ONE OF OUR particular friends doing English at UCL was a girl of striking looks, with jet black hair and olive skin, called Jeswyn Buckwell. Her Italian (and as she would discover late in life, half-Jewish) father had adopted an English-sounding name after immigrating. In her third year she became seriously attached to Martin Jones, a student of chemistry who had come to UCL after doing his National Service in the Air Force. He was very interested in cinema and became President of the college Film Society, a position which, amazingly, was considered important and onerous enough in those days to merit an extra sabbatical year at college with no required academic work. Not long after Jeswyn had graduated with an Upper Second, Martin spotted an advertisement for someone competent in modern languages to join a company that subtitled foreign films, for which Jeswyn, who was well qualified in Italian and French, applied successfully.
The four of us got together occasionally when I was on leave during my army service. I was impressed when I discovered that Jeswyn subtitled well-known films like And God Created Woman, starring Brigitte Bardot, and envied her opportunity, much less interesting though it would have been to her, to see the shots of Bardot in the nude that she told me had been cut by the British censor. I liked and was impressed by Martin, who seemed exceptionally well informed, for a chemist, not only about film but also modern American literature. He subscribed to the New Yorker, and was the first person to tell me about a writer called Vladimir Nabokov before the Lolita controversy made him famous. When Jeswyn and Martin suggested a joint holiday in Ibiza following my release from the Army we agreed readily, although like most Brits in 1957 we knew nothing about the island. There was a difficulty about dates, because Mary and Jeswyn had to return to work only a week after I was released. It was decided that I would join the others after they had been in Ibiza for a week, to spend the second week with them, and then the girls would return to England while Martin and I toured southern Spain for another couple of weeks. He had recently been recruited by the huge oil company BP, but would not be taking up his job immediately.
It is interesting that ‘release’, rather than ‘discharge’ or some other synonym, was the official military term for the conclusion of a conscript’s service, the word that is applied to prisoners who have done their time. The day after I was freed, I flew from Heathrow to Barcelona on a student charter flight, in a Dakota so old and infirm that it did not attempt to fly over the Pyrenees, but shuddered and groaned its way down to the south coast of France at about 10,000 feet and then turned right. There was no airport on Ibiza then. I took an overnight boat from Barcelona, sitting up on deck since the accommodation below was so crowded and filthy. I did not mind: the night was warm and star-speckled, and in the early morning I had the thrilling sight of the island of Ibiza and its port slowly rising, as it seemed, out of the blue-green sea, the steeply stacked houses, tenements and churches behind the harbour catching the light of the risen sun. And there on the quayside were Mary, Jeswyn and Martin, waving and smiling. Everything had gone according to plan. Mary, who was getting tired of playing gooseberry to the other pair, was very glad to see me and we embraced warmly. We all sat down outside a harbour-front café, and as I sipped delicious coffee and heard about their first week, with the unaccustomed heat of the sun warming my back through my shirt, I felt happy. Released.
There is a special charm about an island as a holiday venue, as long as it has no airport. The effort of getting there by sea gives one a sense of achievement, and the practical limitation on the number of visitors enhances one’s enjoyment of its attractions. Becoming temporarily an islander encourages relaxation and imparts a feeling of peace and well-being. I have not been back to Ibiza since 1957, but I am well aware of how much it has changed under the impact of mass tourism. Martin had booked our accommodation for that week in San Antonio, on the opposite side of the island from the port, a small, quiet, unpretentious resort, still recognisable as a fishing village, which was described recently by London’s Time Out magazine as ‘arguably the clubbing capital of the universe’. We stayed in a cheap but clean little hotel on demi-pension terms. It was near the beach, but we preferred to walk each morning about a mile to a small, tree-shaded cove that we usually had to ourselves, where we read and swam. After a late Spanish lunch and a long siesta we would take the air and stroll along the seafront, have a light supper, and end up sampling liqueurs in a bodega. A shot of Cointreau, Benedictine or Green Chartreuse cost about sixpence. For the same price you could have yourself shaved by a barber with a cut-throat razor, and I indulged myself in this luxury several times, urging Mary to test the baby’s-bottom smoothness of my cheeks by nuzzling them. There were, needless to say, no discotheques – the word and its referent had not yet been invented. There were one or two open-air cafés which had live music and a concrete dance floor on which we gamely attempted the Ibizan equivalent of ballroom dancing. That was our very agreeable holiday. Years later I wrote a short story called ‘Where the Climate’s Sultry’ about two going-steady English couples, just graduated from university in the late 1950s, who take a similar holiday and stay in a similar hotel, the boys sharing one room and the girls another, but pair off differently for their siestas, with consequences that should not be taken as biographical.
At the end of the week we separated: Mary and Jeswyn went back to England and work, envying Martin and me as we took a different boat from Ibiza to Alicante. Our plan was to see something of Andalusia by bus, visiting Murcia, Granada, Seville and Cadiz, then to return home by train via Madrid. Our budget was limited. We stayed in the cheapest hotels, in rooms without air conditioning and sometimes without windows, in often stifling temperatures, ate in cheap restaurants, suffered diarrhoea, and managed with very little Spanish between us. In Madrid one day we were followed for some time by two juvenile beggars who had accosted us and been refused, pleading or jeering unintelligibly at our heels, until I remembered that cowboys in westerns used to tell unwelcome Mexican characters to ‘vamoos’. I turned on the couple and yelled the word fiercely in their faces, upon which they fled. It was a small, and for me rare, triumph in a foreign language. The Spanish word is actually vamos – I have just looked it up – but I think I’m right about the cowboy pronunciation: there is an American insect repellent called Vamoos. It was quite a challenging trip for both of us, and the last lap, a long train journey by night from Madrid to Paris in a third-class compartment, was gruelling. Unable to stretch out on the bench seat to sleep, I climbed into the netted luggage rack and used it as a hammock until ordered by a conductor to get down. These are the memories that survive from such journeys in youth, rather than the castles and cathedrals and museums one visited. We arrived home from this one weary but pleased with ourselves for having accomplished it. Martin went off to Aberdeen to join BP and I went to Bloomsbury to get myself a card admitting me to the British Museum’s round Reading Room, where I would spend much of the next eighteen months.
The Museum then housed the British Library, the first and greatest of the nation’s Copyright Libraries, to which one copy of every published work must be submitted by law. The collection is now housed in a new building on the Euston Road with modern technology and amenities, but less charisma. The round Reading Room cast a spell on me as soon as I entered it: the floor a perfect circle nearly fifty yards in diameter, from which rose a wall of bookshelves and a gallery, surmounted by a vast dome; exactly in the middle of the floor was a hub where books were issued and returned, surrounded by concentric circles of shelving in which the catalogue was stored, composed of millions of printed slips which had been pasted into huge leather-bound volumes. From this core the rows of desks splayed out: spacious, leather-covered desks, separated from those on the adjoining aisle by a high partition, equipped with retractable shelves, bookrests and reading lamps, and provided with comfortable chairs of upholstered leather, whose wheeled legs moved soundlessly on the floor. There are photographs of this exquisitely symmetrical floor design, taken from the apex of the dome, in which it looks like a gigantic roulette wheel, but viewed from any angle it was deeply impressive. And the place was hallowed by all the famous persons who had read and written there – you were always conscious that you might be sitting at a desk once used by Thackeray or Karl Marx or Oscar Wilde or Virginia Woolf, or any one of a hundred other famous writers. One day I would write a novel set in and around this wonderful building. Meanwhile it was the ideal place to do my postgraduate research, conveniently situated only half a mile from University College.
I was registered for the London University MA, which in those days was a two-year research degree awarded for a substantial thesis, supplemented by a single examination paper on the literary period to which one’s subject belonged. The title I eventually settled on for my thesis was: ‘Catholic Fiction since the Oxford Movement: its Literary Form and Religious Content’. I was surprised, in retrospect, that the Board of Postgraduate Studies approved it, for it was much too big a subject for a Master’s thesis. Perhaps they thought there couldn’t be a lot of English Catholic fiction in the past hundred-odd years. But there was – much, much more than I had supposed myself.
The first English Catholic writer of note after the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 was John Henry Newman, who converted to Roman Catholicism in 1845, having for some years been the leading light of the Oxford Movement. This was a group of academic divines who sought, by publishing a series of ‘Tracts for the Times’, to shift the Church of England, historically founded upon a combination of predominantly Protestant Articles of Faith and an essentially Catholic liturgy, and therefore always prone to split into parties and factions, towards the Catholic end of the religious spectrum, in order to combat the worldliness which they saw infecting the Established Church and to raise the level of spirituality in its members. It owed a good deal of its inspiration to the Romantic Movement’s nostalgic celebration of medieval culture, and its three-dimensional manifestation was the neo-Gothic architecture of Pugin. Newman’s own thinking moved so far in this direction that he finally ‘went over’ to Rome, taking many disciples and admirers with him, and provoking a spate of ‘No Popery’ outrage in the population at large. He was re-ordained as a Catholic priest, joined the Oratorian order, and founded an Oratory in Birmingham where he spent most of the rest of his life, writing theological, philosophical and polemical works in the Catholic cause, for which he was eventually honoured with a Cardinal’s hat. Interestingly, one of the first things he wrote after his conversion was a novel, published anonymously, called Loss and Gain (1848). It describes the gradual conversion to Catholicism of a young undergraduate at Oxford, but not at all in a solemn or pietistic way. It gives a vivid picture of university life and ecclesiastical politics at the time, in a sparkling, often satirical style, with several brilliant dialogic set pieces showing that differences of opinion about doctrine and liturgy were argued about as fiercely and sometimes as foolishly in the Church of England then as issues of gender and sexual behaviour are today. (A striking index of this contrast and continuity is that the word ‘pervert’ as noun or verb had the same meaning in the nineteenth century as ‘convert’ does in modern English.)
I discovered early in my research that a large number of novels engaging polemically in the religious debate from the High, Low and Broad Church points of view were published at this time, and that Loss and Gain was actually a riposte to one of them: From Oxford to Rome, and How it Fared with Some Who Made the Journey, by Elizabeth Furlong Shipton Harris, a sensational and tendentious account of a group of Anglicans who convert to Rome under the influence of the Tractarian movement and are painfully disillusioned by the experience. It acquired extra notoriety when it became known that the authoress had herself made the journey, and regretted it. The novel began with a conversation between the hero Eustace and his Oxford tutor who, the Quarterly Review thought, was ‘plainly intended for Mr Newman’. Newman himself, who later described the novel’s contents as ‘wantonly and preposterously fanciful’, rightly thought the best response would be another, much better and more truthful novel on the same theme.
Putting his achievement in its context entailed reading many greatly inferior religious novels, and so did tracking the subsequent development of Catholic fiction in England in the nineteenth century. The surge of conversions in the upper and professional classes triggered by Newman’s, and the growing confidence of the English Catholic community, which had kept a low profile until Catholic Emancipation, created a literary market that many writers, especially female ones, were eager to supply. I found the best way to identify novels with Catholic content was to read reviews of fiction in journals like the Athenaeum and the Catholic Dublin Review. It was the age of the circulating library, and the novels were usually in the three-volume form that suited that institution. I filled in large numbers of request slips, and the library’s assistants brought the books from the stacks and piled them up on my desk. I could tell that I was the first person to read many of them because their pages were uncut, and I was provided with a paper-knife with which I hacked my way through this literary undergrowth to the understandable annoyance of readers at neighbouring desks. I reckoned to get through two three-deckers a day and lived in hope of finding a novel as good as Loss and Gain, without being rewarded. I did, however, detect a general trend. The religious novels of the 1840s reflected controversies and competition between different Christian churches and factions within them. In the latter half of the nineteenth century all versions of Christian belief were challenged by various forms of doubt and disbelief, driven by the advances of science, especially the Darwinian theory of evolution, and by demythologising biblical scholarship. One of the upmarket bestsellers of the late nineteenth century was Mrs Humphry Ward’s Robert Elsmere (1888), about an Anglican clergyman’s loss of faith. Catholic novelists in this period seldom engaged with this theme. Instead they took the truth of the Catholic faith for granted and contrived sentimental and often melodramatic stories, narrated in cliché-ridden prose, which exhibited the piety, sacrifice and moral heroism it demanded in personal life.
As the century drew towards its end, this emphasis on the moral and emotional rather than the cognitive aspects of religious faith continued, but with an improvement in literary quality. I found some Catholic writers who, though minor, had genuine ability – among them the John Oliver Hobbes whose scholarship I had won. That name, I discovered, was the nom de plume of Mrs Pearl Craigie, an American expatriate and Catholic convert who had been a mature student at UCL before she turned to writing novels that dealt thoughtfully with personal relationships in a Catholic ethical perspective that was usually implied rather than explicit. They were admired by Henry James and Thomas Hardy, among others. I already knew something about a very different Catholic convert, Frederick Rolfe, self-styled ‘Baron Corvo’, a homosexual spoiled priest who compensated for his life’s disappointments in the extraordinary fantasy Hadrian VII (1904), in which a humble English priest acting as a candidate’s chaplain at a Papal conclave is himself elected Pope and turns the Church upside down. I enjoyed exploring Rolfe’s other equally idiosyncratic writings.
Catholicism became fashionable in literary circles at this time, and the poet Ernest Dowson spoke for many when he declared, ‘I’m for the old faith. I’ve become a Catholic as every artist must.’ Oscar Wilde did not do so until he was dying, but this action was foreshadowed in the eponymous hero of The Picture of Dorian Gray, of whom ‘it was rumoured . . . that he was about to join the Roman Catholic communion; and certainly the Roman ritual had always a great attraction for him.’ For Dorian and his creator, and other converts of the Decadence like Aubrey Beardsley, the attraction of Catholicism was partly aesthetic and partly existential. The work of the French writer J.K. Huysmans, which reflected his spiritual journey through sin and satanism to redemptive faith, was a potent influence, especially À rebours (1884), translated into English as Against the Grain, which was described by Arthur Symons as ‘the breviary of the Decadence’, and which Dorian Gray reads with devout fascination. For these writers, exploring the reality of sin in personal experience, riskily deferring the redemption offered by the Catholic Church, was a sign of authenticity and a way of resisting the materialism and philistinism of the modern world. Huysmans wrote to a friend, ‘it was through a glimpse of the supernatural of evil that I first obtained insight into the supernatural of good . . . With his hooked paw the devil drew me towards God.’ I perceived a link here with the work of Graham Greene, which was to be studied in the last chapter of my thesis, preceded by one on Evelyn Waugh, but I kept on discovering earlier Catholic writers of some interest who had to be explored and discussed first, and the horizon of my project seemed to move further and further away.
I was living at home again and travelling every weekday to the BM on a second-hand Vespa scooter. In those days there was free parking of two-wheeled vehicles in the British Museum forecourt for visitors, and I commuted from home with my bag of books, files and index cards strapped to the luggage rack behind the saddle. My daily companion was Derek Todd. Like me he had been offered a university postgraduate scholarship on getting his First, and having already done his National Service in the Navy he was free to accept it, but by a cruel twist of fate he discovered at the same time that he had contracted TB and must be admitted immediately to a sanatorium for treatment. His doctor had in fact diagnosed the condition earlier and delayed telling him until he had sat his Finals. Derek spent most of the academic year 1955–56 in a sanatorium on the Isle of Wight, where Mary and I visited him during one of my leaves, so he was just a year ahead of me when I began my MA. His thesis topic, ‘Attacks on Scholars and Scholarship in the Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries’, had been suggested by his supervisor, James Sutherland. Swift and Pope were the major authors it concerned but there was also a swarm of minor satirists, poets and essayists whose work had to be tracked down and considered. In due course Derek accepted Sutherland’s advice to convert his MA thesis into a PhD, which normally took three years, and was covered by the university scholarship. My own project was also of a scale more appropriate to a PhD, but I had no wish to extend its duration, since I was determined to get married as soon as I had submitted it.
I saw Derek almost every day at the British Museum. The first of us to arrive would save a seat for the other by putting some books on a desk, taking care not to pick one favoured by any of the Reading Room’s resident eccentrics, a little band of regular readers, mad-looking, weirdly attired and unkempt, who had been coming there every day for as long as anyone could remember and seemed to think they had territorial rights. We would take smoke breaks together in the colonnade that extended on two sides from the building’s massive portico, and exchange news, anecdotes and observations on life in general. Derek had a mind more like a philosopher’s than a literary critic’s, and liked to speculate about whatever subject presented itself in an analytical manner which his friends found amusingly provocative. He appreciated other people’s humorous remarks and rewarded them with a series of high-pitched laughs, his head thrown back and each laugh punctuated by a pause for breath. Sometimes at lunchtime we would meet John Jolliffe, a friend of Derek’s and a graduate of UCL, who was on the staff of the British Library and rising rapidly up the career ladder. (John was a pioneer in the application of computers to cataloguing and would eventually become Head Librarian of the Bodleian at Oxford until an aneurism of the brain cut his life brutally short.) One day he took Derek and me on a tour of the labyrinthine book-stacks behind the graceful walls of the Reading Room – out of bounds for readers, and an experience that I drew on when writing The British Museum is Falling Down.
In an earlier chapter I described the teaching of the humanities in British universities at this time as a ‘First-degree culture’. One consequence of this was the haphazard management of postgraduate studies. At UCL, and I believe at most British universities, postgraduate research was an almost entirely unstructured activity. You submitted a subject for your thesis, and, if it was approved, got on with it largely on your own. You would have a supervisor with whom you could discuss your project and get occasional feedback on work in progress, but there was no timetable for these consultations, and some supervisors were less scrupulous than others about arranging them. If the postgraduate chose his or her own thesis topic, rather than taking up the suggestion of a member of staff, one might have a supervisor who knew little or nothing about it, especially if it was an unusual one; and fully stretched as most of them were by their undergraduate teaching, which had priority, they could not reasonably be expected to keep up with the candidate’s growing body of knowledge about his subject. This was my situation. The supervisor assigned to me was MacDonald Emslie, who had joined the Department shortly before I obtained my BA. He was a youngish Scotsman who always seemed rather harassed and depressed – perhaps he was homesick for Scotland, for he moved back there later in his academic career, where I have been told he became a notorious alcoholic. I could never ascertain what his academic specialism was; the little I have been able to discover about his publications recently suggests a wide range of interests from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, but the history of the Catholic novel was not one of them. He told me frankly that he could not help me with the content of my thesis, but he would read whatever I cared to submit to him and give me his non-specialist opinion for what it was worth. I don’t think I saw him more than once or twice a term. I was quite happy with this arrangement because I knew what I wanted to do and how I intended to do it, but I felt the absence of any corporate life in postgraduate study. Apart from a few lectures on research methods at the beginning of the academic year, there were no seminars or group activities of any kind for postgraduate students in the English Department. So I decided to organise something myself, by forming a group of postgrads working on English literature who would meet regularly to discuss some topic or text of common interest. As it would be an unofficial and informal gathering it would be appropriate to meet in the evenings and outside college. But where? Chance provided an ideal venue at just the right moment.
In January 1956 Jeswyn and Martin got married – sooner than they had planned, but Martin was doing well in BP. He was moved down to Rochester in Kent, and they rented a small, brand-new house there. In consequence Jeswyn had to move out of her flat in Endsleigh Street, a few minutes’ walk from UC, which she was renting from a friend who was working abroad. Jeswyn offered to sub-sublet it to Mary, who was looking for new accommodation since her sister Eileen had decided to make her career as a teacher in Canada. It was a top-floor flat with a large living room that provided an ideal space for the discussion group.
I recruited friends like Derek and Tony Petti directly, and sent invitations through the internal mail to other likely participants. Most of them responded positively. Sadly, I can recall little about our meetings – how often they occurred and what we discussed – but we did not talk about our own research. The idea was to have a break from our daily scholarly labour and be made to think more broadly about literature and criticism. After a while we invited one or two sympathetic members of the departmental staff to join us, and they were glad to do so. The venture came to an end with Mary’s tenancy of the flat, which lasted for six months or so, but it was generally enjoyed by those who took part. The most vivid memory I have of it was quite trivial, and is of the very first meeting. As people assembled and arranged the chairs in the living room, in an excited and expectant mood, Tony Petti plucked a book from a bookshelf, opened it, and began to recite a faux naïf comment on a famous line of Wordsworth’s:
‘The child is father to the man.’
How can he be? The words are wild.
Suck any sense from that who can:
‘The child is father to the man.’
No; what the poet did write ran,
‘The man is father to the child.’
‘The child is father to the man!’
How can he be? The words are wild.
We all thought this was hilariously funny, and demanded to know the author. Tony held up the book, open at the title page: Collected Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. I admired Hopkins’s poetry but had never suspected that he had a sense of humour.
Among the postgraduates whom I approached by mail was an American called Park Honan. We had not met, but I was aware of his existence as a contributor of stories and poems to the college literary magazine, New Phineas,1 of which I had become assistant editor, and I had seen a play he had written and performed in under the auspices of the Dramatic Society, of which I have now only the haziest memory. According to Park’s own account, in an essay he published many years later, the subject of the first session he attended in Endsleigh Street was the short story as a literary form, and I had prescribed for preparatory reading a story of his own in New Phineas (which was distributed free within the college), in addition to some classics of the genre by writers like Hemingway and Katherine Mansfield. In the essay he claimed to have been crushed by the critical comparisons this invidious juxtaposition elicited from the group. That was certainly not my intention, and Park cannot have been really offended because soon after that meeting he invited Mary and me to dinner in the flat he and his French wife Jeannette occupied in Catford, only a few miles from Brockley. It was the first of many delicious meals Jeannette cooked for us over the years to come. She spoke fluent English studded with American idioms in an enchanting French accent, and Mary and I immediately warmed to her. It was a cold winter evening, and in the cosy glow of the open fire in the basement kitchen–dining room a lifelong friendship between the four of us began.
Park was then about twenty-seven, Jeannette a few years younger. They had a little girl, Corinna, aged three or four, and Jeannette was heavily pregnant with twins. Their story was unusual and romantic. Park had grown up in New York City and just outside it in Bronxville. His father, a surgeon who commanded a hospital behind the Western Front in the First World War, was much older than his mother and died when Park was aged seven. The boy was named Leonard Hobart Park Honan – ‘Leonard’ after his maternal grandfather, and ‘Hobart Park’ after his father’s best friend, whose surname Park adopted as his first name, perhaps unique for a Caucasian. It is a common surname in Korea, and those who know him only through the printed word sometimes think he is part Korean. To save his mother the cost of higher education fees he obtained a scholarship at Deep Springs, an unconventional college in the Californian desert, which prepared a small select group of male youths for life with a combination of high-level academic courses and practical manual work for at least four hours a day, such as cooking, irrigation, planting, and looking after the college’s own cattle herd. From there he won a scholarship to Chicago University, where he studied English and History and graduated with an MA. He then moved back to New York, and scraped a living from odd jobs on the fringes of publishing while trying to get his own writing into print, and waiting apprehensively to be claimed by the draft, from which he intended to seek exemption as a conscientious objector. At that juncture he met Jeannette, through his younger brother Bill who was a student at Oberlin College, where she was a Fulbright Scholar, and a mutual attraction was sparked. Jeannette had grown up in Paris under the German occupation, and as a schoolgirl was caught tearing down a Nazi poster by the French police, who told her father, a headmaster who was counterfeiting documents for the Resistance at the time, that they would report her to the Germans if she repeated the offence. She was never able to recall those years of oppression and fear without a shadow passing over her normally smiling features and subduing her effervescent personality.
Defying the uncertainty of their circumstances and future prospects, she and Park married and soon found themselves in difficulties. His claim to be a conscientious objector was rejected because it was based on secular, not religious, moral principles, and at one stage he was arrested and jailed for a few hours. Protracted appeals and negotiations with the authorities followed, during which time Jeannette returned to France, where she gave birth to Corinna, and there was some doubt as to whether she would get a visa to return to America. In the end Park accepted the inevitable for the sake of his wife and child, and was drafted, but with an official undertaking that he would not be given combat duties. It all worked out very well because after doing his basic training and serving for a while in Maryland (where he collaborated with a fellow conscript and Harvard graduate in writing a 1,000-line poem in heroic couplets satirising the US Ordnance Corps, printed for circulation on an army mimeograph) he was posted, either by extraordinary luck or some unwonted exercise of compassion by the authorities, to an American military unit in south-west France, where he was allowed to live off-base with Jeannette and young Corinna. Furthermore, on his release from the Army he was entitled under the GI Bill to a government grant towards three years of higher education, which he decided to spend in England rather than the USA, partly so that Jeannette could remain within easy reach of her family, and partly because the lax British system of postgraduate studies, contrasting sharply with American PhD programmes (a closely monitored combination of courses and dissertation), suited his individualistic temperament perfectly. He elected to work on the poetry of Browning and was being supervised by Paul Turner, a versatile scholar familiar with Greek and Latin as well as English literature, with whom he got on very well, though progress with his thesis was hampered by all the poetry, plays and prose fiction he was writing.
I did not hear the whole of this story on that first evening in Catford, but I got the gist of it and the more I heard subsequently, the more it fascinated me. It was in many ways a more dramatic and adventurous version of my own life to date: the aspirations to be a creative writer, the early attachment to a female partner, the resistance to the ethos of military service, the decision to pursue an academic career, were all parallels between us. But Park had taken more risks, and he created a kind of mythical aura around himself, his family and friends which gave him energy and confidence to face an uncertain future with a wife and child and two more on the way – just the sort of plight I had imagined and prudently avoided by opting for a long, celibate courtship. It had made a difference, of course, that Park was five years older than me, and unburdened with a Catholic conscience. But he seemed to me in every respect a little larger than life, especially educated middle-class English life, with its fondness for understatement and light irony. His manners were boisterous, his speech commanding, his laughter was hearty, his handshake firm. He tended to hyperbole in expressing both likes and dislikes, whether of persons or books, and he habitually nicknamed people as they became characters in his myth. His daughter Corinna acquired several names, including ‘Poupi’ and ‘Bear’ because of her devotion to Winnie-the-Pooh in infancy. Jeannette was ‘Froggy’. His younger brother Bill was ‘Driz’. In due course I was ‘Davido’, and after Mary and I were married, she was always ‘Marielodge’, pronounced as a single word, with a French accent. I had never met anyone quite like Park, and I never would again. Through our friendship I extended my education in American culture, speech and manners which had begun in Heidelberg, and acting as his guide and interpreter of their English equivalents I perceived my own country in a new, and sometimes comical, light. His energetic commitment to writing in various forms, including a novel in progress called Eat Rocks, Tame Tigers (a title lifted from Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida), made him a stimulating friend and confidant as I pursued my own literary goals. Chief among these was the completion of the novel I had started at Bovington, called The Picturegoers.
Set in a London surburb called ‘Brickley’ which closely resembles Brockley and New Cross, the novel depicts the lives of seventeen people of varying ages and social backgrounds who live there and go to the same local cinema, called the Palladium, on Saturday evenings. (There was a popular film magazine published at the time called The Picturegoer.) The several Catholics among them also go to Sunday mass at their local parish church, and the story suggests a kind of analogy between the rituals of religion and immersion in the dream world of film, each providing compensation for, or escape from, the frustrations and disappointments of ordinary life. ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’ would have been a good alternative title when the novel was eventually published, if Alan Sillitoe hadn’t already used it. At the centre of the narrative is the Mallory family, middle-aged Catholic parents of seven children, three of whom are still living at home. Clare, the eldest, has just returned after being rejected by the convent where she was a postulant (a theme carried over from The Devil, the World and the Flesh). Into this household comes a lodger, Mark, a student at a London college with aspirations to be a writer, who was baptised a Catholic but has never practised because his parents ‘lapsed’ in his infancy. The novel traces the relationship that develops between Mark and Clare, and the intersecting fortunes of all the other characters, by describing the events of three weekends separated by several months. While Clare, initially disturbed by Mark’s cynicism and frank references to sex, gradually falls in love with him, he becomes more and more attracted to the family’s Catholic faith and feels he may have a religious vocation. (It wasn’t until I got into structuralism as a literary critic in the 1980s that I realised how pervasive such binary oppositions and reversals are in my fiction.) The minor characters include Mr Berkeley, the manager of the Palladium who has despondently overseen its decline from a popular music hall to a struggling independent cinema, and the Mallorys’ parish priest, who keeps an anxious eye on falling attendances at mass and Benediction. One of the first notes I made about this novel was for a scene in which Father Kipling goes to the cinema for the first time in his life to see The Song of Bernadette, a biopic about the saintly visionary of Lourdes, but gets the date wrong and is scandalised by a Hollywood comedy very like the Marilyn Monroe movie The Seven Year Itch, after which he preaches against immorality in the cinema, with unhappy results. Two other films are featured in the novel under their real names: Vittorio De Sica’s classic Bicycle Thieves, which Mr Berkeley shows in an effort to raise the cultural tone of his cinema but which merely depresses most of his customers, and Rock Around the Clock, which is a huge success with a mainly youthful audience who dance in the aisles (a much-publicised phenomenon when the film was released in 1956), leading rather improbably to the redemption of a delinquent Teddy boy character. First novels do not usually contain as many subplots and points of view as The Picturegoers, and in retrospect I recognise the influence of two favourite sources: the ‘Wandering Rocks’ episode of Ulysses, which represents the actions and thoughts of a large number of characters, major and minor, moving about Dublin at the same hour of the day, and Dylan Thomas’s radio play, Under Milk Wood, which does something similar with the inhabitants of a fictional Welsh fishing village, and which I listened to with delight and read many times after it was broadcast by the BBC in 1954. (I still tease my wife with the henpecked Mr Ogmore’s line, ‘I must put my pyjamas in the drawer marked pyjamas,’ when reproached for untidiness.)
There was another book which exerted a different kind of influence. Shortly after I was released from the Army in the summer of 1957, with more than half of the novel written, I accepted an invitation from the University of London to attend an interdisciplinary seminar at Cumberland Lodge for students beginning postgraduate degree courses, on a subject called something like ‘The Arts in Society’. I have no memory of the seminar, but the invitation came with a reading list that included The Uses of Literacy by Richard Hoggart, which had been published earlier that year to enthusiastic reviews, and I do remember borrowing a copy from the Deptford public library and reading it with rapt attention, for it seemed to have much in common with the ‘Saturday night’ side of my novel. Hoggart argued that the commercially driven products of ‘mass culture’, such as Hollywood movies, were displacing the simple entertainment and reading matter which had traditionally served English working-class communities and reinforced their values. At first sight this seemed to reiterate a familiar complaint of F.R. Leavis and his disciples, but whereas they dismissed all twentieth-century popular culture with generalised contempt, Hoggart studied it with discrimination and without patronising those who consumed it, understanding how even meretricious and formulaic art can help people to negotiate and interpret their lives. This was very much my aim in describing the collective, habitual experience of ‘going to the pictures’, in the era before television largely took over its social and cultural function. Richard Hoggart studied the popular fiction and entertainment of a slightly earlier era, but in the remarkable first section of The Uses of Literacy he described the working-class society that consumed them with the kind of evocative specificity that novelists strive to achieve. Reading Hoggart’s book strengthened my faith in my novel-in-progress, and helped me develop its themes in the second half. A decade later I was able to tell Richard this when he became a colleague and friend at Birmingham University, where he founded the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies and instigated the development of a whole new subject in the humanities.
In spite of all the other claims on my time I managed to finish The Picturegoers by the late spring of 1958 and set about finding a publisher. I began by sending the novel to Michael Joseph, who had responded encouragingly to my first attempt, and I was disappointed when they turned down its successor – kindly (‘it is well above the average first novel’) but without much explanation. Next I tried Gollancz, which was the trendy publisher of the day, having issued both Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim and Colin Wilson’s The Outsider in its trademark bright yellow jackets. I wrote to them first, describing the novel, and received a personal letter from Hilary Rubinstein, a director of the firm, saying they would be ‘delighted to consider it’. It is hard to imagine an unknown, unpublished and unrepresented novelist getting such a response today. Quite soon I received a letter from another director, John Bush, to say that they did not see the novel as publishable, but their readers’ reports had praised several features of it and they would be glad to consider anything else I might submit. Then I happened to see in the Evening Standard a report about a small, relatively obscure publishing house called MacGibbon & Kee, which was expanding and actively looking for new authors, so I decided to try my luck with them, delivering my manuscript by hand as usual to save the cost of postage. Several weeks later when I was staying with Mary at her home in Hoddesdon, we came back from playing tennis in the municipal park one afternoon to receive a message that a Mr Anthony Brown of MacGibbon & Kee had telephoned, having got the number from my mother in Brockley, and asked if I would call him back, which I did immediately, standing in the cramped hall of 72 Lord Street, where the telephone squatted on the window ledge at the foot of the stairs. So it was in the home of the family that had partly inspired The Picturegoers that I received the news every tyro writer dreams of: ‘We like your novel, and we want to publish it’, or words to that effect. There was only one caveat: Anthony Brown said they thought the book needed some more work, and publication would depend on the delivery of a satisfactory revised text, but meanwhile I would get a contract and an advance. I was happy, indeed ecstatic, to agree to these terms, but warned him that I would not be able to work on the novel until I had finished my MA thesis. To my relief he was unperturbed by this information.
The contract when it came was, by today’s standards, simple. The four-page document promised me an advance of £75 in three instalments: £25 on signature, £25 on acceptance of the revised novel and £25 on publication. After allowing for inflation, this still constituted a very small risk for the proprietor of MacGibbon & Kee who signed my contract, Howard Samuel, a left-wing multimillionaire who had bought the firm with the proceeds of his property business. Needless to say, I did not quibble about the terms. Not long after our telephone conversation I met Anthony Brown, a young, enthusiastic editor, at MacGibbon & Kee’s offices in Great Portland Street, and was pleased that he had no radical changes to my novel to propose but left it to me to recognise where it could be improved. He introduced me to Timothy O’Keeffe, whose title was ‘Managing Editor’ but who did not seem to have yet read The Picturegoers. He may have replaced Tom Maschler, who had recently moved to Cape, where he became a celebrated publisher of literary fiction.
Before he left MacGibbon & Kee Maschler had commissioned, edited and published a book under their imprint called Declaration, a collection of manifesto essays by Kenneth Tynan, John Osborne, Doris Lessing, John Wain, Lindsay Anderson, Stuart Holroyd and Bill Hopkins, which did much to disseminate the idea I touched on earlier, that an exciting new wave of writing in drama, fiction, film and criticism, loosely associated with the catchphrase Angry Young Men, was gathering momentum in Britain in the 1950s. As Maschler himself later admitted in his autobiography, the success of Declaration, which sold 20,000 copies in hardback, was surprising, since the contributors were a heterogeneous bunch, and two of them, Holroyd and Hopkins, had not yet published a book and were chiefly famous for being friends of Colin Wilson. Wilson’s The Outsider, an ambitious survey of the alienated intellectual in literature and real life, covering major writers and thinkers in Continental Europe as well as Britain and America, was the literary sensation of 1956. Philip Toynbee, the most influential journalistic critic of the day, described it in The Observer as ‘an exhaustive and luminously intelligent study of a representative theme of our time . . . truly astounding’. The book’s fame was boosted by the romantic circumstances of its composition reported in the press: an impoverished twenty-four-year-old with no academic credentials when he came to London, Wilson had researched and written it in the British Museum Reading Room, encouraged by his namesake, the novelist Angus Wilson who was then a senior librarian there, and spent his nights on Hampstead Heath in a sleeping bag. I actually bought The Outsider soon after it was published – a rare extravagance – and thought I perceived a certain kinship between the radical rejection of the Enlightenment model of civilisation by Wilson’s Outsiders, like Nietzsche and Henri Barbusse, and the antihumanist attitudes of the Catholic writers and thinkers I was interested in, from Newman to Graham Greene, who denied the perfectibility of fallen man. (The title I initially proposed for my MA thesis was in fact ‘The Literary Expression of Anti-humanism in Catholic Literature from Newman to the Present Day’.) Thus inspired, I wrote an article on ‘The Outsider and the Catholic Novel’, which I touted unsuccessfully to a number of literary periodicals, hoping to associate my recondite research topic with a fashionable young author. I was easily impressed by The Outsider because I had read hardly any of the works Wilson discussed, and this was probably true of some enthusiastic reviewers. In due course qualified judges began to point out serious flaws and errors in Wilson’s book, and the appetite he and his friends showed for personal publicity provoked a change of sentiment in literary circles. When Wilson published his second book, Religion and the Rebel, in 1957 there was a backlash of critical opinion and it was rubbished by the very critics who had praised The Outsider. Philip Toynbee described it in The Observer as ‘a deplorable piece of work . . . futile to the point of meaninglessness’, and even retrospectively revised his opinion of the earlier book, now described as merely ‘interesting and praiseworthy’ but ‘clumsily written and still more clumsily composed’. I was fascinated by this story and I wrote a piece about Wilson for New Phineas, entitled ‘Requiem for an Angry Young Man’, saying: ‘his fantastic reputation was a fabrication of the publicity machine, and the spectacle of the machine devouring its own creation is not an edifying one’. When I became editor of the magazine on its next appearance I invited Wilson to comment, and he wrote an interesting and good-humoured piece, in which he gave some choice examples of the misrepresentation he suffered during the media’s feeding frenzy and looked forward with calm confidence to ‘a day when readers would come to my books without any knowledge that I had once been labelled as an Angry Young Man’. He continued to write and publish books which received less and less attention as time went on. His friend and associate Stuart Holroyd, who had been a student for one year at UCL, and whom I interviewed in another issue of New Phineas, slipped more rapidly into obscurity, while Bill Hopkins never really emerged from it. The fact is that the interests and attitudes of these writers, which included phenomenology, existentialism, mysticism, parapsychology, and political philosophy of a fascist tendency, had nothing in common with the general trend of new writing in Britain at this time, manifested in novels like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and Lucky Jim, the poetry of Philip Larkin and other Movement poets, and most of the plays being put on at the Royal Court Theatre: namely, a realistic and/or satirical engagement with contemporary social life. When that disparity became apparent the media simply lost interest in Wilson and his associates. But the new wave was something that The Picturegoers, for all its religious preoccupations, could surf on, and that, perhaps, was why MacGibbon & Kee took it.
They were, however, open to other kinds of fiction. I suggested to Park Honan that he should try sending Eat Rocks, Tame Tigers, a black-comic dystopian novel set in the future, to Anthony Brown, who responded with enthusiasm and gave him a contract with exactly the same terms as mine, publication being conditional on delivery of a satisfactory revised text. Like me, Park had to postpone this task to complete his thesis because he was in the last year of his GI Bill grant, but he was very pleased and – in spite of the meagre signature fee – hopeful that the book might in time help to relieve his financial debts. The symmetry of these positive developments in our literary efforts cemented the friendship between us.
1 The wooden figure of Phineas Maclino, a kilted Jacobite, stolen by students from outside a tobacconist’s shop in Tottenham Court Road, was a UCL mascot earlier in the century. The magazine, originally called Phineas, became defunct, probably because of the war, and was revived in the mid-fifties with the addition of the epithet ‘new’ to its title.