* By chance, after well over forty years, I got back in touch with Tony. He was coming to San Francisco. Would I join a historians’ panel that he was mounting for a conference? We met. We were friends again. He read this manuscript and made some good corrections. A few months later he was dead.
24
JAMES DEAN WAS DEAD before I saw him. In England, for reasons I have never understood and cannot endure, many American movies come out months after their American opening. Dean died—on the road near Paso Robles—on September 30,1955 (even with a fading memory I do not need to look that up). And I daresay it was in the autumn of 1955 at least before I saw Rebel Without a Cause at the Granada, Tooting.
Something odd happened: there was a crowd at the theater, I suppose because of Dean's death, with a large part of it waiting in the deep-carpeted lobby, of the cinema that was the most decorated and extravagant in South London. So I decided to go in early before the end of the previous screening. This meant that I came into the dark just as Dean's character, Jim, edged into the planetarium in his attempt to save Plato (Sal Mineo). Suddenly, you read every bit of information you could get. And Jim seemed devious. He was trying to lure Plato out of the place, with police outside, and he borrowed Plato's gun for a moment and removed its bullets. That looked like a trick to get Plato; it seemed like cunning. And it was a clue to the way in which Dean was always—though not for long—artful, thoughtful, and not quite the vehemently sincere and spontaneous kid he claimed to be.
Now, I loved Dean, and when I at last saw East of Eden, his first film, I found one of the emotional focal points of my own youth. I did Dean, unashamedly, and I tried once to do him for Margaret so she would go with me to see East of Eden. She was Roman Catholic, yet she was already one of the best kissers I have ever met in a state of being (mine as much as hers) that really did not know how to go beyond the kiss yet. So to get her to East of Eden, I acted it out.
“Poor boy,” she sighed. “He can't honor his parents.”
“How can he?” I said. “His mother runs a whorehouse.” Margaret shuddered. “And his father cannot express love.”
“But you have to honor your parents,” said Margaret. “God says so.” How is it that such a person can kiss well?
I kidded her. It was my way of testing absurdity that was still kissing with something close to frenzy. And uttering such prim bromides. “But he is in another place,” I said. “You have to see!” I knew she had to see Dean move to feel his mixture of shyness and mastery, and to possess it for herself, for us. But she didn't think her parents would want her to see the film, and she didn't feel able to exceed that lack of permission.
“Don't you trust me?” I said.
She looked at me. I've never known anyone more beautiful. “Should I?”she laughed.
“No, you should not,” I said, and I felt myself sing away with the idea of becoming dangerous.
What I mean to say is that I saw from the outset that Dean—in all his parts—was remarkable for knowing what he was doing. That's what kids loved in him, and what flattered them. He seemed to know more than his elders. Famously, he and his secret, the Method, became known for naturalness and raw feeling. But Dean is always saying, “Look, a feeling. How do you like that?” And what acting opened up to me was that feeling of hot and cold. There are springs and streams in Yellowstone Park in which the icy-cold water and water as hot as your best bath come on you from different sides. I think it was scene making, or story-telling, creeping up on me.
Some while later, I wrote the first thing I ever had published—an essay on James Dean—in the school magazine, the Alleynian. Did the ghost of Edward Alleyn stir? Had an actor ever been the subject in that magazine?
The magazine was just one of the bonuses at Dulwich if you made it through to the sixth form. Once there you were regarded as semi-adult and working toward university. The workload was hard and sixth-formers were allowed to be antisocial, superior, sarcastic, and stuck up. That encouraged our feeling of being a privileged club, an endless debating society. It was notable and fascinating, I thought, to see that the sour cream, having come through, had picked up many of the styles and mannerisms of the elite, but in a bantering, teasing way again. This is characterisic of how many upper-class rigidities were relaxed by exposure to lower-class ironies.
Last night I had dinner with an English couple who have young children. All of us were the beneficiaries of private education, directly or indirectly. We talked about the way I had had special access to Dulwich, what it did for me, and even for the school. You must understand that the experiment at Dulwich, the era of sour cream, is no more. It ended and has not been repeated, and I believe that it was closed down finally under a Labor Secretary for Education, Shirley Williams, in the late 1970s. So such schools are now fee-paying again, and “private” in the worst sense. Yet I want to say this as I observed it (and I was no fan of it at first): by the time I was in the sixth form, Dulwich was a very good school, at which old ideas and attitudes were engaged in a very useful struggle with sourer, more sarcastic, democratic urges. I regret that the “experiment” has been discontinued, and I marveled at the case made last night that the provocation by which lower-class children came in contact with their “betters” left them uneasy and awkward. I think I saw an opposite effect in the 1950s, in which the gentry had to quicken up to handle the “players,” and in which the new social mix was lively and improving.
I do recall situations at Dulwich in which a pupil of old money let slip some degree of privilege—like having servants at home—and was greeted by hoots of derision from boys raised on household chores. That may have threatened a few, and may even have led to the termination of the “experiment.” But I think it was all for the good. Further, I suspect that the kinds of radical and subversive energy that coursed through British society in the 1960s had something to do with the unforced interbreeding in schools.
It was in my time at Dulwich that the Gallery Club was formed. It was a sixth-former club and involved parties of boys going up to London to see a West End play. We had to have a teacher with us, but the club was run by the boys. I recall going up to town early one morning with cash to get a hundred seats in the gallery for West Side Story. It was the biggest event the club had ever had and a huge success. Ernie Williams, head of the history side, was our patron, and I recall him and his wife dancing at the end of that show. I hope the club functions still.
Somehow or other it proved beyond resources to start a Film Society. It was in the sixth form that some of us discovered the National Film Theater. This was the season, more or less, in which Ingmar Bergman was established as a cultural figure, with The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries. I heard from a friend at school, Paul Mayersberg, who went on to be a director and screenwriter of great merit (The Man Who Fell to Earth, Croupier) that a place called the NFT under Waterloo Bridge was doing a Bergman season; the Swede had been making pictures since 1946. So we went along. We joined the Theater. One evening we persuaded Mr. Henschel, one of our teachers, to join us—perhaps it was Sawdust and Tinsel or Smiles of a Summer Night—and to talk about it afterward.
My second piece in the Alleynian was on Bergman. My third was on Alfred Hitchcock, in the year of Vertigo. I was covering a private waterfront. That film was a failure when it opened in 1958, and very few could see into its cruel and desperate portrait of a director destroying an actress as he tried to make her into an ideal figure. I was possessed by the film, and by the very chilly beauty of its San Francisco. It was a film that took over my life in some ways, and by no means the largest of those was the chance that one day I came to live in San Francisco.
Margaret had dumped me. One evening as I moved to kiss her, she slipped a small gold cross out from under her shirt. I felt like Dracula being repulsed by one of his maidens, and she explained that she had promised herself to another boy, a fellow Roman Catholic. That was another club. Alas, I only fell in love with her all the more for being discarded. My most f
avored club has generally been kept for the unattainable. Is there anything more desirable than the thing you can't have? Is there a worse place to live for anyone who suffers from vertigo than San Francisco?
25
IMET ANOTHER GIRL, a lapsed Catholic, and we escorted each other out of the darkest stages of sexual ignorance without doing anything to diminish erotic expectation. She was pretty, smart, brave, funny, sexy, kind, as wary of gods as of parents. She was perfect, except that she was number two. Put it another way, she was perfect except that she had met me, a person who had such a chronic love of desire that I could hardly get my mind off the lost or the forbidden. I'll call her Mary—though that wasn't her name—because I trust that she's alive still somewhere and I wouldn't want her to be picked out for any hurt.
While I was with Mary—and we went to the National Film Theater together a lot—I would also go on prolonged walks in that part of South London where Margaret lived, on the chance of bumping into her. Was I aware that this was madness? Yes. But I had been forbidden to telephone Margaret. Letters were not answered. And I had a faith in coincidence, I suppose, or gambling. It occurred to me at the time that there was a book in it—The Journal of a Mad Lover—in which the walker digests every great Chinese proverb about searching for the lost one and becomes an old man who one day bumps into an old woman and cannot recognize her. The gap between literature and madness is often very small, and anyone with sense might have guessed that I wanted to write books more than I needed to live a life. Alas, not even the LCC seemed to have classes or therapy available yet for this condition. But I remember at school that I discovered Wordsworth's Prelude and was entranced by its idea of a youthful landscape rediscovered later in life—and by the process of walking.
Though I was obsessed with the remote chance of seeing Margaret, I did begin to notice that South London was changing. Traffic had taken over. The High Road was no longer a gathering of genteel shops, it was a way to the south coast. Coaches, cars, and motorcycles went straight through, headed for getaway fun. The small shops closed. Larger markets came in their place. The family houses in Streatham were being remodeled as families passed away. They became collections of flats or rooms. Roads like Thirlmere became parking lots. London was picking up speed and prosperity. The extraordinary changes of the 1960s were beginning to appear in the distance like ghostly horsemen. But were they coming to free us or to invade?
The country was becoming prosperous. Clothes were changing. Color arrived. And very gradually there was color on the streets as immigrants came to London. All those parts of the Empire with awful ownership names— the Gold Coast, Rhodesia, and so on—were becoming their own countries. It wasn't easy. There had been a movement called the Mau Mau in Kenya, with bodies hacked to pieces, and there had been the collateral slaughter as Britain shrugged off India. Too late? Too casually done? How else were such things to be managed? It seemed to me that Britain, in its slow, awkward way, was doing the right thing and changing the world. Of course, in the 1950s, hardly anyone mentioned Ireland. But old attitudes were breaking down. Not too far ahead, Penguin would challenge the law by publishing Lady Chatterley's Lover. There was a trial, and a prosecutor asked one witness whether he thought it was a book he should let his servant read-without guessing that the bloke had never had a servant in his life. And kids were making trouble.
On Tooting Bec Common, among all the other gentle entertainments there had been a small lake on which one could hire rowboats or canoes. At night the yellow craft were tethered together. But then one morning the word got around that all those boats had been smashed and sunk. “Vandals” was the word, and it went with “Goths” or “barbarians.” But some kids, a gang, had done the deed, not for profit, but just to spoil others’ pleasure. They were called “teddy boys” sometimes because of the way they dressed, and they were associated with the new rock music. They were violent, maybe, and “lost.” Hardly anyone pointed out that they were the remains, the others, in an educational system that picked on them at the age of eleven and said they were in, but a failure. I had got through that broken window, but a lot of kids I knew had been sent to bad secondary schools, and those children knew it was the kiss of death. You can't do that without making some of those kids your enemies.
Not far from where I lived—toward Croydon—there had been the case of Craig and Bentley, kids who went on a rampage. One night in 1952 they had been together robbing a small factory The police had come, and Craig, egged on by Bentley, had shot a copper and killed him. Here was the unusual angle: Bentley was nineteen, and he had been hurt in a bomb explosion in the war. He was said to be a bit “simple.” And Craig was sixteen. But Craig was the stronger influence. In the end, Craig was sent to juvenile prison (though not forever) and Bentley was hung. There was profound dismay at the case, not just because kids had done this and had a gun to kill a policeman, but because the law had seemed so unfair. Mr. Macmillan kept on saying we'd never had it so good, and at last the congealed side of rationing and war damage seemed to be pushing back. But if prosperity was destiny for old England, juvenile delinquency and “hopeless cases” were part of the residue.
Whereas any kid who had lived through our postwar years knew how much luck had to do with it. One night a policeman found me trying to light a fire in a ruined house just to see what would happen. He could have been nasty. He could have taken me in. I might have been out of Dul-wich with “communication problems” stamped on my file. Instead, he very calmly took me through what I was doing and asked me whether I didn't think it was pretty silly I agreed. He sent me home. (But if I had been black?)
Suppose a copper had called me over on one of my endless romantic walks.
“‘Ere! You!”
“Me?”
“Yes. My lad, you've been walking up and down this street for hours.”
“Oh.”
“What are you up to, then?”
“Well….”
“Go on.”
“The truth?”
“It had better be.”
“Well, Officer, I'm walking the streets in search of a beautiful girl I love.”
The policeman's look is stern, stiff, starchy. He coughs discreetly. Then he lowers his gaze. “You too?” he says, and suddenly the sad life of a beat copper falls into place. The police in Britain now are modern. They have their TV shows and their nervous breakdowns. They're motorized, and the British accept that a lot of them need to carry guns. But at one time there were coppers, local, unarmed, conservative, but enlightened. John Arlott was such a man once.
In 1957, I believe, for the England vs. West Indies series, the BBC introduced Test Match Special. It was a program of ball-by-ball radio commentary of Test matches. And it made John Arlott one of those heroes of my life then. Test Match Special meant that you could follow the detail, and it put a tremendous stress on radio. There was television coverage of matches by then. But radio was the classic. Cricket, as some will warn you, is a slow game, and it is vulnerable to boredom. Enter Arlott, ex-cop, poet, wine authority, and man of Hampshire.
He might say, live on the air, and I am makng this up, “And at twenty to three the rains return, and they feel good. The purpose in the match begins to subside. A freshness arises. The players know that this moment won't last too long, but playing in the rain is such fun—they are like children again. Ah, that's it. They've had enough. And they're running off now like middle-aged men afraid of falling on the slippery grass.”
Maybe I exaggerate. Maybe Arlott was tipsy half the time. But he was as insinuating on radio as Dylan Thomas or Samuel Beckett. I know that he was making it up as he went along, but the rhythms were flawless, and cricket was being ennobled. There was a team of commentators and experts—Rex Alston was another—and the team was good. But the game seemed to have been created for John Arlott's meditations. I began to collect his books—there was Days at the Cricket, about the West Indies tour of 1950—and the sound of his voice is still part of me.
&nbs
p; Of course, no good could come from all that walking. You can invent the twist in which the walker gets trapped. This is how it happened to me. I was with Mary, walking along the High Road one evening after dark, and I looked but didn't quite notice at first that Margaret was coming toward us. I hadn't seen her in a year by then. So she was older and lovelier. I made a hash of the introduction. And Margaret stood there looking at the two of us with this smile that surely any proper Catholic God—not to mention the nuns—would have stopped in its tracks. I'm afraid that too much was left naked on the street that night.
“I see,” said Mary later as I put her on her bus home. And it was said with a pitch of gloom too kind to want to crush my wicked elation.
26
AS DULWICH CAME TO A CLIMAX, I said I would like to apply for Oxford rather than Cambridge—but that was only because I had all my life supported Oxford in the Boat Race. And I applied to Brasenose College because I recalled that it had had a number of outstanding rugby players. None of this was informed or rational, but Dulwich imposed the issue upon one and I followed along meekly. In due course I went up to Oxford for about a week and stayed there in college rooms while I sat the entrance examination. The rooms were mean and cold, I thought. The food was dire. But the exams were interesting. I had interviews, too, with dons in the history department. We discussed issues in history in depth.
They asked me what other things I was interested in and I said cinema and jazz, and drew a blank. “We don't do those things,” the professors told me, and they gave every impression of hardly knowing what they were personally. Years later, I was up for a fellowship at the University of Hull. Philip Larkin was on the panel making the award. He asked the same question, and I said jazz again— but modern, knowing his archaic tastes. His lip curled and I knew it was curtains for me. Larkin picked a poet, Douglas Dunn, but I rubbed his superior nose in the storms of Charlie Parker. “Hmmm,” he said.
Try to Tell the Story Page 14
