Going Up: To Cambridge and Beyond: A Writer’s Memoir by Frederic Raphael – review

Friends as well as enemies of the novelist and screenwriter must eat dust in his majestic wake

Writing a memoir is, for many, an acknowledgment that the living has given way to the remembering: a melancholy acceptance. Not for Frederic Raphael. He applies himself with a vengeance. No thresher has been more enthusiastic in reducing the cornfield of others’ reputations to size. Going Up, as its subtitle suggests, has a meaning for this writer far beyond recalling the groves of academe. He started out as a novelist and playwright before he decamped to the cinema and wrote the Academy Award-winning screenplay for Darling (1965), an acidic portrait of celebrity shallowness starring Julie Christie and Dirk Bogarde. The one time I have been at close quarters with him was 20 years ago at the leaving dinner of a literary editor we both wrote for. Freddie, making an impromptu toast, alluded to his Oscar within 90 seconds. But it is not enough for him to assert his own pre‑eminence; his contemporaries – friends as well as enemies – must eat dust in his majestic wake.

It is, I should say, a hugely entertaining book, if not always for the reasons its author might imagine. Coming of age in the 1950s, Raphael saw himself as one set apart from the profanum vulgus (his love of a Latin tag is terribly catching), perhaps from the moment he took to task the headmaster of his hated public school, Charterhouse, for a casual antisemitic slur. He believes the same prejudice disqualified him from a place at Winchester. His antennae for such discrimination twitch throughout the book, not only in the committee rooms of the establishment and the media but in the very pages of the canon. He disdains Pound and Eliot, of course, but also Graham Greene and Dickens, whose creation of Fagin he could never forget.

Continue reading...