A Circle of Friends Read online

  A Circle of Friends

  JULIAN MITCHELL

  to A.T.D.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Preface to the 2013 Edition

  Part One

  One

  Two

  Part Two

  Part Three

  Part Four

  Copyright

  Preface to the 2013 Edition

  This short book was a sort of retreat before I launched my effort at a big, serious novel with The Undiscovered Country (1968). I got the idea from a true story told me by a friend about someone who had, though perfectly innocent, been cited in a divorce case and wrongly found guilty of adultery. In order to tell my version, I retreated to the multi-person narration I’d used in my first two books, and reworked some material I’d used in the two others. For me now, it seems rather more treading water than striking out to sea. Unlike all the other novels, I don’t remember where I wrote it – probably in the small house I rented in Chelsea – though I do know where I got much of the new material.

  I had, during the school holidays in 1952, put on The Chiltern Hundreds, a then popular political comedy by William Douglas-Home, to raise money for lavatories for our local village hall in Gloucestershire. The plot involved an old aristocrat whose son didn’t want to be a Conservative candidate at the election, so the butler was ready to take over the role. At that time I planned to be an actor, so I cast myself in the role of the butler, with a school friend as the Labour candidate, and various local friends in the other parts. One of them eventually ran the Savoy, I believe; one of the girls rose to be head of the British Council in Nigeria; and my school friend became a distinguished advertising man, artist and cartoonist.

  The only professional advice we had was from the vicar of a neighbouring village, who, it was believed, had been an actor in the Colwyn Bay Repertory Company before the war, though whether such a company ever actually existed, or he was in it, I don’t know. When the war ended he was some lowly form of soldier, and not knowing what to do, sought the advice of his commanding officer who advised him, on the strength of his deep rich ham-actor’s voice, to go into the church, so he did. He drank prodigious quantities of gin and smoked cigarettes so heavily he carried them round in boxes of fifty. He was also extremely camp in manner, so the whole neighbourhood went into shock when it later emerged that he was having an affair with a parishioner’s wife. At my earnest request he left his pastoral duties for a while, came to our dress rehearsal and gave us notes. To my chagrin, these were mostly for me, as they are for the schoolboy director in a similar scene in the book.

  I continued to see the vicar over the next few years. When I was at Oxford he took me to lunch at the Randolph where he was warmly greeted by the restaurant manageress. ‘I’ve known her since she was a boy,’ he said. I laughed, delighted. However this was not a piece of campery, but a slip of the tongue, and though he laughed too, he was, I think, a little mortified. He slipped slowly down the clerical ranks, till he became a curate in Burnt Oak. There, perhaps inspired by the suburb’s name, he set the house on fire with one of his cigarette ends. The last time I saw him was in the Salisbury – a gay pub before gays were legal – in the heart of the London theatre district. He was no longer in clerical costume, and seemed sadly diminished. I heard not long after that he was dead. I wish now I’d put him in the novel: he was much more entertaining than some of my characters.

  While briefly at Harvard in 1961 I had directed Henry Fielding’s Tom Thumb for the Kirkland House Christmas play, and I was drawing on personal experience of amateur dramatics there, as well as earlier ones at Oxford. The chapter at the end set in Colorado was based on my experience of the Rockies when I was teaching creative writing at Colorado State. It had been an agricultural college and I could see a paddock of horses from my office window. Long freight trains full of sugar beet wailed through the night.

  As well as these incidental starting points, many things that happen in the book are not wholly unlike – though not all that like either – things that were happening in my own circle of friends in the mid-1960s. I wish now that I hadn’t written so close to my sources, because the book caused some offence, didn’t turn out as funny as I meant, and was not a commercial success (though not one of my novels was that, alas). Most of the friends are now dead, also alas, but it still gives me pain to think that by being too dependent on life, and not enough on imagination, I gave pain.

  After this fifth book, and depressed by how poorly I sold, I decided to put everything I could into a ‘proper’ novel. This was The Undiscovered Country, and it received long and serious reviews which allowed me to imagine I had at last written something quite good. But it sold as poorly as its predecessors. Much of it (as of The White Father) is written in dialogue, and by this time I had had my first play produced. Without making any great decision, I was moving out of fiction into drama – theatrical, cinematic and televisual – where I had, as a schoolboy, wanted to be. I could make a living at it. I have written fiction since, some of it ambitious, but none of it has been published, and perhaps that’s as well. Of my contemporaries, I think only Michael Frayn has successfully combined novels and plays. But maybe, perhaps, in my old age – we shall see.

  Julian Mitchell

  June 2013

  Part One

  One

  In the spring of 1961 I was living in a furnished room with minuscule kitchenette and stunted bathtub in New York City. The apartment-house was an old brownstone in the fashionable East Fifties, between Lexington and less fashionable Third, and my two windows (one by the bed, one by the desk) raised their raffia blinds on the yellow-bricked back of a ladies’ residential hotel. On dry days a bluff commercial wind fingered the multi-coloured panties and brassieres draped on the sills across the way, and when the sun shone the girls fluffed out their multi-coloured hair.

  One morning I woke with my head like an empty American cinema, full of ghostly distorted voices and the terrible sickly smell of stale popcorn. It was noon (as so often) and my room, all bright and glittering in the dirty air, seemed for a moment worse even than the echoing chamber of horrors of my dreams. Recurring nightmares had muttered through my sleep, as though a tape-recorder had been endlessly unwinding beneath my pillow. It was possible, of course, that Gina Coleridge, the girl who rented the room above me, had been entertaining one or more of her many gentlemen callers all night long; for reasons of her own she often made love on the carpet, and the cracks in my ceiling were evidence of an unrestrained passion. It was possible, too, that Vida Nellermoe, who lived on my floor, had been throwing plates again at the huge red-haired man who seemed to live with her but spent two or three evenings a week whining piteously outside her door, like an overgrown mongrel, while she turned the volume of her TV up and up and up. Then the two handsome antique-dealers, who shared the whole of the ground floor and a liver and white cocker spaniel called Charles, might have been giving one of their parties, which, from the noises which reached me, I assumed to be dullish bachelor orgies. But it wasn’t a Saturday or Sunday, so it couldn’t have been that.

  It was Wednesday, nadir of weekdays. My money had almost run out, and there was no mail. The two handsome antique-dealers, thirty-two and twenty-six at a guess, were taking advantage of their lunch-break to tend their small garden, planting out flowers and industriously watering them with a thin pink hose while Charles watched from a canvas chair. There was a tree which I hadn’t yet identified just coming into bud outside my window, and I thought with the first satisfaction of the day that by the time its leaves were fully out I should be back in England where I belonged. A fortnight earlier I had been fired by Malevich, Simonson, Peate, Roscoe and Peate, th
e eminent brokers for whom I had for eight months operated a lethargic slide-rule in a bright windowless room high up on Wall Street. They had decided, not without reason, that my bent was not for finance, high or low. I could not disagree. We parted with the distant politeness with which we had met. Only Harry Blechman, my colleague in the bright windowless room, had expressed any regret, and that in the brusque way of New Yorkers.

  ‘You dumb bastard,’ he’d said, shaking his head.

  I’d saved enough to live on for a few weeks, and to buy a ticket to England. The boat left in a month, the days stretched impoverishedly ahead, like a bread-line.

  To be unemployed in a city as frenetically busy as New York is to feel despised and rejected of men. Express elevators were rising and falling in all the skyscrapers, but not for me. If I strained my ears I could hear, below the din of traffic, the subway thundering to White Plains or Coney Island, and I was not aboard. There was nothing for it but to drag myself with my echoing head to the drugstore on the corner and have some coffee. After that I could amble over to the Central Park Zoo and inspect the Himalayan thar as it poked its snout from its heated stall to sniff the outer, ice-cream-scented air. I felt for that thar, as for a fellow-citizen of boredom. He (or perhaps she—I had seen only the snout) and I were both aliens on this granite island, captives of a civilisation to which we would never belong. I wrote him (or her) occasional poems in tight metrical forms about the need for exiles to keep their mouths buttoned, their souls hermetically sealed, if they wished to survive. Equally occasionally the mar would catch my eye and hold it for several seconds. We communicated. I sent the poems to a magazine, from which they returned by the next post. What the thar and I shared was too foreign for the New York papers.

  I leaned out of the window and smiled down on the two antiquarian horticulturists. Sometimes they would see me and smile back. Today, though, they were busy bickering over the hose.

  ‘No,’ the younger was saying, ‘you did it this morning.’ His name, to guess from the mail-boxes below was either Ed Schneider or Tom Margierson.

  ‘You don’t sprinkle it even,’ said the other.

  ‘I do too.’

  ‘You do not.’

  Bored, Charles sat up in the canvas chair and snatched at a fly. Then he began to pant, his long pink tongue slobbering his liver and white chops.

  I said ‘Good morning’, but none of them heard me, so I studied the lingerie of the ladies’ hotel. A blonde girl on the eighteenth floor immediately withdrew her brassiere. Tom and Ed began to fight playfully for the hose. My phone rang.

  The burr of a telephone is potent with meaning. It can be love, death, money, a job. But my snug beige instrument, with its soft American bell, had deceived me too often. I waited for the rough romantic call of opportunity and heard only professionally eager voices drearily proffering cut-rate magazines and chocolate milk. Once a radio station breathlessly promised me all of ten dollars if I could answer the easy question with which it had just challenged the gibbering aether. Doorbells were just as bad. Twice mine had been rung by strange men who claimed they knew the previous occupant. When I explained he was no longer living there they said, Well, why didn’t they come up and have a drink, anyway, what the hell, Gene was a good fellow, I’d’ve liked him.

  The phone rang for a third time and I picked it up. Howard Auchinclos greeted me, anxious that he might have woken me up. Assured that he hadn’t he invited me to a party he was hurriedly throwing together that evening at nine thirty for someone I hadn’t heard of. Concealing my extreme pleasure, I pretended to check my diary, then said I’d love to come.

  ‘Great,’ he said, and hung up.

  Howard Auchinclos was of uncertain age, perhaps thirty-four, perhaps forty-eight, with a thin coverlet of blond fluff on his otherwise shiny head. His eyes bulged greyly at you as he shook your hand, and you saw at once that he wore contact lenses where glasses were called for. Even with the lenses his sight was poor, and he looked at life sideways, cynically. He was tall, with thick rubbery lips, and he was best late at night, with a long drink of whisky in his hand, when he would tell improbable sexual anecdotes with a air of droll amusement that any audience could be so crassly entertained. He spoke, as he looked, sideways, the words slipping out of one corner of his mouth and into his glass. He smoked continually out of the other corner. He even walked sideways, entering a room over one shoulder and sidling up to you obliquely. The only time you could be certain he wasn’t with you was when he stood four-square before you, blowing smoke into your face. He was twice married, and now a convinced divorcé. His first wife, a beautiful and briefly chic French novelist, spent fourteen months observing his every move, then left New York with a Peruvian guitarist, as gigolos were then known. The novel she wrote from that humourless scrutiny narrowly missed the Prix Goncourt and was hailed by Jean-Paul Sartre as the most devastating attack on American mores since de Tocqueville. ‘I’m afraid,’ said Howard, ‘she didn’t really understand New York. I mean, she took Greenwich Village seriously.’ All he ever said about his second wife, a rich Philadelphian, was, ‘Our silences were prodigious.’ Some said Howard was really queer, but one heard that about everyone.

  I knew him through the wife of my Oxford tutor—an effervescent girl, unsuited to the still, dank society of Boar’s Hill—who said she’d known him when she’d been working as a secretary in New York before her marriage. She was sure he would be glad to be my sponsor. And sponsorship was indeed Howard’s métier. After I’d been in New York two days, just looking at it and trembling, I called him and said who I was and that I was there and that my attempt to discover something for myself had miserably failed. It was swelteringly hot, and I was staying at the YMCA and no, it wasn’t quite the new world I’d hopefully come to explore.

  ‘You can’t possibly stay there,’ said Howard. ‘You should have got in touch with me right away. I’ve been expecting you. Come and have a drink now.’

  So I went and had a drink, and Howard knew of an apartment which was just being vacated by a girl-friend of his who was marrying a simply appalling man from Pittsburgh the following week and I was soon installed, though the rent staggered me.

  ‘Don’t fuss about it,’ said Howard. ‘You simply have to live on the East side, and this is an excellent street. You couldn’t do better.’

  And then he arranged the job for me at Malevich, Simonson, Peate, Roscoe and Peate, and soon I was pretending I was one of the great fraternity of Manhattan bachelors, joking crudely with the receptionist and telephone girls at the office, and really living. Only I wasn’t. Some people, I decided early in life, do keep each separate minute of each separate hour filled to the brim with tingling sensation. And some don’t. I was definitely one of those who don’t. I watched, fascinated and jealous, as men like Howard Auchinclos never faltered in their pursuit of an abundance I would never know. In my own life there had always been great blank stretches in which nothing whatever occurred. There were weeks, even months, in which the even tenor of my way drove me almost mad with boredom. But all efforts to escape, to live abundantly, failed before they ever began. Something in my character, if I could be said to have had one, retired in anguish from the prospect of tingling, sensation-filled living. If I forced myself, for instance, crudely to josh the receptionist, the words came out in a tangle of embarrassed, mumbled grunts, and the girl would look at me curiously and say, ‘I’m afraid I didn’t quite catch what you said.’ Sometimes I told myself it was the British accent that confounded me, but I knew that wasn’t true. Never, ever, would I be the sort of man who could make a remark sound casually friendly, who could, even when speaking spontaneously, sound spontaneous. I was shy and dull, and when I did relax and speak at least clearly I paraded an elaborate apparatus of British pompousness before me, like a portable stockade. Few people seemed interested enough to rush in, and when they did, they usually found that I had fled.

  I knew I was fit only for the daily drudgery of passing on knowledge; I
should have taught while others did things. But I had loathed my schooldays so deeply, had fostered so violent a revulsion from chalk and changing-rooms (and dreamed so hideously of them), that my natural bent was twisted against itself. Changing continents, I’d hoped, would set me free. I would catch the easy-going American style, I would wisecrack, would learn to walk with an easy masculine stride. But of course I didn’t. I spent most of my evenings lying on my bed, reading and listening to the life of the apartment-house. Sometimes I would go to the movies. Often I went to the bars on Third Avenue where, in the anonymous darkness, I would drink alone for an hour or two, feeling at least temporarily one of the great army of lost, lonely drinkers. But I doubt if I was ever really even that. Lonely drinking is claimed as a serious secret vice, but I was never vicious, hard as I tried. I drank alone because I couldn’t think of anyone I could ask to join me.

  As for the girls who are supposed to be such easy game for the randy in that great celibate city, the ones I knew were friendly, sometimes even accommodating, but they had a brightness, a self-confidence, which, however false, alarmed me. Even if their lives weren’t as real as Howard’s they at least had connections with real life and I didn’t. Besides, I was obviously poor husband-material. So I wrote my poems to the thar and met his or her eye and waited for the sack and it came.

  Now I would be going home to less demanding England, my confidence neither greater nor less than before. My brief collusion in the great experiment had had no positive result. I’d made my shot at a new start and missed. Now I could be what I was and accept it. At least in England I knew a few people like myself with whom I could share a failure of communication without any of us caring. We were born watchers, touch line people, able to admire without too stifling an envy the brilliant play of the gifted, sensational, abundant players in the great game of life. A game, after all, must have spectators to make it seem important and real.