High-pitched buzzing from the booksy girls and boys
When I first experienced literary life in London it was 1955 and poor Anthony Eden was prime minister. His delightful wife Clarissa was to be seen at literary parties and, amazingly enough, still is. The great panjandrums were Cyril Connolly and Raymond Mortimer on the Sunday Times, Philip Toynbee and Harold Nicolson on the Observer, and V.S. Pritchett and John Raymond on the New Statesman. John was my friend, and he opened all the doors to me, doors which were firmly shut in many eager faces. Every morning, in the Commercial on the King’s Road, or the French Pub in Dean Street, he and Maurice Richardson would pool their knowledge of book-launch parties that evening, and decide which to go to. I would tag along. These events were worth attending, too. Hosts would still serve hard liquor. Jock Murray, at his gatherings in the splendid first-floor drawing room in Albemarle Street, where Byron’s memoirs had been burnt in the grate still to be seen, used to pride himself on mixing the best dry martinis in London. Gin was served in buckets. At the Dorchester party to launch Alanbrooke’s memoirs there were champagne cocktails: a cube of sugar, soaked in Angostura bitters, with a spoonful of Courvoisier brandy, topped up with Mumm’s. This is a treat not often experienced in 21st-century London, and rare even in those golden days.
Famous writers still turned up in the Fifties. It was not unusual to see T.S. Eliot, Auden, Betjeman and Louis MacNiece in earnest converse together. At George Weidenfeld’s parties, the best of the lot in my opinion, you got the international figures: Edmund Wilson, Günter Grass, Sagan, Moravia, Mary McCarthy, and dozens of ravishing girls. Afterwards we would dine at Fava’s, each armed with a bottle of claret bought round the corner at the off licence: the three of us plus Hugh Thomas, Terry Kilmartin, Henry Fairlie, and sometimes dangerous characters like John Davenport and Con Fitzgibbon, good for a scrap at the downing of a double Campari. Afterwards the Gargoyle beckoned or Muriel’s Bar, or the Mandrake, where desperate characters like Julian Maclaren-Ross, Robert Colquhoun and his crony MacBryde consorted in tipsy boasting and snarling. There were plenty of latenight parties too, to which we would hurtle in crammed taxis.
It is my contention that literary London has not been the same since the Fifties. There has never been another bruiser like Behan, or writing toffs like Quennell, Spender and Waugh, or tasty morsels like Sonia Orwell, Barbara Skelton and the delicious new arrival from Ireland, Edna O’Brien. In the course of a single evening you might come across old Mugg, then editor of Punch, Nancy Mitford, over from Paris, Norman Mailer, ready to fight you or weep on your shoulder, and Tony Powell, looking for material to transform into his Music of Time.
However, the Sixties and Seventies had their points too, and even the Eighties. Echoes of those days are finely recorded in Jeremy Lewis’s Grub Street Irregular: Scenes from Literary Life, recently published by HarperCollins. He got to London a decade after I did, and dug himself deep into the literary catacombs, being agent, publisher, dogsbody, ghost and rewrite man, as well as helping to edit ephemeral magazines, and new arrivals like the Oldie and the Literary Review. He is celebrated for his good nature, equability, all-round skills, and as the father of the beautiful Jemima. I found his book a treasury of anecdotes and information, filling in many gaps in my own knowledge. For instance, he tells us all about a strange man called Derek Verschoyle, a handsome operator on the literary scene, described to me by a voluptuous lady on a bar-stool as ‘the best plater I’ve ever come across’. It seems he was the model for Peter Beste-Chetwynde in Decline and Fall, and later a British wartime secret agent. He ran a publishing firm when I knew him, and had five wives, though not at the same time. He asked me to write him a book but I did not like the look of his set-up: precarious, as indeed it proved.
Another publisher who asked me for a book, and who figures largely in Lewis’s scenario, was a grotesque, repellent and yet intriguing person called Charles Fry. Apart from the sinister and saturnine figure of Tom Driberg, I have never met a man who radiated the bleaker side of sex more powerfully than Fry. He came from a chocolate family and had a rather grand manner. ‘As soon as you deliver your manuscript, I will take you to the best orgy in London,’ he promised. I resented this, with its snooty implication that I was familiar only with second-rate orgies, and I turned him down. Not long after he committed suicide, or rather his pathetic body was found amid a scattering of gin bottles and sleeping tablets. Lewis provides as many hard facts about the man as can be gathered at this late date, eerie glimpses into the darker side of the world where books float bumpily to the printers on a rocky stream of alcohol. There are other excellent portraits: A.L. Rowse, seen in his Cornish manor house, growling about a world run by ‘second-raters’. André Deutsch, perhaps the meanest publisher who has ever existed, who downgraded all the electric light-bulbs in his office to 40 watt. He was the only man in the trade who ever succeeded in pulling a fast one on me. Norah Smallwood, the fiercest lady ever to rise to the top in the business of putting out books, who made her office at Chatto & Windus a place where authors sweated and trembled. Naim Attallah, who ran Quartet and many other publishing ventures, and who, I learn, was known as ‘Tiger’ (like Stanley Baldwin). There is a curious portrait of Bron Waugh, which stresses his taciturnity, and another of Ali (‘Name Dropper’) Forbes, author of many rambling reviews, who specialised in telling you everything except what you actually wanted to know. But the longest and best profile of all is of the amazing Skelton, whom Lewis got to know when he was writing his biography of Cyril Connolly, her one-time husband and probably the only man this precocious bedrabbit ever loved.
When Lewis got to know her, Barbara was in her seventies, though she had lost none of her attractive and maddening ways: horrible perceptiveness about the weaknesses of men, especially literary ones; ability to sting, wound deeply, and excite; and slanty-eyed allure, radiating mysterious possibilities. When I met her in the Fifties, she was the Pamela Flitton as described by Anthony Powell, a huge female force for the destruction of male egos. She was Diana the Huntress, knocking men off their perches of pomposity and power — and pride. She seemed to take men up, and put them down — heavily — at will. I liked her and said so. ‘No. You’re too thin for me.’ I was thin, it’s true: six foot one and under ten stone. Why did she like fat men? ‘I like them to lie on top of me and squash me a bit.’ She had an extraordinary nose for literary merit, and equally for the phoney, which she would condemn with cruel derision. She gave Cyril a hard time, but then he deserved it. She could write well, and her two books of memoirs are, in places, quite magical and very funny.
Lewis brings her back to life skilfully, and I am grateful to him for his book, a series of coloured slides of days when London was the book centre of the world, with a splendid cast of characters who performed their eccentric rituals, to the delight of those privileged to clamber on the precarious carousel.
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