There is a generation of writers who were schooled by the war and the more egalitarian freedoms of its aftermath, and who borrowed intellectual and moral authority from both. A great capacity for friendship helped, and the porosity of an establishment that for the first time allowed state-educated – mostly grammar school – boys and girls a more equal voice with the fee-paying class. Michael Frayn, now 89, was – and is – a shining star in that firmament. This book, a collection of short essays on some of the other fixed points in his constellation, becomes a thoughtful and often moving portrait of a disappearing world in which a generous kind of bookish rigour and worldly wit created fleeting incandescence at the heart of British cultural life.
Frayn did his national service alongside Alan Bennett, studying Russian at the Joint Services School for Linguists, a cold war initiative to steep the brightest undergraduates in military intelligence (it proved to be a kind of theatrical fame academy – Peter Hall and Dennis Potter were also alumni). The Cambridge branch of that school was presided over by Prof Elizabeth Hill, one of the few women who gets a look in here – the absence, Frayn notes in his introduction, is both circumstantial (he grew up in single-sex schools, and almost entirely male barrack rooms and university colleges and newspaper offices) and mannerly (lovers’ secrets should remain intact). Hill acted as a kind of formidable Slavic matriarch for Frayn’s cohort; she addressed them “Gospoda!” (“gentlemen!”), “coaxing the Russian out of you by the sheer brightness of her eyes”, and they duly grew into the role.
Like several of the friends here, Hill was characterised by brilliant longevity. The last time Frayn saw her, at 95, she was rising at six in Cambridge after a party to catch a bus to London to put in a full day’s work at the British Library. She is matched for enduring eye-bright curiosity not only by Frayn himself, but in portraits of several of his closest pals: Neal Ascherson, his former Observer colleague, still writing as eruditely as ever; Michael Blakemore, the director of 10 of Frayn’s plays, who revived the last of them, Copenhagen, on the eve of his own 90th birthday in 2018; and Bamber Gascoigne, who opens this book and establishes something of its presiding spirit: a golden lad at Cambridge, who remains endearingly “lucky and loved” to his end in 2022.
The brightness of some of these young things is sharpened in Frayn’s memory by the close knowledge of alternative narrative arcs. There are among the success stories inevitably several tragic notes. His piece on playwright Peter Nichols feels like one; early success that trails tragedy and intermittent despair. Equally honest and poignant is Frayn’s account of the bipolar extremes of the famed Observer journalist John Gale, who took his own life at 49, and of Frayn’s childhood friend David, who used his imagination to escape from a tyrannical father, but was psychologically undone by that bullying decades later.
As the book progresses, that sense of the precariousness of fate, of roads not taken, takes over. Frayn’s discretion in excluding lost loves was finally overcome, he suggests, at the insistence of his wife, Claire Tomalin. His penultimate chapter here – before a valedictory letter to his most constant companion, his own body – is a recollection of his first overwhelming romance, with Liza Mrosovsky, whom he met in the spring of 1957, his graduation year, and with whom he spent part of a magical summer in Rome. He has kept the 56 letters she sent him during those six months of their grand affair, and reinhabits the intensity of their rise and fall together, the talk of undying love and marriage, and then not.
It was he who ended things, on the brutal grounds, apparently, that she was not part of his “intellectual world” – can he really have offered that “pompous put-down”, he wonders, 65 years on? When he tries to find a trace of her, he discovers a life lived very happily without him, one that ended in 2016. He’d always promised to write, he says, and now, in this poised, heartfelt book, he has fulfilled that obligation.
• Among Others: Friendships and Encounters by Michael Frayn is published by Faber (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
