The Blue Touch Paper (14 page)

I had enjoyed painting a beach house, because, thanks to Roger, we did it to a reasonable standard. The brushwork was fine. But I enjoyed directing a play even more. However, with the achievement came dissatisfaction. Student theatre groups immediately asked me to direct various classics – I undertook Marlowe's
The Jew of Malta
, and later John Whiting's elegiac
A Penny for a Song
– but
Oh What a Lovely War
had spoilt me. It was my first experience of dealing with hot subject matter, treated boldly. My only true interest thereafter was in making new work. Naturally, I had no idea how to generate it. I rang a telephone number in London to enquire about
Dingo
, a war play by Charles Wood which I'd read in a magazine and admired, and was told by the dismissive voice of someone who would one day become my agent, ‘Don't be ridiculous, dear. We're not going to waste a good play on a group of students.' For a while I fiddled around, helping a writer who lived in Cambridge with a story about colonial revolution in the hope that it would be good enough to put on. But I was so far out of my depth that the leading actor, pained, looked at me one day before we ever got to formal rehearsals and said, ‘David, we can't do this.' At no point did it occur to me that the answer to my discontent might be to write something myself. That was not on the cards.
As Ted Hughes would later put it, you could only come out of Cambridge University a creative writer by ‘scrambling through the barbed wire and the camp searchlights'. I wasn't anywhere near ready to scramble.

Perhaps because I was bumping my head on the ceiling of my abilities, I found myself increasingly drawn to the cinema. I had entered my first long-lasting relationship, with a wonderfully cheerful Girton history undergraduate, Diane Millward. Diane was one of a group of girls from St Paul's School in West London, whose enduring mutual friendship was as important to them as any relationship they happened to be in at the time. Not only was Diane herself spirited and funny, she was also part of a circle who understood much more about the world than I did. I got used to their knowing laughter and came to love it. Diane's uncle Sid had a joke Jewish band called the Nitwits, who enjoyed a small cult following sending up classical music. The warmth and straight talking of Diane's devout Central European family in Kensington gave me a standard of comparison for my own chillier upbringing, even though they clearly doubted my credentials to be walking out with their Jewish daughter. My enthusiasm for film had led me to become secretary of the Film Society, which had two regular showings a week of films to packed-out audiences of seven hundred. The movies of the recent past and most especially their heroines – Melina Mercouri in
Stella
, Anna Karina in
Vivre sa vie
, Anna Magnani in
Mamma Roma
and Jeanne Moreau in everything – offered us all an intense sense of possibility, an opening out, an airing which seemed all the more moving for being glimpsed from the Fens. So I was more than ready to collaborate with the society's president, Dick Arnall, who had the ambitious idea of inviting Alfred Hitchcock to Cambridge.

Much to our surprise, Hitchcock came. I read later in a biography that he regarded 1966 as a career low, halfway between the heady days of
Psycho
and the misery of
Family Plot
. But if his spirits were poor, he gave no sense of it. Alfred Hitchcock was the first great artist with whom I ever got to spend any length of time. He arrived for lunch at 1 p.m., but wasn't due to speak until 5.30 p.m. Three or four of us went to the Garden House Hotel, where we fed him slices of cold rare roast beef and baked potatoes and spent the long afternoon listening to everything he could tell us. In 1962, he said, he had sat down with François Truffaut and done twelve hours of interviews about his life's work, so that perhaps accounted for the fact that his thoughts were in such perfect order. Recent film portrayals have made Hitchcock out to be creepy, but in person he was the very opposite. The impression he gave was of being all-seeing. You could put nothing past him. His flow of courteous good sense resonated particularly with me when he said that likeability was a quality which could not be faked. The public had taken Grace Kelly to their hearts because she was indeed likeable. For all Hitchcock's efforts, they had rejected Tippi Hedren because she was not. There was, Hitchcock said, only one actor in the world who was so formidably skilled that he could fake on screen a charm he didn't have in real life. Could any of us guess who it was? Fearing the answer, I replied, ‘Cary Grant.' Hitchcock smiled, satisfied. ‘Correct.'

The following year, as a deliberate provocation, I invited Michael Winner to show his new film,
I'll Never Forget What's'isname
. A Cambridge graduate himself, he walked furious into an empty hall and muttered to me, ‘I've had more at the Hendon Jewish Fraternity.' I programmed Jack Smith's
Flaming Creatures
with Kenneth Anger's
Scorpio Rising
, for which the
society was banned in perpetuity from the science department's Cavendish Laboratories – not exactly the reaction expected from the most rational faculty in the university of reason. But I was also able to invite the Russian director Grigori Kozintsev, who, to a cheering crowd, showed his version of
Hamlet
with Innokenty Smoktunovsky. Kozintsev's elaborately phrased answers to the very simplest questions gave everyone present a chilling sense of the verbal tightrope still walked by Soviet artists. His film also reinforced my growing conviction that the greatest feats of literary criticism were performed by actors and directors, whether on stage or on screen. Never had my formal studies seemed less important. Seasons of René Clair and Kurosawa had so much more to offer.

Problems with our official education had come to a head at the beginning of our final year. When Raymond Williams gathered us together in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's old college rooms to parcel us out for the third time – he intended that I should be taught by a leading campaigner against pornography, who spent his time counting the number of four-letter words in modern novels – we all refused. By pre-arrangement, we staged what amounted to a strike. We told him that we had come to Cambridge to be taught by him, and we were not leaving until it happened. Raymond, I think, was bewildered. He had far more important fish to fry. He was more used to writing about rebellion than to being rebelled against. Since the publication of
Border Country
, an autobiographical novel which reads today as one of the greatest of the period, his creative work had been his most pressing priority. He was planning a sequence of novels, which he would never live to finish, about the people of Wales, going back to prehistoric times. But he was also under sustained pressure from other socialists to prepare what in 1968
would become the May Day Manifesto, a detailed British call to revolution which Raymond co-wrote and for which he was the chosen figurehead. It would be published, with much to-do, on International Labour Day as a Penguin Special, in red covers. As the historian Eric Hobsbawm later observed, not without a trace of jealousy, it was only in England that you might find the militant left demanding to take leadership from a literary critic.

There was clearly a significant difference of temperament between Raymond's generation and my own. Although nearly everyone I knew was taking enthusiastic part in the broad student movements of the time – with Diane, I attended the anti-Vietnam demonstration in Grosvenor Square on 17 March 1968 and witnessed the terrifying behaviour of the police – nevertheless we regarded the drawing-up of revolutionary manifestos as a notably unrealistic activity. The Labour Club had renamed itself the Socialist Society, but even so most of us were all too aware – who could not be? – that we were living through a time more marked by the blood of conquest than by the blood of liberation. We all still agreed with E. P. Thompson that Raymond was ‘our best man', blessed with ‘a stubborn unfashionable integrity'. But we had a more sceptical view towards inflated rhetoric, from whichever direction it came. We thought that our teachers understood little about power and the tenacity of those who have it. Raymond's dreams of capital overthrown drew strength from his roots in the working class, which most of us lacked. We were one satirical step back from believing that any violent overturning in Britain was likely to be benign. We were also far more roused by the daring and openness of the music, plays, poems and paintings of our time than we were by the deliberations of academics. Raymond lectured on theatre without ever going. He preached revolution
as a tenured Fellow at one of the most privileged institutions in the country. Self-aware, Raymond knew more woundingly than we ever could the contradictions of his position. He lived them every day. But he didn't necessarily enjoy being reminded of those contradictions by a new aggrieved generation of bolshie and, as he saw us, middle-class students, intent on righting a professorial wrong.

The result was an embarrassing stand-off from which perhaps neither side came out very well. Years later, the Senior Tutor of the college admitted to me that our experience of finding Raymond elusive had been replicated many times over with succeeding intakes. He went on to defend our educational neglect by saying that perhaps a college like Jesus should be magnanimous enough to let a great intellectual do what he or she must without insisting on the fulfilment of their formal teaching obligations. ‘Besides,' he added, ‘we didn't have his phone number.'

Eventually, Raymond did concede and take me in for a few spotty supervisions, mostly about D. H. Lawrence, towards whom he seemed to feel an identification which bordered on pity. ‘Lawrence, poor bugger, poor poor bugger,' he kept saying, before turning the conversation to last night's Dennis Potter play on the BBC. I loved his calming presence, the essential kindness behind everything he thought and said. But I never got close to him. For a second time in my life, the father was absent. The bulk of my final year's teaching was done instead by Raymond's intellectual godson, Terry Eagleton, who at the time was sunk in tortured Catholic introspection, usually involving young women, and all the more moving for being so helpless and sincere. He had recently published articles in
Stand
magazine arguing that you could not properly be a Christian
without being a revolutionary socialist: they were both about transformation, complete and utter. In the mornings, as you arrived, Terry would open the curtains onto a room in which a sense of the night's long agony palpably lingered. For Terry, the ready Marxist aggro came later. To his credit, at this point he did his best to engage with his students' common disillusion. He was not much older than us. When I wanted to do a third-year dissertation on Oscar Wilde, it was Terry who warned me that no examiner would take me seriously if I offered a paper on a playwright whom they regarded as frivolous – this in spite of the fact that Terry would in 1989 himself write a play,
Saint Oscar
, inspired by Wilde's Irish radicalism. And it was Terry who also tried to untangle the youthful foolishness of my anger. When I was inveighing tediously against Cambridge's insistence that everything had to be serious to be meaningful, he looked at me kindly and said, ‘David, it's not seriousness you hate. It's solemnity. They're different.'

Tony Bicât, lucky fellow, had been a year above me, so he had already left town in the company of a group of friends who were enraptured by intellectual movements on the Continent. Their talk was of Derrida and Marcuse. Tony was getting by, gigging as a drummer. When student/worker demonstrations broke out in May 1968, the Jesus undergraduates who had left the previous year were free to tear up the cobblestones and throw them at the CRS in Paris while I, still frightened to strike out, was enough of my mother's son to feel I must fulfil my obligation to sit in a stuffy exam room in East Anglia. Underneath all the impetuosity and scorn, I was still a timid boy, fearful of disapproval, fearful of failure. During the holidays, however, I would spend as much time as I could staying with Tony's grandmother, who lived in Earls Court Square in a
manner, and with furniture, which any pre-revolutionary Russian would have recognised. Unfortunately, robbed of servants in 1917, Babushka had only ever learned to cook one dish, so every night Tony and I would sit down to eat the same meal of Wiener schnitzel, accompanied by an astonishingly pungent onion and tomato salad, and to discuss what on earth we might do with our lives. The options were many. At one point we considered mimicking a French publisher and issuing what were called
boîtes
– boxes containing objects, drawings, texts and photographs relating to important thinkers of the time. Inevitably, the first one would have been about Godard. We never got as far as the second. But we also talked longingly of working in cinema, without having any practical idea of how we might start. At the Film Society I had invited the head of the BFI production board, the Australian Bruce Beresford, to show us some of his output. But his favoured black-and-white accounts of purposeless folk mooning about in parks did little to make you feel that the UK had such a thing as a vital experimental film culture. Beresford later directed
Driving Miss Daisy
.

In the hope of employment, I had already fired off a series of letters to British film-makers like Clive Donner and Tony Richardson, who had all been kind enough to meet me. Richardson alarmed me in the Woodfall offices in Curzon Street by offering me a glass of the champagne he was already drinking at 10.30 a.m. His producer wore a figure-hugging Jermyn Street suit with a red paisley pattern on the lining. They offered me a job as fourth assistant on their forthcoming film with Albert Finney playing Che Guevara. But it was never made. The charming Clive Donner was planning a film about Alfred the Great with David Hemmings, which even an impressionable twenty-year-old could see had dog written all over it. By
a process of recommendation, I got passed down the line to Associated British Pathé, who accepted me for eight weeks of well-paid employment the moment I left university. I couldn't believe my luck. Possessing a fabulous library of accumulated footage, a tiny fraction of which, naturally, I had already seen in newsreel theatres on Waterloo and Victoria stations, Pathé were looking for a way of using their languishing archive to make documentaries for schools. In charge of the project was the personable Richard Dunn. In 1988, as Chair of Thames Television, Richard would become the target of Margaret Thatcher and Rupert Murdoch's co-ordinated fury when, with unruffled eloquence, he defended the airing of the exemplary documentary
Death on the Rock
, which corrected government misinformation about the way in which three IRA terrorists had been shot by the SAS in Gibraltar. Thatcher, never more dangerous than when proved to be in the wrong, punished Richard two years later by making sure that Thames TV's franchise was not renewed.