Our Age
1990
MY PARENTS’ HOUSE in London having been destroyed in an air raid, they moved to Castle Hill Farm, a couple of miles outside Tonbridge in Kent. I must have been about eight or nine when Noel Annan came to stay. In my bed at night and about to fall asleep, I became aware of his head bald and gleaming as he loomed over me to give me a goodnight kiss on the forehead. Years were to pass before I realized how fortunate I had been that he had done nothing more to me. Devoid of scruples, he several times came sidling up to me at some gathering and then adopted the confidential and slightly sorrowful manner that goes with imparting a nasty little secret, You do know, don’t you, that your father is consumed with jealousy because you are writing the books he isn’t writing. I have never heard another laugh quite like his, braying and persistent, with no trace of mirth in it.
Writing my book about Cyril Connolly, I had his papers at my disposal. And in them I found a handwritten letter from Noel Annan, then Provost of King’s College, Cambridge, complimenting Cyril as a writer and critic in really fulsome, not to say exaggerated, language. As soon as Cyril died, however, Noel published a long piece in the New York Review of Books rubbishing him as a failure in life and literature. The toadying and back-to-back the duplicity is all anyone needs to know about the man. The untranslatable French expression faux bonhomme is an exact fit.
Postscript. Noel Annan’s name came up at a meeting of the English Faculty at Berkeley that I was obliged to attend though I was at the university for only a summer semester. Thomas Parkinson, a Hemingwayesque character, had tenure and I heard him utter what might serve as the definitive mixed metaphor. “Noel Annan? I never knew such bullshit from a horse’s ass.”