A Writer's People: Ways of Looking and Feeling Page 6

  I had given up a job I had taken principally to send money to my mother (her letters were only about money). I was trying in a hopeless kind of way to get going on a new book and for some reason—perhaps I felt the book was still only provisional—was writing by hand on unlined paper. It was a depressing time in that attic. Only the monthly New Statesman review gave me a lift. I used to go to the Muswell Hill public library on Friday, publication day, to see whether they had used my piece. There was always a slender dark-suited man in his twenties or thirties at a table in the reading room ahead of me, with the new issue of the Statesman, smiling with pure joy, cracking his long fingers over the opened magazine. When my turn came I looked first to see whether my piece was in. I was intensely ashamed if it was. And I took good care then not to read it or to look at the pages where it was. I held those pages together when I read the magazine. I have never got over this shyness or vanity at seeing my name in print.

  After some time I began to travel, and that connection with the New Statesman couldn’t be kept up. When after some years I settled down again I needed more than the ten guineas the Statesman paid. Tony got me a fiction-reviewing job on the Daily Telegraph. They paid thirty pounds, almost a living wage. But they had bureaucratic rules: a certain number of books had to be reviewed and the title of the book had to be mentioned in the first sentence of the section devoted to it. These rules made it hard to do a proper article, as I used to on the Statesman. It made novel-reviewing more like hackwork, and no one seemed to read what I wrote. The Telegraph didn’t add to one’s reputation. But thirty pounds was thirty pounds.

  TONY HAD BEEN GOING ON all this time in his way, publishing a book every two or three years, doing his reviews. The Punch business had ended badly, but then Tony began to do the lead reviews for the Telegraph. The literary editor there was H. D. Ziman. He was an unremarkable writer, and he used to dictate his reviews walking up and down in the Telegraph office, greeting new arrivals and going on. I seem to remember a pipe as one of his props, but I am not sure and now there is no one to ask. He came from New Zealand, I believe, but apart from this he was perfectly ordinary. Tony, in his generous, people-collecting way, became fascinated by Ziman. I don’t know why. He called him Z, and more than once he told me stories about Z, which he thought extraordinary but which did not stay with me. For Tony this fascination with Ziman would have cast a glamour on his association with the Telegraph. The books for review could have been posted to him in Somerset, but he preferred to come up to London to look at the books himself and also, I believe, to have a little of the office atmosphere.

  And then an enormous piece of luck changed his life. His father died and left a fortune. It is probable that this late piece of luck, and the consequent absence of tension in his life, a new lightness, affected his writing and gave a certain skittishness to the final volumes of his autobiographical novel. His father was a military man whose prime had fallen between the two wars, when promotions were scarce; and Tony had thought all along that his father had very little money. Tony said he used to feel it was wrong when he visited his father to accept a gin at the old man’s expense. Now Tony could forget people like Hollow Wood and all the Hollow Woods who had come later. He and his wife went on cultural cruises.

  It was pleasant for his friends to be with this new relaxed man, to see the old melancholy drop away. Because I felt that though the English writing life had given Tony his special style, it had also made him melancholy. His contemporaries or near-contemporaries had done so much better—Waugh, Greene, Orwell, Connolly (though perhaps Connolly hadn’t done so well), Betjeman, Amis. All of these people (with the exception of Greene) Tony loved in his way, loved as characters. He especially loved the wicked Waugh; and this relish for the character of each did away with whatever jealousy there might have been. In this way, too, I found him exemplary, setting me an example, preparing me for the hard road ahead.

  Sometimes when he came up to London he asked me to lunch at the Travellers. He would talk about the difficulty of his book and ask for advice, without really wanting it; and often then—this was before the luck struck—I would see him grow abstracted, slightly hunched, deeply melancholy, his colour almost grey, the short hair or down on his old man’s face standing upright.

  I used to wonder why he wrote, why he had got started on the writing life, why he had stayed (many start, few stay), whether there was a true need. His writing didn’t seem to come out of need. He seemed to have risked nothing. After the university he went into publishing; then there was the war; and after the undemanding war he returned to the world of books. Unlike Greene and Orwell and Waugh at no stage did he go to meet the world. His conviction was that his world was enough.

  He might have said, though I am putting words in his mouth here, that the expatriate novel, in the hands of someone like Greene, was meretricious, the seedy foreign setting giving an easy drama to the characters. He would have said, if asked (he had thought profoundly about writing), that many great writers in the past had stayed with their society; and that was true. The Dickens who mattered had stayed in England. Tolstoy was at his best in Russia, and Balzac was at his best in France. But these writers were all pioneers, writing about what hadn’t been written before. By 1930, when Tony was beginning, very little about these great European societies had been left unsaid. The societies themselves had been diminished for various reasons—war, revolution; and the world around these once unchallenged societies had grown steadily larger. A society’s unspoken theme is always itself; it has an idea where it stands in the world. A diminished society couldn’t be written about in the old way, of social comment.

  About this society, at once diminished and over-written-about, it was proper for Waugh to do a wicked fairytale (Decline and Fall) and later a romance (Brideshead Revisited), a book of almost feminine social yearning (in essence like the young Walcott’s dream of brown hair in the aristocracy of the St. Lucian sea) in which for fifty or sixty years a democratic English society has dreamed of ennoblement. That kind of fantasy was not Tony’s aim. He wished to get it right, to be true to his experience, which was, really, to do it all over again. In one way easy, since the material was there to hand (he told me at the beginning of our friendship that he had trouble inventing); in another way self-defeating, since it had been done before, and books do not live if they are not original. (Like Leigh Hunt’s autobiography in the nineteenth century, in which the writer appears to be ticking off the approved things he has done or seen, like someone on a Grand Tour; or like the cartoonist Osbert Lancaster’s various vapid volumes of autobiography of fifty years ago, mentioned here only because they make the point, in which the writer is absolutely pleased to have nothing to add to the hallowed memoirs of famous people, and is content to be saying, “I was there too.” Over-literate societies have their snares.)

  Now that the name of Walcott has occurred in this chapter, it calls up others, and it seems to me (though I don’t wish to make too much of it) that Tony’s attitude to his world is a little like my father’s attitude to his own world, though of course there can be no comparison between the worlds and the writing. My father in his early stories shut out the rest of the island; you might even say he shut out time; he did so for reasons of personal pain, but it was his mistake as a writer. It is hard to be first; but equally there are too many temptations to do the obvious. My father might have been a better writer if he had been second or third in his field, if someone had done the local colour before him, the religion and the ritual. My father then, assuming in those changed circumstances he still wished to write (a big assumption), might have seen the spread of material awaiting him, the things I wanted to find out from him, about his own life and the colonial society of the 1920s.

  IT IS HARD to be the first. It is possibly harder to come near the end.

  Tony, after an unadventurous bookman’s life, retired to the country when he was forty-six. His life continued in its even tenor. He settled down to doing his big autobiogr
aphical novel. This meant that as a writer he would now, even more than before the war, have to spin things out of his entrails.

  In this move he was like his contemporary Waugh, who, after a decade-long exposure to the world, retired to the country when he was thirty-four. For Waugh—leaving out his war experience—it was like a withdrawal from life. The modest country house, the formal staff, might have enabled him to live the life of the successful writer retired to the country, but it gave him nothing to write about, except, in the end, his own breakdown. Country life for Waugh wasn’t like country life for Faulkner or the great Maupassant; there was nothing in it to feed or extend his imagination. English country life had been written about in all its social aspects; there was nothing new to discover. To live in the English countryside was to be sheltered and creatively to die.

  Over-written-about societies have their difficulties for the writer. And in the modern interconnected world everything moves much faster than it did. The world has been shaken up; the centre of the world shifts. The literary vigour of nineteenth-century France might have seemed enduring; the world now hardly hears of contemporary French writing. In the 1920s Jonathan Cape published Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt with a glossary of what were seen as its outlandish American words and a preface by Hugh Walpole pleading for the British reader’s tolerance of the book’s general coarseness. Yet only thirty years later the Atlantic book traffic was nearly all the other way; and just a few years after, places that had been on the periphery, Latin America and India, at one time too far away and too unimportant, were better known. The very novelty of their material now ensured their welcome, and they were seen as sources of a kind of vigour that had gone out of English writing (which only meant that English material was now stale).

  When I had started, in the mid-1950s, I had felt left out of things. It was lucky for me that in 1955 I had found André Deutsch and Diana Athill as publishers. Without them I might have languished; perhaps never got started. My material knocked me out of court; it took me years to get into Penguin. As late as 1961 the great American firm of Knopf was sending back my work unread; my foolish English agent, the chairman of Curtis Brown, had made me take my book by hand to Blanche Knopf at Claridges. It was all of eighteen years later that I established a more or less steady relationship with the house of Knopf. In the twenty-five years since I had started the world had altered its shape.

  But I also feel—only now: it takes time to assess these things—that what was good for me wasn’t good for Tony. When he had begun his big autobiographical novel his material, an English middle-class upbringing, was, it might be said, of an approved kind. When, twenty-five years later, he had got to the end, the world had changed and England had changed. He was seen as old-fashioned, his material dead, belonging to a world that had been superseded.

  He didn’t really know what had happened. His generosity of spirit, his habit of people-collecting, and his own freedom from money worries made him blind to the changed situation. He went among his old friends as the old writer; he had no idea now what was said behind his back. Somebody told Sonia Orwell one day that in Tony’s big book people were driven by the will. She made a face and seemed about to snort. And yet Tony and his wife Violet adored George Orwell; and I remember Sonia talking to Tony in her house on the Gloucester Road about the collected edition of Orwell’s letters and journalism she was helping prepare for Penguin.

  Malcolm Muggeridge, the journalist, was a close friend; or so I thought, from the stories Tony told about him. He had been editor of Punch in the early 1950s and Tony had perhaps met him there. I thought he was one of the people Tony had “collected.” He used to come to stay at the Powells’ in Somerset. A story was that he got up early and, writing in bed with pencil and paper, got through two or three of the week’s articles before breakfast. Tony did not look down on this facility. He thought it was a distinct talent, to write intelligent and appetising and popular copy. It was shocking to me, after hearing so much in admiration from Tony about Malcolm, to find Malcolm writing an unfriendly and ironical review of one of the later novels. Muggeridge had his finger on the pulse of things. This review would have been a sure sign that in the eyes of some Tony had, especially with the skittish later novels of the series, outstayed his literary welcome. Tony didn’t immediately show his hurt; that came out a long while later.

  Ziman, Tony’s Z, was no longer literary editor of the Telegraph. His place had been taken by David Holloway, formerly of the News Chronicle. One morning when I went to the Telegraph office to collect books or deliver copy Holloway said to me, “You’re a friend of Powell’s, aren’t you?” Holloway had a squint; it could make him look shy or malevolent. He wasn’t looking shy now. When I said I was a friend he said, “What do you think of his writing?” Before I said anything he said, with something like rage, his bad eye working hard, “I would pay him to stop writing.” Just like that; and yet week by week he ran Tony’s lead review at the top of the page.

  Those reviews were actually very good, better than Tony’s fiction. They held a lifetime’s thought about an extraordinary range of writers, and they were done in a straight and direct way. Tony didn’t do them for the Telegraph money. He did them as part of the writing life; it was his idea of how the evening of a writer’s days should be spent. He said it gave him something to read during the week. He did the review on Saturday morning. It was his rule never to spend more time on a review, and since it was his rule the time was always enough. To get the tone, he imagined, during the writing, that he was telling someone about the book.

  I wish I could follow his rule. I found that the writing of a review (for the New Statesman) took longer and longer: Saturday morning, then all day Saturday, then all Sunday, much of Sunday evening, and then even Monday morning. When I discovered that the literary editor was at the press on Wednesday morning, I made the extra time fit. In the beginning I used to do a review in two or three hours, about the time it took to do an essay at the university. That seemed to me too much; and I had the false idea that I would become more fluent, become a Malcolm Muggeridge, the longer I stayed with the job. In the event it began to consume my time, being precise about small ideas, and for almost no reward. This was the main reason why (apart from the worthlessness of the job and the enervating jealousy of all those new books), as soon as I could do without the money, I gave up regular reviewing and never went back to it. If I were reviewing now I imagine it would take twice the time to do a piece as it took when I was thirty.

  Bits of honour came Tony’s way, enough to encourage him in his idea of being the successful writer in old age, the lion in winter. He went to dinner twice (in a distinguished large group) with Mrs. Thatcher, the prime minister, once at Downing Street. Oxford University gave him an honorary degree; and the Chancellor, Harold Macmillan, a former prime minister, spoke the eulogy in Latin. Both Macmillan and Tony would have enjoyed that piece of antique theatre, in which Tony was described as a second Menander, after the Greek playwright, about whom very little is known. By chance a short while later, in New York, I met Mr. Macmillan in the untidy waiting room or antechamber of The Dick Cavett Show. Mr. Macmillan was in heavy brown tweed, with a cape; he looked monumental, but old and ill and remote. I asked him about that eulogy, and especially about Menander. What did we know about him? He made an open-palmed gesture with his big hand and said in his now-faded boom of a voice, “Fragments.” This was what my books had told me too; it was the very word. So I assumed he didn’t know much more than we did and with this obscure academic reference was, as it were, chancing his arm in the eulogy.

  Tony had enjoyed the ceremonies connected with the honorary degree. He and his wife Violet had taken many photographs. They had especially enjoyed meeting the minor poet Philip Larkin, and Tony spoke so much about him, and with such generosity, I felt he was on the point of adding Larkin to his collection. I was glad that he didn’t because soon we were to read, after Larkin’s death, the most awful abuse of Tony, in Larkin’s diar
y or in a Larkin letter after the Oxford occasion. Larkin, who was physically a gross man, and no oil painting, chose for some reason to abuse Tony for his—mostly imagined—ugliness.

  Tony’s generosity, his habit of reaching out to people, gave him a kind of protection. At the same time it exposed him to this kind of Larkin-like insult. One Sunday morning, when I was staying with them for the weekend, Tony and Violet had taken me to a house some distance away to meet the owner, a kind of academic-literary figure whose name I just about knew. Now, many years later, I met this man at a big dinner in London. Afterwards, muzzy with the poor wine, he said to me, “You’re a friend of Tony Powell’s, aren’t you?” I had begun to recognise this opening; and it was strange that on these occasions I was cast as the friend. After all, this man’s friendship with Tony must have preceded mine; his was the house I had been taken to many years before, when Tony was a grand name. And just as David Holloway didn’t wait for a reply in the Telegraph office, before saying that he would pay Tony to stop writing, so now this false friend, not waiting for a reply from me, said in a drunken rhetorical way, as though addressing a meeting, “Tony Powell. The apotheosis of mediocrity.” That was all that he wanted to say to me; he shuffled off directly afterwards, leaving me to feel that in his rage or jealousy—there were people who admired Tony in the old days but didn’t like the idea that Tony now had money—he had used the wrong word. He didn’t mean the enthronement of mediocrity; he meant perhaps the acme, the height, of mediocrity.