What were the feelings of my twelve-year-old self?
I’d understood that Raymond Chandler and Reynolds Price were part of my family mechanism, but I’d never felt that the underlying relationship between my parents was at risk. I knew there were tensions, but I did not see how powerful they were. Probably Mum and Dad had made an agreement to keep us children out of it. This meant that they had to keep up appearances even in front of us – a noble thought, but it left a great deal unexplained.
My mother’s position was that Dad’s infatuations with young men had been a phase of his youth that had been discarded. His earlier self, as it were. Dad subscribed to this myth for her sake, even in front of us, but it meant that both of them were in conflict with the record. Their lives were well documented. There were no inaccessible secrets, even if a clue was no stronger than a photo of a sultry young man glimpsed in the back of Dad’s desk as I raided it for stationery.
With regard to my father’s relationship with men, I’d already detected something odd at the age of eight with Tony Hyndman. It didn’t seem a threat, because Tony had charm and he was good at making things with his hands, which fascinated me. Reynolds, as I’ve explained, was an intelligent man who moved cautiously within the strange predicament in which my father placed him. Besides, he had a bad case of acne. Who could possibly find him attractive?
In my early adolescence, I was disturbed by the feeling that a struggle was going on between my parents, but I didn’t feel that sex came into it. I was too young to understand what a powerful mechanism sex is. I thought they were both working hard, and if there were tensions, it was inevitable in a house in which every week there was a deadline for finishing an article or mastering a piece of music for a concert. I saw no competition between them other than that.
My father wanted to be free. It was a necessary condition that enabled him to write. I took his friendship with Reynolds as a by-product of this desire. Reynolds wasn’t a threat but a symptom. There was no reason to feel resentment towards him as a person. And my mother wasn’t in a position to complain, for she’d always made clear even to us children that she wanted my father to tackle his ‘real’ work, which was writing poetry.
Mum was strong. If Dad buggered off, it would be upsetting but we’d survive. We’d gather round the piano and give her our support. But was he ruthless enough to do it? My father was the least ruthless person one could imagine – or so I thought at the time. If you had a different view from his, you didn’t have to worry that you might be squashed by force. If someone said something that he disagreed with, he’d either laugh or change the subject. He hardly ever lost his temper.
His lack of confrontation seemed to me a beautiful thing. Whenever I looked at my mother on the other hand, I saw someone who was needy and ambitious, with no generosity of intent. With her it was win or lose, all or nothing. Life was a series of hurdles, the higher the better. She valued the people at the top and she took for granted that this is where she and her husband belonged.
I remember that when I started to play the clarinet, I didn’t tell her for several months. I knew she’d say something levelling – and she did. ‘Well, you’ve left it too late to become a professional, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have a lot of fun.’ I was fourteen years old. It’s not easy to start the clarinet at a younger age, as the muscles aren’t up to it. Even though I knew this and could discount her remark, I felt daunted. She’d meant to be supportive in her own weird way but dammit, she was discouraging.
I thought her values of success and failure were crude; but my father had also been explicit about his own desire to belong to the category of the ‘truly great’. I saw that they were both equally ambitious people, and that their differences were merely those of style. However, when it came to the emotions, it was clear that my mother was neglected. Dad’s attention lay elsewhere. He was an absent husband. If it came to that, he was an absent father. Behind his good manners there lay a detachment indistinguishable from boredom.
For six months I sided with my father, then for the next six months with my mother. Then one day I decided: this contest is not mine. It’s entirely theirs. I have no say in this matter. I must keep out of it. After all, for better or worse, the family works. Odd decision for someone so young but I never went back on it. The family would be OK; that was enough.
My decision denied our emotions, mine and theirs. I never realized until they were both dead, with their ashes next to each other in the same wooden casket that I’d made for them with my own hands, how much their physical discontent had left them lonely. At the time, the most I could deduce was that neither was at ease. My father was restless. My mother was stressed. But – such is the conventionality of children, always more interested in family cohesion than anything else – so what?
18
YOU’RE UNIQUE
‘WE ARE HAVING a hell of a time owing to Dwight – or at least I think we are going to,’ wrote Stephen to Reynolds late in 1958. ‘It is too long a story to write now, but he really is a damned cracklepotty vain goat-bearded stupid nuisance. I wish Trotsky had finished him off.’
Those who’d known him from New York had warned that Macdonald was too maverick to make a dependable co-editor for Encounter. For several months he’d acted as ‘roving editor’, and following this trial run, he’d filled Irving Kristol’s post in London. Then, however, he wrote an attack on the United States which he wanted to publish in Encounter, and this led to a crisis that lost him his job.
Read today, ‘America! America!’ is more of a curiosity than a piece of criticism. It analyses the civilization of the United States and finds it vulgar. ‘We are an unhappy people … a people without style, without a sense of what is humanly satisfying. Our values are not anchored securely, not in the past (tradition) and not in the present (community).’ In the late Fifties, many members of the former New York Left underwent what in retrospect looks like a crisis of confidence. It wasn’t so much a political crisis as a feeling of frustration with the culture of popular music, cheap food and expensive movies, with which they felt no connection. The left felt removed from what he calls the ‘community’, and now it was time to appeal to ‘tradition’.
The moment when Macdonald was given the sack and replaced by Melvin Lasky was one of the few occasions when the fact that Encounter was a front magazine for a United States agency might have emerged. According to Macdonald, the rejection of his article ‘reflected the attitude of Encounter’s front office, the Congress of Cultural Freedom in Paris, which publishes the magazine with funds supplied by several American foundations. The people in Paris … feared it might cause American foundations to cut off supplies.’ Was Stephen aware that, in the background, the decision-making process had gone up the line from London to Paris to the headquarters in America of the CIA? No, not according to the correspondence. Stephen thought the article was ridiculous and its political agenda outmoded, and he supported the decision of Josselson and Nabokov to reject it.
Dwight found another publisher in New York, and the fact that the article had been ‘censored’ permitted him to launch a few well-aimed barbs at the Paris CCF.
Cracklepot is delivering fiery attacks because we refused an article he wrote on America which appears in Dissent. He says we refused it because of the extraneous influence of the Congress for Cultural Freedom which cannot tolerate fearless anti-American honesty like Cracklepot’s. What is really annoying about Cracklepots is that they drag one down in their polemics and controversies, so that you end up washing each others dirty linen in public and raking round the ashes of bygone schismatic days.
‘Cracklepot’ was a term that Stephen used only in his letters to Reynolds. It’s a mixture of the English ‘crackpot’, meaning crazy, and the American ‘cracker-barrel’, that symbol of homely wisdom. From my father’s point of view, Macdonald deserved to be sacked not because he was anti-American, but because he was out of date.
A family photo taken a few months before
our semester in California in 1959.
At the beginning of 1959 we moved for a term to California, where my father had been offered a job as a visiting professor at Berkeley. This period of my life holds a warm place in my memory, because I was living at home and I had a schedule of work from Westminster which my parents had to go through with me.
I remember going to the edge of a lawn at a party in a professor’s house in order to pee. Below me lay a wide valley filled with scraggly trees and I thought: over these hills there will be walks that people have never taken. Nowhere in Europe would I feel what I’m feeling now. There, every tree has been climbed, every blade of grass has been touched by friendly feet.
I was with Mum two hours a day with my homework. Maths, for instance, which she was good at and I hated. She straightened my fractions and corrected my grammar – which Dad never did, preferring to concentrate on style and meaning rather than the actual words. And now and again as she taught me, she became the schoolgirl she used to be, trying to earn that scholarship and find the way out, while assimilating the accents of her friends who’d tried less hard and never left Maidenhead. I liked that side of my mother. It was later obliterated by Lady Spender, a different persona, just as firm because she believed in it but, to me, less convincing.
In her Maidenhead schoolgirl voice she’d recite a little ditty that went like this: ‘So ’arry went to ’arrygate, and ’arry lost ’is ’at. And when he got back ’ome, ’is Mum said ’arry, where’s yer ’at? ’E said, ’anging on the ’anger in the ’all.’ The last bit came out fast: ang-ing-ong-th’rang-ing-th’rawl. But whereas the usual upper-crustie who imitates a cockney accent makes it mysteriously condescending, Mum’s cockney was the real thing. It was cheery and optimistic and it was evidently part of her real self.
My father’s fiftieth birthday party took place at the end of February. He came into my bedroom, lay on my bed and gave a heart-rending sigh. I was trying to learn The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by heart. Outside various academics made polite conversation. But he didn’t want academics. He wanted young poets and Beatniks. He’d met Thom Gunn and liked him. Ginsberg had promised to come but he hadn’t turned up. I asked him if he was enjoying his birthday. He shut his eyes and shook his head.
Offstage, and far from well, there was Raymond Chandler. He’d written to my mother, ‘I’ll be delighted to see you over here, but I have regretfully to inform you that I can’t give you the full treatment as before.’ He discouraged her from driving down to LA to see him. He’d be going to London soon, anyway.
His biographers show that the last months of his life were absolute hell. He drove to exhaustion a nice male nurse who’d come back with him from London. A friend of Helga Greene’s who’d replaced the nurse broke down after three weeks.
Ray’s last letter to Natasha is dated 4 March. He sees no point in meeting her as he is about to go back to London with Helga. He encloses a cheque for seven hundred dollars.
How strange that you should want to live in America while I, despite the weather, much prefer England. I need hardly say that I am delighted that you are having a so long deserved success at the piano. Of course this is where the money is, and the California climate must mean a lot to you. I have had it so long that it has staled on me. Am I to infer that your staying here means more than appears on the surface? About time if it is, but too late in a way – if anything is ever too late.
Something in this letter made my mother tear it up, but she kept the fragments and stored them carefully in an envelope along with her other letters from Ray. She was maddened by Chandler’s assumption that passionate love was still an element shimmering in the air between them, in spite of the fact that it was so self-evidently and so nostalgically ‘too late’.
He flew to New York with Helga to accept the presidency of Mystery Writers of America. Helga flew on to London but he came back to California. Alone in the house and unable to take care of himself, he drank too much, collapsed in the garden and was taken to hospital. He died of pneumonia on 26 March.
Mum was not told immediately. I clearly remember the moment when she heard the news. It happened in a motel in a desert of Southern California, where we’d gone to see some adobe houses dating from the Spanish period. Outside, there was a lurid advert saying ‘Learn About the Sex Life of the Date Palm’. Someone came up and told her Ray had died. An incredulous look came over her face and she sent me out to swim in the motel pool.
When I came back to where she was sitting on a deckchair, her eyes were red with tears. Why had nobody told her? Behind the tears of real grief I thought I detected rage that she hadn’t been contacted by a lawyer to tell her she’d inherited everything.
In my second year at Westminster, I made the exciting discovery that I didn’t belong to the male sex. In my passport there was neither an F nor an M, but a B. Class B, sexually speaking, was evidently a whole other thing. It probably occurred to me that B could stand for Boy, but the thought was discarded. It was much more exciting to be an unknown gender about which no information was available, and certainly none that could be discussed with friends.
Boarding school meant hot showers after rowing on the Thames, which meant facing the true hideousness of the male sex. So many organs, some of unusual colour, some evidently damaged, almost skinned. Though you’d been told that pricks were as noses, no amount of comparison could reconcile you to the fact that whereas a nose was familiar and visible, a prick was always a surprise and ugly.
Sex at Westminster was an offstage theme that never, at least for me, became real. There were two or three boys in the school who were self-declared homosexuals, but nobody seemed shocked. There was one in our house, a fat and unattractive boy. He tried to seduce me. I was in the sick room listening to my classical records when he joined me on the other bed in this otherwise tranquil room. After lights out he told me that he’d only pretended to be ill so that he and I could give each other hand-jobs. I told him if he left his bed and took a step towards mine, I’d scream for Matron.
For an adolescent boy whose sexual cravings were totally straight, there wasn’t much in the library of Loudoun Road to catch my attention. There was a monograph on Titian’s The Andrians which had a fabulous nude on the lower right. Her stout body was relaxed after a hard day working in the fields. I could fantasize about that. And there was a book given to Dad by Fosco Maraini, an Italian who’d spent much of his life in Japan. It showed the life of the Ama, bare-breasted fisher-girls who dived deep between the waves to prise out abalone from fluffy rocks using short bent chisels. I thought they were wonderful. Their bodies were robust like the girl in the painting by Titian, and as Maraini’s caption put it under one of his photographs, they were splendid examples of womanhood.
I read Dad’s autobiography in my second year at Westminster during this moment of curious changes in my body. I was about fourteen years old. Dad was thrilled, of course. ‘And what did you think of that, I wonder?’ Unembarrassed, he was curious about my response. Typical! He was far away in America and I must have written to him about it. Other boys in the same study at Liddell’s House read it after me. Grins were exchanged, the occasional nudge. And there it was, as fresh as paint. At the time, homosexuality was illegal and you could go to jail for that kind of thing. That didn’t worry us. But the story seemed so silly. Dad and Tony in the Spanish Civil War, wandering around the battlefields hand in hand.
Those who’ve read early drafts of this book about my parents have asked, But wasn’t it a shock when you discovered that your father was homosexual? The answer is no, not that I can remember. Children are fine with just about anything as long as the situation is clear-cut, and such was my mother’s determination to show that their marriage was perfect that I was prepared to believe her. Willpower on her part, good manners on his, papered over the cracks.
When it came to homosexuality, the thing that frightened me was the question of power. As far as I could tell from observing overt homosexual relationships,
whether at Westminster or in the world of grown-ups, whenever two men were in love there was always a struggle to determine who led whom on what trajectory. This confused me, because I could not see where the limits of such a relationship would lie. Tony Hyndman had some emotive hold over my father. I could recognize this as ‘sex’, and I was OK with that, because it was none of my business; but I also saw that Tony despised Stephen, even though he depended on him. And his contempt somehow involved me. I was a symptom of something my father had done wrong. A betrayal.
I wasn’t capable of thinking my way through this quagmire, but I didn’t like it. Yet, in coming to terms with my father when I was an adolescent, the question of power seemed ludicrous. He was the least authoritarian person anyone could ever imagine. There was no question of him ordering anyone to do anything, let alone going in for obscure forms of psychological manipulation.
At this point in his career my father was middle-aged, restless in his work, not particularly happy in his emotional life, uneasy in London but lonely everywhere else. I picked up on his sense of solitude, though I was unable to attribute it to any cause.
The other day I took Matthew to the Savile Club for dinner. Afterwards he said: ‘Dad, I really don’t know how you can talk to those people at that club. You have nothing in common with them. Of course, you’re very awkward when you say anything, and I don’t blame you. I would be myself.’ I said ‘Who can you imagine me talking with?’ Matthew said: ‘That puzzles me a lot. I really can’t imagine you having a conversation with anyone. I often look at people and wonder, but I’ve never seen anyone the least bit like you. I’m afraid you’re unique, dad.’ I said ‘What about Mummy?’ He looked dubious and then said politely, ‘Well, just.’
At Bruern, I lived outdoors, stomping through the brambles and crushing the primroses, or in the attic of the Red Brick Cottage, where I listened to Brahms on Chandler’s portable gramophone. My parents worked downstairs. Meals seemed to hesitate up to the very last minute, not because my parents were working, though that too, but because secretly they were longing to be invited up to the Big House.
A House in St John's Wood Page 22
