Miracles of Life (22 page)

I have often wondered why Eduardo and I never fell out,
though my partner Claire Walsh, who was present at the
time, claims that we had our ‘break-up’ row on the second
day we met. I think Eduardo realised that I was a genuine
admirer of his work, and that apart from his lively imagination
and powerful mind I wanted nothing from him. He
was a generous and sociable man, and tended to attract an
entourage of graduate students, museum curators, art school
administrators eager for him to judge their diploma shows,
well-to-do art lovers and ladies who lunch – in short, what
used to be called sycophants. This became a real problem for
him in the 1980s once he accepted his knighthood.

To what extent did Eduardo’s very busy social life influence
his work, possibly for the worse? I greatly admire his
early sculpture, those gaunt and eroded figures cast from
machine parts who resemble the survivors of a nuclear war. It’s difficult to imagine the Paolozzi of the 1980s, who dined
most evenings at the Caprice, a few steps from the Ritz, producing
those haunted and traumatised images of mankind
at its most desperate. By the end of the 1960s his sculpture
had become smooth and streamlined, and resembled
modules from some high-tech design office working on a
new airport terminal.

I think he was aware of this, and sometimes he would say:
‘Right, Jim … let’s go out.’ And we would prowl the side
streets off the King’s Road, where he would search the
builders’ skips, his huge hands feeling some piece of discarded
wood or metalwork, as if looking for a lost toy. Then
it would be back to the Caprice, with its showbiz and film-
star clientele, its dreadful acoustics and cries of ‘Eduardo…!’
and ‘Francis…!’ Why Bacon spent any time there is another
mystery. Eventually, by the late 1980s, I had to retreat gently
from this competitive circus.

But for the most part Eduardo enjoyed an idyllic life, and
I watched him with real envy as he worked in his studio,
listening to music while he cut up images for his screen-
prints, chatting to an attractive graduate student, recounting
another traveller’s tale about his latest trip to Japan, a country
that fascinated him even more than the US. His early
obsession with all things American rather faded after his
teaching trip to Berkeley in the late 1960s. He told me how
he had taken a party of his students on a field trip to a
Douglas aircraft plant, but they had been bored by the whole venture. Advanced technology might spur the imagination
of a European, but Americans took it for granted, and were
no more inspired by the assembly of a four-engine jet plane
than by the process of sealing beans into a can.

Japan, I think, became for Eduardo the continuation of
America by other means, and the excitement of an endlessly
self-renewing technology lay at the centre of the Japanese
dream. He would return from Japan loaded with high-tech
toys, bizarre robots equipped with electronic sensors that
could lumberingly make their way around his studio. He
once rang me from Tokyo, and I could barely hear him above
a background babble of Japanese voices. He explained that
he was near a bank of cigarette automats with voice-actuated
brand selectors. He shouted above the din: ‘It’s midnight,
there’s no one here. The machines break down and start each
other talking…’ I wish Eduardo had pursued all this in his
sculpture, and can still hear the robots jabbering in the
darkness, with their ‘Please come again’ and ‘Thank you for
your custom’ going on through the night.

Germany was another great magnet for him, and the
country where his sculpture was most admired. I remember
telling him that Chris Evans had found some wartime
film cans stored in a basement at the National Physical
Laboratory, among them a Waffen SS instructional film on
how to build a pontoon bridge. Eduardo was deeply
impressed. ‘That says it all,’ he murmured, his imagination
stirred by the fusion of these almost emblematic elite troops with the down-to-earth realities of military engineering. I
suspect his obsession with Wittgenstein, the Austrian-born
philosopher and Cambridge friend of Bertrand Russell, had
far less to do with
The
Tractatus
than with Wittgenstein’s
trips to the cinema to see Betty Grable.

Eduardo knew few novelists, if any, though the same
could be said of myself. I felt far more at ease with a physician
like Martin Bax, or with Chris Evans and Eduardo, than
I did with my fellow novelists in the late 1960s. Most of them
were still locked into a literary sensibility that would have
been out of date in the 1920s. I’m glad to say that the novel
has changed very much for the better in recent years, and a
new generation of writers has emerged, among them Will
Self, Martin Amis and Iain Sinclair, with powerful imaginations
and a wide, roving intelligence.

The last literary party I attended, at my publishers
Jonathan Cape in the early 1970s, at least brought me a little
closer to the threatening Lord Goodman. I arrived with my
agent, John Wolfers, a highly cultivated man who had served
in the Welsh Guards and been wounded in the battle for
Monte Cassino. He was also a compulsive drinker, locked
into an intensely competitive relationship with the head of
Cape, Tom Maschler, with whom he had been to school. The
evening of the party John was deeply drunk, and barely able
to stand upright. I tried to support him, but he pushed
me away, talked incoherently for ten seconds and suddenly
crashed to the floor, like a giant tree falling in a forest, taking two or three smaller guests with him. This happened several
times, and was soon clearing the room.

Eventually I managed to steer him down the stairs. There
were no taxis cruising Bedford Square, but a uniformed
chauffeur stood by a double-parked limousine. Taking out a
£5 note (then probably worth £50) I offered it to the chauffeur
if he would take John home. ‘Regent Square, five minutes
away.’ He accepted the fiver, and we laid John out in the
rear seat. As the chauffeur started the engine I asked: ‘By the
way, whose car is this?’ He replied: ‘Lord Goodman’s.’

I’m surprised I didn’t find myself in the Tower.

I still think that my children brought me up, perhaps as an
incidental activity to rearing themselves. We emerged from
their childhood together, they as happy and confident teenagers,
and I into a kind of second adulthood enriched by the
experience of watching them grow from infancy into fully
formed human beings with minds and ambitions of their
own. Few fathers observe this extraordinary process, the
most significant in all nature, and sadly a great many
mothers are so distracted by the effort of running a home
and family that they are scarcely aware of the countless
miracles of life that take place around them every day. I think
of myself as extremely lucky. The years I spent as the parent
of my young children were the richest and happiest I have
ever known, and I am sure that my parents’ lives were arid by
contrast. For them, domestic life was little more than a social
annexe to the serious business of playing bridge and flirting
at the Country Club.

My friendships with Eduardo Paolozzi, Dr Martin Bax, Chris Evans and Michael Moorcock were important to me
but lay on the perimeter of my life, and anyway depended on
reliable babysitters and the parking regulations of the day.
My children were at the centre of my life, circled at a distance
by my writing. I kept up a steady output of novels and short-
story collections, largely because I spent most of my time at
home. A short story, or a chapter of a novel, would be written
in the time between ironing a school tie, serving up the
sausage and mash, and watching
Blue Peter
. I am certain that
my fiction is all the better for that. My greatest ally was the
pram in the hall.

The 1960s were an exciting decade that I watched on
television. Driving the children to and from school, to parties
and friends, I had to be very careful how much I drank,
regardless of the breathalyser. I was a passive smoker of
a good deal of cannabis, and once took LSD, completely
unaware of the strength of a single dose. This was a disastrous
blunder that opened a vent of hell, and confirmed me
as a long-standing whisky drinker.

Fay and Bea had taken charge of family life, and Jim and I
were happy to follow orders. This was excellent training for
all of us, especially the girls. They made the most of school
and university, and have enjoyed successful careers in the
arts and the BBC. They married happily and have families of
their own. From the start I drummed into them that they
were as entitled to opportunity and success as any man, and
should never allow themselves to be patronised or exploited.

My daughter Fay Ballard
.

As it happened, I could have saved my breath; they knew
exactly what they wanted to do with their lives, and were
determined to do it.

Some fathers make good mothers, and I hope I was one of
them, though most of the women who know me would say
that I made a very slatternly mother, notably unkeen on
housework, unaware that homes need to be cleaned now and
then, and too often to be found with a cigarette in one hand
and a drink in the other – in short, the kind of mother, no
doubt loving and easy-going, of whom the social services
deeply disapprove. The women journalists who have interviewed
me over the years always refer to the dust that their gimlet eyes detect in unfrequented corners of my house.
I suspect that the sight of a man bringing up apparently
happy children (to which they never refer) alerts a reflex of
rather old-fashioned alarm. If women aren’t needed to do
the dusting, what hope is there left? Perhaps, too, the
compulsive cleaning of a family home is an attempt to erase
those repressed emotions that threaten to break through into
the daylight. The nuclear family, dominated by an overworked
mother, is in many ways deeply unnatural, as is
marriage itself, part of the huge price we pay to control the
male sex.

The absence of a mother was a deep loss for my children,
but at least my girls were spared the stress that I noticed
between many mothers and their daughters as puberty
approached. As a father who collected his children from
school, I spent a great deal of time by the school gates, and
soon recognised the fierce maternal tension that made adolescence
a hell for many of my daughters’ friends. Some
mothers simply could not cope with the growing evidence
that their daughters were younger, more womanly and more
sexually attractive than they were. Sex, I’m glad to say, never
worried me; I was far more concerned about what might
happen to my daughters in a car rather than in a bed. A few
words of friendly advice and the address of the nearest
family planning clinic were enough; nature and their innate
good sense would do the rest.

Sadly, many mothers refused to accept that their daugh

My daughter Beatrice Ballard
.

ters had reached puberty at all. I once collected my daughters
from a schoolfriend’s party, the first any of them had
attended where boys would be present. Mothers were
chatting near their cars, waiting for the party to end, and one
of them laughingly described the pitch-black living room,
thudding with music, where slumped forms of their
precious daughters and the boy guests sprawled on sofas.
Then one of the mothers emerged from the house and
gestured helplessly at her friends. She was clearly distraught,
barely able to walk or speak, and tottered down the garden
path towards us. ‘Helen…’ someone called, taking her
quivering shoulders. ‘Is Sally with a boy?’

Helen stared at us, as if she had seen the horror of all
horrors. At last she spoke: ‘She’s holding his penis…’

The most important person I met in the late 1960s was
Claire Walsh, who has been my partner, inspiration and life-
companion for forty years. We met at a Michael Moorcock
party, when Claire was in her early twenties, and I was struck
immediately by her beauty and high intelligence. I often
think that I have been extremely lucky during my life to have
known closely four beautiful and interesting women – Mary,
my daughters, and Claire. Claire is passionate, principled,
argumentative and highly loyal, both to me and to her many
friends. She has a wide-ranging mind, utterly free of cant,
and has been very generous to my children and grandchildren.