Walking in the Shade (33 page)

The Court was more than a lively theatre, with a brave history, where everyone of talent wanted to work. Its atmosphere, its ambience, was so strong that for a while it was more like an informal community. Around it grew workshops and ‘happenings' of the kind which would be commonplace in the sixties. What need was it then, in the second half of the fifties, expressed by large numbers of people, all young or at least not old—some of them actors and dramatists but some not even working in the theatre—to spend whole evenings, weekends, being Trees, Walls, Rivers, or delineating Anger, Pity, Love, Compassion, and so forth? Some of these sessions were not unlike what one reads of Victorian drawing rooms, with their tableaux and charades. One house where this sort of thing went on was Anne and Peter Piper's
*
on the river at Hammersmith, a wonderful fragile house, with pillared verandahs, giving it the air of a ship adrift on the tides. It was full of beautiful daughters, of all ages, so that it was impossible to be in it without dreaming that Renoir might return and paint the whole lot of them. While I—and Peter—loved visiting the Pipers, I cannot say I enjoyed the charades, neither there nor at the Court, despite its heady atmosphere. I did not like the togetherness, the family, the ‘we against them'—the tribe; I had had enough of all that to last my life. I knew it would soon blow apart, for it always does, but it was charming while it lasted. And for a while I was a Royal Court writer. ‘Oh, you're one of our writers,' they would say, giving me good seats, but meanwhile I brooded over betrayal: you made me a promise and didn't keep it.

I had written a play, about that time when the youth were certainly not interested in politics. For me, after years of political refugees, survivors of concentration camps, of the refugees from the communist countries, to hear some languid youth murmur, ‘I'm afraid I have no time for politics'—it was painful. Kenneth Tynan was the exemplar of the time, for he was a dandy, wearing peacock clothes to annoy his elders, inspired by Max Beerbohm and Wilde. My lot were shocked and disturbed, for we thought, if you are not ‘politically conscious', then you get what you deserve—Hitler, at least. That some of the most politically conscious generations in history had got Stalin was not a thought we could yet accommodate. So that was the background to
Each His Own Wilderness
, that and watching a friend of mine, a communist, being harassed by her non-political son, week in and week out, for months, about her politics. Then she gave up politics, and he, overnight, became extremely, not to say violently political—everything he had criticised her for being. Even while I was writing it everything had changed, and Kenneth Tynan headed the new wave. I sent this play to the Royal Court, which meant to Tony Richardson, and was invited to lunch by him and by George Devine, who both enthused about the play. ‘Just as good as
Look Back in Anger
, da-h-ling,' drawled Tony. Some prescient imp spoke out of me when I said, ‘But you might change your minds.' I was assured by both men, with a thousand promises, that this could not happen. Months passed, and I dared write to ask what had happened to the run I had been promised, and got a letter from George Devine, beginning: ‘There are still some things we like about your play.' Tony Richardson had gone to work in the States, and it was he who had admired the play. His successor as George's mentor was Lindsay Anderson, who was rigidly left-wing, and he did not approve of it and had told George not to do it. Instead of a run, the play was put on at the Court for a Sunday night, John Dexter directing.
*
He was then still unknown, unsure of himself but not of his talent, was already a wonderful director. The Royal Court's Sunday Nights for a time drew packed houses. The play got good reviews. Had it been given a run, it would have done as well as many others, but it was unfashionable not only in subject but also in form. The Court despised the well-made play. They loathed their predecessors, Noël Coward, Terence Rattigan, Anouilh, particularly Priestley. One had only to mention them to hear the sound which is the equivalent of the noisily pulled lavatory chain.

Does it have to be thus? I mean, that a new efflorescence of young talent must despise its predecessors? Many are the New Dawns that I have seen, and all of them are engineered by young people who have to hate their elders. And looking back at my dawn, remembering the vigour of my contempt for those who went just before me, I feel discouraged, know why it is so—but persist in wondering: Surely it doesn't have to be like this? For it is a wicked waste, this cycle, the new energies leaping up, demolishing what went before…then slowly realising they may have been too hasty and learning to salute people who are only themselves a generation or so back. Meanwhile they are being rubbished by their successors. A sad, bad, stupid cycle.

The new plays given a run by the Court were mostly shapeless, not to say anarchic, and badly needed cutting. Few have survived. But to cut and shape and prune seemed to these innovators an insult to creativity. (This was not true of Arnold Wesker's plays, John Osborne's, or Shelagh Delaney's).

I don't want to make any great claims for
Each His Own Wilderness
. It was a nice little play, nothing special. It sometimes gets put on again. To see what it lacked, just think of
Waiting for Godot
, or Genet's plays, or Sartre's. Long after, when Tony Richardson came to see me, visiting London, he said, ‘That was a good play.' He felt bad about what had happened. And he did something generous. He asked me to write a script of Faulkner's
Intruder in the Dust
for a thousand pounds. By then I understood enough about the film world to know that this film might never be made, and certainly not as I had written it, and only later understood that Tony was using this way to give me some money. My experience of Tony, about whom harsh things are sometimes said, was that he was kind, thoughtful, generous by instinct, apart from being very clever.

I saw
Look Back in Anger
with Miles Malleson and could not have had a more appropriate companion. Miles was distressed by the play, but he was far from being some old fuddy-duddy. Now we take Ibsen, Chekhov, Molière, for granted, but then theatre managers were wary of them. Miles had sometimes made new translations, put pressure on the managers, and acted in these plays. He saw himself as having been in the avant-garde all his life, a comparable figure to George Devine. But that night, in the feverish, uneasy audience, the young shouting enthusiasm, the older generation unhappy, Miles kept saying, ‘But bad manners isn't social criticism.' Miles was a socialist, but not far from communist; perhaps he was a communist, I don't know. I met a daughter of his at the National Theatre not long ago, and she assumed my friendship with Miles was that of two old Party warhorses, but I never heard anything like the party line from Miles. Jimmy Porter, with whom so many young men identified, I thought was infantile and as self-pitying as the youths who killed themselves because of
Werther
. Miles saw him as the equivalent of a fart let off in the face of respectability, and as useful.

Why was Jimmy Porter so angry? There are two deaths in that play. One was his father, dying from the Spanish Civil War, which had made so many Britons ashamed of their government, and the other was an old working-class woman who was a survivor of the hungry, threadbare, grimed-with-poverty thirties. I identified with that anger. Yet the older people were demanding, What was Jimmy Porter—or John Osborne—so angry about? Surely that was what he—or they—were angry about. Acres of print then occurred about the reasons for that anger.

In 1951 had appeared
Angry Young Man
, the autobiography of Leslie Paul, a distinguished man of letters whose life and publications fill two fat columns in
Contemporary Authors
. I've never met anyone who has read this book, but its title probably inspired Osborne's title. The phrase was in the air. When at the Royal Court the publicity people were thinking of how to draw attention to
Look Back in Anger
, they said, to John Osborne ‘I suppose you are an angry young man?' And fed it to the press. As we all know, to our sad cost, the press cannot let a good thing go, and for years every appearance of new talent was hailed as an ‘angry young man'. ‘Angry Young Men.' An astonishing phenomenon, journalists: you'd think they would sometimes try for a little originality. Recently we have seen the same thing with John Major, who was described early on in his premiership as ‘grey'. For years, and until recently, John Major has inspired journalists to add ‘grey'. Like so many programmed rats. Mrs. Thatcher: handbag.

And now enter Tom Maschler, very young—twenty-three—handsome, and ambitious, who arrived in my flat with the demand that I write a piece for a book he planned, called
Declaration
. I said I hated writing think pieces. He said reproachfully that his whole future depended on this book. I later discovered that this was how we all agreed: we could not withstand Tom's need. Besides, he had approached Iris Murdoch—he said—and she had said no, and he had to have a woman in it: I could not let him down. This is how I became an angry young man.

Tom was very much a war victim. His parents had come as refugees from Vienna when he was six, and if this was not bad enough, they separated when they arrived. His mother got a job as a cook in a big house in the country. Tom, having been a young princeling in Vienna, was a cook's son. He became the leader of a gang of delinquent youths, and about his exploits he was very funny and somewhat boastful. He also complained that being rescued by being sent to a Quaker school had ruined him by giving him a moral sense, because otherwise he would have become a second Onassis. His short career in the army had not been a success: he was not the only young man I knew who, outraged that anything so crass could happen to him, simply lay on his bed and refused to get up. He had been a tour guide—this was at the beginning of this kind of tourism. His knowledge of languages and his charm made him a success. All kinds of adventures went on, one being the smuggling of coffee across frontiers. (Good real coffee was a treasured commodity.) I, taking Peter to Spain, had been invited to take across a parcel of coffee for our engaging young tour guide; those were innocent days. Tom decided to be a publisher, got a job at five pounds a week at André Deutsch, and was now in McGibbon and Kee, a very junior figure. He proposed to become the best publisher in Britain, but he had to make a start. This book,
Declaration
, would be the start. Tom did become the best, certainly the most visible, publisher in Britain. He had a nose, a flair, an instinct. He showed his flair in whom he chose for
Declaration
. What we had in common was that we were visible at the time; we were ‘names' with an aura of success or promise.

While waiting for the publication of
Declaration
, Tom became friends with us all. Some of us gave him advice. Since he wanted to be a publisher, then it would be a good thing if he read some books. Interesting that we all came up with roughly the same list of twenty books. He should also try to read a newspaper a day, for while he might not be interested in politics, he should know what was going on. Well, all right, then: if he didn't want to read newspapers he must get someone to tell him the news.
*

Tom is one of those people who attract comment, much of it unfavourable. Some of this is of course envy, for he has been so phenomenally successful.

Once, I told him it would be difficult to write about him because some of the things he did were so appalling.

‘For instance?' asks Tom.

‘For instance this,' I say. My Italian publisher, Feltrinelli, rang me from the Ritz to ask would I have breakfast with him. How chic, then, was a business breakfast: I had never heard of them. There we sat in the Ritz, surrounded by the plenitudes of the Ritz breakfast, drinking black coffee, since neither of us ate breakfast. He was an agreeable man, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, and a brave publisher. He was a communist, Feltrinelli was a left-wing house, and he published books like
Doctor Zhivago
and other novels damned by the Soviet authorities. For this, of course, he was reviled by the comrades. That morning Tom happened to telephone, and I said I had had breakfast with Feltrinelli. Tom said, ‘I'm coming over.' He then got me to telephone Feltrinelli at his hotel to say that my friend Tom Maschler was with me and would very much like to talk to him. I did this. I am not saying what I felt about it. I listened while Tom chatted up Feltrinelli, who could not have been blamed for assuming that Tom was living with me. The conversation finished, Tom put down the receiver and turned to say triumphantly, ‘I'm seeing him tonight.' Next day he rang and announced that he was invited to stay with them in their country house. And Tom became a close friend of the Feltrinellis.
^†

‘Well, what was wrong with that?' says Tom. ‘That was just being enterprising.' Chutzpah, that was Tom's middle name. He had been at McGibbon and Kee for six months when Howard Samuels, the proprietor, summoned him for an interview, and said to this ebullient and engaging infant, whom he had after all chosen from so many hopeful applicants, ‘You know Tom, I don't really mind you allowing everyone to think you run this firm, but I am afraid I do rather object to your behaving as if you owned it.'

But really it was only necessary to remember Balzac's Rastignac, the provincial determined to conquer Paris. London was full of young men, most, but not all, from the north of England, many working class, from the grammar schools, without the connections that are so important in this country, but with plenty of cheek and cleverness. Women have ever been useful to ambitious young men. Why not? It is part of the social mechanisms. But until we worked it out—some of us by remembering Rastignac—women then in the news were always being puzzled by how we were being embraced in theatre foyers and public places by young men we scarcely knew, whose attentiveness impressed the onlookers, if not us; or summoned by public address systems, at the same time as youths we scarcely knew, to hotel or airport desks.