One More River, page 10
You’re free for lunch tomorrow so I’ll pick you up here, okay?– Jonathan. Very much okay; his agent of long years and an old friend. A ‘schedule’ from the press girl, saying, Rather thin but I’m trying to fill this in. You didn’t give me much notice! which was perfectly true; this had been a sudden caprice. She’d done some hasty telephoning because here was another old friend (he still had one or two)—Unless horrible things happen you’re lunching here with me on Thursday—Roger. An ex-editor now retired; hm, there was a strong feeling about all this that he himself ought to be retired. High time. Lunching with an Old Man, in the Albany, rattail English silver, grilled sole, lamb chops, broccoli, good claret and ripe cheese, this had always been very pleasant but had decidedly a Twilight-Fall feel to it. A dinner date with his present editor, at home. In Chiswick and overlooking the river. Also nice, and, one felt, hastily improvised. And hm, two rather grudging-sounding journalists. They weren’t exactly rushing, crowding in to greet him, were they now? Well, he had only himself to blame for that. He made himself a big long drink, took a powerful swallow, lit a small cigar, leaned back, closed his eyes.
I have been feeling my heart. I never pay much heed to this; mine is sound. But of course it’s a warning sign, saying Slow Down. So I generally equate it with a spell of overwork. This time, a succession of alarms, anxieties. One still has no proper certainties of how real they are. That is generally the picture, isn’t it, with a man of seventy? Alerted, you pop in to see The Man, in a quiet, beautifully furnished house (financial-wise there’s nothing to match cardiology and the social standing is impeccable). He links you up to a variety of machines, he looks and he listens, he’ll do you a few activity tests, exercise bike and such, and at length (he has plenty of time) he sits behind that reproduction of a Louis XV map table, and he smiles and says, Well Now. It’s all quite comforting, as it’s meant to be: it’s when the bill comes in you feel in need of the bypass job.
Brought up on Kipling I find often enough that a line jumps unasked into my petty actuality. It will be so, still, with a few of my generation in England. But we’re getting fewer; Roger shuttling gently between the Albany and the Travellers’, a winter holiday in Madeira, a summer month in Corfu.
What makes that rear rank breathe so hard? Answer, writing crime fiction. It hasn’t quite come to ‘What makes that front-rank man fall down?’—I do, to the first, and it will, to the second. But there’s also a light-hearted rhyme about the nasty habits of camels. ‘What makes the soldier’s heart to penk, what makes him to perspire?’ My camels are still unidentified, but their detestable character is by now well established. The Swedish police isn’t, even if they do behave as badly as that loathed beast. So what is it? These oddities have got to be connected. I don’t see how, let alone why. The funny coincidence department can be written off, that’s for sure. This last week, in the fine old Roman and Rhineland city of Cologne (bright sun, cold winds) nothing happened at all. I made up my mind that (as had been the purpose of the half-finished plan at Roscoff) I would cross over to England, there look about me; take stock of matters. I am due there anyhow, to burnish the fortunes. Going on as they do, sceptered isle and so forth, Brits have drifted further offshore from mainland Europe than at any time perhaps since Julius Caesar’s day: the tunnel provides an ironic comment. The huddle-together syndrome applies most to the over-fifties, precisely those where one finds most readership. One has to repair this: if they don’t read about you in the paper you cease to exist. I have been like the little boy, didn’t want any nasty soup today, diminishing. A phenomenon which applies also to Brits. So for a few days I Am Brit: let’s drink to that.
He stubbed the cigar-butt, drained the glass, closed the eyes; time to get the batteries charged. No further need for the heart to penk; one is At Home.
An editorial interjection is needed here. I myself, the ‘Jonathan Wade’ here mentioned, am well placed, if by sheer coincidence, to supply it. When I came to read this section of the ‘notebook’ there was little there of real interest. Most of it had turned into diary notes; about shopping, for instance: John had lost much in the fire, had been living out of a suitcase, and bought a lot of things both to ‘build up the morale’ and because he could get them here cheaper: in other countries the pound sterling isn’t what it was. This, for any reader myself included, is very dull.
Then there is a good deal about personalities, who are alive and who might well take exception to some of the remarks made; often disagreeable. These were nearly all John’s old cronies, and in general they’d be tolerant: they still mightn’t like their domestic behaviour or scraps of indiscreet conversation thus made public. I ought to know—I was one, and while a grin spread often across my face a few veils had better be drawn. This was the whirl of gaiety; all his meals in restaurants or in private houses; he ate heartily, smoked a great deal too many cigars, and drank enormously—he remarks himself that he was ‘permanently pissed’, and quite contrary to his permanent habit sleeping late of mornings, both to recover from an unaccustomed social round, and to ‘metabolise’ immense quantities of hospitable good wine.
I believe there are two points which need making. One is that he found a sense of anticlimax. He had gone to Sweden and spent a few days with ‘Brigitta’ (her name has been changed), quite expecting, and one could even say ‘hoping’ that he had been right to think that unknowingly he possessed some scrap of evidence that would incriminate people implicated (I must choose words carefully) in the assassination of Palme. When this came to nothing, all that electricity, you might call it, wasted, it would be fair to say he felt a sense of nothingness. Cologne is of course a charming city and he has friends there, who deal in art he didn’t want any art. Rushing there to London on impulse, he was in an edgy, captious state of mind.
The second point is that John was always ambivalent in his attitudes towards his own country. This can be traced in a large measure to his childhood, of which I knew little then. It is enough to remark that he was one of the cranky, eccentric Englishmen not at all uncommon, who take a bitter pleasure in rejecting the more conventional English viewpoints and often take refuge in self-imposed exile; both the elder and the younger Philby come to mind. They have undoubted talent, often indeed brilliant; immense charm; are good friends, delightful human beings. And they have bees in the bonnet, which can become obsessive, ‘King Charles’ Head’, for they have a crack in the personality, right down the middle. A phrase that John would jeer at as cliché, but there’s no denying the reality. When in England he would show an exaggerated affection for institutions he considered noble, if antiquated, while abounding in fury towards those he disliked, quite harmless features of London life like Hanoverian royalty or Lords Cricket Ground.
I had anyhow an appointment that day with young Matt Arnold (he must have suffered from the name at school but has composed himself to a bland and competent career in publishing); they have two or three of my writers, whom I wished to discuss. It is a highly respectable old house, with rather priggish premises in a listed Georgian building. John has been there for years, for long a valued asset, now rather over the hill. Matt, who is in his thirties, inherited him from the head of the firm, a famous old tyrant now dead, and is a little afraid of John, who hides a natural timidity behind a bullying manner and jokes about ‘Spode cups but weak tea’. Inclining thus towards crossness.
“Here’s Mister Charles announcing he’ll be in our Midst tomorrow, expecting me to have the press bowing on the doorstep, blithely unaware it’s unimpressed, since it thought the last three books were boring. However, we’ve got him on to Scotty.” This guru presides over a television programme, thought to be a feather in writers’ hats.
“Oh good. That’ll be a distinct help.” Matt made a yagh sound.
“Lucky somebody got laryngitis and we popped in on cue. He thought it might be an unexpected field.”
“Let’s hope John behaves himself, he can be shatteringly rude.” I added, “Do your best to be conciliatory.”
I had some qualms; this Scotty’s quite a decent chap but imbued with a sense of his importance, likes to think himself on the dangerous-edge-of-things, and is a scorer-off. If drunk, which he would be (afraid of being afraid) and tending to fall into a light doze, John would be vulnerable. He affects despisal; however, I needed not to worry.
Scott took irritatingly long with his introduction.
“… one of our notable exotics, comes drifting in here with a smell of Havanas, so rarely seen one wonders what brings him … John, do please look less nonchalant.”
“Sorry, I didn’t know I was supposed to speak.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, you’re not at the dentist.”
“What’s this Exotic?” The small prickle would make the man abrasive.
“Isn’t there a risk for a writer appearing so seldom, of turning into a purely continental camellia? Highly decorative but lacking in impact?” Showing the bull the cape.
“To be honest, the idea is to read the book, rather than watch the writer picking his nose.”
“But are we being quite honest?”
“Everybody suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and I am one of the few honest people I have known.”
“Sounds like a quotation.”
“So it is. Fitzgerald—your namesake.”
“You’re a great admirer?”
“Writer, and crime writer, very much so.”
“Good, let’s talk about your definitions of crime writing.”
This was quite nice, brisk and even friendly until the man with a tolerant raised-eyebrow face suggested that these were eccentric viewpoints, weren’t they?—and dropped the fatal word ‘quirky’ which won’t do.
“‘Don’t sauce me, in the wicious pride of your youth.’“
“I’m sorry, is that Dickens?” adroitly. John should be sorry!
“I’m not sure … perhaps Franz Kafka?” Not sorry. “We’ll agree upon a good crime writer.” Back payment for the camellias. But without rancour, and at the end, Thank you, I enjoyed that.”
I picked John up afterwards and we had dinner with some journalists: by then pretty far drunk he got a laugh from saying, “One was tempted to ask whether he wasn’t perhaps related to Captain Scott, who brought the empire to the Antarctic, wasn’t very good at it, went about putting snowshoes on the ponies.”
The ‘notebook’ hereabouts—he didn’t date ‘entries’ but one can often match them to a context—has a dry remark about applause. ‘Those bastards weren’t thinking me witty—they were laughing at me.’ He could have been drunk at three in the morning or sober before breakfast. ‘At least one doesn’t have to endure the standing-ovation, the spontaneous-outburst rehearsed by the advance man, tough little bugger racing through the baseball stadium yelling, ‘Up Up Up, for the Governor’. We only have the publisher’s press attaché.’ Probably at breakfast: John liked to start the day with a very-large-cold glass of mimosa; would appear downstairs an hour later for the soft boiled egg, a great deal of coffee, and lacking those wonderful German petits-pains, lots of buttered toast. The thing to notice here is that he was frugal when at home-disciplined about drinking. Good coffee whenever I stayed with him, but ‘yesterday’s bread’.
The next note is apposite; John detested television, refused to appear over the years of his successes, and had only agreed now in the knowledge that his sales had slid a lot.
‘One works alone, in a space one tries to fill with light, and generally it is dark. Remember the monks at Maria Laach, the plainsong of Tenebrae on Good Friday. How solitary is the city, that once was full of people. I should be going to parties, meeting good-ladies who say, “Do tell me about your last book, I’m afraid I haven’t read it yet.” I envy actors, and singers, who merit their applause. A book comes out and one just tries to feel that life is not altogether a mockery.’
At a guess, before even the champagne-and-orange juice.
Nor can I resist the next note, since it is a portrait of myself. ‘Jonathan Wade bland bun of tanned pale face always looking just that very second shaved, pale fair hair scanty, arranged to cover a broad scalp, big flat ears that listen well. Trained to show little expression, as becomes an agent. Dressy, check suits of supple material, expensive cut Old-Etonian voice and manner, used as mask for much kindness.’ This sounds as though I were about to appear in a book! I am comforted by the footnote. ‘I am deeply fond of this pillar, far from the concept of ten per cent man, no resemblance to Swifty Lazar.’
I took him to the Garrick. Mr Charles feels comfortable in this familiar stamping-ground, where many dead and gone editors have worn the Neapolitan ice-cream tie, told jokes and given excellent companionship. John, the world’s unclubbable, feels himself here the Londoner which he was, along-of Mr Fox and Sheridan. He is addicted to marble busts, periwigged men of Distinction engrooved with the dust of King William the Fourth. One orders very large apéritifs, and about a gallon of house claret to follow.
I found dialogue written for me. Enjoyed your performance last night. Next time I see Mr Scott, likely enough standing next door in the gentlemen’s lavatory, send a smoke signal. Camellia in the buttonhole? My carnation was arousing John’s admiration. He had a small inward disturbance, possibly laughter.
I had to give him a small lecture; people like Scott are there to make the soufflé rise, getting the book talked about. John said Tchaah, not listening. One has to spend a lot of time applying balm to bruised literary egos. John as is his wont gave birth to a bad limerick. Enchanted at getting a blood orange in the vodka.
“Bright little journalist clot
Massaging itself until hot.
The ring of the pot
Bright red on it’s bot
Locking me into a slot.”
Immediately upon which I got the tirade about crime writers, and not just Kafka or Fitzgerald but the beloved-Graham and a whole lot more. Plus the first Queen Elizabeth the downfall of England, adroit politician playing the nationalist string for all it’s worth, ridiculous C of E to back it up, and the severest of state police to enforce it, cut the country off from Europe for good and all. We’ll never get back; we’ve had the odd civilised king but they had to give way to the flood tide of jingoism and xenophobia which has marked us ever since. Perfectly good historical theory and I rather agree but it doesn’t do to say so in public. Particularly not at this moment when every Englishman over fifty feels sore and puzzled at our being so third-rate, after all being brought up to believe we were the Best. John’s always been Cassandra and naturally they hate his rubbing in the salt.
Parallel to this you have his insistence that no novelist is any good unless it’s a crime novelist; since most of our crime books are as wordy as they are worthy he feels a natural dislike and mutters about overpraised mediocrities: so they are and it still doesn’t do to say so, since the public isn’t anxious to be told yet again that the Spanish do it better.
Lastly of course, the old boy’s getting a bit long in the tooth. Should be content; does very nicely and oughtn’t allow a dismissive word in the Bridport Advertiser to perturb him.
Something else is worrying him and I don’t know what it is. Likeliest is a bit of grit in that rather hedonistic existence. Something personal?—a delightful young mistress gone sour on him? Sibylle was in many ways an appalling woman. I always liked her. She was so damned radical; no sense of compromise. Since John has none either it was a foregone conclusion they should end in bitter clash. He’s never been willing to admit how much she meant to him, to myself, to himself, to anybody. Be quite sure that he’s very lonely. Never a happy situation. The Rogue Male is not just another cliché. I can’t do much but apply ointment and hope that an abscess is not forming, painful as well as toxic.
That driver took me seriously! Left a note in the office, good conscientious man, that I preferred to be driven in the Jaguar. So that sailing out, ‘leaving Cheyenne’, towards Heathrow, I have a moment to think of this triviality; one makes a joke and it’s taken seriously (the patriots would feel it their duty to disapprove of Daimler-Benz). The opposite happens also and all too often. Being perpetually on the wrong foot; I am overfull of my own contradictions. One is reminded of Philby (St. John, Philby père; I suspect one would prefer Kim’s company). A man perpetually at odds with himself, and at war with his own Englishness; one would be sorry for him, but that would mean my being sorry for myself.
My behaviour while standing about in Heathrow is a case in point; why do the Favourite Airways stewardesses look so untidy and so dirty? Is it only because their uniforms are unbecoming, badly cut and the wrong colour? I was then snubbed by a rude and negligent Air France stew: it serves me right. Mr Kipling put it well, in a delightful Just So rhyme for children, about the horror We feel towards They; forever unaware that they
‘Look upon We as only a kind of They’.
I am flying on, from Germany. I don’t know why I ‘decided’ this; perhaps that the Oddities, as I think of the Enemy, left me to my own devices while in England. Just as they did in Sweden. So that I have decided to give them a third chance, trying to grasp whether ‘the pattern’ so far makes any sense.
