April may be a cruel month, but can it be the cruellest? There is an old Jewish joke about the man who died and whose relatives and the usual obligatory mourners gathered, in accordance with custom, for an evening of prayers and-as today's cant would put it-"coming to terms with" the loss. On such occasions people usually stand up and pronounce a few words of eulogy. On this particular evening, however, when the rabbi called for someone to speak well of the departed, no one stirred. He chided the company for its reticence, but still no one moved. Finally, he became vexed: he reminded them that a member of the community had died and that it was their duty to find something good to say in his memory. Someone, he insisted, must have something to say in favour of the dead man. After another protracted period of reticence, an old man at the back rose, with great reluctance, and said: "I'll say this for him. His brother... was worse."
This year at least, December is worse for us. We are selling a house we have lived in for over 34 years. It is a death of a kind to have to gut it in order to give vacant possession to the pleasant young persons who will, literally, take our place. We have been stuffing wads of memories into black plastic bags, noticing how cheap things were in the 1950s, and regretting the bottles of spoiled champagne and Chablis in the cellar. The most poignant trash contained the change of address cards from when we moved into The Wick in 1962. The most uninteresting relics were of press cuttings from days of optimistic ambition when I subscribed to a service which clipped every mention of my name. In 1967, when I got a little bit lucky in the movies, Jack Lambert, the arts editor of the Sunday Times, said to me at a party, with one of his characteristic sniffs, "Your books will never again be treated according to their merits." I asked if that was a threat or a promise, but he remained unsmiling. There is a certain grace, I have since discovered, in being dispensed from hopes of praise. What resentment is more comic than the down-with-all-critics rage of fortune's favourites when they are very slightly disappointed?
It was more difficult to consign old letters to oblivion than it was the third carbon copies of ancient short stories. Who would throw away that handwritten note from Ivy Compton-Burnett, in 1963, thanking me for a nice review or the earlier one from Willie Maugham inviting me to tea at the Villa Mauresque and warning me, at the same time, of the remoteness of the house, which I might find difficult to reach unless I had a "motor-bicycle"? I hope that I have properly repaid WSM's kindness in the article which I have just revised for the new Dictionary of National Biography on CD-Rom.
Ray Monk, with whom I am lucky enough to be editing a new series of philosophical monographs for Orion, wrote recently on the art of biography and its affinities with detection. He was puzzled and appalled by what he discovered about Bertie Russell's private cruelties, which contrasted savagely with his ex-pressions of public benevolence. DH Lawrence probably got Bertie right when he told him, during the great war, that he campaigned for peace with hateful belligerence. Willie Maugham's sour reputation was due largely to his scorn for human affectations of virtue and to his dismissive treatment of his wife, Syrie. She had a lot of friends, not least Beverly Nichols, for whom envy could speak with the convenient voice of chivalry.
Unlike Russell, Willie was privately generous. When I did visit Maugham at his villa, he and Alan Searle were busy with the bonfires in which, so he imagined, he was ashing all evidence of his sins. He reckoned without Ted Morgan's biography. My French translator, Joe Dobrinsky, wrote a brilliant Jeunesse de Somerset Maugham as his thesis at the Sorbonne, but it has never found a publisher. Everyone is too busy finding another biographer to overrate Virginia Woolf.
I used to think that to keep carbon copies of private letters killed spontaneity. As a result, I have found a lot of letters from other people which are in reply, often indignant, to lost texts of my own. Is it not as if we had the letters of Atticus, but lacked those of Cicero? As Cicero himself used to say, "It would be better if another had said it." However, the fun of it is to try to remember what it was that I wrote which so infuriated Carl Foreman, a screenwriter whose reputation, like that of Joseph Losey, benefited enormously from his figuring on the Hollywood blacklist. All right, I think I know what: in 1967, at the time of the Six-Day war, Foreman organised a fund for Israel. By the time I sent him a small cheque the war had been won and I inscribed "Preferably for humanitarian purposes" on my offering. Foreman took great offence. I found it comic that a writer-director who had long advertised his hostility to war, should have become a sort of honest Horatio Bottomley on behalf of Israel. He told me, in his reply, that I must be "a very unhappy man."
