Walking in the Shade (45 page)

Henry Kissinger reminded me of Eysenck of that Oxford lecture now so long ago. He had a thick German accent, he radiated energy and decision—and, too, wariness and disapproval. As far as the U.S. papers were concerned, the entire movement for nuclear disarmament was communist, and to say to him that only a tiny minority of members was communist was mere hair-splitting.

Our conversation soon crystallised around one word. He said that a nuclear weapon had been evolved which could be accurately targetted to kill a hundred thousand people. He called it a ‘kitten bomb'. He kept using the phrase, kitten bomb. I was shocked and said that anyone who could use the word ‘kitten' to describe such a weapon of war showed a lack of moral feeling and sensitivity and that just about summed everything which was wrong with American foreign policy. He said I was sentimental and unrealistic and understood nothing about
Realpolitik
. We were not quarrelling: to quarrel with someone, you have to have something in common. I experienced him as a harsh, abrasive, aggressive force, terrifying because of what he represented, and he experienced me as a sanctimonious wincing idiot who was using the language of humanism in the service of world communism. This encounter lasted about an hour and confirmed the worst prejudices we had about each other.

In fact, I admired the man for making the attempt. No other conservative American tried to understand the enemy—the Left. And it was brave. Kissinger had not yet achieved the summits of his success, but he had a lot to lose. I could just imagine the headlines in the States: ‘Kissinger Under the Influence of the Kremlin.' ‘Communism Corrupts Kissinger.' ‘The Communist Trojan Horse and Kissinger.' No, I certainly do not exaggerate. How to convey now the lunacies of that time? The nearest to it is what we see when reports come from inside movements of the Muslim hardliners: a dark unreason, a murderous hate of the unknown. That is how Americans saw communism, whether in or out of the communist countries. And that is how large numbers of Europeans, whether left-wing or not, saw the States. A violent and terrifying unreason.

 

Another American sent to visit me by Wayland Young was William Phillips, he who had founded the
Partisan Review
in the thirties and edited it ever since. He had a wistful admiration for the British New Left, seeing them as a movement which might succeed in creating a socialist Britain. He became and has remained a good friend. The irony was that once I had been a Stalinist. He had been more of a Trotskyist, and in the States had fought the Stalinists, a battle which from the outside seemed like a spotlit bout between combatants inside a very small ring. Ancient differences seemed irrelevant now: ancient differences came so soon to seem irrelevant.

The
Partisan Review
began essentially as an organ of the anti-Stalinist Left and has always conducted the most passionate political polemics, but from the start it had another face. Some of the best and best-known American writers and poets were first published in the
Partisan Review
, and contributors from abroad too. That is why I read the
Partisan Review
—and still read it. And it was why many British people read it, those from the Left and people who were not at all socialist. I would glance through the polemics—feeling that I ought to be interested—to get to the literature.

William Phillips was a dry, well-read, ironic man, very American but fed as much from Europe. Long years later, when I confessed that I had never been really interested in the politics of the
Partisan Review
, I think he was disappointed. But the fact is, again and again in my lifetime, the vicious vituperations, the polemics, the dialectics, the sophistries, of politics have become vapour and mist, while what remains is the literature and the art, which at the time might have been merely tolerated by the politicos.

 

J. P. Donleavy was around and about in London in those days, the author of the scandalous
The Ginger Man
, yet another incarnation of the irreverent out-to-shock maverick, in the line of
Lucky Jim
and of
Hurry on Down
, but Donleavy, with a fine feeling for the unexpected, presented himself like a duke in exile, a grave, mournful, elegant man who with Murray Sayle enlivened our days with tales of improbable adventure. I remember him best for the tenderest little moment. It is early evening, the starlings are squealing around the roofs, and Donleavy drops in. He has been at the BBC, where he had felt an impulse to salute a muse, in my person. ‘Oh, sit down, have a drink—my Muse is exhausted for today.' He indicated a carrier bag, which had in it four large bottles of milk stout. ‘Good Lord, you haven't taken to tippling milk stout?'

‘No, I'm on my way home, to take these to the wife. Any woman who has had to spend the day with the babbies needs her milk stout, and if there was such a thing as milk of ambrosia I'd buy it for her, every day, the poor, poor woman. And she'll be in need of some civilised conversation when the babes are in bed.'

 

Murray Sayle sometimes dropped in, for as with all natural entertainers, there were times when he had to have an audience. Once, he telephoned to say it was an urgent matter, and when he arrived it turned out that he had just turned thirty. We sat in a pub garden—at any rate, out-of-doors somewhere—for most of the day, while he explained to me that women had no idea of what a terrible thing it was for a man to be thirty. It was the end of youth. I am sure I was sympathetic, for his distress was real, even if he was being, as ever, very funny. Only afterwards did it occur to me that I had just become forty, and I had not thought to apply to him or anyone else for sympathy. I did not say, ‘Damn it, Murray, what are your sorrows compared to mine?'

 

And so, too, with Kenneth Tynan, by whom I was summoned to mourn the passing of time. We sat in his flat most of the day, while his secretary brought this and that in the way of restoratives, and Ken said he was thirty but had already reached the summits of achievement, being a theatre critic for the
Observer
. At first I thought he was mocking himself, as he so often did, but no, he meant it. I did suggest that there surely were other summits he might aim for, while we exchanged words but not feelings, for there are times when the little horizons of the British simply stun observers into a sort of despair. He meant it; he meant every word: He saw himself as a brilliant projectile hurled against the philistinism of the British theatre but already falling back, having reached too high too soon.

Was I a particular friend of Ken's? I never thought so, but that was because his guard was so perfect, the glitter of wit, and you did not feel you had got any closer to him. I had to deduce that I must be in some special niche, perhaps as a kind of elder sister, for several times he called me over for what he probably thought of as a heart-to-heart.

Ken lived in Mayfair, in Mount Street, with Elaine Dundy, his then wife. The flat was decorated in what I thought was bathetic chic. The wallpaper was Bosch's
Garden of Earthly Delights
, and there was a chair covered in fake tiger skin. The flat was often full of the currently trendy. If you went to a party there, everybody was in the news or reflected some kind of fame. People who have to collect the well known are in fact suffering from insecurity, but I didn't see that then.

I always found Ken fragile, vulnerable, like an elegant grey silky moth, with his large prominent greeny eyes and his bony face. He was tall and much too thin. I wanted to put my arms around him and say, There, there. Hardly appropriate for a young king of the theatre. People were afraid of him, because he had such power. I enjoyed his wit but thought his judgements too often pulled out of good sense by dogma. He was archetypically that character who liked to shock by saying he was a communist or a Marxist, while he would rather die than actually join the Party. These people always have a kind of political innocence, or ignorance, because their thoughts are all in the air—are never brought down to earth. For instance, Athol Fugard, who is one of the original playwrights of our time, did not fit into Ken's political agenda. There were other mistakes too. But Ken's theatre writing was brilliant, it coruscated, and there has been nothing like it since.

When you met him at a party or somewhere, he would deliver himself of some witticisms, but with difficulty, because of his stutter and his hoarse breathing, while he watched your face for the reaction. He might explain he had been polishing them up that day, because ‘you mustn't think that wits like me and Oscar Wilde don't have to work at it.'

Ken's marriage with Elaine Dundy was ending, in sound and fury, often conducted in restaurants, so you might see Ken at one table, white-faced and bitter but full of the energy of battle, hurling reproaches at Elaine at another table. She was more than able to hold her own.

He enjoyed the public show of himself, like an extension of theatre. He was a public man. Often when he telephoned me I knew I had had a good review or at least was in the newspapers. I was critical about it then, but now we take that kind of thing for granted, for we are more and more manipulated from outside. Fans may write, ‘I loved that book,' or unfriends, ‘I hated that book,' but usually it is, ‘I saw that review.' The stimulus is the review, not the book.

Ken went off to New York, and for six weeks I was theatre critic for the
Observer
, to be succeeded by the next on the list of his friends whom he had designated to hold the fort until he came back. I enjoyed the experience, mostly because of seeing plays I normally wouldn't see. I had had no idea of the variety of plays on. And that was long before the fringe theatre, theatre in pubs, shows of all kinds in pubs. Some kinds of plays seem to have disappeared, a certain kind of farce, for instance, like the Whitehall farces, skilful, brilliant theatre. I suppose those audiences now would be satisfied with television. There were not nearly as many musicals. I came out of the experience with the conclusion that some critics did not review plays according to their class and kind, but patronised plays that were good of their sort though not for highbrow audiences. Surely it is not helpful to review something like
Carry on, Nurse
as if it were a failed attempt at
Hedda Gabler
.

Ken was heartbreaking. When he died so horribly, and so much too young, of emphysema, my feelings about his always ominous brilliance turned out to be justified, but that was hardly a consolation. There are people whose deaths leave an unfillable empty space.

 

John Osborne. He was as much involved with a disintegrating marriage as was Ken. I was at a restaurant dinner with John, Mary Ure, and…who? There was a fourth. John sniped steadily through the meal at beautiful Mary, who was in tears. Just like Jimmy Porter and Alison, whom Mary had recently been playing.

I knew three of John's wives, Penelope Gilliatt better than the others. At a certain dinner at the Gilliatt flat in Mayfair, there was John Osborne, his mistress Jocelyn Rickards, Ken Tynan, and one of his mistresses. Clancy was there too: though we had broken up, we were often asked together. Clancy, for a while, was part of fashionable London, whether he likes it or not. The Gilliatt marriage was breaking up, the Osborne marriage had broken up. Penelope was more than pretty, she was beautiful, your classic red-haired beauty: milky skin, green eyes, slinky figure. John was in love with her the way some men are in love, as if they are preparing for a session at the dentist. Doctor Gilliatt I liked very much and admired: he was a quiet man, watching his wife being charmed away from him but not showing what he felt.

It was at that meal that Penelope congratulated me on my enterprise in going ‘to get material' for
In Pursuit of the English
, which had recently come out. I said I hadn't been getting material, it was necessity. I had had no money to speak of, a small child, and the only people prepared to take me in with a small child was that warm-hearted Mediterranean household. Penelope had always been rich. I was angry: the moment epitomised one of the reasons I sometimes felt uncomfortable in these circles and why I felt at home with, let's say, the new young people at the Royal Court: none of them would have needed to have it explained to them.

Later I knew Jill Bennett too. I thought then, and think now, that any woman allowing herself to be in love with John Osborne must be crazy. Yet all his women were remarkable, and all mourned him when he ditched them. My judgements are those of the noncombatant. With me he was never anything but courteous and kind. Affable, that is the word. Magnanimous in his judgements. Gentleman John, that was his real nature—and then something deep and spiteful forced him into venom.

I felt kin to John because of that pain of his, like an abscess deep within. I understood the throb of anguish, making you irritable. I went to dinner with John two or three times at Jocelyn Rickards's house. It was after Mary Ure but before Penelope Gilliatt. This leads me to the reflection that the reigns of mistresses are often more secure than those of wives. At least, Jocelyn was the only one of his women he was complimentary about after he had broken with her. Tony Richardson was there. This was the time of Woodfall Productions. They were working on their films and spent a lot of time together. The two men were irritable, affectionate, competitive, and in any gathering were the centre because of the electricity they engendered. In his memoirs John called it a
mariage blanc
, but I thought they were like brothers, and as with siblings, behind everything said or not said were suggestions of long, intense entwined experience. Yet they had not known each other long. How precarious, chancy, and brief those friendships were: looking back, what I see is how we were all being blown together into quick, intense, trustful comradeship, as if we were members of an extended family, and then a shift of the kaleidoscope, and for no reason at all—apparently—new arrangements of people. I used to meet John here and there, with Penelope, with Jill Bennett. He went in for ambiguous postcards: he sent me several, I think after Penelope but before Jill, or perhaps it was after Jill but before his final wife. They beckoned you forward but at the same time slapped you back. For instance, the picture of a grim seaside street with Bed-and-Breakfast houses that had ‘Vacancies' on them, or ‘To Let'. He wrote, ‘I wish you were here.' A couple of kisses, but at first glance you might think they were crosses on graves. Unsigned. Or, ‘J.' Then, ‘Why haven't you rung?' Speech after long silence. I did nothing about it. I was very fond of John. But if there was ever a man who needed allowances made, attention paid, constant vigilance for fear you might say something he would find wounding, it was John, and I was so beset by burdens of all kinds then that it was all too much of a good thing. I have said that I was born with skins too few, but John seemed to have no defences at all. He reminded me of a young dog who has been badly treated. It bravely confronts the world, licks your hand, is grateful for a caress, but its hide is shivering and shrinking when a hand comes too close, away from a possible blow. I used to dream about John for years. Now, those were interesting dreams. Straightforward sexual dreams are not interesting; you wake and think, Oh, one of those. But there is a kind of dream about a man that is affectionate, friendly, and with a flicker of amorousness, like old lovers meeting, and there is regret and humour and charm. Charm—the main thing; landscapes that seem to smile; nothing to do with ordinary life.