How I persuaded Martin to say yes to this proposition remains a mystery to me and, I dare say, to him. In the normal course of events, Martin, rather than step into the spotlight, would prefer to die in an unarmed attack on the power station supplying its electric current. His genuine modesty is the main reason for the fateful discrepancy between him and the journalistic literary sexton beetles who make copy out of him: they would like to receive the degree of attention that he would like to avoid, and the clearer it becomes that he would like to avoid it, the more they resent him for failing to appreciate their generosity. But he said yes to being cast as my doomed young hero. I can only conclude that he saw truth in the role, although Perry’s odyssey, like the personal history of any character in anything I have ever written, is drawn almost exclusively from my own experience. (Whence my thanks to fate that I went travelling so much in the next twenty years: otherwise I would have written endlessly about a man staring through a window at a lake dotted with the white floating bellies of dead carp.) Warning me that he must not be expected to do any acting, Martin settled down to study the part. I assured him, truthfully, that most of the acting would be done by Dai.
And so it happened. The literati packed into the hall at the ICA heard their own voices coming back at them out of Dai’s mouth. There was no scenery, just the three of us with a lectern and a microphone each, but one of the microphones was a cornucopia. Characters in the poem who weren’t present to hear themselves speak heard about it soon enough. (It was on the evidence of the reception for Bob Lull’s featured role in Peregrine Prykke’s Pilgrimage, and not the attention given to Edward Pygge’s Three Sonnets by Robert Lowell, that Elizabeth Hardwick was able to inform her ex-husband, ‘They’re laughing at you in London, Cal.’) Martin had no trouble indicating the diffidence of the young Perry taking his first steps on the path to glory. As the hubristic, slightly less young Perry on the road to perdition he was less convincing, but he got away with it. More amazingly, in the face of Dai’s virtuosity, I got away with it. The audience was riveted even when not howling. Nobody went to sleep except Charles Monteith of Faber, and a few days later he sent me a note pleading jet lag. What might have seemed like a colonial’s act of retributive arrogance was saved by the laughs and by a central truth: the destruction of Perry’s innocence was bound to happen, because destroying innocence is what literature does. Since any group feels flattered when told that it lives by jungle law, the audience afterwards queued to pat my head. Most of the compliments felt genuine, although there was one from Michael Frayn that bothered me momentarily. ‘It was the scale of the thing that amazed me.’ Since he could equally have meant the scale of the disaster, this noncommittal encomium can be recommended for use among all the other anodyne stand-by effusions for when you ‘go around’ after the performance. ‘What can I say?’ ‘Well, you did it again!’ ‘Only you could have given us an evening like that.’ And: ‘It was the scale of the thing that amazed me.’
But paranoia soon proved to be inappropriate. Apart from the gratifying hubbub on the night, there were a couple of immediate reactions next day that would have yielded a double thrill if they had not so neatly cancelled each other out. Ian Hamilton, who obviously hadn’t at all minded being renamed Ian Hammerhead, asked me for the whole 1,400-line text so that he could print it as a limited-edition booklet in soft covers, and then, in full, in the New Review. I was so chuffed at his reacting with unequivocal approval to one of my poems that I said yes before realizing other editors might have similar ideas. Anthony Thwaite, then the literary editor of the globe-girdling Encounter, asked if he could print the whole thing. If Encounter had carried the poem, I would have been unarguably established as a poet from that day forth, no ifs, no buts. There were excellent reasons for double-crossing Ian. But they didn’t seem quite as excellent as the reasons for keeping my word. And as Dai put it, over a pint at the Pillars, Encounter would have paid me folding money, and we couldn’t have that.
Cape paid folding money up front to both of us when it commissioned a booklet of the Improved Version of the poem illustrated throughout by the omnicompetent Dai, whose graphic constructions were as inventive as his verbal ones. To jump forward a bit, I undertook an Improved Version when I realized that the versification of the original was intolerably clumsy. James Fenton helped me realize it. Never hesitant with criticism, he told me that I had glaringly failed to count my syllables. I didn’t like him for saying so, but when I started counting I could see that he was right. So I rewrote the whole thing. There is always a danger, when you start watching your technique too closely, that you will develop the kind of mani`ere aigre that crippled Renoir after Degas scared him back to school. But a form like rhyming couplets – like, indeed, all the set verse forms – gets a lot of its propulsion from its precision. So I think I sped the poem up, and I’m sure I sped up the companion piece that followed it. The following year’s epic was The Fate of Felicity Fark in the Land of the Media, with illustrations by Mark Boxer, who hated the title. More than twenty years later I decided he had been right, and I scrapped the poem along with two more mock epics that followed in the same track. For the second poem, the modest performance in the ICA had once more gone well, and this time a long extract from the text was run by the Sunday Times, much to the Observer’s disapproval. Another year on, the next epic venture, Britannia Bright’s Bewilderment in the Wilderness of Westminster, once again with drawings by ‘Marc’, was front-paged by the Observer in retaliation. Or I might have got those two serializations in reverse: it doesn’t matter now. But it all mattered like mad to me then. Though personally I still feel that my four mock epics got technically and dramatically more adroit as they succeeded one another, there might have been something to the prevalent critical idea that Peregrine Prykke’s Pilgrimage was the best of them because the literary world was the ambience I knew most about. It was an idea I resisted might and main, because I was having too much fun to quit. If I couldn’t have a reputation as a serious poet, this alternative means of expressing myself in verse made a much bigger splash. The poems were written to real contracts, were performed like plays, were showcased on the front of the review sections: more buzz than the average British movie. Even better, they spoke directly to the audience, without intermediaries. ‘At least I can tell, with your stuff,’ John Cleese once told me, ‘why it’s written that way. With most poetry I can’t do that.’ Such off-trail encouragement wasn’t the same as official endorsement, but maybe different was better. And anyway, how much attention could I ask for? My life in the literary world looked more stable than poor Perry’s. I had the column, the commissions for features, some solid reviewing connections, I was the author of a couple of books of bits and pieces, and now, running alongside, there was this mini-industry of the mock epic. I didn’t see how anything could stop me.
14. TYNAN STEPS IN
The regular critics tried to when Faber brought out a collection of my verse letters under the title Fan-Mail. The hyphen was my mistake and so was the book, which was reviewed like the plague. People scarcely capable of writing a sentence that could be read were accusing me of being unable to write a stanza that could be scanned. For a long time I agreed with the reviewers, although the fact that those poems still appear among my collected verse in The Book of My Enemy (2003) is an indication that my opinion has reverted to what it was when I was writing them, in a trance of concentration every time. (The letter to Michael Frayn, composed in Pushkin’s cruelly demanding Onegin stanza, and the letter to Tom Stoppard, composed in the almost equally tricky Burnsian measure, both sent me to the brink of oxygen starvation: I would forget to breathe as I pieced the phrases into the intricate set schemes.) The verse letter as a genre, however, I now saw as only a small part in my total global output of comic verse. Everything for the stage, for instance, should be in comic verse. If only Shakespeare had followed Chaucer’s example! Kenneth Tynan pulled a face when I explained this to him, but by that time he looked as if he was pulling a
face anyway: his habits were catching up with him, there had never been much flesh between skin and skull, and now he looked like a skeleton trying to escape. Tynan had called me to his house in Thurloe Square to discuss a project. It was our second meeting. The first had been at a Garrick Club reception not long after I joined the Observer. Tynan had been wearing a tailored green shantung Dr No jacket and I had worn one of my usual polyester paisley ensembles from the Nightmare Alley boutique on the Planet of the Drapes. Much to Terry Kilmartin’s amusement, David Astor looked at me as if I were a German paratrooper. Tynan, however, chose to address me, grandly telling me how I wrote TV criticism with such verve that I should consider ‘moving up’ into drama criticism. Our subsequent exchange is no less true for my having told the tale a thousand times. When I asked him if he could really, truly, still stand the theatre, he said, ‘I get a thrill every time the curtain goes up.’ And I said: ‘I get a thrill every time it goes down.’
Or something like that. In reality, dialogue is never as crisp. But theatre isn’t reality and I didn’t want it to be: I wanted it to be verbally electrifying. Most theatre, in my experience, was the opposite. One of the reasons I admired Stoppard so much – later on I admired Michael Frayn and Peter Nichols for the same reason – was that his plays, despite the room they made for an exalted level of visual hoopla, were so full of lines begging to be spoken. Tynan pointed out that even Stoppard had needed help in pulling Jumpers together. Since the help, in that case, had been provided by him, Tynan was speaking with authority. When we met again in Thurloe Square, however, he soon found me more opinionated than ever. In his capacity as the dramaturge who had beaten back sexual constrictions by giving the world the designedly scurrilous revue O, Calcutta, Tynan now wanted to make a similarly liberating play out of a book by the prankster, brothel-keeper, and strolling philosopher Willy Donaldson. Tynan wanted me to write the script, which being done, he would take over and supply all the other requirements. After reading the book I suggested that the play should be done in verse.
Tynan had looked pretty ill at the previous meeting, but at this meeting, when he heard my suggestion, his face moved even nearer death. Actually, that aspect was no joke. Tynan had emphysema, and it would eventually do for him, but at that stage he could still tell himself that he only had to quit smoking. There were a lot of people who loved him and wanted to believe the same thing. I was one of them: if only for his gift of phrase, I admired Tynan to the point of worship. I just didn’t think that he made any sense politically. He was one of the British theatre’s permanent supply of licensed radicals – Harold Pinter and David Hare are other prominent examples – who are allowed, and even encouraged, to rain scorn on the beliefs of the very people who come to see their plays. How this reciprocating system of gauchiste rhetoric subsidized by bourgeois self-flagellation actually works is a subject for sociological analysis that need not detain us here. Sufficient to say that Tynan was far too nice ever to realize that the sincerity of his Brechtian revolutionary principles would have stunned Brecht, who had manufactured them to please a state-sponsored market and had banked his foreign royalties in Switzerland. But at least Brecht, whose didactic plays had bored the world for decades, was safely out of the picture. Unfortunately Tynan thought that Willy Donaldson was yet another social revolutionary: perhaps not precisely of the Brechtian stamp, but promising a usefully subversive libertarian critique of the institutionalized inhibitions of Western society.
I went to meet Willy off-campus, as it were, and we soon had each other sized up. His dim little flat in Chelsea was clearly the model for the exciting brothel in the book. All he had done was build up its crumbling face with a few layers of pancake makeup. The same could be said for his girlfriend, whose patterns of speech and behaviour soon revealed themselves to have been souped up and distributed between all the exotic houris, demi-mondaines and grisettes that populated his story. Willy had the knack for the prose that floods mundane reality with a radiance it could never generate by itself. In his pages, the hypnotic hookers came swaying towards you in couture underwear, drunk on the perfume of their own armpits, their eyes alight with your reflected dreams, hungry to blend their burning need with yours. The money didn’t really matter to them. They were driven by desire. In reality, Willy’s girlfriend had a sour face painted on the surface of a veteran grapefruit, and the Band-Aids on the back of her calves where the last shave had gone wrong were curling at the edges. Her bloodshot eyes, never very large, were focused on something bad happening a few inches in front of them, perhaps the tiny pall of heat coming up from the cigarette she smoked no hands. Tynan had told me that Willy, once a tycoon of upmarket sexual commerce, had fallen on hard times. I hadn’t talked to him for half an hour before I realized that there had never been any soft times. This was it. He had been making everything up since the days when the Beyond the Fringe boys – he was their first impresario – had twigged that he was a bull artist and eased him out. He and I talked the same language. He was a fabulist. It takes one to know one.
I wrote the play anyway, and I wrote it the way Tynan wanted it: in prose. The manuscript must be somewhere among my junk. It never got any further than script stage, thank God. My main problem with the material, as they say in Hollywood, was that I have never been able to believe in self-fulfilment through sexual liberation. I believe in sexual desire as a transfigurative force all right, but I don’t think that it contributes to intelligence any more than salmonella contributes to digestion. Even now, on the threshold of the departure lounge, I still fall in love instantly with every beautiful and brilliant woman I meet; and I am still likely, if the woman is sufficiently beautiful, to think that she must be brilliant anyway, even as the evidence to the contrary becomes mountainous. I could write a book on the subject of sex, and one day, if there is a sufficient pause after it’s all over, I probably will. The book’s principal conclusion, I imagine, will be that a man whose romantic folly is infinite had better try to find himself the kind of woman who values the realism in him and knows how to bring it out, or he will end up dead, or bankrupt, or surrounded, like Willy, by the kind of faded decor into which the flannel dressing gown decorated with cigarette burns blends like camouflage. If he finds more than one woman like that then he will still be in trouble, but at least he will know what kind of trouble he is in. The idea that the rules for controlling a force could be derived from the force itself was one that only a man like Tynan could sincerely believe. Willy didn’t believe it any more than I did. He hoped the project would dig him out of a hole. I was truly sorry I couldn’t help. (Later on I was glad when he had a money-spinning hit with his ‘Henry Root’ caper.) I liked him. He forgave me for being as square as a brick under my air of exuberance, and I forgave him for peddling fake petrol. We had to forgive each other because we both pulled our cons using the same device: the spellbinder sentence, that little castle in the air.
Tynan was probably relieved when I pulled out of the project without needing to be pushed. I told him the truth: that the kind of theatre I wanted to do was a lot smaller, more like a cabaret; that it was almost all talk; and that it was mainly mine, so that I couldn’t screw anybody else up. I didn’t need to tell him that I wasn’t sure yet of how to do it. My mock epics ran for only one night and nobody could pursue a show-business venture on that basis. (The answer to that one is to go touring, but for that you need fame, either your own or borrowed: thus the British touring circuit is replete with acts calling themselves the Platters, the Drifters, Elvis Presley, and Buddy Holly – itinerant bodysnatchers who sign their real names only on the contract.) So I just looked vague on the subject. It was an expression Tynan was used to, having worked with so many actors; and he let me go without rancour. Several years would go by before I saw him again, and for the last time. (I jump forward to the scene now, out of sequence, because his greatness has been wilfully neglected and no signs of enthusiasm should be held back that might help to restore its lustre.) It was in Los Angeles. On an
afternoon off from an Observer assignment I went out by cab to see him in the house he and Kathleen had taken in one of the canyons. Coldwater Canyon, I think; or maybe Stone Canyon; anyway, one of those names out of Raymond Chandler. If I had the biography here I could check up, but I hated the biography, even though Kathleen wrote it, and with a loving, forgiving hand. The biography, and the letters, helped to sink what was left of his reputation, so that now, when he is out of print, he is patronized, without a blush, by the sort of people he could write rings around. But he was the stylist of his time: the true star critic. One of the things that made him so, apart from his turn of phrase, was what he called his limitless capacity for admiration. When I said that Hemingway’s style had fallen apart in the end, Tynan read aloud from that marvellous passage where Hemingway, towards the close of his life, talked about the Gulf Stream’s ability to take in any amount of junk and still run clean again after a few miles. I could tell that Tynan was talking about his lungs; and Hemingway was wrong, of course; but the prose sounded like holy writ in Tynan’s strained voice as the hot sunlight inexorably ate its way into the absurdly green lawn. Tynan was giving me a final lesson in what lasts: the style impelled by the rhythm of the soul, breadth of feeling with a narrow focus. Any youngster who wants to get into this business should find a copy of Tynan’s first book, He That Plays the King, and do what I did – sit down and read it aloud, paragraph by paragraph. It will soon be seen that his sometimes pedestrian radical opinions were far outstripped by his perceptions, which moved like lightning to energize almost every sentence. Tynan had drama in his prose: drama far beyond anything he could do as a dramaturge. It was only fitting that his death should be a drama too. It was a fight between him and the oxygen machine. He looked at it with hatred because he knew that when he sucked on it, it would taste nothing like a cigarette.