Actually all these refinements, once the aim of slick, high-speed, value-for-money, stop-for-nothing efficiency had been decided on, were matters of simple mechanical deduction. I had more right to be proud of the production numbers, in which cutting and long rehearsal had improved already successful pieces into gosh, how-did-they-do-that? coups de theatre. Squeezed to half its original length and re-rehearsed so that every move was a gag, the Fantastograd Russian Dance Ensemble made the ideal pre-closer. Russell Davies did one of those Cossack dances performed in the sitting position, with the cocked feet kicking sideways as if at two soccer balls placed a couple of yards apart. He had never had any dance training but once he had seen or heard anything, he could copy it. When he folded his arms, squatted and kicked, the audience rose to its feet in a panic. After about a week of bringing the house down, Davies mildly complained that his feet were hurting a bit. I slapped his back with comradely understanding and discovered only several nights later, when he held up one of his boots in the dressing room and blood ran out of it, that he had been kicking his way towards hospital. His dedication to the show went beyond the heroic. Suicidal was a better word. The whole cast was motivated like, fanatics.
It was my misfortune, however, not to be in the show. Having my name on it wasn’t enough. Even after running drills and re-rehearsing for a couple of hours a day, I still had too much time on my hands. The Scottish National Gallery had some useful Poussins but I couldn’t look at them for ever. At the Traverse I joined in discussions, usually unasked, but the Americans from the La Mama company liked their own voices too, and they had a social revolution to proclaim. I saw matinee performances by other revue groups. Some of them were rather better than I was prepared to allow: the Scaffold, for example, were on at the Traverse and performing material which must have made our stuff look class-ridden to anyone with an objective eye. But most of the revue groups, especially the ones from other universities, were just less disciplined and more thinly cast versions of ours. There was no point going on with the search. Anyone who saw everything on the Fringe would end up in a basket. So with Daryl Runswick and his band I organised a poetry-and-jazz programme for the afternoons, featuring my poetry and his jazz. It is a matter of regret among poets, however, that poetry lovers, or at any rate poetry lovers who turn up to poetry readings, are not a glamorous bunch. Everything E. M. Forster says about his fellow music lovers applies with bells on to poetry lovers. They wear personally-knitted beanies. They bring their own sandwiches. Intoning my translation of Mon-tale’s The Sunflower while the Daryl Runswick trio backed me up with dulcet riffs, I gazed out over the thinly populated hall — they all sat a long way apart, so as to facilitate concentration – and resolved to try something more ambitious next year. That I would be back next year I didn’t doubt. It felt like home. Like all those who have left home, I know exactly how home feels when I find it again, wherever that might happen to be. Haunting the second-hand bookshops, swaggering along the Royal Mile, taking an ill-advised short-cut through the Grass Market late at night in the sad hour before the alcoholics so far gone that they were eating boot polish had crawled away to sleep, I treated Edinburgh as if it were at my feet. Actually I was at its. The strict romance of the city had found a suitably compliant devotee.
16. BLACK TIE, WHITE KNUCKLES
Back in Cambridge, I should have settled to my studies. It hardly needs saying that I was unable to. Instead of disappearing into the University Library I disappeared into the language laboratory. If I could have my way, I would still be down there, learning Persian by now, or perhaps Basque. The language laboratory was my bunker. In it, like Hitler in his last days, I could plot the manoeuvres of phantom armies and hide from the implications of the flashes in the distance, the trembling of the earth, the drone from overhead. Another bunker was the Copper Kettle, which at that time began rivalling the Whim as a hangout for the aesthetes. Internally, the difference between the two places was no more striking than that between, say, the Deux Magots and the Flore. Through the big front windows of the Copper Kettle, though, a diarist could look across at King’s while he sucked his pen. Establishing rights to a small table by the simple expedient of piling my books on it, I sat for hours bringing my journal up to date and pursuing my brilliantly successful strategy of adding depth to my view of Shelley by reading anyone except him. Wittgenstein induced the same passion as Croce but at a different temperature. Wittgenstein was liquid helium. Saturated arguments crystallised out as aphorisms. I read him as literature: an approach which, I much later realised, is probably the correct one for anyone except the professional logician. Nowadays I can see his sentences, each resonating like a leaf of a xylophone made of ice, as part of an Austro-Hungarian imperial tradition which he fits as surely as Schnitzler or Klimt, as well as part of the larger German aphoristic treasure-house that includes Lichtenberg, Schopenhauer and Goethe himself. But if that whole expressive effort is now one of my touchstones – one of the things I would like my work to be like – then Wittgenstein was the way in, and still rules that long corridor by a tall, uncompromising head. It is so hard to register the thrill of discovery. You have to think yourself back to a time when part of what built you was not there. You have to unbecome yourself. This much I can say for sure, however: Wittgenstein’s demonstration that the multiplicity of the self could not only be lived with, but could actually be an instrument of perception, was a revelation to me, and partly because I already knew it. The things that influence our lives don’t necessarily just give us the courage of our convictions – they usually help to alter those, or at least refine them – but they do usually make us feel better about our propensities. Croce had made me feel better about being unable, or unwilling, to distinguish between high art and popular art. Wittgenstein made me feel better about being unable, or unwilling, to construct a coherent self. Intelligence had pulled him apart. In Sydney, when I was first a student, Camus had helped console me for the feeling that my life was in pieces. Everybody’s life, he said in The Rebel, feels like that from the inside. I had acknowledged his assistance by cultivating an existentialist air of amused resignation: a set of the eyebrows which incorporated, no doubt too successfully, the concept of the Absurd. But a wish that the pieces might one day be reintegrated was hard to quell. Now here was Wittgenstein, whose personality was in a million fragments. They shone. I got his aphorisms by heart. They were a star catalogue. Croce had carried me away. Wittgenstein carried me back to myself. There must have been a self there of some kind, or I wouldn’t have been able to register these comings and goings. I luxuriated, however, in the awareness of an undiscovered country in the mind. Every man his own terra incognita. With the slim volumes of Wittgenstein’s output piled up like poetry, I sipped coffee, scattered ash, and soaked up the Philosophische Bemerkungen like a parallel text of the Duino Elegies. It was a cool love and that could be why it has lasted. Even today, in moments of depression, I still visit Trinity College chapel and commune with his brass plaque. Now he was depressed, and look what he got done. How? Because he knew that his unhappiness was only personal.
Other bunkers were the various cinemas, at which my attendance increased, as if that were possible. The Cambridge Review appointed me film critic. In London, recent cineaste publications such as Movie magazine had already imported the Cahiers du cinema approach into English. In Cambridge, it was still unheard-of for anyone to take Hollywood movies as seriously as continental art films. Treating movies and films as if they were part of the same continuity was a kind of heresy. As always, heresy made for more sparkling copy than orthodoxy. There was no particular posturing involved on my part. The propensity to take popular art seriously was in me by nature. Week by week in the Cambridge Review I would talk about Fellini or W. C. Fields, Kurosawa or Don Siegel, as if they were in the same business, which I believed they were. I explained, perhaps too confidently, why Fritz Lang’s best film was not Metropolis but The Big Heat. I was tireless. I was tiresome. I was omniscient. I was a p
ain in the arse. But my Cambridge Review film critic’s job, though unpaid, was invaluable practice at writing a thousand-word column each week. Employing my Footlights monologue training, I shaped each column as a performance, with a set up, an early pay-off, a development section, a late pay-off and a closing number. I learned that it wasn’t necessary to cram one’s whole Weltanschauung into this week’s piece: save some of it for next week. Above all, I learned how to make the writing not sound like writing. If a parenthesis grew to such a length that it would have sounded unnatural read out, I recast it as another sentence. I tried to make every sentence linear, so that the reader never had to look back This trick, the essence of writing for the theatre or television, is not so necessary when writing for the page, but readability depends on it. Well before my year as a film critic was up, I had evidence that I was getting somewhere. Since everyone, even the dons, went to the cinema, everyone had his own opinion. Since everyone, even the dons, saw the Cambridge Review, he wanted to discuss his opinion with me, especially if his differed. The Cambridge Review had an illustrious heritage. It had prestige. But that wasn’t why I enjoyed writing for it. What I enjoyed was the communal aspect. It was like preaching a weekly sermon and then having to justify it to a rebellious congregation filing out of church. There was an aspect of showmanship that suited my temperament, and an aspect of obligation to the complexity of events which suited the only sense of responsibility I had. Already the evidence was accumulating that whatever I eventually wrote, I wouldn’t be writing it in an ivory tower. A circus tent would be more my pitch. So even when I was lounging in the dark I was thinking about the hot lights. The only reason I was hiding, I told myself, was that I was in a false position. My ditherings were nothing to those of my nominal thesis subject Shelley, whose two-volume biography I finally got around to finishing, with some alarm at the erratic nature of the hero I had chosen. Here was another lesson. Since then I have selected my role models with more care.
In the underground maze which I mentally, and to a great extent physically, inhabited, the connecting tunnels that led from the language laboratory to the coffee bars to the circuit of cinemas led on, I need hardly add, to Footlights, where I would finish the day by adding to my already monumental bar bill. With Barry Brown now safely installed as President, I had no duties except to fill my self-elected office as elder statesman and wise counsellor. After a special screening of The Bank Dick in the clubroom I gave a detailed lecture on the art of W. C. Fields. ‘He never led?’I announced, as if I had learned the lesson myself. ‘He just let himself be overheard.’ Ruthlessly exploiting my friendship with Joyce Grenfell, I arranged for her to be guest of honour at the Footlights annual dinner. The first great lady most of the club members had ever seen in action close up, she wowed them with her perfect manners. I was pretty proprietorial about her afterwards. Far into the night I laid down the law about Ealing comedy. Why had it gone so far and no further? Because the social forces that gave it shape held it reined in. Why were the Americans so much more penetrating? I had my theories. I expounded them. Another round? Put it on my card.
Looking back, I can now see that I must have been a bit of an Ancient Mariner, telling tales of old that held people riveted only because I had them pinned against the wall. Yet some of the time I spent haunting the place was spent well. Atkin and I seemed always to be writing at least four songs at a time. One of the best things about our collaboration was that I received more instruction than I gave. Atkin’s justified enthusiasm for the Beach Boys and the Lovin’ Spoonful he passed on to me. An instigator, he organised the recording of a limited-edition disc of what we fancied to be our best songs. The edition was limited to whoever could be persuaded to fork out for a heavy shellac pressing in a cardboard cover. A surprising number of people did. Atkin and Julie Covington did the singing. I forget where the recording sessions took place, but remember well that they didn’t happen in a proper studio. The venue must have been somebody’s college rooms. I recall that a grey blanket was hung up to make a sound booth. The sound quality was frightful. Julie’s voice came purely through the static as it would have come purely through a war, but in all other respects the disc caused us misgivings even in our moment of creative euphoria. We distributed it with solemn warnings to ignore its limitations. This was a grave mistake. Nothing except a finished product should ever be put up for judgment. Art is a matter of deeds, not intentions. That art was what we were involved in we had no doubt, and might even have been right. The title of the disc was taken, in all solemnity, from Eliot: While the Music Lasts. Later there was a sequel called The Party’s Moving On. Today, copies of both change hands at too high a price for either me or Atkin to buy them up and melt them down. Our songs always had fans. Just why the fans, over the next six or seven years of hard work, never accumulated into a listening public big enough to keep us alive, had better be the subject of another, and different kind of, book. This is a book about becoming, not being, and it is getting near the end, because by this time my extended apprenticeship was clearly in its terminal phase. If I wasn’t quite ready to ply my trade, whatever that was, I certainly couldn’t go on preparing for it much longer. There was a credibility problem. In London, among Nick Tomalin’s hard-bitten Fleet Street friends, I was known as the world’s oldest student. In Cambridge I was known as an aspiring Grub Street scrivener living cheap on college food, or a would-be theatrical assiduously preparing for his advent into the West End. These contradictory views both had something to them. I was caught in the middle.
As a Footlights sketch writer and performer I might have, and perhaps should have, gently faded away at this stage. To inspire an Indian summer of activity in this area, Tony Buffery returned from post-graduate studies in psychology at Toronto. When an undergraduate in Cambridge he had been the member of the original Cambridge Circus cast who had pulled out because he wanted an academic career. In his absence, many Footlights cognoscenti, Eric Idle included, had assured me that Buffery was the most inventive cabaret talent ever: not as aggressive as John Geese, perhaps, or as intellectually wide-ranging as Jonathan Miller, but with an ear like Peter Cook and a mind from outer space. Though some of this sounded like legend-building, it is always interesting when people adverse to that activity make a common exception. When Buffery returned to Corpus Christi as a don, I was ready to find him remarkable, although I didn’t expect to see much of him. After a week of the port and walnuts, however, he was up the wall, over it, and into Footlights as if he had never been away. Very tall with thick glasses and curly hair like Harold Lloyd, he was so lacking in arrogance that the young made him nervous. He couldn’t have been more approachable, so I approached him. Partaking of the strong Footlights oral tradition by which fragments of sketches are passed down from one intake to the next, Idle had once told me a killing line from a Buffery sketch in which the Queen Mother, played by Buffery in a floral hat, made a speech to open a redbrick university, which was gradually revealed, as the speech proceeded, to have very little going for it. ‘Plans have already been drawn up to equip the seventeen-storey science block with a lift. Or a staircase.’
‘He used to take the laugh after the bit about the lift,’ Idle had explained, ’and then hit them with the staircase. They were helpless.‘ Remembering this vivid fragment, I now asked Buffery what had come next. ‘I can’t remember.’ he said, with a slight stutter. ‘I kept changing it all the time and never wrote it down. I remember she said: “I name this library, Library.” They liked that. But I never finished anything. Lacked discipline. Still do, really. Why don’t we write something together?”
I had some notes for a sketch about the Olympic games in my pocket. After my tried and tested winter sports number I wasn’t too keen on the idea of another monologue. Maybe it would work better as a two-hander. I read out some bits of it to Buffery, suggesting that we could share it out for two voices. ‘No, you do the words,’said Buffery, with a light switching on behind his spectacles, ‘and I’ll be the athletes
.’After a grand total of about two hours’ rehearsal we tried the number out at the next Footlights smoker. From off-stage I supplied a BBC-type commentary full of the usual wretched optimism about British athletes who had no chance. Buffery kept crossing the stage in various personae. He was the German superman Hans-Heinz Reichstagger. He was the Russian female javelin thrower Olga Stickintinskaya. He was Tomkins, the perennial British loser with the pulled hamstring who might have done so much better. Hidden in the wings, I sometimes lost my place in the script, so entranced was I by the way Buffery became these people. Without leaving the ground, or not by much, he could mime Reich-stagger doing a sixteen-foot pole vault, clicking his heels in mid-air as if he had suddenly met a superior officer. Russell Davies was still the most protean performer I had ever met, but in his case there was one dour and reticent personality holding it all together. Buffery had multiple selves. By day he was a scientist, probing the human brain to find out which sections of it did what. By night, as a performer, he was a dozen other people. He was also a married man with children. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde weren’t in the running. Neither of them ever made anyone laugh. Buffery made people laugh until they ached. If he wanted to work with me, I would be crazy to turn the chance down.