ALASDAIR CLAYRE

A Fire by the Sea

1965, ENLARGED EDITION 1973

THE OLD EATON HALL in Cheshire was the place where Officer-Cadets doing their National Service were prepared for commission. Arrival there was something of a shock. The sheer mass of the building was unbelievable. Alfred Waterhouse, the architect, had designed a monument that represented the thrust and achievement of the Victorian age, and in particular the wealth of the owner, the 1st Duke of Westminster. In keeping with the post-1945 emphasis on equality, a later Duke had handed Eaton Hall over to the army. We lived in grandiose rooms adapted to dormitories. It never felt right to be clattering in studded boots down huge marble stairs or racing to a lecture past a majestic old master painting.

Early one half-dark morning, we assembled for drill. Taking the parade was the Senior Officer-Cadet, identified by his shoulder flashes and cap badge as a Grenadier. Recruits from all five regiments of the Brigade of Guards did their basic training at the same barracks, Caterham in Surrey. I didn’t recognize him, but it was understood that guardsmen, like birds of a feather, flocked together. Instead he started to shout at me, “Stamp your feet, you idle Coldstreamer!” and the next thing I knew, this officious fellow was handing out extra drills as punishment.

Some time later, and by then a second lieutenant, I had to take my platoon to Pickering in Yorkshire, where the army had a range for rehearsing with live ammunition the infantry tactic designated as Fire and Movement. It was winter and the ground was white. The camp was a cheap affair of Nissen huts left over from the war, with a mural that Rex Whistler had painted on his way through its sole redeeming feature. As I was crossing from one of these huts to another, I heard someone playing a flute. Opening the door, I was face to face with the Grenadier who had thought me idle. This was Alasdair Clayre. The music was Schubert, and he was reading Immanuel Kant. He had been Head of School at Winchester. We both had scholarships to Oxford and he would be going up to Christ Church and I to Magdalen at the beginning of the coming academic year. Meanwhile in the course of the military exercises at Pickering, he and his platoon won some sort of competition, and then had to give a demonstration to the rest of us.

Several generations of Alasdair’s family had been doctors and lay missionaries, one of them his father. His mother was to tell me that the father had died when Alasdair was 19 and the loss was so testing that Alasdair could hardly get over it. However that may be, he had the confident good looks and manner of someone on the highway to eminence: a large head with strong features, brown eyes bright with intelligence, a laugh that was almost a shout. Those in contact with him soon recognized his exceptional intellectual energy. We made a point of attending the lectures of Edgar Wind and Isaiah Berlin, and on one particular occasion my attention wandered and I failed to follow the discussion. What was that about, I asked Alasdair afterwards. “Three things have been said today,” and he summarized them in unforgettably lucid language. (At a conference I once attended, Margaret Thatcher chose to speak last: she had the same power of synthesis and by coincidence also began by saying, “Three things have been said today.”)

One afternoon I happened to meet Alasdair walking across Christ Church Meadows. No doubt we soon engaged in undergraduate chatter about the meaning of this and that. The profound but unapproachable part of his character suddenly took over and right there and then, ankle-deep in long grass, he sang Schumann’s great lament for the human condition, Ich grolle nicht, und wenn das Herz auch bricht (I bear no grudge even though my heart is breaking).

For the summer vacation of 1957, friends of Alasdair’s proposed to charter a yacht that accommodated twelve people – each paying their share – and would sail down the Italian coast from Naples. He arranged for me to be one of this gang. We were still on the train chugging through southern France when he announced that his life’s purpose was to reconcile Wittgenstein and Christianity, something too far above my head to have any meaning. The train pulled into the station in Naples. I was lifting a suitcase down from the rack overhead when an arm came through the open window and our hand luggage was gone.

The money in our pockets was all we now had. We decided it would have to do and we would board the yacht as planned. A few days later we were on a beach discussing how to get home. An elderly English lady approached and apologized for eavesdropping, but was sorry for us and offered to lend whatever money we needed. Behind her back stood her son and his wife grimacing, as much as to say, Mother’s letting herself be exploited again. By the time the yacht was back in the Naples marina, I had just enough money for a ticket to Rome and the gettone with which to call the only Italian I knew, Princess Letitia Boncompagni, a friend of my parents. She was in. It was a hot day when I found my way on foot from Rome station to the Villa Aurora. Unprepossessing as I must have been, the Princess greeted me with the realistic question, How much do you want? and invited me to the lunch party she was about to give. So I met Ignazio Silone and Gian Carlo Menotti.

When it came to Finals, the whole university seemed to have heard that the Chairman of Alasdair’s Examiners, the forbidding philosopher Professor J. L. Austin, had said that it had been a real pleasure to read his papers and congratulated him. Such a compliment was virtually unknown. It seemed in the natural order of things that Alasdair went on to win a Prize Fellowship at All Souls, the last word in academic prestige. The world was open to him. I joked that he would end up as His Grace Field Marshal Professor Lord Clayre.

Clarissa and I were married in July 1959 and we saw a lot of Alasdair. At weekends we had the run of a cottage at Somerhill, the great Jacobean house with an estate on the edge of Tonbridge. The owners, Sir Henry and Lady d’Avigdor-Goldsmid, otherwise Harry and Rosie, and their two daughters Sarah and Chloe, used to invite house parties of the old and famous and the up-and-coming young. Alasdair was a perfect fit. After dinner, he might play his guitar and sing his own compositions, perhaps the melancholic “There’s a Cold Wind Blowing,” or the rather ludicrous “The Invisible Backward-facing Grocer.” The Goldsmids nicknamed him The Clarifier.

In 1961, he and I published our first novels, mine entitled Owls and Satyrs, his The Window, both the kind of book that reviewers damn with faint praise about awaiting with interest to see what this author will do next. That same year, like any right-thinking intellectual at that moment, Alasdair went to Israel. An envelope addressed with Byronic spelling to Childe Pryce-Jones and postmarked Tiberias contained the words of a song for Clarissa. The opening lines are, “I heard a baby cry / And saw a mother lean her golden head/ Across the cradle with a lullaby,” leading to the final couplet, “And then a winter darkness, still and long / Closed over child, and golden hair, and song.” The intimation of the child’s death is unmistakeable, though I made nothing of it at the time. Isaiah Berlin happened to be in Israel, and he was more perceptive. In a letter to his Oxford colleague Stuart Hampshire in October 1961, he described an encounter with Alasdair and their discussion about which kibbutz might provide solitude and a private life. “I do not know quite what is wrong, but something certainly is,” Isaiah concluded. “There really is a screw loose somewhere – rattling audibly.”

Together Alasdair and I visited Wormwoods Scrubs and Pentonville for articles about the prison system. Alasdair took up architecture and in the course of qualifying won the profession’s major award, the Leverhulme Gold Medal. A Fire by the Sea is his one book of poetry, and he reworked and extended the contents for a subsequent, more presentable edition. “Pope Kept Awake at Limehouse” reflects his own experience of living in a studio near the Commercial Dock.

Ten times the bray of “Bye bye baby” stuns the waking day,

still as great ships glide by with silent lights

loud “Bye bye baby” rocks the sleepless nights.

He also collected folk songs, composing, performing and recording some of his own. Broadcasting, work and play, the cooperative principle, political economy, were subjects that fully engaged him one after the other until they were exhausted. Friends bandied about various theories to explain why he didn’t find a cause or a task or an office that would hold him and allow him to do the good for the whole society that he so evidently wanted to do. Perhaps he found everything too easy and was searching for something he wouldn’t be able to do.

Although at first fully engaged emotionally with his numerous girlfriends, he dropped them without ceremony when the affair was exhausted. Over the years, one after another had come to sit weeping in our kitchen and they seemed to get younger the older he grew. In 1974 he married Felicity Duncan, a leading literary agent. Since her father was a Member of Parliament, the ceremony took place in a chapel in Westminster. The marriage lasted six years. Subsequently living on his own, borrowing a good many thousand pounds from his mother for a flat, he was evidently searching out new people in his life, or so we thought.

A breaking point for Clarissa and me was Alasdair’s sudden and total conversion to The Process. This was an offshoot of Scientology operated by a couple who called themselves Mr. and Mrs. de Grimston, quite likely a pseudonym. The purpose of The Process was obscure. What was clear, however, was that everyone associated with it was obliged to make their money over to the de Grimstons. Like many others, Clarissa’s brother, David Caccia, admired and trusted Alasdair. A relation had left him a substantial fortune that he was ready to give the de Grimstons on Alasdair’s say-so. I had it out with the de Grimstons. I could not help noticing that in one corner of their office was a pile of books promoting Nazism and Fascism. Then I had to tell Alasdair that the whole point of being an Oxford philosopher and fellow of All Souls was to promote reason, not rubbish. It was inexplicable. Eventually he apologized, David Caccia did not beggar himself but the damage had been done.

A few days into January 1984, I was walking towards the BBC when I spotted Alasdair coming out. Distress was visible on his face. For the past three years he had been researching and writing The Heart of the Dragon, a book about China from which a thirteen-part television series had been made. The book was now out and he’d just been interviewed about it on the BBC. He said it had been a fiasco, he couldn’t answer the questions, he’d dried up, he had to confess he didn’t read Mandarin Chinese but was restricted to secondary sources, he couldn’t be a serious historian. I tried to reassure him and said it didn’t matter anyhow, audiences wouldn’t remember if he’d performed well or badly.

A few days later, Felicity telephoned with the news that he had thrown himself under a train. He was 48. A psychiatrist who had had sessions with him said that usually people on the borderline of genius and madness kill themselves much younger, when they are around 20. We had been granted these extra years with Alasdair and should be grateful for that. Have nothing to do with genius, the psychiatrist summed up, it creates and it destroys.