The Complete Unreliable Memoirs by Clive James
Back at what I had by now learned to call my digs, the problem of laundry loomed large. Open at the foot of my bed, the giant suitcase had nothing left in it that had not already been classified at least twice as too dirty to be worn, and some of my socks were twitching where they lay. So I bundled the whole heap into one of the landlady’s threadbare pillowcases and crunched off along a pavement of newly refrozen slush to the nearest launderette, otherwise known as the coin-wash, or – inaccurately but more evocatively – the bag-wash. (Strictly speaking it was only a bag-wash if you left somebody else holding the bag, and if you stayed to tend the machine yourself it was a coin-wash, but as usually happens, the fine semantic point gave way before the attractions of sonority.) The launderette had two rows of seats down the middle, back to back, so that everyone could watch his or her machine. The place was jammed and I had to wait for both a machine and a seat. During the waiting time I read the instructions. Large coins would be required for the machine and smaller ones to obtain a cup of soap. When my turn finally came I loaded the machine with a convincing nonchalance, poured in a cup of soap and sat down between two South Africans who were smiling to themselves. I could tell they were South Africans because (a) when they talked across me it was like being beaten up, and (b) two people from any other nation would have arranged to sit beside each other if they wanted to conduct a conversation. After ten minutes of going gwersh gwersh my machine proffered an explanation of why my companions had been smiling, snorting and clubbing each other with verbal truncheons of crushed Dutch. The window in the front of the machine having whited out completely, the flap in the top popped open and a gusher of suds began gouting out, enveloping the machine and advancing inexorably across the floor. It was an albino volcano. The South Africans were beside themselves and I was between them. They even laughed with that accent. Finally the woman in charge of the establishment came wading through the foam and added the antidote, some form of contra-detergent which killed the suds off inside the machine. I was handed a squeegee with which to contain the gleaming cloud around it.
After the second rinse, my clothes were ready to be slopped into a plastic basket and transferred to a centrifuge which would rid them of excess water. I was interested to note, during the transfer, that my shirts had taken on some of the colour of my socks. The South Africans had noticed this too and were reaching across my temporarily empty seat to hit each other with rolled-up copies of the News of the World, having apparently given up hope of reducing each other to unconsciousness by voice alone. The rattle of the centrifuge drowned out their merry cries. Next came the tumble drier, which required a large coin for half an hour’s tumble. It had a bigger window than the washing machine and gave you a better show, but at the end of it most of my clothes still felt wet, so I put in another coin and set them tumbling again. Resolving to bring a book next time – Prescott’s The Conquest of Mexico in three volumes would be about the right length – I occupied myself with observing how the yellow tint of the window was making my whites look tea-coloured instead of the pale bluish-grey they had been when I put them in. When the drier at last finished its second stint I opened the window and found that all my drip-dry shirts had indeed gone slightly saffron in colour – clearly as a preliminary to catching fire, because they were so hot I could hardly touch them. There was a riot of harshly accented laughter in the background.
When I got the shirts back to what I hated to call home, they proved to be not just aureate in hue, but brittle in texture. I put one of them on and a cuff broke off. The nylon polymer had been transformed into some friable variety of perspex. Another worrying aspect was the pillowcase, which I should have washed along with its contents. I would have to sleep holding my nose. But at least my personal linen was now fragrant enough to allow me a night out with the Australians at a party in Melbury Road, on the Holland Park side of Kensington High Street. This was perilously close to Earls Court, which I had vowed never to enter again, but as an evening’s distraction it beat watching television with the Voortrekkers. The previous evening there had been a play about a black African freedom fighter earning the respect of the security police by his bravery. Whenever the weary policemen stopped hitting him there were shouts of protest from my fellow lodgers. The uproar reached a climax when the black was allowed to make his dying speech without being assaulted. ‘Thet’s what’s rewning Efrica,’ said a voice from a winged chintz chair, ‘litting a keffir talk to them like thet.’ Another chintz chair agreed. ‘Thet’s right,’ it said. ‘They mist not be allowed to enswer beck.’
Far from sure why I had come to England at all, I was nevertheless certain that it hadn’t been in order to hang out with my compatriots, but unaccountably I now craved their well-modulated tones. With a gallon tin of brown water under each arm I climbed the stairs to the top-floor flat of a house in Melbury Road which had held a large Australian expatriate contingent since the time of the Pre-Raphaelites, one of whom had rented the studio in the back yard. There were fifty duffle-coats draped over the banisters and about a hundred people frantically twisting inside the flat itself, data which suggested that each couple had arrived sharing the one coat. The girl to whom I had sworn eternal fealty was half the world away and I was feeling friendless, but this new style of dancing, in which the partners did not actually touch each other, was a heaven-sent opportunity to move in on other men’s women. I had been practising the Twist in my room and because of the necessity to remain undetected by the landlady’s sonar I had developed a finely calculated frictionless style, in which my feet trembled noiselessly on the spot while the rest of my body alternated between drying its back with an imaginary towel and pointing out the approach of hostile aircraft. All this was done in a closed-eyed trance, but I can’t believe that I looked any more ridiculous than the rest of the men and certainly I inflicted far fewer injuries through inadvertent karate blows with the flying feet, although, my rapidly and randomly extended pointing fingers were admittedly apt to make contact with somebody else’s eyeball. A polite squeal resulting from just such an infringement brought me face to face with one of my erstwhile girlfriends, who had already been in London for a year, working as an editorial assistant for a publisher. Unfortunately she had embraced Catholicism in the interim, which turned out to mean that I was not allowed to embrace her. It was quite an accommodating broom cupboard that I backed her into – much larger than the sort of thing we had been used to in Sydney – but she warded off my beer-breath, bristle-chin importunities with a regretful knee and insisted on going home with the English publishing type who had brought her, some woofling galah with a Morgan.
Next evening I took her to see Hiroshima mon amour and we became the only couple in history ever to see that film and not get into bed together afterwards. We sat on it instead. Her bed-sitting room in Chalk Farm was cosy enough if you didn’t mind the crucifixes. ‘You saw nothing in Hiroshima.’ You can say that again. She looked prettier than ever in all that wool. Even her tights were made of wool. It became clear that they would stay in place. But she was generous with something more substantial – practical assistance. Rupert, the goof in the Morgan, was looking for a free-lance copy editor. With my Sydney Morning Herald training I could do it on my head. Helping myself to more of her wine, I explained my firm intention not to compromise. But the duty-free cigarettes were running low and at this rate even my bed and breakfast would soon be too expensive. A temporary sell-out might be advisable. Having finished off her reserve bottle of banana-skin Beaujolais, I took the typescript she had given me and set off on foot through the cold, foggy night towards Swiss Cottage. Navigating by a sure Australian instinct for the lie of the land, I saw quite a lot of Maida Vale, and got home in good time to be locked out.
The typescript was for a children’s book about dinosaurs. ‘As massive as a modern home and weighing many tons, Man would have been dwarfed by these massive creatures . . .’ I spent the next two days sorting out tenses, expunging solecisms and re-allocating misplaced claus
Hampstead Heath was a slush curry of dead leaves but lent itself readily to the creative meanderings of young writers with high expectations and cold hands stuffed into duffle-coat pockets. In the next few days I joined this ambling band, ploughing a lonely furrow to criss-cross with theirs. On a park bench padded with newspapers I sat shivering while a new kind of poem formed in my notebook. It was a poem I could understand. Until then, most of my poems had been devotedly incomprehensible. Now they were becoming comprehensible, a transformation that would have allowed me to detect their sentimentality if they had not been so true to my feelings, which were sentimental. But I was warmer than I would have been in my room, and when inspiration failed I could always make the short pilgrimage to Keats’s house. It looked compact and elegant among the leafless trees – compact and elegant like him. He wrote the ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ there, but although I was mad about his odes at that time, the ode I was maddest about was the one on Melancholy. Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud. I thought of that line when I was walking down Frognal and the rain caught me with nowhere to hide. So I got back home soaked, just in time for the evening post, which informed me that I hadn’t got the editorial job. Apparently what I had written in my covering note – that the thing needed rewriting entirely – was what I should have done. So once again I had been saved from selling out. Drying myself in front of the radiator while the meter ate half-crowns like Smarties, I tried to feel relieved, but it was getting less easy all the time.
3
Soul for Sale
Never, I had vowed, would I sell my soul to an advertising agency. Not even if I was starving. Not even if I had no ceiling over my head. Yet starvation was only one step down from the breakfast I was getting every morning, and the ceiling over my head had South Africans on the other side using it as a floor. Waldo invited me to a party he was throwing for all his flash new friends in English advertising. I went along in order to be disgusted by their materialist values. There were plenty of materialist values on display, starting with the traffic jam of early production model E-type Jaguars parked out in the street. The men were reasonably easy to sneer at, with their elastic-sided, chisel-toed Chelsea boots and girlish length of hair. As usually happens in such circumstances, the real challenge was presented by the women. One of them was called Brenda and she was so glossily pretty that it was hatred at first sight. Unfortunately she was clever and funny too, so it was not easy to remain hostile. She was married to some pipe-sucking Nigel who tried to interest me in how David Ogilvy had once told him that if you fouled the air in somebody’s bathroom, all you had to do was strike a match and the atmosphere would instantly return to its pristine sweetness, even if the bathroom were as big as an aircraft hangar. I can remember this with such clarity only because I was in the process of falling in love with his wife at the time. But she was married, and would have been even more frightening if single. It was clear just from what she had on her that it took a lot of money to run such a woman. The time had come for a modification of values. Faust was ready to negotiate. Casting Waldo as Mephistopheles, I drew him aside and asked him how to set about becoming a copy-writer. Since he had had to endure my callow jibes against his profession many times in the past, it was big of him to answer this question with useful information instead of the horse laugh. Apparently there was a vacancy coming up at Simpson, Sampson, Ranulph and Rolfe. He would get me through the door and from then on it would be up to me.
Reassured, I danced a few times with Brenda and tried not to be disappointed when she had to leave early with a gouged eye. She and Nigel climbed into a ludicrously small new car calling itself a Mini. With my bump for technology I could tell straight away that such a glorified toy would never catch on, but still I couldn’t imagine anything more desirable than being in a very small car with a girl like Brenda. All it would take would be a few scintillating jingles, and vroom-vroom. ‘You’ll piss it in,’ said Waldo. ‘Just remember to cover your mouth when you belch and don’t stub your fags out on the Axminster.’
Waldo was as good as his word and I had barely a day to prepare my spontaneous utterances before reporting to St James’s Square and being ushered into the suave presence of SSRR’s senior partner and creative chief, the legendary P.H.S. ‘Plum’ Rolfe. He had Hush Puppies on his feet and a tweed tie around his neck, but the tie was loose and his feet were on his desk, so it was possible to relax – something I would not otherwise have found easy to do, because I was a bit worried about my wardrobe. The suit from Singapore had still not arrived and by now I had begun to wonder if the green sports coat and the wrecked shoes were quite the thing, especially as my scorched drip-dry shirts tended to shatter no matter how carefully I buttoned them up, making my façade look like a vandalised housing development unless I not only arranged the tartan tie to cover the damage but contrived to keep it that way while lounging casually in a chair. But Rolfe seemed to like my poems. While he was opening my old Sydney University magazines to the places marked, I tried a few rehearsed spontaneous utterances and he liked them too. It was even more encouraging when he turned out to like the unrehearsed ones still better. He told me to send him a five thousand word essay on why I wanted to be an advertising man and then come back again in a fortnight.
Having written the essay that same evening, I went next morning to the Mayfair branch of the Bank of NSW and raised a £50 overdraft on the strength of being a hot job prospect for a top agency. Since I had no account at the bank and was clearly opening one only in order to see the assistant manager and touch him for a loan, it will be appreciated that my powers of persuasion were benefiting from a surge of confidence. No doubt the beard helped. Looking less like an oversight by now and more like an act of defiance, it must have presented an overwhelming challenge to the assistant manager’s bourgeois inhibitions. I should have asked him for a hundred.
A small part of the ensuing desert of vast eternity I was able to spend marching from Aldermaston with Waldo’s advertising contingent. Actually we didn’t march from Aldermaston. Like 90 per cent of the marchers we marched from just outside London, but it was called marching from Aldermaston and felt wonderful. That was the whole point, I need hardly say: feeling wonderful. The whole thing was essentially a religious festival. It wasn’t politics, it was performance. I was aware of this even at the time, since my radical socialism, which in my own eyes made me an implacable outsider like Bakunin, necessarily included a deep hostility to the Soviet Union, which I already knew, long before Solzhenitsyn’s revelations, to have been a murder factory on a scale barely hinted at by Khrushchev’s speech to the 20th Party Congress in 1956. No amount of stupidity on America’s part could allay the uncomfortable feeling that unilateral nuclear disarmament had no more in common with multilateral nuclear disarmament than insanity had in common with sanity. But solidarity between opposites being possible for as long as it remains ineffective, the party got bigger and louder while you watched. I danced along with the Ban-the-Bombers because they were the nicest people. I even sang with them, which was the ultimate tribute to their sweetness, because those songs were terrible. ‘Ban the Bomb, it’s now or never / Ban the Bomb, for ev-er more!’ Actually I just moved my lips. Like a Shadow Cabinet Minister pretending to sing ‘The Red Flag’ at a Labour Party Conference, I was too bashful to pronounce the words. But I was there, acting out a fantasy because it was more fun than what I knew to be truth. Brenda was there too, of course, and the chance to stride along beside her would have taken me on a pilgrimage to Lhasa if necessary. It turned out she had all the sam