Kindred Spirits Read online

  JEREMY LEWIS

  KINDRED SPIRITS

  Adrift in Literary London

  Contents

  Apologia

  Prologue: Dreaming of Arcadia

  1 Carbonated Lightning

  2 Tartar Sauce

  3 ‘Deutschland über Alles’

  4 The Steam-powered Computer

  5 Seaview in the Rain

  6 Oxonian Interlude

  7 William IV Street

  8 Heroes of our Time

  9 Waiting for the End

  10 Taking the Plunge

  11 Scenes from a Garden Shed

  Envoi

  About the Author

  Copyright

  To

  Jemima and Hattie Lewis,

  dearest of daughters and best of friends

  Apologia

  A few years ago I published a book called Playing for Time, in which I used my time as an undergraduate at Trinity College, Dublin, as a kind of washing-line from which to hang an autobiography that took me up to my mid-twenties, and was all to do with the follies and the ineptitude of youth. Suddenly overcome by the presumptuousness of what I had done, I wrote an apologetic foreword in which I said that the only justification for a nonentity writing an autobiography was that it should entertain, and articulate feelings and states of mind that are common to us all; and that, with luck, it should be easier for an unknown to avoid the pomposity, the discretion and the blandness that blight the memoirs of most public figures once they put childhood behind them. For a nonentity to produce a sequel may well seem a case of pushing his luck too far, not least because trying to write about the follies of middle age while still in mid-stream is a rather more hazardous affair than deriding those of one’s youth: if I have failed to pull it off, I can only apologise once more, and reassure readers eager to learn no more that, since this second book brings my story up to date, I should be well into my eighties before I get round to Volume Three.

  Like travel-writing in the 1960s and early 1970s, autobiography is, in critical terms at least, an unfairly neglected art, and one at which the English excel. Those that I particularly relish − James Lees-Milne’s Another Self, John Gale’s Clean Young Englishman, Julian Maclaren-Ross’s Memoirs of the Forties, Michael Wharton’s The Missing Will and The Dubious Codicil, P. Y. Betts’s People Who Say Goodbye − tend to assume a self-deprecating tone, and combine comicality with an underlying melancholy, vigorous anecdotes with a corrosive sense of the sad absurdity of things: to them at least − if not to the other heroes of my book − I offer the double-edged compliment of pallid emulation.

  I would like to thank the following for their help and encouragement: Mike Fishwick of HarperCollins, the most patient, enthusiastic and long-suffering of editors; Robert Lacey of HarperCollins, who more than justified his reputation as an unusually sympathetic and meticulous editor; my agent, Gillon Aitken, whose suggested titles for the book − The Fishwick Papers and The Callil Palimpsest – were reluctantly overruled; James Douglas Henry and Carol Smith, both of whom read the typescript at various stages and urged me on in the face of authorial despondency; my wife, Petra, who read it in proof and proved, as always, the shrewdest and most severe of critics; and Alan Ross, who first published various pieces from the book in the London Magazine, and kindly asked to see more. ‘Maria Pasqua’ and a shortened version of the section on Mr Chaudhuri first appeared in The Oldie, and the envoi in The Tablet. Extracts from The Letters of Evelyn Waugh, edited by Mark Amory, are reprinted by kind permission of Weidenfeld & Nicolson Ltd and Peters, Fraser & Dunlop Ltd.

  JML

  PROLOGUE

  Dreaming of Arcadia

  ONE DAY is much like another for the desk-bound office worker: life ebbs away, almost imperceptibly, in a blur of meetings and memos and gossip, of coffee-drinking and conferences and sticky summer afternoons when a post-prandial slumber becomes almost de rigueur, and our passage from our thirties into our forties and beyond is accompanied, and given definition, by the complicated movement of pieces of paper from one place to another. For a quarter of a century I worked in the most congenial and convivial of trades, constantly bemoaning my lot and a salary which − not unreasonably, I now feel − kept pace with that of the average prep-school master, yet relishing the company of the raffish, the literate and the indiscreet; and the last ten years I spent with a small but well-regarded firm, which has since been absorbed into an American conglomerate and transplanted to a modern office block, all open-plan and winking VDUs, but was, when I went there in the late 1970s, the epitome of an old-fashioned literary publisher. Our offices were off the bottom of St Martin’s Lane, immediately opposite the Post Office: the floors were covered with blue lino, the telephones were Bakelite and the furniture Utility, the rattle of elderly upright typewriters was punctuated, from time to time, by terrible howls from the opera house next door, where sopranos were practising their scales, and the place was staffed by loyal, long-serving spinsters in cardigans and sandals, and − for much of the firm’s history at least − amiable and highly civilised men with large private incomes, who considered publishing a better field than most in which to display their talents.

  Towards the end of our time in those old offices − before we moved, briefly, into the late-eighteenth-century grandeur of a house in Bedford Square − I occupied a grey-painted, wood-panelled office in the front of the building, high up on the third floor; and from its windows, on somnolent afternoons, I would gaze down into the street below, with its cargo of grimy, leather-clad motorbike messengers and lunatic, red-faced men waving bottles and roaring abuse at hurrying passers-by, or into the windows of the office opposite, where men in their shirt-sleeves and neatly-turned-out girls in black pencil skirts were hard at work opening or closing filing cabinets, or standing about in little groups, or drinking coffee out of polystyrene cups, or gazing absently back in my direction until, suddenly aware of being watched, they hurried importantly away. In between gazing and snoozing, gossiping and counting the hours until it was time to sneak out to the pub for lunch or (better still) to plod back home again, I would busy myself, pleasantly enough, with the various routines of a publishing editor’s day − correcting proofs, editing a typescript, writing a blurb, puzzling over the small print in a contract, trying to make sense of an estimate or a computer print-out of sales, soothing an author’s ruffled spirits, or indolently reading − while in the background I could hear, like a bagpipe’s never-ending drone, the familiar sounds of an office in which, as is so often the case, literacy and liberal views were combined with an autocratic and temperamental style of government: blood-curdling, imperious cries of rage, the slamming of doors, the sob of a retiring underling.

  My own attitude towards office life in general, and publishing in particular, was an uneasy, and ignoble, mixture of timidity and detachment: I resented its demands and derided its absurdities and its sporadic self-importance, yet I was never brave enough, or convinced enough, to say what I really thought, to strike a blow for revolution rather than mutter subversion in the wings. I got on well with my authors, especially the more bibulous among them, and did good work for them, as an editor if not as a promoter of their wares; I understood, and knew much about, the complicated workings of a trade that combines, in its ideal state, the intimations of art with the exactitude of commerce; I seemed reasonably popular with my colleagues and, more than most, I relished the parties and the gossip and the indiscretions endemic to that most incestuous of trades: and yet I remained, throughout my career, an observer rather than a participant, unwilling or unable to take the whole business − or, indeed, myself – as seriously as I should, and far too diffident or fearful of rebuff to elbow my way to the front. Years earlier I had, as a large,
clumsy and heavily bespectacled schoolboy, rationalised my fear of the physical and my hatred of the team spirit by adopting towards organised games an attitude of derisive superiority and refusing to join in, while at the same time feeling genuinely puzzled by the way in which those set in authority above me − loudly-shouting housemasters in scarves and duffle-coats, or solemn, serious-minded prefects – could work themselves into frenzies of excitement over matters so self-evidently futile as hoofing a lump of leather from one end of a field to the other or thwacking smaller lumps of leather with a stick; and this same combination of the fearful and the over-rational − first implanted, perhaps, by Spam-coloured legs in a scrum, the owners of which were grunting and farting about me and twisting the ears off my head for no very worthwhile reason, or the withering cries of ‘For God’s sake, Lewis’ as I trailed unhappily back to the pavilion, last man in, bowled out for nought − permeated and blighted my life as a working man. I flung myself into the social life of the office, outlasting all but the hardiest at publishing parties and stealing back late in the afternoon from yet another extended lunch, to be greeted by a palimpsest of yellow stickers on my typewriter informing me that the boss had been looking for me since 2.15, and where had I been all this time; I did my work as well as I could, and often enjoyed what I did; and yet I remained on the touchline, refusing responsibility and for ever holding back − in much the same way as, thirty years before, banished from the rugger field on grounds of unpardonable incompetence, I had shivered among the spectators, none of whom reached above my shoulder, my melancholy bass booming unhappily among their excited trebles as the game surged to and fro before us. My heart bled for the sobbing underling or the baffled new arrival, not simply from sympathy for the underdog, though that had its part to play, but because − despite thinning locks and failing sight and an Audenesque network of wrinkles and an uneasy tightening of the trousers and even a place on the board, for what it was worth − I continued to think of myself as a servant rather than a master, as someone who had to be told what to do and, while grumbling with the rest at the folly or the harshness of what ‘they’ had decreed, was more than happy to leave it that way. Like a grizzled schoolboy, I longed for the boss to go on holiday, or for the firm to be laid low by one of those bouts of ’flu or diarrhoea that sporadically sweep through such places; had I arrived at work one day to discover that the office had burned down in the night, my immediate reactions would have been of jubilation and relief.’

  Institutional life of any kind, like the games I so dreaded at school, depends on the suspension of belief: we learn to feign – and yet not entirely feign, for our livelihood depends upon it − excitement and delight and rage and indignation and despair, if for a moment only; our features harden and grow strained as we approach the office in the morning and soften and relax as we leave it in the evening, and once installed behind our desks we persuade ourselves, and others, that the weekly sales figures or a particular point in a contract or the urgency of publishing a novel which no one will remember in five years’ time or persistent incompetence on the part of an amiable but scatterbrained member of staff are matters of supreme and over-riding importance (as indeed they are). Here too I let my colleagues down, finding it hard to suppress or conceal the views of civilian life. Lacking, to an alarming degree, any trace of the killer instinct or the competitive urge, I found it hard to work up the necessary, if transient, emotions of fury or aggression when faced with the activities of a rival or a predator. I fidgeted through meetings, yawning and glancing at my watch; I was competent at the minutiae of the trade, at estimates and contracts and knocking a book into shape, but proved a poor dissembler, unable − as the best publishers always can − to see all our geese as swans, and to persuade others to think the same. I took refuge in a kind of cynical buffoonery, a world-weary raising of eyebrows at the folly of mankind; and, whenever I could, I sought oblivion in those jovial, interminable lunches with friends whose company I relished and whose views seemed to match my own.

  Nor was my behaviour at home any more creditable or mature. I had married, in my mid-twenties, a girl who had been at university with me, with the eyes of a Tartar horseman, hair like a badger, and a face and a nature too kind, too trusting and too dear for the world in which we find ourselves; we had two loud and dashing daughters, both of them eloquent, stylish and funny, and both encouraged by me in incurable frivolity; we lived, happily enough, in a small, half-decorated suburban house near Richmond Park (I found it hard to admit to East Sheen), crammed with books and pictures and cats and pieces of paper, with a long, overgrown garden like a hazy cavern of green, and a white wooden verandah on which, on summer evenings, we would sit and drink and talk to our friends while the days and the years and the months stole, almost unnoticed, away.

  All this made for a congenial if impecunious life, in which far too little thought was given − certainly by me − to such grave matters as pension schemes and insurance policies and the provision for rainy days: at home, as in the office, I shied away from the graver realities of life, leaving Petra to grapple with the bills and juggle our finances and worry about how and whether we would ever be able to afford a new car, while I salved my conscience by tackling a mound of ironing − a job I anyway enjoyed − or, equally agreeably, peeling the vegetables for that evening’s supper (deciding what we should eat, and doing the necessary shopping, were not on my agenda: Petra was expected to combine these with a full-time job).

  To my shame I had − still have − more than a touch of the Harold Skimpole about me. I somehow assumed, on slender evidence, that my refusal to accept responsibility or to deal with the more tedious aspects of life was an endearing attribute of the impractical literary man, whose thoughts were hovering on a higher plane (the fact that my own literary activities were more in my head than on paper seemed neither here nor there); I revelled in infantilism, making much of a belief, assiduously promoted, that all the most interesting and entertaining men I knew were, in their various ways, irremediably childish, and that it was this that set them apart from those grey, responsible, prematurely aged figures − keen games-players to a man, no doubt, and avid upholders of team spirit − who assumed their duties with ponderous gravity, wore their middle age like a shroud, and spent more time than I felt quite decent discussing their retirement plans, with special reference to the proximity of golf clubs. And since I remained, for all my haggard looks and creaking joints, incurably infantile when it came to such matters as farts or lavatories or performing tribal dances, clad in nothing save my socks, while the rest of the family was trying to watch television (‘Oh Dad, do be quiet!’), my refusal to confront or to do battle with the demands and the responsibilities of life threatened to become a full-scale retreat. And although, on good days, I thought myself luckier than many, and liked to affect a lofty condescension to friends who had abandoned the ideals and the enthusiasms of youth for safe, dark-suited jobs and explained, with an embarrassed, apologetic laugh, that they hadn’t much time for reading nowadays apart from the occasional Wilbur Smith on the flight to Australia or Robert Ludlum beside the pool in Barbados − since authors like these seemed far harder to read than Dickens or Trollope there may have been more to this than met the eye − I spent much more time than I might have wished being undermined by feelings of terrible inadequacy. I felt inadequate because I knew I earned several thousand pounds a year less than my dark-suited friends’ twenty-five-year-old personal assistants, and because I longed to go to Australia and knew I never would, and because I could take my family (or, more accurately, be taken by them) no nearer the Caribbean than Cornwall or the Isle of Wight; I felt inadequate when I went to dinner parties in North London and the conversation eddied and surged above my head and I remembered, all too well, why, thirty years earlier, I had been shown the door by a distressingly large number of Oxford and Cambridge tutors for admissions; I felt inadequate (and irresponsible, too) when men in ribbed jerseys and the up-to-date equivalents of cavalry-
twill trousers banged their pipes against the grate and, puffing ruminatively, discussed those ever more imminent pension schemes and retirement plans; I felt inadequate when my daughters’ friends went trekking in Peru or paid homage in Tibetan monasteries or lent a hand in the Philippines, and I tried (in vain) to endow my own timid forays as an undergraduate with retrospective dash and glamour; I felt inadequate when I caught sight of myself in a mirror, or climbed behind the steering-wheel of our car with other people on board, or took to the dance floor, or was expected to kick a football back into play while strolling in the park; and I felt quintessentially inadequate when, early one summer, we set out for Holland from the Pool of London on board a bottle-green converted trawler, and Petra’s cousin − the mildest and most unalarming of sea-dogs − asked me to take the helm as we threaded our way down the Thames and headed for the open sea. He needed to go below, he said, to study some charts and plot our course: would I be a good chap, and remember to keep to the right (or was it the left? One of the two, for sure, but − instantly panic-stricken − I had no idea which as we headed straight towards a tug dragging behind it primrose-painted barges crammed with industrial waste). Within minutes I had succeeded in palming the job off on our skipper’s self-assured son of thirteen, and hurried importantly below, where I felt more inadequate than ever as grave, manly figures clustered about the charts and compasses and took readings of various kinds and traded valuable information about positions and destinations over the intercom with a crackling voice on the shore. How I envied and admired my fellow-crew members as they sprang nimbly about the deck, and tossed ropes to grinning Dutchmen on the quay, and decided, with no evidence of dithering, where and how we should park for the night, while I tried to look both keen and unobtrusive, one finger carefully keeping the place in my book. How eagerly I leapt ashore, and how briskly I led the way once on dry land, as if anxious to redeem my inadequacies on board.