My father, who is 78 and lives in Malaysia, has lunch once a week with a group of his high school classmates. I’m in awe, and not a little envious, that he has a group of friends who are so committed to each other that they convene weekly, six decades after they first met.
My father’s group reminds me of the legendary collection of British novelists and critics – Martin Amis, Christopher Hitchens, Julian Barnes, Salman Rushdie et al – who had a standing Soho lunch for many years. There were of course some points of difference between these two groups, not least that my father is teetotal and the writers by most accounts drank as much as they ate… What it must have been to sit at that table – and to stagger out afterwards.
The most productive literary lunch of all time was actually a dinner, and it took place in the Langham Hotel in London in 1889, when the publisher J.M. Stoddart invited two young writers he was courting to create something original for his magazine, Lippincott’s Monthly.
The writers invited were Oscar Wilde and Arthur Conan Doyle and, by the end of what one can only imagine was a pretty fabulous meal, Wilde had promised to write The Picture of Dorian Gray and Conan Doyle had committed to penning The Sign of the Four, featuring one Sherlock Holmes, for the magazine. One hopes nobody queried Stoddart’s expense claim.
Often I find myself dreaming of being invited to one of these lunches, or of perhaps being present in that motel room in Miami one warm night in February 1964 when Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, Jim Brown and Sam Cooke drank and talked through to the morning after Ali’s victory over Sonny Liston. I find it unbearably romantic, this idea of a group of great historical figures who are also friends, who lunch and achieve greatness together and who remain each other’s best critics and wisest counsellors throughout their lives.
I suspect that I’m obsessed with stories of this type because with my career zig zagging between books, theatre, tv, and film, I’ve never settled down in one discipline long enough to acquire a tightly knit peer group of my own.
Whilst I’m lucky to count many writers of distinction amongst my friendship group, and even luckier to have collaborated with many of them, few of my closest creative relationships could strictly be called peers.
From Douglas Adams (who I first met when I was 18) and David Baddiel to Lenny Henry and Sanjeev Bhaskar, I seem to always surround myself with mentor-collaborators, a decade or two my senior, and rather more famous than me.
Those last three constitute a coterie of multi-ethnic trailblazing National Treasures, who I admired as a teenager, and have inexplicably ended up collaborating with as an adult. On the upside, I have learnt so much from these greats that whatever I might lose in peer-feeling, I gain in expertise.
Also, they usually pay for lunch.
Lately, I seem to be taking this tendency of mine to extremes, seeking mentorship not only from the talented living, but also from the great dead. Over the last year I’ve been immersed in adapting two of the finest prose stylists of the 20th century: P.G.Wodehouse and Raymond Chandler.
Wodehouse, comic chronicler of the British aristocracy and creator of Jeeves & Bertie Wooster, Lord Emsworth and the inimitable Psmith, is the undisputed king of the English country-house farce; Chandler, creator of the iconic P.I. Philip Marlowe, is rightly acknowledged as the writer who elevated the detective story to the realms of literature.
Asked by their respective estates to adapt their work for stage and screen, I find myself in the terrifying position of having to write dialogue that can sit comfortably aside their original perfect sentences.
Consider the following:
‘It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.’
‘She looked as if she had been poured into her clothes and had forgotten to say ‘when’.’
‘He had the look of one who had drunk the cup of life and found a dead beetle at the bottom.‘
‘He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.‘
‘From thirty feet away she looked like a lot of class. From ten feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from thirty feet away.’
‘She had a penetrating sort of laugh. Rather like a train going into a tunnel.’
Hang on. What’s going on here, you might ask? Half of those lines are Wodehouse and half are Chandler. Yet, if you can correctly match the right sentence with the right author on all the above , without resorting to the internet, a) you’re lying and b) I’d like to hire you as a script editor.
It started to become clear to me that these two apparently very different writers have, on the level of the sentence at least, quite a lot in common. Both are masters of the unexpected simile and the heroic metaphor, and both wield transferred epithets with snake-like accuracy: their writings are full of meditative cigarettes, thoughtful forkfuls, lonely breakfasts and feet that take steps in the right direction but don’t go far enough. They share a deep feeling for the rhythm of dialogue, the musicality of words, and neither is afraid of a compound sentence, full of parenthetical phrases and subordinate clauses that zig from high thought to low gag.
As I got deeper into their work, it became clear that they shared another similarity: they each wrote what are essentially variations on a constant theme.
In every Chandler story you have an (invariably blond) femme fatale, a corrupt millionaire, a blackmailing low-life, a mobster who despite being ruthless also is capable of a kind of love, an unreliable client, a missing loved one and the square-jawed detective to sort it all out.
In each of Wodehouse’s adventures one finds some combination of: an inept bachelor, an alluring blond (or brunette, or redhead), an overbearing aunt, a case of mistaken identity and a highly effective Butler/Secretary/Uncle/Godfather/Best Friend to sort it all out.
Some critics assert that their repeated and strict use of formula makes them lesser artists. This is shallow, nonsensical thinking. Austen and Shakespeare adhered to strict formulas; as of course did Bach and the Beatles – as Douglas Adams put it, in an essay about Wodehouse:
‘It matters not one whit that he writes endless variations on a theme… . He is the greatest musician of the English language, and exploring variations of familiar material is what musicians do all day.’
To put it another way: a chessboard always has the same set of pieces on it and they each obey strict rules, but that in no way limits the endless variety, beauty and appeal of the endless games waiting to be played, and Wodehouse and Chandler were both grandmasters.
So how did it come to be that these two writers, working in very different genres on different sides of the Atlantic, have such overlap in style and form? This was the mystery I set about solving. Fortunately, no hard streets needed to be traversed, nor tough-guys interrogated. Google gave me my answer in seconds: Chandler and Wodehouse were contemporaries at Dulwich College in South London. They were schoolmates.
That news, as you might imagine, played happily into my fantasies. They were childhood friends! Of course they were; perhaps like my father and his pals or like Amis & Co. they had spent the subsequent decades meeting over lunch and exchanging manuscripts. If so, they were the platonic ideal of my dream, a duo ascending from the school yard to literary dominion, together.
Further research and reality quickly intruded: it turns out that the two only overlapped for one brief term, in 1900. There is no account of them meeting or even being aware of each other either at school or in their later lives. So much for my fantasy.
I kept digging, though. The truth, as it often is, turns out to be both simpler and more profound than our imaginations. These two great masters may not have learnt from each other – but they were both taught by the same teachers.
At Dulwich, seven years apart, they were instructed in Latin and Greek by the Classics teacher Phillip Hope and by the Headmaster, A.H. Gilkes, both men of fearsome scholarship and linguistic felicity. By ‘instructed’ read, immersed. Under Gilkes and Hope, the boys copied Virgil and Livy out by the yard, memorized pages of verse and free-translated, under the threat of the ruler, until they could each compose as fluently in Latin and Greek as they did in English.
In later life, as pointed out by the classicist Kathleen Riley, both writers acknowledge this debt explicitly; Chandler saying: ‘it would seem that a classical education might be a rather poor basis for writing novels in a hardboiled vernacular. I happen to think otherwise,’ whilst Wodehouse was clear that his schooling ‘on the Classical side… was the best form of education I could have had as a writer.’
As a writer myself who has benefited, from the school yard to this day, from great teachers and mentors, the unearthing of this story is better than fantasy. Teachers, it turns out, matter.
(That Nigel Farage also attended Dulwich, we will regard as the exception that proves the rule. He will be lost and forgotten whilst Marlowe and Jeeves live immortal.)
And yet… the romantic in me wants to discover that Plum and Ray were friends after all, that they read each other’s work and swapped similes and reminisced about the production of Aristophanes’ Frogs in which they played Tadpole 1 and Tadpole 2. Alas, other than the hallucinations of ChatGPT, no such evidence seems to exist, but then I remembered Wodehouse’s own description of his books and where they sat in the spectrum of literature:
‘I believe there are two ways of writing novels. One is mine, making a sort of musical comedy without music, and ignoring real life altogether; the other is going right deep down into life and not caring a damn.’
Two ways of writing novels, says Wodehouse. My way and Chandler’s way. Maybe the two old masters knew each other after all.
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