Under Cover

by Jeremy Robson

  There was, too, the time when a disgruntled Christopher Logue arrived in Bristol by train with Dannie for a concert at the university. Seeing that there wasn’t a car to meet them at the station, instead of sharing a cab with Dannie he turned around in a huff and took the next train back to London. No reading from him that day! Socialism, and poetic egos, it seems, come in various shades. I’m reminded of when Edith Sitwell (no socialist!) was asked what fee she required to read to a certain literary society. She named her figure, and then added, ‘But double that if I have to have dinner with members of the committee afterwards!’

  * * *

  To our relief, the Belgrade Theatre was packed that Sunday afternoon. It was the first time Christopher Logue had read with us, though in the light of the above we should perhaps have been relieved that he turned up. For all that, he was never anything but friendly to me over the years. I was a great admirer of the poetry and jazz recording he’d made with the Tony Kinsey Quintet, on which he read his own adaptations of delicate poems by Pablo Neruda. One love poem in particular, ‘Blue Lament’, in which the poet looks back at a lost love, still moves me with its simple lyricism and deep feeling, beautifully read by Logue, whose deep-throated, crystal-clear voice adds to the effect, as does Kinsey’s subtle musical arrangement around the words. That afternoon at Coventry, the poems he read were far less personal and mostly skilfully wrapped political invective, delivered powerfully and dramatically. One poem he always liked to read was prompted by a story he’d read in the Daily Express headed ‘Britain Builds a Chain of H-Forts’. It was written, he announced disparagingly, ‘by a man called Chapman Pincher’ (how Michael Garrick, a born mimic, loved to imitate Logue’s distinctive voice, with the heavy emphasis he placed on the ‘ch’ in the name of the famous whistle-blower). It was enjoyable to listen to Logue read and to watch the effect on the audience, though I seem to recall mutterings in the wings from a disapproving Laurie Lee, whose kind of poems these obviously weren’t. Still, it takes all sorts, and this kind of mixture made for an interesting programme.

  As for Laurie, he had his own way of winning an audience over even before he read a line. Watching him from the wings that afternoon in Coventry, I saw close up the master-charmer at work. As he often did, he recalled the occasion when a young schoolboy accosted him in the street and, fixing him with accusing eyes, asked, ‘Did you write a poem called “Apples”?’, and when Laurie admitted that he had, back came the aggrieved response: ‘Our teacher made us learn it.’ Then followed the poem, read very slowly and musically. Another of Laurie’s favourite stories was about a stork that wandered into a bodega on a hot day in Jerez and got drunk. His ‘Stork in Jerez’ always went down well and one felt Laurie was a little envious of that bird. Another poem he read, movingly, sprang from his experiences in Spain during the civil war. It began:

  Less passionate the long war throws

  its burning thorn about all men,

  caught in one grief, we share one wound,

  and cry one dialect of pain…

  Arnold Wesker was in the audience at Coventry. I hadn’t then realised what a strong association Arnold had with this go-ahead theatre, which had premiered his Chicken Soup with Barley before it transferred to the Royal Court Theatre in London, triggering his career and fame. The Belgrade had also premiered the other two plays in his landmark trilogy, Roots and I’m Talking about Jerusalem. Maybe that accounted for his presence at the theatre that day, but whatever the reason, Arnold approached me afterwards and asked if I’d arrange similar concerts for the series of Centre 42 arts festivals he was planning in conjunction with the trade unions. This followed the adoption of Resolution 42, whereby the unions formally recognised the importance of the arts in the community. Taking this as his springboard, Arnold was planning week-long festivals in Wellingborough, Nottingham, Leicester, Birmingham, Bristol, Hayes and Southall.

  It was a hugely ambitious project, but such was his charisma, passion and social zeal that he won people over with apparent ease. He already had a formidable line-up of artists and performers, and naturally we were thrilled to become a part of it. As an artistic director of Centre 42, it would be my responsibility to arrange the poetry programme alongside the other events. It would all kick off in Wellingborough in mid-September.

  Before that, though, we had four concerts of our own – at Cheltenham Town Hall in April, Oxford Town Hall in May, Hintlesham Arts Festival in July, and Birmingham Town Hall in early September. Spike read at Cheltenham and Oxford. Oxford in particular was fun, while Hintlesham Hall was inevitably a more formal setting than we were used to – Shake Keane’s high notes rattling a few chandeliers – but it was packed and we were well received. Spike appeared at Oxford with his new bride, Patricia (Paddy) Ridgeway, an opera singer. They had interrupted their honeymoon in Cornwall to join us. Spike was on great form, declaring to the audience, ‘You think I’m mad. You paid to come in!’ Then he invited Paddy up onto the stage to sing Gershwin’s ‘Summertime’. Laurie, too, was in a mischievous mood, telling the audience he was a little drunk, since, having arrived too early, he had waited in the public library, where he’d drunk gin out of an inkwell. Reading a review of that concert in the Oxford Mail headed ‘The poets came in all shapes and guises’, I am amused that their critic was more interested in the poets’ dress sense than their poetry. Logue, he said, ‘appeared in a cardigan with a will of its own’, Laurie was in ‘an elderly brown suit with bandy trousers’, while Spike was wearing ‘a turtleneck sweater on loan from a giant’. It seems that I had ‘a talent for unhappy images’, but at least my clothes were not remarked upon, and nor were those of Lydia Pasternak Slater, who also read that night, along with Dannie and Adrian Mitchell.

  It was at Birmingham that Vernon Scannell took part for the first time. I hadn’t met him before, and he struck me as being a rather reserved and shy man, looking a little like a clerk or schoolteacher in his sober sports jacket and grey trousers, but he had a fine deep reading voice, as I knew from hearing him on the radio. How wrong first impressions can be! Rather wary of the jazz at first, Vernon became one of the musicians’ favourite poets and a frequent reader. Michael Garrick’s setting of his powerful ‘Epithets of War’ is both inventive and haunting, and Vernon loved to perform it. We became close friends and he stayed with us many times when he was in London. Indeed, Robson Books later published both his poetry and autobiographical books, in which he recalled his colourful life – from his troubled childhood under the strict control of a brutal father, through the war years and his court martial ‘for desertion’, to his time as a boxer, and beyond. Many of these experiences fuelled his poetry, too, particularly his war poems.

  Pianist Michael Garrick responds to the humour in one of Vernon Scannell’s poems. His haunting setting of Scannell’s ‘Epithets of War’ was one of his finest works.

  Another who was reading with us in Birmingham for the first time was the handsome, much-admired Indian poet Dom Moraes, whose first wife, Henrietta, was the model in several of Francis Bacon’s paintings. Dom was the son of the editor of the Times of India, and his first book, written while at Oxford, had won the coveted Hawthornden Prize ‘for the best work of imagination’. The first non-English person to win the prize, he was also the youngest. As that master humorist Alan Coren put it in a delightfully sardonic memoir of his Oxford days: ‘And then there was poetry, or Dom Moraes as it came to be called. Dom’s success having carried beyond the city limits, he was the focus of much ambivalent admiration.’ And it was Coren who revealed that on one occasion ‘a London actress – having found herself in the Moraes chambers with their tenant unaccountably absent and possibly escorting some other lady – had torn up all his manuscripts’. When Alan’s piece was published in a book called My Oxford, the name of the very famous actress had to be withheld for reasons of libel, much to Alan’s chagrin – and mine, as the book’s publisher.

  Dom was to become a legendary figure, covering wars in Algeria, Israel and Vi
etnam, returning to India, where he married a celebrated actress and beauty (though it was never clear whether he’d actually divorced Henrietta). For some reason that night in Birmingham, although he was an experienced reader, Dom made little effort to communicate with the audience, spurning the microphone, propping himself up against a table and screening himself behind the smoke from a cigarette he dangled from his left hand while reading. I liked him, and he came to dinner several times with our mutual friend, the Israeli poet Carmi, but I have to say that inviting him to read at a poetry and jazz concert was not one of my wisest decisions. Many years later, when I was deep into publishing, Dom phoned me out of the blue and said he’d like to come and discuss a book on India he was working on. He arrived grey-suited and grey-haired at my office and we talked. The soft-eyed, gentle-voiced, beautiful boy who had charmed his way around Soho had gone and he seemed a shadow of his former drinking self. Though he was very friendly, I found it hard to believe it was Dom I was talking to and I have always been sorry that I wasn’t free to take up the dinner date that he proposed. Then, ever the mystery man, he vanished, and I was shocked not long after to read that he’d died in India. Apart from a long battle with the bottle, he had developed cancer, for which he’d refused treatment, dying from a heart attack in Mumbai. He was buried in that city’s Sewri Christian Cemetery and according to his wishes earth from his grave was scattered in Odcombe in Somerset.

  The charismatic Indian poet Dom Moraes.

  I also regretted not asking Dom whether his manuscripts had really been torn up by that famous and enraged actress, or whether it was a figment of Alan Coren’s extremely fertile imagination. You never quite knew with Alan.

  8

  CENTRE 42

  As the poetry and jazz concerts gathered momentum, back at the Tit-Bits office I had acquired a welcome champion in a newly arrived member of the editorial team. Bruce Robb seemed to my young eyes to be an old hand, though I suppose he was only in his forties. He was certainly more experienced than the others and, more importantly from my point of view, he was both keen on poetry and had worked at a literary agency. For some reason he made it his unlikely mission to find me a publisher, urging me to get a collection of some thirty poems together, which I did, calling it (modestly, as I thought) First Poems. He then sent it to Sidgwick & Jackson, following this up with a letter with details of the readings I’d been giving, the magazines I’d had poems in, quotes from various reviews, etc., elevating and exaggerating as agents do. For all that, I didn’t have great expectations, especially since as far as I could see Sidgwick had only ever published one poet: Rupert Brooke! Still, it was a highly respected publishing house and Bruce remained hopeful, even when there was no immediate response.

  The months went by and, despite the occasional follow-up letter from Bruce, they seemed reluctant to make a decision either way; indeed, reluctant to respond at all to his letters. He urged me to be patient, but in my mind I wrote the whole thing off, continued to review for Tribune and give the odd reading. But I began to feel restless, and decided it was time to alter the landscape and move on, perhaps change tack a little, and so I applied for a job in the publicity department of Harrap, a venerable book publishing company with offices off the Strand. To my surprise, they offered me the job, and so I took my first tentative steps into the wonderful world of publishing. A Dickensian outfit, it couldn’t have been more different from Tit-Bits, with everyone walking around on tiptoe, talking in whispers. I adjusted myself as best I could, writing blurbs for books I hadn’t read, drafting rather downbeat press releases (for such was their style) and on one glorious occasion helping the respected publicity manager to set up a window display in Foyles bookshop in Charing Cross Road, something I have never had the chance to do since.

  To familiarise myself with the Harrap list, which was very large and seemed to go back over centuries, I would creep into the church-quiet library and sometimes take a book away – after I’d signed for it in triplicate and assured the nervous librarian he’d have it back next day. I’d had the experience of publicising our own poetry events, and that is probably what landed me the job, but I didn’t really know anything about book promotion, which seemed to me a very laid-back affair. In later years I would become friendly with an eccentric and lovable showbiz publicist called Theo Cowan. If you ever asked how he was, he invariably replied, ‘It’s a miracle.’ Theo had the impossible task of looking after such stars as Michael Caine and Peter Sellers, and once told me his job was to keep his clients out of the press, off television, out of sight of the media, whereas, of course, we’d always tried to do the very opposite with our celebrity authors! Harrap seemed to adopt Theo’s approach, but then I don’t suppose they ever published headline-grabbing titles. For A level I’d been given a copy of their French dictionary, but apart from their strong educational department there didn’t seem to be much to set the world alight. So I’d sit there writing press releases, looking at my watch, wondering whether an author would ever make an appearance, whether the phone would ever ring, and once more found myself wandering at lunchtime around Covent Garden.

  Occasionally a charming, chirpy Ian Harrap, who was ostensibly director of publicity, would bounce into our office to offer a few encouraging words, but I always felt he’d be more at home behind the wheel of a vintage car than running a publishing department. Still, it was all very civilised, though I missed the man in the mac with his weekly dose of nubile girls prancing at the sea’s edge, just waiting for me to caption them. Bruce Robb, whom I’d occasionally meet for lunch, had inherited that job, and I gathered that there was still no word from Sidgwick. Anyway, here, for the moment, I’d found a port in what was not exactly a storm, and I would at least be able to say I worked in publishing.

  * * *

  Outside the office, if not a storm, there was a coup de foudre in the shape of a strikingly beautiful young girl called Carole de Botton, whom I met at a party I went to – fortunately – at the last moment, having been let down on a blind date by the friend of a French girl my cousin Teddy Stonehill had arranged to take out. I have many things to thank my friend Anthony Harkavy for, but none more so than for agreeing to sit down at the piano and play ‘Sunny Side of the Street’ – slowly – while I danced with a cautious Carole. But before continuing, and without wishing to enter into the politics of the situation, I must turn the clock back to 1956, the Suez crisis and the subsequent war in the Middle East. This had ostensibly begun when Israel launched an invasion of the Sinai Peninsula in retaliation for a growing number of fedayeen attacks on its citizens, and also because a bellicose Egypt had closed the Straits of Tiran, thus blocking the Gulf of Aqaba to Israeli shipping. For France and Britain, who subsequently attacked Egypt, the motives and aims were different, their main concern being the nationalisation of the Suez Canal by Egypt’s President, Gamal Abdel Nasser, and the challenge to their interests there. For them, it was a political disaster, one from which Prime Minister Anthony Eden never recovered. For me, it ultimately led to Carole’s family settling in England after Nasser began, with mounting nationalistic fervour, to bring in harsh measures against foreign nationals that led to a large exodus – including Carole’s family, though they were hardly ‘foreign nationals’.

  As it happened, in the months before meeting Carole, I had been steeped in Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, his classic novels published in the late 1950s and set in Alexandria before, during and after the Second World War. I’d been attracted to the books by an in-depth interview Durrell had given in the Paris Review, and through them I’d become aware of the cosmopolitan nature of Egyptian society in that period, and the fact that many nationalities had lived there for centuries in perfect harmony – in the case of Carole’s family, more or less since the time of the Inquisition, when the Jews were expelled from Spain, many ending up in Egypt. (Carole’s cousin Gilbert, father of the writer Alain de Botton, actually commissioned a book tracing the family history.) But the Jewish community was jus
t one colourful thread in the complex fabric of Alexandrian society. As Durrell described it in Justine, the first book in the Quartet: ‘Five races, five languages, a dozen creeds: five fleets turning through their greasy reflection behind the harbour mirror…’ How he brought that city to life with his poetic prose: the beggars wandering the streets, the sun creeping through the leaves of the lemon trees, the beguiling mixture of scents and seasons, the buzz of the many languages. Simply looking at the distinctive covers of those four fine books brings it all back.

  And now here I was at a party in north London, having recently been captivated by Justine, the fictional Alexandrian Jewess, and there was Carole, a real Alexandrian Jewess, different in every way from the capricious Justine, but just as captivating. Carole’s background and story fascinated me, though I came to learn it only gradually over a period of months, even years, since she has always been reticent to talk about herself. Strangely, in the Durrell novels, too, the stories of the various characters emerge slowly, piece by piece. But eventually Carole’s own very real story, and that of her family, came together under my cautious probing.

  Born in Alexandria, she was brought up speaking mainly French, though she quickly tuned into the colourful Egyptian language that was all around – her father, Ben, spoke seven languages. When she was about six, her parents moved to Cairo, where her father, one of eleven children, began to establish a business. He too had been born in Alexandria, where his parents lived, and went to the city’s illustrious Victoria College, and though he’d won a place at Oxford, the family fortunes were such that he’d had to forgo it and set about earning a living. So it was in Cairo that Carole went to school – a French school – walking there in the early morning along the Nile, under the cypress trees, bougainvillea exploding on all sides from the gardens and white balconies of the flats and villas she passed. Later, she would join her parents at the Gezira Sporting Club, where her mother played bridge in the shade and her father, work over for the day, engaged in one or other of the sports at which he excelled. Alexandria, though, was a city Carole continued to visit regularly, staying with her grandmother, who had been widowed at a young age and to whom she was extremely close, and enjoying the wonderful beach there. She would also visit her rather more formal paternal grandparents and play among the exotic fruit trees in their lovely garden.