Authors: Frederic Raphael
Beetle and I decided to do the romantic thing and have a midnight swim under the new moon. We walked the silvered road to Pampelonne and turned down through the vineyards, unseen dogs barking, to the long beach. We hesitated and then plunged in, and out, and ran towards our towels and then preferred each other and made love on the shining shingle. When we had finished, our wet skins were badged with the ocean’s small change. I may have quoted Ezra Pound’s line about ‘fish-scale roofs’. The excursion was unforgettable; but we did not feel the vocation to repeat it. On the Quatorze Juillet, we danced in the village square and Beetle cried and when I asked her why she said, ‘Because I’m so happy.’ As our tally of days dwindled into single figures, I realised that I would never complete the sad complement of Philip’s schooldays nor achieve his Lawrencian liberation from woeful chastity. With less than a week left, I had accumulated a hundred and some pages, but I was too conscious of their gaucheries to believe that I should ever return to them.
Then I remembered that Noël Coward claimed to have written
Hay Fever
in three days. If he could do it, so could I. My play was called
With This Ring
and the main character was called Tynan, a tribute, no doubt, to the precocious Ken, who was already the tyrant of Shaftesbury Avenue. Mr Maugham was right; if you had a facility for dialogue, you needed only to take dictation from the voices in your head. When we boarded the sad train back to Paris, I had the eighty and some pages of a finished play in my luggage.
We stayed our last sad, happy nights together at the Hôtel des Etats Unis on the Boulevard Montparnasse. I hunted adjacent shops for a present nice enough to sweeten the lies I was going to tell my parents about the weeks I had spent, somewhere or other, conning Virgil with John Patrick Sullivan. On our last evening, I persuaded Beetle to come to Le Jockey, a nightclub where there were girls with naked breasts. She did not seem to enjoy it all that much.
To arrive back in England was a return to childhood. I was spineless enough to be less distressed by separation from Beetle than nervous of being discovered to have been happy. I meant my black beard to be the bristling announcement to Manor Fields that I was now a grown-up writer. I gave my parents a nice glazed dish with a green bird in the middle that I told them came from the Boulevard Montparnasse where John and I had stayed. They asked few questions about where else we had been. It would be nice to suppose that it pleased them to think of me having a good time.
Before my beard was removed, as my parents insisted, Jack Piesse wanted to come and see it. Bronzed from the English summer sun, he asked me to open my shirt so that we could compare the depth of our tans. He laughed and, more with a gesture than any actual physical contact, seemed to embrace me. The scene remains in my mind like the prelude to something that never, in fact, happened. I had a sense, nothing more, that he would not have been as effusive, in a manly way, if Margaret had been there. Since my beard grew in thick curls under my jaw and was quite prickly, I was not very sorry to be shorn. A petty Samson, not eyeless, in Putney not Gaza, I was deprived of my badge of virile independence. At the same time, I was glad enough of my success in avoiding detection to resume life in Balliol House with furtive relief.
T
HERE WAS TIME, before the autumn term, to take my new play to a meeting of the Alumni Dramatic Society. Thanks to the enthusiasm of Jackie Weiss, the company agreed to stage
With This Ring
before I went back up to Cambridge in early October. I was confident enough, among Jews, both to direct the play and to take the leading role. I also supplied the paintings (one of the pink house we had called
Eyeless in Gaza
, others of Ramatuelle) with which we decked the set. It was easier, and more enjoyable, to be the first man in St John’s Wood than the umpteenth in Cambridge. Synagogue members and friends came to the play in generous numbers and laughed at my jokes. The plot of the piece escapes the lucky dip of memory. I do recall one line, in which someone said, ‘He chased her all through the Olympic games and she fell at the last hurdle’ and another, concerning a divorce case, in which the plaintiff was proud to announce, ‘The judge said he’d never been so shocked.’
I never imagined that any critic would trek to Westbourne Grove for an amateur production, but
With This Ring
received a half-column review in
The Stage
. It congratulated the author on his wit and on his energetic direction, but remarked that he had ‘
walked backwards
’ on stage. How
was I to know that there was anything anomalous in such a move? When the play’s brief run was over, I packed my trunk to go back to Cambridge. Beetle found a job as secretary to a freelance journalist, Leonard Rule, who lived near Abbey Road and was sure that the future of mankind depended on nuclear energy. He paid her £8 a week. Her duties included walking his dog in Abbey Road.
My scholar’s privileges no longer secured me rooms in college. I was allotted ‘licensed digs’, complete with chapel-going landlords, not far away, behind the Round Church and the Union, in Park Street. The Amateur Dramatic Club had its exclusive premises further down the same street. Tony Becher and John Sullivan had also been evicted from college, but Tony was immediately at odds with the landlord of the digs to which he had been assigned. His report of their altercation concluded:
Landlord: ‘I’ll tell yer chutor.’
Tony: ‘I’m going to see him myself.’
Landlord: ‘I’ll be there before ya.’
The matter was resolved by Tony being offered a double set of spare rooms in college. Asked with whom he would like to share, he chose Sullivan. That evening, I went into Hall and sat deliberately alone, several places from where Joe Bain and Pat Hutton (a handsome, always smiling Old Wykehamist) and other ‘arties’ were grouped. Sensing that they were talking about me, I assumed that they were rejoicing in my ostracism by Becher and Sullivan. Carthusian experience has always disposed me to believe that I may at any moment be deemed a pariah. Suddenly, with a concert of cutlery, the company shifted down the long table towards me.
Chris Stephens said, ‘You’ve written a play, do we gather?’
I said, ‘How the hell do you know that?’
My despicable fear was that someone had discovered, and would spread the word, that
With This Ring
had been staged by a group from the Liberal Jewish synagogue.
‘It was reviewed, wasn’t it? In
The Stage
. Not bad. At all.’
I found myself all at once an accredited member of what its members called ‘the Gaiety’. There was no overt homosexual implication. The Gaiety’s camp style distinguished it from the Hearties, who regarded theatricals as effete, if not necessarily ‘like that’. A founder member, who had gone down by the time I took my place in the company, had been notoriously and unashamedly queer. Joe Bain told of how Mike H. had picked up a paratrooper in The Baron of Beef one evening and came to collect his porridge the following morning twirling a crimson beret on one upraised finger.
In our day, H’s outrageousness was echoed only by John Hargreaves, a tall, blanched, Yorkshireman. His long, square-shouldered black overcoat might have been seconded from some undertaker’s wardrobe. It gave him the funereal allure of a corvine priest. His terse loquaciousness presaged the reproduction Yorkshire of Alan Bennett. In our first year, Hargreaves’s air of mordant difference made him the target of derision from the louder members of the Lady Margaret Boat Club. Some of them, in a translated Oxonian spirit, threatened to debag him and dump him in the Cam.
At the outset of our second year, Hargreaves pinned a pronunciamento on the Junior Combination Room noticeboard. Headed ‘To Whom It May Concern’, it declared that, having been menaced with physical assault by a posse of the less savoury members of the college, Mr John Hargreaves had taken the precaution of arming himself with a swordstick. Should anyone lay so much as one finger on him, he would not hesitate to run him through. Hargreaves was a performance artist who never appeared on any Cambridge stage. Wherever he happened to be was his theatre. His catchphrase, uttered with exaggerated tykishness, was ‘very beautiful and very sad’. Whether he was practically gay, who knows? Another of his favourite sayings was, ‘The jewels I lavished on that boy!’ I never saw him after he had left St John’s. One rumour has it that he later became the deputy chief constable of Yorkshire; another that he contracted leprosy and literally fell to pieces.
Joe Bain, who was now sporting a gold-topped stick, needed no sword to enforce his modest superiority. Having come up for a fourth year, he was studying for a ‘Dip. Ed.’ (Diploma of Education) before embarking on a teaching career, first at Stowe, then as sixth-form master at Winchester. Unlike Tony Becher, Joe preferred arcane obscenities. The most memorable was of the Frenchwoman (it might have been Colette’s Léah) who said to her young lover ‘
Doucement, doucement
’ and then – with a tolerant sigh – ‘
Trop tard!
’ The little phrase proved useful many years later: it supplied a succinct summary of the action in Ian McEwan’s
On Chesil Beach
when I came to write an essay about a novelette on which Karl Miller, among other pundits, had lavished contestable superlatives.
In 1950s Cambridge, love and marriage were said, by both Frank Sinatra and Frank Leavis, in their different ways, to go together like a horse and carriage. There was fierce competition (from which I was happily exempt) for female favours, however rationed. The Lady Margaret Players held occasional readings to which females were invited. The most welcome was the beautiful Joan Rowlands, who was soon linked, somewhat permanently, with Michael Bakewell. On one occasion, organised by Harold Cannon, there was a shortage of texts of whatever Ben Jonson piece had been selected. Some resourceful performer equipped himself with a folio edition from the college library. Cued to enunciate a line that, in his antique text with its tall ‘s’ was easy to misread, he pronounced it ‘wind-fucker’. Harold Cannon, a solid person, glanced in shame at Joan and said, ‘SUCK ’er, you fool.’
Soon after my enrolment as an accredited member of the Gaiety, Donald Rudd, who had printed my poem in the Young Writers’ Group magazine, asked me to enter my play for the competition its new editor, Peter Firth, was running. The prize was a week’s run on the ADC stage. Rudd told me, in an excess of candour, that Peter would be grateful if I submitted
With
This Ring
, because there had been so few entries. I had no doubt that a comedy about a suburban romance, in which a girl not wholly unlike Hilary
Phillips was the put-upon bride, would never win prizes in the Cambridge theatre commanded, not to say commandeered, by Peter Wood and Peter Hall. If genius is certified by taking infinite pains, Hall showed early signs of it. When directing
As You Like It
, he took care to insist that any male actor costumed in tight breeches should wear a jockstrap. Folklore promises that a voice from the back called out, ‘Does that include those with small parts?’
After Donald Rudd reported my reluctance to be an also-ran, Peter Firth sought me out to say that, if I delivered my play to what he conceded might well be a gentle execution, he would make sure that something appreciative was said about it in
Varsity
. I am surprised, looking back, that I had a copy of
With This Ring
in my narrow Park Street digs, but I gave it to Firth, with no hope of preferment. As a result, those three days in Ramatuelle during which I wrote my first play turned out to be cardinal in my life.
When the winner was announced, it was Hugh Thomas. His play,
Some Talk of Angels
, was precociously calculated to procure the prize. A fantasy in the style of Christopher Fry’s
The Lady’s Not For Burning
, it was set in a modern, still independent Venice, quite as if Ludovico Manin had never thrown his ring into the Adriatic and surrendered his city to Napoleon. Since
Some Talk of Angels
took place soon before the Second World War, there was opportunity for farcical portrayals of strutting Fascists and supercilious Nazis without any need for references to their later, less laughable activities. In the first years of the 1950s, Cambridge was a
repêchage
of the
bon vieux
temps
in which foreigners were comic and Britain retained dominion over palm and pine (the University Appointments Board was still on the lookout for likely district officers).
We continued to live in the era of ration books, utility furniture and national indebtedness. The return of Winston Churchill to 10 Downing Street, in 1951, primed the illusion that the old gentleman (whom the left denounced as a ‘war-monger’) could restore Britain to what it was when Evelyn Waugh first visited Brideshead. Hugh Thomas’s Waugh-like penchant
for grandiloquence was symptomatic of the nostalgia that seldom dared to speak its full name. In the bipartisan spirit known as Butskellism, the ascendant Hugh Thomas reconciled patrician tones with socialist affiliation. As President of the Union, he became acquainted with Hugh Gaitskell, the new leader of the Labour Party.
In 1956, after resigning from the Foreign Office in protest at Eden’s Suez adventure, Hugh was given an inside track to stand as the unsuccessful Labour Party candidate for Ruislip. He was then alerted, by James MacGibbon, to the fact that a reliable history of the Spanish Civil War had yet to be written. His pioneering, nicely balanced account was published in 1961 and has been revised several times since. In recent years, while remaining a Hispanic pundit, he has swung as far to the right as an ermined pendulum well can.
Peter Firth suggested that I audition for the part of the American ambassador to the Serene Republic. In Yankee guise, I was not in the least nervous. My Carthusian accent might as well have been an affectation and American my natural style. I wrung enough laughs from the selectors, feet up in the stalls, to imagine that my New York self was a shoo-in for the part. They thanked me and promised that they would ‘let me know’.
A few days later, I was approached in Park Street, as I left my pinched digs, by the tall Toby Robertson, one of the auditioning panel. It was a sunny afternoon in early November. He said, ‘Oh, Raphael … I was, um, meaning to get in touch with you.’
‘Really?’ I said. ‘And why would that be?’
Robertson said, ‘You did by far the best audition for the Yank, by far. We all thought so.’
I said nothing; quite eloquently, I thought.
‘Don’t take it personally, will you? But we finally concluded that, good as you were, the part needed an experienced actor. So … we’ve plumped for Peter Firth.’
I said nothing, again.
Robertson said, ‘I hope you’ll come and see the play.’ I looked at him, as I had at George Turner when he denied me Oxford, and did not trust myself to speak without anger or tears, or both. I sniffed at the tall, fair, prefectorial prig and then I walked to Jordan’s Yard, hoping there might be a bridge game that night. Over thirty years later, when Toby had become a shiny, bald character actor, he had a smallish part in a radio piece of mine,
The Daedalus Dimension
, which took place in ancient and modern Crete. I was pitilessly considerate in my brief comments on his performance.
Hugh Thomas’s triumph occasioned the epiphany of Mark Boxer, freshest of freshmen. Mark designed a primary-colourful, unrealistic set. His Venice
à la mode
was a three-dimensional Mondrian. Boxer’s transatlantically sourced, unEnglish chic announced the end of the austere spirit that had accompanied rationing and National Service. No one was sure where Master Boxer had come from; but there was no doubt that he had arrived, or that he was going places. He announced himself, in the Whim café and the Copper Kettle and wherever else the
gratin
queued for coffee and doughnuts, by the shrill reach of his greetings. Everyone wondered where he acquired those slim, dark, over-long jackets, single slit at the back, extra bone button on the cuff. With his blanched, narrow face and springing dark hair, he looked like a pen-and-ink caricature of an Edwardian masher. Poised between cad and dandy, he impersonated what Stephen Potter typified as a master of ‘One-Upmanship’. Mark soon epitomised Cambridge smartness. He did as little as possible as well as it could possibly be done.
I presumed, from his freshness, that Boxer had spent the war in the US. He was, in fact, at Berkhamsted, a mundane, but co-educational, English boarding school. His knowledge of American magazine layout and Madison Avenue advertising techniques indicated a prescient sense of the style that would soon dominate London. Ken Tynan had been similarly quick to spot the imminent Americanisation of the post-war world. Ken’s punctual,
puncturing theatrical reviews, in the
Evening Standard
and then in
The
Observer
, were spiced with quips that smacked of George S. Kaufman, Alexander Woollcott and George Jean Nathan. Ken was at no marked pains to credit their readily convertible coinage. His early book
He Who Plays the King
embraced a reference to the brief stage career in which he was cast as the Player King to Alec Guinness’s Prince, to no loud acclaim. Was he aware of John Mason Brown’s line in which it was said of some unhappy actor, ‘He played the king as if someone had just played the ace’? John Mason Brown was a New York drama critic regularly featured on the BBC radio’s
Transatlantic Quiz
, which was broadcast seemingly live, with the realistic waxing and waning of voices (brilliantly imitated, in due season, by Kingsley Amis) as they sighed back and forth on the transatlantic cable. Lionel Hale was quizmaster in London, Alistair (
ci-devant
Alfred) Cooke in New York.