Daniel Martin (21 page)

The effect of public on private history is mysterious; or perhaps I should say since our century can hardly be accused of not trying to solve the enigma mysterious to me. All my life I have veered between a belief in at least a degree of free will and in a determinism. The only clear conclusion I have come to is that what have appeared to be my own freely taken decisions provide very little evidence of more wisdom that the blind dictates of destiny. One of the monsters in my father’s seventeenth-century theological bestiary was quietism; it always sounded attractive to me when he denounced it… the notion that both virtue and vice were the enemies of grace. I certainly haven’t found the grace, but neither have I found any good reason for supposing that to surrender to one’s nature pays any worse dividends than resisting it. The problem, of course, the ultimate catch, is knowing what one’s true nature is.

I can’t remember that the national misery of that first decade after the war, the general resentment that having won the bloody thing, we now had to pay for it, particularly worried anyone in the milieux that I inhabited. It seems to me today that the one abiding drive of all my generation—and I do not mean just my class—was intense selfishness. We watched the imperial and commercial underpinnings of our culture collapse without regret (that came later), mainly because the disappearance of a national mission gave our selfishness more Lebensraum. If most of us were liberals in public, we were all parties of one in private foreshadowing the many desertions to the right that took place in the Sixties. The current situation, with everything determined in terms of the entrenched rich versus the would-be rich, was already latent.

Most of us still saw the confrontation in the context of Marxist theory. The true face of British organized labour and its party had yet to be seen. None of us quite guessed how crypto-bourgeois and conservative it would become or how the country’s political life could perish away into a sluggish battle less between ‘Tories’ and ‘Socialists’ than between the comforts of apathy (historical destiny) and occasional fits of free will, or mutual blackmailing between capital and the power to strike; or how the remaining national virtues (civic decency, hatred of violence and all the rest) would one day come to seem as much a result of sheer indolence as of positive choice. Even the absurd nostalgia for the imperial and military past that has appeared like a toadstool on rotting wood in recent years (and which I was by no means sure the sceptical line I was taking over Kitchener in my script would counter, though it had been an initial reason I took the thing) springs far less from political conviction than from a puzzled sense that the selfish present is somehow selling us all short.

Like so many individual members of its armed forces in that first decade of ‘peace’, the whole country felt itself demobilized from centuries of boring old duty to others, false prestige, spurious uniformity of character and behaviour. The 1951 Festival of Britain was not at all the herald of a new age, but the death-knell of the old one. We then broke up into tribes and classes, finally into private selves.

I am not against this, in principle. I have never felt ‘British’ since my schooldays… only English, and even that tenuously most of the time. But I think it is clear now that we made a bad mess of the transition from nation of brainwashed patriots to population of in-turned selves. We failed to see what was really happening; and just as we also failed to evolve new political parties to meet the needs and dangers of an increasingly self-centred society, so also we lacked the honesty to throw away the old masks. Obsession with self was everywhere, yet we treated it like some personal secret that had to be hidden from everyone else… so on with the puritan motley endless public concern about the economy, about Britain’s new role (as if it were some distinguished actor), the Suez farce, the more recent rantings against pornography and the permissive society, the triumph of Carnaby over Downing Street, of television bread-and-circuses over true democratic feeling. All that my generation and one sired have ever cared a damn about is personal destiny; all the other destinies have become blinds. This may be good, I no longer know; but the enormous superstructure of hypocrisy and the clouds of doubletalk emitted in the (still incomplete) process must make us stink in the nostrils of history.

I am not pretending that Dan was honest and prescient; ready from the beginning to murder an unborn child rather than leave his smallest desire unsatisfied though I wish now he had trailed a touch more sulphur and rather fewer compromises and lies. If he did stand a little more substantially for the future than most of his contemporaries, it was merely because he had more offered to his selfishness and more opportunities to indulge it. I think Nell stood no chance.

The age of self offered him old sins he could convert into supposed new freedoms. It set her in a cage. That was her real jealousy; and his real adultery.

Dan was already, like the entire country faced with the Hottentots who begin at Calais, closing up. The intense private world, part pure imagination, part imaginatively altered reality, that he had lived in since childhood now came into its own. If it had sometimes seemed a perversity, a wickedness, in the past, it was now, with success, forgiven and sanctified and boldly took over the course of his life. It was less and less inclined to brook interference, distraction, claim-jumping. Nell became a threat, a potential interloper, who might one day sneak in and assay the ‘gold’ in those hidden grey brain-folds and find it lacking. I suspect our growing incompatibility was at least as much a matter of history as of personal psychologies.

If I had been born into an earlier world, where society punished the heretic, I should very probably never have betrayed Nell or at any rate I should have concealed the betrayal much better. But I was what the Victorians banned from their arts: a dramatist. I think they condemned and castrated the theatre for so long because they knew the stage is a long step nearer an indecent reality than the novel. It tells secrets publicly, it gabs to strangers, its lines are spoken not by anonymous print, in a solitude like that of defecation or masturbation, merely in the single mind, but by men and women in front of an audience. The novel, print, is very English; the theatre (despite Shakespeare) is not. I was always conscious of this paradox, of my all-hiding private self and my lying public one; my unwritten Sonnets and my all too written Plays. In 1954 I did my first ‘big’ script the fourth chronologically. The locations were to be shot in Spain. I went out to Hollywood for the first time, since it was also my first encounter with a ‘big’ producer, a sacred monster… and like all his kind, much more the noun than the adjective by the standards of any sane view of man. Nell and Caro came to America with me, but they stayed with her mother and stepfather on the East Coast. During my three weeks alone on the West I slept with a girl who picked me up in the bar of my hotel. She wanted an entree to the world I had just got my own precarious foothold in, but she was much more a wry tramp, of the kind Preston Sturges made Veronica Lake portray so well, than an ambitious whore. I grew to like her both in and out of bed, not least because she had an easy day-to-day acceptance of life that contrasted very pleasantly with Nell’s increasing need to live in anything but the present. I found even her naiveties and ignorance (she was only a month or two in from the Midwest herself) endearing especially as my own superiority in knowledge was tenuous in the extreme… no more than a product of what I was picking up each day as I went along.

It was also my first encounter with someone who had de-romanticized sex, who seemed to regard it, like so many Americans, as a mixture of anatomy and gastronomy to be discussed, before, during and afterwards, like a meal. I wasn’t used to such frankness, and it fascinated me at first, though that side of things began to lose its charms before I returned to Nell and has gone on losing charm ever since. Limbs are nouns and actions verbs, and there is nothing more profoundly destroying of all but skin pleasure than the need to assess and analyse what is really a perfectly sufficient language in itself; and like music, to be enjoyed best in silence. I am not blaming Elaine for conforming to her culture—indeed I owed her a lot for helping me to understand it, and my own.

In short, it was an affaire with America itself. Despite Elaine, I didn’t quite realize during that first visit how far California is from the rest of the United States. I liked it a lot, though less for intrinsic reasons than for its total non-Englishness and the endless facilities it offered me for suppressing that side of my nature. I felt very little guilt over her; or just enough guilt to keep our three weeks of dates and sex-games as clandestine as possible. I telephoned Nell almost every day—less out of solicitude than to be sure she wouldn’t suddenly fly out and surprise me. I suppose I had become quite amoral by then; or sheik-like. Nell didn’t repel me physically, which made her physically easy to deceive and like most women, she set great store by that lying test. I also quite enjoyed the week I spent with her in Connecticut before we returned home, not least because the visit to Hollywood had given me a cachet in her parents’ eyes I had previously lacked.

Our working holiday in Spain during the location filming, later that year, was not a success. We rented a small villa just outside Valencia, near the beach, and there was a Spanish maid to look after Caro. But Nell grew bored with the long setups. I could hardly blame her, they began to bore me myself, but this was the first time I had seen such stuff, involving many hundreds of extras, and I felt I had a professional duty to pay attention. I was also kept busy by my sacred monster, whose anxiety and incipient megalomania began to soar as shooting approached and remained at a sustained high pitch throughout the ensuing weeks. I had been warned that this always happened by the young American director who was also being given his first big chance, and we managed to weather the floods of four-letter abuse and the constant threat of being sacked. Scenes that had been ‘great’ a day before would turn overnight, usually the one before shooting, ‘lousy’. All through the writing the wretched old man had showered me with his own ideas, delivering them with all the delicacy of a calving glacier and these dreadful whims and notions of his had a habit of floating back weeks and even months afterwards, as barren as icebergs, but always threatening to sink any intelligent course the director and I advocated. All this added more fuel to Nell’s distrust and contempt for the whole activity.

She developed an equally strong streak of intellectual snobbishness over the petty rivalries, the shallow chat, the general monomania and absorption in ‘shop’ that characterizes movie people on location the world over. It is, or was then, a world without university graduates and any terms of reference outside the one art and industry; and as irrationally hierarchical as Ancient Egypt. Her contempt for me grew in strict proportion with my refusal to dismiss it en bloc. In turn I felt my script, that precious seed from which sprang all this energy and spending of money, was insulted. Nell took to passing her days on the beach with Caro and the maid. I had a reason for not objecting to that; a continuing fear that someone among the production people who had come over from Hollywood might have had wind of my little affaire there. I didn’t want any of them to get too close to Nell.

Some months later, we were now in the spring of 1955, I was back in London and on my second script for Tony. Andrea was again the production secretary, the long immanent feeling between us one day boiled over… I don’t know how Nell finally guessed what had happened, but to prove her guess she hired a private detective. I came home one evening to find a carbon of his report laid out for me to read. She and Caro had disappeared. After the initial shock it came as a relief. In the end I rang Oxford. They must have been expecting the call, for Anthony answered, refused to fetch Nell, refused to discuss anything over the telephone—and insisted on coming down to London to see me.

A couple of days later he appeared at the flat and I took him out to lunch. I expected to have one of his ethical riot acts read over my head, but he was surprisingly matter-of-fact. Jane and he had realized for some time that things weren’t going well, it was a matter for my own conscience, he didn’t propose to judge the rights and wrongs of it all. I suspected that he was secretly frightened of me, perhaps of what I might say about Nell and her habit of retreating to Wytham at the drop of a disagreement. He was outwardly understanding, almost deferential towards my professional life and world in a way no true-blue Oxford don, as he was by then, would ever truly feel at heart.

Nell was ‘very hurt’ and would talk of nothing but a divorce. Yet he thought, if I wanted to make some attempt to mend the marriage, that Jane and he could argue her into at least waiting a while before she took action. He pressed for that course and (perfectly fairly) used Caro as an argument; but too quickly agreed that as much damage could be done by constantly rowing as by separated parents. I then told him I bound him to secrecy, which he observed, that there had been other women. I gave no names or details, but I could see the disclosure shocked both of him: the middleclass Englishman as well as the Catholic philosopher. I detected something Jesuitical in his outward reaction; in former days he would have had that out, tried to discover what drove me to such behaviour; now he evidently thought it more politic to play the man of the world.

He had to be back in Oxford that evening and we parted about three, having grown increasingly guarded and remote with one another. My lack of contrition (except over Caro) and my general acceptance that I was the man I was (which was not the man he had thought) must have distressed and angered him. But he showed no sign of it on that occasion. Very probably I do him an injustice, he was sincerely trying to appear neutral, but the paradoxical effect of all this diplomacy was that I wished we had been more brutal with each other. I decided he had been playing priest. He had condemned me in secret beyond appeal; the courtesy was for the already damned, not the possibly innocent. I think the real trouble was simply that I still respected his judgment and that he supposed I now despised it. I am trying to explain what happened later.