Under Cover

by Jeremy Robson

  But back to Paris, where I’d come to improve my French, not to come to terms with my Jewish heritage. Once Tony arrived, we started going to the Alliance in the mornings, but not for very long. We found it all rather intimidating – perhaps because we were almost the only males in the class (something we should have relished!). But the girls were so tall and sophisticated and all seemed so aloof, we couldn’t imagine what they’d want with two young English boys. Besides, there was plenty else to do: exhibitions to see, afternoons spent swimming in a pool along the Seine, evenings listening to jazz in Le Caveau de la Huchette, where the bands of André Reweliotty and Claude Luter held sway. I remember hearing the great Sidney Bechet too, his soprano saxophone pointing at the sky, enormous rings flashing from his fingers. There was hot American jazz to be savoured in the cafés of Pigalle, and much else that was hot besides. We also had friends to look up, girls we’d met in London who invited us to various parties, and the fact that they’d heard we were in Paris seemed to encourage friends from London to visit us. So much for improving our French!

  That didn’t stop us soaking up the atmosphere of the famous bookshop, Shakespeare and Company, founded by Sylvia Beach in 1919, a shop that became a second home to many writers including Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound and James Joyce. Indeed, it was Beach who bravely published Joyce’s Ulysses. Way in the future the day would come when I would nervously give a reading there myself. The bookshop, and indeed Le Caveau jazz club, was just around the corner from the rather grotty hotel we’d found in the Rue de la Harpe, a place (to quote Eliot) of ‘restless nights in onenight cheap hotels / and sawdust restaurants with oyster shells’. But it was an exciting area, especially given the occasional gunshot that would explode in the night, bringing everybody to the windows of the narrow street.

  One weekend we made a surreptitious foray to Lausanne, where we had Swiss friends, including an ex-girlfriend of mine I’d met when she was in London studying English. It had been an intense involvement, and she had, in many ways, been a lifesaver during my low law days, as we talked and talked into the small hours. But we had very different backgrounds and with her return to Lausanne (where her father was chief of police!), despite a long-running exchange of express letters, the party was really over. Or was it? Ever the romantic, and never wanting things to end, I had persuaded Tony to make the long rail journey with me from Paris, just to be sure. I vaguely recall a long boozy night with my ex and a group of friends in a restaurant high in the hills above the town, with the enthusiastic singing of songs we didn’t know, and as the evening progressed it becoming increasingly clear that my ex was going to remain strictly ex. It all ended rather dramatically when her would-be new beau, who was evidently disturbed by my presence and had been drinking heavily since we arrived, suddenly staggered very unsteadily to his car and drove off furiously into the night, causing more than a little alarm. Still, it had been a kind of adventure, and as we took the train back to Paris we managed to convince ourselves that we’d had a good time, even that it had been good for our French. For my part, I was glad to have the past well and truly behind me… or was I?

  Inevitably, we visited the notorious Madame Arthur nightclub in the Rue des Martyrs, where dolled-up tarty women who were actually men pranced about in plumes et paillettes (less sexy than it sounds), singing, dancing and flirting with the audience in a Folies Bergère-style cabaret act. People seemed to love it, but I found it an uncomfortable experience and rather sad. I’d have swapped it any day for the real thing at the Folies, or at the more risqué Crazy Horse (yes, we tried those too).

  A lingering memory of that short time in Paris is of several visits to a major exhibition of Chaim Soutine’s work. For some reason I responded strongly to that great Jewish artist who, brought up in an extremely Orthodox environment in a Russian village, where the painting of the human form (graven images) was taboo, had turned to the carcasses hanging in the windows of butcher shops for his models and inspiration. Having arrived in Paris, he’d been able to study at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts, where among his few friends was the painter Amedeo Modigliani. Soutine’s life, like Modigliani’s, was tragically short, and when, on my first visit to Israel, I was wandering one night through the streets of Tel Aviv, I was immensely moved to come across Soutine Street and Modigliani Street converging on each other. How imaginative, I thought, as the romantic in me surfaced once again.

  Now when I reread those French poets I so loved, I can see how their emotionally charged verses would have held such appeal for a wide-eyed young man on the loose in Paris. I think of Lamartine’s ‘Le Lac’, with its imploring lines:

  O temps! suspends ton vol, et vous, heures propices!

  Suspendez votre cours:

  Laissez-nous savourer les rapides délices

  Des plus beaux de nos jours!

  or Samson’s cry in de Vigny’s ‘La Colère de Samson’:

  Et, plus ou moins, la Femme est toujours Dalila.

  How many thwarted young men must have identified with that sexist outburst, I wonder, and how many women must have thought the reverse!

  Could we get away with such inflated language in English? I rather doubt it. One only has to compare those lines from ‘Le Lac’ with Andrew Marvell’s more sophisticated ‘But at my back I always hear / time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near’ to highlight the difference. Yet the emotive power of Lamartine’s poem is so French, so affecting, so memorable, as are the songs of the incomparable chansonniers Brassens, Barbara, Brel, and such stars as Piaf, Aznavour and Chevalier. How marvellous that we can savour them all, pour ourselves a glass of fine French wine, and drink to la différence!

  * * *

  The Regent Street Poly was as near to university as I would ever get, and I’ve often regretted the forces that took me in the false direction of the law when I could have been closeted somewhere reading English. I seem to have spent my life since then trying to catch up and cover up the enormous gaps in my knowledge. On the other hand, my life and so-called career, unexpected and unplanned as it has been, have proved rewarding, and perhaps would have turned out very differently if I’d been smothered by academic strictures. Who can say?

  The Poly (part of the School of Modern Languages) was not in the rather grand main Regent Street building but in nearby Great Titchfield Street, off Oxford Circus, in a somewhat makeshift building. The students were a mixed but lively and convivial bunch, not all of them English. Mark Colley, a tall, intelligent student from Rhodesia, became the sports editor of a major newspaper in Johannesburg. There was also a friendly, rather earnest student from Pakistan, older than most of us, called Tarikul Alam, who will feature in the story a little later. Once again the girls seemed to outnumber the boys, so I had little to complain about. It was refreshing to be in a relatively creative environment with students who were mostly bright and ambitious.

  The two people I became closest to – both of whom remain friends, and both of whom we subsequently published – were Anne Hooper and Jeff Powell. After a distinguished career in journalism, the very attractive and vivacious Anne was to become a bestselling author of over seventy books and a well-known sex therapist, with her own newspaper column and radio programme where she would speak with authority and wisdom. Her biggest success was probably Anne Hooper’s Kama Sutra, which we didn’t publish and which I’d eye with envy when it appeared week after week on the bestseller lists. What we did successfully publish was her How to Make Great Love to a Man (her equally well-known therapist partner Phillip Hodson wrote a matching book for us, How to Make Great Love to a Woman, which seemed only fair!). In the days before Amazon, when book clubs were an important outlet for publishers, I remember taking these titles to the editor of the Doubleday Book Club in New York, and from her excited reaction to Anne’s name I could appreciate just how successful she’d become, for the editor was willing to take the books sight-unseen. I didn’t think it wise to tell her that in Anne’s books very little went unseen. />
  My Regent Street Poly friend, the bestselling sex writer and counsellor Anne Hooper, with her equally well-known therapist partner Phillip Hodson.

  Jeff Powell struck out in a different direction, starting on the Walthamstow Journal, and graduating to sports editor before becoming an ace sports writer for the Daily Mail. During his long and continuing career on the Mail, Jeff has covered twelve World Cups and countless world title fights, winning various awards along the way, including that of Lifetime Achievement. His dramatic and colourful accounts of the big sports events have brought him close to many of the great sporting figures of our time. He can proudly claim to have been the only British journalist invited to Muhammad Ali’s 70th birthday party, and his friendship with Bobby Moore led him to write a bestselling biography of the footballing legend for which we found ourselves in a bidding war against a well-known publisher, and which I’m pleased to say we won. Jeff has always had an eye for a good deal, and this proved an excellent one for us both.

  Among the other students I remember was Penny Valentine, who became an influential critic of pop and soul music, championing Aretha Franklin before she was famous and becoming the favourite interviewer of both the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, as well as press officer for Elton John’s record label. There was also a rather sultry dark-haired beauty called Wendy whom I was rather taken by. However, the only favour she offered was free tickets for the Academy Cinema in Baker Street, where her mother was the manager. For me and half the class, that is. The mother of another girl called Susie Moreland was the influential director of the Institute of Contemporary Art, and as a result Susie got me into to a number of talks and readings there. It was around this time, at the ICA, that I first heard the poet Adrian Mitchell read – a dynamic performance of poems with biting political attack and much wit – quite different from anything I’d learned at school. I couldn’t have imagined that within a year or so I’d be giving a number of readings with this iconic champion of the left.

  The lecturers at the Poly had very different styles. The urbane Frank Huggett, who’d worked on the Daily Telegraph for many years, had an amusing line in wry, cynical humour, while Ray Boston, who hailed from the Mirror, had an altogether racier and more direct style, bravely covering up a slight stammer with a whistle whenever he was stuck for a word. The bright red socks he always wore (which may or may not have reflected his political views) were the subject of much mirth. Both lecturers were somewhat informal in their approach and treated us more like friends than students. I enjoyed my year there, and the course certainly produced some good journalists, even if I wasn’t among them. Pete Brown, who went to the Poly the year after me, recalls Frank Huggett saying rather sarcastically, ‘Some people think that when they leave here they will become poets.’ I appreciate the irony of that humorously intended remark as much as Pete!

  Messrs Huggett and ‘Red Socks’ Boston would set us tasks, send us to cover various events, then go through the pieces we wrote, pointing out where we had fallen down, suggesting how they could be improved, other angles we might have taken. They explained how the different papers worked and what was expected of their writers, taught us how to proofread and made us sub each other’s work, write arresting headlines and striking lead-ins to our stories. We visited newspapers, went on a three-day course at the London School of Printing and Graphic Arts, for which we got certificates, and were given talks on the British constitution and valuable lectures from a barrister on various aspects of media law, including libel, which were useful to me in years to come. We even had regular lessons in shorthand from a small, elderly lady, but I must confess that I could never get the hang of this mysterious language. I eventually found it so daunting that I would often dodge her classes to go to an exhibition in nearby Bond Street, writing an unwanted review of it as if I’d been sent by a paper. All grist to the mill, I suppose. If only I’d had the money to pick up one or two of the early Bacons I remember seeing and admiring – relatively inexpensive then – this story might have taken a different turn.

  Sometimes, when I felt particularly restless, I’d stray further afield to browse in Better Books in Charing Cross Road, a fine literary bookshop which stocked the small poetry magazines of the time. I’d eye them hungrily, dreaming that one day I’d find poems of my own within their alluring covers. It was there I bought my cherished copy of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, whose opening lines stir strongly in my head even to this day: ‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness’. How wild, how full of energy, how full-on! The small, square paperbacks with their distinctive black and white covers (of which Howl was one), published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights in San Francisco, were magical. Gregory Corso, William Carlos Williams, Kenneth Rexroth… the list is legendary. At Better Books, too, I bought copies of The Evergreen Review, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and Ferlinghetti’s own landmark collection, A Coney Island of the Mind. All a lot more exciting than shorthand! Some years later I went with my future wife Carole to hear Ginsberg reading in Hampstead, to find him sitting cross-legged on the floor, facing the audience and hitting a large iron bell with a metal rod repeatedly and monotonously for some minutes until an increasingly agitated Carole turned to me and said, ‘If he does that once more, I’ll scream.’ Fortunately, he stopped, and started to read.

  Unquestionably, the lectures I found most stimulating were by the head of the English literature department, David Waldo Clarke, a tall, beautifully spoken, elegant man who rather resembled Graham Greene, one of the authors he was passionate about. He was also keen on Hemingway, Evelyn Waugh and James Joyce, discussing the work of these authors in fine detail, analysing their style and the structure of their books, encouraging us to write short stories in their various styles. Given my passion for the American West and the fact that I’d spent hours of my childhood queuing at the local Odeon for the latest Roy Rogers film, perhaps the thing that endeared me most to the excellent Waldo Clarke was that he wrote popular Westerns on the side under a pseudonym. Who would have imagined it? Perhaps to balance this, he also wrote respectable books on English usage. He was particularly generous to me, spending considerable time commenting on the poems I shyly showed him, not slow to recognise the obvious Eliot influence, and always sharp but encouraging in his observations and criticism.

  Not a student at the Poly but far more forthright, and spot-on in everything she said, was Valerie Barnett (as she was then), a highly intelligent and perceptive girl who was really a friend of a friend and reading English at Reading University. We had a sort of literary friendship, and when she asked me to send her some poems I readily complied. Her long, detailed reply took my poems to pieces line by line, image by image, thought by thought, as she was being trained to do. Her letter started: ‘I don’t quite know what I expected but I certainly didn’t expect this. BUT – OK, here we go…’ And away she went. Someone once said the price of reading other people’s poems was praise, a maxim she certainly didn’t subscribe to. I picked myself up, dusted myself down and started all over again. When we met again in 2014, Valerie had become a highly successful children’s writer for Simon & Schuster under her married name, Valerie Mendes, and was launching Larkswood, her first historical novel for Orion. She was also the mother of the director Sam Mendes. And I’m relieved to say that the warm words she sent me after reading my newly published book of poems Blues in the Park were generous in the extreme – all the more appreciated since I knew she was still a lady who didn’t mince her words. I don’t recall what I sent her all those years ago, and hopefully she doesn’t either. But she’d taken the poems seriously, and that meant a lot to me at the time.

  But back to the Poly. We started our own magazine called Slant, which I edited, with Anne, Jeff and a pretty girl called Fleur Whitehurst with whom Jeff was rather smitten, as assistant editors. By the time we produced our last edition (selling price: sixpence), we also had a diary editor. Most of the students contributed and there was a wide variety of material – shor
t stories, articles, criticism, poems. In the first edition there is even an article by a Mr S. Milligan entitled ‘How to Make a Foon’, which he must have given me as a favour. It begins, ‘The editor of this well-known English newspaper has asked me to write 1,000 words on How to Make a Foon … with what I’ve just written that leaves me about 965 words to go.’ He goes on to advise readers that it would be wise to buy a Geiger counter before continuing, ‘such as you will find in any American’s home. These can be bought from Surplus Army Stores, or indeed from the surplus army itself.’ The article ran on over several pages in the same Milliganesque vein. We were thrilled to have it.

  Apart from contributing my own poems to Slant (and who could stop me!), I was elated to have several accepted by the main, rather smartly printed Polytechnic magazine across the road in Regent Street, and three in a Scottish literary magazine called Gambit – a breakthrough for me. Reading those three poems now, I see that they are shorter than previous ones, the imagery more exact, less abstract, and that at last the tone was moving away from that of the Master.

  The party was coming to its end, and we all took our final exams and probably all left with the same certificate. Nothing was too demanding. I even managed to pass shorthand, and can only surmise the examiner must have been either short-handed or short-sighted. Anne Hooper, who has vivid memories of the Poly, tells me that at the end of the year we were all given what she calls ‘a proper reporting assignment’, that she ‘panicked like mad’, and that I said, ‘Leave it to me,’ marched her into the nearest telephone box ‘and called a friend’. We’d then presented the piece we wrote as a joint project, which was accepted by Ray Boston.