Michael Church

Born within months of each other, both raised under constant scrutiny by powerful grandparents, both made into vehicles for their mothers’ repressed artistic ambitions: the early histories of George Melly and Russell Baker run strikingly in parallel. Their books reveal an even more striking coincidence of form. Melly chooses, in his closing paragraph, to play affectionately along with his mother’s happy delusion that she is fifty years back in the past and the conjuror is coming to tea. Baker begins and ends his story with a baroque variation on exactly the same theme. Senility, that affliction so often viewed with embarrassed horror, is seen by Baker as yet another manifestation of his mother’s courageous resourcefulness – she turned herself into her own time-machine.–

‘Between me and my childhood,’ says Budd Schulberg, ‘is a wall.’ Half-remembered incidents are the loose stones which he must tear away to make a hole big enough to crawl through. There is a Greta Garbo stone (he once pelted her with ripe figs), and stones called Gary Cooper, Freddie March and Sylvia Sidney, but one of the biggest and loosest goes by the name of Clara Bow. Vulgar, gum-chewing, and with a comically nasal Brooklyn accent, the It Girl flashed through his world leaving him dazed with pity and affection. He describes her shooting a scene in which she was required to weep, listening intently to the mood-orchestra (silents were made with the aid of music), and then melting into a grief which was obviously real. She had been brought up in brutalised poverty, and the tune the violins were playing had painful associations. Her downfall after ten dizzy years was only in part because of the coming of sound: she was neither clever nor calculating enough to survive in Hollywood, and in five-year-old Budd, whom she called her secret boyfriend, she recognised a kindred soul.

For his 15th Christmas, Erik Lee Preminger’s mother gave him an antique gold watch and two glass eyes set in clay, with a card which said: ‘Remember dear, Mother is always watching.’ She thought it a hysterically funny gift, but he found it strange and unsettling. The last thing he needed, on the brink of manhood, was a symbolic reminder of her domestic omnipotence. Preminger may not move on the exalted literary plane of Edmund Gosse, but the impulse behind his book is not dissimilar to that which gave rise to Father and Son. Gypsy and Me absolutely had to be written, ostensibly as a tribute to a remarkable woman, but more importantly as a way of resolving a near-mortal conflict.

‘The bird that I hope to catch in the net of this play is … the true quality of experience in a group of people, that cloudy, flickering, evanescent – fiercely charged! – interplay of live human beings in the thundercloud of a common crisis.’ Who among our contemporary playwrights would dare pen anything so shamelessly romantic? Who would even want to? Certainly not our Brenton-and-Hare political puritans, nor yet our Ayckbourn-and-Frayn tragicomedians. Poverty, disease and disability we encounter in abundance, but as the occasion for either morbidity or schmaltz. The slow but sure revival of interest in Tennessee Williams – this summer Harold Pinter directing Sweet Bird of Youth, and brilliantly – suggests a general awareness that there may currently be a hole where our theatre’s heart should be.’

Eric Ambler told an interviewer recently that though he often felt the urge to write for the stage he was put off by the scrutiny to which he would be subjected: and the pun in the title of his autobiography was a precaution against exposure. It proved less necessary than he had feared, but the message underlying the opening chapter is unmistakable: readers, and reviewers in particular, should keep their distance. The chapter takes the form of a prologue, characteristically melodramatic, and with an oblique jump back through time. He has turned his new car over on a motorway in Switzerland, and is taken to hospital with concussion, miraculously lucky to be alive. He tries to deceive the doctors into setting him free so that he can go home and diagnose himself with the aid of his forensic-science library, but they keep him in for observation. He’s suffering from amnesic aphasia, and observes his own symptoms, wondering if the wits by which he has lived will now desert him for ever. He can’t remember … and then suddenly he does remember what he had been thinking about when the accident occurred.