Places and friends he still can recall
Penelope Lively
YESTERDAY CAME SUDDENLY by Francis King Constable, £16.95, pp.328 Autobiography comes in many guises — as stern narrative, as expiation, as justifi- cation, as smokescreen. Francis King is an accomplished raconteur and it is in this style that he has chosen to write his — a sequence of anecdotes by means of which the great array of people with whom he has been associated trip in and out of the pages. The result is a book which is always entertaining and sometimes moving. It is a book about others quite as much as it is about the author, which is appropriate, since clearly Francis King's consuming interest is in the quirky behaviour of other people — just as well, for a novelist. He notes that someone once observed that he loved his friends for their faults — a point which is evident indeed as one reads of the egotism of Olivia Manning or the perversi- ties of L.P. Hartley or of Joe Ackerley. Though it should be said that all such por- traits are as affectionate as they are candid. Malice is reserved for the few who really got up the author's nose: Lindsay of Balli- ol, a hapless British Council representative, C.P. Snow (`. . . a Baked Alaska — sweet, warm and gungy on the outside, hard and cold within').
Francis King spent his early childhood in India and was then sent to England as a `remittance child' at the age of nine, just like Kipling, by whose harrowing story Baa Baa Black Sheep he had already been unnerved. In the event, he was never treat- ed in any way like Kipling was, but he cites vividly the feeling of being an 'extra' in other people's homes and attributes to that experience his subsequent tendency to please and placate. The account of child- hood and of his family is in many ways the most attractive part of the book. Especially strong is Francis King's honest and percep- tive view of his loving but ambivalent relationship with his mother, who lived to a great age and remained always a central figure in his life.
It has been a life very much on the move: Italy, Greece, Finland, Japan. Francis King went overseas for the British Council at the time when the Council attracted colourful and maverick figures as much as or rather than career officials. The Council may have lost out on efficiency, but it was vastly enriched. He began with the British Insti- tute in Florence soon after the war, from which period spring chatty and anecdotal descriptions of expatriate Florentine soci- ety centred around such as Harold Acton and Bernard Berenson which set the tone for the rest of the book. From then on we
are in the thick of it — Francis King seems to have known everyone you've ever heard of (and a fair number that you haven't) and the names hurtle forth upon each other's heels: Angus Wilson, Edith Evans, Merlina Mercouri, Harold Nicolson, Louis MacNeice, Somerset Maugham, Anthony Blunt .. . there is no end to it. And if at points this unstoppable catalogue has a whiff of Jennifer's Diary, the writing certain- ly does not. Francis King seems to be endowed with the gift of total recall (or else with an unusually rich archive of diaries and notes) — flicking back through the autobiography you realise that it is as richly spattered with dialogue as a novel.
The second half of the book is taken up with the author's years back in England, having left the Council, living first in Brighton and then in London — packed years in which he writes most of his novels and short stories, does theatre reviewing, and weathers a libel action, the account of which will have many another novelist breaking out in a cold sweat and anxiously reconsidering their own latest typescript. Needing information for literary purposes about the life-style of Brighton deckchair attendants, he puts an ad in the local paper and thus meets the young man who is to become his lover and companion of the next 20 years, and of whose death from Aids he gives an unflinching and acutely painful account. His beloved mother dies also, and he himself encounters cancer. The last section of the book is both brave and sad, and takes the reader back to the author's own comment at the beginning, that at times he feels 'as if life were a mat- ter of picking one's way over the thinnest crust of earth above a sleeping volcano'.
Public events are curiously absent except for a flurry of international involve- ment when the author is International Chairman of PEN (a sprightly account of this, and various people's hash settled). I would have liked a little pruning of the parade of personalities in favour of more appraisal of the countries in which he lived. And, especially, it would have been illuminating to hear more of the author's reaction to an entirely changed climate of opinion about homosexuality. For today's young, the pre-Wolfenden days when sex between consenting adult males was an indictable offence must seem like the Stone Age. Francis King has surprisingly little to say about this, except for the comment that an increased toleration made possible for him intense and valued friendships with women. But the revolution in opinion seems to me such a significant one that it would have been enlightening to hear more about it from someone centrally involved.
These are relatively minor carps. This is an autobiography with all the appeal of a compelling novel, and no doubt right now those of the large cast of characters who are still around will be busy letting the author know what they feel about their roles.
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