*2 A long footnote, this, but one that will serve as a short guide to Phoebe’s mental state…In a party political broadcast of April 15, 1978, Mrs Thatcher referred to Solzhenitsyn as ‘Solzhenitskin’. I heard it! They said she mixed him up with Rumpelstiltskin! cried Phoebe that night (she had the radio on in the bathroom); and early the next morning she was on the phone with Noel: her forecast was that Thatcher would be ousted as leader (by April 30), and Noel got good odds…Of course, Thatcher’s error made not the slightest impression, and Phoebe herself only knew it was ‘Solzhenitsyn’, and not Solzhenitskin or for that matter not Rumpelstiltskin, because all three volumes of The Gulag Archipelago were on display in my flat (and I sometimes talked about him and his rural exile in Vermont)…How much was your bet? I asked her on May 1. She looked away and said, Well that’s the thing. Um. About the same as your advance for the last one. The advance for my third novel amounted, by the skin of its teeth, to four figures. Plus about twice your salary. I was by then full literary editor of the New Statesman. So Phoebe had lost £11,000. In short, Martin, she said, I’m ruined.
*3 In calmer and happier times, bouts of heavy petting were an occasional feature of our weekends. Protracted and strenuous (everything-but and not for the queasy), those sessions used to end with Phoebe – holding a bouquet of paper tissues in her free hand – granting him brisk relief, in the manner of a therapist or, more exactly, a dairymaid. These days it was different: she simply waited for the phase of maximum engorgement, then just stopped, desisted, without a word or a glance. When I eventually rolled out of bed I still had a little diving board (recently bounced on and vacated) attached to my pelvic saddle. You couldn’t call it foreplay; nothing followed from it…In this chapter, I notice, much that is pertinent but embarrassing has been confined to the footnotes: a sort of internal exile or house arrest.
*4 Those spare tenners. Life goes on, after all; and it became clear, a week or two after the cohabitation began, that my monthly income would for a while increase by a factor of twelve. And ‘writing’, for now, meant humouring Kirk Douglas and Harvey Keitel (who were always in venomous opposition). But that’s another story – some of which is told in my fifth novel (1984)…The film was presided over by Stanley Donen, who in his twenties co-directed On the Town and Singin’ in the Rain with Gene Kelly…One night after work Stanley invited me to dinner at his ‘local place’; Phoebe was in Belgrade, so without hesitation I went along to his plush and panelled sanctum in St James’s…Now at that time Stanley was married to Yvette Mimieux, wife number four (and his past lovers included Judy Holliday and Elizabeth Taylor). Having picked Christopher’s brains about girls and madness, I took the chance to pick Stanley’s brains about girls and coquetry – a subject that was on its way to becoming my chief concern. Stanley talked discreetly, naming no names, but otherwise with boundless candour, and for almost two hours my ears hummed to tales of Hollywood’s most famous vamps (some of them famous actresses, some of them just vamps and famous for nothing else – chorus-liners, body doubles). And even in this company, I reckoned, Phoebe could hold her head high…By the way (a footnote to a footnote), nearly forty years later I ran into Harvey Keitel at a Christmas party in Manhattan (December 9, 2016). We agreed that this was one of life’s little epiphanies: it was Kirk Douglas’s one hundredth birthday.
*5 Phoebe’s evident favourite, ‘This Be the Verse’ (‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad’), has a technically near-identical sister poem, ‘The Trees’, which ends: ‘Yet still the unresting castles thresh / In fullgrown thickness every May. / Last year is dead, they seem to say, / Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.’ At the foot of the manuscript Larkin wrote, ‘Bloody awful tripe’. But he let the lines stand; and rightly. ‘The Trees’ represented a very different kind of mood; but in both cases the poet has to explore it and get to the end of it. As Auden writes in another context (with accidental but complete appositeness), ‘Follow, poet, follow, right / To the bottom of the night…’ Larkin comes to London once a year, I said that same afternoon. There’s usually a party. I’ll introduce you. The meeting did in fact take place; and it was eventful, too.
*6 In fact Phoebe’s prompting was only marginally ahead of its time. In the UK in the very early 1980s, the newspapers were getting thicker and thicker – first the Sundays, then the Saturdays, then all the days in between; and what filled these extra pages was not additional news stories but additional features. Soon the featurists were running out of people to write about – running out of alcoholic actors, depressive comedians, ne’er-do-well royals, jailed rockstars, defecting ballet dancers, tantrum-prone fashion models, reclusive film directors, adulterous golfers, wife-beating footballers, and rapist boxers. The dragnet went on widening until journalists, often to their palpable irritation and dismay, were reduced to writing about writers: literary writers.
*7 Pornography has become a sorry business all round (though I ask readers to ponder a remark I heard from the amiable Art Spiegelman, cartoonist and graphic novelist: ‘Banning pornography would be like killing the messenger’)…In the era under
