I have often wondered why Eduardo and I never fell out, though my partner Claire Walsh, who was present at the time, claims that we had our ‘break-up’ row on the second day we met. I think Eduardo realised that I was a genuine admirer of his work, and that apart from his lively imagination and powerful mind I wanted nothing from him. He was a generous and sociable man, and tended to attract an entourage of graduate students, museum curators, art school administrators eager for him to judge their diploma shows, well-to-do art lovers and ladies who lunch – in short, what used to be called sycophants. This became a real problem for him in the 1980s once he accepted his knighthood.
To what extent did Eduardo’s very busy social life influence his work, possibly for the worse? I greatly admire his early sculpture, those gaunt and eroded figures cast from machine parts who resemble the survivors of a nuclear war. It’s difficult to imagine the Paolozzi of the 1980s, who dined most evenings at the Caprice, a few steps from the Ritz, producing those haunted and traumatised images of mankind at its most desperate. By the end of the 1960s his sculpture had become smooth and streamlined, and resembled modules from some high-tech design office working on a new airport terminal.
I think he was aware of this, and sometimes he would say: ‘Right, Jim … let’s go out.’ And we would prowl the side streets off the King’s Road, where he would search the builders’ skips, his huge hands feeling some piece of discarded wood or metalwork, as if looking for a lost toy. Then it would be back to the Caprice, with its showbiz and film-star clientele, its dreadful acoustics and cries of ‘Eduardo…!’ and ‘Francis…!’ Why Bacon spent any time there is another mystery. Eventually, by the late 1980s, I had to retreat gently from this competitive circus.
But for the most part Eduardo enjoyed an idyllic life, and I watched him with real envy as he worked in his studio, listening to music while he cut up images for his screen-prints, chatting to an attractive graduate student, recounting another traveller’s tale about his latest trip to Japan, a country that fascinated him even more than the US. His early obsession with all things American rather faded after his teaching trip to Berkeley in the late 1960s. He told me how he had taken a party of his students on a field trip to a Douglas aircraft plant, but they had been bored by the whole venture. Advanced technology might spur the imagination of a European, but Americans took it for granted, and were no more inspired by the assembly of a four-engine jet plane than by the process of sealing beans into a can.
Japan, I think, became for Eduardo the continuation of America by other means, and the excitement of an endlessly self-renewing technology lay at the centre of the Japanese dream. He would return from Japan loaded with high-tech toys, bizarre robots equipped with electronic sensors that could lumberingly make their way around his studio. He once rang me from Tokyo, and I could barely hear him above a background babble of Japanese voices. He explained that he was near a bank of cigarette automats with voice-actuated brand selectors. He shouted above the din: ‘It’s midnight, there’s no one here. The machines break down and start each other talking…’ I wish Eduardo had pursued all this in his sculpture, and can still hear the robots jabbering in the darkness, with their ‘Please come again’ and ‘Thank you for your custom’ going on through the night.
Germany was another great magnet for him, and the country where his sculpture was most admired. I remember telling him that Chris Evans had found some wartime film cans stored in a basement at the National Physical Laboratory, among them a Waffen SS instructional film on how to build a pontoon bridge. Eduardo was deeply impressed. ‘That says it all,’ he murmured, his imagination stirred by the fusion of these almost emblematic elite troops with the down-to-earth realities of military engineering. I suspect his obsession with Wittgenstein, the Austrian-born philosopher and Cambridge friend of Bertrand Russell, had far less to do with The Tractatus than with Wittgenstein’s trips to the cinema to see Betty Grable.
Eduardo knew few novelists, if any, though the same could be said of myself. I felt far more at ease with a physician like Martin Bax, or with Chris Evans and Eduardo, than I did with my fellow novelists in the late 1960s. Most of them were still locked into a literary sensibility that would have been out of date in the 1920s. I’m glad to say that the novel has changed very much for the better in recent years, and a new generation of writers has emerged, among them Will Self, Martin Amis and Iain Sinclair, with powerful imaginations and a wide, roving intelligence.
The last literary party I attended, at my publishers Jonathan Cape in the early 1970s, at least brought me a little closer to the threatening Lord Goodman. I arrived with my agent, John Wolfers, a highly cultivated man who had served in the Welsh Guards and been wounded in the battle for Monte Cassino. He was also a compulsive drinker, locked into an intensely competitive relationship with the head of Cape, Tom Maschler, with whom he had been to school. The evening of the party John was deeply drunk, and barely able to stand upright. I tried to support him, but he pushed me away, talked incoherently for ten seconds and suddenly crashed to the floor, like a giant tree falling in a forest, taking two or three smaller guests with him. This happened several times, and was soon clearing the room.
Eventually I managed to steer him down the stairs. There were no taxis cruising Bedford Square, but a uniformed chauffeur stood by a double-parked limousine. Taking out a £5 note (then probably worth £50) I offered it to the chauffeur if he would take John home. ‘Regent Square, five minutes away.’ He accepted the fiver, and we laid John out in the rear seat. As the chauffeur started the engine I asked: ‘By the way, whose car is this?’ He replied: ‘Lord Goodman’s.’
I’m surprised I didn’t find myself in the Tower.
19
Healing Times (1967)
I still think that my children brought me up, perhaps as an incidental activity to rearing themselves. We emerged from their childhood together, they as happy and confident teenagers, and I into a kind of second adulthood enriched by the experience of watching them grow from infancy into fully formed human beings with minds and ambitions of their own. Few fathers observe this extraordinary process, the most significant in all nature, and sadly a great many mothers are so distracted by the effort of running a home and family that they are scarcely aware of the countless miracles of life that take place around them every day. I think of myself as extremely lucky. The years I spent as the parent of my young children were the richest and happiest I have ever known, and I am sure that my parents’ lives were arid by contrast. For them, domestic life was little more than a social annexe to the serious business of playing bridge and flirting at the Country Club.
My friendships with Eduardo Paolozzi, Dr Martin Bax, Chris Evans and Michael Moorcock were important to me but lay on the perimeter of my life, and anyway depended on reliable babysitters and the parking regulations of the day. My children were at the centre of my life, circled at a distance by my writing. I kept up a steady output of novels and short-story collections, largely because I spent most of my time at home. A short story, or a chapter of a novel, would be written in the time between ironing a school tie, serving up the sausage and mash, and watching Blue Peter. I am certain that my fiction is all the better for that. My greatest ally was the pram in the hall.