A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
A female acquaintance recently told me she thought this picture made me look cool. I’ve always had kinder friends than I deserve.
It was taken in my room at St John’s College, Oxford, in the summer of 1978 by my lovely and talented friend Maggie S. We are on the first floor of the North Quad and the windows to my left look out over St Giles – the dual carriageway Inspector Morse is always driving down in his red Jag. The mirror behind me sits over a sink. There is a stack of LPs (ask your grandparents) to my left next to my desk. The room also contains a bookcase, a cupboard, a bed, a wardrobe, a coffee table and a sofa. They looked after us very well at St John’s. I’ve lived in much pokier bedsits than this since.
The picture on the wall over my right shoulder shows the fabulous smiling face of the model Twiggy. Not for me the tacky cliché of that tennis player scratching her arse, or Farrah Fawcett in her pre-Baywatch swimsuit. I like eyes.
But it’s not just the Twiggy poster and the indoor smoking and the brownish 70s tinge to the photo that bespeak its time. It’s not even the plethora of hair and the denim flares – both of which, alas, are now long gone and never likely to return – or even the face fungus like a badger’s backside that I kept for far too long. It’s that hole in the left sleeve of the shirt. This was a time before computers, and I can’t count the number of left sleeves I got through leaning on that side as I (and everyone I knew) sat hour after tedious hour writing things out longhand. The previous year in Germany I had got through at least three shirts and cardigans simply in the course of writing my novel One Bumptious Bumpkin. (I called it that before deciding to change it for something good.)
Incidentally, it was Twiggy who indirectly taught me a useful lesson in writing comedy. One early sketch I did mentioned someone making a model of Twiggy out of an old Sqezy bottle and a couple of pipe cleaners. It was the Sqezy bottle that always got the laugh, rendering the second part about the pipe cleaners redundant. (What were they meant to be for anyway? The arms? The legs? The hair? I just never thought it through.) It took me a while to work out why. I thought I’d just been poking fun at the perennial Blue Peter trope of making anything and everything out of Sqezy bottles. What the audience were actually latching onto, I suspect now, was the way the container’s smooth, narrow, cylindrical profile mimicked the model’s iconically uncurvy shape.
But you sometimes never know what’s going to work. In a series of quickies based around a séance for our first Edinburgh show, I had come up with this:
MEDIUM: (knock knock knock) “Is there anybody there?”
GHOSTLY VOICE: “Ye-e-es. Is there anybody there?”
MEDIUM: “Y-y-yes.”
GHOSTLY VOICE: “Well, whaddya know? Life before death.”
It always seemed to get a big reaction, and I couldn’t work out why. Someone explained to me later that it was probably because it was reversing the accepted point of view and suggesting that maybe the dead see death as their only reality which means they would be as surprised as us to suddenly hear from the other side. News to me. I thought I was just putting “before” in place of “after”. But I was happy to take any acclaim that was going. The exchange took me less than twenty seconds to write down, leaning heavily on my threadbare left elbow, and made an average of ninety people titter twice a day for two weeks. That’s worth sacrificing a shirt or two, I reckon.
The year after I came down from St John’s, the college went co-educational. They obviously wanted to make sure I was safely off the premises before they admitted women. My French tutor, Professor Cave, asked me to pose for a couple of photographs to be taken in the library for the new prospectus. This was one. The other was a reverse shot wherein I was leaning forward across the table, looking as if I was actually reading the book rather than falling asleep over it, which was much more my style. I think that was one of the reasons they used it. The other reason was doubtless because this other shot also featured the wise and wonderful Maggie S, an exemplary student who has probably never fallen asleep over a book in her life, and who also took that shot of me above in my holey shirt. (Note: both pictures are obviously posed. What student worth their salt reads a book without pen and paper to hand to make notes? Apart from me I mean?)
