Walking in the Shade (37 page)

I wrote another book in Warwick Road, which I later withdrew. It was called
Retreat to Innocence
. So little do authors' wishes count that I often meet people who say triumphantly, ‘I have a copy of that book you tried to suppress.' Like children in a playground: Sucks to
you!

That novel was born out of being with Jack from Czechoslovakia, from Europe's bloody and fought-over heartland, and how inexperienced, how innocent—and unpleasantly so—he made me feel. He did not try to make me feel this. If you have the kind of knowledge about human behaviour that he had, then most of what people say that does not come from that area of experience must sound like babes prattling. As I write, the war in Bosnia goes on, and those who are part of it will think all their lives, Don't talk to
us
about civilisation. The two main characters in the novel are an older man, Jan, and a girl, Julia. It is a wonderful theme for a novel, but I didn't succeed. I wasted it. It is a shallow novel. But some people did like it, and some still do, and when they say so I feel the pain of an opportunity lost. What I could have explored is how the human mind—our minds—continually try to soften and hide bad experience, by deliberately forgetting or distorting. The way not only individual minds, but collective minds—a country's, a continent's—will forget a horror. The most famous example is the Great Flu Epidemic of 1919-1920, when twenty-nine million people all over the world died, but it is left out of the history books, is not in the collective consciousness. Humanity's mind is set to forget disaster. That was the contention of Velikovsky, whose story of our solar system's possible history is dismissed by the professionals, though surely some of what he said has turned out to be true. There is certainly nothing in the human consciousness of the successive calamitous ice ages, and we—humanity—lived through more than one. There are glimpses in old tales of great floods, but that is about it. In the book which I failed to write would be implicit the question: Is it a good thing that every generation decides to forget the bad or cruel experience of the one before? That the Great War (for instance), such a calamity for Europe, became the ‘Great Unmentionable'—which made my father and other soldiers, of France and Germany, feel as if they were being nullified, discounted, were just so much human rubbish. That five or six years after that terrible civil war in Southern Rhodesia, the new young generation had forgotten and ‘didn't want to know'. Well…it could have been a good book.

What else? I begin thinking about the scheme for
The Golden Notebook
, and I wrote
Play with a Tiger
.

For this play I used Warwick Road, as I experienced it, for a setting, the room with its typewriter, and the bed sheltering behind thin curtains, often seeming to lose its walls to the din and stink of the lorries thundering outside, the raucous groups of boys who late at night were forlornly drunk, mirroring Clancy's tales of his street-corner adolescence in Chicago, on the ‘wrong side of the tracks', the prostitutes' house a diagonal glance away, where the girls sometimes emerged on to the pavement to attract customers or to quarrel.

By now Oscar Lowenstein was well into his career as successful impresario.
*
He did nothing but good for the British theatre and films, and he has not been given the credit he deserves, but he could have done better for me, personally. He liked
Play with a Tiger
but insisted on Siobhan McKenna for the lead. She was tied up for four years, and so that was the time we had to wait to get it on. I kept saying that there were other good actresses. But impresarios often have a streak of power obstinacy, and it was Siobhan McKenna or nothing. Jumping ahead then, to 1962, Ted Kotcheff directed brilliantly, with a sense for the play's flow and movement that meant, when watched from the dress circle, it looked like a slow dance. The male lead was another mistake. I said I wanted someone in style like Sam Wanamaker, but younger, but Oscar said, Over my dead body. He and Ted flew off to New York to audition and come back with a man's idea of what is attractive to women, a stud, like a cowboy. He was a good actor, but he had no feeling for ambiguity. He and Siobhan hated each other on sight, and this showed.

Siobhan was a kind of genius. She had that quality we agree to call charisma, but what is it? She flew over from Dublin, to be ballast during the auditions. It was a cold day, and the theatre was freezing. She was a bit drunk. She had a cold. She was inside layers of clothes. So as not to upstage the aspirant actors, she sat to one side of the stage with her back to us sitting in the auditorium: she was a generous actress and a kind woman. And yet we couldn't take our eyes off her, off that lump of a back with her dark-red hair tousled over it. She was someone you had to look at; it was an effort to take one's eyes off her to watch the actors auditioning.

She was a fine actress but an undisciplined one, because somewhere early in her career she had been described as a wild Irish child, and so she lived up to it, all Irish impulse and whimsy, and she drank far too much. It was a tragedy that she had not learned discipline. On one evening she could be magnificent, unforgettable—and it was easy to see why Oscar wanted her—but on the next she was pathetic, forgetting her lines and moves, and evidently drunk.

We had a great supporting cast. Maureen Prior was sent the play and loved it so much she staggered from her sickbed, where she was ill, and came out in a bitter wind to the cold theatre to audition. ‘I have to do this part,' she said, ‘if I die for it.' She was perfect. Godfrey Quigley was good. They all were. The play was put on at the Comedy Theatre, and it ran for two months, but just under its break-even point. Harold Hobson, the most influential critic then, liked it, calling it ‘the most troublingly poetic play in London'. T. C. Worsley said it ‘ought to be seen by anyone interested in the contemporary theatre and indeed in contemporary living'. Milton Shulman said it was sensitive, sympathetic, and touching. Robert Muller said it was ‘written with lacerating passion and truth'. But these remarks were culled from on the whole indifferent reviews—apart from Harold Hobson. Graham Greene liked it very much and generously wrote to tell me so. But he was not a critic.

The fact that it was so brilliantly directed was hardly noticed. Still, I am not the only person who thinks that when Ted Kotcheff left us for Hollywood, the theatre lost the best director working then.

What do I think about this play now? It is a good play but not a great one. It has a good shape and structure but needs the right director. It was of its time—why? That remark about ‘lacerating passion' hints why. Lacerating passion is most unfashionable. The play for the times was
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf
, the sex war red in tooth and claw.
Play with a Tiger
has been put on here and there in various countries ever since, but mostly by feminist theatres, where it becomes an indictment of men, losing its balance and its humour. For it can, if done right, get not a few laughs.

I was hurt by its reception. I thought it deserved better. There was a sour and disagreeable note in the comment that I was to get full blast when
The Golden Notebook
came out. I believed it was due to anti-female bias, which can take many forms and may be far from straightforward. People known to me or not kept coming up and saying, But you put your own life into the play. Just as if John Osborne's
Look Back in Anger
were not direct from life, and as if Arnold Wesker's plays were not from life. No one had said to John or Arnold anything like the unpleasant things that were said to me. And I was probably oversensitive, for many more than were critical liked the play and wrote to say so. People still say now that they remember the play and how they liked it.

But there was no doubt that on the whole the play was a failure, and I was beginning to have thoughts about my career as a playwright that can only be described as unscientific.

At the Salisbury Playhouse,
The Truth About Billy Newton
filled the seats but did not transfer; to London and it had suffered improbable setbacks and fatalities. Then look what happened to
Each His Own Wilderness
. Then
Play with a Tiger
. To wait four years for an actress who was only intermittently satisfactory, and to be landed with the wrong leading man, and then all the fever and fret and the wounded pride—was it worth it? Later I wrote two more plays. One of them I read recently and thought—as I did then—that it would have done well at the Court, being a farce about the clash of the classes, but they turned it down. Joan Littlewood liked it, or said she did and came to lunch to say so, but Raffles, her manager, didn't agree. Then I wrote a modern version of the
Medea
, which for a couple of years kept getting itself cast on the highest level, but every time a star was secured, something terrible happened, until finally one of them died just as the contracts were being signed. By then I had decided that I was unlucky in the theatre, and I should see this and simply give up. But the end was when the National Theatre asked me to do a version of Ostrovsky's
The Storm
. I was asked because I was a woman and the play was seen by John Dexter as about the sufferings of womanhood. I should have said no, but my vanity was involved. A hundred plays would have interested me more than
The Storm
. It was played wonderfully by Jill Bennett and Anthony Hopkins, all grand passion and suffering, but in fact the play is about teenagers, as young as twelve and thirteen, being married off by cruel and greedy parents to secure their money and their estates. It is about the insufferable ignorance and stupidity of provincial Russia then. The understudies' production got the play right, heartbreaking it was, poor children enjoying a little flare of life before the lid slammed down on them. But no one saw this production.

I could go on about what was wrong with John Dexter's production—yet he was usually brilliant—and at the time I did go on about it, and just before the first night I was for an evening with Laurence Olivier and said what I thought about it all, much too forcibly, for I was drunk with despair. He was kind. I remember him all vitality, energy, sympathy—above all the vital energy (the same quality possessed by Charlie Chaplin, whom I met for ten minutes on a pavement with Miles Malleson in Leicester Square: he has left behind in my mind for ever an impression of quick forceful movements, quick intelligent dark eyes, humour, charm).

And that was when I sat myself down to do some serious thinking. Not one of my attempts at the theatre had gone as I wanted. I had put so much time and effort into plays. At least, when I wrote a novel, it was printed as I wanted it. The anguish, the tension, the sleepless nights, so many disproportionate emotions: and what for? I did not again write for the theatre but did for television, successfully and without disasters or misfortunes.

And so my passion for the theatre, my ambition to write for it, has been sublimated into the great pleasure of theatre-going, in that cornucopia of great theatre, London, and if sometimes I think, Oh, if only…, then I do not allow the moment of weakness to last.

My experiences in the theatre and later in opera went into
Love, Again
, my novel that describes a theatre group at work.

 

And now an encounter with the ex-comrades, which did not differ at all from confrontations with the comrades. Clancy Sigal had gone to a mining village, in the same spirit as I had five years before, but he, being a man, was at once part of the hard-drinking, pub and club culture of miners at leisure. He became friends with a young miner, Len Doherty, and spent a couple of weekends there. He wrote
Weekend in Dinlock
in three days, over my head, in Warwick Road, while I listened to his chattering typewriter. It is a brilliant little book. I have known no one in my life with Clancy's capacity for minute acute social observation. And then it was published and at once exploded that farcical shameful reaction that, alas, people on the left have seen a thousand times. Those people who you would think must welcome this book were those who did most to harm it.

Why is that? This book is no place for a little essay on literary criticism and its history on the left, but these push-button enmities have a long history, going back at least to the methods of the Inquisition, later adapted to the uses of communism. Every new writer, every new book, must if successful somehow survive the arrows of envy, but communism gave envy and jealousy a robe of respectability to wear over the nasty truth. Under names such as ‘socialist realism', communist attitudes towards art and literature have been and in some places still are art and literature's deadly enemy. Again and again and in country after country, we have seen ‘socialist realism' surfacing to rubbish respected writers, and this long after it was hated and despised by every working artist and writer in socialist realism's mother country as well as by readers. What happened in the countries of Scandinavia in the seventies is instructive: ‘socialist realism' was used to discredit the well-known writers. And now, in country after country of the Third World, these primitive emotions are used against the successful.

Clancy's little book was greeted with a storm of accusations. One was that he had taken advantage of the good nature of the miners of the village in question. But he had shown the book to Len Doherty, who had cleared it for publication.

Then
The New Reasoner
asked Len Doherty to review it.

There followed an exchange of very heated letters between me and
The New Reasoner
, me and Edward Thompson. I certainly had a nasty little talent for invective. But then we all had, having learned in a nasty school. I shall quote only two little bits, relevant to my chief points:

‘I'm sick to death of socialists knifing each other in the back,' I exclaim.