“The manager’s name was Love” is the opening sentence of Frederic Raphael’s autobiography (he calls it “a writer’s memoir”) Going Up.
Bernard Love lived in a flat at the top of Putney Hill opposite the Raphaels’ and young Frederic observed him doing his matutinal exercises in his childhood in 1938. Raphael was born of Jewish parentage in 1931 in Chicago where his father worked for Shell until he was transferred back to their London office. Frederic went to Charterhouse and won a scholarship to St John’s Cambridge where he read Classics.
He was an outsider at Charterhouse and saw the world through a prism of his Jewishness and early American childhood; although his father was English, his mother was from Kansas. He liked to observe, even at Charterhouse where he kept notes on his contemporaries’ forms of speech and habits. He writes that Somerset Maugham’s A Writer’s Notebook “had shown me how neatly and surreptitiously a man might can his beans before opportunity came to spill them”.
This shaped his writing as a novelist, screenwriter, playwright and biographer. It also gives his observations a detachment that might have been lacking from an “insider”. If you don’t like this sort of book, you will call it a litany of name dropping and luvieness. As it happens, I rather go for both so I am enjoying it. Many familiar names crop up: Jonathan Miller, Simon Raven, Tom Maschler, Ken Tynan, Somerset Maugham, Victor Gollancz, Stanley Kubrick and so on. There is overlap with Tom Maschler’s memoir, Publisher, and the same story about Tom babysitting for the Raphaels appears in both books. Maschler writes that “Frederic Raphael is one of my oldest friends” and calls his wife Bee. Raphael says that he called his wife (real name Betty) Beetle, sometimes Bett, so maybe they weren’t such close friends.
He and his wife lived abroad while he was writing; France, Spain and North Africa all are described and provide long and enjoyable interludes from the London literary and media scene. There is a quote from Somerset Maugham which is probably an old chestnut but was new to me.
“A writer need not devour a whole sheep in order to know what mutton tastes like, but he must at least eat a lamb chop.”
Frederic Raphael’s book is a lamb tagine, with enough spice to make it interesting throughout. I suspect it is a better read than many of his novels. I find that I can read a book with pleasure at the same time as being pretty sure I would not like the author. I was certain of this when Raphael writes, “I have never laughed at PG Wodehouse”.
