Was that all there was?
Helen Osborne
MAINLY ABOUT LINDSAY ANDERSON by Gavin Lambert Faber, £18.99, pp. 302 The price of repression is extremely high,' Tony Richardson observed of Lind- say Anderson in 1955 when they launched the Free Cinema movement. Later, when Anderson had become an associate direc- tor at the Royal Court Theatre, Tony referred to him as 'the Singing Virgin'. The label stuck, and I think we all knew why.
After Anderson's death in 1994 a large cache of somewhat disturbing diaries was discovered. Gavin Lambert, egghead critic, screenwriter and Lindsay's friend for over 50 years, was persuaded to plunder them as the basis for a memoir. This may not have been wise: the main problem with Mainly About Lindsay Anderson is that there is far too much baloney about Lambert, who proves to be the most self-regarding of chroniclers.
Sixty years ago, when they were both pupils at Cheltenham College, boys were divided into Toughs, Wets and Tarts. Lam- bert was a committed Tart, having been seduced into the Greek ideal by a music master when he was 11. 'It made me feel superior to the people who wouldn't or couldn't understand.' The closet was never an option. 'I would have felt it "abnormal" to be "normal".'
Anderson was altogether more troubled and equivocal. 'It seems, then, that I am homosexual,' he writes in his diary. 'Oh God. It is really rather awful and I suppose I shall never get rid of it.' And then, 'Some- times everything seems just so difficult to battle with.' But the most obvious misfor- tune of his life was that he always fell for unobtainable heterosexuals, usually mar- vied, often with children: Albert Finney, Richard Harris, Malcolm McDowell. . . 'I have the wrong mind in the wrong body,' he admitted to his journal.
Lambert had no such misgivings, as we discover in more squelchy detail than is strictly necessary. For him gay sex was the dizzy centre of a bright pink universe. He whoops off in a flounce of chiffon and a flutter of gold-painted eyelids to the flesh- pots of Hollywood, leaving Lindsay in his grey north London redoubt, fuelled by a legacy from Bells whisky, to buckle down and set the world to rights.
Movies were his passion, John Ford and Bufiuel his mentors. His own films would be 'gauntlets thrown down to the audi- ence'. First he made advertisements for Cracker-Barrel cheese and Lux toilet soap, then documentaries (Every Day Except Christmas, Oh, Dreamland) and, finally, the gauntlets, among them This Sporting Life, If . ., Britannia Hospital — all metaphors for his abiding love-hate relationship with England.
`We led parallel lives,' claims Lambert but, leaving aside the issue of homosexuali- ty (which our biographer is reluctant to do), there is little here to explain the almost schizophrenic paradoxes of Ander- son's personality, and particularly the mat- ter of the Royal Court. When he arrived there in 1958, his co-director Anthony Page says it was 'like a home waiting for him'. Yet Philip Roberts in The Royal Court Theatre and the Modem Stage (Cambridge University Press) recently revealed just how disruptive he could be.
George Devine wrote to him in 1959, 'I have known, of course, of your bad rela- tions with most of the staff and bursts of temper with inferiors, but what has sur- prised me more than anything is your lack `Were you born in a barn conversion?' of drive and initiative.' Even at home, it seems, he could be an unpopular manipula- tor, creating factions rather than collabora- tions. He would never fully commit himself to the grinding job of running the theatre. `To be critical from the sideline,' says Roberts, 'became in Anderson's case a fine art.'
There was a violence beneath the surface of his pedagogic bullying. He could, famously, intimidate a press conference with a weary sigh or a loud, patrician sniff, and I once watched him cruelly reduce a loyal and talented casting director to tears over a mere memory lapse. The designer Jocelyn Herbert, herself a victim of his venom, excuses it: 'I came to realise that Lindsay treated all his favourites that way. Abuse was a kind of affection.' Hmm Contradictions abounded. As a director he always seemed to me most assured in `Storeyland', that muscular, muddy world of David Storey's plays that was miles away from his own. Yet Peter O'Toole, who appeared in Anderson's first Court produc- tion, The Long and the Short and the Tall, claims, 'Lindsay's idea of the working class was perfumed shit.' Alan Bates feels that `Lindsay kept actors on his side because he genuinely liked them. He made you laugh, kept you alert, but didn't make you bristle at criticism, which is quite an art.' Ralph Richardson, however, flew at him to rehearsal for Home: 'I don't like being addressed like a schoolboy. I don't like this flicking headmaster act.' Anderson was mortified.
Alan Bennett remembers 'how consis- tently and constructively kind he was. • ,• shouldering other people's burdens'. It s true that his mansion flat became a hospice for the mildly or seriously desperate, including two suicidal actresses, an occa- sionally demented screenwriter and all unhinged nephew. But at the same time Lindsay recorded, 'Every day an increasing impatience and intolerance with those vibe surround me.' Latterly he was `no longer in love with the human race' (had he ever been? It takes a certain sense of humour). He had buried his self-confessed 'insecurity' ie° well and the movie money-men were weary of his hectoring arrogance. Dreams of a leather-clad motorcyclist who will sweep me away' were long gone. John Ford saw the world going in a way he could neither approve nor wholly under,' stand, and this made him sad. I don t approve the way it's going any more than Ford did, but I think I understand it better which makes me even sadder.
Most nights he would watch television, and 'cook myself a tin of mince, a tin 0! carrots and two poached eggs', with only Rachel Roberts's ashes, gift-wrapped 111 Versace bag, for company. He called tilf documentary he made about himself' shown posthumously, Is That All Thee ills c' Perhaps it was. A bleak epitaph, het t deserves a wiser memorialist than Lambe*. •
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