Like Oxford, Cambridge was, as it still is, an aggregate of colleges. The university as a whole existed only in two ways: one, as a means to examine the undergraduates, and two, as a display case for their extracurricular activities. Into these latter I purposefully entered. Actually, I did not have much of a plan, but since I was four or five years older than most of my fellow undergraduates – a big gap at that age – I was, although unusually immature, a bit less unsure of myself than they were, and in my principal activity, writing, I had the immense advantage of having been at it a while longer. Cambridge was full of aspiring writers. To publish their works, there was a whole range of periodicals: the weekly newspaper Varsity and the irregularly appearing but dauntingly historic Granta were only the two most prominent. There were poetry magazines with names like Pawn, Solstice, Inverse, and – a token of seriousness, this – Poetry Magazine. There was a stapled, cyclostyled weekly called Broadsheet which reviewed everything: the penniless prototype of the listings magazines which ten years later were to strike it rich. The Cambridge Review, for which William Empson had once written and in whose letter columns the Leavisites would still occasionally immolate a colleague, was put out by graduates, but otherwise the whole immense publishing effort was produced by a few young men, and fewer young women, all in statu pupillari. They were in constant search of publishable material. They were about to meet the right man. They had the demand and I had the supply. In prose even more than in verse, I was still trying to bring my style under control, but in comparison to all the other hungry young geniuses I had the odd scrap of solid information to offer along with the strained metaphors and the overloaded syntax. When I reviewed a film, for example, I could quite often refer to other films by the same director. All those tickets to the National Film Theatre, paid for by my dear lost love Lilith Talbot, were now to have their effect. The great age of the undergraduate film buff had not yet arrived. Nowadays every university in the country boasts a dozen young aspiring film critics who know everything about their subject, even if, because they have seen so many films so fast, they know nothing about anything else. In my day, such a range of reference was less common. I was a harbinger. For Varsity, reviewing Muriel, I launched into a survey of Resnais’s entire oeuvre, including the rarely seen Nuit et Brouillard. For Broadsheet, reviewing Cuba Si!, I questioned whether Chris Marker in a state of certainty could ever be as interesting as he was in Letter from Siberia, when he was in a state of doubt. Other undergraduate would-be cultural journalists might have been cleverer than I was – as I was later to discover, several of them were – but they hadn’t been alive long enough to have that kind of scope. Beyond that, I had the virtue of my chief drawback. My childish imagination was still vivid with the gaudy bric-a-brac which had helped to form it. I wrote about Tarzan and Jane as if they were still real to me. They were, so I sounded convinced, and to sound convinced is the first and longest step towards sounding convincing. My prose pieces gave the effect, strained for though it might be, of a sort of panoptic pop. For the undergraduate editors, always too short of publishable contributions, I was a gift horse who ran off at the mouth.
Soon I was appearing in every publication. The poetry magazines I supplied from the dog-eared back catalogue of finished masterpieces that lined my cardboard suitcase. Here again, there were other undergraduate aspirants more talented. But they were in the first phase of their development and I was in the second of mine. I had got to the point where I would keep working on a poem until it sounded, to my ears at least, like a finished product, not just a promise. It hardly needs saying that my judgment was often faulty: no amount of finishing touches will compensate for a bad design. Much of what I then published seemed to me so immature in retrospect – and retrospect began only a few years later – that at one recent stage I seriously planned to buy up all surviving copies of the relevant magazines and burn them. But at the time it must have seemed, and not just to me, that my work had an authority lacking in the average undergraduate’s contribution. It would have been surprising if this had not been so. The poets and editors – all the editors were poets and most of the poets were editors – were admirably poised in their reserved demeanour but they were terribly young. They wore tweeds and corduroys. One of them smoked a pipe and ate seed cake with his sweet tea. Another hid his acne with his hand. The occasional poet-editor was a classless arriviste, called something like Steve Bumption, who wore a white leather jacket and talked about Graphics, but at that point trendiness had barely impinged. ‘Graphics,’ he would say, ‘is where it’s all happening.’ But he was saying it into a void. It was all happening in Carnaby Street, not in Cambridge. Mostly the young people who ran the university literary scene looked and sounded as if they belonged in a wartime BBC radio studio along with C. Day Lewis and Louis MacNeice. They crouched beside the gas fire in their rooms pasting up the layout of the next issue on the threadbare carpet while they drank Nescafé from chipped mugs. Doubtless they had ambitions of their own but this failed to occur to me when I burst in and brow-beat them into running a two-page layout of what I cheerfully assured them was my best stuff.
Since I never took ‘no’ for an answer, their only way to reject my work was to accept it and then try to forget it. I wouldn’t let them forget it. Even in that first year, about two-thirds of everything I submitted got published, which, since I submitted a lot, was a lot. My self-assurance must have been a bit tough on the nerves of some of the young poets who had been around for two years already and might have hoped to shine unrivalled during their third year. None of them sought to make me aware of this, or even, in my hearing at any rate, objected to a colonial taking over. There might, of course, have been the odd snide comment I missed. There probably wasn’t much I didn’t miss, come to think of it. I had never been much of a one for the hidden message. Nor did it occur to me that a lack of editorial resistance might not necessarily be a good thing. What I really needed was discouragement.
Fate decreed that in the theatrical field, if in no other, I would soon get what was coming to me. At the second Footlights smoker in the first term I was on stage in half a dozen different sketches. The Footlights club room, while it had a curtained stage, had no deep wings or any other means of concealment while you waited your turn to go on. Under the windows on the Falcon Yard side of the clubroom there was a wooden bench where you had to wait. It was de rigueur to look up at the stage and pretend to enjoy the act preceding yours. As I write, I can feel the curve of that wooden bench under my buttocks: it grew so familiar. Like the oiled stench coming up through the floor from MacFisheries below, and the thump of the dancing feet coming down from the Yacht Club through the ceiling above, the pinch of the bench evoked a cocktail of fear and triumph. You couldn’t have the triumph without feeling the fear first. Thus the basic structure of any theatrical experience was laid out cold. Without having in any way begun to refine my sketches – it still hadn’t crossed my mind that they would have to be constructed at least as carefully as poems – I went out to the little stage often enough to make an impact. Also I had an angle. My stuff was literary. With the aid of an unsuspecting Canadian who played Alice B. Toklas, I performed a sketch I had written about Gertrude Stein. Nobody really understood it – I’m sure of that because I didn’t either – but at least the number had a tone of its own. At that time, the Footlights was going through one of its recurring periods of looking for a new style. A few years before, Cambridge Circus, essentially a Footlights May Week revue with a bigger budget, had conquered London and eventually the world. The Footlights, which had recovered from the success of supplying half the cast of Beyond the Fringe, was once again plunged into the necessity of not repeating itself. In London, the satire boom was already commercialised to the point where joining it would have looked slavish. The challenge, as always, was to find your own voice, and the problem, as always, was to find out where that had been mislaid. The club was full of precociously accomplished young performers but as yet they had little to say
. I had a lot to say, even if I was not accomplished. This put me in the dangerous position of playing uncle: my worst role. Like most people who organise their lives badly, I just love giving advice.
The Footlights committee were advised by their new recruit to climb on a train and go up to London to see the opening night of The Charge of the Light Fandango. The revue I had written with my erstwhile Svengali and long-term collaborator Spencer had found a backer: Spencer’s father-in-law. My share of the writing had largely been completed before I came up to Cambridge. Employing the odd weekend exeat, I had attended a few rehearsals and helped Spencer to rewrite those of our songs and sketches which threatened to be insufficiently obscure. The cast were all Australian expatriates with high hopes. Some of them had been abroad long enough to be wondering if the big break would ever come. Spencer himself had high hopes, strangely enough. His dedication to obliquity was unimpaired but somehow he expected that his efforts to alienate the audience would meet with rapturous applause. Less forgivably, I expected the same result. I not only should have known better, I did know better: but I had been caught up. Any theatrical event has a momentum of its own: any theatrical event except The Charge of the Light Fandango. The Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, had been hired at colossal expense. The Footlights committee were sitting with me in a box. To say that the disaster unfolded would be to exaggerate its pace. The disaster developed at the speed of stale cheese growing blue hair. It was all low points, but perhaps the lowest was a song about a jewel robbery which Spencer and I, greatly pleased with our own ingenuity, had written to the tune of Ravel’s Bolero. Six of the cast were meant to sing it while tip-toeing in intricate patterns around the stage. If they had merely forgotten the words it would have been a mercy. Pummelled by the waves of indifference from the auditorium, however, they remembered the words, but in the wrong order. Since the choreography was cued by the lyrics, the actors were soon out of sequence. Eventually two of them were out of sight, having taken craven advantage of their proximity to the wings. It was hard to blame them. The song was a tour de force and nothing else.
The whole show was like that. It was all technique. Even at that time I half-realised it: a pretty drastic self-appraisal after more than a year’s work. The Lord Chamberlain, who at that time still exercised his baleful influence on the British theatre, had insisted that my best sketch be left out. It was an all-purpose Queen’s speech, in which the sovereign assured some foreign country that her best wishes, warm blankets or aircraft carriers were on their way towards it. The idea was that she could cross out what did not apply. When the Lord Chamberlain crossed out the whole thing, I tried to convince myself that censorship had wrecked our chances. The dutiful chuckles of the Footlights committee should have told me the truth, They stayed to the end, in sharp contrast to the majority of the audience, which drained away steadily throughout the first half, leaving the second half to be watched only by friends and relatives. The party afterwards was a wake in all respects except the failure of Spencer’s father-in-law to realise that he was the corpse. Either he enjoyed losing money or else he was simply relieved about not having been on stage. It would have been disloyal to renounce my expatriate colleagues, who had all tried hard. Also I honestly felt (self-deception always feels particularly honest) that we had done something new and challenging. Privately, however, far back, in a dark part of my mind which admitted light but was slow to reflect it, I was getting ready to begin again. In Sydney, though I had found Spencer’s influence overwhelming, I had always harboured secret desires to establish a contact with the audience. In Cambridge, the undergraduate thespians, however green, shared the same impulse. The polite young men I was with wanted to be entertainers and so did I. On the train back up to Cambridge we talked about something else. They were so kind and tactful that they frightened me. Where had they got it, this sensitivity to the pain of others? School must have been Hell, like the trenches in World War One, which could have been the subject of the reviews that The Charge of the Light Fandango got next day. I read them in the Junior Common Room and resisted the temptation to rip them out of the newspapers so that nobody else would see them. This forbearance might have been, had it been conscious, a correct guess about the tactical advisability of not reacting to criticism. In reality, however, I was so drained of energy that the effort of tearing a sheet of newspaper would have left me breathless.
Luckily a chance to work off my embarrassment offered itself straight away. Footlights was not the only institution to stage smokers. Some of the colleges had an annual smoker of their own. These college smokers were staffed almost exclusively by Footlights members who were not necessarily members of the college concerned. In other words, the Footlights were pulling a fast one. The relevant university bye-law, fiercely enforced by the proctors, allowed the Footlights only two smokers per term plus the annual May Week revue. In order to work up the best material from the twice-a-term Footlights smokers into a form which might possibly make it into the May Week revue, the Footlights infiltrated the college smokers. Any Footlights member who wasn’t enrolled at the college concerned was invited in as a guest. A sufficiently fanatical Footlights performer could thus tread the boards in the club room, in his own college and as a guest in every other college, so that he was in a constant rhythm of rehearsing and performing for as long as the academic year lasted. In a college smoker, especially, he would get plenty of practice at playing to a wider audience, because a college smoker could be attended by anybody from that college or any other college, since the tickets were on the open market.
Of all the college smokers, the most reliably successful was the Pembroke smoker. When Peter Cook had been up, agents from London would attend the Pembroke smoker and try to purchase the material. On one occasion Cook sold the whole show to the West End. The effect of his professionalism, though not necessarily of his originality, had lingered on. It was a hard act to follow, and when the Footlights committee suggested that I might like to direct the next Pembroke smoker I was not hasty in saying yes. Without question I was the natural choice. The only other Footlights member from my college was some kind of scientist who had been elected to the club by accident after giving what the audience had taken to be a brilliant impersonation of a man who had forgotten a terrible script. When the fact finally percolated that the script had really been terrible and that he had, indeed, forgotten it, he settled down for three years of enjoying the bar facilities and left the field clear for me. But although I had no doubts about the desirability of going back to basics and learning to please an audience, I had several doubts about whether this was the right time to do it. First of all, there was the question of my studies, which so far were non-existent. Also my confidence was not at its highest. The quality of the silence with which the audience had greeted The Charge of the Light Fandango was still ringing in my ears like a blow to the side of the head with the flat of the hand. I could still hear every cough, every wild, bitter laugh of disbelief, every bang of the safety exit double-doors as the steel bar across them was hit loudly by the uncaring fist of another customer baling out like a test pilot from a prototype spinning to its doom. Finally, the doors had been held open by the usherettes. They had nodded knowingly. I didn’t want to see that knowing nod again.
I was talked out of my gloom and into the job. Actually, the show couldn’t lose. Eric Idle was in it and he knew all the ropes. Above all, he knew that what really mattered was the wine. Into Pembroke’s old library, called Old Library, were carried many boxes of a cheap but acceptably smooth Beau-jolais from Peter Dominic, who also supplied the glasses. Many of these were broken on the first night by the Hearties. The show ran for four nights and everybody came. The Hearties were merely the noisiest element. Large, boat-rowing types with low foreheads, thick necks and annoyingly pretty female companions imported from London, they laughed at everything, including the love songs. Everyone else enjoyed the show too, although most of them would have been hard put to give a clear account of it afterwards
. All the men were in black tie and all the women in evening gowns. Some of the male dons would have liked to have been in evening gowns also, but they confined themselves to lipstick and rouge. The stage, constructed from beer-crates for the occasion, was only about six feet square and stood uncurtained in one corner of the room, so that you could make an entrance through the door leading to the book-stack. The rest of the room was packed with small low tables tightly surrounded by increasingly happy people. The oxygen was quickly used up. So was the wine, except that our waiters kept replacing it. The heat was terrific. Breathing neat nitrogen, with only an unlimited supply of plonk to stave off dehydration, the entire audience was already drunk before the lights went down on the first act. Even the dons were shouting. But the level of physical behaviour remained decorous if you didn’t count the periodic attempts by the Hearties to smash their table by dancing on it.
The show, I am bound to say, merited an enthusiastic response. A cast of all the best Footlights guest artists did their stuff, topped off by Romaine Rand’s fabled strip-tease nun routine, making its first appearance since the Sydney University revue several years before. For its reincarnation in the Pembroke smoker, she had hand-sewn a whole new Carmelite nun’s habit. She wore a particularly daring bikini underneath. Luckily, the Dean didn’t see the show until the last night, when he bit through the stem of his pipe. Though Romaine pulled the walls in, really there was nothing in the show which did not go down a storm, mainly because the audience was clinically intoxicated, but partly because, in my role as producer, I had arranged the running order with some care, making sure that the up-beat songs came at the end of the half and stuff like that. I even got away with my own monologue. A whimsical little number about two railway locomotives in love, it went on for so long that the Hearties, from a sitting start, managed to reduce their table to matchwood before I was half-way through. But the show had built up too much impetus to be easily stopped. Since the whole of the university’s theatrical establishment turned up over the course of the four nights, this small success could be counted as my first tangible impact on the broader Cambridge scene. For anyone with the right set of personal inadequacies, an applauding audience is a wine far more heady than anything that you can buy in a bottle. I was especially pleased to see the women putting their hands together admiringly. The wine having flowed freely for the cast as well as the audience, it was with a fond eye made foolish that I peeped low around the corner of the book-stack door while some other act was on stage and checked out those pretty faces looking up, lit as if they were spectators at a ballet by Degas. I felt love. I felt grief. I felt sick. Where had they been?