Signatures Read online

  My diary continues, “Amis ringing me about the Aldous Huxley book on Science and Literature. ‘I had a glance through it this morning on the john, it’s no bloody good at all.’”

  WILLIAM ANDERSON

  Translation of Dante,

  La Vita Nuova

  PENGUIN CLASSICS, 1964

  GOING UP TO OXFORD IN 1956, I expected to meet brilliant contemporaries. There were a few, and Bill Anderson was one of them. Another was Dennis Potter, a village Robespierre who spread throughout the university his hostility to everyone from a background different to his but who in the end wrote television plays of reconciliation. In Bill’s college, Exeter, was Alan Bennett, whose natural gift for playing the class system was to redirect him from a career as a medieval historian into a national treasure, the master presenter of social grudge as art. Bill’s thin features had strain or nervousness in them, but he was tougher than he looked. The slightly screechy voice could be thought affected, and he let you know that he was smoking and inhaling deeply. His movements gave the impression that he was late for some important meeting.

  Bill was a genuine aesthete. His mother was a choreographer, and during her pregnancy with Bill she had been working on Bizet’s suite L’Arlésienne. To hear this music as an adult, Bill liked to say, returned him to the snug safety of the womb. His father had been killed in Normandy towards the end of the war. Bill had no money but it never seemed to matter. The whole point was to discover how to approach the civilization created by the great writers and artists, and then contribute to it oneself. This was a rejection of the Stalinist and philistine orthodoxies of the university. I’d not previously heard of many of the sources from which Bill took inspiration, for instance Robert Graves’s The White Goddess or Owen Barfield who apparently had theories about literature worth following up. As an undergraduate, Bill was already a complete Dante enthusiast, and his book Dante the Maker, published some twenty years later, is one of the best defenses of the high culture of Europe. In a circle of like-minded friends were Robert Symonds, a poet, and John Calmann, who wrote a verse play in five acts about Frederick the Great. When it was time for finals, I crammed Bill and two others into my Morris Minor and we drove to Llanthony, on the Welsh border. Next to the ruined abbey is a pub that then had no electricity. Revision by candlelight was a fitting envoi to Oxford.

  Soon after graduating, I had a job as literary editor of Time and Tide, a weekly magazine then in the hands of Tim (afterwards a Lord as well as a vicar in the Church of England) Beaumont, descendent of the man billed as the richest commoner in England. The editor, John Thompson, particularly urged me to discover and publish people setting out on a literary career. Bill’s poetry had an unfashionable humanist spirit that went against the grain of the times. He was for things beautiful and against things ugly, and the passion of it over the years led him to write about cathedrals, castles, the Green Man, a biography of the artist Cecil Collins, and finally a wide-ranging book about the creative imagination. In order to pay his way, he was employed full-time writing and editing the publications of a major medical charity. He once complained to me of pain between the shoulders, in his words “the stab in the back that all writers have.” The last time we met, he knew that he would very soon die from cancer of the lungs brought on by smoking. Following surgery, he had almost completely lost his voice.

  The aesthetes were unfortunate. Robert Symonds died young from some inherited genetic flaw, John Calmann was murdered by someone he’d picked up on a motorway in France, and Bill never received the recognition that is his due.

  NOEL ANNAN

  Our Age

  1990

  MY PARENTS’ HOUSE in London having been destroyed in an air raid, they moved to Castle Hill Farm, a couple of miles outside Tonbridge in Kent. I must have been about eight or nine when Noel Annan came to stay. In my bed at night and about to fall asleep, I became aware of his head bald and gleaming as he loomed over me to give me a goodnight kiss on the forehead. Years were to pass before I realized how fortunate I had been that he had done nothing more to me. Devoid of scruples, he several times came sidling up to me at some gathering and then adopted the confidential and slightly sorrowful manner that goes with imparting a nasty little secret, You do know, don’t you, that your father is consumed with jealousy because you are writing the books he isn’t writing. I have never heard another laugh quite like his, braying and persistent, with no trace of mirth in it.

  Writing my book about Cyril Connolly, I had his papers at my disposal. And in them I found a handwritten letter from Noel Annan, then Provost of King’s College, Cambridge, complimenting Cyril as a writer and critic in really fulsome, not to say exaggerated, language. As soon as Cyril died, however, Noel published a long piece in the New York Review of Books rubbishing him as a failure in life and literature. The toadying and back-to-back the duplicity is all anyone needs to know about the man. The untranslatable French expression faux bonhomme is an exact fit.

  Postscript. Noel Annan’s name came up at a meeting of the English Faculty at Berkeley that I was obliged to attend though I was at the university for only a summer semester. Thomas Parkinson, a Hemingwayesque character, had tenure and I heard him utter what might serve as the definitive mixed metaphor. “Noel Annan? I never knew such bullshit from a horse’s ass.”

  W. H. AUDEN

  Collected Shorter Poems, 1927–1957

  1966

  THE NEWDIGATE PRIZE for poetry is awarded every year at Oxford. Those who enter for it have to write a poem to a title set by the judges, and in 1957 it was “Earthly Paradise.” I was in my second term reading history at Magdalen College. My rooms were in the handsome New Building, famously misnamed because it dates from the eighteenth century. From my desk I had a view of the deer in the park. Images from childhood worked into the poem that I wrote and submitted.

  One morning, there was a knock on the door and W. H. Auden entered and sat down heavily on the sofa. Professor of Poetry at the time, he was one of three judges of the Newdigate. I had never met him. Yours is much the best poem, he said, and I want you to know that I voted for it, but I couldn’t persuade the other judges so I’m afraid you are only the runner-up.

  In his lifetime, Auden became perhaps the best-known practicing poet in the English language, and John Anstey, editor of the Daily Telegraph Colour Magazine, commissioned me to write a profile of him. Auden lived in New York but spent summers in Kirchstetten, a village not far from St. Pölten in Lower Austria. “I should like to become, if possible, a minor Atlantic Goethe,” was how he had come to speak of himself. In his speech, the American letter a, short where Oxford would have it long, was a sign of his dual identity. His was a face like nobody else’s, wrinkled and deeply furrowed all over like some animal’s hide, possibly due to age but more likely to inner distress. “A wedding cake left out in the rain” was Dom Moraes’s image for the devastated appearance. There was something awkward about him, nonplussed. Even out of doors, Auden could be seen shuffling about in carpet-slippers.

  Receiving me at the house in Kirchstetten, Chester Kallman launched into a critique, evidently well prepared, of the village and its inhabitants. He had lived with Auden since before the war. To judge by his air of condescending superiority, he thought highly of himself. A smile stretched across his face making a disturbing feature of his teeth. Also in the house was a Greek teenager.

  Auden was at work in what had been the loft of a farm building tacked on to one side of the house and converted into his study. The sole approach was up an external staircase of rickety wooden posts and planks that creaked when anyone trod on them and which led up to a retreat where he surely would not be disturbed. There on the desk were drafts of poems and sheets of paper with word games, acrostics and aphorisms. On a table lay the twelve massive volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary, one or two of them left open where presumably he had been engaged in his favorite sport of chasing rare usages and meanings. I also copied down a line of rhymes: blot, dot, jot,
got, what. He gossiped about friends and contemporaries: Cyril Connolly, John Betjeman, John Sparrow the Warden of All Souls, and Hugh Gaitskell. Guy Burgess had been coming to stay with him when the scandal of his defection to Moscow broke. “Arthur Koestler, me no like-ee,” he said, imitating the pidgin English supposedly spoken in the Orient. Why? I asked. “Underdog!” he said in a normal voice, as if that settled it.

  At the end of the afternoon, Auden wobbled his way down the staircase and Chester Kallman gave him a martini, and ten minutes later another, and ten minutes after that a third. By the time Kallman and the Greek teenager had got him to bed, it was about half past seven and he was past making sense. They gave him a flask of Chianti, and he lay on his side sucking at it like a baby with a bottle, gurgling, splashing red wine now and again onto the sheets and over himself.

  Next day, I gave them a lift to Vienna. Kallman was making up to the Greek teenager, with much laughter between them as they directed me to the gay bar where I was to drop them. Uninvited, left sitting by himself on a red plush sofa in Sacher’s Hotel, Auden was a picture of distress.

  BERYL BAINBRIDGE

  Injury Time

  1977

  THE PUBLICATION OF Young Adolf brought Beryl Bainbridge into my life. For whatever reason, I failed to have her sign my copy, but she did sign two of her previous novels. That Hitler had spent some months before the First World War in Liverpool with his elder brother Alois was a fantasy that powerfully confused fact and fiction. Born and brought up in Formby, just outside Liverpool, she interpreted all experience as desolation stretching away into immeasurable distance.

  She lived by herself in a part of London colonized by men and women much like her, talented in one or another of the arts. A creeper cloaked her house, and inside it was a junkyard. Stuffed animals in glass cases or under bell jars cluttered every space. Out of one wall jutted a plaster cast of a chorus girl’s leg, from the Locarno Ballroom in Liverpool. A crucifix had been remodeled as a candlestick.

  Her father, the youngest of nine children, had left school at the age of nine. “The general impression my mother gave was that he had married above himself.” When she was eleven, she joined the Young Communists and later was briefly a Catholic. “I was terribly wanting my mother’s approval but doing everything not to gain it.” In 1954 she married, but her husband soon emigrated to New Zealand. His mother broke in and fired a revolver. On the stairs was the bullet hole, none too well replastered.

  More often than not, a Bainbridge novel reaches its climax with a grotesquely contrived death. My copy of Injury Time contains a bundle of notes from our conversation, and one of them reads, “To have a sense of well-being destroys your personality.” I coined a word for her: murderee.

  ELLIOTT BAKER

  The Penny Wars

  1968

  IN THE SUMMER OF 1968 and again in 1970, I taught creative writing at the California State College at Hayward, a wonderfully tidy suburb of San Francisco. Bob Williams, a member of the faculty, had arranged my invitation to Hayward. In 1964 he had spent a sabbatical year teaching at the Writers Workshop of the University of Iowa, where I was. We first met at a getting-to-know-you faculty party where he gave me a disquisition on the Yiddish word putz. Tequila was his drink because it had “no waste motion.” Free spirits, he and his wife Hatch, more properly Harriet, had decided not to have children. Bob had published a couple of novels under his full name of R. V. Williams. He had come up the hard way. His father, a railway guard, had been a bigamist. In the war Bob had driven a landing craft at Salerno on D-Day, which entitled him to a college education paid for by the Fulbright program. If only he could have written as vividly as he talked about his experiences of battle.

  Somehow, maybe through Bob Williams, Herb Caen, the gossip writer of the San Francisco Chronicle, heard that I was at Hayward and I believe it was through him that I was asked to do some reviewing for the paper. Elliot Baker’s The Penny Wars was one of the novels I was sent. His first novel, A Fine Madness, had set him up as a writer from whom masterpieces could be expected. The Penny Wars apparently tells a tight story of relationships gone wrong, but much more profoundly is about America and Europe discovering one another in the shadow of Hitler. Baker, I wrote, allows his characters “to speak and laugh and cry for themselves,” and that was something that “went out with the classics.” Still, it might win him the honorific title to which he aspired, of Great American Writer.

  Back in London, several years later, a letter arrived from Elliott. It turned out that he and Helen, his wife, had settled here and we lived only a few hundred yards apart. We took to meeting in a favorite café on Kensington High Street. The blueness of his eyes, the energy of his person, was telling. One day, he let drop that his real surname was Sukenik, though he was no relation of Yigael Yadin, the famous Israeli soldier and archaeologist, originally born Sukenik. And he also let drop that in 1945 he’d been in an infantry battalion engaged in the Battle of the Ardennes. Afterwards they’d all volunteered for a mission behind the German lines, killing SS concentration camp guards before they could kill their prisoners.

  Elliott’s conversation was like his books – you didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. An obsessive gambler, at home in the lurid world of clubs and croupiers, Mafiosi, blackjack, odds and debts and threats, he committed himself to hackwork to pay for his losses.

  Elliott had made a huge sum of money writing the script for Lace, a popular television series. Due to the time change with Hollywood, it was the middle of the night when the producer telephoned to commission the script of Lace Two. Elliott refused. Every twenty-four hours for several consecutive nights, the producer woke him up again, each time offering a million more. Finally he said, “Name what you’ll do it for and that’s positively my last offer.” So Elliott became the best-paid scriptwriter in the United States. A very well-known lady romancer had a three-book contract for ten million dollars but didn’t actually feel like writing the stuff. For a token ten thousand dollars Elliott ghosted one of her books in six weeks. And still his own books were written, mostly in his tragi-comic style, though Klynt’s Law is slapstick that had me laughing aloud. A second obsession, more restricted than gambling but equally deranging, was the insoluble riddle of Shakespeare’s identity.

  In the end, he and Helen returned to the United States. We used to correspond. Modestly he made no claims, but I sensed his regret that time was running out and he wouldn’t ever know whether or not he was accepted as a Great American Writer.

  ARTURO AND ILSA BAREA

  The Forging of a Rebel

  1972

  STRICTLY SPEAKING, I’m stretching a point, since the copy I have of this book is a French edition published by Gallimard in 1948, and he and Ilsa both signed it for my mother, “For Poppy with our love.” They had married in 1938 when Arturo was press officer and censor for the Republicans in Madrid under attack from General Franco and the Falangists. Both of them were socialists but never Communists. John Dos Passos, one of the writers Arturo handled, described him in the siege as “underslept and underfed.” Arturo also knew Hemingway well and had the integrity to say in a review of For Whom the Bell Tolls that, “as a novel about Spaniards and their war, it is unreal and, in the last analysis, deeply untruthful.”

  Arturo and Ilsa escaped to England and lived as freelance writers. She translated his books. In a review in September 1941 George Orwell paid him a compliment, for once rather awkwardly phrased: “One of the most valuable of the literary acquisitions that England has made as a result of Fascist persecution.”

  In the Sixties when I came to know Ilsa, I was a literary editor and she was a publisher scouting for manuscripts. She had survived too much hardship to be sentimental, and it showed in the tough set of her face. Poppy was already dead by then, yet Ilsa used to make something of the fact that she, Poppy and I had all three been born in Vienna. Her own book baldly titled Vienna and subtitled Legend and Reality is the last word on the history and inhabitants of th
at equivocal city. At the age of sixteen, in 1918, she took part in a political demonstration just as the Habsburg monarchy was falling. Troops opened fire, some students in the front line fell and the young man marching next to her immediately ran away down a side street, continuing to run until at last he reached the safety of New Zealand, and he would have run still farther if he could have. That was Karl Popper, she said, who’d been so traumatized by this ordeal that his great book The Open Society was intended to ensure there’d be no repeat.

  SYBILLE BEDFORD

  A Legacy

  1973 REPRINT

  THE LITERARY SCENE ought to glow with bright mysterious personalities like Sybille Bedford,” I once wrote, “but rarely does so.” Her father, a German count, had the aristocratic virtue of keeping himself to himself. Grandfather Herz was eminent, cosmopolitan and Jewish. For the sake of the fiction, she changed the family name to Merz. There was a trace of a foreign accent in the way she rolled the letter r in her speech. The characters she writes about call each other Mammina, Caro, Herr Baron and Principessa, and it is taken for granted that civilized people speak the major European languages. “La bêtise n’est pas mon fort,” is a saying of hers: stupidity is not my strong point.