I was also, considering my other obligations, crazy to take it up. My best excuse was that the collaboration provided a modicum of extra income. The Footlights fielded a cabaret team which would perform anywhere in Britain for a suitable fee. When half the fee was given to the club and the rest was divided amongst the participants, it was an unsuitable fee, but it helped me believe that I could earn my own living. It was more fun than supervising undergraduates in Sidney Sussex and easier on the nerves than trying to sweat a thousand words for the New Statesman into a gleaming block of lapidary prose – both of which things I was doing as often as I could, although without showing any signs of digging my fingers into the slipping side of the pit of debt in which I helplessly trod slime. I was still in hock to Footlights and now that I was an ex-President the Senior Treasurer tended to clear his throat significantly when we met. A don from Selwyn called Harry Porter, he was a sweet man and a great friend, but neither the university bye-laws nor his own impeccable probity allowed him to encourage the notion that a club could be a bank. My levels of expenditure effortlessly outsoared my levels of income. Even the train journey to Oxford cost money. When Françoise moved to Cambridge in order to become a don at New Hall, domesticity loomed, with all its requirements of financial equilibrium. Also there was the challenge of performing away from the home patch, where the audience would not be so indulgent.
I was right about that. At Goldsmith’s College Ball in London, John Cleese, by then an ex-Cambridge professional and already well known, was the first act on. His monologue was brilliant. The huge audience, pissed and impatient to dance, barely heard him out. I watched one purple-faced student at the back of the crowd shout ‘Harold Wilson!’ over and over while Cleese was performing. Cleese was pretending to be a wartime air force officer in a hurry to recruit new pilots. ‘Can anyone fly a B-17? [Pause] All right, can anyone fly a B-16? [Longer pause] A B-3? [Very long pause] Can anyone drive?’I was wide-eyed at the perfection of his delivery, and at his courage, because during all the time he was at work, this florid dick-head at the back was shouting out, ‘Harold Wilson! Harold Wilson!’ Then a newly-formed band weirdly known as Cream came on to play a set. I had never heard such a noise. Until then, my idea of an electric band had been the Dave Clark Five. Cream were more like an earthquake. Loudspeakers the size of coffins emitted sound that compressed the air. It was a beat that hurt. Buffery and Atkin and I, our throats dry from the impact of the tumult, retreated to our dressing room to consult. Our dressing room was, literally, a toilet. ‘We can’t go on,’ I shouted thinly. ‘We have to,’ croaked Buffery. He was right, as usual. When we were announced, the hissing was not universal: it came only from those who had heard the announcement. Luckily the ginger groups in the audience found it easier to attack each other than us. High up on the stage, we were hard to reach except with bottles more accurately thrown than the vast majority of those that flew towards us. Buffery’s song about Richard III made a few nice girls laugh. Riding on the shoulders of their partners, they were within earshot. Our Olympics number, however, went for nothing. Working on a bare stage, Buffery had no wings to disappear into and reappear from, while I found it impossible to raise my voice above the growing brouhaha, in which the only words that could be heard clearly were the first and last names of the Prime Minister, piercingly repeated like a horn motif in a Mahler symphony. We managed to make our act look meant, though. An objective observer would have found it impossible to tell if we were failing. Perhaps we were succeeding at some mimed ritual.
The Footlights cabaret team was well rehearsed and usually got away with it. Often we did better than that. Natty in our dinner jackets, we felt pretty pleased with ourselves as we sang a planned encore after slaying them for a solid thirty minutes. Audiences who had once been undergraduates themselves liked us best. There could be an awkward amount of chippy social edge if they thought we needed reminding of our advantages in life. Facing some revelling groups, we wondered why we had been booked. Apart from the Goldsmith’s inaudible non-event, which could largely be put down to bad acoustics, we had but one unarguable disaster, explicable only in terms of a mistake on somebody’s part. Coming
after a string of successes, it was a failure on a scale that builds character, but while the fiasco was in progress we would have given a lot for a hole to open in the floor so that we could have disappeared into it, still waving and singing. The audience was composed of the farmers of Needham Market, a town within easy driving distance of Cambridge. We imagined the kind of prosperous farmers who drove Aston Martins and in January took their elegant wives to ski at Davos. When we came dancing into the dining room, the farmers were all sitting there as if a giftless artist had drawn them. They didn’t have the word ‘Farmer* written on their hats, but there was something on their shoes that looked like loam. Perhaps loam was what they had been eating. They looked glum and we did nothing to cheer them up. Buffery and I did our Olympics number to less reaction than we would have earned by slowly deflating a large rubber raft. The farmers looked resigned, as if waiting for the death of a sick cow which had never been very valuable when well. It wasn’t just that they didn’t laugh. They didn’t smile. They hardly breathed. A carefully planned half-hour of entertainment was all over in seventeen minutes. When we went dancing off, there was a perceptible difference in the quality of the silence. Throats were being cleared in relief. As we stood white-faced outside in the foyer discussing the details of our escape, a representative of the farmers’ committee joined us. ‘Do you get paid for this sort of thing?’ he asked with open scorn. ‘We certainly do,’ said Buffery. ‘The agreed fee. And we might as well take it in cash, if you can arrange it.’ I was very impressed with that. It was a good lesson all round. Jokes aren’t necessarily pearls just because they fall before swine, but a deal’s a deal. A performer always feels guilty when he fails. If his guilt overcomes his business sense he will quickly starve. To flop is already penalty enough. Don’t punish yourself. The audience will do it for you.
17. WITH A HUMAN FACE
Winter wore on and the very idea of my PhD thesis slipped further back into the past. Spring was in the air again but my heart was heavy with undeclared anguish. Fooled by an early mild spell, the crocuses came up along the barbered edges of the backs, were duly filled with snow, survived for a few hours like candy baskets of sorbet, and so died. Reality had intruded. A similar crisis was being played out in my soul. My nagging conscience was partly stilled by Stakhanovite devotion to whatever work I was doing instead of the work I was being given a grant for. Everything the New Statesman asked me to do, I did, even if it was beyond me. In Prague, Dubcek’s life was on the line. Now was the time to come to the aid of Socialism with a Human Face. Socialism with an inhuman face had already impressed me as the salient moral fact of the twentieth century, a disaster outstripping even Nazism, which has at least worn its true colours on its sleeve. Weighed down by the evidence of history, my erstwhile radicalism had modulated into a version of social democracy which, while still hospitable to the idea of universal popular enfranchisement, was concerned about the milk being delivered on time to the doorstep. In short, I was no longer a revolutionary. No doubt the Zeitgeist would have been relieved to hear this news. I did my best to let it know. Nicholas Tomalin sent me books to review that were hard to make relevant to the temper of the times. I developed a technique for turning any subject into an occasion for an anti-totalitarian essay. I tried to write as if George Orwell were looking over my shoulder. When Eric Bentley’s excellent short biography of George Bernard Shaw was reissued, I identified, surely correctly, Shaw’s failure of imagination with regard to Stalin as clear evidence that the creative mentality should guard itself against its own inevitable pretensions to omniscience, Less correctly, and ignoring my own homily, I signed off by lamenting that Bentley, presumably through ignorance, had paid so little attention to Shaw’s music criticism – a body of work with which, I made it plain, I was intimately familiar. When the piece
appeared in the magazine it struck as having the effortless auctoritas of holy writ. This mood was punctured when the New Statesman forwarded me another book by Eric Bentley, sent, not for review but for my information, by Bentley himself. It was a reprint of Shaw on Music, edited, with a long introduction, by Eric Bentley. He could have humiliated me much more thoroughly by writing a letter of protest to the magazine. Thankful that he had taken such a generous course, I resolved never to fudge again. The intellectual community is self-policing. Nobody who tries to pull a fast one will get away with it for long. Also the memory plays such cruel tricks that you will make enough embarrassing mistakes just writing about what you are sure of.
Shamed into flight by the unremitting uproar of Romaine Rand’s supercharged typewriter, I had left the Friar’s House and gone into exile in digs across the river. My new nest was a front room with a bow window on Alpha Road. The light bulb had a shade. There were shelves for some of my books.I was half way to respectability already. New Hall was only a few hundred yards up the hill. Françoise lived there in a set of rooms whose austere white walls and plain wooden appointments did not preclude an air of luxury verging on decadence. There was so much shelving that even after all her books had been installed there was room for the rest of mine. I also installed my ashtray: a hubcap off a Bedford van, it could hold the stubs of eighty cigarettes, so I only had to empty it once a day. Life was beginning to seem settled, apart from the nagging disjunction between my nominal role and my actual practice. Even the saintly Professor Hough was showing disturbing signs of having at last remembered that I was supposed to be writing a thesis. I promised to show him the finished article soon. It was easier than telling him I hadn’t started. The only finished articles I was turning out were for the Cambridge Review and the New Statesman. Then The Times Literary Supplement – in the person of its assistant literary editor, Ian Hamilton – asked me to review some poetry books. Contributions to the TLS were still anonymous in those days. This policy didn’t suit my lust for glory but it had the merit of not tipping off the dons that my whole attention had turned towards London. It would have been a false conclusion anyway. The university remained, in my mind and feelings, the one place where I could be everything I wanted to be all at once. To a certain extent I feel that even today. Certain kinds of people belong only in universities. Later on they make more or less, usually less, successful attempts to convert the rest of their lives into yet another university. Although nowadays I have to get up early in the morning, on the whole I have been lucky enough to arrange my working life along university lines. Mentally I am still in statu pupillari, still pursuing extracurricular activities, still torn between all the attractions of the stalls at the Societies’ Fair.
The difference is that nowadays I am not so worried about living out an anomaly: let the public judge. In the spring of 1968 I was less confident, and, being that, more strident. If Cambridge thought of itself as the centre of the world, I was determined to take it at its own estimation. With the universities in turmoil throughout the free world, the Cambridge undergraduates regarded their own activities as being of planetary importance. Apart from Delmer Dynamo, who was engaged in an extensive tour of Britain at the wheel of the Bentley which he had at last coaxed out of the car-park, most of my Americans were gone. It didn’t need the debacle of Tet to tell them that the war in Vietnam was a national catastrophe. They had a real moral decision to make. Some of them went into the Peace Corps to do good in Africa, some into the American universities to avoid the draft, some into battle against Mayor Daley’s police, some into a long, cold exile. As fast as they left Cambridge, however, more Americans arrived: a new, more vocal bunch who preached direct action. Rome university closed in March. Danny Cohn-Bendit became famous at Nanterre. The new Cambridge Americans wanted to be noticed too. King’s College, with a typically canny diplomatic stroke, provided facilities for a Free University. Essentially the facilities were a large room with unlimited supplies of instant coffee, but they were sufficient to supply what the student revolution really wanted — the opportunity for a perpetual meeting. Elsewhere, the world shook. LBJ called it quits on a new term. Bobby Kennedy ran for President and died in the attempt. Martin Luther King was murdered. In the Free University at King’s, the rhetoric reached a pitch of ecstasy. A list of Demands was drawn up. A Demand for the complete restructuring of Western civilisation was high on the list. Imported simulacra of Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin called for an assault on the university’s property, whereupon, it was promised, the repressive nature of the institution would reveal itself. Called upon to speak by a chairman who was later universally upbraided for truckling to bourgeois elements, I argued against the notion of making demands that could not be met, and thereby provoking a confrontation. There were legitimate demands that could be met. The whole apparatus of in loco parentis,for example, could be dismantled, with no loss of jobs among the townspeople employed in the colleges and a clear gain in freedom for the undergraduates. This part of my address was listened to in a silence which I construed to be respectful, but when I got to the point of casting doubts on the efficacy, or even die feasibility, of direct action there were snorts of derision from the radical young academics standing at the back, which were soon accompanied by pitying smiles from the undergraduates sitting at the front. I argued against the proposed defacement of King’s College Chapel, on the grounds that it would dramatise nothing except propensities towards vandalism; that it would alienate the proletariat, who, if they didn’t care for great architecture, cared for militant undergraduates still less and that there were students in Prague ready to die for the freedoms which in Cambridge were being condemned as illusory.
I was more proud of this impromptu speech than the occasion warranted, because it changed nothing. Speeches rarely do. What changed things in Cambridge was the demonstration outside the Garden House Hotel, staged for a reason now lost in history. Either the hotel had been too hospitable to some representative of the US government, or it had not been hospitable enough to Rudi Dutschke, or perhaps both. Anyway, the students besieged the place. During the siege, a few of them picked up stones and threw them at the windows. All the rest suddenly realised that they liked the talking and shouting part of the revolution but didn’t like the part where things got broken and people got hurt. The student revolution in general, not just in Cambridge but in Britain as a whole, was over as from that moment. Effectively the same thing happened in Paris, where, although many more and much bigger stones were thrown, the rhythm of events was dictated by the clubs of the CRS, which descended with a precisely calculated force so as to induce headaches that felt like death but were not it. May of 1968 was theatre. I was glad to be in the cast, if only in a bit part, but like almost everyone else involved I had no intention of relying for long on the unrestrained instincts of my fellow man. The perpetual meeting of the Free University should have proved conclusively to all those in regular attendance that they didn’t even know how to conduct a meeting, let alone run a society. In Cambridge the real May, as always, was in June. Well before exam time, indeed well before the time for final revision, the Free University had dissolved, leaving nothing but a rump of misfits who had declared their intention of existing on a single bowl of rice a day so as to dramatise their solidarity with the great, continuing social experiment of the Chinese People’s Republic. China was their dreamland. Critical, with some justification, of institutionalised power in the democracies, they managed to believe, because they wanted to, that the centralised, perpetuated and unlimited power of a totalitarian nation was somehow more open to argument, more compassionate, more democratic. Impatient for the millennium but oddly prepared to remain stationary until it arrived, they sat on crossed legs and regaled each other with the prospect of what Cambridge would be like when Mao’s vision finally prevailed. Whether King’s supplied them with their daily bowl of rice I can’t be sure, because by then I had gone too, back to Footlights with a new faith in the validity of the purely f
rivolous. The impurely frivolous had been on display for a month, and I hadn’t liked its inhuman face. The undergraduates could be forgiven their ideals. Experience and knowledge are required before one can accept that an ideal can be murderous, and perhaps they should not come too early. The young dons who had urged the students on, however, were in a different case. Preaching cold-eyed against Repressive Tolerance, safe in their own jobs while urging their pupils to opt out, they were hypocrites and pleased about it: with the taste of cynicism in their tight-lipped mouths they reminded themselves of Lenin, a name they often invoked. Still working out where I stood, I knew where I didn’t stand – with men like them. Not just as a displacement activity, but in a kind of wordless affirmation, I directed, for the last Footlights smoker of the year, a sketch baldly entitled ‘Slow Motion Wrestling’. Russell Davies was the referee. Robert Buckman, who was very agile, and Alan Sizer, who was large and very strong, very slowly wrestled each other. Russell Davies very slowly tried to stop them cheating. The whole thing happened very slowly indeed. At one point Sizer very slowly punched Buckman in the stomach while equally slowly lifting him bodily into the air with his other hand. Buckman was airborne for an age, mouthing his agony with agonising slowness, while Davies moved like a glacier to intervene. The audience rioted. I felt cleansed. This was worthwhile. Sartre hailing the Chinese Cultural Revolution as an act of liberation: that was a waste of time.