I had written my first book review, of Edmund White’s States of Desire, while still in Charlottesville, for Craig Raine’s Quarto — I remember sitting in the Howard Johnson’s on West Main Street to write and rewrite my piece. Happy days! It would take me about five years of literary journalism in print and on the radio to start earning a living. My lowly status was partly disguised by my being so conveniently located, only a short walk from the Sunday Times on Gray’s Inn Road, where Claire Tomalin would let me root through the book cupboard for lateral assignments, and from the TLS in Clerkenwell. Physical proximity was much more important in those days before e-mail.
It was only the anomaly of a new and serious-minded broadsheet newspaper (the Independent) being set up, with an arts editor, Tom Sutcliffe, whose address book was full of radio names rather than hacks as such, that edged me into solvency. It was an unlikely combination of events, a shower of frogs coinciding with a blue moon.
In the meantime I was an adult with an eccentric portfolio of privileges and restrictions. If Dad had been a bed and breakfast, he would certainly not have advertised himself as gay-friendly. Limits to behaviour weren’t spelled out, and of course there was more potential leeway when Dad was on circuit. Even so, it was clear that a new face wouldn’t be welcome at breakfast, unless possibly it belonged to Camilla Parker-Bowles. Now there’s a lady who can wear a hyphen!
However little time Dad and I actually spent in the flat together, it’s perfectly obvious that one of us (at least) was compromising his principles, and naturally I’d rather think it was him.
Did I want to invite someone into the flat for the purposes of pleasure, someone who might murder my mother or make off with the Investiture chairs? Well of course I did. Yet the situation suited me well, even in the aspects that seemed to chafe the most. I imagined I was looking for a relationship but didn’t actually establish one. Certainly the partners I pursued were self-disqualifying by reason of unavailability. If they weren’t ruled out by reason of a previous commitment then it was a matter of distance, whether geographically or emotionally expressed.
I wasn’t a fully paid-up non-committer. I was really just stringing committophobia along. I kept it dangling, never quite saying in so many words that I didn’t see us having a future.
As far as I could see, my brothers weren’t in any great rush to settle down either, and perhaps I can hide my particular pathology behind wider patterns in the family.
I remember one idyllic picnic on the flat roof of the Gray’s Inn flat, where Mum used to sunbathe. I hauled food, plates and cutlery for a romantic lunch up the vertical metal ladder which provided access, using the carrier-bag-on-a-rope system she had devised to convey her sun cream and chosen book. From this distance it seems jarring to be calling her ‘Mum’, but it can’t really be avoided, Mum being what I called her at the time.
At the end of our rooftop meal, my date delivered what may have been the tenderest, warmest speech of romantic severance ever made. He had been having a very nice time, he said, and there were many ways in which I was wonderful, but he was looking for a lover of his own age.
It took a moment for this to sink in. ‘Tony,’ I asked, ‘how old do you think I am?’ The age difference between us was about eighteen months. Even in a highly competitive gay market I didn’t qualify as a dinosaur or even a coelacanth, the ‘living fossil’ that turned up to everyone’s surprise in a fisherman’s net in 1938.
I told myself that being a Published Author conferred a gravitas which might be mistaken for seniority of the flesh, and so this comment wasn’t the vote of no confidence in my grooming regime it might seem to be. I’ve never tired of reminding Tony of his micro-gaffe, not when Keith and I attended the party to celebrate his civil ceremony with George, nor when the two of them came to celebrate ours in 2008.
I suppose it was forgiving of me to use this new-fangled legal procedure, since I had declared in the London Review of Books in the mid-1990s that marriage was too central an institution of heterosexuality, too well defended, to be made to yield even a junior mechanism for the benefit of same-sex couples. I suggested instead, following up a remark of Foucault’s, a modification of the adoption process as the most practical way of securing legal rights for loved ones. Since then a Labour administration had introduced new legislation, as if determined to show me up as a poor prophet of social developments, but there was no sense in bearing a grudge.
The dynamics between homophobic judge and publicly gay writer son, tolerating each other at least to the extent of sharing a roof, are probably not standard. I dare say each of us tried to avoid confrontation while also steeling ourselves against compromise. It was my impression that the slow, slow melting came from his side of the glaciated valley, but perhaps he would have said the same thing.
Along the way there was a series of small breakthroughs and setbacks. A timeline of sorts can be established.
Even before I left for the States in 1978, when I was still based in Cambridge, there was a postscript to the protracted New Year seaside debate about sexual identity. Dad sent me a letter in which he told me that remarkable results had been obtained from testosterone treatment on homosexuals. There were references to medical journals.
I found this fairly insulting even before I consulted the journals. The articles concerned testosterone levels rather than treatment, and the homosexuals on whom the tests had been carried out were female. I wrote Dad a curt note pointing this out, saying sourly that he should do more homework before accusing his sons of lesbianism.
The most painful thing about the episode, though, was that the references to medical journals were not in Dad’s handwriting, but his clerk John Cant’s. There had been delegation. Dad couldn’t be bothered to do his own skimpy bigoted research. I felt very let down. We’d had our difficulties in the past, but I had always been able to rely on the stamina of his prejudice, and I missed the personal touch.
Back in residence after my time in the States, I didn’t willingly expose Dad to details of my ‘private life’, but that didn’t make me culpably discreet. Sometime in late 1981 an estranged sexual partner stuck a wounding letter through the letterbox of the flat. Seeing me flinch as I opened the envelope, Dad said hoarsely, ‘Is it … blackmail?’ He was playing a very straight bat to the googlies that the queered pitch of life with a gay son was going to send his way. Even so, it wasn’t clear in his scenario quite how the proposed extortion was to be managed. Presumably the blackmailer was threatening to expose my secret life. But to whom?
Dad and I were basing our assumptions on different historical periods, or perhaps different trends in the theatre. He was giving a performance of pained dignity out of Rattigan, while I had overshot even the kitchen sink brigade, ending up on the far fringe, where the Lord Chamberlain would hardly have dared to tread. For those few hours my personal drama edged into Orton territory, black farce rather than liberal-leaning problem play.