The Addresses

My tribute

The first film Alan and I saw together in 1994, was ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral’. I mention it because it seemed so utterly unlikely, at that point, Alan would become my husband or I, his fourth wife. And it makes him sound like Blue Beard.

He had just returned from Bosnia with Ken Lukowiak, who introduced us. It was spring, it was the matinee, and Alan placed his jacket over my lap, the first in a succession of courtesies from this inscrutable man with the black eyes and the lilting, gravelly voice. His looks reminded me of my own Russian and Polish ancestry even though it was a northern light that cast across Alan’s whole being.

Over a lunch at Zamoyski’s, we talked about Savile Row tailoring - he still wore a bespoke suit he’d had made in September 1965 - and pearl buttons on oyster satin. ‘We go in and out of the same door’ he would say.

I had never knowingly read him and knew nothing of his reputation. His first present to me was a copy of Lenin: the Novel, delivered by hand, inside which he wrote ‘If G. Greene can write letters in other people’s books. I can write to you in mine…I would like (as we used to say at school) to be your friend…if you have a life time or two to spare, dip into mine - it contains about half of what has happened to me…’ Though he never used two metaphors where three would do, my, what a book.

He was working on his second novel, a fiction of The Life of Cicero, and our first trip abroad would be around the ancient Greek and Roman sites of the Western Mediterranean, when we would always be first at the gates to disembark.

Alan, owned himself, as Boswell put it, “to be amorous”. He became a life model at the Ruskin School of Art in the forties to be nearer the Cuban studio model he had a pash on. He had the gift of listening with his whole attention and those stealthy tactics of his were extremely seductive.

I now know the Alan I met, aged 68, was less gladiatorial than he had been. Strangely, in retrospect, I think he handed the baton of ‘bad cop’ in this partnership, to me. He never bragged, rarely took credit, NEVER said ‘I don’t know’, was most tender with animals. He owned very little, other than books, and poetry in particular lit him up. What prejudices he had, he put aside for me, embracing the Bloomsbury Group, for one, becoming deeply fond of my old friends, Igor Anrep and Annabel Farjeon.

Alan was the first person I had met who almost never said ‘no’, nor ‘I told you so’, no matter how many times I ditched the car, we were caught by the tide, not even after I encouraged him into the middle of the river to get a better view of Low Force, and he broke his ankle. His pedal was always pressed to the floor and we enjoyed the same kind of delving into things.

But there is also the truth of unremembered things. I want particularly to say that DEVASTATING as the diagnosis of Alan’s Lewy Body disease was, with respect to the things he couldn’t influence he showed tremendous courage and stoicism, adopting his father‘s motto ‘let the other fellow be embarrassed’. If anything his imagination became even more elaborate and filmic. Alan called his hallucinations ‘free cinema’ and if he didn’t mind them neither did I… most of the time. He may even have had Alice in Wonderland Syndrome for all I know. Of course I jest but he had always seen the world through a fish eye lens, whitewashed mulberry trees in Crete were cricketers, starlings in the sky were tea leaves, he loved the narratives of cloud formations, and he was eccentric, a natural bohemian. Once he dyed his sand shoes with food colouring that turned his feet green when it rained.

Strangely, given his autobiographical style, he didn’t gossip or chew the cud.
Alan’s silences had always been more pregnant than most and I never stopped wanting his opinion, succinct as it became. When we met a new person and I asked what he thought, ‘shallow but not superficial’ came back in a heart beat.

The fact is Alan was very entertained by himself. He was rarely unhappy. Lives coast on memory and for Alan it became new ones. He had the ability to live in the moment. His appetites had always been vital, ravenous even. ‘That was the best meal I ever ate’ he would say. ‘You were marvellous’ he would whisper on our way home from a do during which he had simply smiled beatifically.

I never tired of looking at him. What a gift he was for painters and sculptors. But how is it possible to be variously mistaken, in the street, for Sean Connery, David Leitch, even Liberace? And, to resemble all of them, including Lenin, Augustus John and Cezanne. Somehow, they all really were aspects of Alan.

Now Alan was tone deaf and the only song I ever heard him sing, and really well, was ‘Herrin’s Head’.

From Paul Vaughan

A little more than 60 years have passed since I first met Alan, and so you’ll understand how very hard it is to realise that we’ll never hear again that voice still with its traces of Sunderland and somehow tuned to mockery and aphorism...like those in his famous 34 Things Every Sociologist Knows (and may or may not be true). It was a New Statesman piece in 2006: example --

14. The average annual income of authors in Britain
who have published more than one book is £178.

And

19. The chances of any cheque being marked "return
to drawer" increase with the number of hyphens in the
name of the signatory.

I think I may have been present at the coining of one of his axioms. It was at Oxford in the forties when a man none of us knew had punched one of the people sitting in the bar where we had met. When remonstrated with he said, ‘I’m sorry, I always talk with my fists,’ leading us to try to think of suitable rejoinders to this fatuous excuse, like ‘I don’t like your grammar,’ or ‘We don’t speak your language.’ Alan however remarked ‘Violence is the repartee of the illiterate,’ a precept he must have stored away, because out it came later on in life though didn’t for some reason make it to the famous 34.

Alan had started writing at school in Sunderland. One thing he wrote was a story
for the Wizard, or it might have been The Hotspur, with a hero called Hercules Standpoint. He sent it off to D C Thomson of Dundee, the firm who published all the popular boys’ weeklies, and they liked it, and put it into one of the weeklies in their stable. The letter of acceptance asked for more episodes -- but unfortunately Alan was quite unable to think of one, and never replied. What happened to Standpoint, marooned, as it were, in one episode, Alan never found out.

In spite of this early glitch in his career, Alan became the No 1 literary journalist of his day but I always think of him first at Oxford after the war -- a slim, laconic individual already with a beard: he shaved it off one day and looked so different that I passed him off as somebody else, an undergraduate called John Martin: I suppose we could have called him Hercules Standpoint but thought a very ordinary name would work better. Anyway people introduced to him were puzzled: the voice was familiar and so, vaguely, was the face but who was he? Alan re-grew the beard and Martin passed, briefly, like a sort of semi-recognised phantom through Oxford society.

Of course the late 1940s in Oxford were a wonderful time as many here will testify: we had come out of the services, a reforming government was in by a landslide, and we had the world at our feet. And I think we all, including Alan, loved Oxford with its glorious buildings and vistas and wonderful things to do. Alan, like me, had been up during the war, before being called up, and he had upset the dons at Jesus by his Sunderland accent and as I understand it rather delinquent behaviour...so much so that the Principal of Jesus said, when Alan left, ‘That man will come back to this college over my dead body.’ And as Alan said to Godfrey Smith, ‘that is exactly what I did.’ The Principal having unfortunately died in the interim.

Alan‘s career in the RAF was only intermittently heroic. He went for training as a pilot but he turned out, as he told us, totally incompetent, and his last act in pilot training was to crash his plane while attempting to land. The CO of his unit was furious, and told Alan he was going to have to pay for a new aeroplane out of his RAF pay (ten bob a week or so) but I don’t know if this threat was carried out. Instead they made him an air-gunner, and he liked it when someone said to him once, ‘If you’re an air-gunner, where’s your air-gun?’ Actually Alan did fly one mission, and told us he was terrified: luckily, the war ended before he could be sent up again.

So it was back to Oxford, where the star undergraduate of the time was Ken Tynan, conspicuous in those peculiar orange and green ensembles of his. He had written a piece about Oxford for Vogue, which appeared I think in the long vac of 1947. It was a rather camp sort of piece, on which Alan did an efficient hatchet-job in the Isis. Tynan had written ‘Oxford is feminine, yes, feminine,’, causing Alan to write, ‘The emphasis will be Mr Tynan’s to the grave.’

Anyway this led to his being appointed editor of the Isis. He was a huge success at this and his Isis was funny and essential weekly reading. Derek Cooper was Features Editor and they made a formidable partnership, Derek producing brilliant parodies (notably of Graham Greene and John Betjeman (the first brought a telegram from a reader that said CONGRATULATIONS GRAHAM GREENE), and Alan with extraordinary leading articles, like one that started

‘Like Adversity, and I dare say Perversity, University makes
strange bedfellows...’

During his term as editor, the rival university magazine was Cherwell. The Cherwell editor had for some reason been made a Papal Count, and (I dare say quite reasonably) he liked to flaunt this honour. But he was rash enough to pick a fight with the Isis and it developed into a sort of mini-feud. Alan finished it off: he delivered the coup de grâce when he described Cherwell as ‘count-struck.’

With his sharp eye for paradox, Alan could make ordinary things seem extraordinary. We were walking back to his flat in Walton Well Road one day and he said,’That’s the house, there, the one sticking out at the front. looks as if it’s volunteering -- Here, take me...’ And once, we were in the ABC in the Corn when the door opened and in came a black man who happened to be in holy orders, and with his dog collar he was wearing a white tropical suit. ‘Look,’ said Alan, ‘there’s a clergyman in negative.’

When he went down he continued to view the world with a certain louche disdain. He was determined to become, not a journalist but a literary journalist.and that is what he very soon did. There were one or two hurdles to be jumped, including the job at Mini-Cinema, which he called Mini-Enema -- and that job ended badly, when the editor called him in after he’d been enjoying a three- or four-hour lunch and told him he was fired. Drawing himself up, Alan said before stumbling out: ‘I came here for increment. And you give me excrement.’

During his earlier years as a journalist he became a sort of ghost writer for Randolph Churchill, a position that led to several odd adventures. He had a story about staying the weekend, with Randolph, at Chartwell, Winston Chuirchill’s house in Kent. It was said that a small boy who was one of the other guests, having nothing to do, wandered around the house and climbed the stairs. He walked along a corridor and opened a door: at the other end of the room he saw an old man sittingup in bed smoking a cigar and reading. He looked up over his spectacles. The boy said, ‘Are you the greatest living Englishman?’ And the old man said, ‘Yes, I am. And you can bugger off.’

There was ano9ther occasion when Randolph took Alan to lunch at White’s, in St James’s. As it happened, Alan had just written for George Scott’s Truth a Profile of Evelyn Waugh in which he made no attempt to hide Waugh’s faults, chiefly his snobbishness and country-squire affectations. As Randolph and Alan entered the club, Waugh emerged. Randolph greeted him enthusiastically, and introduced Alan. In the moments that followed Alan decided he should identify himself, and he said, ‘I’ve just written your Profile for Truth.’ Waugh ignored him. But later wrote to a friend, ‘Randolph hired a Jew to insult me in White’s.’ I suppose this tells us more about E velyn Waugh than aboiut Alan but it does illustrate Alan’s fearlessness, his readiness to take risks and his indifference to those whom others regarded as iconic.

At Oxford he was a pupil of the great F W Bateson, Oxford’s only rival to the Leavises in Cambridge, a believer in analytical reading and close criticism of the texts we had before us, and quite opposed to the romantic, phrase-making belle-lettriste tradition that had held sway in Oxford for decades. Alan would come back from a Bateson tutorial and pass on the day’s aperçus, like the probability of incest in the Wordsworth household and the masturbation images in Donne --

But since that I
Must dye at last, ‘tis best,
To use myself in jest.
Thus by fain’d deaths to dye...

On the whole t wasn’t wise to bandy words with Alan, I remember him saying he used to deal with bullies at school by arguing with them -- no poor man’s repartee for him -- he was like Auden’s ‘The silly fool, the silly fool, who beat the bully as a rule,’ except that Alan was certainly no fool. He was a man of strong opinions, eloquently and wittily expressed. I recall how he came out of the Radcliffe one day after reading some of Coleridge’s Biographia Litteraria, in a contemporary edition and was pleased to find someone (no doubt some early Victorian undergraduate) had written in the margin Damned Whig. Somehow it could only have happened to Alan. He was a damned Whig of course: he was on more than one Aldermaston march and in 1956 he asked his editor on the Evening Standard to send him to Hungary...the editor wouldn’t, but as a kind of compromise he sent him to New York. There, his bullshit-detector was no doubt working at full stretch. At about this time his telephone number in London, which was GULliver something, could be more easily remembered by people like us who were better at words than numbers, as GULFPAN.

Well, it continued to do that throughout his career. He had a way of looking at you sideways through eyes that were a quarter closed and you knew his sceptical intelligence was examining your opinions and, quite possibly, found them untenable. You can’t say that he would begin, and you’d have to try to defend your ideas as he dismantled them for you. It has been the grimmest of ironies that this most articulate of men should be stricken with a condition that interferes with your judgement and causes, of all things, a failure to communicate. But I am glad to say that when I saw him a few days before he died he was pretty lucid and seemed in control of his feelings and actions. Much like the old Alan that I shall always remember with admiration and affection.

Dear Jane here are my words: [Valerie Grove]

Alan Brien was one of those rare people with whom I fell in love long before we actually met. Since he came from Sunderland, and I came from South Shields only six miles away, I always knew we’d get on because people from the North-east always do. But what I fell in love with was his pieces in the New Statesman in the 1960s, and when we did meet, I was able to recite from memory a paragraph from a column of his that I’d copied into my commonplace book – something he’d written in 1969.

At that first encounter, at a film preview in 1971, he did not disappoint. He was everything I’d expected: a large presence, with a fine profile and those Slavic eyes and cheekbones and sardonic smile that were entirely suited to the amused, sceptical expression he so often wore. He would listen, but he was always ready to argue and provoke, even when wrong. We had a bet on his assertion that The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God was written by Kipling, which in fact was written by E Milton Hayes. He seemed to recall everything that Lord Beaverbrook ever said, and could recall whole conversations, at fantastic length: you’d think he’d reached a punch-line, but then he’d go on to another. It was the same in arguments, where Jill’s famous description of him being like a wart-hog, butting its way through the other animals to the water, was most apt: he’d shoulder his way through everyone’s verbiage and views, and get to the truth. I’ve never met anyone who held the table like him.

Here’s the opening of his column that I still have by heart.

“I remember noting, when I first came to London, how often the names of stores in the ads sounded like the baby-talk of the Nanny Mafia in Kensington Gardens -- ‘Don’t be so selfridge, Master Fortnum. Eat up all your harrods, and then you can have a gorringe. You’ll do yourself a gamage, mark my words, unless you have a c. and a. every morning on the derry and tom. Ponting is rude. I knew a child once died of the Whiteleys after eating too many burberries’.”

Dear Jane

I plan to be at the memorial. Not sure about The Garrick Club.

Will one of your eulogists add a paragraph pointing out that it was Alan
who contacted me to alert me the fact that The Roundhouse had been bought,
along with other land, by a property dealer named Louis Mintz who didn't
know what to do with the old engine shed, which was a Grade Two listed
building, and perhaps - suggested Alan - I could persuade Mr Mintz to give
it to the Centre Fortytwo project. I took up the suggestion and eventually
persuaded Louis Mintz to give us the 19 years lease left on the building.
Thus it was Alan who ignited the spark that led to the Roundhouse becoming
an iconic London building. And it was Centre Fortytwo's focus on The
Roundhouse and its surroundings that led to the beginnings of Camden
Market!

Arnold

SIR ARNOLD WESKER F.R.S.L