The light head would prove to be my salvation in the long run, but I was foolish enough to be ashamed of it then. If I didn’t exactly fall over, I certainly bounced off the walls on the way to and from the can. Come to think of it, I did fall over, but not exactly. I fell in various directions. Once, on the last train to Cambridge, I slept all the way to King’s Lynn and had to come back in a cab, at a price that the payment for the latest piece would barely cover. My wife, who had been unaware that I had ambitions to recreate the leading role in The Lost Weekend, was not impressed. But the piece was safe in Hamilton’s pocket. Now suitably shaved, sponged free of its indignities, it would go into the TLS, where I would read it with satisfaction. Other people must have done so too, because the invitations kept on coming in. Charles Monteith, the revered senior editor at Faber and Faber, sent a written request that I should call by to see him. I had better sense than to think he was after my poetry, which I knew he had never seen, because a collection of it had been sitting for more than a year on the desk of an editor in a less illustrious house – one of those editors who are so enthusiastic about your manuscript that they will do everything they can to persuade the board of directors to take a chance on an unknown, and are reasonably certain that the green light will be given just as soon as there is an economic upturn on Wall Street and a general withdrawal of Soviet troops from Eastern Europe. (Such skills for procrastination should be cherished, because they have saved many a young poet from sending out to die a slim volume that was never fit to live.)
But I could scarcely hope that Monteith was after a whole book of prose. He was, however. Sweetly pretending not to be disconcerted by my appearance – I still suffered from the delusion that a satinized polyester tie looked good with a fake Viyella shirt – he suggested that I might consider taking a crack at writing a biography of Louis MacNeice, a Faber poet, not long dead, whose reputation was already cooling in the shadow of W. H. Auden’s. In one of my poetry reviews for the TLS I had invoked MacNeice’s precision of imagery while condemning some respectable windbag’s vagueness in the same department, and Monteith had been so taken with my choice of paragon that he foresaw a whole monograph fuelled by the same admiration. Foolishly, so did I, although I already knew that I was short of spare time, and that none could be made available at the price Monteith was suggesting. There were no big advances in those days, but the sum he proposed was more like a retreat. I would practically be paying him. The offer, however, was too flattering to resist. So I didn’t resist, and thus once again made a commitment that I couldn’t come through on without removing other commitments from my diary. The offence was made easier by the fact that I had no diary. For several years I had kept a journal and would go on keeping it for several more, but a journal dealt with the past. A pocket diary for noting future appointments had never been part of my equipment. I was still under the impression that I could trust my memory. How I had ever got that impression was a bit of a mystery, because there had been evidence since my schooldays that any fixture more than a few hours ahead would disappear from my mind, especially if it entailed an inconvenience. People with that characteristic should above all get out of the habit of saying ‘yes’ when asked to do things. Since I invariably said ‘yes’ in order not to disappoint, I was effectively mixing malleability and fecklessness – binary ingredients of a powerful explosive. Eventually I was to learn some measure of reliability, but only because the explosions accounted for so many innocent civilians. For the moment, however, the MacNeice biography joined the list of things I would do soon, once I had dealt with the things I must do that day, because they had been promised for yesterday.
Perhaps the idea that I might have a place in literary life had scrambled my brains. Scrambled them even further, one might say. Back there in Sydney I had loved my evenings in the King’s Cross coffee bars. One of them was called the Platypus Room, Another, Vadim’s, was named after its New Australian proprietor, a poet manqué. It should hardly need saying that he was no relation to the Vadim who, back in faraway Europe, would not long later seduce a long line of beautiful young actresses culminating in Jane Fonda. Our Vadim had shortened his name from something like Vadimskapolonskiewicz. Still working hard on his English, Vadim would strain valiantly through the hiss of his Gaggia espresso machine to eavesdrop on the conversation of the half-dozen literary journalists who counted as the city’s intelligentsia in those torpid days before the arts boom. But as the new boy I was sitting below the salt, and forced to do much more listening than talking. The London scene was on a grander scale, and although I was a new boy all over again, I could do all the talking that my tongue allowed before the beer and wine numbed it at the root. The Pillars of Hercules was the focal point, but there was a glittering periphery. At Nicholas Tomalin’s house in Gloucester Crescent, Camden Town, there were big guns to be seen. The area had already been colonized by some of the people who would make it as famous as the old Bloomsbury. Alan Bennett and Jonathan Miller were both in the area, working on the new careers that would take them beyond Beyond the Fringe. But the chief attraction was Nick himself. Unplaceable in the usual social order, he had limitless charm to go with the three qualities that he had notoriously said every journalist must have: a certain amount of literary ability, a plausible manner and rat-like cunning. His charm was the first quality you noticed. Well-connected and beautifully constructed young women fell for him, which made life all too interesting for his wife Claire, but obviously she adored him. It was impossible not to. Young men felt the same, partly because he was a good enough listener to make them feel that they might be almost as fascinating as he was. When you spoke, he had a way of looking sideways and downwards through his heavy black horn-rims that convinced you he was doing so only in order to favour his good ear, not wanting to miss a word. (In fact he had a bad neck, but typically he turned the affliction into a point of style.) What impressed me most was the way he had come to terms with what he saw as his lack of originality. If he couldn’t make things up, like a proper writer, he would find the best way of writing down what happened in front of him: corporate fraud, voyages by mad yachtsmen, wars. Actually, of course, this determination was deeply original in itself: he was in at the start of what would later be called the New Journalism. Headed by his famous piece about Vietnam – he had made the notes for it while looking sideways through the open doorway of an American gunship at vibrating miles of jungle stiff with armed men in black pyjamas – his collection of journalism still reads well today, and at the time he seemed to some of us the embodiment of a possibility: permanent work in an ephemeral medium.
Not that he didn’t enjoy the passing moment for itself. I made myself popular with him one summer evening when I got the time wrong and turned up an hour early for dinner, bearing a dubious gift of two bottles of cheap white wine. It wasn’t Piat d’Or, which hadn’t yet established itself as the would-be sophisticate’s cut-price bring-along. It was some variety of Liebfraumuck with a label full of gothic lettering. Nick saluted it gravely as if it were a prize-winning vintage that I had bankrupted myself buying, and actually smiled when I put both bottles in the garden fountain to cool. ‘In Australia,’ I explained, ‘we used to sink the stuff in the river and fish it out later. Sometimes we got more bottles out than we put in.’ He guessed immediately that there had been a party in the same spot previously. He loved the idea and told people the story later on as something typical of me, the boy from the bush who could quote Wittgenstein. He was creating a role for me, as he did for everyone. As roles go it wasn’t bad, and when I realized I was stuck with it anyway I tried to make the most of it. Not fitting a category: it was a category in itself. Nick, a dazzling example, was one of the first to see it as a social trend. The media meritocracy would be the next Establishment. Most of this I would figure out only gradually and much later, but I could tell straight away that Nick was something new. It meant a lot to me that he seemed to think the same of me. He nodded assent, instead of snorting, when I declared
that a literary career could and should draw sustenance from involvement in show business and popular music. My theory that any genre could be practised as if it were a field of poetry prompted some gratifyingly thoughtful puffs on one of his black cigarillos – from both of us, because I was helping myself to his supply. When we fished the first bottle of wine out of the fountain he even pretended to enjoy it as much as the champagne that Claire had been serving us previously, although at the first sniff of my stuff he must have known that it was battery acid. The man who broke the story on the European junk-wine scandal wasn’t going to be fooled by a label that looked like a page from Martin Luther’s Bible. But he didn’t even flinch.
Yes, the literary world should have been enough. But I had already noticed that it was full of casualties. Even the byline journalists tended to die poor after the salary was switched off, and among the poets it had never been switched on. There would have been good reason to think that a more abundant source of income might be worth seeking. Hitting four deadlines a week, I was earning scraps that added up to a pittance. Also I often had to stay up all night to hit them. When I tried doing that at home in Cambridge, the woman who had already realized she had married a maniac was kept awake by a typewriter yammering away like a rivet-gun. (It’s one of the ways that a writer’s life has most profoundly changed since computers came in: writing used to be noisy.) In Swiss Cottage the noise didn’t matter so much: I was just somebody having one essay crisis after another. But I could tell by the way the boys brought me the occasional cup of instant coffee that I must have looked like someone on the road to ruin. It was instinct, however, and not reason, that led me to keep the theatre thing going. Like a broken love affair, it was begging to be fixed. Eventually, I was convinced, the songs I was still writing with Pete Atkin – in his own small room off the next landing, he was bent over his guitar as he set my latest lyrics about death and destruction – would make us both big money. Meanwhile, the current Footlights bunch, still at university, asked me to direct their Edinburgh Fringe revue on a professional basis.
I did the job with passable results, but there was a bigger job on the near horizon. Still the dominant powers on the Fringe, Oxford and Cambridge teamed up to mount a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream to tour the American colleges. The play was to be directed by a professional, Richard Cottrell, who was excellently qualified: his production of Richard II had been a huge hit at the official Edinburgh Festival and later in the West End, with the young Ian McKellen making himself famous in the leading role. I had seen McKellen’s performance in Edinburgh and been suitably stunned by how his Olivier-like athleticism was compounded with the ability to float a line like Gielgud. I had seen both Gielgud and Olivier on stage earlier in the decade, but they were in separate plays. McKellen was both of them, made young again and sharing the same body. Cottrell had provided McKellen with a set in which the furiously posturing boy monarch could descend from the upper levels in a series of leaps to appear suddenly on the forestage like Spiderman arriving in a gay nightclub. The future knight was still years away from outing himself but his performance left little room for doubt, just as the production left nothing to be desired for its verve and grace. If all theatre had been like that I would have spent much less time at the movies. The Oxbridge bunch were lucky to have Cottrell aboard, because in normal circumstances a director of his calibre is wasting his time marshalling the limited abilities of amateur players: it’s like hiring Michael Schumacher to drive a minicab. But Cottrell, still manfully scraping the money together for his Prospect Theatre Company, agreed to take the Shakespeare job on. Since the Oxbridge bunch also wanted an accompanying revue as part of the tour package, however, he specified that he would direct that only if he could be provided with an assistant director, script doctor and dogsbody – someone steeped in the revue business, about which, he was honest enough to say, he knew little and cared less. Headed by my old friend Jonathan James-Moore, the Oxbridge people approached me. I wasn’t hard to find. The whole deal was going to be rehearsed in the Footlights clubroom in Cambridge and I just happened to be standing outside in Petty Cury with my hands in my pockets, whistling. The fee was more than I could earn by reviewing ten different hopeless books so I said yes, reflecting that if I reviewed the books anyway, I would double my money.
Scarcely an hour of rehearsal had elapsed before I realized I should have said no. Though Cottrell was large-hearted in saying that humour was not his forte, he was also definite about having the last word. There was a power struggle right from the jump, which I was bound to lose. I didn’t much like his ideas, he positively hated mine, and the helpless cast were caught in the middle. For them, what should have been a joyous conjunction of two separate undergraduate revue traditions turned into the most miserable time of their young lives. Most of them were also in the Dream production and the difference must have been startling. Cottrell did a dazzling job with the play. In an opalized Athenian forest designed by Hugh Durrant, he deployed the student actors almost as if they could act. The cruel truth about university actors is that although they often go far, they rarely do so as actors, mainly because even the most gifted of them have chewed up essential years that they should have spent at RADA learning to speak, move, and fence, or even at Raymond’s Revue Bar learning to stand in a spotlight as if they belonged there. Apart from Julie Covington, who made an enchanting Peasblossom, only a few of the Dream cast went any distance in the professional theatre later on. Some showed up on the small screen, but as presenters and newsreaders rather than actors. (An exception was Mark Wing-Davey, who eventually grew an extra head to play Zaphod Beeblebrox in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.) Michael Wood, now one of the most prominent historians on television, deployed a fine leg as Oberon but would spend his future in tight jeans, not loose tights. Others became bank managers and academics. But they all had bliss to look back on. In that pixillated forest, they had been touched with a magic wand.
When they came back to the Footlights clubroom to rehearse the revue, the contrast was brutal. At the end of the rehearsal period, the revue was ready to go on in the Arts Theatre, and it even held the stage, but the critic for Varsity was not the only member of the audience to note that the cast looked as if they had all spent the previous week beside the death-bed of a loved one. Three nights into the run, after three days of re-rehearsing some of the sketches in the attempt to make them funnier than a mock execution, I spat the dummy. One of my last memories of the resulting shambles was of James-Moore, called Jo-Jo for short, throwing up in the washbasin of his dressing room. Many years later he was a power in the land, in charge of comedy at BBC radio, but I bet he didn’t forget how his own lunch looked when it was staring back at him. It took me almost as long to get a realistic perspective on what I had helped to let them all in for. Too much of it had been my fault, a truth that I wasn’t then equipped to consider. When it mattered, I had spent too much time taking umbrage and not enough taking pains. I should have settled for my subordinate position, done what was required, and, above all, put the welfare of the troops first. But I threw a tantrum instead, right there in the Green Room of the Arts Theatre, the gift of John Maynard Keynes to civilization. I foamed at the mouth and smashed my fist into a mirror. It was the right target, I now realize, because the true culprit was on the other side of it. The fact of the matter was that I was nowhere near as good at dreaming up sketch material for an ensemble as I had thought. My only reliable ability was to dream up material for myself. The tantrum was an excellent example. Bugsy Siegel would have recognized a gifted imitator, especially when I climaxed the routine by threatening to kill Cottrell. Luckily he was elsewhere at the time, but when he heard about it he put his foot down. Either I was removed from the picture or else the American expedition would not include him. Since the production of the Dream was what really mattered, Jo-Jo and his colleagues had no choice. Effectively, I had already fired myself, by converting my tantrum into a nervous breakdown.
 
; I owe my wife the courtesy of leaving her as a background figure in this book, along with my daughters, who would combine to lynch me if I went into detail about their virtues. All three women in my immediate family are united in the belief that private life and publicity are incompatible, and I agree with them. One of the dire consequences of the celebrity culture is that this belief has come to seem perverse. So much for the celebrity culture. But I can say this much: over the next two weeks, my wife got into training for her first baby. I went to bed and stayed there, like Stalin when he got the news that the German army had invaded his country after all, despite his express instructions that it should not. The shock of reality had reduced me to immobility. I sent long groans towards the ceiling while doing nothing except grow a beard. I groaned louder at the effort of turning my pillow to the dry side. I could just about make it to the bathroom on my own. Otherwise I didn’t go anywhere, even to the kitchen, where the refrigerator lived which in normal circumstances I could never pass without stopping to look in. But I was indifferent to what I put in my mouth. As long as it was a cigarette, it would do. As soon as I could raise myself on one elbow, I got busy starting small fires in the bedding. For a while I couldn’t even read a book: the first time since World War II that I had been unable to do so. The Guardian took me all day and the Observer took me all Sunday. Finally, from one of these papers, I noticed that there was a four-volume collection of George Orwell’s journalism due to come out. I must have grunted at the right moment, because the complete set was brought to me as a gift, ready-wrapped in its jackets of deep Socialist red.