7. THE OSTRICH ALTERNATIVE
Obsessions are what we have instead of normality. They aren’t a version of it, they are surrogate. My obsession with the moving image was what I was having instead of working on the set books. Out of the three terms of my second and last year as an undergraduate, one and a half had gone by before I could bring myself even to sit down and assess the magnitude of what I had not yet done in the way of preparing to satisfy the examiners. When I finally faced the issue, I quickly realised that I would have a better chance of satisfying them if I offered them my body. To present them with the contents of my mind would be an insult. My first move was to write one of my classic letters to my mother telling her that I was studying hard and not to worry about a thing. More than usually specious, this work of fiction helped get me in the mood for works of fiction composed by other people, such as Dickens and Thackeray. But merely not feeling negative wasn’t the same as feeling positive. Enthusiasm was lacking. Why did it have to be Dickens and Thackeray? And why were Dickens’s novels so very long, not just in thickness but from page to page? He piled it on as if I had all the time in the world to take it off. Jane Austen had had a far better idea of how much time a busy poet and performer had to spare. There was also the advantage that in previous incarnations, while being an aesthete at the University of Sydney or a down-and-out post-Beatnik Bohemian in Earl’s Court and Tufnell Park, I had actually read some of her books. Acquiring a working knowledge of her oeuvre was thus on the cards. I resolved to concentrate on Jane Austen and thereby reap the benefits of the informed insight that cuts deep, the sharp focus. Whether a sharp focus on Jane Austen would come in handy when discussing the novels of, say, Dostoevsky, was a point that remained moot, A moot point I could always deal with by crossing the river, climbing the hill and hiding from the reality of afternoon in the sweet, artificial night of the Rex.
Most of the films I saw there were like me: rootless, unsung, wandering the universe like a spaceship with a dead crew, When The Manchurian Candidate was withdrawn from the screen after the assassination of President Kennedy, it showed up nowhere in the world except at the Rex, where I saw it at least ten times. I could, and at the drop of a hat would, analyse its camerawork exhaustively, but in a more reliable part of my addled brain I must have realised that it was the words which really counted. I learned George Axeltod’s perfectly turned screenplay line by line. At that time and for years to come, the muttered question ‘Why does your head always look as if it’s coming to a point?’ was a secret password among those who shared the Manchurian connection. I, however, was the only person I ever met who could correctly recite the key line in Breakfast at Tiffany’s: ‘I’ve never had champagne before breakfast before. With breakfast, often. But never before before.’ The line was Axelrod’s, not Capote’s. I also knew that the best line in The Big Sleep – ‘She tried to sit in my lap while I was standing up’ – was not Raymond Chandler’s. Years before it was rediscovered as a cult classic, the all-time off-beat Hollywood sleeper The Night of the Hunter would also show up only at the Rex. The print was full of splices yet the photography retained its lustre and, more importantly, the narrative still flowed. Bowled over by Charles Laughton’s talent as a director, I still had enough sense to realise that James Agee’s screenplay was the vital contribution.
The second time I saw Night of the Hunter at the Rex – once again I was in light from Dickens – I was one of only three people in the audience. The others were two of the most beautiful people I had ever seen in my life. Both of them were Indians, and before I introduced myself I had mentally transferred to them the title of a piece by Duke Ellington: the Beautiful Indians. The beautiful girl was called Karula Shankar and the young man, if possible even more beautiful, was called Buddy Rajgupta. They looked like a tourist advertisement for Nirvana. It turned out, however, that they were students like me. In some respects they were even my kind of student. They, too, were in flight from the size of Dickens’s novels. In other ways they were not students like me at all. Apart from their physical allure, they seemed materially comfortable to a degree unparalleled among the undergraduate population. This I deduced before we had even reached what Karula called Buddy’s pad, whither I had been invited back for coffee. Buddy’s casual Western clothes he might have worn at a Hyannis Port lawn party and Karula’s sari was so subtle in its colours that you had to check your eyes for teardrops. Surely it was a film of water which was supplying the prismatic interplay as she rustled silkily along? No, it wasn’t. In the middle of her superb forehead a tiny upright ellipse of scarlet spoke of the mysterious East. Her voice, however, spoke of Sarah Lawrence or Vassar, with the occasional word strongly emphasised, as if she had suddenly moved closer. ‘You don’t play bridge, by any chance?’ Already lost, but not so far gone as to have forgotten that a competence at bridge might be hard to fake, I said I didn’t. ‘Man, have you ever met the wrong people. We play it all the time. We’ll have to teach him, won’t we?’ Buddy said nothing for a long while as we walked. I could tell he was thinking. Finally he said: ‘Yeah. OK.’
Buddy’s pad was behind a heavy door in a neo-Georgian brick façade somewhere near Newnham. I can remember a gravel drive and an overhanging elm which must be gone by now, because the Dutch elm beetle went through Cambridge like silent wildfire later on and missed hardly a single candidate for extermination. I imagine the spacious layout of Buddy’s pad has gone too. There can’t have been many subsequent undergraduates who would have been able to keep up that level of classy carelessness. By student standards the place was enormous, colossal, outlandish: it was Grand Central Station, the Grand Salon of the Louvre, the Great Hall of the People in Peking. Actually I suppose the main room was only about thirty feet by twenty, but even among all the divans and cushions there definitely would have been room to swing the tiger whose skin was on the floor. The general arrangements were for a Rajah who had been brought up in the Ritz, which was apparently pretty well what had happened. Family photographs indicated that Buddy’s forebears had driven at Le Mans, flown in the King’s Cup, hunted from howdahs, played host to the Mountbattens. Pretending not to be impressed by all this was made easier by the books, which were loosely shelved by the thousand, and all interesting. Such American avant-garde publishing houses as New Directions and Evergreen were fully represented. These imprints I at least recognised. Others were new to me. Proud of my one-volume collected Nathaniel West, I was rather put out to see his separate novels all lined up in the original American editions, their paper wrappers intact. Undergraduates like to believe that they read adventurously but few of them do. Mostly they follow two curricula: the official one, and the unofficial one which prescribes books supposed, by general consent among their generation, to be of epoch-making interest. Buddy was a genuine extracurricular reader. He had his own taste and followed it where it led. Nor was he one of those paid-up exquisites who read minor writers because the major ones are insufficiently obscure. He was in search of originality in all its forms. The quest was made only the more impressive by his off-hand manner. Nowadays he would be called laid-back. At that time the word for him was cool. Even in conversation, he never ran to catch the bus. ‘Have you read Agee’s film criticism?’ he asked. ‘Yes,’ I lied. Buddy crossed slowly to his shelves, took down the relevant book, leafed through it, found some paragraph that he had been looking for, silently read it, closed the book and handed it to me. ‘You should,’ he said.
And I did. That year I read almost everything on Buddy’s shelves. Constant attendance at the cinema never cut into my reading: only into my official reading. Unofficially I would rather read than sleep. The Cambridge second-hand bookshops always beckoned. By the second week in any term I was usually too broke to buy anything. The University Library, needless to say, was out of the question: it was full of students who were actually studying, a sight which would throw me into a panic. So every few days I took an armful of books back to Buddy’s pad, there to exchange them for more. Occasionall
y I was a fourth in bridge games but I never learned: the Beautiful Indians were too good at it to remember what it was like not to be able to play, so they couldn’t teach me. Several times I was paired off with an Italian graduate economist called Mario who could memorise the whole pack at a glance no matter how it was shuffled. I came to dread the moment, usually no more than half-way through a hand, when Mario, Buddy or Karula said something like ‘That’s it, then,’ and they all laid out their cards, having foretold how the hand – or round or rubber or whatever it was called - must play itself out. I had no sense for cards and got no better. Even today, playing gin rummy with my small daughter, I am notoriously easy meat, and have been since she was seven years old. If I make a fool of myself at gin, it can be imagined what a figure I cut at bridge. I just couldn’t do it.
Reading I knew how to do: except, of course, when it was prescribed. Buddy was the same way. As far as I remember he never sat for the examinations, and might well already have been sent down without his noticing. Already, on that first afternoon, I envied him his insouciance, although I was too obtuse to realise as yet that it was only part of an aristocratic principle whose other main component was a deep sense of social obligation. Downing the proffered martinis as if they were water, I conveyed to Buddy and Karula my radical convictions, explaining to them the economic problems facing their country and how easily these could be solved. ‘Man, that’s crap,’Karula murmured from her sleepily curled position in a heap of paisley cushions, as if Liberty’s had been bombed and geraniums were growing among the ruins. Buddy, smoking a black Russian cigarette so delicately that it seemed never to, grow shorter, either listened to my monologue or thought of something else. Perhaps he was thinking of his country, in which, he slyly neglected to tell me, his father was a liberal publisher who had many times laid his life on the line for democracy and would expect his children to do the same. It was a typical Cambridge undergraduate evening: ignorance spoke out confidently while experience waited for it to catch up. Night fell and deepened. Karala rose from her cushions and made for the kitchen. She constructed large, American-style hamburgers. Eating a hamburger without putting down my martini glass made it difficult to talk, but I coped.
It never occurred to me that I should at least have offered to leave the Beautiful Indians together. Anyway, towards midnight I was given the job of escorting Karula home. She lived right in the centre of town, in a suite of rooms in a gingerbread house in a little lane, no wider than a thin man, leading off Market Square. It took a long time to get there because I found her a bit of a handful to escort. In fact I found her at all only with difficulty. The martinis must have had something in them. Alcohol, perhaps. Probably it was the way they made them in India. I tripped over gutters, detoured into bushes, fell down holes in the road. I peed behind a parked Mini and missed it. Karula, perfectly sober, was in hysterics. When we finally got to her place it turned out that she had forgotten her front door key. Luckily her room was on the ground floor. We jemmied her window without much trouble - Karula’s peals of oddly accented laughter covered the noise of splitting timber – and I boosted her through. There was so much sari that I didn’t really touch her. It was like pushing an unfolded parachute into a dumb waiter. But I felt her. The sweet heat of life. She was lovely and she wasn’t mine. I wanted all the lovely women to be mine. If not all, then a few. If that was too much, then just one. Here, now. This instant. I sat down and had a little cry. ‘Shit, man,’ came that bewitching voice from inside the window, ‘go home.’ But where was home? Far, far away. Using the cool wall as a guide, I edged toward the streetlight at the end of the alley. So cold in England, even when it was warm.
8. WELL INTERRUPTED, PEMBROKE
Let me not convey an impression of time completely wasted. If I had been enrolled to read a science subject and had dodged work in such a fashion, I would have been cheating. But in retrospect it seems possible that I only felt fraudulent. Eschewing the set books with unequalled diligence, I read everything else. From the conversations that lasted until dawn, I remembered what I heard in the rare intervals when I wasn’t talking. The awkward truth, when it comes to the humanities, is that knowledge, taste and judgment get into us by uncharted routes. Late one night in Footlights, alone with the sputtering black-and-white TV set, I saw and heard Jacqueline du Pré playing the Elgar cello concerto. I saw her before I heard her, and went mad for her smile as I never did for Elgar, but another barrier between me and classical music softly crumbled. Until then I had been convinced, wrongly, that the main stream of great music was in the symphonies and the operas. After that, I started looking for it in the right place, in the concertos and the chamber music. It was her passion that did it. We live more by example than we think. Strong evidence for this view was provided by the disconcerting fact that I was a bit of a role model myself. Undergraduates who were shy about their intellectual or artistic ambitions looked up to me because I was blatant about mine. They believed that I knew a thing or two and I’m bound to say that I agreed with them. When the JCR of my college was invited to send a three-man team to compete in the television programme University Challenge, that I should be included seemed natural not just to me but to everyone. The rank of captain being offered, I made no demur. My second-in-command was an American called Chuck Beaurepaire, who was a walking, shouting encyclopaedia. Delmer Dynamo and the other Americans avoided him because of his knack for making his interlocutor redundant. He talked all the time and nothing he said was refutable, because all of it was facts, A formidable practitioner along those lines myself, I had been known to go toe-to-toe with him for a full half-hour before pausing to draw breath, whereupon he swept inexorably into the gap. Beaurepaire talked the way Alexander gave battle. He went straight at you. ‘Watch out for Chuck,’ whispered Delmer loudly one night in Hall. ‘He’s got another hole to eat with. The mouth never gets tired.’ Beaurepaire was sitting only about three places away and should have heard, but he was talking. ‘Johnson has the legislative record. Viewpoint of social benefits, Great Society biggest thing since New Deal. Just has a dumb name. Should’ve called it something else. Fair shake. Free lunch. Whatever. Know what Johnson said about J. Edgar Hoover? You don’t? Teil you. Listen, this is great. They asked him why he didn’t fire Hoover, right? Johnson said he’d rather have Hoover inside the tent pissing out than outside pissing in. My father was there when he said that. Johnson was on the Hill when Jack Kennedy ...’ Beaurepaire delivered all this in a sustained bellow that made all around him look into their stew as if a tunnel might open through it and lead them to salvation. But from the viewpoint of Pembroke’s team for University Challenge, to have Beaurepaire on tap was like being offered the assistance of Otto Skorzeny to pull a bank-raid. The third member of our team was a nice young man whose name I have forgotten. He had been chosen because he knew something about science. Beaurepaire knew all about that too, so the young man never needed to open his mouth, and, being shy, didn’t try. Let us call him Christopher, because if his name wasn’t that then it was Nicholas. His family had a nice house outside Manchester, where we all stayed the night before we recorded the show next day. In those days, Granada Television ruled the ionosphere with Coronation Street and an unrivalled array of classic small formats like University Challenge, All Our Yesterdays, What the Papers Say and Cinema, which was to be the first programme I ever regularly presented when, some years later, I tentatively essayed what has turned out to be my principal means of earning a living. At that time, however, I had been on television precisely once. It had happened in Sydney. Television itself had been new to Australia. I was one of a team of Sydney University students ranged against a team of journalists in a game of bluff. We had scored precisely no points. I forget the rules, but I never got over sitting there for half an hour without saying a word. This time, I resolved, would be different. In one of Christopher’s guest rooms, I lay awake looking at the hammered beams and white plaster of the low ceiling. Outside in the grounds, the moon shone on t
he lake. I didn’t want Christopher’s inheritance. I didn’t even want, or not very much, Christopher’s mother, which was quite mature of me, because she was exactly the stamp of unassuming but self-assured gentlewoman most calculated to arouse greed and resentment. Her husband, I had guessed, must have been that object covered with coats and hats that we passed in the hall. Anyway, he hadn’t joined us for dinner, which, excusing herself, she did not change for, merely adding tiny pearl earrings to her ensemble of cable-stitch roll-neck sweater, corduroy trousers and penny loafers. Quality unencumbered by finery, her soignée allure was the unfussiest possible interplay of form and content. Serene. What a word. There was nothing ruffled about her image until it reached my eyes. ‘You will look after Christopher tomorrow, won’t you?’ I nodded conspiratorially while Beaurepaire told her about the Tennessee Valley Authority.