UR TV CAST

Let me just say that when Cain decided to list his 10 greatest films, he offered 12 (he was profoundly disobedient, even to himself) and nearly all of them were from the Fifties: Citizen Kane; Monsieur Verdoux; Ivan the Terrible (“the great Stalinist film,” he said, “an epitome of terror and total power” – he reckoned Fidel had turned Stalinist too); M. Hulot’s Holiday; Vertigo; Les 400 Coups; Bicycle Thieves; The Diary of a Country Priest; El (by Luis Bunuel); Ugetsu (by Kenji Mizoguchi); Pather Panchali (by Satyajit Ray); and L’Avventura (“the memorable moment in which the cinema says to the novel: move over, sister, I can tell a story too.”)The delight of A Twentieth Century Job is not just the many piercing insights into film, but the clear proof that a great writer could as easily take the screen’s dream as a subject as the memories of old Havana. In addition, Cabrera Infante was a close friend to the Miami Film Festival and to the festival at Telluride. At Miami, he ran on-stage conversations with Robbe-Grillet (another novelist-filmmaker) and Sontag and he did a great deal to introduce Pedro Almodovar to America. He quipped that he had helped make him “Almodollars”.But there is another way of remembering Cain. He had been friends for 15 years with the Cuban actor, Andy Garcia. Together they had been working on a film, The Lost City, written by Cabrera Infante and adapted from Three Trapped Tigers.

That film is now very close to completion, and it will star Bill Murray and Dustin Hoffman in addition to Garcia.We can hope that The Lost City somehow recaptures the rapture that Cain felt in Havana in the Fifties when, “What has pushed the cronista to go and see the movie [Vertigo] on three successive nights, obsessive nights like a date with fate is not its absolute novelty, nor its obvious avant-garde allure, nor its terseness of manufacture, but its complete immersion in the sea of magic.”d.thomson independent.co.uk. All curators dream of that great discovery – the scroll in the cave which tells us something new about Jesus, the flash of silver from dark-age silt, the old master long overlooked in the cool dark corner of a Tuscan church. My find was made in a cul-de-sac just off the Oxford ring road. He explained that his mother-in-law had some old boxes of papers that a literary friend had given to her many years back. She had carried them with her through most of her life but the time had now come for her to move into sheltered accommodation. There would be no room for the papers, which she was none the less unwilling to dispose of.

Would I be interested in taking a look?Barrelling down the M4, I called to mind the great manuscript turn-ups of the past: Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”, unearthed from a private collection by scholars in 1934, its measured script looking remarkably sober for a drug-induced vision; the 15th-century Book of Margery Kempe, the earliest autobiography in the language, stumbled upon in the same year and almost thrown out by an old buffer searching for ping-pong balls; Thomas Traherne’s meditative Commentaries of Heaven, written around 1674 and plucked from a Lancashire rubbish tip in 1967.As I pulled into the drive the more mundane image came to mind of an old biscuit tin I had once buried, stuffed with treasure for future generations. It was rediscovered a few months later (by Dad, planting potatoes, or interring a pet), a sodden piece of trash.My scepticism was misplaced. The roughly wrapped parcels I found piled up in the corner of that modest house really were a time capsule. As soon as I undid the first, I realised that I had unearthed the holy grail of the literary Forties: Tambimuttu’s long-lost archive.Meary James Thurairajah Tambimuttu, claimed descendant of the Kings of Jaffna and future King of bohemian London, steamed into England from Ceylon in January 1938, aged 22. Poor and obscure, he headed for the capital and set up editorial shop wherever he could, determined to establish himself as the West’s foremost publisher of poetry.A little ambitious, for sure. Yet over the course of the next 10 years, despite illness, debt, bombs, paper shortages and the general chaos of world war, Tambimuttu’s “Poetry London” imprint left an indelible, colourful mark on British literary culture.And so did its director.

In a decade celebrated for its bohemians, none comes more extravagantly mythologised than the man known as “Tambi”. Seemingly every account of the period has something to say about the dissolute, handsome, princely poet of Fitzrovia; the snake-hipped wonder worker who could promise Parnassus and snaffle your cash in the blink of an eye; the talk of the town who could spot genius with a glance, charm a pint off Dylan Thomas, and the pants off anyone.The stories of Tambi’s pub-crawling progress through the Forties trailed a persistent subtext: that no papers had survived The notion is hardly surprising. In his celebrated memoirs of the Forties, the Soho dandy Julian Maclaren-Ross recalled one basement room crawling with cockroaches and littered with manuscript submissions. Rats, Tambi confessed, had eaten many of them.On another occasion, the young Lawrence Durrell, calling at his new editor’s shabby digs off the Tottenham Court Road, noted “that the contents of his first number reposed under his bed in an enormous Victorian chamber pot”. Durrell later brought his poetic offerings for appraisal to the Turkish Baths at Russell Square. Tambimuttu, cold in his new country, found the atmosphere conducive, only resigning his tenancy when he could no longer ignore the “deleterious effect of the steam on his manuscripts”.Yet here were the very papers I had long wondered about, untouched for over half a century. In the cluttered front room of the house she was about to leave, Tambi’s keeper told me her story.

She had been his friend from the mid-1940s, by which time he had moved from his eccentric offices of earlier years to functional rooms at 26 Manchester Square She worked round the corner. Late in 1949, after an argument with the latest of many financial backers, Tambi lost control of his operation Exhausted and broke, he decided to head home. She helped to arrange his transport to Southampton docks and watched him depart aboard the SS Canton for Ceylon. Before he left he had handed the papers to her.After a three-month sojourn in the blast freezer (it does for the insects), I spread the papers out in the vaults of the greatest research library in the world. There, fixed together with rusting pins and clips, occasionally riddled with pest holes but otherwise intact, lay the substantial remains of a decade’s worth of literary endeavour; a decade in which Tambi had issued 14 editions of Poetry London magazine and over 60 books of poetry and prose, often exquisitely illustrated by up and coming artists. Here was something wonderfully – almost spookily – hermetic, beginning in 1938 as soon as Tambi arrived in London, and ending in 1949, on the very eve of his departure.Manuscript submissions, usually typed up and signed, but frequently handwritten, came with covering letters from their aspiring authors.