Raphael Last Post

1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-1-80017-304-0
Verlag: Lives and Letters
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 522 Seiten

A The Tablet Book of the Year Last Post has a double life; it both sounds for the gallant fallen and recalls what spurred freelance journalists, in all those yesterdays before e-mail, to get their copy in the pillar-box by deadline time. Frederic Raphael's compendium, written in the lively equivalent of the French epistolary second person singular, is a rare mixture of loud salutes, occasional raspberries and affectionate farewells. Its intimacy delivers frankness that formal biography, however plumped with proper sources, seldom achieves. To John Schlesinger, ''Fuck 'em all dear,' you used to say. And God knows, you did your best.'; Ludwig Wittgenstein saying 'What do you know about philosophy, Russell, what have you ever known?'; Cyril Connolly to William Somerset Maugham who was complaining about his lack of true lovers, '...then although the room was chilly, no one cared to poke poor Willie'; 'You bloody fool,' the first words said by a venerable professor to George Steiner. As the parade goes by, Last Post becomes what classicists call a 'prosopography'. Raphael's own versatility shows up in the varieties of tone and vocabulary in long letters of tribute to the two Stanleys Kubrick and Donen, Ken Tynan, Leslie Bricusse, Tom Maschler, Dorothy Nimmo the known and the less known but no less valued; finally, above all, in farewell to his beloved daughter Sarah.

Frederic Raphael was born in Chicago in 1931 and educated at Charterhouse and St John's College, Cambridge. His novels include The Glittering Prizes (1976), A Double Life (1993), Coast to Coast (1998) and Fame and Fortune (2007); he has also written short stories and biographies of Somerset Maugham and Byron. Frederic Raphael is a leading screenwriter, whose work includes the Academy Award-winning Darling (1965), Two for the Road (1967), Far from the Madding Crowd (1967), and the screenplay for Stanley Kubrick's last film, Eyes Wide Shut (1999). The first volume of Personal Terms was published by Carcanet in 2001, with subsequent volumes in 2004, 2006, 2008, 2011 and 2013.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Raphael, Frederic

Leseproben

To Leslie Bricusse.

Dear Leslie,

You, more than any other man, changed my life. I spent my first year at Cambridge honouring my father’s dated advice to wait for the world to beat a path to my door. I waited in vanity and in vain. During the long vac of 1951, my first, Beetle and I lived blissful weeks in hilltop Ramatuelle, up the coast from St Tropez. In the mornings, I typed chunks of my first novel. In the afternoons we had long, deserted Pampelonne Beach to ourselves. The Yanks had landed there seven years earlier. We ate Thé Brun biscuits, shared a banana for tea. Soon before we were due to return to England, it was clear that I should never finish the novel. Noël Coward had written Hay Fever in three days. I set out to emulate the Master. The eighty pages of With This Ring chattered off my Olivetti before we took our sorry way north to the tight little island.

Beetle and I had met at the Drama Group at the Liberal Jewish synagogue, where neither of us worshipped. Our friend Jackie Weiss arranged a reading of my play. It went so well that the Group voted to put it on. We rented a little theatre in Westbourne Grove for two or three nights. A quintet of my canvases, relics of Ramatuelle, dressed the sofa-and-two-armchairs set. Not to my great surprise, except when looking back, the little theatre was full each night. It didn’t occur to me that the play might be reviewed, but it was, in The Stage, generously. The only chiding comment was that I, the producer, had at one point walked backwards on stage.

Theatricals at St John’s, known (if only to themselves) as ‘the Gaiety’, had their camp at one end of a long table in Hall. At the first dinner of the new term, after I had read grace, a scholar’s privilege so irresistibly showy as to excuse my collusive ‘Per Christum Jesum dominum nostrum’, I joined Tony Becher at the far from gay end. The Gaiety swelled down the table towards us. They had seen The Stage. A dark horse was welcomed into their stable. A few days later, Peter Firth, President of the Young Writers’ Group whose mag had published a couple of my poems, came to my rooms. The Amateur Dramatic Club was sponsoring a play competition. He had heard that I had had a play put on in London and hoped I would participate. I explained that With This Ring was of small sophistication. He conceded that it was not likely to win, but it would give the judges something to sit on, so to say, and they duly sat on it. The winner was Hugh Thomas’s chichi fantasy about a still independent pre-war Venetian republic being wooed by Musso the Wop (as he was called in the wartime Dandy, unless it was Beano) and other caricatured suitors. Mark Boxer designed the Mondrian-style sets. Did Peter Hall direct? Some Peter or other.

I auditioned for the part of the American ambassador. My retrieved Chicago-born accent provoked no few laughs from the feet-up centurions in the stalls. An hour or two later, I met Toby Robertson, the tallest of them, outside my narrow digs in Park Street. I had been much the best of the Yanks, he told me. The selectors had gone for the experienced Tony Church, who was as American as lumpy porridge. Toby hoped I’d come to the first night. I did not. Some thirty years later, I found him a job in a radio play of mine. I can do forgive, rarely forget.

My from-day-one Johnian friend Tony Becher had joined the Footlights. I had funked the audition. I couldn’t sing for toffee nuts, as they used to say. Nor could Tony, but he had a facility for witty lyrics: ‘In a Graham Greenery / where God paints the scenery…’ There would also be a much applauded one about Lord Montagu ‘mount a few’ of Beaulieu. Today it would be indictable. You recruited Tony to collaborate on Ogden Nash-like squibs that appeared in The Daily Sketch. Your father was ‘in distribution’ for the Kemsley press. He despatched vans that delivered the papers.

At the beginning of the following year, Tony brought you to the rooms in the Wedding Cake I was sharing with a first-class soon-to-be-schoolmaster classicist. Dull as virtue, Brian Moore wore a tie-clip and disciplined his orderly hair with a triad of tortoise-shell implements. You, in double-vented, non-Harris-tweed sports jacket, camel-hair waistcoat with gold buttons, bow tie, specs more businesslike than scholarly, looked all set for something beyond Cambridge. I was never to see you dishevelled. Already secretary of the Footlights, you intended to start a musical comedy club. You had asked Firth, now President of the Footlights, who had written the best dialogue in the play competition won by Hugh Thomas’s little Venetian blinder. Peter fingered me. Would I care to write the ‘book’ for the show you meant to put on in a few terms’ time? Set on being a serious novelist, I never had the least wish to write musical comedies. I agreed at once.

Your charm had nothing to do with class or scholarship. Having spent a large part of the war in Hamilton, Ontario, you had the unrationed ambition of the new-worldly. You could even drive. You were one kind of mid-Atlantic; I quite another. You signed yourself ‘Lezzers’; I was never anybody’s Fredders. When I confessed that I had funked the audition for the Footlights, you said to consider myself a member forthwith. The straight theatrical A.D.C. had no attraction for you; no more did Granta, the smarties’ mag where Mark Boxer (‘Marc’ when signing his minimalist cartoons), Karl Miller and Nick Tomalin determined who was in and who was out. Only in Karl’s absence did Mark print a wishful story of mine about free living and loving in Chelsea. Later, I emulated Whistler’s fine art of making enemies by writing a column in Varsity under the editorship of that shameless son-of-a-rich man Michael Winner. Bob Gottlieb, early on-the-maker and later editor of The New Yorker, never forgave my mocking him and a wife he later dumped by citing Joe Bain’s canard that the reason they were rarely seen together was that they shared one pair of specs.

Rich and famous never occurred to me; published would do. You had no peripheral targets; success was your bull. Your surname announced you a rarity, of Belgian origin, was it? You were reading French, but the loudest volumes in your rooms in the modern Caius block, across Trinity Street, advertised your principal tutors to be Noël Coward, Cole Porter, George and Ira Gershwin. Your desk sported a framed photograph of you as a Sam Browned second-lieutenant. I cannot remember you speaking French, not even when you and I and Beetle and Tony Becher spent the following Easter vac in St Germain-des-Prés. Oh, Jonathan Miller told me years later of meeting you in the street and you said ‘Tiens’. Hard to believe, but it was reported with disdain, hence probably true. So what? We talk differently to different people, something even the best novelists rarely honour in their dialogue.

You already had songs – ‘Someone, somewhere, some day’ etc. – you wanted to fit into our show, no notion of a plot. You proposed that we seek oracular intelligence from Hugh Thomas. His rooms in Queen’s were across the wooden bridge on Silver Street. Assembled with geometrical ingenuity, its original elements had been composed by joinery alone. Dismantled for repairs, no one could put it together again without screws. Hugh received us with curly-haired hauteur. On the early steps of a pedestal far from showbiz, he condescended to be solicited. In his lop-sided voice, he affected to improvise a plot set in Transylvania where ‘youth leaders and fairies’ would sing and dance in charming counterpoint.

We deferred simultaneous blurts of incredulity until back on the clever bridge. In time, having been president of the Union, Hugh would veer left of centre and stand for parliament under Hugh Gaitskell’s patronage, in an unwinnable seat. He then swung right. He wrote one novel, The World’s Game, good title, light-fingered from a thirteenth-century Pope, before making a timely academic speciality of Cuba and becoming professorial. He married the lady daughter of an earl and was later made a peer, thanks to Mrs Thatcher. Upwards leads in all sorts of directions.

I have small memory of how Lady at the Wheel evolved. Its plot, about a female driver in the Monte Carlo rally, its Riviera setting, your lyrics (‘Pete, y’know, / Is kinda sweet, y’ know’) and Robin Beaumont’s and your music and my playing-for-laughs dialogue made small appeal to chic tastes. Noël Coward furnished a strip of common ground and up came Lady at the Wheel, at one time entitled Zany Miss Dando. Long live second thoughts! The sole acknowledgement that there had been a war was a comic German, played by Colin Cantlie, son of an admiral, with a feather in his Tyrolean hat. I spent much more time than a scholar should ‘tickling up the book’, as you put it.

You persuaded a freckled Canadian brunette called Jane Carling to bring her singing voice across the Atlantic. Pretty girls accumulated at your call, blonde and breasty Julie Hamilton in particular, daughter of screenwriter Jill Craigie (‘Craggy Jill’ in Bricusse-speak) and step-daughter...