The thorny subject of this awkwardly titled memoir was against humbug and claptrap, deplored his antecedents, hating what they had become. Himself an iconoclast and England-berater in the long and honourable tradition of T. E. Lawrence, Kipling, Orwell and to some extent Cyril Connolly, Lindsay Anderson's fastidiousness took another form. Aloofness was his forte; he kept himself to himself.
His father, Captain A. V. Anderson, born in North India, came to be stationed in Bangalore, where the future movie man was born. His mother was born in Queenstown in South Africa. Lindsay Anderson described himself as "a child of Empire", and asked rhetorically: "Did these antecedents make for an alienation long unrecognised?" (and long suppressed?). And answer came there: "H'rrumph!"
Gavin Lambert was one of the alumni of Cheltenham College who early on nailed his colours to the mast, and here declares himself unreservedly homosexual. Lindsay Anderson came to see his homosexuality as part of his apartness at Oxford; a year and a bit senior to Lambert and not above "pulling rank", Anderson was already besotted with movies.
Lambert's superficial, off-the-cuff coverage of the man who made This Sporting Life, If . . . , O Lucky Man!, Britannia Hospi]tal and The Whales of August seems inadequate, a wasted opportunity. Bogdanovich did a better job on Orson Welles.
Anderson's first documentary, in the great tradition of Crown Films, was about drainpipes. His last documentary, Is That All There Is? was about himself, his career, his movies, the funerals of two suicided members of his repertory company, Jill Bennett and Rachel Roberts. He liked, as did John Ford, to retain a team of regulars. He made something beautiful out of the dirty Thames, the obituary flowers floating away. That, after all, was his manner; he deplored the antecedents, hated what they had become.
There was always something apart about Lindsay Anderson, the imperious nose, the truculent set of the Laird's jaw. He had been to school at Cheltenham with the son of the Bulldog Drummond author "Sapper" and fancied the tall, handsome boy rotten. He was the king in exile all his life, even if he remained at home, dying abroad of a heart attack after a dip in a lake near Angouleme. Like Sinatra, he had a rough, dismissive way with admirers and paltroons: "Fuck off!"
He idolised Ford and fastidious Humphrey Jennings the documentary man, the rara avis Jean Vigo, the old black and white masters (what's Pabst is Pabst) of chiaroscuro. His presence was felt in all his movies, the humanitarian concern, the firm hand at the helm. At the showing of Mike Todd's Around the World in 80 Days they were asking in 18 languages "But what did Lindsay Anderson think of it?" He was an auteur in the manner of Bunuel, Ford and Preston Sturgess, made a kind of poetry out of the banal. Behind him, supporting him, was the swank of Long Voyage Home, Tobacco Road, The Grapes of Wrath, Ma Joad fingering her knick-knacks by the light of the fires; the poetry of the mundane.
Anderson's casting was always unexpected and it always worked; his instinct was seldom wrong. He drew performances from his regulars that they couldn't repeat with other directors. To be homosexual, to be gay, was to be persona non grata to a great number of people. He cultivated his aloofness, that apartness of his setting himself apart from the general run-of-the-mill sort: he didn't see eye to eye with Richard Attenborough.
On the thin evidence of this sloppily written memoir with its awkward title and dedication (triple dots betray sloppy thinking) potential readers are likely to be put off. But it does give some limited insights into the reclusive movie man of Maida Vale who harboured forbidden homo-erotic longings in his breast, longings regulated to the back burner, kept out of sight. The titled lady in O Lucky Man! sinks down the social scale until she joins the low London life of methsdrinkers, down-and-outs and social outcasts.
Daughter Anjelica asked the dying John Huston whether there was anything he wanted. "A good script," he whispered. Richard Harris heard this at a dinner party and repeated it to Lindsay Anderson, who said: "My dear Richard, that's been the story of my life for the last seven years".
Lord Attenborough's Gandhi made him wince, made him see red. If in the last 30 years of his life he made only six films, there was more matter in those six than in 60 runof-the-mill movies churned out by the system. He remained his own man to the bitter end. At the memorial service Frank Grimes took up his guitar and played Red River Valley. We shan't see his like again.
The first two volumes of Aidan Higgins's memoirs, Donkey's Years and Dog Days, are available in Vintage paperback: the final volume, The Whole Hog, is due in October