Going Up by Frederic Raphael (Robson Press, £25)
As he reveals in this enjoyable and often funny memoir, the novelist and screenwriter Frederic Raphael has always relished being an outsider. Born in Chicago in 1931, he moved to London with his parents in the late 1930s. Charterhouse and St John’s College, Cambridge, followed, where he read classics and formed ambitions to become a writer. He ends his story in 1962 as an established novelist but with greater success to come for writing the screenplay for the Oscar-winning film Darling (1965) and the Bafta-winning Far from the Madding Crowd (1967).
A gifted student, Raphael was initially shy when it came to women. As a teenager, he tries to banish such thoughts with Tennyson’s Idylls of the King but, he observes regretfully, “they too carried an erotic charge.” At Cambridge he tries to charm a pretty girl with Chelsea buns and large doses of AJ Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic. She isn’t interested in either—or him. Winningly, when he meets his future wife, what impresses him is that she once took five wickets for eight runs playing cricket for St Paul’s Girls’ School
first XI.
But Raphael, who is Jewish, was never shy about challenging the anti-Semitism of English society—whether among the clergy or newspaper columnists. He challenged Bernard Levin’s claim in The Spectator that antipathy towards Jews did not exist in Britain. Levin listened to him in person and changed his mind, for a while at least.
At 400 pages this memoir is too long and a touch self-indulgent. There are, though, plenty of entertaining barbs at his contemporaries. Lancing Jonathan Miller’s pretentious unpretentiousness, he writes: “Even after he became a member of Princess Margaret’s set, he claimed not to own a dinner jacket.”
But Raphael, who is Jewish, was never shy about challenging the anti-Semitism of English society—whether among the clergy or newspaper columnists. He challenged Bernard Levin’s claim in The Spectator that antipathy towards Jews did not exist in Britain. Levin listened to him in person and changed his mind, for a while at least.
At 400 pages this memoir is too long and a touch self-indulgent. There are, though, plenty of entertaining barbs at his contemporaries. Lancing Jonathan Miller’s pretentious unpretentiousness, he writes: “Even after he became a member of Princess Margaret’s set, he claimed not to own a dinner jacket.”
