidation in the near future or that my well-attested capacity to screw up would militate against permanence, but more likely I was just being, without particularly meaning to, deceitful. It can get to be a reflex.