You couldn’t blame the Japanese for being mad about their cameras, most of which, after all, were manufactured in Japan, like the Land Cruiser we were sitting in. I made a note that we would have to get this kind of scene on film, because it was part of the truth. We would have to film the photographers as they took photographs. But it was a depressing spectacle. One felt for the leopard, whose instincts were geared up for hunting, not for being hunted. ‘Kwenda,’ said Denis to Kungu. He meant, ‘Let’s go.’ So we went, driving off to a stretch of river where no Kombi vans were in evidence. ‘You sometimes see one or two elephant crossing here,’ said Denis. As if on cue, a whole family of elephant showed up, moving out of the trees on our side of the river and plainly bent on fording it. As the family waded in, a few more elephant started arriving behind them. Then there were many more. Finally there were about fifty of them wading across or queuing up to take their turn. Among the adults there were infants, almost fully submerged and poking their little trunks up like snorkels. Some of the old males were yelling with impatience, as old males will in a traffic jam. Denis told me I was in luck: he had never seen anything as good as this in all his time in Africa. Kungu said he hadn’t seen anything like it since he was a boy. I had never seen anything like it in my wildest dreams. I didn’t need telling I was lucky, but I was feeling exactly the opposite, because we weren’t getting it on film. I didn’t say that, however: for once the adjective ‘breathtaking’ had a literal sense. The muddy water was being whipped to a froth. On the far bank, two clumps of Kombis were rapidly assembling to flank the path that the emerging animals would take. A hundred cameras crackled. The storm of photoflash put the herd into a panic. The leading tuskers trumpeted. The whole herd sped up. The ones getting out of the water slipped on the mud. To either side of the beaten path, mothers boosted their babies out of the water with their foreheads. I saw one of the mothers, while she was still hip deep in the water, wrap her trunk around her squealing tot, lift it and deposit it on the bank, where it trotted around in small circles of bewilderment. ‘I suppose you’re sorry you’re not filming this,’ said Denis, master of understatement to the last. But I had already decided that I would never mention what we had missed getting on film, and until now I never have. It might have sounded like bitterness.
The film camera is an instrument for creating rain. In Kenya we got lucky with the weather and I did not have to learn this lesson, but it had already become apparent to me that time was expensive. If you did not have a plan B ready for when plan A went wrong, you would be wasting money at a rate that the people supplying it would be bound to notice. A grasp of this fact is the beginning of realism. There are other artistic fields in which you can be creative without being realistic. In poetry there will always be a Dylan Thomas, and he will often do great things, even while borrowing more money than he earns, breaking his bargains, drinking the pub dry, pissing in your fireplace and wrecking every life with which he comes into close contact. But when film or television cameras are involved, you can’t lead a bohemian existence even for a week. Flaubert’s rule – live like a bourgeois, think like a demigod – applies rigidly. Against my own profligate nature, I was already learning to be parsimonious with my energy. It’s half the secret.
The other half, of course, is to seize an opportunity. I was getting better at that too. It was a firm part of our plan that all my commentary would be done later in voice-over, with no ‘pieces to camera’ on the spot. This principle had been hatched mainly at my initiative, and sprang from my belief that the walk-and-talk was not only something that I was no good at, but something that no normal human being looked sane doing. David Attenborough got away with it when he was walking towards you out of the desert while explaining that the erosion of the topsoil was due to the agricultural policies of the Roman Empire and then a 150,000-ton oil tanker crossed the screen behind him in the same shot, thereby encouraging the viewer to suspect the hidden presence of the Suez Canal. But without the oil tanker he would have looked exactly like a man walking for no reason except to prove that he could. I wanted to do most of my talking over the finished film, which could be cut together far more tightly in the absence of long filmed speeches that had to be preserved no matter what. But this future flexibility entailed a strict discipline of getting plenty of coverage at the top and tail of each sequence, so that there would be space to add the links. These bread-and-butter shots can be boring for young directors, most of whom fancy themselves as Federico Fellini’s natural heir. Such journeywork can even be boring to the cameraman, so you have to get him on side, employing gifts of diplomacy that did not come naturally to me. I learned them because I had to. Many a film has been ruined by lack of coverage. Luckily Mike was a workhorse as well as a daredevil. His only real drawback was that he spoke Cockney rhyming slang as if he assumed that I would understand what he was saying.
‘Can you,’ he asked, ‘just hold it there while we get some light on your boat?’ The time I took to figure out that ‘boat’ was short for ‘boat race’, which rhymed with ‘face’, could prove important if the other face in the shot belonged to a buffalo sticking its head out three feet away as we toiled uphill in the Land Cruiser on a bumpy track cut through thick bush. The shock of suddenly seeing the buffalo’s foaming nostrils and mad red eyes from so very close is with me still. It was like turning over a Sunday colour supplement and finding, on its cover, Donatella Versace after her latest encounter with the collagen. I yelped as if stung. Denis reassured me by saying that the buffalo needed room to run before it did any damage. ‘Give him a bit of space and he could take the engine out of this car.’ My boat turned white, like a yacht.
Onward to Kilimanjaro, where we camped out in the open with the mountain for a backdrop: a cyclorama three miles high. The mountain had Hemingway’s legend stamped all over it. It might as well have featured a giant sculpture of his head, like Mount Rushmore. Possibly as an elegiac closing scene for the film, we did a campfire interview in which Denis evoked the departed spirit of the Great White Writer. Denis did the old boy proud, but while the magazines were being changed he let slip a few things that would have been dynamite on film. ‘He couldn’t shoot straight to save his life, so he had to wait until the animal was practically on him. Quite daunting if you were standing next to him.’ Also it turned out that the master of language had never learned nearly as much Swahili as he liked to pretend. Since Green Hills of Africa is peppered with Swahili words, this was hot news. Why hadn’t he learned it? ‘He wasn’t a very good listener. Not like you.’ This was the only time that I had been called a good listener and I took it as one of the biggest compliments of my life. From that moment I redoubled my efforts as Kungu’s star pupil, and the time soon came when we spoke together in his language as a matter of course. Our conversations were a bit elementary from my side, but they were good for my brain tissue. An awful pity that Swahili is so short of literature, or it would be with me still.
There is a lot more that I could say about my safari but at this rate I would need ten more volumes just to recount my memories of filming in twenty years’ worth of foreign places. I have gone into detail about the Kenya film because it provided a foundation course in which I had to learn an awful lot in a hurry. One of the things I learned was the importance of leaving your prejudices at home. The story of the connection between the Europeans and the native Africans had seemed cut and dried in Nairobi: it had looked like no connection at all. But when Denis and Kungu were together you saw something else. It wasn’t a master–servant relationship. They were colleagues, working by agreement. Denis taught me a wonderful Swahili expression which had been much employed by the white masters of the old days. It could be translated as ‘Why? Because bwana says so.’ But he also said that it was an expression he himself had never used in earnest, and that it would have been all over for him in Africa if he had ever felt the need.
Near the end of the shoot, there was a day when I climbed out of the old Dakota that had brought us from
Kichwa Tembo and I got the news from someone on the ground that the BBC had just announced the death of Philip Larkin. That prince of poets had always been very kind to me and I found the sense of loss hard to take. Kungu asked me what was wrong. Running out of words, I told him that a wise old man, a man who spoke beautifully, was dead. Kungu taught me the phrase for when you miss someone. When I left Denis and Kungu to lead the rest of their honest lives under a succession of corrupt governments, I often missed them both. But I never got in touch. Filming is like that: you get to know people well, and then you don’t see them again. And I’m afraid I’m like that: I get busy somewhere else, and nothing connects or continues except in my work, where I put the care and patience that I should have given to real life. It’s a character flaw, and filming gave it a licence. Already, back there at the beginning, I was wondering how long I could keep at it before everything else fell apart. I would have liked to have been in England when Larkin died. On the plane back to London I began a poem about him. In fact I wrote it to him, as an address to his ghost, and I included a lot of detail about Africa, which he had never seen. When you have a vision as powerful as his, of course, you can see the world without leaving home, but some of us are lesser spirits.
5. PAUSE TO REGROUP
Back in Cambridge with my family, I strove to atone for my recent absence by telling stories of Africa at the dinner table. To my disappointment, my rare carved wooden rhinoceros aroused only a mild interest, although it is still there today, looming in a small way on the shelf under one of the windows to the back garden. But I scored a hit with my evocations of the charging elephant and the narrow escape from the killer crocodile. People under a certain age go for that kind of thing. Phrases that I planned to use in my commentary were duly tested. I also learned, to my surprise, that a family holiday was due. But first I had to edit the film. I took my tested phrases with me into the editing room and soon found that very few of them fitted. Since electronic editing was still in the process of being invented, all the footage was hanging there in the form of strips of celluloid, a forest of potential. But after the relevant bits had been loaded into the editing table it soon became apparent that several scenes I had thought were in the bag barely existed. The elephant charged and I ran, but we were in different shots, so I might as well have been running on Dartmoor. The crocodile charged and I ran again, but again there was nothing to prove that these things were happening on the same day or even the same continent. It was nobody’s fault except mine. I should have realized the necessity of staying close to the camera and keeping it behind me, so that it could pan easily with the animal while keeping me in the frame. Off to the side, the camera would miss the connection. Richard was in charge of the editing and tried hard to convince me that kicking myself was useless.
Eventually I cooled down and started to earn my money by writing a narrative that would tie the fragments together. Most of the raw material was impressive, even beautiful, but I had been counting on the moments of action that made me look all set to take off at high speed when danger threatened. When jumping with the Masai I looked sufficiently silly, but I had always thought that the real story lay in the moments when I was included in the picture along with the prospect of death, so that the viewers would share my impulse to hit the ground running. Those moments weren’t there. Richard was very good at getting me beyond what I had always thought and into the realm of fact. He had a phrase, ‘Let’s see if we miss it,’ which made it easier to take the disappointment when a sequence that had required a lot of hard work to shoot had to be cut out. All the scenes set in Nairobi hit the floor. I didn’t mind losing those, but when I said that I was sorry we had ever shot them in the first place Richard had the right reply: they would have come in handy if the animals had been rained off. It was a long, hard edit but the results were pretty good. Next time they would be better. There had to be a next time because already I was convinced that writing words to pictures was the most fun that a writer could have when not being handed an Academy Award by Sophia Loren.
One principle I had already grasped was that the words could punctuate the pictures and vice versa. Measuring sentences to fit a sequence or even a single shot, I relished the freedom of not having to say that a charging rhino was a charging rhino. I could say that its horn would end up in an aphrodisiac cocktail glass in Hong Kong if it didn’t end up in me first. Windows of opportunity opened up one after the other. It was an interplay. This principle came in handy when we started planning a weekly variety show composed of interviews, with a top section reviewing the news. To go with some footage we had of the Soviet leaders reviewing the May Day parade in Red Square, I wrote a sample fantasy and Richard went for it.
This frivolous approach to world affairs would not have impressed my fellow regulars at the Friday lunch. At various locations, the Friday lunch was still going on and would do so for some years yet, but increasingly the demands of our respective careers were pulling it apart. When the up and coming are still in the early stages of their ascent, they cling together for warmth, but higher up the mountain, even though it gets colder, they start going their separate ways to the top. They just get too busy. It was our timetables, and not our different views, that put the first cracks in the old camaraderie. Different views there had always been. Kingsley Amis regarded James Fenton as an agent of the Viet Cong, an impression that Kingsley had perhaps gained from the fact that Fenton had arrived in Saigon riding on a North Vietnamese tank. Their contrary opinions did not stop them making each other laugh, and even when they weren’t laughing they had the common background of a deep knowledge of English poetry throughout its history. Martin Amis was of the opinion that the mere existence of nuclear weapons was enough to rot our minds with subconscious dread. I agreed with Robert Conquest that nothing except nuclear weapons could have stopped the US and the USSR from going to war. Ian McEwan and Mark Boxer also thought that atomic bombs were bad things and that peace was a principle. I believed that peace was just a desirable state of affairs. Christopher Hitchens thought I was a propagandist for global nuclear war. I gave chapter and verse to prove that I had got my concept of an armed truce from Raymond Aron. Terry Kilmartin, who had known Aron personally and translated some of his major works into English, said that I was overdoing my admiration for a philosopher who had after all, um, ah, ended up ‘a bit right wing’. I said I was still a leftie. Peter Porter said I was certainly to the right of him. Russell Davies, speaking in the voice of Sir John Betjeman, said that only the Queen’s opinion counted. The clashes of opinion were mighty, but the rule of the table was that you couldn’t fight your corner without making it amusing. The ability to quote helped there. Allusions flew like paper bullets. Craig Raine, modelling a hairstyle based on an explosion in an armchair, was so hard to interrupt that I wanted to stab him with a fork. To judge from the way he was waving his own fork, the feeling was mutual. Piers Paul Reid, secure in his Catholic faith, got cooler as the quarrels heated up. He was a Jesuit at a conference of evolutionary scientists, relishing the shades of folly. Julian Barnes, as has always been his wont, said just enough, and it was always good. Otherwise he sat stonily amused, like an Easter Island statue watching a restaurant scene in Mr Hulot’s Holiday. With the talk as the main dish of the feast, nobody noticed what they ate, and Ian Hamilton, as usual, never even ate it. He just smoked and drank simultaneously. Smoke was part of the landscape, as on a misty moor haunted by voices.
Having realized that some of my best friends were still slow to abandon the notion that the totalitarian regimes in the East, despite their impeccable record of victimizing the common people they were notionally in business to protect, had somehow questioned the validity of liberal democracy in the West, I found myself writing with more urgency on the subject of the totalitarian mentality and its implications. My thesis was that true intellectuals in the West, or indeed anywhere, would have to attain a clear view of the past if they were to work beneficially in the present. My own view of the past was
expanded considerably by a recently acquired ability to read Russian. Helped along by the sheer beauty of the language, I had gradually elevated my level of reading somewhat beyond the level of cat-sat-on-the-mat. A big help in coping with the initial stage was that the one thing the Soviet Union was really good at was publishing cardboard-covered teaching aids full of pictures of cats sitting on mats. Since Russian is the kind of language where there is a different verb for cats sitting down slowly, cats sitting down suddenly and cats just sitting there, it is very easy to have your heart broken before you get to the far edge of square one, so I had some reason to bless the Kremlin. But now that I could read the dissident and exile texts in their full range, other reasons for admiring the regime were looking thin on the ground.
Christopher Hitchens, whose sense of humour was of such a quality that he could quote from P. G. Wodehouse and make him a lot funnier than he was on the page, was less cheerful when I quoted Lenin’s written opinion that the party must rule by terror. Reacting sharply to the suggestion that the foundations of state terror were already well laid before Stalin took over, the Hitch still saw merit in the revolutionary tradition. Later in his coruscating life as a commentator he modified that view, but at the time he had no trouble in making me feel like an incipient Tory for placing my faith in historical institutions: it was not, after all, as if I, with my relatively poor memory, could easily quote Edmund Burke in my defence, whereas the Hitch, who had a memory like a library, could quote Tom Paine until the cows came home and turned the milking shed into a commune. But I think I was rather better at remembering the words of the dissident Russian sociologist Alexandr Zinoviev, who said that any society which placed collective rights above individual rights was a lawless society, and that was that. The words, in the original language, had cost me almost as much trouble to read as they had cost him to write, so I was unlikely to forget them. (When I met him one day in Geneva shortly after he had been expelled from his homeland, he complimented me on how I had quoted him in an article but asked me why I had found it necessary to make the point. ‘Does not everyone think that here?’ Bad guess, tovarisch.) Thus armoured, I could persist in believing that a naivety based in reality was better than a sophistication based on a fantasy, and I pressed on with my intention of expressing what I felt in the form of connected thought.