He was setting the scene, which was some years away. He is working on an important book in this big flat, and guests are assembling in the lounge while the table is being laid (by a devoted old woman in mob cap and smock, Wickett, an absolute treasure). Pat is in the kitchen supervising, or is she in the parlor pouring drinks? In any case, it is lunchtime, and Vidia is working in his book-lined study.
“And then”—he made a two-armed gesture of double doors opening, swinging apart, as he buttoned his jacket and made his entrance—“I go through to lunch.”
I wish he had been smiling, but he wasn’t. Nor was I, though at the back of my smiling mind I saw the master summoned from his study to a roomful of expectant and admiring lunch guests. It was the kind of scene I associated with Tennyson at Freshwater, or Henry James at Lamb House, or Maugham at the Villa Mauresque, the category of writer whom Larkin satirized as “the shit in the shuttered château.”
Because of this flat, I saw Vidia more often. That pleased me, because I had so few other friends in London. At the end of my writing day it was pleasant to get out of the house — my arms ached, my back was kinked, my legs were knotted from sitting too long. I rode my bike over Battersea Bridge and kept going north through Chelsea and Fulham to Kensington, where I chained my bike to the black railing outside Vidia’s white apartment block and listened for his voice on the squawk box: “Yes, yes.”
One day I happened to have a paperback jammed into my pocket. He noticed it and asked me what it was.
“The Go-Between. I’ve never read it before.”
Vidia suddenly remembered something ironic. I could see it in the set of his lips and in his eyes.
“Hartley was mad about the Queen,” he said. “Absolutely adored her. Then the day came — he is offered an OBE. He accepts it at once. His chance to meet the Queen.”
We were drinking tea. Vidia swallowed and smiled at the same time.
“All his preparations are made. He is in Bath. He hires a car and is driven to London in his morning suit — tails, top hat. Filled with excitement. Big day. His work recognized at last. The Queen awaits.”
Now Vidia was nodding, teacup in hand, and his posture suggested this was a moral tale.
“Hartley is at the palace. He is in the queue of people accepting their honors. The Queen approaches. Hartley is very nervous, but grateful. At last he has the Queen’s approval. She stands before him and glances at her note cards and says, ‘Hartley, yes. And what do you do, Mr. Hartley?"’
Vidia put his teacup down and lowered his head and looked humble.
’"A writer, Your Majesty.’”
And he laughed at the absurdity of it.
“As you say, Vidia, people should get their knighthoods and OBEs at the post office.”
“Books of stamps. Buy some each time and stick them into the book.” He made licking and sticking gestures. “Hartley was crushed, and I imagine it was a very long trip back to Bath.”
On another bike ride to Vidia’s flat, a few days after a riot in Clapham, I passed through Clapham Junction and saw boarded-up shop windows and looted shops; there was shattered glass in the street and dented cars. It was much worse than I had been told. The riot had started as a racial incident in Brixton and had spread up the High Road and across the Common to the Junction, where the rioters had converged and spent hours breaking windows and vandalizing cars.
I described the scene to Vidia when I got to his flat.
“That was not a riot,” he said. “That was a disturbance. Frightening, I grant you. But not a riot.”
“Hundreds of people. Angry West Indians.”
“Not angry,” he said. “Why would they be angry? They were jubilant. They wanted witnesses, and people took notice. They succeeded in destroying something. Windows, whatever. I suppose they stole some television sets.”
“It looked serious.”
“It’s all for show.”
“If that’s not a riot, what would you call it?”
“High spirits,” Vidia said.
He was afraid of mobs, he avoided large crowds, he did not use public transportation. But his general feeling was that it had all been done for cameras and publicity. If no one had taken any notice, nothing would have happened.
But when the riots — for they were riots and not high spirits — continued, Vidia was asked by a BBC news program to comment on the violence. He said all right, he had been thinking about it. The BBC would provide a car to take him to the studio, but Vidia said that such a trip was out of the question. With great reluctance, the producer agreed to come to Vidia’s flat with a camera crew.
I was at Vidia’s the next day while, smiling, he told me what had happened.
“There were three of them,” he said. “I must say, it was rather crowded. They wanted to get started immediately, and of course I had prepared my remarks. I wanted to talk about the excitement of this sort of affair, how it stirs people to see destruction and makes them spirited. I was going to quote from that lovely Louis MacNeice poem ‘Brother Fire.’ Do you know it? ‘When our Brother Fire was having his dog’s day / Jumping the London streets…’ It’s about London being blitzed by German bombs, the perverse thrill of someone watching it. It is perfect for what is happening now.
’"Shall we get started?’ the producer said.
“I said, ‘You haven’t mentioned money.’
“This clearly threw him. Money? But I told him I do not work for nothing, and that I must be paid. He asked me what I wanted. I said, ‘What you would pay a world-class doctor or lawyer.’
“‘I’ll telephone my department,’ he said. At the end of a very long call he said, ‘I can offer you three hundred pounds.’
’"Out of the question,’ I said.
’"It’s the best we can do.’
“I simply turned my back on him. I noticed that one of the crew was looking at my bronze of Shiva. I said, ‘Do you know how each arm is positioned in a particular upraised way and the whole figure gives the dynamic impression of movement?’”
I said, “What about the BBC?”
“They stood around for a while and then went away. I won’t work for three hundred pounds. The figure I had in mind was a thousand.”
“I wonder why they wouldn’t pay more.”
“Because they hold a writer in contempt.”
“But why did the man come all the way over, thinking you would do it?”
“Because he was a common, lying, low-class boy.”
“What about the others?”
“Epicene young men.”
He knew I was baiting him. He did not mind. He was glad to have a chance to vent his feelings. Pat tended to sigh or become fearful when Vidia fumed, but his anger was a loud broadcast of what was on his mind.
A writer must not let himself be presumed upon, he said. The TV crew had come and unpacked; the TV crew was sent away, having filmed nothing. A weaker person might have said (I am sure I would have said), “Since you’ve come all this way, we might as well do it. But this will be the last time.”
To relent in that way, Vidia would have had to break one of his cardinal rules, which was: Never allow yourself to be undervalued.
“Do lawyers allow it?” he said. “I say to these presumptuous people, ‘What would you pay a lawyer? What would you pay an architect, or a doctor at the height of his profession?’” On this subject he was unshakable. “An architect or a doctor would command thousands of pounds for a consultation. That is my fee. I am at the frontier of my profession as a writer. My fee must be no different from a doctor’s, or a scientist’s, or a lawyer’s. Anything less is an insult.”
Around this time, the first year of his little flat, the Public Lending Right movement had gained a following in London. The moving force was one person, the writer Brigid Brophy. The campaign called for a parliamentary bill to establish a government department that would determine, on the basis of random sampling, the number of times a writer’s books had been loaned from libraries. Using a formula, an amount would be worked out, and the writer would be sent an annual check. There would be a ceiling of about £2,500. Public Lending Right — authors compensated for library borrowings — was an enlightened scheme for which I became a strong advocate. In its early stages, signatures were needed to bring the idea to the attention of the minister for the arts. I pedaled up to Vidia’s for a signature.