Then I realised what had drawn me to the National Gallery. There were very few surrealist paintings on display in London in the early 1950s. Colour printing was in its infancy, and there were few illustrated books at affordable prices. I had unconsciously done the only thing I could – I had turned the National Gallery into a virtual museum of surrealist art, and co-opted Leonardo, Raphael and Mantegna to become surrealist painters for me.
In 1955 there was a modest retrospective of Francis Bacon’s paintings at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, followed in 1962 by a far larger retrospective at the Tate Gallery, which was a revelation to me. I still think of Bacon as the greatest painter of the post-war world. Sadly, when I met him in the 1980s I found, like many others before me, that he was not interested in receiving compliments or in talking about his own work. I suspect that he was still sensitive to charges of gratuitous violence and sensationalism that were levelled at him in the 1950s and 1960s. He chose as his official interviewer the art critic David Sylvester, who was careful to steer clear of the questions everyone was eager to hear answered, and only asked Bacon about his handling of space and other academic topics. In his replies Bacon adopted the same elliptical and evasive language, with the result that we know less about the motives of this extraordinary painter than we do of almost any other 20th-century artist. At least Crivelli’s Annunciation in the 1950s was not screened behind endless lectures on Renaissance perspective and the fluctuating price of lapis lazuli.
Bacon’s paintings were screams from the abattoir, cries from the execution pits of World War II. His deranged executives and his princes of death in their pontiffs’ robes lacked all pity and remorse. His popes screamed because they knew there was no God. Bacon went even further than the surrealists, assuming our complicity in the mid-century’s horrors. It was we who sat in those claustrophobic rooms, like TV hospitality suites in need of a coat of paint, under a naked light bulb that might signal the arrival of the dead, the only witnesses at our last interview.
Yet Bacon kept hope alive at a dark time, and looking at his paintings gave me a surge of confidence. I knew there was a link of some kind with the surrealists, with the dead doctors lying in their wooden chests in the dissecting room, with film noir and with the peacock and the loaf of bread in Crivelli’s Annunciation. There were links to Hemingway and Camus and Nathanael West. A jigsaw inside my head was trying to assemble itself, but the picture when it finally emerged would appear in an unexpected place.
14
Vital Discoveries (1953)
Working as a copywriter at an advertising agency was not as glamorous or interesting as novels and films suggested. Most of it was a slog, a dull chore of writing booklets and copy for manuals. I needed the daylight to write my own fiction, so I took a job as a Covent Garden porter, working in the chrysanthemum department of a large wholesaler. We started early, at something like 6 o’clock, and were through by noon. When too many sleep-starved nights finally got to me, I sold encyclopaedias door to door, a job at which I was surprisingly successful, partly because the Waverley Encyclopaedia was the one I had read as a child in Shanghai
– I knew it backwards and genuinely believed in it. It was a fascinating time, roaming the Midland towns with my samples, living in shabby hotels among garment workers. A modest street of Victorian terraced houses would hold a universe of differences – cheerful teenage girls bringing up a brood of small children while the mother slumped in the kitchen watching TV among the clutter; religious fanatics with barely a stick of furniture and wary daughters who couldn’t wait to grow up; a man so excited that I worked for a publisher that he propelled me into his living room and proudly showed me a piano whose keys were coloured and numbered, his ‘revolutionary’ system for teaching music that he wanted me to market for him – by way of proof, he whistled up the stairs and his amiable 13-year-old daughter came down and sat at the upright with her sheet music annotated like a candy bar, then solemnly played the Moonlight Sonata. I still see coloured stripes when I hear the melody, and taste sweetness on my lips.
Prosperity of a sort had reached the Midlands, and the early 1950s was on the cusp of social change. The poorer that people were, the keener they seemed to be to buy the encyclopaedia, and I often waived my commission (there was no salary) to secure for them the hours of intelligent pleasure I had known as a child. But the better-off residents, especially those working in the Coventry car plants, had moved beyond the hallowed notion of education as a gateway to success. Information came through advertising and the television set. They would show off their huge new screens, their wall-to-wall carpeting and their modern kitchens and bathrooms, taking it for granted that I was genuinely interested in these features, then politely decline the eight-volume Waverley. Consumerism provided all the bearings they needed in their lives.
Meanwhile, my writing was still stuck. I had sensibly abandoned my efforts to go one better than Finnegans Wake, and knew that I wasn’t muscular and morbid enough to emulate Hemingway. My problem was that I hadn’t found a form that suited me. Popular fiction was too popular, and literary fiction too earnest. A spate of World War II memoirs and novels was being published, but surprisingly it never occurred to me to write a novel based on my own wartime experiences. Even the grim events I had witnessed as a child in Shanghai could never match the genocidal horrors of the Nazi death camps.
By now, seven or eight years after the war, I had begun to switch off my memories of Shanghai. Very few people had shared my experiences, and the European war was still everywhere around us in a hundred bomb sites. I had always detested nostalgia, and the attempt by British politicians of all parties to assert Britain’s importance in the world, when in reality we were nearly bankrupt, by harping on our wartime role and our pre-war empire, reminded me of the danger of dwelling too much in the past. The Shanghai years would never return, and it unsettled me whenever I met friends of my parents and former Lunghua internees who were detached from the present and living entirely within a cocoon of China memories.
Flying still interested me, and I began to notice advertisements for short-service commissions in the RAF. The flight training was in Canada, an added attraction. My years in Lunghua had exempted me from National Service, and as an officer I would be able to leave the service if I was reassigned to ground duties, as happened to so many pilots and navigators. A change of scene, from grey and overcrowded London to the vast spaces of central Canada, would give me time to think and with any luck be a new spur to my imagination. I was still only 23, but my career as a novelist showed no signs of ever beginning.
I signed on at the RAF recruitment offices in Kingsway, passed the assessment tests at RAF Hornchurch, near Dagenham, and started my three-month basic training at Kirton in Lindsey, in Lincolnshire. I enjoyed my time there, a mix of army-style drill and square-bashing, basic navigation and meteorology, weapons training with the Lee-Enfield rifle, Smith & Wesson revolver and Sten machine gun (I turned out to be a fairly good shot), lessons in officers’ mess etiquette (we would be Britain’s ambassadors around the world as well as becoming nuclear bomber pilots), and experts at self-diagnosing the first symptoms of VD, thanks to hours of instructional films that gave a rather odd impression of our future role as serving officers of the Queen.
In the autumn of 1954 we sailed for Canada on one of the Empress liners, and then spent a month at an RCAF base near London, Ontario, not far from Detroit and Niagara Falls. The intention was to ‘culturally relocate’ us within the North American way of life, and wean us off the enticements of cricket, warm beer and toad-in-the-hole. Needless to say, we were all eager to embrace the North American way of life from the second we stepped off the Empress boat. Canadians were generous and hospitable, without any of the rough edges that can make America jar. The country was vast and sparsely populated, and virtually under a blanket of snow for six months of the year. The Canadians had the natural warmth towards strangers of a desert people.