17 Big fish

During my spell as The Scotsman’s London arts correspondent, my resident boss was Tom Dawson, a subordinate of Alastair Dunnett, senior editor at the paper’s head office in Edinburgh.   Dawson’s role was one  that traditionally led  to a major Edinburgh posting - his predecessor Eric Mackay became Dunnett’s assistant editor on North Bridge and finally his very impressive successor as editor.

But Dawson’s ambitions, whatever they were, did not lie in a return to his native Scotland. He had become a Londoner and would later inform me, when I myself was preparing to return to Scotland, that it was all very well becoming a big fish in a small pool. It would surely be better, he said, to remain in London and  become a bigger fish in a much bigger pool. If this was his own ambition, it was soon sadly denied him. He died, still  young, during a round of golf.

As my London editor he had been not specially inspirational, but at least he seldom got in the way and was content, for the most part, to leave me to my own devices, respecting me enough to let me get on with my job while he concerned himself with more important matters. Brooding quietly in his office; while  chain smoking cigars, he seldom demanded to examine what I had written before I sent it north to Edinburgh. It suited me fine.

Where Dunnett was concerned, he was, I thought, a bit of a yes-man, not a person who defended his staff against Edinburgh intrusion, but more inclined simply to pass on orders from the north. His main cultural interest lay in art - he had many artistic friends - and as London art correspondent (as well as arts correspondent) I occasionally found myself being leaned upon to write, or not to write, something which, one way or the other,  had not been greatly on my mind.

Usually, as I was to discover, Alastair Dunnett himself was in some way involved with the issue, if it could be called an issue. For example, some of the artists I interviewed in London were Scots who had moved south, achieved a degree of success or notoriety, and referred to themselves as “outcasts” whose work was appreciated in London but unwelcome in Scotland, indeed sometimes actively disliked back home.

I detected here a recurring theme, which struck me as something worth writing about, not necessarily defensively or admiringly but simply as a matter of interest. But Dunnett, it seemed, would have none of it. Without approaching me personally, he sent Dawson an edict that The Scotsman had published enough of such pieces. The point, such as it was, had been made, and no more interviews with grumpy artists - I think the word employed was scum - were to appear in the paper. Dawson passed on the information to me with a faint smirk, and that was that. Since my life in London was busy and wide-ranging, involving several theatre reviews, news stories,  and at least one major interview per week, I was perfectly willing to drop one minor aspect of my arts coverage.

Scottish artists who lived in Scotland but who occasionally exhibited in London mattered more to Dunnett as editor of The Scotsman, and I was certainly happy to interview them and review their exhibitions. One of these was the great Joan Eardley who, not long before her early death, had won a name for herself  in Cork Street.  I met her around the time of her first major London show. The gallery, I recall, was seething with experts, some of whom advised her that various tiny details in her paintings would benefit from alteration. Eardley was my idea of an exciting  artist and the paintings looked fine to me. But then I was not, and never would be, a London art critic, merely a journalist with an interest in art.  However, it gave me a hint of one aspect of the London art scene which  I did not like  and which I was soon glad to free myself from.

Drama was a different matter. Although, compared with London’s team of drama critics in the nineteen-sixties, I was a nonentity, writing for a readership far away in the north, I enjoyed reviewing first nights and developed part of my craft as a music critic from doing so. I never got to know the aloof Kenneth Tynan, and was ignored by Bernard Levin (with whom, years later, I exchanged many a friendly letter on aspects of music) but the plays I saw - Peter Hall’s productions at the Arts Theatre, the latest John Osborne at the Royal Court,  Paul Scofield’s granite-voiced King Lear at  the Aldwych - have stuck forever in my mind.

Trips to Stratford - The Tempest staged to admiration - resulted on one occasion in a stroll along the Avon with Tom Fleming, who disclosed his plans to build a Scottish National Theatre on Cramond Island. Though this  never happened, his later directorial residency at the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh showed what it might have been like, even if it failed to last. Fleming was an under-appreciated man for whom I had great admiration and fondness.

And what of music? Though my own subject had to lie dormant, apart from a chain of illuminating interviews - one of them with the young Vladimir Ashkenazy, newly settled in North London and advising me to listen to some of the worst Stalinist composers (surely he was not serious). But its time was coming. By 1964 my career had reached a crossroads which, despite other enticements, would bring me back permanently  to Edinburgh and permanently to music. But that is a subject for another blog.

5 November 2014