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And Another Thing

Paul Johnson

Wednesday, 3rd September 2008

High-pitched buzzing from the booksy girls and boys

When I first experienced literary life in London it was 1955 and poor Anthony Eden was prime minister. His delightful wife Clarissa was to be seen at literary parties and, amazingly enough, still is. The great panjandrums were Cyril Connolly and Raymond Mortimer on the Sunday Times, Philip Toynbee and Harold Nicolson on the Observer, and V.S. Pritchett and John Raymond on the New Statesman. John was my friend, and he opened all the doors to me, doors which were firmly shut in many eager faces. Every morning, in the Commercial on the King’s Road, or the French Pub in Dean Street, he and Maurice Richardson would pool their knowledge of book-launch parties that evening, and decide which to go to. I would tag along. These events were worth attending, too. Hosts would still serve hard liquor. Jock Murray, at his gatherings in the splendid first-floor drawing room in Albemarle Street, where Byron’s memoirs had been burnt in the grate still to be seen, used to pride himself on mixing the best dry martinis in London. Gin was served in buckets. At the Dorchester party to launch Alanbrooke’s memoirs there were champagne cocktails: a cube of sugar, soaked in Angostura bitters, with a spoonful of Courvoisier brandy, topped up with Mumm’s. This is a treat not often experienced in 21st-century London, and rare even in those golden days.

Famous writers still turned up in the Fifties. It was not unusual to see T.S. Eliot, Auden, Betjeman and Louis MacNiece in earnest converse together. At George Weidenfeld’s parties, the best of the lot in my opinion, you got the international figures: Edmund Wilson, Günter Grass, Sagan, Moravia, Mary McCarthy, and dozens of ravishing girls. Afterwards we would dine at Fava’s, each armed with a bottle of claret bought round the corner at the off licence: the three of us plus Hugh Thomas, Terry Kilmartin, Henry Fairlie, and sometimes dangerous characters like John Davenport and Con Fitzgibbon, good for a scrap at the downing of a double Campari. Afterwards the Gargoyle beckoned or Muriel’s Bar, or the Mandrake, where desperate characters like Julian Maclaren-Ross, Robert Colquhoun and his crony MacBryde consorted in tipsy boasting and snarling. There were plenty of late-night parties too, to which we would hurtle in crammed taxis.

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