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During these eighteen months or so, I began
After Julius
. In this novel, Julius leaves his wife and daughters and publishing business to go and take men off the beaches at Dunkirk. The
novel is about what happens to all of them and its theme is the distinction between public and private responsibility. I was also doing a television programme in Manchester every three weeks called
Something to Read
, compèred by Brian Redhead and directed by Olive Shapley.

This was a good old-fashioned programme of the sort they
don’t do any more. Every week, I had to review three or four novels straight to camera – no autocue
– with the floor manager holding up his fingers to show me how many minutes, or seconds, I had left. I also interviewed one author for each programme and it was there that I met Elizabeth
Taylor whose new novel,
In A Summer Season
, was just out. Naturally, I’d read it before the interview, and had prepared about twenty questions to ask its author. The novel was of a
kind that at the time you enjoy very much, and afterwards still find yourself impressed by. It had such ease, such simplicity, and was so deliciously funny and sharp in its perception. Her economy
of expression reminded me of Austen with whom far too many novelists are carelessly compared, but here it seemed really apposite. I looked forward to the interview with confidence and interest.

Elizabeth sat quietly opposite me, her large, extremely beautiful hazel eyes fixed attentively on me each time I asked her a question, to which she answered either yes or no. In less than a
minute I had none left. I hadn’t had the sense to realize that my questions had to be framed in such a way that they couldn’t be dealt with by monosyllables, and there were five more
minutes to fill. Later we sat under fluorescent lighting at a Formica table with cardboard cups of rotten grey instant coffee and her shyness remained impenetrable. After that I read everything
she’d written and, much later, got to know and love her, but then it was all courtesy and embarrassment.

Meanwhile a hard core of misery that was my marriage was settling in my life like an Ice Age. It was so continuous, and as far as I could see so endless, that the only way I could manage to
endure it was by pretending it wasn’t there. This convinced others on the whole, and gradually even myself. The moment I began to think about it, I was overwhelmed by self-criticism, and as
it just made me feel worse, I did everything I could not to think of it at all. But one incident did bring it home to me for a while.

I was trying to begin
After Julius
and life alone in my flat was
extremely difficult. Michael Howard, a director at Jonathan Cape, invited me to stay with him and his
wife Pat in their house near Farnham. Pat was a painter and Michael went to the Cape office in London every weekday; the idea was that I should work there and we’d all have supper together.
This arrangement was ideal for me: I have always liked working in a house where others are also working and I loved company in the evenings that didn’t have to be arranged. So I went there
for about three weeks.

Michael’s first wife had drowned in France after a picnic by a river. Pat was his second and they were very happy together, living in a brightly painted house with two Siamese cats. For a
time, all went well. I worked hard, only leaving the house once for my television stint in Manchester, and an hour each day after lunch when I went for biting winter walks. At weekends, Michael and
Pat would spend the afternoons in bed, and after my walk I’d lie in mine and wish I wasn’t alone in it. Whoever woke up first would make tea and take it to the others. I remember
carrying a tray into their bedroom and seeing them in their cosy, sensual
déshabille
and feeling acute pangs of envy. During those weeks it became clear to both Michael and Pat that
all wasn’t well in my life. Michael was particularly kind to me and as a result we fell a little in love with each other. It was mentioned but that was all. Michael decided to tell Pat, and
at once, the
ménage
came to an end: I went back to London the next day, and they went to Marrakech for a holiday to forget it all. Pat, of course, did the right thing: the romance was
nipped in the bud, but for months afterwards I couldn’t help dwelling on what I wanted and didn’t have. I might have recognized by now that three wasn’t a good number, but at the
time, I simply felt stuck – unable to see the trees for the wood.

The Ouspensky Society, membership of which was supposed to improve me, didn’t seem to be doing much good for me. My friend Ray Aickman, Robert’s wife, left to become a nun in an
Anglican community, and invited me to go to attend the ceremony where she would take the vows of a novitiate. I was allowed to see her for
a little while the evening before the
service. She looked exhausted, and her ugly novice’s dress was rather dirty, but she seemed happy. I asked her if she prayed a great deal. ‘Oh, there is hardly any time for
prayer,’ she answered. ‘Prayer is a luxury.’ On a later visit, she told me that her Reverend Mother had asked her what she missed most of what she’d left and she had said
intelligent conversation. It became slowly impossible to have that with her, since so many subjects were barred: anything about our earlier life together, the books we’d read, people we had
known, the state of the world, or how she spent her life in the convent – all of it was banned, until finally we were reduced to smiling sadly at each other, full of difficult goodwill.

Then Maharishi Yogi came to London. He appeared at one of the big meetings of the society, and sat motionless on a large chair dressed in white silk and a camel cashmere shawl, surveying us all
with a watchful and serene intelligence while our leader introduced us to him and he to us.

Maharishi is now an established figure, and transcendental meditation widely used and known, but this was, I think, his first semi-public appearance in England. That evening he introduced us to
the idea that meditation – thought for so long to be the property of mystics and recluses – was a tool for what he called the householder, the ordinary person living in the world. The
practice of it was simple, twenty minutes twice a day would suffice, and peace, happiness, health and virtue would flourish.

He spoke volubly and well, although there was a disconcerting high-pitched giggle when he made a sharp or amusing point. I think that everyone in the room was moved and uplifted by the prospect
he laid before us, and we were all eager to be initiated into the rite of meditation. Focusing on a mantra – a word or a sound – and emptying the mind of all extraneous thought is at
once so easy and so difficult that it can’t but be absorbing to those who try it.

The one thing that was certain was that it required practice.
Forty minutes in twenty-four hours doesn’t sound much, but that time varied – could expand or
contract itself from a kind of fidgeting eternity to some nameless dimension where it was nothing at all. Eventually, I was taught to ‘check’ or help new initiates, but I never felt
worthy of the responsibility, although people with glowing eyes who felt the great benefits and surges of benevolent energy surrounded me.

On one occasion Maharishi decided to conduct a course in Austria high in the Alps, and many of us went. This was the only time I ever went abroad with my mother, who’d taken to meditation.
We all stayed in a hotel that was used for winter sports in season, but was now given over to us. Maharishi announced that he was embarking upon a translation of the
Bhagavadgita
and asked
for volunteers – writers or people interested in language – to help him. There was a forest of hands. My mother nudged me. ‘Go on. You could do that.’ I said I didn’t
think so.

Later that day Maharishi sent for me and asked me to help him, so of course I did. As there were lectures and meditation all through the day, the translation work had to be done at night. This
didn’t seem to worry Maharishi as he seemed hardly ever to need sleep, but I remember sitting on the floor of his room until well after midnight wrestling with the difficulties of translating
one word of Sanskrit into intelligible English. Sanskrit – of which I knew nothing – turned out to be a kind of portmanteau language: one word could have a dozen different meanings.
Maharishi would explain the sense he was after, and I’d have to try to find a choice of possible English words that might fit, then he’d deliberate and decide.

It was a slow and arduous business: one verse could take nights. There were also frequent interruptions. I remember particularly how a woman burst into his room at about two a.m. She was clearly
in deep distress. Before she could speak, Maharishi said, ‘You must not be so anxious. Your daughter was in great danger, but she is getting well now and she will be all right.’ And the
next morning
she had a telephone call saying that her daughter had suddenly turned the corner and was out of danger. ‘How did you know, Maharishi?’ someone braver
than I asked him. ‘I went,’ he said. ‘Travel can be conducted in different ways.’ Other things happened that made it plain to me that he was no ordinary man. For one thing
he was the only person I have ever met – for me, at least – who had an aura around his head. One day someone asked him about saints, and he said in a matter-of-fact voice that the
trouble with many of them was they were so happy that they wouldn’t take the trouble to go on to become angels.

One day he expressed the wish that we should all go several miles up the mountain to the top of the pass to meditate. There was deep snow and ice on the rocks, and someone suggested that we
might get rather cold – by now meditations were a matter of hours rather than minutes. Maharishi looked across the room and smiled. ‘It will not be cold.’

It was about half an hour in a bus to the top of the pass, from where the view stretched down for miles into Italy. The air was sharp as a knife, the pale yellow sun without heat, but when we
were enjoined to sit on the ground – it was
warm
. I remember looking at John Allison, my friend and doctor, amazed, and he simply smiled with a shrug. The ground remained warm during
the hour that we sat there, but nothing was said.

While I was there I managed to meditate for up to four hours a day, but back home it all seemed difficult again. And then, gradually, as I listened to the lectures it dawned on me that
meditation
was
for recluses or people inclined that way. Prolonged practice could only result in a detachment from life that, although it might be better, I didn’t want. I didn’t
want to become indifferent to
anything
, and as I watched those closest to Maharishi it seemed to me that they had this desire, gift, need – however you want to put it. I wanted to be
in the middle of ordinary life trying to make the best of it even if – I could see more clearly now – it entailed my making the same mistakes many times. I didn’t want to give my
life
to anyone, I wanted to have it and use it and be an ordinary householder. So gradually I stopped. I think of Maharishi with great respect and affection, and I am sure that
there is a spiritual hierarchy in which I am merely on the lower rungs. That was it.

In February 1962 I was invited to a meeting of the Arts Council to discuss what was to become of the forthcoming Cheltenham Festival of Literature. John Moore, who’d
directed it for some years and had always been a leading light in its affairs, wanted to retire, and a new director was required. At the meeting it transpired that they thought I’d be a
suitable candidate. I was amazed, flattered that anyone thought I could do such a thing and said I’d think about it. ‘We need an answer rather quickly,’ John said. ‘There is
only eight months to go.’ He knew I was going to accept.

Cheltenham’s festival was a very much smaller affair then than it is now. It had almost no money, very little sponsorship, and most of the local inhabitants were totally uninterested in
such an event, but it had been quietly plodding along for years. I’d attended it as one of a group of young writers sometime in the 1950s. Running it would be a challenge in every sort of
way, and my present life made me long for distraction, something that would use up energy and crowd out the lethargy of despair.

I started to make lists of ideas for events. I have always been the kind of person who has many impracticable ideas, one or two of which work. We had the first meeting with the festival’s
council in the town hall. It came to my turn to speak and I produced my list. It included an exhibition of portraits of living writers, a literary zoo, cheap train tickets for the festival,
courtesy of British Rail, three schools’ events, and a bookshop in the town hall for people to buy the works of writers they’d heard and have a glass of wine.
I
thought we might arrange for messages from all the most ancient and established writers throughout the world to be sent wishing the festival well, and possibly an auction of manuscripts. I also
suggested about a dozen events: one with playwrights, one of biographers, several of novelists, lectures by Peter Scott and Laurens Van der Post and so forth. I also planned to seek sponsorship
from a major newspaper. Schweppes already sponsored the programme and, having a friend who was a professional designer, I resolved upon something glossy and illustrated.

The council listened to all this with silent, amazed incredulity. Only John said he was sure they’d made the right choice in choosing me, and good luck. I was allowed money for writing
paper, stamps, and travelling expenses to and from Cheltenham, otherwise the appointment was strictly honorary.

I went home and started to implement my pipe dreams. I went to the Arts Council with the idea of the exhibition, hoping they’d help me, but they’d thought of it years ago and there
simply weren’t enough works to mount one. I didn’t believe them. British Rail was unprepared to do anything about train tickets. The zoo was equally adamant about the impossibility of
the literary zoo. On the credit side, the
Sunday Telegraph
agreed to sponsor one evening for £1,500. I wrote letters: to writers asking them to come; to people who owned paintings or
drawings or pieces of sculpture; to advertisers to take space in the programme; to yet more writers for manuscripts they felt they could donate; to schools offering events; and to the
Publishers’ Association for agreement about the bookshop. This last was a hard struggle. It had never been done before, the bookshops in Cheltenham wouldn’t like it, and we
wouldn’t sell any books anyway. I persisted with this for the entire eight months, and in the end they grudgingly agreed to give it a try.