Going Up/Private View reviews: ‘relentlessly rebarbative’ Frederic Raphael

Several years ago Frederic Raphael established an email correspondence with the American writer and essayist Joseph Epstein. In the course of their exchange, published, in 2013, as Distant Intimacy: A Friendship in the Age of the Internet, Raphael offered a self-assessment of his career: "I still write like a man who never wanted to do anything else much, except make love, of course, and a name, I guess."

Raphael's portion of this dialogue is not distinguished by an especially notable aptitude (or appetite) for self-knowledge. But his statement to Epstein must be granted some force: Raphael has written a lot, and when he is not writing (or talking about writing) his major preoccupations do not stretch far beyond the subjects of women and reputation – usually, his reputation. That is certainly the impression one gets from reading his latest volume of memoirs, Going Up: To Cambridge and Beyond – A Writer's Memoir.

Raphael was born in Chicago in 1931, after his English father moved the family to the US to pursue a career in the oil industry. When they returned to England (to Putney, in London) in 1938, Raphael, who describes himself at this time as “an honest-to-God American kid”, was dismayed: he had, he says, been “untimely ripped from Ethical Culture School, on Central Park West, and subjected to an English classical education, first at Copthorne, a Sussex prep school . . . then at Charterhouse”.

Raphael's time in England brought him into contact with an alarming level of anti-Semitism, largely of the sort that could be caught, as Harold Abrahams phrases it in Chariots of Fire, on the edge of a remark. One instance of this concerned the provost of Guildford, who, during a visit to Charterhouse, delivered a sermon that suggested that Jews are particularly avaricious.

Raphael heard the sermon and wrote a letter of complaint to the provost, who promptly sent a letter of his own to George Turner, the head of Charterhouse, bemoaning the young man’s impudence. Turner’s response was to declare Raphael ineligible to appear on the shortlist of candidates for a scholarship to Christ Church, Oxford.

Effectively prevented from applying to his university of choice, Raphael set about securing a scholarship to read classics at St John's College, Cambridge. Before going up to Cambridge he worked as a reporter for the Sunday Express.

Raphael is amusing about what he took to be the paper’s ideal style – “no story should be longer than three paragraphs, no paragraph longer than three sentences, and no sentence much longer than three words” – and he evokes the lost world of Fleet Street with a vividness and pace lacking from the rest of the book.

His years at Cambridge (already the subject of The Glittering Prizes, an award-winning TV series and follow-up novel) are chronicled at excessive length, as are his subsequent travels in France, Spain and Italy in the 1950s. The whole enterprise is exhausting, and most of the exhaustion is generated by the manifold irritations of Raphael's style.

Pretentious? Moi?

Raphael likes to pepper his prose with what he terms, apparently without irony, the locution franç

aise ("version originale", "reclame", "en-tout-cas", "en deuxiemes noces", "coureur de femmes"). He reaches with wearying frequency for fussy double negatives ("it did not seem unbeatable", "security was not a displeasing concept", "not unknown among climbing intellectuals", "not wholly displeased"). And he displays a vigorous anti-talent for queasily lascivious euphemisms: "I embraced Maud again, and pressed her against the evidence of my desire, which she seemed to appreciate."

Elsewhere, women (or, in Raphael’s parlance, “females”) are continuously robbed of agency, routinely cast as citadels to be stormed: “English girls furnished a passive and interminable assault course”; “Mona had the biggest, most enticing breasts. I never surmounted them”; “As we sat below his dais, I could observe two appetising tarts who, in broad daylight, paraded for custom”; “I asked the daughter of a Golders Green dentist to come to see [a play] . . . I lost my appetite for her undoing”; “my ardour might have been capped by her grateful subjugation”.

When Raphael is not writing unpleasantly about women he turns his attention to his literary reputation (the third of his great preoccupations) and writes unpleasantly about that. One feels he is consumed by a sense that he has never received the literary acclaim he has deserved, and that feeling is intensified by the amount of time he spends documenting the nice things that have been said about him.

We learn that on the publication of his second novel, The Limits of Love (1960), Peter Foster "devoted most of a broadsheet page to proclaim me 'a really remarkable new talent' "; that "Desmond Flower announced a reprint of my 'considerable achievement' almost as quickly as Victor Gollancz"; that his third novel, A Wild Surmise (1961), "received even better reviews, in smarter places, than The Limits of Love"; that "Jake Davenport said that I wrote the best dialogue he had read in many years"; that Richard Greyson declared the first draft of Nothing But the Best "the best script he had ever read". Raphael is relentlessly rebarbative company.

This would all be easier to take if Raphael had produced a body of work that was not so obviously slight (the only substantial thing about his corpus is its size) and if he were not so flamboyantly contemptuous of other writers.

In Distant Intimacy Raphael dismissed, among others, Kingsley Amis, Christopher Hitchens, Michael Holroyd, Saul Bellow, Julian Barnes and Alan Hollinghurst. In the present volume PG Wodehouse and Charles Dickens are the most famous of those who are disposed of.

Excruciating dialogue

Anybody in doubt of Raphael's shortcomings ought to look at his most recent novel, Private Views (Peter Owen Publishers, £9.99), which, through the figures of the mysterious artist Katya Lowell, the aristocratic banker Charlie Marsden, the drama critic Benedict Bligh, the thriller writer Ferdy Plant and the magazine columnist Tamsin Fairfax, aims to offer a portrait of smart society in 1970s London. But all that it really succeeds in painting is a picture of how carelessly and unappealingly Raphael writes.

When the excruciating dialogue does not make you feel you are reading a third-rate screenplay, the prose is painfully mannered ("The confusion of ancient and modern gave the place a discordant chic which had attracted favourable remark in the glossy press"; "He seemed solicitous of her approval") and full of the kind of infelicities that characterise Raphael's style when he is writing as himself in Going Up.

The novel is full of his peculiar brand of sweaty-palmed euphemism (“His stance made a feature of his desire”), and of his tendency to write about women in such a way as to make them feel like pieces of lightly anthropomorphised furniture: “Even the breasts seemed downcast”; “The large breasts, faintly veined with blue, were handsomely sustained”; “The hair was bronzy-red”; “The dark hair was lifted from her neck”.

Seldom has the definite article been so revealing. And seldom have two late publications managed to define their author with such remorselessly damning finality.