Author: The Good Reader

The Nightjar by Henry Newbolt

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It’s almost time for the nightjars, those most elusive and mysterious of birds, to be on their way after their fleeting summer visit to these shores.

Here is Henry Newbolt’s poem, The Nightjar, written towards the end of his life, 1936 I think. It’s a bit different to the earlier poems he is most remembered for today, Vitaï Lampada (Play up! play up! and play the game!) and Drake’s Drum.

No opinion or analysis this time, just a poem that I like. Walter de la Mare regarded it highly and wished that Newbolt had written more in the same vein. I found it in an anthology compiled by Kingsley Amis. I believe John Betjeman liked it too. See what you make of it.

The Nightjar

We loved our nightjar, but she would not stay with us.
We had found her lying as dead, but soft and warm,
Under the apple tree beside the old thatched wall.
Two days we kept her in a blanket by the fire,
Fed her, and thought she might well live – till suddenly
In the very moment of most confiding hope
She raised herself all tense, quivered and drooped and died.
Tears sprang into my eyes – why not? The heart of man
Soon sets itself to love a living companion,
The more so if by chance it asks some care of him.
And this one had the kind of loveliness that goes
Far deeper than the optic nerve – full fathom five
To the soul’s ocean cave, where Wonder and Reason
Tell their alternate dreams of how the world was made.
So wonderful she was – her wings the wings of night
But powdered here and there with tiny golden clouds
And wave-line markings like sea-ripples on the sand.
O how I wish I might never forget that bird –
Never!
But even now, like all beauty of earth,
She is fading from me into the dusk of Time.

The Ipcress File by Len Deighton

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The Ipcress File made a big impact when it was published in 1962, partly because it coincided with the release of the film of Dr No. Critics tended to see Deighton’s book as a more realistic take on the world of espionage.

Re-reading it again recently I was struck by just how cryptic and complex it remains. It’s a playful and modernist take on spy fiction. This is reflected in the visual presentation of the book. The black and white photograph on the dust jacket of the first edition, a stark image of a revolver and a coffee cup, was something new in book design. The novel is subtitled “Secret File No. 1” and the prologue starts with what looks like a copy of a memo, summoning the narrator to the Minister’s office to explain the case to him.

The conceit that this is actually a secret document is continued with the use of appendices. Quite important information about major characters, that would be incorporated into the main text in a more conventional novel, is given in this way.

We never find out the narrator’s name. When someone hails him as “Harry” he tells us: “Now my name’s not Harry, but in this business it was hard to remember whether it ever had been.” He has several sets of false identity documents as “a spy’s insurance policy”. Nor do we ever find out the full name of the department he works for, WOOC (P). War Office something something (Provisional) is as near as we get.

There’s a certain irony in the fact that when the novel was filmed in 1965, it was perceived as a more downbeat alternative to Bond, despite being co-produced by Harry Saltzmann, one half of the Bond production team.

The book actually has some things in common with Fleming’s work, most specifically Moonraker. There is the authentic civil service atmosphere at the beginning and also the fact that it is the hero’s female assistant who discovers the crucial clue that cracks the case in both novels.

The film is justly remembered as one of the most gripping and believable of all espionage films, but it is quite different from the book. The book does have quite a lot of description of a changing London, although Deighton was to develop this further in Funeral in Berlin. There’s a sharp contrast between the “official” London of Whitehall and the War Office, and the location of the provisional unit in Charlotte Street, Fitzrovia (“one of those sleazy long streets in the district that would be Soho, if Soho had the strength to cross Oxford Street”).

Whereas the film mostly takes place in London (possibly for budget reasons), in the book our hero travels to Beirut, as well as to a Pacific atoll where a hydrogen bomb test is about to take place.

One of the most interesting changes from book to film is the character of Jay. The book gives a lot of information about his Polish origins and earlier career as a spy and peddler of information. He is rumoured to have been the figure behind the disappearance of Burgess and Maclean. Crucially, he has friends in very high places, as the phone call to the mysterious “Henry” reveals. He ends up working for the British. So that’s why we are told his codename has been changed to “Box Four” in the memo right at the beginning! You really do need to read this more than once, and pay attention while you are doing so.

The title of the novel is an acronym. IPCRESS stands for Induction of Psycho-neuroses by Conditioned Reflex with Stress. The treatment of the brainwashing theme is more realistic in the book than in the film. It is based on recognised techniques, such as disorientation and sleep deprivation. In the film, crucially made a few years further into the 1960s, it has become a psychedelic sound and light show.

What was behind the 1960s obsession with brainwashing? I suppose it was the idea that “altered states” could have a military as well as a hedonistic purpose. There were those crazy American ideas about putting LSD in the Moscow water supply, for example. I believe there was also a fear at the time that television advertising, then relatively new, was manipulating peoples’ minds in ways they were not aware of.

I think the first novel to deal with it was Richard Condon’s The Manchurian Candidate in 1959. A Clockwork Orange, with its suggestion that the minds of criminals could be re-programmed to alter their behaviour, was published the same year as The Ipcress File. Many books and films used the brainwashing idea and the interest was still going strong in 1967, when the first episode of The Prisoner shared a certain feel and a couple of cast members with the film of The Ipcress File.

On a more personal note, it is wonderful what a little internet research can reveal these days. The first TV screening of The Ipcress File was in 1972, 28 May I think. That’s when I saw it for the first time and thought it was the best film I had ever seen. I vividly remember the preview clip, the land rover crashing through the factory door, and thinking this was something I had to see.

Also running on TV around the same time, was a series called Spy Trap. The BBC in their wisdom have wiped the tapes of this one, so it exists in memory only. It was actually very good, with Paul Daneman as the ex-navy officer head of a counter-intelligence department. The funny thing is, it was originally shown in the early evening slot across four days of the week. A spy soap opera! This was the cold war and spies were the thing, not the lives of people in east London. Perhaps these were the formative experiences that pointed me towards a lifelong interest in spy fiction.

 

The Regent’s Canal in fiction

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Just what is it about this North London canal in fiction?

How did the area by the Regent’s canal in Maida Vale come to be known as Little Venice?

A London guidebook I had suggested that the term had first been used by estate agents in the 1950s. I was therefore surprised to find that the name is used in Margery Allingham’s 1934 art-fraud detective story Death of a Ghost.

In the novel, it is not the area but a house that is called “Little Venice”. An artistic clan left over from the Victorian age inhabits the stucco house by the canal basin. So it appears that an estate agent had read Allingham and borrowed the name.

There is a little bit more to it than that, though. This was where Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning lived, sometimes rowing out to the island in the basin.  Allingham mentions “the Crescent”, presumably Warwick Crescent to the south of the canal basin, and Browning’s house was here. Allingham is linking her fictional Victorian painter, John Lafcadio, with Browning, who was rumoured to have commented on the resemblance of this area of London to Venice. There has even been a suggestion that the name was coined by Byron.

Personally, I think it’s all down to Allingham and the rest is an attempt to pull in the tourists. For example, the island is now known as “Browning’s Island”.

I could write a lot more about Allingham and London. I write as one who once spent an afternoon in Bloomsbury, trying to pinpoint the exact location of the square with the little church that features so memorably in The Tiger in the Smoke.

Maida Vale makes its next significant appearance in fiction in Books do Furnish a Room, the tenth volume of Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time sequence, published in 1971, but set in  1946/47, finishing in the freezing winter of that year. This novel introduces a new character, the writer Trapnel, based on Julian Maclaren-Ross. When Pamela Widmerpool embarks on her extra-marital affair with Trapnel, she lives with him in a seedy flat in this area, a bit north of the canal itself.

Jenkins, the narrator, makes an excursion into this netherworld to deliver a book for Trapnel to review. He notes that the area by the canal had not at that time become what he calls a “quartier chic”, as it did later: “The neighbourhood looked anything but flourishing.” There are gaps along the canal where houses have been reduced to rubble by the recent bombing. This now run-down zone is Trapnel’s stamping ground, a suitable locale for a bohemian writer.

The canal proves fatal to Trapnel when Pam throws the manuscript of his novel into it, destroying both the physical pages and Trapnel’s resolve and determination as a writer. It is followed by Trapnel’s death’s head swordstick, which he throws in a despairing gesture. The oily canal, with floating litter of all kinds, might as well be the Styx.

We are in the late 1940s literary scene here, the world of little magazines such as Horizon. Widmermool, MP, businessman and all-round establishment figure, is the proprietor of the magazine Trapnel writes for. There’s a sharp contrast between his West End Parliamentary world and altogether shabbier milieu that Pam has moved into with Trapnel.

Trapnel is supposed to live in a succession of flats in the Paddington area borrowed from acquaintances at his favourite Fitzrovia pub, The Hero of Acre. Powell enthusiasts have identified this as being probably based on The Wheatsheaf. We tend to think of Fitzrovia as a time and place of the1940s, but it appears in the Allingham novel too, which is set in 1930. Campion goes to The Robespierre in Charlotte Street, “that most odd of all London pubs”.

A few years later a location further along the canal appears in John Le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. The address of the safe house where the mole meets his Russian contact is 5 Lock Gardens, Camden Town, in reality St Mark’s Crescent. It is one of those houses with a walled garden backing on to the canal. Peter Guillam waits on the other side of the canal for the signal that the traitor has arrived. The towpath is closed to the public after dark, leaving it to lovers and down-and-outs, a smell rises from the water and the trains that pass are empty.

John le Carré has always been quite precise about the social status of particular London districts. “The neighbourhood possessed no social identity” is his verdict here. This is a long way from the Pall Mall clubland world of the senior spies. It’s somehow suggested that this is a marginal zone, a very suitable place for undercover activity.

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If Powell, looking back from 1971 was able to suggest that the gentrification of Little Venice had already taken place, no such improvement is evident here. In 1974, Camden market has not yet brought the area back to prominence in the minds of a younger generation.

I’m sure there are many other examples of the strange appeal of the canal being used in fiction. After all, Ruth Rendell was a resident of Little Venice. I believe her last novel was set close to home, but I have not read it. So, I would encourage you to explore this fascinating area of London both in reality and on the page.

 

The Beast Must Die by Nicholas Blake

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Surbiton Festival (4) XA

The Beast Must Die by Nicholas Blake was published in 1938. It is an example of the type of detective story where the identity of the criminal is known, or appears to be, right from the start. It has some of the expected features of novels of the “golden age”, but is also strikingly different. It feels like an attempt to do something more realistic with the genre conventions, closer to Graham Greene than Agatha Christie.

This is hardly surprising, given that Nicholas Blake was the pen name of Cecil Day Lewis, poet and critic, who was poet laureate from 1968 until his death in 1972. The Beast Must Die was the fourth book to feature his series detective, Nigel Strangeways.

Depending on your view of these things, you might see him as a serious poet writing commercial fiction on the side, or as an innovative and brilliant crime writer who also wrote a great deal of poetry. What is undeniable is his talent for language.

Day Lewis wrote sixteen Strangeways novels, and four “stand alone” mysteries, from the early 1930s to the late 1960s. All of them anticipate the more psychological approach adopted by later writers in this genre.

The plot of The Beast Must Die concerns the attempts of Felix Lane to take revenge on the man who killed his young son in a hit-and-run accident. The opening section of the novel is presented as Felix Lane’s diary, describing in great detail how he goes about identifying and tracking down the driver.

Like his creator, Lane is a man with an alter ego. He is in fact, Frank Cairns and Felix Lane is the pen name under which he writes detective stories. It is his knowledge of detection that enables him to find the speeding driver, garage owner George Ratteray, and the use of his pen name that enables him to cover his tracks.

Lane/Cairns has told us right from the start that once he has found the driver he intends to kill him, yet when Ratteray is found dead, Lane insists he has been framed and calls in Nigel Strangeways to clear his name.

The latter part of the novel is on the face of it, more conventional, as all the occupants of Ratteray’s household come under suspicion, and Strangeways works in conjunction with the police inspector to crack the case.

Strangeways begins to suspect that all may not be as it seems when the evidence he gathers conflicts with what Lane wrote in his diary. Has Lane deliberately falsified his account, or has he accurately recorded that Ratteray lied to him?

Strangeways gets to the truth in the end, and the solution is highly ingenious, involving the interpretation of a literary reference in Lane’s diary. It’s an early example of textual analysis as detection, the sort of thing done later on by Colin Dexter in The Wench is Dead.

The greater depth than usual comes from the characterisation and the moral questions that the reader is asked to ponder. Ratteray is a domestic monster who beats his wife and tyrannizes his sensitive son. He has callously covered up his responsibility for the death of a young boy. He would be no great loss to the world.

But the central question of the book, on which the mystery depends, is just what sort of man is Felix Lane.

The criticism that is often made of “golden age” stories is that tragic events seem to make no real impact on anyone. That is not the case here; Lane has been devastated by his boy’s death and there is a suggestion that his nurturing relationship with Ratteray’s son Phil is a substitute for that with his own lost son.

Like all the Blake novels, it is fluently written and highly readable. The peaceful English rural locations, seen at their best in the summertime, are an effective counterpoint to the sad events of the story.

The 1969 Claude Chabrol film adaptation of this book is very good, but omits Strangeways altogether and alters the ending somewhat. The use of the diary in the book would be difficult to reproduce on screen in any case, as it depends for its impact on the sense that Lane/Cairns is confessing directly to the reader.

I am pleased but also somewhat wary to find that the BBC are going to do another adaptation. Pleased because I am a huge admirer of the Blake novels and I think they deserve to be better known today. Wary, though, because I wonder how the finished version will actually turn out. This story is quite dark enough as it is, and does not need any alterations. In the end, there is more than one victim.

(An interesting footnote is that the story was said to have been inspired by a similar incident in Day Lewis’ own life, when his young son had a “near miss”. Perhaps Blake/Day Lewis and Lane/Cairns had more in common than we might think.)

 

H V Morton: poetic snapshots of a lost London

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The short pieces that make up H V Morton’s The Nights of London were originally published as newspaper columns in the 1920s, but had a long afterlife in book form. My small blue hardback is dated 1948 and it had been reprinted fourteen times by then.

Morton was a star journalist, making his name by being present at the opening of the tomb of Tutankhamun. He went on to become a successful travel writer, the Paul Theroux of the inter-war years.

Here, Morton is our guide on a series of lone, nocturnal tours of London. He was aware that the idea of London by night had already become something of a cliché and he strove to avoid that.

He starts out at two in the morning in front of the Bank, cold, dead and deserted. It’s immediately clear that we are in the company of a sort of poet of London, as he walks on to London Bridge: “No sound, but that of a stray, petulant siren downstream. . . the rush of lit water and a sudden puff of steam from the Cannon Street railway bridge.”

Part of the fascination of this book is reflecting on what has changed and what has not. Morton’s attitude to the Chinese in Limehouse is not that of today; on the other hand he is broadly sympathetic to those struggling to make ends meet.

He visits the Suicide Station under Waterloo Bridge, where the police wait with a small dinghy to fish would-be suicides out of the dark water.

He accompanies the maintenance men on the tube and hopes that the current in the live rail really has been turned off, as they so confidently assure him.

He passes the time in a warm and cosy cabman’s shelter.

When he visits Fleet Street, we feel the journalist’s love for “the astonishing thunder of the press”. There is something of Rudyard Kipling here, as he describes the huge printing machines, “ready to tell today about yesterday”. There is also a reminder in his language that this is London just after the first world war: “In Fleet Street it is zero hour. The first edition is just going over the top into a new day.”

Similarly, the firemen in the station he visits remember dealing with the recent Zeppelin raids.

The pieces on evening classes and hospitals, remind us that we are in a harder world than today, before the expansion of public education and public access to health care.

He spends an evening in the East End, watching boxing bouts in a smoky hall.

The steam engine Sir Percivale pulls the night Continental boat train into Victoria Station, bringing the romance of the Mediterranean into London along with his train of Pullman cars. A touch of Kipling again, as Morton imagines the engines talking to each other in the engine shed.

He reflects on the sad atmosphere in an afterhours club, where people dance on into the small hours, people “who dare not be alone with themselves”.

A long bus ride north takes him to the very edge of London, where a development of new houses is reaching out into the countryside. His young companion proudly shows him the unfinished house, waiting for him and his young bride. On the other hand, a Bloomsbury boarding house straight out of E F Benson or Patrick Hamiliton is inhabited by retired Indian army colonels and shabby-genteel widows.

On a trip down the river on a police launch, time slips away in the dark and Morton sees London looking much as it always has done. This is an experience certainly not available to us today. What would Morton make of the view now?

The penultimate piece is slightly longer and was not previously published. Morton goes to stay in a candle-lit room at The George in Southwark, the coaching inn even then regarded as a miraculous survival from Victorian London. Even more miraculous is that it is still there today, now looked after by the National Trust.

His nocturnal wanderings end with a beautiful evocation of early morning over London: “The feeling of other worldliness has vanished with the dawn light”.

“London in the dawn is a clean, unwritten page”, Morton tells us. What will the new day bring for the millions of Londoners?

Goodbye Bernie Gunther, farewell Philip Kerr

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For many years now the publication of a new Bernie Gunther novel by Philip Kerr has been something to look forward to, but this time it’s a sad occasion as well, because Philip Kerr died in 2018, before this book was published. It is therefore our goodbye to Bernie Gunther and our farewell to his creator.

It was a brilliant idea to take a Raymond Chandler-style, wise-cracking narrator and make him an ex-policeman, now a private detective, trying to make a living in Nazi-era Germany.

For this last appearance, Kerr takes us back to where the whole story began, Berlin in 1928, with a youngish Bernie still haunted by his experiences in the trenches and newly appointed to the murder squad. Despite the first three novels being re-issued as an omnibus volume under the title Berlin Noir, not all of the saga takes place there. Over the course of 14 novels and approximately 30 years, Bernie finds himself in many of the conquered territories of the Third Reich and, after the war, in Vienna, the South of France, Greece, and South America, re-visiting Berlin in flashback.

For me, though, the scenes set in Berlin have a special quality, so this last novel is a real treat, as Bernie delves into the neon-lit night of the metropolis in search of a serial killer. Or is it two killers? Bernie has to offer himself as a potential victim to find out. Detection isn’t really the point here, though, it’s merely the pretext for a portrait of Berlin in all its 1920s wildness.

Kerr has always mingled real-life characters with his fictional ones, but as this is the only one of the books set before the Nazis came to power, several of the real-life characters here, rather than the familiar villains such as Goebbels and Reinhardt Heydrich, are the artists of the Weimar era.

Thus, Bernie becomes a somewhat unwilling sitter for both George Gross and Otto Dix. Thea von Harbou, Fritz Lang’s wife and screenwriter, asks for Bernie’s inside help with a crime story she is planning. Bernie’s impersonation of a disabled war veteran brings him into contact with the theatre world as well. At the theatre where his make-up is being applied, the music that Bernie doesn’t care for is The Threepenny Opera. The singer he thinks can’t carry a tune turns out to be Lotte Lenya. There’s a sly vein of humour in that Bernie’s taste in art and music is conventional. He’s quite disdainful of the works that we readers of 2019 regard as modern classics.

There is a another film reference too, when Bernie “accidently on purpose” mistakes the actor Gustaf Grundgens for Emil Jannings. Grundgens was the basis for the character in the film Mephisto, the actor who stayed in Germany and worked under the Nazis.

Kerr has planted film references in his Bernie novels before. In A German Requiem, set in Vienna in 1948, there’s a British film crew shooting in the streets at night, a nod to The Third Man. Dalia Dresner in The Woman from Zagreb, was a (fictional) UFA star.

And so to the neatest film reference of all. The novel takes its title from Metropolis, Fritz Lang’s futuristic fantasy film. The black joke about the killer having the word “murderer” chalked on his back, and the witnesses’ accounts of the suspect whistling a classical tune, point us in the direction of another Lang film, however. The attentive reader who has seen the film in question, will spot what is going on here by the appearance and behaviour of one character in particular.

Bernie has already suggested to Thea von Harbou that, in a film about serial murder, the audience might inclined to think that if the victims were prostitutes, they deserved their fate. It would work better with children as victims. He has also told her that detectives need contacts in the criminal underworld. And so, after the way events play out towards the end of the story, Bernie says he has another film idea for her. It’s left for the reader to realise that this is Lang’s classic M, and it’s a clever conceit that the idea for it came from Bernie Gunther, based on his own experience.

I saw M for the first time on TV, on the BBC many years ago. Now, the world in which one could stumble by accident on a classic film such as this in the middle of the evening, seems as remote as the Weimar republic itself.

However, Kerr also suggests that a certain public cruelty is not unique to the Berlin of that era. The Cabaret of the Nameless, where talentless individuals are tricked on to the stage to be mocked by the audience, is alive and well on British television today.

Of course, no novel in English as steeped in Weimar culture as this one is, would be complete without a reference to Christopher Isherwood and there it is, at the visit to the grisly Berlin mortuary. Philip Kerr takes his place alongside Isherwood, Len Deighton and John le Carre as a British author who has found literary inspiration in Berlin.

We will never know where Kerr might have taken the series had he lived to write more. There’s an intriguing loose end in the penultimate novel, Greeks Bearing Gifts. There is a suggestion that the 60-year-old Bernie is going to work for the Israelis hunting down Nazi war criminals on his return to Germany. This would have fitted in nicely with Bernie’s dealings with Eichmann in earlier books. Bernie could have played a role in the capture of Eichmann, which would have been atonement for the things he was forced to do on the Eastern front.

I must say I enjoyed this book hugely and it might even rival The Lady From Zagreb as my favourite of the whole series. I particularly like that one for its delving into a murky area of history, and the nice black joke when the clean-cut young SS officer who is chauffeuring Bernie reveals that his name is Kurt Waldheim. And the lady herself, Dalia Dresner, has to be the ultimate femme fatale.

The Good Soldier: a good film

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I finally watched the DVD of The Good Soldier the other week. This is an adaptation of the 1915 novel by Ford Madox Ford, much admired for the unreliability of its narrator. My partner is not altogether a fan of the book, but she enjoyed this as much as I did. We both thought it was really excellent. Everything just seemed to come together to produce an adaptation that was faithful to the feel of the book.

It is quite rare that you have an ensemble piece like this where the actors playing the main characters are all perfect for their roles, but in this the four principals were all dead right. Jeremy Brett, Susan Fleetwood, Robin Ellis and Vickery Turner all seemed to be the characters from the book as I remember them.

The locations were dead right, too. I think they may have used the actual German spa town, Bad Nauheim, in which the early part of the book takes place. These parts of the film had the same sense of leisured ease, with nobody in too much of a hurry, that comes across in the film of Death in Venice.

The screenplay adaptation was a masterclass, really, in how to take quite a complex, literary novel and make it work on screen. It’s a long time since I read the book, but I think the major change was the flashback structure. We knew from the beginning that Ashburnham was going to be dead at the end, and this worked really well.

Scenes were repeated, as the both the audience and the character Dowell gained more knowledge about what had really been going on. The look on Dowell’s (Robin Ellis’) face when Leonora told him that Flora and Edward had been having an affair was quite something. These repetitions gave the film something of a Nicolas Roeg feel.

Jeremy Brett was magnificent as Ashburnham, perhaps the best thing he ever did on screen, even better than his Max de Winter. I always thought he was a bit wasted as Sherlock Holmes. I have the feeling that Susan Fleetwood was sometimes a bit hard to cast, because she seemed to radiate strength of personality all the time and that wasn’t always what was called for, but here it was exactly right.

Going back to the screenplay, it was of course by Julian Mitchell and quite the equal of Pinter’s scripts for the Losey films, I thought. The only thing I can say against this film is that it is in need of a good restoration and clean up; the print on the Network DVD is a bit faded. I suppose it is not well-known enough to get the full digital upgrade treatment, which is a great pity.

I was unaware that this film had been made until I found it on DVD. I had seen the text of a stage adaptation, so I assume that is derived from his screenplay. I can’t think how I managed to miss this. It was first broadcast in 1981, at around the time Granada were making some really good TV drama. It may be that I had not actually read the book at that point and therefore did not notice it in the schedule.

It is a great pity that it was not released in the cinema first, like the films that Channel 4 made later in the 1980s. I think that, if it had been, it would quite rightly be regarded as a classic today. It is not for nothing that Robin Ellis has devoted a whole section on his website to this film. And of course, the highest compliment I can pay is that it has made me want to read the book again. I read a fascinating piece online that suggested that John Dowell is not quite the innocent he portrays himself as. I shall have to read it once more to find out.

Guy Burgess: An Englishman Abroad

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The other day I listened to Alan Bennett’s An Englishman Abroad, as I like to do from time to time. This is the BBC radio recording with Simon Callow as Burgess and Brigit Forsyth as Coral Browne.

I suppose it is something of a favourite of mine. I have seen the original 1983 TV film with Alan Bates more than once, I have a copy of the text on my bookshelf, and I saw the theatrical version with Robert Powell and Liza Goddard.

Out of a real-life anecdote, the actress Coral Browne’s chance meeting in Moscow with the exiled Cambridge Spy, Guy Burgess, Alan Bennett fashioned a witty and amusing piece that invites us to reflect on those perennial English pre-occupations of class, charm and the establishment. In the original film, Coral Browne played herself.

This version of Burgess is not so much a villain as a scapegoat, condemned to “sit on the naughty step” forever, not allowed back to the UK because there “is too much egg on people’s faces”, despite the fact that the threat of prosecution that hung over him could never be carried out.

I love the quote from Browning’s The Lost Leader that comes near the end: “Life’s night begins, let him never come back to us/There would be doubt, hesitation and pain/False praise on our part, the glimmer of evening/Never glad confident morning again.”

The music is beautifully chosen, too. Burgess has only one gramophone record, Who Stole My Heart Away by Jack Buchanan, which he plays repeatedly. It seems like a neat allusion to Stalin until Burgess asks Coral Browne if she knows Buchanan. I nearly married him, she explains; he jilted me.

And what could be more appropriate to close with than the Gilbert and Sullivan song? “For in spite of all temptations, to belong to other nations, he remains an Englishman”. Impossible to hear now without seeing in one’s mind’s eye Alan Bates strolling insouciantly along, resplendent in his new outfit, made up from the measurements that he persuaded Coral Browne to take back to his tailor in London.

It could easily be argued that Bennett was too soft on Burgess here, although I think his concern was more with the condition of exile than with spying. Burgess certainly did supply huge bundles of documents to his Soviet masters. However, the very ease with which he obtained them meant that the Soviets could never quite rid themselves of the suspicion that he was a plant, still working for the British. Much of the material he supplied was never translated into Russian and it’s been suggested that it was the revelation of traitors in high places that did the real damage to British interests, rather than any information leaked.

Alan Bennett himself was one of the bright young men who were seconded from the army during their national service in the 1950s and given intensive training in the Russian language. It was thought that in the event of a war with Russia, interpreters would be needed for the interrogation of prisoners. It’s been rumoured that Burgess liked to cast an eye over the young men, possibly fishing for potential recruits to the Russian cause. I wonder if he and Bennett ever met?

I’ve been out of a job for some while, so these days I feel a bit like Guy Burgess myself, as he sits marooned in his Moscow apartment, doing the crossword, waiting for the afternoon phone call from his minders giving him permission to go out.

 

Of Love and Hunger by Julian Maclaren-Ross

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At first glance, Of Love and Hunger, the 1947 novel by Julian Maclaren-Ross, has some resemblance to the work of Patrick Hamilton. There is the South Coast setting, the world of seedy boarding houses, pubs and insecure employment. Against this background there is the doomed love affair, the Mosley supporters, the very specific time of spring and summer 1939, as Britain slides slowly towards the second world war. One can’t help but think of The Slaves of Solitude and Hangover Square.

There are crucial differences, though. The language here is terse and straightforward, a long way from Hamilton’s more ornate style. For example, the verbs are all shortened, “he’d”, “I’d”, and so on, there is a lot of dialogue and a lot of slang; the word “gertcher” appears on the first page. The novel is told in the first person, by the main character, Fanshawe, vacuum-cleaner salesman and aspiring writer, whereas Hamilton always favoured omniscient narration.

Along with the main narrative concerning Fanshawe’s problems with work, money and sex, there is a fascinating second one, a sort of ongoing speculation about what is suitable material for fiction, what can and cannot be put into a novel. Sukie Roper, Fanshawe’s married lover, lends him a copy of The Postman Always Rings Twice, by the American “hard-boiled” writer, James M Cain, and he takes this as his model.

Fanshawe reads a novel set in India and wonders how it would read if it had been written by the author of The Postman. He thinks of his own experiences in India, and this is printed in italics. He reflects: “There was so much now that I could write. Course a lot of it I couldn’t put in.” There are several other passages where thoughts printed in italics represent buried memories, the unpleasant truths that Fanshawe thinks must be held back, both from himself and the page.

While his character wrestles with this problem, Maclaren-Ross himself quietly pushes the boundary of what was acceptable to publishers in 1947. We are in no doubt that Fanshawe masturbates when he thinks about his former lover, or that he thinks the friend of his colleague’s wife is a lesbian, but the language used is so subtle that no censor could have objected.

Sukie reads another book, Auden and Isherwood’s Letters from Iceland, and it is from a poem in that book that the title is taken.

The coda, set in 1943 makes clear that the low-rent pre-war world will have to be replaced by something better after the war. This is another difference to Hangover Square; Maclaren-Ross was looking back at 1939 from a slightly greater distance. This raises the interesting question of just how many Mosley supporters were there in the 1930s, if one uses fiction as the measure. By 1947 it was clear that they had backed the wrong side, so it might have been tempting to make them slightly more prominent than they had been in reality.

I first became aware of Maclaren-Ross in the 1980s when I was reading Anthony Powell, and discovered that he had been the model for Trapnel in the later volumes of Dance. Powell was quite open about this in his memoirs. The only work of Maclaren-Ross’s that I could  find at that time was the Penguin edition of Memoirs of the Forties. There was something of a Maclaren-Ross revival in the early years of this century. Paul Willetts’ biography came out in 2003. Of Love and Hunger was reissued by Penguin in 2002 and that is when I first read it. Given the things that have been happening in my own life, it seemed appropriate to re-read it now.

In his memoir, Maclaren-Ross recalled a visit to Graham Greene, at that time living near Clapham Common. Greene was fascinated by the details of the vacuum cleaner trade and amazed to find out that Maclaren-Ross had actually done the job in reality. Was this the inspiration for Wormold’s job in Our Man in Havana?

Powell himself acknowledged that he had used Maclaren-Ross, slightly exaggerated, as the basis for Trapnel. He may also have borrowed an event from this novel. When Fanshawe loses his job, he has to move in a hurry. He is in such a state over the breakdown of his relationship with Sukie, that he forgets all about the manuscript of the novel he has been writing with her encouragement, and leaves it behind in a drawer. Rather more dramatically, in Dance, Pamela Widmerpool hurls Trapnel’s manuscript into the Regent’s Canal.

Finally, where is Of Love and Hunger set? Brighton, Worthing and Littlehampton are mentioned by name, but Bognor isn’t. If my memory is correct, the real life events on which the novel is based took place in Bognor. So, bugger Bognor, indeed.

Betjeman’s Banana Blush

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John Betjeman was a National Treasure before that term was in common use. His avuncular, teddy-bear-like presence in his many TV appearances saw to that. His poetry was hugely popular. Lightish, rhyming stuff that scanned, that you could understand, I remember older people saying. The poet of suburbia, of the everyday. In his campaigning for the preservation of Victorian architecture, he seemed to represent an older way of life that was being swept away.

But the themes of his poetry are the classic ones of all serious poetry – love and its absence, death, the existence or not of God. He can be very dark at times. Just think of Croydon, a poem that for me, speaks of the first world war without ever actually mentioning it directly. And there is a sexuality in some of his poems that is quite modern and that the Victorian poets he appeared to resemble would never have dared to publish.

In 1973, the year after he became Poet Laureate, he recorded the LP, Betjeman’s Banana Blush. This was not simply a record of him reading his verse, but placed his voice against music that had been specially composed for the occasion. There had been plenty of recordings of poets reading their work before. T S Eliot and Ezra Pound had done it. There was also the tradition of setting poetry to music, in which the poem became the lyrics of a song, such as John Ireland’s setting of John Masefield’s Sea Fever, or Charles Stanford’s setting of Henry Newbolt’s Drake’s Drum, familiar from the last night of the proms.

The Betjeman record was something a bit different, I think. The music, composed and conducted by Jim Parker, enhances the mood and tone of the poems. Thus, Indoor Games near Newbury, the story of a rather grand and chaperoned inter-war teenage party, alternates between a sort of fanfare-like tune and pastiche 1920s dance music. The melancholy piano, strings and French horn of Business Girls make the single women even lonelier. The slow melody of Youth and Age on Beaulieu River seems to glide like the sailing boat on the water. The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel is given a fast-paced treatment, creating a comic Victorian stage melodrama effect.

In The Cockney Amorist, the jazzy banjo and clarinet contrast with the tale of lost love. Perhaps most effective of all are the descending strings that open On the Portrait of a Deaf Man, where contemplation of the physical decay of his late father’s body leads the poet to question the existence of God.

It’s not really surprising that Jim Parker has gone on to have a very successful career as a film and television composer, including the theme for Midsomer Murders. The blend of words and music on the Betjeman record creates a sort of film in one’s mind.

Betjeman was sixty eight when he recorded this, but the overall effect makes him a strangely modern figure, having more in common with Ray Davies or Scott Walker, than John Masefield. After all, it’s not a million miles away from the sort of thing that John Cooper Clarke did only a few years later.

It appeared on Charisma Records, an independent company, whose label was a painting of the mad hatter. It was home to a roster of other English eccentrics such as Genesis. Betjeman was rather dismissive of his efforts here but this is a recording that has definitely passed the test of time.

I only discovered this marvellous recording a few years ago, but it certainly gave me a new understanding and appreciation of Betjeman’s poetry. If I not heard this, I might have been tempted to dismiss his writing as a bit “old hat”, as so many people did in the 1970s.

A Banana Blush is a cocktail, I believe, but I am not sure exactly what its ingredients are.