By that time the London Literary World’s Friday lunch had moved from Mother Bunch’s to the Bursa Kebab House, an obscure bistro near the new centre of the action. From the literary viewpoint, the New Statesman, still occupying its insanely valuable piece of real estate in Holborn, was in its most glorious period. You could be indifferent, or even hostile, to the opinions expressed in ‘the front end’, but ‘the back end’ had an authority not to be ignored, entirely because the standard of its editing was so high. At one time or another, Anthony Thwaite, Francis Hope, John Gross, Claire Tomalin, Martin Amis, and Julian Barnes were all active at the command level of the magazine’s cultural pages, with a direct line to all the best critics in the country. Contributors flocked and flourished. Christopher Hitchens and James Fenton came to write and stayed to lunch. Mark Boxer started turning up regularly. An erudite student of the dandy tradition, he proved by his mere presence that this was a fashionable event in the rarest sense: but his fastidiousness also had the salutary effect of discouraging the anecdote as a form – he wanted the flash of wit. James Fenton was also quick to spot the threat of boring self-indulgence and curl his lip at exactly the right angle to frighten it into silence. Nobody was allowed to take his time except Terry Kilmartin, who, applauded for every ‘um’ and ‘ah’, knew that he was being guyed and had the charm to make it funny.
The conversational results turned the Bursa Kebab House into a stock exchange for literary quotations. I have never heard better talk about the arts and don’t expect to again, but I think all who participated would agree that the thing really took off when traditional fact gave way to current fantasy. Already becoming famous but still retaining enough anonymity to move among other people without their putting on an act, Martin Amis, in conversation, could translate the circumstances of ordinary life into the kind of phantasmagoria that didn’t show up in his novels until later. When he got going, he was like one of those jazz stars, relaxing after hours, who are egged on by the other musicians into chorus after chorus. He had a favourite riff about the number of thieves in his area. (As I remember it, he was living in Notting Hill at the time, but it could just as well have been Belgravia: in his imagination, all of London turned into a single country, which I think I was the first to call Martinique.) On one occasion the riff developed into a symphony. According to him, he was one of the few non-thieves allowed to live in his district. The thieves did not emerge from their lairs until evening. Then you started seeing them on the skyline, moving, to the beat of tom-toms, in stooped silhouette across the rooftops, on their way to a previously determined destination. During the night, every residence of a non-thief would be visited, even if the non-thief was at home and awake. ‘A pair of white eyeballs at the window,’ Martin would explain, ‘reluctantly absorbing the evidence that the place is inhabited. I look back casually, trying to convey with my lazy sprawl that I would only with reluctance reach for the .357 magnum in my desk drawer. I keep typing away at my article about Henry James. The eyeballs blink.’ By this time the whole table would be helpless, and Martin would be ready for his final evocation of the stooped thieves marching nose to tail along the skyline, ending up in each other’s places, and taking the stuff that had already been stolen from someone else, perhaps even from them.
The key to Martin’s style of talk, apart from his protean range of pinpoint mimicry, was the economical stroke of the whip that did just enough to keep the top spinning. Granted time to think by the massed laughter, he could make the next bit up. (It took him a while to get that good on the page, and there are great talkers who never make the jump, perhaps because they are too modest to be their own delighted audience when they sit alone.) Hitchens, on the other hand, did the reverse of economy, or seemed to. At that time his world fame as a political and cultural essayist still lay in the future, as it was bound to, because his style of conversation – the key to his penetrating sarcasm – was too extravagant to be absorbed into a normal paragraph of prose. If he had been leading the conversation, he could have done a ten-minute version of the chicken crossing the road. (‘Blind drunk … drunk as only a chicken with no head for alcohol can be … headless chicken … sobbing, clucking drunk … not shedding the occasional feather as chickens are wont to do … every feather glued to its body by wine-flavoured perspiration … out of El Vino’s with hanging beak … the busy, roaring road looming before it … the broad thoroughfare as an unbridgeable chasm, if I may quote Edith Wharton … doomed from the egg onwards … a fish out of water … standing up to be counted … helplessly victimized in a chicken-hostile environment …’) But he hardly ever led. His decorations and interruptions were applied not to his own monologue, but to someone else’s. Thus, if someone was being straightforward he could make them funny, and if they were being funny he could make them funnier. Since the cause of wit in other men is always popular with the other men, his knack of saying the unforgivable thing was invariably forgiven. To ostracize him would have meant staying away, and nobody wanted to be absent when Martin and the Hitch were head to head.
Trying to keep up with either of those two, when they were flying, was the mark of a beginner. It was better to wait and let things die down. In similar circumstances, Oliver Goldsmith used to go home annoyed if he could not, as Boswell put it, ‘get in and shine’. But to listen was sufficiently pleasant, and a lot of us looked forward to Friday as the best day of the week. I think Jonathan Raban, flying back from an assignment abroad, was the first participant ever to re-book his flight so that he would be in time for lunch, but later on a lot of us did the same. It was a very competitive scene, though, and therefore very male, and nowadays it would probably be against the law. Doubtless there were a few women in town who could have done what Dorothy Parker did at the Algonquin before World War II, but they would have had to be ready to fail at it. Nor was it enough to be a good speaker. You had to be a good listener, which is a surprisingly rare quality, and one that I could have used a bit more of. Julian Barnes is still getting a lot of mileage out of my ability to turn the conversation back to my own concerns. Still, they used to accuse Scott Fitzgerald of the same thing. If the assembled company rags you for a failing, you can usually play up to it for comic effect: it’s the failing they don’t mention that you have to watch out for.
Exaggerated stories about my childhood, I noticed, went down well. On the other hand, my liberal democratic political opinions – situated in what Ian McEwan nowadays usefully calls the radical centre – were regarded with barely disguised impatience by almost all those present, and with open contempt and disbelief by both Fenton and Hitchens, who were still basing their positions on the belief that the Russian revolution, even if it had been betrayed, had started off as a good thing. Later on I would have been able to defend my views better, but at the time I was content to be steamrollered. When Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest started showing up, the steamrollers rolled from the other direction as well, and there were some resonant collisions, especially between Conquest and Hitchens. The Hitch had the snappy rhetoric but Conkers had the right quotations in the original Russian. It isn’t true, however, that they became fast friends later on. They always were. The spectacle of people with radically opposing views still managing to amuse each other is something that makes London different from New York, and very different from Sydney. Amusement was treated as a value – which, of course, as long as it doesn’t attempt to erode sincerity, it is. If it does attempt to do that, it soon ceases to be valuable, and not much later it ceases even to be amusing. There are a lot of people who talk well enough but forfeit a hearing when it becomes clear that they will say anything for effect.
The Friday lunch was too enjoyable to waste. When I realized that I was wasting at least half of it through getting smashed too quickly, I finally resolved to temper my drinking by the only method that I knew would be effective: i.e., to quit altogether. To my later remorse, I could have gone on bearing the shame of passing out on the train while bringing a hangover home to my f
amily. Also I had managed to live with the knowledge that I had been cruelly rude to a keen young Indian who had seen my face on television and concluded that this feat of recognition entitled him to occupy my chair at the table in Mother Bunch’s while I was away in the toilet dealing with the overflow of a largely liquid lunch – one of the last before the move to the Kebab House. Luckily I was the last one left of the assembly that day, so there was nobody there except my voluble victim to see me in action when I came back from the bog and told him to take off. He was out of line, but I would have been more polite had I been less drunk. I might even have engaged him in conversation – or at any rate joined the conversation in which he was already engaged – and thereby learned something. As things were, I gained only the memory of having been arrogant. The young man’s fallen face got into my dreams, haunting me as the imperialist policeman Merrick in The Jewel in the Crown might have been haunted if he had had a conscience. Congratulating myself on having one of those, I foresaw many an internal struggle when drunken idiocy would have to be paid for with mental anguish. Well, I could live with that, too. In other words, I could bear the prospect of carrying on as before. But I couldn’t bear the thought of speaking with a furred tongue in eloquent company. So it was for the sake of ego that I gave up drink, and not out of virtue. These are sorry confessions to make and I feel doubly sorry that I feel bound to make them, but a book about growing wiser would be dangerously untrue if it suggested that there is always something charming about the attainment of self-knowledge. Sometimes it is exactly like meeting the wrong stranger in a dark alley.
Perhaps encouraged by recent theatrical success, I arranged the trappings of a show-business event for the occasion when I would forever abjure the demon rum. It never occurred to me that the best way to quit would be to quit sober. I was intent on going out with the receding wave of one last party. On the big Friday, I told everyone that the drinks were on me. Two hours later, quite a lot of them were. My sweater was soaked. After an initial half-hour during which I had the impression that I was talking brilliantly, I had to be warned against shouting. Well, another glass of wine would be a quick cure for that. But I kept on missing my mouth. Tipping a bottle over had always been an early sign that I was losing the plot, but trying to drink through my chin, instead of my mouth, was sure evidence that locomotia ataxia was setting in. I explained this to the few people left to listen. The trip to the toilet turned into a more epic search each time, until finally I came back and found that only Terry and Peter Porter were left. They were talking about Proust. I joined in, although for a while they did not realize it, because I seemed to be talking about someone called Bruce. Then Peter went off to do a broadcast, leaving only Terry, who kindly reminded me that I had to get back to the Observer and read proofs. (‘Broofs,’ I said knowingly.) Even more kindly, he let me share his cab, which must have been like offering house-room to someone wired up with a time bomb who sincerely wants to abandon his mission but has forgotten the code to cancel the explosion. With a wealth of experience from his own roaring days – which he had spent blessed with a far stronger stomach than mine – he was all too aware of what must eventually happen. That it didn’t happen in the cab was a stroke of luck, especially since it had the sort of driver who didn’t hesitate to announce that if the geezer with the green face had not yet started vomiting – instead of, as Terry claimed, having already finished – there would be a fee to have the upholstery washed, or, if necessary, replaced. Terry exerted his natural authority and kept the driver driving. After that he kept me walking, all the way to the most out-of-the-way of the Observer’s staff toilets.
He waited outside, an exercise of tact for which I was grateful, because a man doesn’t want other men to see him supporting himself at the urinal by leaning his forehead on the wall while he attempts to shuffle backwards far enough to keep his shoes away from the erratic effusion of his bladder. (Shuffle back too far, and your forehead starts sliding downward, pulling the face upright until the upper lip comes in contact with the wall, by which time the momentum is hard to arrest as you go down sneering. Very few women know about any of this.) When I emerged, Terry saw me to my desk. ‘Are you, um, going to be, ah, all right?’ Not daring to speak, I nodded. Seeing that a word was called for, I searched for one, but could not find it. So I nodded again, as carefully as I could.
Thus reassured, he retired to his office and could not have seen me leaving for the toilet again. Once more I placed my forehead against the wall, but partly, this time, because the wall was cool, and I felt very hot. I had not felt quite so hot since the night of the killer joint. It might be a good idea to go into a cubicle. Not that I really wanted to vomit. I never do want to. Once again I was struck by that familiar fear, a fear bred not so much by the actual thing, as by the accumulated memories of the apprehension leading up to it. This reflex attempt to keep it in probably multiplies the force when it comes out. It certainly did in this case. First leaning over the bowl and then kneeling in front of it as if it were an altar, I repeatedly yelled repentance for a misspent life. Mixed liquids and insufficiently pureed solids gushed past my teeth. I heard the noise of an early post-war Italian two-stroke motorcycle giving birth. Things really got noisy when there was nothing in my stomach left to chuck. Through a throat already restricted by the intensity of its efforts, I went on vainly trying to hurl my personality – a hedgehog the size of a badger. When Terry came for me, I was lying on the floor of the cubicle, my body wrapped tightly around the pedestal of the bowl, as if the porcelain were my last source of warmth.
13. THE NAME’S PRYKKE: PEREGRINE PRYKKE
By the time I was well again, the story was all over London. Humiliation was complete, but it had one big advantage. It was very hard to go back on such a public promise, although even I would have been surprised to have been told that I would never touch alcohol again for another thirteen years. Not long afterwards, I quit smoking as well, and for just as long. Terry, who had a front-row seat for my transformation, said an interesting thing. Minus its ums and ahs, it went like this: ‘You’ve always managed to get quite a lot done, but what are you going to be like now?’ I was naive enough to take this as an unmixed compliment, but there might have been an element of apprehension in it. Although his regard for Proust suggested otherwise, Terry didn’t much approve of anyone who missed out on life through being too assiduous in pursuit of its honours. He had seen too many promising young men deprived of its pleasures. There is something to that view, and I try to respect it, although from holding it I am debarred by nature.
No longer required as a receptacle for sixty cigarette butts a day, my Bedford hubcap was thrown into the skip parked in front of our house in Cambridge. The skip otherwise held the debris emerging from our new knock-through. We were expanding. I was slow to admit that cutting out the booze and fags had improved the financial position, because the admission would have suggested that I had been robbing my own household since the day of its foundation. I preferred to think that several ships were coming in at once. There was something to that interpretation. Donald Trelford, who had now taken over from David Astor in the editor’s chair at the Observer, looked with favour on my work. Too much favour, initially. When the paper came up for a redesign, I was only just in time to stop the design team doubling the size of my photo at the top of my column and adding a bold subheading that promised yet another weekly dose of hilarity fit to cure all ills among the living and bring the dead up dancing out of their tombs. Never one to be hobbled by modesty, I nevertheless have a horror of being overbilled. Above all I can’t stand being introduced as some sort of cheery fellow in a floppy cap and long, pointed shoes. The error wasn’t Trelford’s but he had let the designers get too far along the road to setting it irrevocably in lead.
On the other hand, it was Trelford who had the excellent idea of sending me off all over the world to write feature articles about foreign cities. Although I always prepared as thoroughly as possible for these assignments I
couldn’t hope to equal the knowledge of the Observer’s man on the spot: whether staff appointee or local stringer, he was likely to be jealous of his turf for a good reason – that he knew every inch of it. What was I to gain by dropping out of the sky for a few days of room service? Trelford was clever enough to spot the plus. I wouldn’t be writing the informed letter of the man in residence, I would be recording the uninhibited first impressions of the flying visitor, which would be of value to the reader precisely because the man who lived there no longer thought them worth noting. It would suit my style. It was also Trelford who thought of the generic name for the pieces: Postcards. Thus one of my standby formats was born. Eventually I was to write enough Postcard pieces to furnish, in 1981, a book called Flying Visits, and in the next decade I transferred the idea to television, in which medium my Postcard programmes were always my main claim, if not to fame, then at least to work painstakingly done. The whole project, whose legs turned out to be a full twenty-five years long, arose out of a single conversation. I got a lot of glory out of it in the long run, so I owe it to Trelford to acknowledge his imaginative encouragement. He had to think like that on everybody’s behalf every day of the week, with nobody noticing except when things went wrong. But that’s what editors do. Thank God I was never one of them.