I wasn’t even surprised. In the area of poetry, however, there was a gulf between us that could easily have remained unbridged. I only partly believed that what he was doing in poetry was as necessary as what he was doing in prose, and he didn’t at all believe the same thing about me. If your friend takes your woman off you, he merely doesn’t care about your feelings; but if he makes it clear that he thinks you are wasting your time with poetry, he doesn’t care if you live or die. There had been a dozen occasions when our friendship might have been over, if we hadn’t made each other laugh. It worked like a marriage, which can survive anything except lack of good will. But even the good will had been often under stress, and we would have called it quits sooner if the Edward Pygge connection had not intervened. As we stood there at the bar of the Pillars, we were joined by Pygge, the phantom impresario, in the spirit of a new enterprise. The scurrilous Pygge papers, an untidy array of typescript hedged about with pints of beer and glasses of Scotch, clearly had theatrical possibilities. We could do some of these voices ourselves. The rest could be done by Russell Davies, who could do anything. He could also write parodies to a high standard. Yet more Pygge products were in prospect! The very consonant ‘p’ became a provocation. At that moment, Davies himself walked in out of the gathering dusk, picked up my Pygge parody of the Welsh bard R. S. Thomas, and read it out with the appropriate accent. All within earshot fell about. The barman looked puzzled, but he probably wouldn’t be coming to the show anyway. We already had a name for it: the Edward Pygge Revue.
I always loved that stage direction in one of Ring Lardner’s little surrealist plays: ‘The curtain comes down for seven days to denote the passing of a week.’ To denote the several weeks it took to prepare the Edward Pygge Revue for its one-night run, let me make a slapdash collage of some of the other stuff I was busy with at the time. The more slap the dash, the greater the fidelity to a period of confusion. Looking back on it, I can see that this was a formative moment. In most of our formative moments, we do nothing much except lie around in a daydream, like a snake measuring itself for a change of suit, and we find our future purpose through discarding the false purposes of the past. But there are other formative moments when so much happens at once that there is no order to it, or even a chronology: opportunities arrive like a hail of bullets, and a circus performer who had previously to catch only one bullet at a time in his teeth finds himself snapping desperately at a fusillade. One of the bullets he swallows, and it turns out to have transforming properties, even though it tastes at first just like another mouthful of lead. Full of metaphors no less extravagant than that, my book The Metropolitan Critic finally came out. For stylistic brashness it invited the pillory, and its exterior appearance might have been designed as a provocation. Almost full size, my self-approving face, enriched with untrimmed sideburns, appeared on both front and back, as if appearing once were not more than enough. But some of the reviews were good, and one of them was better than good.
It was written by Philip Toynbee for the Observer. Before it was published, Miriam Gross kindly showed it to me in galley proof when I came into the office to write my TV column. Toynbee had praised me in sumptuous terms. His piece was the literary equivalent of ‘Roll Over, Beethoven’. The new boy from the Australian bush, according to Toynbee, was a prodigious combination of style and exuberance: the ant’s pants had met the bee’s knees. George Orwell, look to your laurels. Dr Johnson, the jig is up. Montaigne, rien à faire. It went on like that. After memorizing the piece like a poem, I spent Friday night getting smashed in the Pillars, striving to share my secret with no more than one person at a time. As I explained to Ian that I was finding it a struggle to reconcile literary integrity with blazing success, was there an element of respect in his usual sneer? ‘You’re a very complicated character.’ No, it was an element of contempt. But he would have to live with that. Lying on the floor of the last train to Cambridge, I rehearsed the speech that would prepare my wife for the life-changing impact of the Observer on Sunday.
11. WELCOME TO THE COLOSSEUM
The impact was all on me. As published, Toynbee’s review of my book was only about half the length of the proof. Almost instantly I realized that Terry had been at it with his half-glasses, blue pencil, scissors, and axe. All superlatives had been excised. There was practically nothing left except a brief description of the book’s size and weight. The previous day, the Saturday, in between my usual household tasks of lifting weights and searching for the goldfish behind the bookcase, I had toured Cambridge to tell our acquaintances that they might care to catch the Observer books pages tomorrow, after they had read my column. But now they would merely be puzzled. In London, there were dozens of my colleagues who would now, at this very moment, be rolling around with aching sides. My own sides ached for a different reason. I could hardly breathe for my sense of injustice. Screwed by my own editor! Kicked into the pit by my own Virgil! My wife, who had to live with injustice every day of the week (like any other female don, she was surrounded by suavely indolent male dons who sincerely thought they were doing her a favour by loading her with extra duties just because they knew she would carry them out), was faced once again with a husband’s peculiar capacity to treat a setback as an international crisis, instead of as a petty local condition. In later years I tried to correct that discrepancy, but even today, when I have a cold, it is the worst cold in the history of the house. On that day, cruelly deprived of what I thought my due, I addressed long speeches of protest to the wall I was supposed to be painting white. I could see the words flaming back at me, as if admonishing a DIY Nebuchadnezzar: You have Been Weighed in the Balance and Found Ridiculous. Early in the following week I found some moral courage for once and called in on Terry to have the matter out, instead of letting it simmer for a few years as I would normally have done. I thought I had the moral high ground: Toynbee, after all, had actually written such and such, and to cut out his true meaning was an act of censorship. But Terry, staring at me over the top rims of his half-glasses, soon reduced my high ground to a molehill. Using far fewer ahs and ums than usual, he informed me that a regular contributor to the Observer must not be seen to be puffed by his own paper. That would, ah, do the paper no good. The molehill became a foxhole when he added that it would, um, do me no good either. He said I was no longer the oldest living student, but well established as an indecently productive and successful young critic, and that I should avoid being seen as seeking more of the validation that I had already achieved: it was as counterproductive as to go on talking the girl into bed when she was already, ah, lying in it. The trench I was now standing in deepened, and my eyes were level with the earth, when he added that Toynbee was an eternal enthusiast, had once glorified Communism in the same terms, and that his rapturous praise of a new saviour was a well-known equivalent for the kiss of, um, death. The ground finished swallowing me up when he said if he hadn’t cut the piece he would have had to kill it altogether. He was the literary editor, and ah, making decisions like that was what the literary editor, um, did. From my subterranean position, I tunnelled out under the foundations of the building and headed for the Pillars of Hercules. Already dead, I had no fear of being killed by Ian’s laughter.
But he wasn’t laughing, and he had a fate worse than death in store for me. John Carey, an Oxford don already established as the most deadly of the academic critics moonlighting in Grub Street, had reviewed The Metropolitan Critic for the New Review. Ian showed me Carey’s typescript. With memories of my unfortunate preview of Toynbee’s Observer piece still fresh in my lacerated mind, I would have been smart to leave Carey’s manuscript unread. But the chance to do the stupid thing was irresistible as usual. Besides, Ian was insisting that I should know what was in store for me, so as not to feel double-crossed when the piece was published. I didn’t quite see the logic of that. Does someone who has mailed you a dead cat exonerate himself by telling you that it’s in the post? Not that Carey’s piece was a dead cat. It was a living
cheetah. My opinions that I had thought so bold were chased down, bitten through the back of the neck, and dined off for their tender parts, with the bulk of the corpse contemptuously left for the hyenas and the vultures. What made this treatment worse, I reflected bitterly, was that Carey could write. The bits of my prose that he quoted did indeed look overwrought when put beside his. (As a general rule, a review that doesn’t quote you can never hurt you, and a dullard will never quote you unless he is so stupid that he doesn’t realize how his own prose fails to shine.) As I read on in deepening despair, Ian manfully forbore to smile, and even nodded in sympathy, but there was a gleam in his hooded eyes that I had learned to interpret. In the name of editorial integrity, he not only didn’t mind making enemies, he didn’t mind hurting his friends either. As I handed the typescript back – the hand failing to tremble only because rigor mortis had already set in – he told me that I could look forward to seeing the piece in the next issue. I nodded, feebly voicing my observation that although it was not the done thing for a newspaper to praise a regular contributor, it apparently was the done thing for a magazine to make a monkey of him. ‘Yeah. It’s tough.’ That evening I got an early train.
When in Cambridge, I still spent a lot of time in the Copper Kettle, which had previously been my office when I was a skiving graduate student. Directly opposite King’s College, it was a good place to go to ground. One of Carey’s less devastating points was that the virtues I claimed for the metropolitan critic as a recurring type throughout modern literary history were rather undermined in my case by my continued attendance at the university. It would have been more devastating had it been fully true. But it was only half true. I had no attachment to Cambridge University beyond living in the middle of it. Even today, the family base is still in the centre of the city. I suppose that by now we could afford a bigger house out in the country, with a pond and a couple of ducks. But I like the way the learned buildings wall me in with their reassurance that there is really nothing wrong with sitting down for half the day to read and write. At the time The Metropolitan Critic was published, I did the reading and writing in the Copper Kettle. When I lifted my eyes from the page, there was none of the meretricious argument London always offers that the sole real purpose in life is to hustle for a buck. Through the window, I could see the crippled physicist from Caius who had recently handed in his crutches for a motorized wheelchair. Now he took less time to go past the window. There were rumours that even his colleagues were puzzled by his explanation of the universe. Later on he would lay out the explanation in a book that puzzled people by the million, but even at that stage he was clearly occupied with thought in its pure form. It was a useful reminder that the mental life must be pursued for its own sake. The reminder came in handy when The Metropolitan Critic, after selling only a few hundred copies, turned over and sank.
But the heartening truth was that my very first book had done me good. Apart from Carey’s stroncatura – my wife, while pressing cold towels to my forehead, had kindly supplied me with the useful Italian word for the review that kicks the shit out of you – the press had been tolerant at the very least. Some of the critics had been kind enough to identify a new, peculiarly Australian style that approached European culture the way Rod Laver approached Wimbledon, as if what mattered wasn’t the cut of your shorts or the angle at which you bowed to the royal box, but whether you could hit a cross-court running forehand. I liked the sound of that emphasis. It had an echo of what Nick Tomalin had once said about how the resident aesthete scores nothing for cultivation, whereas the barbarian invader scores double. Really he was saying that it didn’t matter if you talked with your mouth full as long as you were quoting Rilke in the original German. It was an insult to my country, but I took it as a compliment to me, and now I started to see the possibilities. Instead of narrowing my range of allusion to appease my critics, I would widen it to flatter my readers, who, I had guessed, quite liked the idea of someone treating the whole world of the arts as if it belonged not to any special caste or class, but to anyone with the interest and the energy, and who could possess the whole thing even though plainly having no background except the outback. (Actually, like the vast majority of Australians, I had been born and raised in a city, but in the British imagination at that time the whole of Australia was still the outback, which was somehow equipped with a beach. Later on, this outback beach acquired an Opera House and row of brick bungalows, one of them occupied by Kylie Minogue.) I resolved, however, to exploit the image only by countering its negative expectations, and never by reinforcing them. Suddenly the opportunities to take this course had increased. Now ranking as an author instead of a mere journalist – it was the journalists, not I, who thought in those terms – I had a whole new swathe of prominent outlets available to me.
Some of them were the wrong ones. I should never have tried to write for Punch, because Punch was a funny magazine and nothing but, and for me it was fatal to work in a funny context. The only way I can find a point in what the Americans depressingly call ‘humor writing’ is to be funny in a serious context. I had already formulated this rule after learning in the Cambridge Union that I should never, on any account, accept an invitation to participate in the Humorous Debate. (In the gales of forced laughter generated by an avowedly Humorous Debate, anything genuinely amusing you happen to say will be lost like a fart in a tornado.) But I was so engaged by the company of Punch’s then editor, Alan Coren, that I broke my own rule, and suffered the consequences. Come to think of it, Coren might not have been the editor. The editor could have been William Davis, a man with the same Teutonic origins as Wernher von Braun, although not as funny. Either way, Coren was the master spirit. I could check up and make sure of who was nominally in charge, but the whole episode is a patch in my memory that I would rather leave vague. The pieces I choked out for Punch are among those I never later reprinted in book form, and even at the time I had the rare experience of wondering why I had written them at all. I record this sad fact in the hope of passing on a useful lesson. If it feels like a mistake before you go in, don’t go in. Even when working with a whole heart, you are bound to have the occasional failure, and sometimes the whole heart will be the reason: caring too much can make you try too hard, and what should have sung will merely simper. But to work with half a heart means failure every time, and the results will scream the place down. I got away with the Punch misalliance, however; not just because I got out early, but because nobody you were going to meet read Punch even under Coren’s editorship; the magazine was destined for dentists’ waiting rooms, where it played its traditional role of making what happened next seem comparatively amusing. Having got out, though, I never got away from the enigma of Coren’s personality. For me he remains the most enigmatic man of his generation, because the sprawling palace of his attainments has so many rooms he has scarcely bothered to look into. He can fly planes, drive fast cars, dance accomplished jive, speak perfect German. But who is he? His writing never tells you, because its humour is a shield. He understood exactly why I could never settle in at Punch. With that kind of writing, you keep yourself to yourself. Not my thing at all.
Other outlets were an unequivocal plus. Those who had wanted book reviews from me now wanted features as well, including the Observer itself. To conduct their side of the annual salary round for my TV column, three of the Observer’s top-echelon corridor-stalkers were waiting for me in a conference room off the main open-plan office. On a glass-topped table, three pairs of Turnbull and Asser cufflinks gleamed in concert. Wearing a new brown corduroy velvet jacket carefully chosen to look as wrong as possible in combination with my chocolate chinos, I shambled into their presence. Usually their faces would have conveyed the strained politeness of Roman senators receiving a Hun plenipotentiary whose army was parked outside the city gates, but I detected a new warmth. Things went well from the start. They would up the fee for the next year’s column by a healthy percentage if I agreed to throw in four features during the
year for either the paper proper or its new colour magazine. Since I would have thrown them in for free, just for the kudos, this seemed like a good deal. But it got better while it was still being negotiated. The Observer now seemed prey to the flattering belief that as the author of a book I must be in demand from other sources. Would I care to suggest an additional figure to ensure exclusivity? A decent response would have been to say that I would be flat out writing just the stuff they had stipulated, with no time left over for a postcard to my mother. But the challenge of picking my own figure for the sweetener ruled out any response at all. I hadn’t a clue. This turned out to be an advantage. Being forced to think has the effect of temporarily shutting my mouth, while my tiny eyes are too deep-set to transmit panic, and even, I am told, can make me look quite shrewd, as if weighing the odds instead of looking for the exit. Faced with a Mississippi gambler daunting in his taciturn immobility, the Observer suits reached further into the bag. Exclusivity, they explained, meant only that I could not do comparable work for any other Sunday newspaper. (Effectively, this meant the Sunday Times, the Observer’s only real rival for the liberal audience in those years.) I could write for any periodicals I wanted to. Somewhere about this point they named a figure themselves, at which my mouth began to say ‘Wow!’ but got no further than the first consonant, for lack of breath. It must have looked as if I were pursing my lips thoughtfully. Far inside my head, my eyes bulged, but the effect was to lower my eyelids and seal them shut. Having finished adjusting the exclusivity downwards, the suits went on adjusting the fee upwards. There was a lesson here: in life as in love, it rarely hurts to say nothing. By the time I summoned up the strength to nod, I was on a stipend that any unattached freelance would have recognized as top whack, and certainly no staff writer would be doing better. The staff writers, of course, had guarantees if they got into trouble, and if they croaked on the job the paper would pay for the funeral. But that was OK, because I was going to live forever. We Mississippi gamblers know how to look after ourselves: that silver derringer isn’t just for decoration. I glided away down the corridor, mentally adjusting a black Stetson.