Strolling on the waterfront, Juanito pointed out pockmarks in the buildings made, he said, on the evening the Deutschland was bombed. From the heights of the old town, looking out to sea, he indicated where, during World War II, tankers flying the Spanish flag had refueled German U-boats.
One day Joshua took a knife with him and buried it close to the rock overlooking Mueller’s villa. Then, alarmed at his own behavior, hardly daring to wonder at its implications, he resolved to quit Ibiza. Taking his breakfast on the terrace of the Casa del Sol one morning, he decided to leave on the Jaime II, bound for Valencia the next Wednesday.
The new hotel, helped by Mueller’s patronage, had caught on quickly, displacing the Café Formentor as a rendezvous. Among the first guests who came to stay at the Casa del Sol there was a charabanc full of Americans. Joshua watched as they began to drift onto the terrace for breakfast. Dr. Dr. Mueller, taking his seat, waved. Joshua didn’t acknowledge his greeting, which made Frau Weiss smile.
Looking out into the bay, Joshua could see three destroyers, obdurate in the morning mist, rising and falling grayly at anchor. The American Sixth Fleet. Toward Formentera, an aircraft carrier, also at anchor, rocked half-concealed in the mist. An American tourist came out, sat down at a vacant table between Joshua, Mueller, and Frau Weiss, and asked the waitress, in English, for two fried eggs, toast, marmalade, and coffee. “And just this once,” he said, “forget the olive oil, will you, honey?” Then he settled back easily in his chair. An owner. Indicating the ships at sea, he winked at Mueller. “Ours,” he said.
Freiberg’s brother-in-law Max, a smuggler and money-changer of sorts who had arrived only a day earlier, emerged through the beaded door from the hotel and waddled over to the tourist’s table, cameras and binoculars slung over his shoulder. “Good morning,” he said.
“I’m not buying anything.”
“On these cameras,” Max said, warming to his pitch, “you do not pay tax. Like in America.”
Both men were wearing beach shorts and sandals. The tourist was tall and tanned, brawny, broken-faced, his smile engaging. Max was small, pasty, and potbellied.
“Hey you,” the tourist said. “Take a good look at me. Do I look like I pay tax?”
“Certainly, no.”
“Then why don’t you do me a big favor and fuck off?”
Max turned to Dr. Dr. Mueller, taking him for another member of the tourist party. “Would you like to look at a camera, Joe? They are German.”
“If they are German,” Dr. Dr. Mueller said, grinning at Joshua as he simulated an American accent, “they must be the best. How much?”
“One hundred and fifty bucks.”
Dr. Dr. Mueller laughed and passed his big brown hand among the cameras and binoculars slung from Max’s shoulder, much as if he were insinuating it inside a woman’s blouse, and then he shook them about roughly. “Where did you steal them from?” he asked Max.
“Yeah,” the tourist said, grinning, as he wiped egg yolk from his mouth with the back of his hand.
Max laughed, he slapped his thigh, his stomach shook: then, abruptly, he was solemn again. He whacked his mutilated hand against the table, like a butcher flinging a fish on the counter. He propped his left leg on a chair and ran his bad hand along a scar there. “Gestapo,” he said.
Frau Weiss whistled, feigning astonishment.
“I’ll give you fifty dollars cash,” Dr. Dr. Mueller said playfully. “Real American dollars.”
Max clacked his tongue reproachfully. He wiped the lenses of a camera and set it down tenderly on Dr. Dr. Mueller’s table. Stepping back, he admired it from different angles. “You must pay two hundred dollars in New York. Don’t forget taxes.”
“Hey,” Dr. Dr. Mueller said, smiling, “you’re a very smart fellow. You’re not Spanish.”
Boiling with rage, Joshua watched Frau Weiss reach over and nudge Dr. Dr. Mueller.
“I’ll let you have it for one hundred dollars without the case, O.K.?”
“How much for the binoculars?”
Swiftly Max polished a pair of binoculars. “They are German,” he said. “The best.”
Frau Weiss covered her mouth with her hand. She tittered.
“Seventy dollars,” Max said.
Dr. Dr. Mueller picked up the binoculars and studied the destroyers in the bay, frowning.
“For you,” Max said, “only sixty dollars.”
“You are not Spanish,” Mueller said.
“I am Spanish.”
“You are a Jew,” Mueller said, “is that not so?”
“For Christ’s sake,” Joshua howled, fishing into his pocket, “I’ll take the fucking binoculars. Give them to me. Come on.”
Max, Frau Weiss, the tourist, Dr. Dr. Mueller, all turned to look, startled, as Joshua hastily signed a traveler’s check for fifty dollars, added some pesetas, and thrust the money at Max.
“The camera as well?” Max asked, beaming.
Frau Weiss clapped her hands together and laughed. The sun caught a gold filling.
“The hell.” Joshua seized Max by the arm and pulled him over to Frau Weiss. He pointed at the scar on Max’s leg. “Now laugh at this, you German cunt. Co ahead.”
Dr. Dr. Mueller rose languidly and stepped between Joshua and Frau Weiss. “You,” he said to Max.
“Yes, sir.”
“Tell this rude boy when you left Germany. The truth now.”
Max shrugged.
“Speak up!”
“Nineteen thirty-three.”
“Gestapo. You see how they lie, Shapiro. How they exaggerate. It’s all propaganda.”
“Unlike Dresden,” Frau Weiss said. “Everybody should be made to see Dresden.”
Joshua grabbed the binoculars and flung them from the terrace. They did not, as he had intended, shatter against the rocks, but landed short, falling softly into the sand. He seized Max by his narrow shoulders, shaking him fiercely. “You don’t have to be afraid of him any more. He’s shit. How did you get the scar?”
“Let me go, you’re crazy.”
Joshua pushed Max from him. He stumbled backwards against Mueller’s table. Dr. Dr. Mueller, shaking his head, helped him into a chair, and then grinning at Joshua, he called, “Waitress, the baby’s having a tantrum. Bring me his bottle quickly.”
Joshua quit the terrace, pursued by Dr. Dr. Mueller’s laughter, but he did not leave Ibiza as planned, sailing on the Jaime II the following Wednesday. Because on Monday, Monique and her mother arrived.
THREE
1
On that arid square, that fragment nipped off from hot
Africa, soldered so crudely to inventive Europe,
On that tableland scored by rivers,
Our fever’s menacing shapes are precise and alive.
FOR MANY MEMBERS OF JOSHUA’S GENERATION, SPAIN was above all a territory of the heart. A country of the imagination. Too young to have fought there, but necessarily convinced that they would have gone, proving to themselves and the essential Mr. Hemingway that they did not lack for cojones, it was the first political kiss. Not so much a received political idea as a moral inheritance.
When John Osborne’s Jimmy Porter, in Look Back in Anger, mourned that there were no more good, clean causes left, Joshua glowed in his Royal Court seat, nodding yes, yes, but once there was Spain. The Ebro. Guadalajara. The men of the International Brigades defending Madrid with no better map than a plan of the town torn from a Baedeker. André Malraux’s flying squadron. Dr. Norman Bethune’s blood plasma group. Arthur Koestler awaiting execution by a firing squad. Christopher Caudwell presenting his life. George Orwell, in the trenches, refusing to fire on a Fascist because he was squatting with his trousers rolled to his ankles, preparing to defecate, and it seemed wrong to kill another man in that posture.
Sometimes life improves on art. Or, looked at another way, when Joshua last caught sight of Osborne, somebody he had once taken for a spokesman, he was reposing in a photograph for the benefit of the
women’s page of the London Sunday Times, acting out exactly the sort of item that Jimmy Porter used to read aloud, outraged, to his wife at the ironingboard.
LOOK!
His Clothes and Hers
Jill Bennett and John Osborne
The playwright, spade-bearded, reclined languorously on a chic, ultramodern chair. Radiating content.
JOHN OSBORNE is wearing a cashmere sweater from a selection costing £12 at Doug Hayward, and tartan trousers, £26 at Doug Hayward.
In the text, running underneath, John and Jill chat.
Jill (Mrs. Osborne): I change my scent all the time. Today I’m wearing Calandre by Paco Rabanne. But I’m mad about Guerlain’s No. 90 and Calèche and Joy. And John always wears whatever I have on. He never bothers with after-shave.
John: After-shave is for pooves.
Ah, but once there was Spain. Once, writers had been committed to revolutionary change, not their own absurdity. Instead of Catch-22, there was La Condition Humaine; rather than Portnoy, Robert Jordan.
In London, in 1953, shortly after Joshua had been obliged to flee from Ibiza, the notion of attempting a book on the men who had fought in the International Brigades grew into an obsession. He began to sift Charing Cross Road bookshelves for anything about the Civil War. Memoirs, old Gollancz Left Book Club editions, pamphlets. He started a file on the names of volunteers as they appeared in the books he devoured or in old copies of the New Statesman and the Daily Worker. He had no literary connections, he was working in a vacuum, squeezing out a living of sorts by filling in three nights a week on the Canadian Press desk and doing the occasional broadcast for the CBC. Then, slowly, things began to fall into place. A piece he had written about traveling through Spain, visiting the old battle sites, was accepted by Encounter. He earned a stint doing a novel-review column for the Spectator.
In those days you were expected to churn out copy on a batch of four books, but, in recognition of the pittance paid, you were allowed to actually carry off twelve, each one worth half the retail price at a bookshop on Fleet Street. One day Joshua entered the literary editor’s poky little Gower Street office to discover a wiry figure already plundering the novel shelves, obviously a veteran man-of-letters, for he was hastily snatching up books not on the basis of such trifles as the author’s name or the publisher’s imprint, but on the only important consideration: the retail price. “Ah,” he’d say, appropriating a 21-shilling novel. “Lovely.” Next he seized another fat one, a 25-shilling beauty. “This looks fascinating.”
“Murdoch, you bastard. Leave something for me.”
Together they hopped a bus to Fleet Street, flogging those books they had no intention of reading, let alone reviewing, and then they made off for the nearest pub. “The art books, my dear,” Murdoch said, quoting an earlier reviewer, Evelyn Waugh. “That’s the stuff we want to get our grubby hands on. Some of them fetch as much as three guineas each.”
Then Murdoch asked him about Ibiza. Hesitantly, his bruises still raw, Joshua told him something about his adventures with Juanito. But he did not mention Monique. He was still too ashamed. And then, floating on too many large gins, he found himself saying how he had outwitted and finally humiliated Dr. Dr. Mueller. Murdoch begged for more and more details. Improvising, Joshua obliged him with lies even larger.
He didn’t tell him – he couldn’t possibly tell him – that he had written to the Freibergs, a long and convoluted letter of apology, explaining himself as best he could and asking if they were all right. Please be all right. His letter had gone unanswered, which, all things considered, did not surprise him.
With Murdoch, he became a regular at the Mandrake Club. And on wintry Friday afternoons they waited impatiently there for Murdoch’s wife, a secretary in a publishing house, to drift in with her pay envelope, enabling them to settle the week’s account. As soon as Murdoch had become sodden and truculent, and they had taken him back to their flat to tuck him in, Margaret and Joshua used to sit together in the kitchen, drinking. One night he reached out to feel her breasts. “Yoicks,” she said.
At the time, Murdoch and Margaret lived in Kentish Town and Joshua had a small flat in Chelsea.
In the seedy early fifties, long before London had been pronounced swinging, Chelsea’s most celebrated tomcat was Eliot, a resident of Cheyne Walk, and the only boutiques worth seeking out on the King’s Road were dark, smelly little places stacked with secondhand books. Joshua’s modest flat on the then tatty end of the King’s Road lent him the use of place-names that matched his mood perfectly. His bus stop was Lot’s Road; his local, The World’s End. Stepping out in his baggy utility tweeds, he could, if he chose to, stroll toward squalid Fulham, lingering at smog-encrusted windows of row upon row of decrepit junk and second-hand furniture shops, munching fish and chips wrapped in a greasy News of the World. Or if he wandered the other way, toward Sloane Square, there was an abundance of foul Anglo-Indian and Chinese restaurants, secondhand bookshops, tobacconists, and barbershops with big flashing Durex signs in the window, and chemists, their dusty, faded window displays proffering rupture belts and salves that promised relief from itchy hemorrhoids.
Murdoch, whose first novel had been published to hosannas, was already famous as well as feared, though not yet in the money. He was still supplementing his income from royalties by reviewing here, pounding out a telly column there, and reading for a publisher somewhere else. Moved by his condition, even more parlous than his own, Joshua advised him to order all his food, even whatever clothes he required, from Harrod’s. “Open an account. Get your bloody publisher to sign for you, if necessary. And then, so far as gullible tradesmen are concerned, you are no longer a yabbo but a proper gentleman. The Harrod’s accounts are sent out quarterly. When it comes, ignore it. A month will pass before you are sent a polite reminder. Then you run through the itemized account and query a jar of mustard here, a tin of sardines there. This creates unimaginable confusion. Wretched little clerks, who cycle to work from darkest Clapham, scurry from desk to desk in the basement. Files are pried open. Sales slips consulted. Ledgers double-checked. Months will pass before somebody comes up with the actual signed sales slip, including the mustard or sardines. The next step calls for a little guile. You write an indignant letter querying the authenticity of the signature on the sales slip. More confusion. Consternation in the very bowels of the emporium. Further delays. Six months will pass before you have to settle the account and by that time, I hope, you will have the necessary money. If not, keep the correspondence going.”
A publisher Joshua met at a New Statesman party invited him to lunch, asked to see some pages from his manuscript about Spain, and ten days later mailed him a contract, with the promise of a much needed £150 advance. That night, in a mood to celebrate, Joshua crashed a party at the home of an Australian actress who lived in a rambling old house in Earl’s Court. Celia was an ardent left-winger. And in those days, before the Khrushchev speech had confirmed Stalin’s obloquy to even the most obdurate, before the uprising in Hungary, many of her friends were still active in the Party. These friends, Joshua would discover later, after he had become a regular at Celia’s gatherings, included one Colin Fraser and his dazzling, reputedly promiscuous wife, Pauline.
Meanwhile, there were problems.
Murdoch’s second novel was (deservedly, Joshua thought) even more highly praised than his first, but it didn’t even earn enough to clear his overdraft. Margaret already had one child and eighteen months later gave birth to another, obliging her to leave her job. Something, Joshua thought, had to be done.
Yes, yes, but what?
On a letterhead pinched from the office of Encounter, Joshua wrote to the curator of the rare manuscript collection at the University of Texas, saying that he had been commissioned to write an essay on the novels of Sidney Murdoch. He would be in Texas in the spring, he added, and would be grateful if he could be allowed access to the Murdoch papers. There were, a librarian replied, no Murdoch papers in Texas. Jo
shua wrote back immediately to say that he was astounded and, for good measure, he enclosed a batch of Murdoch’s most flattering reviews. The librarian wrote again to say that the curator was then traveling in Italy, but Professor Shapiro’s letter would be brought to his attention on his return. Joshua took the University of Texas letter to a printer on the Old Kent Road and asked him to reproduce twenty copies of the letterhead. He then wrote to all the dealers he could find listed, asking them if they had any Murdoch papers available. Finally, an unsavory American dealer was snared on his hook. He approached Murdoch with a view to purchasing his papers. Murdoch promptly unloaded everything he had on him, earning about five hundred pounds, and when the dealer came back for more, he was not about to admit the cupboard was bare. Instead, he went Joshua one better. He improvised.
Visiting Murdoch’s flat in Kentish Town one night, Joshua came upon his two-year-old daughter, Jessica, howling on the floor, yanking at a soggy nappy, while Murdoch, determined to shut her up, was rubbing her lips with cognac. Ralph, squatting in another corner of the freezing living room, his nose running, was totally absorbed in a box of Ritz crackers. Joshua’s immediate problem was that he didn’t know where to stand. The floor was covered end to end with typewritten pages.
“Where’s Margaret?” he asked at once.
“Clever. Oh, very clever indeed.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Little greaser.”
Rattled, Joshua inadvertently stepped on a manuscript page. He withdrew his foot immediately.
“Oh, no. That’s just the thing. Step on some more of them, please.”
“I’m sorry. It was an accident.”
Joshua Then and Now Page 25
