Ifs and Buts

Copyright

Introduction

More than fifty years ago, the racing driver Mike Hawthorn used to write (or have written for him) a weekly column in Beaverbrook’s Sunday Express. In one multiple choice quiz, he asked what was most dangerous: bald tyres, lack of a rear-view mirror, defective brake lights or exceeding the speed limit. The value of seat belts did not arise; no one had yet invented them. If they had been available, Hawthorn might not have died in his Jaguar, in 1959, while exceeding the speed limit, on the wet Guildford by-pass. As it was, he declared that lack of a rear-view mirror was more dangerous than anything else on the list.

Looking Back was the title of a memoir written by Somerset Maugham in the late evening of his ninety-one years. It was generally assumed that Max Beaverbrook, had put him up to it, since the book was serialised in the Sunday Express. It included what seemed outspokenly sour memories of Maugham’s wife, Syrie. They sold copies at the time, but would be mild today. Syrie’s sad fault was that she went on loving Willie when he could no longer stand the sight of her. As a result, she ‘made me scenes’, not what a writer needs when he is trying to make his own. In fact, the main reason for Maugham’s aversion was that she belonged to the wrong sex.

His reputation for man-of-the-worldliness was dented by the spleen which he unleashed in Looking Back, but a succession of biographies, the most recent by Selena Hastings, proves that ‘the Old Party’ – a title he assumed when hardly more than sixty years old – has retained his interest for the public. Whether or not, as Hastings advertised, his sins were scarlet, his books continue to be read, although rarely ‘taught’. Maugham’s connection with the theatre (and later the cinema), and Virginia Woolf’s sneer, echoed by Frieda Lawrence, that he ‘wrote for money’, have put him into the category of writers who excite both envy, for their success, and scorn, because they are assumed to have pandered to vulgar appetites in order to gain it.

In the first volume of Personal Terms, I noted how I went to see Willie, as insiders called him and I never did, in the autumn of 1954. I knew little of his personal life and cared less. Of Human Bondage had incited me to write fiction. I had been working on my own first novel, about the rise of a proto rock star, in a small hotel bedroom in Juan-les-Pins, on the day that I took the bus to St Jean Cap Ferrat in order to have tea with him at the Villa Mauresque.

I still envy the facility with which, when young, some people gain access to impressive company. Biographies frequently tell us how, within a few days of arriving in a strange city, their subjects have met the reigning artists or intellectuals. I lack the nerve to rap on the doors of people who regularly appear in indexes, even though I might have learnt, from Maugham’s amiable response to my letter out of the blue, that the famous can often be as lonely or curious as they are remote. When Maugham, always the Edwardian gentleman, replied to my letter, in his own ‘claw’, as Churchill put it, he remarked that it was ‘undated’ (he did so only because he wondered if I would ever receive his inviting answer). Which of Shelley’s ‘antique courtesies’, is now more dated than letter-writing, using pen and ink?

Only the finest prig denies himself the facility of e-mails, the promptness of despatch, the speed of reply; but there is a systematic frigidity in electronic correspondence. The date is supplied automatically, but today’s writers tend to omit introductory endearments and proceed, usually with platitudinous directness, to whatever the matter is. E-mails have no individual script; they are the medium for the toady, the huckster and the importunate: it has never been easier to quiz authorities.

When I went to tea with Maugham, he was wearing a fingerless leather glove on his bent right hand. After six decades of writing with pen and ink, he was an incurable sufferer from writer’s cramp. He might have adopted Henry James’s late habit of dictating his fiction to a secretary, but he never did. As far as Maugham was concerned, the lesson of the Master was that more was altogether too much. He told me that he had written all the books which he had ever had in mind to publish. Writing had become a physical sport to which he could no longer easily turn his hand.

As for his notebooks, the 1949 epitome was all that was ever set up in print. Most of his private papers went up in the smoke of the bonfires which he and his last secretary, Alan Searle, took pleasure in lighting in the garden of the Villa Mauresque. Selena Hastings makes Searle into the villain of Maugham’s twilight years, mainly on account of the legal wrangles involved in the division of his estate. I found him charming, patiently attentive company for a sad man who, it seemed to me, was older than anyone could ever choose to be. Did Searle, as Tom Moore did with Byron’s diaries, throw into the fire letters or manuscripts which could have ruined, or enhanced, their author’s reputation with posterity? Selena Hastings’ hot revelations of what we largely knew already suggest that it is unlikely that anything was destroyed which publishing scoundrels have failed to glean. Remembering what happened to Oscar, Maugham feared that his homosexuality would come out and do him harm; it did, and it didn’t. As Willie might have said of anyone’s secrets but his own, what does it matter?

I am now close to the age which the Old Party was when I went to visit him. I was then twenty-three. ‘You have plenty of time,’ he said. Now I don’t. It is one of the small graces still left to us that we do not, in the normal course of things, know how long we have left. It is just as well. A friend of ours, a cheerful ex-ballerina who often cooked elaborate meals for her guests, was told, when in her seventies, that she had oesophageal cancer. She could expect to live only a few more months. She was filled with dread. She waited for the symptoms to get worse. She ceased to entertain or to go out. The symptoms did not get worse and, almost four years later, she is still alive. Either her tumour went into remission or it was misdiagnosed. Meanwhile, the joy has gone out of her life. Denied what she feared, she has become a Sibylline hypochondriac, possessed by death.

My father used to say, after he had read my latest volume, ‘I hope you have yet to write your best book.’ His less than kind hope is now mine. I am aware that my notebooks contain more ideas that I can ever develop, more plots and characters than are likely to be plumped into full-size fictions, and yet I go on adding ideas to them. If I say again that I never intended to print what I have squirrelled into those cahiers from Joseph Gibert, it will be taken as evidence that that was always my intention; but it is true.

I go back to them without knowing what I shall find. The stories in this volume which Rebecca West told me concerning Willie Maugham are, for all I know, common knowledge to insiders, but I had entirely forgotten, in particular, the one about Syrie and the handsome Lord Lovat. Retrospection is, I daresay, a function of advancing mortality: one averts one’s eyes from the narrowing prospect ahead and finds pleasure, and sometimes treasure, in the blue remembered hills of the past.

Since this volume, like the last, covers a short span of years, it may seem comic for me to say that I have been rigorous in shortening the original text. Dr Johnson’s advice remains sound: he told a young writer that he should go through his work and, when he came upon something he considered particularly fine, he should strike it out. I have also honoured Eric Korn’s suggestion, in his review of Ticks and Crosses, to omit all further references to family holidays.

It would not have surprised me if he had also proposed that I say no more about Jews, with or without ‘the’, but there I should not have obliged him. I have, however, cut as deeply as I can in that department, without falsifying what seems important. It has come home to me that, as was said by Mr Eliot (whose lack of anti-Semitism is so often applauded these days), ‘the jew is underneath the lot’. I grant that his minuscule j may be less an affectation than a reference to standard French usage, for instance by Charles Maurras, whom Eliot always admired; but then the reference itself just might be an affectation.

Korn is an antiquarian bookseller, whose main service to the Times Literary Supplement is to deploy his recherché knowledge in order to put down people who dare to be a little too like him. In Ticks and Crosses, I mentioned, in a passage concerning a family holiday in Crete, how I had misunderstood the price, in drachmae, demanded by a boatman who took us the few hundred metres to the small island of Mochlos. I thought he said ‘dtheka’ (ten) when, as it turned out, he wanted ‘ekaton’, ten times that much. Korn chose to puncture my (small) delusions of Hellenic competence by saying that the exchange proved that I could not have had even the rudimentary Greek to which I pretended.

I took petty pleasure in writing him a two-page letter in Greek, in my own claw, in which I pointed out that ‘eka’ was common to both words and that, in the toothless mouth of a Greek oarsman, one could indeed, and did indeed, be mistaken for the other, not least because the larger number was, in those days, an excessive one. Korn’s spidery reply was more amiable than his review. It was, however, obvious that he had not been able to understand anything much in my letter apart from the fact that it took exception to his sarcasm.

I found it incredible, back in the 1950s, when Mr Maugham told me that he no longer read reviews. Now that I am almost as old as he was then, I am at least much less interested in what is said about my work, although I do not object to having flattery thrust upon me. A good rule is not to look at reviews until at least several months have passed; a year or two is recommended. It cannot be denied that one of the consolations of seniority is to find that you are still a target for reproach or parody. It warms the heart to be accused, as I have been quite recently, both of pretentiousness and of ‘selling out’. I might wish, in view of the price of educating our grandchildren, that I had done the latter with more profit, but one cannot have everything. This volume, with its mixture of pensées and showbiz, portraits and caricatures, does little to refute either charge.

It is possible that if I had not written movies, I might have written better novels. No doubt there would have been more of them, but I do not think that the influence of the cinema on fiction has always been pernicious. I have a notion that the jagged form of The Waste Land was as much a tribute to movies as to The Golden Bough: it even has a mute soundtrack, weiala, Shakespeheerian rag and all. A novelist can do worse that to read his or her dialogue aloud and listen to how it plays.

I should never wish not to have had the pleasure of rehearsing with actors and hearing my words on their lips (no one has done it better than Tom Conti). It remains chastening to look back and realise how much time and ingenuity I spent on movie scripts which never got the green light. A New Wife, which features intermittently in these pages, was only one of the hits which were expected to bring me fame and fortune until circumstance aborted them. If Diane Keaton and Al Pacino had agreed to do the picture after a director had committed to it, instead of demanding the right to select him, I might have been able to live my imminent eighties in a Malibu house with a deck overlooking the shore. But they did not, and I shan’t. Perhaps, in that respect at least, I have been luckier than I know.

FREDERIC RAPHAEL

2011

1978

10.5.78. In 1950s Cambridge, ‘The Critics’ on the radio had a cachet unmatched by any of today’s pundits. Hence my silly pride when Philip French, who produces Critics’ Forum, the current version, offered me three weeks at the end of March. Since he had just been appointed the Observer’s film critic, he consigned me to Leonie Cohn, once the mistress of Herbert Read (or was it Henry Reed?). As a producer, she proved the blight that I was never born for; exigent and plaintive, the grim crone haunted every event we covered to check for truancy. My stint done, I had a feeling of liberation from a childhood appetite. How nice that there are some things one will not regret never doing again!

Buñuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire was the single worthy target of our attentions; its masterliness was perhaps too grateful a joy, so badgered had we been by the protracted paltriness of the RSC’s Henry VI. One performance was of such lock-jawed amateurishness that my colleagues clubbed together to drub its perpetrator. True, Young Clifford had taken an unconscionable time a-dying, the end of an arrow protruding from his epaulette at an angle unlikely to cause a graze; but there was something so vulturous in the desire of the glee club of Richard Cork, Alex Walker and others to nail the sorry actor that I said, ‘Hasn’t he got enough of a problem trying to make a career when he has no talent at all? Must we broadcast his ineptitude to the whole parish?’ They insisted that it was their duty to name names where an artist had failed. In that case, I said, I should make a point of attacking Terry Hands. It had to be as much the director’s as the actor’s fault when a scene was that badly played. Once I threatened to zero in on someone they might meet in chummy circles, not a single just word was uttered about young Cliff.

Hospitality. Christopher Ricks jumped up to pass the cheese as if involved in an audition for Second Waiter.

At the TLS spring party, Tom Conti was confronted with a critical mass, all of whom, he told me, ‘clearly wanted to fuck, and couldn’t’. One of them said, re TV reviewing, that it was enjoyable to look at something ‘with hostility’. The same man added (after a wince from Tom?) that he liked nothing better than to admire something. They all want to be high court judges without ever having been on the circuit.

He declares his love for his wife by selling her scribbling services to newspapers and magazines. Having wound her up and set her to work, he procured her the means by which she can now afford to despise him. That nocturnal run down a steep hill into an unseen brick wall seems to have ended her youth. Why did she marry him? Because she had heard such a lot about him that she hoped that love could turn the famous trick for her. What is more heartless than callow ambition?

11.5.78. Aldo Moro has been murdered. ‘Death,’ they said in an early bulletin, ‘was not instantaneous.’ When we lived in Vigna Clara, Moro was the head of Democrazia Cristiana. With that blaze of white in his ebony hair, he had the mournful pride of one who knew where bodies were buried. There was an air of woeful amusement about him, as if he mistrusted a society willing to vest power in him. His interment, in an inconspicuous cemetery in his native Puglia, marks the end of the affair. No Regulus, he had begged his ‘friends’ to make a deal to save him from ‘execution’ by the Red Brigades. In his long despair (after his kidnap, he spent more than fifty days expecting death), he could have bet that his colleagues would never separate cant from sincerity. That they should not negotiate, but advocate the stoic course (the stoicism had to be his), was of a piece with the callousness that had made them, and him, what they were. When had any of them distinguished the interests of Italy from their own? Terror led him to secede, in those last desperate messages, from Party solidarity. His only loyalty then was to his family. When he denounced the governing clique, he confessed the futility of his own career.

12.5.78. My father dwindles away in the dismal surroundings of the Royal Hospital and Home for Incurables. For several years, he served on the Committee of Management. I attended a meeting, in Mayfair, when they were considering a change of name. In the event, they persisted with the unsubtle but purse-opening version.

The patients are not all mentally damaged; but most suffer from the irreversible consequences of meningitis or accidents or congenital defect. The majority of the staff consists of aliens. If some are amiable, few have any sense of what the patients once were or might have been. Cedric, on the second floor, shares a room with a man, forever recumbent, who believes that every day is his first in the hospital. He has been there for fifteen years. He is addressed by his first name, Ralph. The voice is raised when anyone needs to tell him what food is on his tray and where positioned. He eats lying down, muttering disjointed syllables to which my father, his bed at right angles to Ralph’s, behind a curtain, pays no attention. He accepts the presence of a man with whom he can never communicate with the gloomy patience with which a boarding school boy had to tolerate whomever he found in his dormitory. Ralph is preferable to a bully or a bore.

Cedric has not changed; he has shrivelled. As he becomes more helpless, he gets less help. Do they really take away his bell if he rings in the night? He is not so much ill-used as despised, in an impersonal way. His appearance slowly worsens. I found fragments of egg in the creases of his pyjamas, his blanket and his sheet. He goes home, he hopes, every weekend; but he dreads the exception when some malfunction will make it ‘more sensible’ (in my mother’s phrase) to remain in situ for the weekend. He must never sneeze nor confess to a sore throat lest his leave be cancelled. His best day is Thursday, since it precedes Friday. As soon as he is in his own home, he is happy; except that being there is the prelude to being returned to his cell. We have tried to persuade Irene to have him home again for good. I will pay for the necessary nursing, gladly. No: she coped for years, she says, until the death of her own ninety-three-year-old mother, which was accelerated by the crass decision of a mercenary GP to send her for surgery to her back. In hospital, Fanny fell out of an unguarded bed, broke her hip and died, slowly, in gasping terror.

My mother then disembarrassed herself of my father too. He was clever enough to foresee that she would. Fanny’s presence had prompted demonstrations of conjugal worthiness which she was no longer obliged to mount. The old lady had also been the scapegoat on whom she and Cedric could vent common frustrations. The bugbear removed, their alliance lost its butt. Beetle says that if Irene loved Cedric she would have him at home. Did he treat her badly or has he loved her too well? He has loved her slavishly; but in too masterly a fashion. He was unkind enough to do nothing with which she can reproach him. She might have been liberated by cruelties he never visited on her. Who is less free than someone for whom everything possible has been done?

To demand and, by fidelity, to merit virtue in a wife is to imprison her. The door need never be locked; she cannot open it. Conjugal love puts a cloche over its object; it is pampered and embargoed from its own vitality.

Sophistication implies aptitude for deceit.

Deception is the spice of erotic delight; there is limited happiness in having nothing to hide.

In the train going up to London, I frowned at the fluent quasi-intelligibility of three ladies, one of them the very instance of a seaside landlady. Chapel-going, round-hatted, they chatted across the aisle in a language almost familiar. Then I remembered an advertisement for Esperanto I had seen in Venice. The Latinate forms interspersed with the Anglo-Saxon ‘yes’ meant that identikit confection had to be the right answer. Flemish, French and English, with no language in common, they talked mainly of health, and its price. They had substituted the ability to talk for serious conversation. Plain speaking could not have been plainer. Proud of their system, they recommended it in terms of the money that would be saved, at the UN and elsewhere, if universalism replaced the many tongues which jostled for audition. They had difficulty, they told me, recruiting the young; they preferred variety to the pursuit of a common tongue. Esperantists have a programme of salvation without metaphysics, an easy target for satirists such as Graham Greene. They dream of a cosmic bungalow that reaches to the heavens; their sky is at first-floor level.

Just such a simplicity of humane purpose may have been behind Steiner’s alleged catastrophe at Babel. Might it be that when the happy band of masons were building that tower, united in practical banality, some malcontent sensed the need for conflict, depth, diversity, duplicity? What became obvious at Babel was the mounting dreariness of uniformity, course on course. The heterogeneity with which we are said to have been cursed made progress and nuance possible.

‘All right, my love?’ she said to him, when in the dull dungeon of his unattended room she knew everything to be wrong. He dared not protest, lest he be docked of his sole comfort, the weekend for which he endures the weekday calvary. Should he risk the remission of his resurrection? He agrees to be persuaded that she needs her time without him. Would he ever have delivered her to similar anguish? She has exiled him from his own flat, for which years of petty labour and ignominy (when he was demoted and degraded in the service of Trevor Powell) have paid and paid again. She never, in their whole married life, earned a penny. Perhaps he would not have wished it. She now sits and sleeps alone in a three-bedroom flat, paid for by his pension, and hesitates to spend money on his care for fear that, when he dies and the pension is halved, she will not be able to maintain herself in the style to which he has accustomed her.

She is surrounded by a sorority of widows. While they are generous, after a fashion, to my father (they volunteer for weekend bridge as warders do for chess in the condemned cell), they are glad to induct Irene into the sexless world where unwanted, unwanting women live. Because of his Parkinson’s, he can no longer hold thirteen cards in his hand. He racks them in an upturned scrubbing brush.

The pitilessness of vengeance lies in its patience. The unforgiving are never so implacable as when they are willing to bide their time.

An American woman proves her femininity by devoted contempt for her mate. Avarice trumps sensuality; it is more bankable. Fidelity in the flesh is the cover for a dissidence more callous than adultery. As Michael Ayrton told us, it is a chastening punishment to have an implacably faithful wife.

Joan A. There is nothing she would sooner keep up than appearances. Reality, what good is that to a girl? Modesty is to her what nakedness is to the exhibitionist: her compulsion is to hide every natural thing. She has used this skill to attract and to inhibit men; an American girl of her day might use her sexuality to enchant others but should never yield to or enjoy it herself. Forced to prudery by dread of the desire which her own body excited, she grew to be the chaperone of her own charms.

The widows, with their pensioned greyness, cross a slow bridge of sighs, a little after the men who have been their victims and their oppressors; and