From the first page of the first volume, I was on the road to recovery. Many years and a much bigger bank balance later, at just the moment when she felt the walls of the house were closing in, I bought my wife a 3 Series BMW, and suddenly she was out and about like Emma Peel in The Avengers. It was only a partial return for the perfect timing of that Orwell set. Most of the essays I knew by heart already, but here they were in the weekly context of his indefatigable toil. Here was the proof that it took effort to write plain prose but, if you could do so, the results might have the effect of poetry. A simple-seeming sentence could have a cadence to remember. There was also the matter of Orwell’s political sagacity. He could be batty on the side issues but on the big issue he was right. It was the main reason he remained relevant, because those who had been wrong had spread a pervasive influence, and some of them remained in business even in old age. While sticking his head above the parapet in the Spanish Civil War, Orwell had said that it wasn’t enough to be against the Nazis, you had to be anti-totalitarian, which meant being against the Communists as well. The latter part of this message continued, after more than thirty years, to be a pill hard to swallow for thinkers on the Left. Even if they were ready to accept that Stalin had been conducting a massacre of the innocents, they still wanted to believe that there might be a vegetarian version of absolute state control. Orwell’s central belief was thus enduringly unpopular even among those who shared his detestation of capitalism.
No fan of capitalism myself – there had to be something easier than working for a living – I had nevertheless been raised in a house where that central belief of his didn’t need to be stated, so when I read him at length it was like a long verification of what I had always felt. My mother and father, both of them prime examples of the suffering proletariat in the 1930s, would have left me a Communist heritage if they had thought that there was anything to it. My father’s copy of Bellamy’s anti-capitalist classic Looking Backward was in the hall cupboard waiting for him while I was growing up. He never came home to read it again, but its presence was a reminder of his championship of workers’ rights. Yet my mother assured me that he would have detested the idea of giving the state unbridled power over the individual. Like my father, she had met the Communists before the war when she was working on the production lines, and remembered their tone of voice. But when Prime Minister Menzies staged a referendum to outlaw the Australian Communist Party in 1952, my mother, during a single dinner of beef, potatoes and cabbage, gave me a political education that has lasted me a lifetime. She told me how she had voted in the referendum earlier that day. She had voted against Ming’s move to outlaw the Commos. (In Australia, Menzies was Ming and the Communists were the Commos for linguistic reasons we won’t go into here.) She thought the state should not be given so much power to repress opinion, even if the opinion was wrong. That, she said, was the principle my father had fought and died for, and the only reason why his death had meaning.
Still in short pants at the time, I struggled to comprehend, but I was so fascinated that I ate the cabbage. Since the right not to eat cabbage was one of my own most jealously guarded political tenets, this was a large concession, and a tribute to my mother’s quiet passion. At the time she spoke, George Orwell had only recently published Nineteen Eighty-Four, so my mother was up there with him at the heroic forefront of intellectual adventure. I remembered that moment as I lay there in my smouldering bed, at last telling myself to get up, get out and get going. Above all, the collection was a persuasive demonstration that periodical journalism could be built to last. Much of it had been written for publications of restricted, or no, circulation. I resolved to despise no outlet that would print my work. I also resolved that the theatre thing could still be fixed, if I could just avoid my previous mistakes. With these two resolutions – the first questionable, the second suicidal – firmly in mind, I cast the charred coverlet aside and went back to work. If my wife could go on functioning as a conscientious don while nursing her mental wreck of a husband, the least I could do was persevere. One thing I can tell myself, from this distance, is that I was always pretty good at getting busy again after a catastrophe. I was just bad at realizing that being too busy had got me into the catastrophe in the first place. Hamlet had said it to the corpse of Polonius: ‘You find that to be too busy is some danger.’ But Polonius wasn’t listening, and it turned out that Hamlet wasn’t either.
The idea that periodical journalism could be built to last was never likely to apply to Oz magazine, but I deluded myself into believing that it could. A new wave of hungry young Australians had hit London, having the immediate effect of making the young Australians who were already there feel that they were getting old. Perhaps that was what drove me to say yes when they asked me to contribute to Oz. Richard Neville, the editor, was dedicated to the belief that Play Power could transform politics. I never believed that – I had enough trouble believing in his hairstyle, which he had apparently copied from Bette Davis in All About Eve – but I did think that this new emphasis on youth, music, soft drugs and less uptight sex might have an ameliorating effect. My stance, however, was to contend that all thoughts of actual revolution were the kind of nonsense that could be excused only through ignorance. I soon found that Neville and his confrères had plenty of ignorance to excuse themselves with. They seemed to have read nothing but Naked Lunch. But my counter-revolutionary polemics were printed anyway. Usually they were printed in white type on pink paper with an oil-slick overlay, so that there was no danger of the stoned readership actually reading them. Germaine Greer’s contributions, by contrast, were printed clearly, often accompanied by startling photographs of their author. One photograph showed her with her legs behind her neck: an advanced position even for a swami. In a previous volume of this memoir I gave Germaine the name Romaine Rand, on the principle that if I was going to attribute foul language to her it would be ungentlemanly to use her real name. In the context of Oz, however, it would be ungentlemanly not to, because by that time her habitual and madly entertaining subversion of linguistic decorum stood fully revealed as a big component in a political attitude that was transforming the speech of the country. I admired her boldness, and still do. Though she sometimes seemed to harbour the impression that ordinary young women could liberate themselves if they became groupies for the sort of American rock band that looked like a pack of rapists in search of a fresh victim, she was undoubtedly striking a blow for freedom from stifling conventions. Her weak point, obvious to everyone but her, lay in her generous confidence that women, if they could be released from bondage, would all prove to be as creative as she was. Girls, you don’t have to spend all that time wiping the poop off the back end of your child. Hand it to your grandmother while you write a symphony.
My own view, that the shattered conventions might one day become objects of nostalgia, sounded pretty stifling even to me. Luckily nobody could decipher what I said. There was quite a lot of it, and later on I was careful to reprint none of it. Long before the Oz trial at the Old Bailey I had tacitly opted out of the Youth Culture: my hair, as it were, didn’t make the cut. Even when accompanied by the soft music and pastel swirling smoke of psychedelia, propaganda for a consensus of individual rebellion had no appeal to me as a genre, and it was clear that protesting against rebellion in a rebel publication made no sense at all. When Richard Neville and Felix Dennis appeared in court, it became obvious that this was a mere prelude to their appearance on television. In other words, the trial was a stage: a stage on the road to institutionalized protest, although nobody at the time could guess that Dennis would one day be a publishing tycoon on the scale of Robert Maxwell and Conrad Black, if a bit more careful with the petty cash. The judge, confidently mistaken as English judges so often are, informed the court that Dennis was clearly of low intelligence. The judge lived long enough to find out that he had been wrong by many millions of pounds, but it was never a case of two worlds colliding. It was the one world, hiccuping on a breath of fres
h air. The fresh air turned stale later on, as it was bound to do. Social changes get nowhere if they are not needed, and when they succeed they soon cease to be news. Not having been really a part of it, I was easily out of it, with no regrets except that I no longer had an excuse to gaze at the angelic face of a young woman who rejoiced in the name of Caroline Coon. She was billed as the scene’s expert on drugs. I suppose she knew a lot about them for the usual reason – that she had taken a lot of them – but although I had no idea of what she was talking about I loved watching her delicately sculpted mouth when she spoke. No expert about clothing at that stage (certainly I was no expert about my own) I could nevertheless not help noticing that her revolutionary outfits were composed of cashmere, suede and silk, all hanging on the lissom figure of a debutante by Boldini. She was draped across two-page spreads in the colour supplements and the glossies almost as often as Germaine herself. Here was a revolution for men to die for, but strictly in the spiritual sense.
Orwell had said that you could see what was wrong with radical movements by the kind of women they attracted. By that test, the Youth Culture had a lot right with it. There was a great deal of glamour about. One of the spin-offs of Oz was an Alternative Newspaper called Ink. If anything, it had even less editorial judgement than Oz – the itinerant Australian journalist Leon Selkirk even managed to sell it his standard scoop about the missing uranium, a story that he had been carrying around for years – but the office was full of Biba-clad lovelies from the shires wondering what keys to press down on the electric typewriters, which like all the other equipment had been bought instead of hired, thus guaranteeing almost immediate insolvency. None of the girls was more beautiful than the paper’s cultural editor Sonny Mehta, whom I had known at Cambridge. (In May Week Was in June he appeared as Buddy Rajgupta, so that I might cover myself against the potentially libellous implication that he had done no academic work at all.) Though Sonny was much more focused as a newspaper executive than he had been as a student, the newspaper was doomed from its inception. But I enjoyed his company as always, and later on the connection was to pay off in a big way, as I shall relate.
At the time, my whole activity as a writer for the Alternative Press added up to a no-no. Lest I doubt the fact, Karl Miller of the Listener pointed it out firmly, although ‘no-no’ was not the kind of word he would have used, either then or later. A classically educated Scot, a rebel angel from Dr Leavis’s dour Empyrean who gave the impression that he had found its irascible ruler insufficiently serious, Miller had no time for the light-minded. The Listener was still the printed voice of the BBC as Lord Reith had once conceived it, and Karl Miller was universally acknowledged as a worthy successor to the paper’s founding editor, J. R. Ackerley. Miller had all of Ackerley’s discerning attributes and none of the frailties. Miller, you could be sure, would never have a love affair with an Alsatian dog. (Ackerley did, and recorded his emotional commitment in a book whose sex passages take some swallowing even today.) Such was Miller’s reputation that to be invited to write for the Listener was a sure mark that one had arrived at the point where Grub Street’s reeking gutters turned to polished marble. I entered his office at Langham Place with roughly the feelings I had once had when asked to call on the Deputy Headmaster of Sydney Technical High School. Miller had a similar reputation for severity, although it was fairly certain that he did not keep a cane. But at our first meeting he throttled back on the withering impatience and confined himself to the laconically sarcastic. He made it clear that my involvement in the Alternative Press was a waste of what in a less barbaric context might almost be mistaken for a certain effectiveness in English prose. According to him, there was no such thing as an Alternative Press, there was only the press, which was either responsible or frivolous; just as there was no such thing as Experimental Writing, there was only writing, which was either competent or worthless. Some of what I had done for the New Statesman and the TLS, he told me, could have been regarded as competent if I had curbed my exuberance. He had already printed a radio script that I had written and delivered for Philip French, BBC radio’s omniscient arts editor. (The Listener was contractually obliged to reprint a quota of radio scripts, an obligation which sometimes weighed heavily on Miller, but he carried out the duty faithfully, quietly subtracting the solecisms from some eminent professor’s would-be mandarin diction.) My script, however, he informed me, had been marred by deficiencies of coherence, which he had felt bound to expunge. I could have said that there had been plenty of other deficiencies of coherence that Philip French had expunged first, but for once I had the sense to shut up and take the compliment. Proof that it had actually been a compliment, even if expressed like a rebuke from Captain Bligh, was provided by what happened next. Miller asked me to try my hand at writing a critical column about radio once every four weeks. There were three other radio critics, he explained, who each also wrote a column every four weeks, the collective thus furnishing the paper with a column every week. While he searched my face for signs that I might not have grasped the mathematics, he further explained that the work had to be taken seriously: I must listen to all the important programmes, analyse their qualities, point out their shortcomings, and provide a concise summary with no deficiencies of coherence. It was easy to assume that the critic I was replacing had died under the strain.
Philip French had a gentler nature but he was just as punishing on the facts and details, partly because he already knew more about everything than all his contributors put together. Both men were models of conscientiousness, and I could have learned even more from them had I been as good as they were at concentrating on one task at a time. As it happened, I added their deadlines to all my other deadlines, in the belief, sadly correct, that a freelance writer could accumulate his piece-rate fees into a living wage only by working until the night sky paled. My typewriter squeaked as it ran out of oil, its ribbons frayed as they ran out of ink. In order to make marks through a dry ribbon I hit the keys extra hard, thus gradually turning the platen into a cylindrical Rosetta Stone. (How many people are left who know what a platen was? And where did all the typewriters go? In what vast quarry do their rusting frames coagulate?) In those days you needed carbon paper to keep a copy and I can remember choking back a sob when I discovered that I had put the carbon paper in backwards. (In childhood, I had sobbed the same way when I spilled flavoured milk into my box of crayons. In the course of time we cry for different things, but we always cry the same way.) As the plaintive note of these parentheses suggests, there was thus some reason for dreaming of a big score that might get me into another financial league, and so buy me some time to finish that book on Louis MacNeice, or anyway start it.
The big score didn’t have to be in the theatre. It could be in the movies. Part of the Oxford and Cambridge Theatre Company disaster had included a proposed film of the revue, to be supervised by me because Richard Cottrell, after taking one look at its proposed financial backers, sensibly didn’t want to know. The backers, or at any rate the people who said they could get the backing, were a bunch of grandees from the Lord’s Taverners, one of those charitable outfits that do good things for the deprived. Along with a sprinkling of dedicated and efficient philanthropists, such organizations are invariably haunted by a shambling squad of superannuated burghers in continual search of some pointless event that they can have meetings about. It was just such a bunch of blazer-wearing drones who had put themselves in charge of immortalizing our revue on celluloid, thus to benefit their charity from the inevitable worldwide sales. Normally they would have had no means of advancing such a project beyond the stage of getting all of You Young People (that was us) packed together in the Arts Theatre boardroom so that we could admire their Hush Puppies and silk cravats while they told us how diverting Prince Philip had been at their last annual lunch. But they had an ace in the hole: one of their new members was Jack Cardiff, the veteran cinematographer who had been responsible for the look of Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes. Perhaps in
the hope of meeting Prince Philip at next year’s lunch, Cardiff had come over from Switzerland to make the film. Success was therefore assured.
3. ENTER THE MASTER SWORDSMAN
What happened next is quickly told: almost nothing. After half a century of dealing with maniacs in the film industry, Cardiff soon spotted that his fellow Lord’s Taverners had no idea of what they were doing. A stocky, self-contained figure in his suede car-coat and leather hat, he was not one for any signs of disgust beyond a wry smile and a raised eyebrow, but only the men who had got him into this balls-up could have believed that he was pleased. The camera they had hired for him had last been used by Alfred Hitchcock before he left England in the early 1930s. It took three men to lift it. Nobody had realized that extra lighting would be necessary to film the show inside the Arts Theatre. The Lord’s Taverner who went off to hire some lights never returned. The only revue number we got on film was an exterior action sequence. Our jocund young company ran spontaneously along the riverbank above the Mill while a couple of us fell spontaneously out of a punt. Off to one side, a thin crowd of townspeople spontaneously yelled abuse. We would have been better off capturing the abuse, but the camera needed a locomotive to turn it around. Despite the manifest hopelessness of all this, Cardiff was sufficiently impressed with my verbal skills to suggest that I might help him with a screenplay he had in mind. His long career as a cinematographer, for which he had won two Oscars and countless other awards, had eventually earned him the chance to become a director. His first film as a director, Sons and Lovers, had done well: the script had already been prepared before he was brought on board, but he was justly praised for the thoughtful handling of actors in a lustrous black and white ambience. More recently, however, and from a script developed by his own hand, he had directed Girl on a Motorcycle, which had been a critical disaster. With a big heart to go with his experienced head, Cardiff was slow to blame the young Marian Faithfull’s difficulties in staying on the motorcycle, although the filming had taken place during a phase of her life when she was having difficulties staying on a chair. The phrase he used was ‘script problems’. Eager to avoid script problems on his next project, he thought I might be just the man he needed.