Murderers and Other Friends Page 21

  This means that your translation must not only have exactly the right number of syllables to fit the musical phrase, but the long and short syllables must be properly positioned and the accents, or emphases, must fit the appropriate musical notes. No doubt the author of the original libretto had a far easier task. He could ask the composer to write for his words. The modern translator is entirely bound by the long-established and much-loved music, and there was no possibility of my asking Johann Strauss if he could see his way to giving me a couple of extra notes or moving an accent a couple of centimetres to the left.

  So I began my task, ignorant of Auden’s warning, but I was soon faced with the difficulties he describes. I sat on an Italian beach with my literal translation and my Walkman and started to fit English words to the German libretto. I would think of what I hoped was a joke, but when it was reduced to the exact number of syllables as there were in the German, when I tried to follow the German rhymes and get the stresses on the same syllables as the German, the joke began to look a little contorted, not to say strangled. So I started again, this time in Switzerland on a balcony in the snow. My family grew used to seeing me on our holidays sitting with an extremely worried expression and an opera in my ears. I found the big solo arias the easiest. The trios were like solving a difficult crossword puzzle in a foreign tongue.

  At last I had what I thought was right and fitted, and then I spent happy days with a charming lady répétitrice and a piano in the catacombs below Covent Garden. She was exceedingly generous, and if my words didn’t quite fit she would pop in an extra note or two that Johann Strauss never thought necessary. Later I was handed over to Covent Garden’s learned and brilliant head of music, who was far stricter with me. He took away my extra notes, all except one, which I challenge any musicologist to discover. Then, one happy day, I sat in a big rehearsal room where the opera chorus, taking various parts, sang the whole of my translation to me. By this time, miracle of miracles, it seemed to fit, more or less, but the carpet could not yet be tacked down; the supreme test was yet to come.

  Weeks before Christmas I was in another rehearsal room, at a read-through with the cast. Now read-throughs are part of my life. I’m used to the draughty rooms, the instant coffee, the set plan taped to the floor and actors who murmur, ‘I don’t think I’d say this.’ But a cast who said, with great politeness, ‘This has got too many consonants,’ or ‘If I say “divorce” on a high note it comes out as “divorce”,’ or ‘Please don’t give me a “th”,’ added a new and alarming complexity to a writer’s life. The confusing thing is that the rules don’t seem to be universally applicable; while one singer abominates a ‘th’, another can put up with it and give it welcome.

  There are general rules, however, which Auden has stated: ‘An aria contains a number of high notes, long runs and phrases which repeat like an echo. Any English version, therefore, must provide open vowels for the high notes and runs and phrases which can sound like echoes.’ So there is yet another burden the joke or moving phrase has to bear; it’s no good its ‘ee’ sound coinciding with a high note. Once again the music is of supreme importance. It also seems to me that the singer’s task is so indescribably difficult, that if the likes of Carol Vaness and Thomas Allen, who sang my Fledermaus, shy at a ‘th’, they must be accommodated by the translator. So far as I am concerned they were welcome to all the open vowels they needed.

  Just to be in the great gilt and plush horseshoe of Covent Garden was a pleasure, and a lot of rehearsals seemed to take place on the stage, with the conductor in command and the director wandering about, quietly moving the singers as though they were pieces in a gigantic game of chess. I had strayed into a new world and, when I thought I shouldn’t be there because I can’t sing, I comforted myself by remembering that Johann Strauss the younger couldn’t waltz.

  Entertainments vary from the sublime to the deeply embarrassing, venues from the glories of Covent Garden to a huge gathering of fairly elderly comics at a dickie-bow and rubber chicken do in a London hotel. The invitation to speak at their dinner came as I queued up with an actor in a canteen during a rehearsal; like death it seemed sufficiently far away to be acceptable. As with death, the date inevitably came.

  I looked round the vast room and saw that every one of what seemed hundreds of comics was male. The one I was sitting next to, who enjoyed, for the evening, the title of Commander, told me that this was so the jokes could be ‘free and easy with no holds barred’. It was then I realized that I was in hell. ‘I only played in a small family circus’ – the Commander was as nervous as I was – ‘and a function like this scares the wits out of me. What’s more, I do not read with fluency.’

  The melon balls were hardly on the table before a wispy old comedian got to his feet and yelled, ‘I say, I say, I say, Commander,’ at the top table. ‘Yes, Sandy,’ the Commander stammered back uncertainly. ‘ What do you say?’ ‘I say, what’s the difference between soixante-neuf and a terrorist?’ ‘I do not know, Sandy. What is the difference between soixante-neuf and a terrorist?’ ‘With a terrorist you can see the bugger coming!’ The answer was drowned in a wave of laughter, but the Commander was deeply frustrated. ‘I had a great act worked out with Sandy,’ he was telling me. ‘When he said, “I say, I say, I say, Commander”, I was going to ask, “Who the fuck let you in here?” It would have been a great gag and, I tell you, we worked on it. But it slipped my mind at the vital moment, you see, and now the act’s fucked up.’

  From then on the ‘I say, I say, I say’s’ volleyed and thundered from every distant corner of the vast room and the poor Commander, nervous as ever, stood up, flinching, to the cannonade. Then we had a trip down memory lane, golden oldies, the dirtiest jokes of long-dead comedians, disinterred. At last the Commander’s dreaded moment came and he had to stand up to speak. His words were written in very large letters and a kindly fellow comic stood beside him, running a finger under each word, the task Hollywood producers are said to perform for themselves when they read scripts. His speech was frequently interrupted by shouts of ribaldry. ‘How did I do?’ he asked his helper when he sat down exhausted. ‘You did fine, Commander,’ the kindly comic did his best to be reassuring. ‘All the laughs was at you and not with you. But you did fine.’ My speech, which has been considered racy and once caused a blue-rinsed lady to walk out of a literary lunch in Chichester, sounded in that company like the address of a celibate vicar to the Women’s Institute.

  At the end of the evening a hitherto silent comic got up to propose a vote of thanks to me, the visiting speaker. He was a ventriloquist and he held a sort of Gladstone bag at arm’s length, from which emerged a disembodied voice. From then on the evening sunk to even greater depths, for he opened the bag and removed from it a two-foot model of an erect penis, with which he held a lively conversation. ‘Does this chap work much?’ I asked the Commander. ‘Not in public,’ he assured me. ‘It’s mainly private functions.’ At which the ventriloquist’s doll began to compliment me on my speech. I sat there in full black-tie depression. This is my life, I told myself, surrounded by an all male audience and being thanked by a prick.

  Chapter 21

  What is the 20th of June Group?’

  The person who asked this question was the chairman of the fringe meeting at a Labour Party conference. We had eaten at a Blackpool restaurant and were now off to talk. In fact our collection of around twenty writers and journalists got its name because we first met, in a Campden Hill sitting-room, one 20th of June 1988.

  ‘It’s called that,’ I said, hoping to raise some sort of laugh in the car as we drove past the Waxworks and the Tower to the conference centre, ‘after the well-known Luxemburg revolution of the 20th of June 1849. A group of intellectuals, you will remember, took part in a failed coup d’état. There was a show trial and they were expelled to Paris, where they sat drinking champagne in La Coupole and remembering their glorious past.’ I didn’t get much of a reaction to this at the time, although Penny smiled tolera
ntly. However, when the chairman introduced me to the comrades and brothers, he said that I would talk about the 20th of June Group, which was named after the well-known Luxemburg revolution of 1849. At this, I heard some murmurings of assent from the audience and whispers of ‘Of course, Luxemburg, 1849.’ Our movement was, it seemed, easily misunderstood.

  I had known Harold Pinter since the late fifties. Michael Codron had taken the old Lyric, Hammersmith, for a season when it was in its rightful place in the middle of a whirl of traffic and hadn’t been moved, in all its beauty, into a grey building where it’s stuck like a once-glamorous actress in an old people’s home. He put on Harold’s The Birthday Party and my first plays, The Dock Brief and What Shall We Tell Caroline?, and a production by Michael Elliott of Ibsen’s Little Eyolf. Harold was some seven years younger than I and he had the unnerving habit of standing closer to you than you had bargained for. The fates, in handing out qualities, had given him the gift of aggression. He made some use of it, indeed, in life; but it was a boon beyond price in the theatre. It’s his characters’ aggression, expressed, suppressed, always unexpected and often terrifying, that gives his plays their supercharged energy. He also has, perhaps from his experience as an actor, an infallible a sense of theatre as some people have a perfect ear for music. Added to all this, he has a marvellous feeling for the rhythms of dialogue. With all these gifts it’s idle to say that Harold’s plays mean less than they hint at, when they hint so effectively at so much.

  It’s no secret that Harold’s theatrical sense of aggression sometimes explodes into real life drama. It’s less well known that he is kind and generous, loyal to the friends he helps in all sorts of unheard of ways, seeing them out of difficulties or getting their poems printed. On the morning after dramatic and seemingly serious quarrels he is a great one for sending flowers.

  After the season of plays at the Lyric we did a revue (a vanished form of entertainment, greatly to be regretted) called One to Another, which was largely written by Harold, N.F. Simpson and me. Harold’s sketches were unforgettable and greatly applauded, in contrast to The Birthday Party which, with the notable exception of Harold Hobson, had been quite misunderstood by the critics. As a trio we wrote an evening of three plays, which were also done by Michael Codron at the Arts Theatre and the Criterion. It was during rehearsals for this triple bill that the late Emlyn Williams said to me, as the oldest writer present, ‘Well, you just got into the New Wave as the tube doors were closing!’

  In all these years Harold seemed quite unpolitical, as far removed from the business of party politics as his hero and mentor Samuel Beckett. The only event which might be called political, and which moved him to anger, so far as I can remember, was the fact that his son was expected to take part in religious teaching at school. Later, I think much later, he became concerned with American imperialism in South America. He was also convinced that in Britain police horses are trained to shit on demonstrators. The aggression of dictatorships and power politics had been strongly confined in the claustrophobic world of his plays; later his feelings became more widely diffused and, perhaps, less focused.

  It was the end of the eighties, the world had changed, and those headily optimistic days when we had done our plays together had receded as deeply into the shadows of history as the fighting forties or the tinkling twenties. Penny and I went out to dinner with Harold and Antonia Pinter and I happened to regret the apparent absence of left-wing journalists; even old lefties such as Woodrow Wyatt and Paul Johnson had fallen victim to the stentorian siren song and apparently erotic allure of Mrs Thatcher. The New Statesman, once powerful and respected, had sunk into a swamp of sociology and political correctness; the Spectator had captured the young who, dismissing all political ideals as airy-fairy claptrap, had become middle-aged long before their time. All we had believed in was dismissed as dangerous or absurd or both. After I had gone on in this vein for a while, Harold had me rattled by exclaiming, ‘Do you realize what you’ve been saying! What’re we going to do about it then?’ It was some time since the Bishop of Durham had dismissed miracles as vulgar conjuring-tricks, so I didn’t think we could convert conservative newspaper-owners or bring Bernard Levin out in favour of Neil Kinnock overnight. But it did seem we might get a few friends together to discuss the situation. Antonia, who, having been married to Hugh Fraser, a leading Conservative MP, was experienced in such gatherings, said the great thing was that someone should read a ‘paper’. So invitations were sent out for the first meeting: the date the 20th of June 1988, the place Harold and Antonia’s sitting-room. I think that what I, at any rate, wanted to do was to redress the balance of the political debate and remind everyone too young to remember that we had done pretty well with a Labour government.

  As Antonia suggested, we had a ‘paper’ and Anthony Howard read it. He said that it was quite inconceivable that Labour could ever win another election, and we listened in growing gloom. In the subsequent discussion we did our best to raise our spirits with more optimistic forecasts. Germaine Greer came, and Salman Rushdie, Melvyn Bragg, Peter and Thelma Nichols, Margaret Jay, Michael Holroyd, Margaret Drabble and many others. In the subsequent meetings, when Denis Healey, Jonathan Porritt, John Smith and Barbara Castle came with ‘papers’, we began to educate ourselves. As David Hare said, the meetings were our evening-classes.

  We did, however, have an immediate and hilarious effect on the world outside Campden Hill Square.

  News of our meeting, ferreted out by Frank Johnson, who worked at the Sunday Telegraph, first appeared in his paper a few days after our inauguration. The reaction that followed showed how far the press had moved towards the Thatcherite ideal, which was, put briefly, that there is no such thing as society so we needn’t worry about that; private citizens should devote their energies to getting on in the world, making money, buying shares and voting Conservative at appropriate intervals, and for writers and artists to worry their pretty little heads about politics is simply laughable. Even such a respected columnist as Peter Jenkins in the Independent thought that the idea of a Socialist intellectual had become absurd and, with a surprisingly vogueish view of political history, said that ‘radical chic’ had gone out of style and ‘reactionary chic’ was now the rage. So we awoke to find ourselves ridiculously newsworthy. In numerous London houses Tory groups were meeting and discussing politics unpilloried; indeed, Mrs Thatcher’s ideas for government emerged from smoke-and claret-filled rooms. It was clear that no such luxuries were to be allowed to the left. We were meant to assemble in draughty church halls, drink strong tea and wear anoraks with bobble hats. A Spectator diarist went so far as to accuse Antonia of some kind of treachery because she allowed leftish bottoms to perch upon the sofas on which the Conservative Philosophy Group had once sat listening to ‘papers’. The headline on the Spectator’s cover, LADY ANTONIA’S INFIDELITY, promised more revelations than the paper was able to deliver.

  There is another assumption and that is that only the poor should be allowed to complain on behalf of the poor. If you earn a regular income, or have put by a few savings, you should forget the unemployed and avert your eyes from those sleeping in doorways. This is a convenient belief for those in power as it may silence eloquent voices of criticism; my only regret now is that our voices were not more eloquent, and that we didn’t make better use of the free publicity awarded us. A final objection was that a belief in social justice imposes on those who hold it an obligation to adopt habits of particular austerity, Conservatives being free to lead the life of Riley. This seems absurd to me. A taste for champagne didn’t stop Nye Bevan introducing the Health Service, any more than an occasional whisky deterred Mrs Thatcher from imposing on British politics the moral values of the Chamber of Commerce and the corner shop.

  Looking back on that summer I think we should have thrown our meetings open to the public. Harold, it must be said, thought otherwise. Perhaps his way of writing gave him a taste for secrecy; at any rate he saw us as conspirators faced with de
eper and more complex conspiracies, with moles burrowing into our midst and throwing up earthworks for the amusement of the public. Perhaps, and he may have been right, he thought that secrecy made us more interesting. In any event, our meetings were to be shrouded in silence. With Campden Hill Square staked out by journalists, we retired to Ruth Rogers’s Italian restaurant on the river at Hammersmith, just opposite the building which will always be known as Harrods Suppository. There we were to hold a meeting at which Harold was to be the chairman. He was greatly concerned that our revolutionary plots should not be leaked to the press by the waitresses.

  Of course our hiding-place was discovered; not a particularly hard task as one wall of the restaurant is mainly glass. I arrived with Penny and Ann Mallalieu in her van, out of which rolled two empty beer cans, none of my doing, when I got out. My arrival with the falling cans and 'two women’ was described as part of the lingering evil of the permissive society. But, as the restaurant was besieged by reporters, Harold became more and more determined that no journalist should be admitted.

  One potential customer had been promised a table, in error, on that night when the River Café was filled with what the paper called ‘literary lefties’. He was someone who worked on a news programme at the BBC and he had booked dinner for four. He entered the restaurant and, seeing such people as Germaine Greer and Melvyn Bragg, David Hare and Gavin Ewart dotted at various tables, he looked forward to a delightful evening in a well-patronized eatery. To his surprise, someone he later described as ‘a man with a black pullover and heavy horn-rimmed glasses’ approached him in a hostile manner and asked if he was a journalist. When he was compelled to admit that it was, indeed, his profession, he was unceremoniously turfed out. Then he sat on a wall and consulted his Filofax to make sure he’d got the right date. Nothing daunted he made another attempt to enter the restaurant, but ‘the same man’ was ready for him and ejected him once more. In the end the River Café had to provide a free dinner for this innocent journalist and his friends on a safer date.