AND ANOTHER THING
Learning to be an old entertainer
PAUL JOHNSON It has just occurred to me that, for the first time, the holders of all the four great offices of state, Prime Minister, Home and Foreign Secretaries, and Chancellor of the Exchequer, are younger than me. Three of the four, indeed, are so young that such phrases as 'Can I do you now, Sir?' and 'Don't forget the Diver' mean nothing to them. All of which suggests that I must think about growing old. I mean, not just older but old. 'The thing about growing old, dear boy,' Malcolm Muggeridge used to say, 'is that you must decide, well in advance, how you are going to play it.' As he pointed out, some people avoided the problem because youth or even middle age had eluded them anyway. There was, for instance, an Archbishop of Canterbury called Ramsay who had looked and talked like an old man since his mid-20s. And C.P. Snow was always an ancient, an abso- lute Nestor, though he was only 50 when I first met him.
In any event, better to play it old than young. There is nothing more off-putting than the jaunty step and glittering eye of a well-preserved old man. Evelyn Waugh started his superannuated act in his mid- 40s, quickly adding props, good for on- stage business, such as an ear-trumpet. Lord Curzon used a footstool: the arrival of a servant with this antique piece of furni- ture was always a signal to his cabinet col- leagues that 'the Marquis is on his way'. J.B. Priestley, who had thought a lot about the histrionics of age (he died on the eve of his 90th birthday), awarded the palm to Harold Macmillan: 'He gets over the prob- lem of being old by pretending he's very, very old.' It was true: sitting at the head of the table at the Beefsteak Club, or facing the largely hostile younger generations at the Tory Philosophy Group, he engaged in elaborate quavering and doddering, scarce- ly able to lift a glass of Dom Perignon to his withered lips, which made his flashes of wit, penetration and pure, undisguised venom all the more effective. By the time he died in 1986, aged 92, he had been doing the centenarian for a decade, giving the impression his pockets were stuffed with telegrams from the Queen.
Seriously, though, the real problem of age is how to make the most benevolent use of that other form of constantly accu- mulating capital you can't take with you: memory. Unlike money, you can't bequeath it. It vanishes in the instant of death. So the
old distribute it lavishly, while there's still time, and not just once but repeatedly. 'Old men forget,' wrote Shakespeare. That is just the trouble. They do not forget. They remember only too well, and are eager to press their vintage treasures into your hands, or rather ears. Compton Mackenzie was a minatory example. He had lived a long, varied and interesting life, every sec- ond of which he remembered with breath- taking clarity. He was a superb teller of true stories, in his soft, Highlander's lilt, and the first half-hour of his company was pure magic. The second half-hour you edged away, more and more desperately. A weakness of age is a reluctance to recognise that, in conversation, it is more blessed to receive than to give, accompanied by a growing irritation at anecdotus interruptus. Recently I have noticed that Kingsley Amis has perfected an impressive new version of his goggled-eyed-serial-murderer-raving- lunatic face, accompanied by a testy 'Would you mind allowing me to finish my story?'
The way to solve this surplus memory problem, I believe, is to be like the Sibyl and wait to be asked. The publisher Martin Secker, who lived well into his 90s, and at whose house I used to listen to Mackenzie, one .of his first authors, had exactly the right reticence. His personal knowledge of literary men and women went right back to the first decade of the century. He was not diffident about sharing it but he always waited to be asked. 'Martin, what was Arthur Ransome like before he discovered 'Let's play soldiers.' Swallows and Amazons?' Is it true Norman Douglas was caught in flagrante delicto in the V&A?' Did D.H. Lawrence have a Notts accent?' You would then get the answers, in accurate detail. I admired a similar self-restraint in Lady Violet Bon- ham-Carter. She had been endowed, like Mackenzie, with total recall but she did not exercise it at your expense. If, however, you inquired of her what it was like to take a hansom cab up to Hampstead at the height of the Commons row with the House of Lords over Lloyd George's budget, she would tell you, down to the last clip-clop. She would even tell you which member of her father's cabinet was most likely to take advantage of a shared hansom-cab rug to put his hand on a girl's knee. The glint in LG's roving eye, the whiff of FE's cigars and his brandy-breath, Lord Beaverbrook's taste in chintzes, the way Mrs Gladstone dressed and Mrs Greville undressed impossible to better the meticulous bravura with which this eloquent old woman recalled ante-bellum London society. Harold Nicolson was good too: his account of delivering the declaration of war to the German Embassy on the night of 4 August 1914 was electrifying. But, like most of his tales, it was a bit too rounded; it smacked of midnight oil. Nor did he wait to be asked before telling it.
The conclusion, then, is that the secret of a popular old age — as of any age, come to think of it — is the curbing of self-indul- gence. The old should not broadcast their memories, like pop-music in a horrid pub, but wait, like books on the shelves of a library, to be consulted. Even better than waiting for the young to ask questions, is to put them yourself. The most successful handler of old age I know is Lord Long- ford. One reason for this may be that he always greets you with a query. 'Are you still suffering withdrawal symptoms at hav- ing to give up Mrs Thatcher?"What do you think of Joan Collins?'Written any good books lately?' Though he is now 86 and recently had a bruising struggle with a grandfather clock, I heard him last week 'set the table on a roar' at a glittering Park Lane banquet. Afterwards, he asked me: 'My new gag — "The good news is that I have mislaid my speech and will have to improvise; the bad news is that I've mislaid my watch too" — did it make you laugh? Did it work?' The art of being an old enter- tainer is to consult the audience.
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