I had ditched the beard by then, with some regret because it was the best of my beards to date, less like the old salt on the Player’s Navy Cut cigarette packet and more like Dinwiddie, master swordsman of the Elizabethan age. The beard had been a sign of my unwillingness to compromise, and its disappearance was a sign of how my unwillingness could be overcome by the prospect of getting more of my face on screen. The space left by the beard’s removal also left room for the knot of my tie to show: a relatively plain tie this time, although there was nothing plain about the shirt, which I remember as some sort of Liberty print on brushed nylon, fresh out of Carnaby Street after falling off a van from Yugoslavia. ‘It’s only a pilot,’ muttered Paul Knight, but he and the studio director had bigger problems with me than that. Davies took easily to the teleprompter as he took easily to everything – he could play most musical instruments as soon as he picked them up and could probably have flown a plane after a few minutes to study the controls – but I had trouble grasping the simple principle that the teleprompter would scroll its message at the same speed as I spoke. I was under the impression that I had to speak as fast as the teleprompter was going. Since reading a text aloud at high speed had always been one of my party tricks, I read faster and faster, unable to believe that the teleprompter was following me, not I it. In those days the teleprompter, not yet called an autocue, stood separately to one side of the camera, so the effect I made on screen was of a man talking rapidly sideways to an invisible window cleaner. But Stella liked the pilot even though some of her fellow executives didn’t (one of them threatened to resign) and she scheduled two days in studio to shoot a set of six.
The scheduled shooting days were only a few weeks ahead, so we had to write like a pair of convicts petitioning against an imminent death sentence. By night we wrote in pubs, in Wimpy bars, at the Angus Steak House. By day we were in our corner of the open-plan office, somehow finding room for our elbows among the coffee cups, sandwich crusts, and foully heaped ashtrays. Off to one side, behind a glass partition, sat Paul Knight, shaking his head over our scripts. Beautiful young secretaries queued up to take him coffee. None of them came near us: we had to make our own. I can still remember one of our script segments as being not half bad. It was about Michael Frayn, who had not yet begun his second career as a playwright. But as a columnist and novelist he was an inspiration to both of us. Frayn’s ‘Miscellany’ column in the Guardian had been one of the things that made my life seem worth living even during my first winter in England. The thought that I might never have to be so poor and cold again no doubt gave my share of the script wings. I wrote the exposition while Davies, armed with a copy each of Frayn’s paperback collections The Day of the Dog, The Book of Fub and At Bay in Gear Street, worked on the voicing of the extracts. His powers of mimicry were our best weapon, and the whole office would stop when he tried the voices out. My job was to provide the framework for his virtuosity.
Rehearsed in the studio, the result gave at least a hint of how that kind of arts presentation could look and sound: rich in content and unforced in vocal style, even if one of the voices, mine, belonged to a Benzedrine addict being held at gunpoint. The rehearsal came in useful for staving off at least one incipient blunder on my part. Paul Knight emerged from the control gallery to gently disabuse me of the idea that I should reinforce my vocal points with physical gestures. I had made the classic mistake of assuming that the illustrative use of the hands might be useful on television merely because it was so useless on radio. The assumption is natural but exactly wrong: rather than raise the hands into shot, it is less distracting to sit on them. Rehearsals were so prolonged that fatigue set in, which proved beneficial for me, because I slowed down and even managed the occasional pause in my tirade. A pause on radio sounds as if the world has come to an end, but on television it looks like thought. I had learned something. When we went for the tape I looked less like a man about to be shot and more like a man who had been shot already. You could call it relaxation, of a kind. Because the programmes were wiped as soon as screened – it was still quite rare to keep a tape after transmission – I can safely say they weren’t bad. They went to air in a graveyard slot where they were immune from criticism, because nobody was watching except Joan Bakewell.
The song show was to be called The Party’s Moving On. Pete and Julie were already hard at work rehearsing for it. Though required to be in attendance to help supervise the format, I had much less scripting to do, which was lucky, because the Observer had sent me a book to review. In those days the Observer was the most important Sunday paper by a long mile. Edited as a family fiefdom by David Astor, it had arts pages that left those of any rival paper for dead. Not even the Sunday Times came close. The Observer’s arts editor was Terence Kilmartin. During the war, Kilmartin had saved Astor’s life somewhere behind enemy lines. Doing a favour in return, Astor gave Kilmartin a free hand to run the arts pages as a kind of university campus. The roster of the faculty was dazzling. Although Kenneth Tynan was no longer reviewing regularly, he was still writing features. Penelope Gilliatt was the latest film critic in a line that went back to C. E. Lejeune. Katharine Whitehorn, author of Cooking in a Bedsitter, was a style-setter for woman journalists writing about all the practical matters of everyday life that had never previously got a mention. Edward Crankshaw, author of one of the best books about old Vienna, wrote on politics. John Weightman wrote so authoritatively about French literature that the French government gave him a decoration for his buttonhole. Even the man who wrote the round-up review of crime novels, John Coleman, was a recognized wit. John Silverlight, one of the section editors, was an outstanding example of a type now vanished: the expert on English usage who kept a strict eye on grammar and syntax throughout the paper. The whole thing was required reading every Sunday for the brightest million people in the country. For a Grub Street foot-slogger to get the nod from Kilmartin was like being commissioned in the field. Overawed at being asked, I over-wrote my first article to the point of sclerosis. Would-be epigrams met each other, fought and froze. Pointless erudition and strained jocularity formed a rigid amalgam. Correctly estimating that the result could have been written by no one else, I mailed it in. Fortunately Kilmartin was used to that reaction from new writers and instead of spiking the piece he called me down to the Observer office to discuss it. The office, in that era, was in the old Times building on Printing House Square, near the City end of Blackfriars Bridge, about a hundred yards south of the point where Ludgate Hill, plunging down from St Paul’s, changed its name to Fleet Street. Let’s say that name again. Fleet Street! I couldn’t believe it. Nowadays, with the newspaper offices scattered all over London, the personnel who remember when they were still concentrated in and around Fleet Street are dying off like old soldiers. At the time when I made my way to the Observer’s door, however, such a diaspora was still inconceivable. Fleet Street was a boulevard of unbroken dreams and the Observer was the dream I held most dear. If Kilmartin turned me away, the Thames was conveniently nearby. I could just jump in.
He didn’t turn me away, but he did scare me half to death. Not that there was anything terrifying about his manner: quite the reverse. Rising politely from his plain chair behind the book-piled desk in his book-lined office, he held out a dry firm hand that must have detected the residue of the sweat I had just wiped off against my trouser leg, but his face registered no disgust. It was too busy registering handsomeness. Kilmartin was as good looking as a man can be without ceasing to look intelligent as well. Of Irish origin, he was self-admittedly of the type that his countrymen call Desperate Chancer. There was a story that he once spent a night in jail in Paris after getting into a fight with the police. But none of that showed. He looked like the ideal English gentleman, in the exclusive sub-category of ideal English gentlemen who wield natural authority, speak perfect French, are charming to women and read ten books a week. It was a face to lead men into battle. There was only one item missing from the full kit of a commanding m
anner.
Scarcely a minute into our first conversation, I realized that he took a while to say things. Between any two words he said either ‘um’ or ‘ah’, except when either of these sounds occurred twice, in which case it would be separated by the other. The effect was to stop time. ‘Your, um, piece, ah, needs, um ah um, some, um, attention.’ By then we were sitting down, he had put on a pair of half-glasses, and he was pointing at my first paragraph with a blue pencil. ‘Where, um, you, um, say, um ah um, this, ah, hugely, ah, impressive, um ah um, novel …’ Then an extraordinary thing happened. Suddenly several words came out uninterrupted. ‘I should have thought we didn’t need the “hugely”. I mean, if you call it “impressive” then you’re already …’ There was a pause, as if to recuperate. After a small eternity, normal service was resumed. ‘Either, um, you’re, ah, impressed, or, ah, you’re, um ah um, not.’ We were three lines into the piece with about ninety-seven lines to go. He was right, of course, and I quickly saw that my manuscript was going to end up a lot shorter. But it was equally clear that I was going to end up a lot older. I never doubted, however, that I was in good hands. Twenty minutes later, the fourth paragraph that had given me so much trouble to get right revealed why: it was all wrong. Trying to say too much at once, I had constructed a sentence out of clauses that should have been sentences in themselves. With apologetic regret, he prised them apart. Writing in my head, I supplied new beginnings for each. ‘That, um, sounds, ah, much, um, more, um ah um, natural.’ His secretary brought tea. At this rate she would have to bring us food and medical supplies.
But he was right every time. At the speed of a glacier, my overwrought piece was brought back in touch with living speech. It was my conversational tone, he told me, that he was after: there was no need to get up on stilts. It took him a long time to tell me, but that probably helped to drive the lesson home. ‘We, um, can, ah, print, um, this, ah um ah, now.’ It would have been an affectation to show my delight, because I had realized in the first few minutes that he wouldn’t have been taking the trouble if he had thought the piece beyond salvation. But there was another wonder to come, and this time there was no holding back a laugh of disbelief. He showed me a row of upcoming books and asked me which one I would like to review next. No doubt it was the slush pile left over after the big stuff had been sent out to the name reviewers, but being granted access had to mean that I was in. Instantly I conceived a whole new ambition. Just as I aimed to write a piece for Miller that would make him smile, so I would aim to write a piece for Kilmartin that he would print without consuming more than an epoch to take me through the manuscript. Simultaneously exalted and exhausted, I limped along Fleet Street past the celebrated landmarks of my new trade. Outside El Vino’s, the most famous of all the Fleet Street hostelries, a byline journalist whose face I recognized from photographs was standing on the edge of the gutter, gathering his concentration for the six-inch descent into the carriageway. He was so drunk that he swayed in the wind of a passing cab. A hundred yards further on, I looked back, and he was still in place. But not even he could depress me. He might be standing on the edge of doom, but I was walking on air.
5. NIGHT OF THE KILLER JOINT
But it was my effort in Grub Street that had led to my first toehold in Fleet Street, and, for a while yet, Grub Street would continue to be my main base. There could be no base more shaky: it was like Khe Sahn in there. You had to be on the alert twenty-four hours a day just to hold the perimeter, or you would wake up sharing your sleeping bag with several small men in conical hats. To keep up with the punishing requirement of putting an income together out of piecework, the temptation was to find a neutral style and just fill the various spaces as specified. But my instinct dictated otherwise. I tried to give each piece everything, composing it as if it were a poem, with every word considered before it was placed, as if I were a mad bricklayer building a garden wall out of precious stones. If I had known how to write with less effort I might have written more. Luckily the extra lolly from London Weekend took off some of the pressure, so that I never got to the point, quite common among veterans of the genre, where I was not only jobbing all over the place but doing each job with cheap materials, like a cowboy plumber. It thus became possible for me to overfulfil a specification: a possibility which, I later concluded – once again I didn’t realize it at the time – is one of the keys to attaining a recognized competence in any field, and also of escaping from it when the moment comes.
If you just do the minimum you will get stuck. Give it the maximum and you will make your employer feel that you are doing him a favour, instead of he you. An example of this was when Ian Hamilton asked me to do a round-up review for the TLS of Edmund Wilson’s last few books. I thought Edmund Wilson was not just America’s most comprehensive man of letters, but the greatest critic alive anywhere: and now he was on the point of death. Writing about him anonymously for Britain’s most hallowed literary institution, the TLS, I would be giving him a send-off worthy of his stature. (One measure of the stature was that his English publisher had gone on bringing out his books right to the end, even though they went straight to the remainder shops: heavy evidence that commitment to quality can be a commercial disaster.) Anonymity would work for the venture instead of against it, because it would be the institution talking, and not just some Australian swagman humping his bluey through the early stages of the road to Hullaboola. Hamilton would have been content if I had wrapped the task up in two thousand words. I gave him eleven thousand, plus a suggested title, ‘The Metropolitan Critic’. Hamilton cut it back to ten thousand, kept the title, and the piece ran, filling several pages of the paper. I’m not sure what the effect was on Wilson – I like to think it was not necessarily a bad sign that he died a few days after the tribute appeared – but it had a stirring effect on some other established writers, who might have quite liked the idea of one of their number being celebrated as a crucial figure in modern intellectual history. If him, why not them? No doubt inspired by motives rather more exalted than that, Graham Greene asked the TLS chief editor Arthur Crook who had written the Wilson piece. Crook having spilled the beans, I duly received a letter from Greene himself, telling me that he, too, held a high opinion of Wilson, but that he was very glad someone so young should have written the opinion down. Flatteringly avuncular, Greene suggested that I might consider the discursive critical essay as my destined field of operations. The piece wasn’t as long as the letter I wrote in reply, which was probably the reason I never heard from him again. (I had not yet learned that any writer, even when much less prominent than Greene, is swamped with correspondence and should never be communicated with at any length greater than a single paragraph. A single sentence is plenty.) Still, I had that first letter from him, and there were many other letters from other people to back it up. I had done something right, and had done it, not with one eye on my ambitions, but by submitting myself to an obligation.
The lesson was not lost on me, although I was a long time figuring out the full range of implication. The range can be summed up thus: given the choice between personal opportunism and public duty, go with the duty. The rewards might not show up straight away, but they will outlast the quick returns for cynicism. Since rewards are still in mind, that interpretation might seem opportunistic in itself, but only because of a supervening paradox: virtue resides in the taming of a baser instinct, not in its elimination. Our baser instincts act in our interests, to get us fed, to make us loved, to keep our children safe. For all but the saints, neglect of one’s own interests limits the power even to be altruistic. One gets more free time, but only to interfere. It must have been just about then, in her Observer column, that Katherine Whitehorn wrote, ‘You can recognize the people who live for others by the haunted look on the faces of the others.’ I didn’t have to write it down: it went straight to memory, which may have displaced some of the words, but the balance of the sentence was unforgettable. With the best writers for the Sunday papers and literary magazin
es in those days, one of the pleasures was their confidence of aphorism – a confidence generated, as always, by the receptivity of the audience. The resonant sentence has been a basic form throughout the history of philosophy; a form in which all the best writers sound the same and time collapses into a permanent present. Consider one of my favourite moments from Seneca, his warning to the tyrant: you can kill as many enemies as you like, but your successor will be among those who survive. It’s an insight anyone can have, but made penetrating by the compactness with which it is put.