As one essay succeeded another, I found I was getting better at it. In the field of discursive, expository writing, practice helps. Time brings fluency, or at least the appearance of it. With experience and accumulated knowledge – I was still reading a great deal, a habit I retain today, although my always unreliable memory has begun to weaken – the actual practice of writing got more difficult, but that was a good sign. (Thomas Mann defined the writer as someone for whom writing is harder than it is for other people.) As a reward for persistence, the finished product became less clotted, more transparent, and therefore easier for the reader to remember from paragraph to paragraph, the unit on which I based my style. (Writers who compose only in sentences, even if the sentences are vivid, soon strain the reader’s patience: sensible people are not long amused if they are flicked repeatedly with a wet towel.) The relative success of my first novel Brilliant Creatures didn’t distract me from my ambition as a factual writer. Some of its reviewers thought that a television performer had no business writing a novel of any kind, but there were others who approved, even if they had to do it through gritted teeth: always the best kind of approval to have. In both Britain and Australia, the blessedly literate educated reading public made up their own minds, and the book, after its honeymoon period as a bestseller in both hardback and paperback, went on to sell more than a quarter of a million copies in the course of its life.
But if I could publish Brilliant Creatures again now, I would have to annotate its contemporary references. It was a commentary on the times. Even in the first flush of its vogue I never thought of myself as a career novelist. I sat down every week with people who could do that better. I knew that the best use of fantasy in my writing was to make factual statement entertaining. What changed for me, in those years, was my notion of the range of fact over which entertainment was possible. It could go wider, if not deeper. My first two books of essays, The Metropolitan Critic and At the Pillars of Hercules, had got me somewhere. The essays I was writing now got me further. A few years later I collected them in my third volume of essays, From the Land of Shadows, the first of my books to make my political position explicit. There were many people, some of them uncomfortably close to me, who were ready to insist that my political position was somewhat compromised by the physical position of Japanese game-show contestants staked out on a beach for the crabs, but I was determined to keep going with my balancing act.
It was a balancing act performed on the run. The weekly studio show consumed a lot of energy even before it got to air. It was hard enough just to sell the thing. Jeremy Isaacs, not yet equipped with a knighthood, was at that time still in charge of Channel 4, which he had created from scratch. He agreed to meet me and Richard at the Garrick Club. It was a club rule that you weren’t allowed to do business at the dining table. You weren’t even allowed to take a piece of paper out of your pocket. When I got elected to the Garrick after the usual wait of several years in the queue, I cravenly allowed its prestige to impress me, and for a long time the place came in useful if I wanted to hire a room for an anniversary party or something like that, but eventually I had enough sense to ask myself what the hell I, of all people, was doing in a club that did not admit women unless they were on a leash. I saw a bunch of sozzled old men camped under the grand staircase, boring the daylights out of each other, and I had a sudden urge never to be one of their number. So I resigned. Hardly anyone ever resigns from the Garrick. I know that my friend Tom Stoppard did after he figured out that he was going there only once a year and therefore paying several hundred pounds in membership fees for a single lunch, but hardly anybody else has ever been on the exit list. Most luminaries are on the entry list, and once they get in they stay there until they have to be carried out in a black plastic bag. But that’s exactly what’s wrong with the place. It’s essentially a well-decorated nursing home.
At the time of this meeting, however, I was still susceptible to the aura of an inner sanctum. Isaacs, whom I now count as a friend and neighbour, fitted right into the Garrick’s trad decor. He did quite a lot of quoting in the original Latin. But he listened, and he bought the show. It was still a paper project and we couldn’t even show him the paper, but he had imagination. This was the man who gave Verity Lambert the green light to make The Naked Civil Servant, which remains, to this day, the single most adventurous television programme I have ever seen. Like Sir Michael Balcon at Ealing or Lord Bernstein at Granada, Jeremy was one of that great line of British Establishment Jews who had been cultivating the nation’s artistic garden since the heyday of Benjamin Disraeli. It was not yet apparent that the line would soon lose its confidence and finally die out. What Jeremy said, went. He gave us his word and we knew it was as good as gold. Many years later, when he was in charge of the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden, he took the word of a BBC producer on the assumption that it was as trustworthy as his, and the new boys stitched him up a treat: o tempora, he no doubt said echoing Cicero, o mores. What times, and what customs. But on the day he met with us the times had not yet changed: the grandee had spoken, and we were in like Flynn. There was still a lot of work coming up, however, so the family holiday would be a welcome break.
6. ALPINE IDYLL
I was lucky it didn’t break my neck. For several years the family had gone skiing in Italy, mainly at Bormio and Madonna di Campiglio. At Madonna there was a ski instructor called Italo who was much loved by our daughters and who taught me a lot about life, if never enough about skiing. Taking me out for a solo lesson, he carved a turn on a slope covered with fresh snow and explained the resulting sculpture using a ski-pole as a pointer, like an art critic decoding a doodle by Brancusi. The tiny amount of displaced snow at the start of the curve showed how the weight had been applied in a smooth progression as the knees were gradually bent to push the skis down. But then there was a symmetrically equivalent crescent indicating how the knees had been straightened with similar gradualness to complete the turn, thus maintaining the curve instead of its degenerating into a skid. Done this way, a completed turn would prepare for the next as the unweighted skis floated naturally into the fall line. Though my own turns continued to look like a demonstration of elementary ditch-digging, what he had shown me served as an ideal in my memory of how the application of effort should always be exactly measured: nothing by force, everything by logical progression. Too much disturbance in the medium was a sign of strain. The lesson is still with me today. It serves me like the passage in Johnny Weissmuller’s autobiography about how the essence of swimming the crawl is to relax the arm when it’s out of the water, so that it wastes no energy. Fully relaxed, it will fall into the water under its own weight, without a splash. The secret of composition in any form is the appropriate application of effort. The result is an aesthetic effect that should never be aimed at directly, but only reaped as the harvest of correct preparation. If skiing in Italy had always been like that, I could have gone home and written a sequel to Byron’s Don Juan or a companion volume to War and Peace. But at Bormio the whole family traumatized itself by following a less judicious instructor across the slope that had been prepared for the World Downhill Championship.
Trekking cross-country, we came to the edge of the championship slope about halfway up its initial precipice, where the competitors would be riding their hissing skis at full clip in the tuck. If the high-speed pista had been covered only with snow the view downward would still have been enough to chill the blood, but it had rained the previous night and the whole thing was a sheet of ice. We were about a mile up the mountain and we had this highway of frozen water diving past us. Everyone else edged their way across successfully to where the soft snow started again on the far side, but I was the one who lost his edges and started down like a crate of pig iron. As I approached the speed of sound, I could only just hear my instructor’s voice as he came streaking down after me crying ‘Joe! Joe! No, Joe!’ He called me Joe because he couldn’t manage the name Clive (no Italian can: it comes out as ‘Cleevay?
?? if you’re lucky), and he was yelling ‘Joe, stop! Stop, Joe!’ He had the English word for ‘stop’, but if I had known how to stop I wouldn’t have been on my way through the sound barrier on the road to certain death, would I, you dumb bastard? His next shouted imprecation was even more useless. ‘Too fast, Joe! Too fast!’ Luckily, when he got below me, he managed to get his skis in parallel under mine and bring us both to a halt only about a kilometre below where my family, with varying degrees of compassion, were watching the nominal head of the house revealing his fragility on the path to oblivion. Trembling all over in the nearest I have ever come to liquid fear, I vowed to shake the ice crystals from my heels and never ski in Italy again. Too many people knew me. As I started the long slog of chipping my way back up the glacier there were groups of people on either side of it taking photographs. One of them had a little film camera.
So we went to Davos, which is a bit more swish, and has many slopes kinder to the average skier, as part of the Swiss plan to send every visitor home happy. Even the black runs are less likely to get you killed, and on the red runs I fancied my style. My wife, naturally elegant in everything she does, was a neat skier, but she knew she was no Ann-Marie Moser-Pröll. With her sensible nature, she could take it when our elder daughter, thriving on the advantage of having started as an infant, turned into a notably graceful expert who could slalom down a mogul field like a gull through waves, and even our younger daughter collected a medal for going downhill faster than the other tots in her class, many of them wearing designer crash helmets bought by doting mothers in mink hats. I couldn’t take it at all. If you make your start, as I had, by doing stem turns, it is frustratingly hard to persist with a parallel turn when things get sticky: you revert to the stem, as a badly trained singer in a panic will revert to singing from the throat instead of the diaphragm. Still relying too often on brute force – always the main reason why men learn more slowly than women – I bullocked my way down a tight gully when I should have linked carved turns together. Instead of winding a silent, snaky trail down the fall line, I hauled myself noisily though a rough and unlovely zigzag. But there was a long, empty, straight and inviting slope ahead, ending about half a mile down with a set of apparently gentle bumps. With the rest of the family behind me, I went into full Franz Klammer mode and dived down hill with my speed building up all the time, like a P-47 leaving behind a flock of Me 109s. For almost a minute I just kept on going faster until there was no faster I could go. My velocity was far beyond the point where I could contemplate any kind of turn at all. But I didn’t have to turn. I just had to negotiate the first bump. I did, but I went airborne, nosed over and, after long enough in the air to mentally rewrite my will, hit the speeding snow with the full length of my body from nose to toe. The quick-reaction bindings worked all right and my skis came off in the advertised manner, but there was no such automatic mechanism to prevent the loops of my ski-poles from practically pulling my thumbs off even before I had come to a sobbing halt halfway up the next bump.
After what seemed an age the family accumulated around my crucified form, kindly asking if anything was broken. Judging from the pain, almost nothing wasn’t. After I reassembled myself I was ready to pretend that it had all been planned as a comic routine, but the agony in my thumbs prompted involuntary cries that rather spoiled the effect. Advised to turn myself in at the clinic and have my thumbs put in plaster, I typically preferred to wait until the piercing throb went away by itself. Decades later it still hasn’t.
This disinclination to get my medical problems attended to has been with me throughout my life. I would like to think that it sprang from a magnificent detachment from material concerns, but I can’t deny that there might be an element of fear. The doctor, like the dentist, is a judge of behaviour, and I quailed at the thought of being sentenced. Even if I had been blessed with moral courage, however, I would probably always have been inclined to just let things go. I lack the time. I have things to do. To the objection that procrastination is bound to cost me more time in the end than prompt attention would have cost me at the start, and that I would have got more done if I had been sensible, I can only answer: don’t you try reasoning with me. To be aware of the doomed struggles going on within my soul, however, gives me an edge as a commentator on politics and culture: I know from internal evidence that the capacity of the human mind to fool itself can be infinite. Turpitude, even when it looks energetic, almost always springs from mental sloth. When the real Berlin was burning all around him, Hitler went back to tinkering with the scale model of his dream Berlin which would never now be built. Rather than face facts, he took refuge in his art. Greater artists than him have done the same. Think of Charlie Parker, who must have known that drugs would kill him. He even knew that they made him play worse. In fact he said so. But he went on reaching for the needle anyway. You can see the whole picture and still miss its point.
For the last two days of the holiday I sat alone in the bar of our hotel, working on the opening chapters of a second novel, for which my provisional title was The Remake. Perhaps the spasms in my torn thumb muscles had gone to my brain, because I found myself planning a book which was bound to fail. It was going to be a novel comprising all the modernist narrative techniques that I most hated. Thus I would demonstrate that I cared nothing for my reputation. Looking back on the self-immolating folly of this intention, I can’t counsel firmly enough against the inadvisability of deliberately flouting elementary propriety, especially for anyone whose reputation is already under threat. Inviting your critics to come and get you is a very bad way of proving that you don’t care what they say. But I already knew all that, and planned to put it in the book. It would be a book about the centrifugal multiplicity of a personality. It would even be a book about the monumentality of its author’s stupidity. It would be a book with everything, which is rarely a good aim with which to start out, because it courts the employment of overloaded prose. Luckily there was a compelling reason to dictate that the opening lines of my suicide note would at least be carefully composed. With my right thumb useless, I had to hold my pen between the next two fingers. As a result, the dangers inherent in fluency were staved off, at the rate of about one paragraph per hour.
On the plane home to England, with my thumbs held erect, I distinguished myself by transferring the food on my plastic tray directly into my lap. It is always a bring-down when the people to whom you are most closely related can’t bear to watch you eat. When I went to the toilet I had a lot of trouble with the zip and what happened next was a farce, as if I was trying to aim an unlit cigar. In cold weather it still happens. Laugh, Pagliaccio. But the new studio show was waiting for me to join it, and the pain in my thumbs was soon sidelined by the pressure in my head. There was a lot to think about.
7. THE WEEKLY STINT
The bulk of the weekly show would consist of interviews, and there would be only two ways of doing those, well or badly. But the top of the show offered multiple ways to go wrong. I had seen too many talk-show hosts struggling in vain with an unpunctuated opening solo spot. Theoretically it should have been interrupted by the spontaneous laughter of the studio audience but all too often it had to be interrupted by enforced hysteria that sounded even more embarrassing than silence, as if Stalin was doing a stand-up routine for the Politburo and the penalty of not splitting one’s sides was to get it in the neck. What I wanted was an illustrated solo spot. Such a device had been a feature of American television talk shows since the earliest days. In my time as a TV critic I had mugged up on what the Americans did. Mugging up was harder then than now, because there were no discs or tapes, but when I was in New York on other business I would spend every spare hour surfing the channels on the TV set in my hotel room, looking for re-runs.
Partly I had wanted to confirm my suspicion that the British front-men were getting nowhere, but I would have done it anyway out of sheer admiration. The famous Johnny Carson always had plenty of props he could react to. In a later day, even D
ick Cavett, the best solo talker of the bunch, always had other stuff on screen so that he could snatch a few minutes being a voice without a face, and his face was a lot nicer than mine. Such ploys were already in a high state of development before British critics, who often had only a slight knowledge of American broadcasting history, credited David Letterman with inventing them. Invention almost always has a tradition behind it. As with poetry, all the revolutions are palace revolutions. Totally original innovators – Ernie Kovacs in the US, Spike Milligan and Kenny Everett in the UK – are very rare. I had no ambitions as a revolutionary. But there were new things I had seen done that I thought could be further developed.