Going Up: To Cambridge and Beyond

A Writer’s Memoir

Frederic Raphael (Robson Press, 413pp, £25, Oldie price £20)

‘PEOPLE RESENT ARTICULACY,’ Frederic Raphael has written, ‘as if articulacy were a form of vice.’ If it is a vice then it is one that has paid off handsomely for Raphael, a witty, pungent, versatile and highly intelligent writer who for 60 years has made a very good living from his pen. Why then is he so disobliging about ut almost everybody who has crossed his path? As Anthony Quinn noted in the Guardian, paraphrasing asing Gore Vidal: ‘It is not enough for him to assert his own preeminence; his contemporaries — friends as well as enemies — must eat dust in his majestic wake.’ Raphael, he concludes, has always been a loner: ‘the only child who never learned to play with the others.’

But suppose ‘the others’ didn’t want to play with him? ‘There were no hurdles like English hurdles,’ the Times’s Roger Lewis quotes him as saying, a reference to the antiSemitism Raphael detects ‘in the very ideas, attitudes and textures of English life’. This so poisoned his schooldays at Charterhouse that despite his atheism he once fantasised about making provision in his will for a synagogue there. Anti-semitism also permeates his epic, quasi-fictional television series The Glittering

Prizes, so it is odd to find Alan Massie in the Telegraph describing Raphael’sR experience of this as ‘little morem than an irritant’.

Though Massie found something ‘to delight and savour on almost every page of this rich memoir’, he was not the only reviewer to query the apparently ‘total recall’ Raphael has of ‘60-year-old conversations and how almost everyone he met was dressed’. Asked about this by Rosie Kinchin in the Sunday Times, Raphael gave a rather oblique reply: ‘Yes, unfortunately with age you do forget things — you also have many more to remember.’