Donkey’s years ago Michael Frayn wrote a comic masterpiece called Towards the End of the Morning. The novel was about the newspaper men of old Fleet Street, but its subtext was the approach of middle age, a problem particularly for Bob, its protagonist, who until then “had been young all his life”. More than half a century on from its publication, Frayn, 90, is heading toward the end of the evening.
It is not long after the end of lunch, however, that I meet him at his home outside Richmond, southwest London. As he makes us coffee, his wife, the outstanding literary biographer Claire Tomalin — like him, a former journalist — gives me a tour of the house they have lived in for 20 years: their bedroom overlooking a magnolia tree; the neat spare room (“should you ever come to stay”); their busy his-and-hers studies; and another room lined with methodically ordered box files.
The last time I visited she was working on A Life of My Own, the memoir she published in 2017. She won’t write another book, she says. Her husband’s latest, a touching and funny series of essays about his friends, is, I say, amazingly good. “Not ‘amazingly’,” she corrects me, and she is right. It is every bit as good as you would expect from the author of the novels Sweet Dreams and Spies, plays such as Alphabetical Order, Noises Off and Copenhagen, and, lest we doubt the comic writer’s ultimate seriousness, two works of philosophy.
Conversations with Friends
Of the 13 friends celebrated in Among Others: Friendships and Encounters, only three are alive: his Cambridge philosophy supervisor Jonathan Bennett, the journalist Neal Ascherson and the theater director Michael Blakemore. His publisher wondered whether one might interview him onstage, but Bennett lives in Canada, Ascherson is very deaf and Blakemore, with whom he is dining this evening, is almost 95. Of any friend, Bamber Gascoigne, the genial, cerebral University Challenge host, would probably have been the ideal interviewer. “But Bamber,” Frayn says, “died even while I was writing about him.”
The book’s final quizzical essay is about Frayn’s own body, which after years of good health has begun to fail him. At a meeting, he records, he became suddenly unable to remember the name of anything at all. In the middle of the night, up for a pee, he fell over in the lavatory. Later he suffered a mini-stroke. Although he appears very far from infirm of mind or body, I need to ask after his health.
“Well, it’s reasonable. I’ve had to have a lot of work done on my heart. A pacemaker and stents and an aortic valve. Otherwise it’s reasonable. I mean, the problem for both Claire and me is memory, failing memory. We are getting very old. Especially names. Why are names in a separate section of the brain? Because they do go first. Proper names go long before common nouns.”
Was the attack of comprehensive amnesia terrifying? “It was dismaying. It was upsetting, yes. It wasn’t quite terrifying. It was just a sense of complete unreality. It has happened to me once since. Walking with my daughter along the river, I suddenly realized I simply could not take part in any of the conversation. I could hear perfectly well what she was saying, but I couldn’t make sense of it.”
Apart from mostly being dead, the characteristic most obviously shared by the friends who make it into the book is cleverness. “Bamber, for instance, learnt Italian — which is a relatively easy language — in a fortnight, well enough to go and do a lecture tour.” Another genius was Eric Korn, whom he met at Cambridge. Korn wrote poetry and sketches, spoke Russian and introduced Frayn to cybernetics and comparative philology. He was probably the cleverest person he knew, he writes, but not perhaps the most intelligent.
What’s the difference? “Well, knowing about a thing doesn’t necessarily make you think more profoundly about it and he found it very difficult to get his cleverness down onto the track. He suffered disaster after disaster professionally although he knew an enormous amount. He finally found this wonderful niche of first of all being a bookseller, then writing a column about books, and then being on [Radio 4’s] Round Britain Quiz team.
“But I’ve been a member of various different groups of people, different circles of friends, and I’ve always been one of the less clever people in the group. And that’s a mercy really because if you were the cleverest person in a group, how boring it would be with everyone stupider than you were. If you know people who are cleverer than you are, it’s endlessly interesting, entertaining and challenging. You have to raise your game to stay in the ring with them.”
With three exceptions, the friends in Among Others are also men, an imbalance he worries away at in the introduction. “A difference in gender is like a difference in electrical polarity,” he writes. There is always a “slight intriguing tingle” between a man and a woman.
“If you were the cleverest person in a group, how boring it would be with everyone stupider than you were.”
I wonder if he would think differently had he not gone to single-sex schools. “I would think it quite likely. Yes, quite likely. There are a number of women who had a considerable influence on my life, but they’re mostly ones that I’ve been in love with. Two of them I married. And I don’t see how you can write about people you are or have been in love with. Well, I’ve done it with two women in my life in this book.”
The pair are an early girlfriend, Liza Mrosovsky, a student at Oxford when they met, and Sarah Heffner, a German painter, with whom he reveals he had an affair while married to his first wife, Gillian Palmer. It was what he would until then have dismissed as a banal midlife crisis (it happened not long after the death of his father in 1970) and it “caused a good deal of anguish for everyone involved”.
The romantic recklessness comes as a surprise. Frayn is renowned for his orderliness. Indeed, order v chaos is the theme of much of his work, from Alphabetical Order, set in a newspaper’s library, to his academic philosophy. With his family in Blackheath, southeast London, he had felt content — did he secretly want to know what chaos was like, enjoy it even?
“It’s a very good question. I can’t remember. I thought it was absolutely intolerable at the time. Maybe with any experience, whatever it is, you feel there is some sort of positive aspect, that you are learning more about the world and yourself and what it’s like for other people.”
“A difference in gender is like a difference in electrical polarity.”
A number of years after the Heffner hiatus, and 20 years into his first marriage, he left Palmer for Tomalin, finally marrying her a dozen years later in 1993. He briefly refers to the divorce in his 2010 book My Father’s Fortune. It was clearly bloody. His sister so strongly disapproved that she refused to speak to Tomalin for the 27 years.
Is he the type to feel guilt? “I know I obviously hurt my first wife a great deal by leaving her. Yes.”
In her autobiography Tomalin writes that the situation was resolved “very slowly through the generosity of his wife and his determination to keep an unbroken and close relationship with his three daughters, which he achieved”. But, she adds: “Middle-aged love proved stronger than anything I had known before, and enduring.”
Was it the same for him? “Well, we’ve been, after a difficult period, continuously together since 1981. And it’s been a period of great calm. I mean, I haven’t got the faintest inclination to think about anyone else at all and I don’t think she has.”
Perhaps late love endures because the libido declines? “I don’t think so. It’s rather strong,” he assures me. “Well, it does finally get a bit quieter.”
Having guarded his private life for so long, in old age he is finally opening up, but doing so still does not come easily to him. He says he rarely talks about these things to even his closest friends. “Claire has written her own memoirs. She’s very frank about life, really can’t see why I’ve got a problem in writing about it.”
Is it that Gillian wouldn’t like it? “My first wife? Well, I think it would be difficult, wouldn’t it? It’s not that she’s said anything about it, but I am conscious that it could be painful for her.
“I do feel anxious that the book is taking a bit of a liberty, writing about real people. And the more I’ve written about real people, the more I’ve seen why I’ve spent most of my life writing about fictional figures.”
He almost never inserts real people into his novels or plays. An exception is John Silverlight, who was an excitable leader page editor of The Observer, where Frayn worked. Silverlight became John Dyson in Towards the End of the Morning, something obvious to every colleague, but not to him. Another was his best friend at school, David, who appears in his novel Spies as Stephen. By coincidence David got in touch with him just as he was finishing the novel. Frayn sent it to him and he liked it. “He loved the picture of his father. He was even more monstrous than I realized at the time. Absolutely destroyed my friend’s life.”
“The more I’ve written about real people, the more I’ve seen why I’ve spent most of my life writing about fictional figures.”
And now Spies is an A-level text. “I was told by a teacher that Spies was a very popular choice and I was very gratified by that, but she said, ‘No, it’s just the shortest book on the list.’ I have talked to lots of schoolchildren about it as a set text and their reactions have often been quite interesting. It didn’t seem to be just a chore. They did seem to have a personal reaction to it.”
Among Others is about lives fully led, including, obliquely, his own, but death does receive a nod. “I shall never be dead. Not in my lifetime,” he writes, demanding this is the same as eternal life. I say that Gascoigne, who disliked philosophy, would surely dismiss that as a quibble.
“I do believe in eternal life because what is eternal life? It is the extent of one’s own life. Death is not an event in life. It’s an illustration of what you call a limiting case, which is something that stands just outside a range of things.”
But the length of a life matters, I say. Tomalin lost a daughter to suicide. Her young death was a tragedy. “Yes,” he concedes, “it’s nice for eternity to be a bit longer.”
So does this eternity theory prevent him fearing death? “I don’t fear being dead at all, but the approaches towards death are mostly pretty grim. I wouldn’t say I actively worry about it, but I can’t say I’m looking forward to it either, not to being in pain or stupid or incontinent, all the awful things that happen to people in old age. But being dead seems an extremely uninteresting experience.”
I hope there is at least another book before it. “I think this will probably be my last work, sadly. You never know, but I must rely on ideas suggesting themselves. I don’t think one can artificially say, ‘And now I would like to write about a book about the problems of day care.’”
I ask him to sign Among Others and, of course, my favorite of all his books, almost of all books, Towards the End of the Morning. Then I walk back to Richmond railway station along the river path he and Gascoigne walked so often. It is — and certainly for me — toward the end of the afternoon.
Among Others: Friendships and Encounters, by Michael Frayn, is out now from Faber & Faber
Andrew Billen is a features writer at The Times of London
