I also, with everyone else, went to a great many films. I relished hard-edged American thrillers with their expressive black and white photography and brooding atmosphere, their tales of alienation and emotional betrayal. Already I sensed that a new kind of popular culture was emerging that played on the latent psychopathy of its audiences, and in fact needed to elicit that strain of psychopathy if it was to work. The modern movement had demonstrated this from its start, in the poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, and the willing engagement of the audience’s own psychopathy is almost a definition of modernism as a whole. But this was strongly denied by F. R. Leavis and his notion of the novel as a moral criticism of life. I went to one of Leavis’s lectures and thought how limited his world was, and remember saying to the English literature student who had taken me: ‘It’s more important to go to T-Men (a classic noir film) than to Leavis’s lectures.’ It sounded preposterous at the time, but less so now.
I briefly met E.M. Forster at a King’s sherry party, already an old man or convincingly posing as one, and often drove in a friend’s car around the US airbases. No one seemed aware that the nostalgic pageant called ‘Cambridge’ was made possible by the fleets of American bombers waiting in the quiet fields around the city.
At the end of my second year I knew that I had absorbed all I needed from the medical course. My interest in psychiatry had been a clear case of ‘physician, heal thyself’. I never wanted to walk the wards as a trainee doctor, and friends ahead of me at their London teaching hospitals warned that years of exhausting work would postpone for at least a decade any plans to become a writer. Varsity, the student weekly newspaper, staged an annual short story competition, and my entry, a Hemingwayesque effort called ‘The Violent Noon’, won joint first prize in 1951. The judge was a senior partner at a leading London agents, A.P. Watt, who commended my story and invited me to call on him.
This was another green light, and I told my father that I wanted to give up medicine and become a writer. He was dismayed, especially as I had no idea of how to bring this about. He decided that I should study English literature, the worst possible preparation for a writer’s career, which he may well have suspected. I managed to get a place at London University, at Queen Mary College, and started the degree course in October 1951.
I had written a number of short stories at Cambridge, heavily under the influence of James Joyce, and had sent a few unsuccessfully to Horizon and other literary magazines. The surrealist painters were deeply inspiring, but there was no easy way to translate the visually surreal into prose, or prose that was readable. At heart I was an old-fashioned storyteller with a lively imagination, but English fantasy was too close to whimsy. This created problems that would take me a good many years to solve.
13
Screaming Popes (1951)
I enjoyed my year at Queen Mary College, glad to become a student rather than an undergraduate. I travelled on the London tube system with people who were going to work, and I could almost imagine that I was doing a job. I was one of those millions of European students who had helped to launch revolutions and had battled with police on the streets of eastern Europe, a political power bloc in their own right, something one could never imagine in the case of Oxford or Cambridge undergraduates. A student, Gavrilo Princip, had assassinated Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo and launched a world war. At Cambridge, an academic theme park where I was a reluctant extra, the only splash I could have made was by falling off a punt.
I liked London, and particularly the Chelsea area, with its lesbian pubs and rich friends of friends who took me to expensive nightclubs like the Milroy and Embassy in Mayfair. People lived in the present, and no one cared about property values or redecorating their flats. Everything was still very shabby and much of South Kensington, where I had a room in Onslow Gardens, was semi-derelict. People lived in dilapidated flats but bought their clothes in Bond Street. One of the English lecturers, a woman in her forties who lived nearby, owned an open-topped Allard, an impressively stylish car, which she drove all the way to the Mile End Road, a journey unthinkable today. Sometimes she gave me a lift. As we roared through the City of London she would take both hands off the wheel to hold forth about Gammer Gurton’s Needle. I had the sense that my life could veer away in any direction, figuratively as well as literally.
I also liked the social mix of students. At Cambridge everyone was middle-class, trying to be middle-class or trying not to be. At London University the students came from all possible backgrounds, with very different approaches to everything. In my group was a surprisingly free-thinking nun, who wore a wimple and a full nun’s rig. There were several ex-servicemen who had become interested in taking a degree while in the wartime forces. They had travelled all over the world. One or two were married. Another had spent his entire childhood in foster homes, was pleasantly good-humoured but quietly anti-semitic. They were all intelligent, which wasn’t true of Cambridge undergraduates, and already had original ideas about the world. When I mentioned that I had been born in China and interned during the war they noted this in the way they would have reacted had I told them I was born in a North Sea trawler or a lighthouse.
The English course was interesting, but modern fiction played no part in it, and at the end of my first year I decided to leave Queen Mary College. My attempts to write a new experimental novel were a complete flop. I needed to get away from academic institutions, and I needed to be free of all financial dependence on my parents, a sentiment I am sure they shared. They were strongly opposed to my hopes of becoming a professional writer, and I found their hostility wearing. Through a Cambridge friend who was working for Benson’s advertising agency in Kingsway, where Dorothy Sayers had worked and which housed the spiral staircase that appeared in one of her novels, I found a job as a novice copywriter with a small London agency.
Like most people living in London for the first time, I spent many of my free hours visiting art galleries and museums, especially the National Gallery and the Tate, as well as the commercial galleries off Bond Street. Now and then there would be a small exhibition of new surrealist paintings – I remember Dalí at, I think, the Lefevre Gallery, and a show of new Magrittes. These sold for remarkably low prices, even the Dalís, but the surrealists had lost most of their prestige and appeal after the war. Their wayward imaginations seemed tame by comparison with the horrors of the Nazi death camps, and no one gave them credit for anticipating the pathological strains in the European mind that had propelled Hitler into power. There were very few surrealists in the Tate collection, and while I was interested in modern art as a whole, my imagination wasn’t touched by cubism or abstract art, which seemed to be formal exercises confined to the artist’s studio.
Today it seems to me that the works by modernist pioneers displayed in the Tate have begun to lose their lustre. Those landmark paintings by Picasso and Braque, Utrillo and Léger, Mondrian and Kandinsky appear smaller than they did fifty years ago. Their colour has faded, and they lack the imaginative bite that I felt when I first looked at them. At the same time I have to accept that my entire visual response to the world was kindled in those Millbank galleries I visited in my early twenties. Then, whenever I visited the Tate, I would always turn right into the modern rooms, and never left to the British art of the past four centuries. I admired Turner because he seemed to anticipate the Impressionists, but the Pre-Raphaelite painters, and Burne-Jones in particular, presented an airless and over-imagined realm as suffocating as the children’s books I read uneasily as a boy. Today, my sense of direction has changed: whenever I enter the Tate I first turn left, and never right.
Surprisingly, given my passion for the new, I spent a huge amount of time in the National Gallery, and would often go every day. By a touching coincidence, my future partner Claire Walsh, then a hyper-bright 12-year-old Claire Churchill, would also visit the National Gallery, as part of her intellectual roaming around London. I wish I had seen her. Gallery tours are now part of every school curriculum,
but in the early 1950s even the National Gallery would often seem deserted, and a visitor could be alone in a room filled with Rembrandts, a powerful charge to the imagination.
I am sure that a large part of the enduring mystery of the Renaissance masterpieces in the National Gallery was due to the absence of the explanatory matter that now drains away much of the strangeness and poetry of the Old Masters. I would stare at Crivelli’s Annunciation, charmed by the peacocks, loaves of bread and other incongruous items, the passer-by reading a book on the bridge and the Virgin in her jewel box of a house. I was forced to use my own imagination to stitch these elements into a master narrative that made some kind of sense, rather than read an extended wall caption and be solemnly told that the peacock was a symbol of eternal life. Perish the thought, and let the exquisite bird be itself, and nothing more or less than itself. What could be more natural, and more mysterious, than a peacock and a loaf of bread appearing on the scene to celebrate the forthcoming birth of the Saviour?
Years later, standing in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence in front of another Annunciation, by Leonardo, I found my view blocked by a huge party of Japanese tourists. I wondered what they made of the religious paintings in the gallery, with their winged men kneeling in front of rather self-conscious young women. A few Japanese take the Latin mass, but most know nothing about the Christian myths, and the paintings must have seemed completely surrealist.
Then I realised what had drawn me to the National Gallery. There were very few surrealist paintings on display in London in the early 1950s. Colour printing was in its infancy, and there were few illustrated books at affordable prices. I had unconsciously done the only thing I could – I had turned the National Gallery into a virtual museum of surrealist art, and co-opted Leonardo, Raphael and Mantegna to become surrealist painters for me.
In 1955 there was a modest retrospective of Francis Bacon’s paintings at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, followed in 1962 by a far larger retrospective at the Tate Gallery, which was a revelation to me. I still think of Bacon as the greatest painter of the post-war world. Sadly, when I met him in the 1980s I found, like many others before me, that he was not interested in receiving compliments or in talking about his own work. I suspect that he was still sensitive to charges of gratuitous violence and sensationalism that were levelled at him in the 1950s and 1960s. He chose as his official interviewer the art critic David Sylvester, who was careful to steer clear of the questions everyone was eager to hear answered, and only asked Bacon about his handling of space and other academic topics. In his replies Bacon adopted the same elliptical and evasive language, with the result that we know less about the motives of this extraordinary painter than we do of almost any other 20th-century artist. At least Crivelli’s Annunciation in the 1950s was not screened behind endless lectures on Renaissance perspective and the fluctuating price of lapis lazuli.
Bacon’s paintings were screams from the abattoir, cries from the execution pits of World War II. His deranged executives and his princes of death in their pontiffs’ robes lacked all pity and remorse. His popes screamed because they knew there was no God. Bacon went even further than the surrealists, assuming our complicity in the mid-century’s horrors. It was we who sat in those claustrophobic rooms, like TV hospitality suites in need of a coat of paint, under a naked light bulb that might signal the arrival of the dead, the only witnesses at our last interview.
Yet Bacon kept hope alive at a dark time, and looking at his paintings gave me a surge of confidence. I knew there was a link of some kind with the surrealists, with the dead doctors lying in their wooden chests in the dissecting room, with film noir and with the peacock and the loaf of bread in Crivelli’s Annunciation. There were links to Hemingway and Camus and Nathanael West. A jigsaw inside my head was trying to assemble itself, but the picture when it finally emerged would appear in an unexpected place.
14
Vital Discoveries (1953)
Working as a copywriter at an advertising agency was not as glamorous or interesting as novels and films suggested. Most of it was a slog, a dull chore of writing booklets and copy for manuals. I needed the daylight to write my own fiction, so I took a job as a Covent Garden porter, working in the chrysanthemum department of a large wholesaler. We started early, at something like 6 o’clock, and were through by noon. When too many sleep-starved nights finally got to me, I sold encyclopaedias door to door, a job at which I was surprisingly successful, partly because the Waverley Encyclopaedia was the one I had read as a child in Shanghai
– I knew it backwards and genuinely believed in it. It was a fascinating time, roaming the Midland towns with my samples, living in shabby hotels among garment workers. A modest street of Victorian terraced houses would hold a universe of differences – cheerful teenage girls bringing up a brood of small children while the mother slumped in the kitchen watching TV among the clutter; religious fanatics with barely a stick of furniture and wary daughters who couldn’t wait to grow up; a man so excited that I worked for a publisher that he propelled me into his living room and proudly showed me a piano whose keys were coloured and numbered, his ‘revolutionary’ system for teaching music that he wanted me to market for him – by way of proof, he whistled up the stairs and his amiable 13-year-old daughter came down and sat at the upright with her sheet music annotated like a candy bar, then solemnly played the Moonlight Sonata. I still see coloured stripes when I hear the melody, and taste sweetness on my lips.
Prosperity of a sort had reached the Midlands, and the early 1950s was on the cusp of social change. The poorer that people were, the keener they seemed to be to buy the encyclopaedia, and I often waived my commission (there was no salary) to secure for them the hours of intelligent pleasure I had known as a child. But the better-off residents, especially those working in the Coventry car plants, had moved beyond the hallowed notion of education as a gateway to success. Information came through advertising and the television set. They would show off their huge new screens, their wall-to-wall carpeting and their modern kitchens and bathrooms, taking it for granted that I was genuinely interested in these features, then politely decline the eight-volume Waverley. Consumerism provided all the bearings they needed in their lives.
Meanwhile, my writing was still stuck. I had sensibly abandoned my efforts to go one better than Finnegans Wake, and knew that I wasn’t muscular and morbid enough to emulate Hemingway. My problem was that I hadn’t found a form that suited me. Popular fiction was too popular, and literary fiction too earnest. A spate of World War II memoirs and novels was being published, but surprisingly it never occurred to me to write a novel based on my own wartime experiences. Even the grim events I had witnessed as a child in Shanghai could never match the genocidal horrors of the Nazi death camps.
By now, seven or eight years after the war, I had begun to switch off my memories of Shanghai. Very few people had shared my experiences, and the European war was still everywhere around us in a hundred bomb sites. I had always detested nostalgia, and the attempt by British politicians of all parties to assert Britain’s importance in the world, when in reality we were nearly bankrupt, by harping on our wartime role and our pre-war empire, reminded me of the danger of dwelling too much in the past. The Shanghai years would never return, and it unsettled me whenever I met friends of my parents and former Lunghua internees who were detached from the present and living entirely within a cocoon of China memories.
Flying still interested me, and I began to notice advertisements for short-service commissions in the RAF. The flight training was in Canada, an added attraction. My years in Lunghua had exempted me from National Service, and as an officer I would be able to leave the service if I was reassigned to ground duties, as happened to so many pilots and navigators. A change of scene, from grey and overcrowded London to the vast spaces of central Canada, would give me time to think and with any luck be a new spur to my imagination. I was still only 23, but my career as a novelist showed no signs of ever beginning.
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I signed on at the RAF recruitment offices in Kingsway, passed the assessment tests at RAF Hornchurch, near Dagenham, and started my three-month basic training at Kirton in Lindsey, in Lincolnshire. I enjoyed my time there, a mix of army-style drill and square-bashing, basic navigation and meteorology, weapons training with the Lee-Enfield rifle, Smith & Wesson revolver and Sten machine gun (I turned out to be a fairly good shot), lessons in officers’ mess etiquette (we would be Britain’s ambassadors around the world as well as becoming nuclear bomber pilots), and experts at self-diagnosing the first symptoms of VD, thanks to hours of instructional films that gave a rather odd impression of our future role as serving officers of the Queen.
In the autumn of 1954 we sailed for Canada on one of the Empress liners, and then spent a month at an RCAF base near London, Ontario, not far from Detroit and Niagara Falls. The intention was to ‘culturally relocate’ us within the North American way of life, and wean us off the enticements of cricket, warm beer and toad-in-the-hole. Needless to say, we were all eager to embrace the North American way of life from the second we stepped off the Empress boat. Canadians were generous and hospitable, without any of the rough edges that can make America jar. The country was vast and sparsely populated, and virtually under a blanket of snow for six months of the year. The Canadians had the natural warmth towards strangers of a desert people.
We arrived at our training base in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, as the first snow was falling, and I think it was still falling when I left the following spring. NATO pilot training took place in Canada as part of the country’s contribution to the alliance, but a wilderness of ice and snow was not the best location for a flying school. The fierce isolation of the Canadian winter, and the white world that surrounded the airbase ten miles from Moose Jaw, meant that for long periods we had nothing to do but sit in the flight rooms, reading magazines and watching the snow fall on the buried runways. Now and then a moose would leap the perimeter fence and gallop off into the mist. In the very comfortable mess, virtually a four-star hotel, I would sit by the picture windows and watch the snow carried horizontally by the icy wind. Walking to the mess from our barracks, I would sometimes find small contact lenses on my cheeks – ice dislodged from my eyeballs when I blinked. We lived on turkey, waffles and ice cream, and drank the bar out of its bourbon and gin. There was no taboo about flying and drinking – one of my Canadian instructors always boarded our plane with a cigar and two bottles of beer.