Lament for the Folding Stuff

Titanic

In the Small Hours

The Broken Web

Cliff Path

Resisting Prince Charming

At the beginning of his autobiography Prince Charming, Christopher Logue comments wryly that he has never written three hundred pages of anything. Well, he has now, and his autobiography is lively, amusingly malicious, and endearingly frank.

Within the first few pages he is describing how he fell in love with Nell Dunn, and was taken to see her mother, Lady Mary Campbell. Lady Mary, who was lying in bed, looked from Logue to Nell and said: 'Darling, how awful for you'.

Christopher Logue was a middle class boy, born in 1926 to a mother who came to dislike him as much as he disliked her. It may have been in reaction to the lack of maternal affection that, at the age of 8, he began to lie and steal. The lying was usually directed to self-aggrandisement, the stealing mainly to money which he did not need - all signs of a deep seated resentment, which has continued to flourish, on and off, throughout most of his life.

He sounds not unlike Graham Greene when he says: 'Throughout my childhood I thought of happiness as a state of affairs found in films.' But he sounds more like Rousseau when he describes robbing a small girl of her ice cream with a toy pistol, getting caught by his headmaster while masturbating, and appearing in court for stealing copies of Men Only for autoerotic purposes. The reader is not surprised when, in the army, he gets two years in jail for stealing paybooks.

Life suddenly livened up when he went to Paris, at the age of 25, and met the brilliant and erratic writer Alexander Trocchi, who was soon editing a magazine called Merlin, which published Samuel Beckett when he was totally unknown. A hypochondriac named Maurice Girodias offered them all work writing pornography, making it clear that he just wanted filth, not literature. Logue and Trocchi obediently churned out some dirty books.

It was during this period that I was also in Paris, with my friend Bill Hopkins, and we were introduced to Logue by the American editor George Plimpton. Logue was gaunt, ugly, with bad teeth and a combative manner. But I have to admit that he was kindness itself to myself and Bill, finding us a place to doss down, and giving good advice on the best places to eat cheaply.

He also read us some of his poetry, which I thought atrocious - he now admits as much himself - and showed us the prospectus of a magazine to be called The Pillory, which would feature on each of its covers some member of the literary establishment, his hands and neck locked in a pillory.

In 1956, Logue and Alex Trocchi decided to move to London, and Alex moved into the bedsit in Notting Hill where I was living with my girlfriend Joy. He was brilliant, charming and likeable, and enlivened the lives of the other tenants with his pot parties and dizzyingly erudite conversation. I had just, at this time, had my first book The Outsider, accepted. But Alex grew bored with London, and took off for New York, where he began shooting heroin and was soon in trouble with the police.

I saw Logue for the first time since Paris at a party given by Mel Lasky, one of the editors of Encounter. He was dressed from head to foot in black, and his face looked sallower than ever. I was delighted to see him, for I remembered his kindness, and shouted 'Chris, how are you?'

To my surprise, he looked at me without smiling. 'Hello Wilson'.

'What are you doing in London, Chris?'

'Christopher, if you please', said Logue coldly, and left me to pursue a redhead in a low cut dress.

Then I realised what I had done wrong. The Outsider had become a bestseller, and, together with John Osborne, I had been labelled an 'Angry Young Man'. I had committed the unpardonable sin of becoming a success.

Not long after, there was the odd affair at the Royal Court. My friend Stuart Holroyd had written a play called The Tenth Chance, based on the diary of a Dutchman named Peter Moen, who had experienced a religious conversion while being tortured by the Gestapo. Stuart persuaded George Devine, director of the Royal Court, to give it a Sunday evening performance.

I did not like the play. The religious conversion was unconvincing on stage, at once theatrical and sentimental. But at the climax of the play, there was a loud cry of 'Rubbish', and Logue stamped up the aisle and went out of the door with a crash. A moment later, his friend Kenneth Tynan also stamped up the aisle. I grabbed him as he passed my seat, and said: 'Listen Tynan, if your bloody rude friends want to create a disturbance, let them do it during their own plays, not somebody else's.' Tynan shouted: 'G-g-g-get out of my life, Wilson', and also slammed the door behind him.

I was furious. And when I saw Logue sitting in the pub next door, I went up to him and told him I thought he was a mean-spirited little bastard to spoil Stuart's play. At that moment, Stuart's wife Anne hurled herself past me like a thunderbolt, grabbed Logue by the throat, and knocked his chair over backwards. As he looked up at me from the floor, he flinched, as if expecting me to kick him in the face. Instead I walked out. The next morning all the newspapers were full of the 'punch up' at the Court.

I am glad to say that our estrangement did not last long. The press had turned against the 'Angry Young Men', attacking us as excessively as they had praised us. Stuart Holroyd sought Logue out, and the two became friendly. And when Bill and I met Logue again, it was like old times in Paris. On one occasion, he did us an important favour, tipping us off that a journalist who wanted to interview us actually meant to do a razor job.  We cancelled the interview.

Yet the old hostility could still rear its head.  When a friend of mine named Sidney Campion wrote a book called The World of Colin Wilson, Logue threatened to sue him for describing him as a Communist. My friend had to settle out of court for about £500, an immense sum in those days. We all knew Logue was a Communist, and in this book he proudly admits it. It struck me then, as it still does, as totally immoral of Logue to have taken the money. But a mutual friend, Laura del Rivo, put her finger on it when she said: 'Communists dislike society, so they think they have a right to behave in a shitty manner towards individuals'.

I moved to Cornwall and heard nothing more from Logue until a few years ago, when I made a friendly reference to him in The Literary Review, in a piece about the long-dead Alex Trocchi. I received a pleasant letter from Logue, and replied in the same tone. Apparently ancient hostilities were forgotten as we both approached the threshold of old age.

But when Prince Charming arrived for review, I realised this was self-deception. He does not, I hasten to add, attack me. He simply takes care not to mention my name, even when discussing the Angry Young Men or the 'punch up' at the Court.

I have known a few other contemporaries who have had this same touch of bile in their make-up - for example, Arthur Koestler, John Osborne, John Wain. It springs from a sense of not being accorded sufficient respect and admiration. Perhaps, after being described on the dust jacket of his autobiography as 'one of our great poets', Logue will finally relax into some kind of mellowness.