WHEN NOTHING HAPPENS ALL AT ONCE

SIDCUP, HAROLD PINTER, LEICESTER SQUARE, BILLIE HOLIDAY, BILL NIGHY, LESTER YOUNG, ALEX SHARP, LUCIEN FREUD, AND "LIVING"

(Above: Actor Alex Sharp photographed by Benedict Evans. When I moved to London recently I threw out a print of this portrait I found in my closet as I was getting rid of everything I owned to start anew as a cultural and spiritual pilgrim with nothing left to my name but some dark-hued clothes and a deeper sense of who I am: a writer.)

DAVIES: I got plenty of references. All I got to do is to go down to Sidcup tomorrow. I got all the references I want down there.

MICK: Where’s that?

DAVIES: Sidcup. He ain’t only got my references down there, he got all my papers down there. I know that place like the back of my hand. I’m going down there anyway, see what I mean, I got to get down there or I’m done.

MICK: So we can always get hold of these references if we want them.

DAVIES: I’ll be down there any day, I tell you. I was going to go down today, but I’m … I’m waiting for the weather to break.

from The Caretaker by Harold Pinter

That’s the thing about the weather here in England, it breaks several times a day. I especially like when the late-day light parts the clouds in that way it has of imparting that it is the truer majesty that rules this isle. It not only settles over me, but settles me down. I often say that acknowledging light is my spiritual practice but here in England I often feel acknowledged by it. There is a communal contentment I experience when it breaks through. I feel less broken, the same but different as the battling becomes more about scaling the balance - like these words balanced against their almost identical selves in these previous sentences, not reconfigured exactly but instead reconsidered so they exist in a new way with many of the same letters that went into making them. Language, the one constant in my life, remains my lifeline

I experienced another sort of communal contentment the other day when I traveled out to Sidcup in Kent to Rose Bruford College in order to see a friend of mine in his drama school production of Nora: A Doll’s House, a reconfiguring of Ibsen by Stef Smith. But it wasn’t Ibsen about whom I was thinking on the Southeastern Railway car out there on the train I correctly boarded after reconnoitering Waterloo East. It was Pinter. In his first big hit, The Caretaker, he referenced Sidcup as a sort of Avalon of virtue where deliverance resides instead of the perceived drab drudgery that awaits those who disembark from such trains there. The Sidcup thread of the play marked Pinter himself with the knowing irony with which his privilege pushed his politics about onstage resulting in those silent standoffs that also marked his voice as a playwright. I’ve often thought those silences were less about his dramatic cadence than they were also a, well, standoffish way he found to fend off the drudgery of having to dredge up drab plots to plop down in the middle of a stage. He left the plotting to us. His characters were there to plead the case that life could hold lots of plots simultaneously if we had sense enough - and maybe even a higher instinct - to discern them. Watching his work can sometimes feel like an experience in physics - a peopling of the uncertainty principle - as much as a theatrical one.

When I got off the train, I had a vague idea of the eastern direction where Rose Bruford College was located but I stopped into The Iron Horse pub next to the station to ask for directions. The bartender was busy reading about the upcoming World Cup but told me the two old chaps at the bar, whose cheeks were clouded with that deepening red that can make a sunset here look as if it has a rusty case of rosacea itself after another day of too much rain, could be of help. “They like telling people where to go,” he said. It was only 1 p.m. but they seemed to have been on their stools for a few hours already. Indeed, I thought they looked like the final two actors who had made it for callbacks to play Davies in a local production of The Caretaker. There was a talent to their raffishness, it also a bit rusted-out. But they could still churn forth the charm when the right moment coaxed it from them. “Rose Bruford is not an easy ramble,” said the first one. “It’s terribly tucked. Hmm. Let’s see … Go out and turn right and you’ll see a church on the corner.”

“Of course. Always,” I said as a coax, making the second one laugh.

“Walk past that and go through the traffic light,” the first one said, elbowing his laughing friend. “Then turn right into the park there - don’t be afraid of the mud - and make another right when you come to the end of that path and then bear right a bit into a car park and you’ll see the school. Nothing much to look at now. But there was a manor house …

“I know I’ll get lost,” I interrupted him.

“Isn’t that the whole point?” asked the second one. “You can’t find your way back without first getting lost …

“….and finding your way back is half the fun of it all,” this first one finished the thought.

“What’s the other half?” I asked.

A pause worthy of Pinter seemed to pull up its own stool and join us. Finally the second one said, “Being lost. Getting lost … you know .. let’s see … lost …”

“Oh, I know lost,” I said. “I know it well.”

The duo of Davies’s didn’t quite know what to make of that, so downed their ales in unison. The first one then tapped the fingers of one of his hands atop the bar like Pinter might have on the keys when typing with one hand and smoking with the other when he was finding his way back to a play’s pull. The bartender noticed the fingers as well which, it turned out, was a signal to pour them two more ales. “The secret to life is enjoying the lost bits as much as finding your way again,” the second one said.

“See?” said the bartender. “I told you you’d be better off to ask these two.”

(Above: Late-day light alighting in Lamorbey Park in Sidcup on Thursday November 17, 2022.)

It turns out I didn’t get lost. With my boots, yes, muddied a bit, I found the college with a surprising ease. Another surprise alas awaited me there. When I asked at the reception desk where the matinee was being staged, I was told there was no matinee. The receptionist Morgan and I - with the help of the school’s librarian, Frank, who happened by - did some research and discovered that the production had been there the previous week but on that day had begun its three-day stand at a theatre in North London. I had misread my ticket. Frank, not the prissy type but the precise sort who can be mistaken for prissy, asked if I wanted a tour of the school since I was already there with nothing to do. I appreciated the kindness of his offer and accepted it.

For the second time in less than an hour in Sidcup, I had been charmed by the kindness of three very different gentleman. Frank was well-pressed in his precision, a librarian’s hushed dignity having taken him in hand long ago. I was taken myself by how humble he was in his pride about the college, incongruity the interesting wrinkle in his otherwise well-pressed presentation of himself. Those first two old chaps I encountered, sitting on their bar stools awash in an addiction that made them less wary of others, not only offered up their combined kindness, but also a wizened bit of guidance that accompanied their directions to a place, as it turned out, I didn’t really need to be.

When Frank finished the tour, I asked Morgan if she thought it would be okay to stick around for a bit and hang out in the school’s cafe. She said of course it would. After my coffee in the cafe, I circled back inside one of the buildings to sit on a stairwell outside the theatre where a final dress rehearsal for the costume drama Coram Boy was taking place. It is a play with music and the young actors were scurrying about, whispering their lines to themselves, humming along with the music when it erupted inside, and waiting for their cues. Sitting there listening to this play about the child cruelty housed in a foundling hospital during the 1700’s, I thought of my orphaned oft-harped-upon 1960s Mississippi childhood when I was as defiantly sad as I was defiant in my determination not to tamp down on my being a sissy no matter how much I was taunted because of it. Such emotional cruelty felt as if it were physically attempting to press my own innate prissiness not into the fabric of who I was, but instead to smooth it rather violently out of me.

But it was that sadness early on that became the defining defiant act of my life. People would wish for me to be happy when they didn’t harbor inside of them the trauma not only of being a bullied, belittled little Mississippi sissy but also that of losing my father to a car accident when I was at my most deeply sissy at seven and then losing my mother the next year to cancer when that deep sissiness of mine became even performative because it seemed to soothe her physical pain and somehow, by seeing her soothed, my emotional sort. To be happy after my parents consecutive deaths was to me not to love them anymore; it was a betrayal, to use another Pinter title. Sadness conflated with my still being their son, a sissy one but theirs. At some point, it was the sadness itself that became performative. My writing is rife with it. This column is. I am performing it in this very paragraph. I sat with it on that stairwell watching those young actors in rehearsal for their performance that night and felt its longing to join them and continue to perform. Sadness and being a sissy: the two-hander I’ve been touring in all my life.

When I was a young guy - a sissy with a bit more swagger in my swishy hips - I not only found Joni Mitchell’s Blue album but also, like Joni, fell in love with jazz and the musicians and singers who blew and sang their sadnesses into song. Then: sex. So much sex. With its arrival in my young life, the sissy sadness found a further more furtive way to perform, to soothe. In fact, there was another Young guy, this one named Lester, I’d listen to a lot; he could move his fingers along his tenor sax in a way that had the tenor of sex to me. Born in Mississippi himself, Lester was also a lover of language. He created much of the jargon that jazz musicians still use. Young’s longing - his lurch of notes and then their sudden unexpected graceful slide into something that could once again be called a tune - matched how my own young longing felt to me, lurching about for a note of grace here and there as I kept trying to grow up by finding the tune of myself. “Joni and jazz and the joy of jism” I can joke when describing my youth, the allure of alliteration still hanging around like Lester and Lady Day - he came up with that name for her - when, in the late night of their lives in a carefully lit CBS studio, they performed “Fine and Mellow” for a special called The Sound of Jazz. They were feeling anything but fine, but mellow, yet for a few moments they seemed to remember what it felt like to be not happy exactly but in harmony with it. When Lester - Prez to Lady Day - surprisingly got up from his much-needed chair at that point in his life and pressed his lips to his horn for a short solo, a lurching grace of notes emerged, blues so pure the sound turned instead into the quick lush feel of lustrated joy of the kind that the injured lungs of jazz musicians can conjure. An injured kindness, come to think of it, is a description of what I felt when I first started listening to jazz. Listening to Lester’s in that studio at CBS put just enough hope into Lady Day’s hooded eyes that she, bobbing her head only slightly, rhythmically signaled to him that she recognized it. “Lester got up, and he played the purest blues I have ever heard,” claimed jazz aficionado and critic, Nat Hentoff, one of the show's producers. “Lester and Billie Holiday were looking at each other, their eyes were sort of interlocked, and she was sort of nodding and half–smiling. It was as if they were both remembering what had been—whatever that was. And in the control room we were all crying. When the show was over, they went their separate ways.”

(Above: Billie Holiday, Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, and Gerry Mulligan in the 1957 CBS special The Sound of Jazz. Marvin Gaye: “I'd been studying the microphone for a dozen years, and I suddenly saw what I'd been doing wrong. I'd been singing too loud. One night I was listening to a record by Lester Young, the horn player, and it came to me. Relax, just relax. It's all going to be all right.”)

I began softly to hum “Fine and Mellow” sitting on those stairs at that college in Sidcup doing nothing but trying to figure out why I was thinking of Lester Young and Billie Holiday in such a moment instead of remembering my days at the Juilliard School’s Drama Division when I felt rising in me what was rising in these drama students all about me, that initial concentration of hope in a talented youngster that can hone a life or cripple it. Just ask Billie. Just ask Lester. Just ask me. When I got back to London from Sidcup, I had nothing planned to do, so checked to see if there were a seat at the 6:30 p.m. screening of the new film Living which was playing in Leicester Square. It stars Bill Nighy in an anglicised version by Kazuo Ishiguro of Kurosawa’s Ikiru which he had based on Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich. There was one seat left - a “companion” one but since the movie was starting in less than a minute they allowed me in my chronic companionless state to book it.

Living deeply spoke to me in ways I am still trying to figure out. I do know that when Nighy’s character, who has been diagnosed with a fatal disease, stares at a young woman with a fleeting look of revived hope that life can actually mean something and he might just be able to harmonize with happiness if not be happy himself, his eyes so hooded with a performative dignity - “I just wanted to be a gentleman,” he tells her in the stunning monologue at the heart of the film - I was reminded of Lady Day’s hooded eyes as she looked over at Prez and for a moment found the rhythm that had for so long given her own life its reason if not, that night in that CBS studio, a reason to keep on living. She and Lester were dead in a couple of years. By the end of the film Nighy’s character was. I can’t watch that CBS special without crying during that song as if I were in the control room with Hentoff. And Living left me awash with tears but not, oddly enough, with sadness.

(Above: Lucian Freud, “Self-Portrait” (c.1956), oil on canvas, 61 x 61 cm( private collection; © The Lucian Freud Archive / Bridgeman Images)

I walked across Leicester Square in the misty night after the film with a profound sense of lightness. I had begun the day at Waterloo East station wrongly assuming what my day would be and ended it with a film I had no idea was going to see that began itself in a scene set at Waterloo East station. When I was cleaning out my closets before my move to London and not only daring to throw out so much of the detritus of my life, but also to look upon it as such instead of things I’d falsely, I’d convinced myself, cherished, I discarded a beautiful portrait of the actor Alex Sharp who costars with Nighy in Living. I had once created a magazine in San Francisco as its founding Editor-in-Chief and put Sharp in it. I loved that portrait which I used in the magazine for his story so much that I had kept it for years. Seeing him in the film brought up not only the emotions he was, as an actor, conjuring in me, but also the ones I could still feel for having discarded everything in my life, much of it combining into the manly mourning that had descended upon me as a child - that defiant sadness - that I keep recreating in my life.

But I sensed something else rising in me as I walked toward the tube station to head back to Kilburn where I have parked my life in one small room since “home is now what I carry inside me,” I keep saying aloud trying to convince myself of it just as I had convinced myself to toss that portrait of Sharp. Living is set in a London of 1953. That’s around the time my parents married. I was born in 1956, the year that Lucien Freud painted that unfinished self-portrait above that I saw recently in an exhibition of his work at the National Gallery. Or maybe it is finished and he just knew when to stop. Its unfinished quality is exactly what he wanted to convey. I too am unfinished, and I realized walking in that misty night after a day of doing nothing in Sidcup and a night sitting doing nothing in a movie theatre watching a dying man happily embrace a purposeful life, hooded no longer with performative dignity but liberated with a dignified life, that I haven’t waited for a fatal diagnosis to live such an embraced sense of life. I am living, in a way, the life that the dying dare to live once they know they’re dying. I just didn’t need a diagnosis to do it.

Or maybe it is this. I am finally learning the lesson that my parents having themselves died so young taught me: shed all of life except the living of it. It was never defiant to be sad about such trauma their deaths inflicted on me. Sadness was the predictable response. Being sad about their consecutive deaths was so profoundly predictable a response that it came to underlie the rest of my life that I aways thought was predicated on being unpredictable in my need to defy conventions. How wrong I have been. The act of defiance is to be happy. It took a day of doing nothing while simultaneously seeing all the plots of my life converging in a kind of principled uncertainty to come to rest in that thought. I have always feared that happiness took too much work and sadness just came so easily to me. But, no. Wrong again. Happiness: when nothing happens all at once.

“He sought his former accustomed fear of death and did not find it. ‘Where is it? What death?’ There was no fear because there was no death,” wrote Tolstoy in The Death of Ivan Ilyich. “In place of death there was light.” I walked on in the mist of Leicester Square beneath the manmade twinkle of it with which all cities christen Christmas, but especially London. But it is Sidcup I will reference when I remember this day I lived when nothing happened except my shedding the final thing I had to shed to live this life I now long to live: the fear of being happy.

I’ll always defiantly be a Mississippi sissy, but in that misty night after seeing a film titled Living, the curtain came down on the two-hander that has defined my life. The show was over. Sadness and I went our separate ways.