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PARTISAN REVIEW
"Cooperation" meant informing on my friends, ex-Communist Party
comrades, and co-workers.
In
the McCarthyite 1950's, "everybody" sub–
mitted who wanted, as I did, to make it in the movie business. I didn't
trust myself not to be a stoolpigeon. A hot blowtorch to my naked feet
I
might have heroically withstood. But not the promise that
I
could
keep my name on the office door, my two secretaries and Christmas
bonus I'd left behind on Sunset Strip. How many Chicago kids get to
call Humphrey Bogart and Ava Gardener by their first names?
My English interlude lasted thirty years. And
I
never did see the
Tower. But almost everything else in Britain took - as is the habit of
visiting Americans, from Mark Twain and T .S. Eliot to the Eighth Air
Force Gis - my name. If "Kilroy," the mythical World War Two
trooper, could scrawl himself on walls and fences all over Blitzed Britain,
so could
I.
You had given us Tom Paine, the 1776 Revolutionary War
best-selling pamphleteer. I'd repay the compliment almost two hundred
years later. After all, I thought, your 1945 postwar "revolution" needed,
as ours had, a bit of foreign enthusiasm too. And maybe I, like Tom,
could become a literary celebrity abroad. Only one small detail needed
working out. I had to learn the writing trade .
It
couldn't be that hard. The first writers
I
met were, at first glance,
astonishingly normal people. Alan Sillitoe, John Wain, Angus Wilson,
Doris Lessing, Mervyn Jones, John Osborne, V.S. Pritchett, Colin
MacInnes, Bernard Kops, Robert Bolt, Laurie Lee seemed incredibly gray
and downbeat compared to boisterous types
I
admired like Jack Kerouac
and Norman Mailer. You had to be "interestihg" to write good prose,
surely.
That was my second lesson. Ordinary people wrote exciting work,
exciting people somehow forgot to put it in their writing. It seemed
unfair. I thought I was a hell of a lot more "interesting" than the writers
I met, but they had the trick while I was still knocking about the
country getting into fights, combatively squaring off against writers who
seemed deeply bored by my posturing. Damn their eyes, I'd show 'em.
It was also a clash of literary traditions. Yours was Shakespeare,
Fielding, Trollope, Dickens, etcetera. Mine was Superman, Tarzan, the
Lone Ranger, Gene Kelly and John Wayne. When a stranger strolls into
town, pardner, he either guns down his rivals or dances off with Cyd
Charisse. Once, I bulldozed my way into tea with E. M. Forster at Kings
College, Cambridge. He politely listened to my complaints about Lon–
don literary life, then quietly observed: "Yes, I quite see your point. I'm
afraid we're not in the slightest like Paris or Rome or New York. Per–
haps you should try one of those places next. Another biscuit?"
But I'd already tried New York and Paris, and I couldn't speak
ital–
ian. So I launched my writing life in Thurcroft, outside Rotherham by
