Up Staircase

By Stefan Kanfer

HERE LIES

by Eric Ambler

Farrar, Straus & Giroux

234 pages; $16.95

To a generation raised on the novels of John le Carre, the name of Eric Ambler has assumed a legendary quality. Graham Greene generously called him "our greatest thriller writer," and in fact he and Greene invented the modern novel of intrigue, with its moral ambiguities and flawed, bone-weary protagonists. But the prolific Greene stayed in view. Ambler spent years between books and, like one of his characters, eventually slipped into the fog.

He has emerged at the age of 77 in a reflective mood prompted by a nearfatal automobile accident in Switzerland, where he now lives. "Only an idiot believes that he can write the truth about himself," he begins, and then demonstrates that idiocy becomes him. Unlike Greene's God-haunted memoirs, Ambler's have few ominous moments and only one bitter note. The ironic revelation is his specialty: "Uncle Frank . . . had confidence in himself and had acquired important skills. We knew that because just a week ago he had been giving evidence . . . as a witness for the Prosecution. His expert field was the identification and valuation of non-ferrous scrap metal . . . It must have been at about that time, I think, that he began his remarkably long career as an embezzler." The failed playwright remembers his debut: "After the first act I wanted very much to leave." A colleague gives him "the job of editing a disastrous manuscript he had just received from one of his red-brick university dons. The subject of the book was Clear Thinking."

The mysterious process of creativity remains offstage in this short look back, but the sources of Ambler's work are discernible in his genealogy. His paternal grandfather was a printer's proofreader; his maternal grandfather was a cabinetmaker. This heritage, suggests the writer, must account for his tongue-and-groove plots and for a lifelong addiction to the printed word. The child's first polysyllabic effort was "Me-di-ter-ra-ne-an," a favorite locale for later fictions.

The London-bred novelist had two false starts. He was an engineering trainee at an electrical-products factory, a job that made him skeptical of some laborers' claims: "When, in explaining the job he did, a man told me that there was 'an art in it' it would very likely turn out to be basically unskilled." Then he became an advertising copywriter assigned to a chocolate laxative account: "In the copy department this was seen as a promotion for me. I tried to see it that way too." On holiday in France, he imagined a murder at a Marseilles waterfront. A few weeks later, a Yugoslav King was assassinated at the same spot. "I felt oddly guilty," Ambler admits, "but also pleased." His first novel, The Dark Frontier, was even more premonitory: its villains were toying with atomic blackmail. The year was 1935. As Europe slid toward war, he began to write against the pulp tradition of "power- crazed or coldly sane, master criminals or old-fashioned professional devils . . . I no longer believed a word of them." His tales concerned a real world of crumbling borders and bullied refugees. His antagonists were as dangerous as the dictator next door, and his narrators looked and sounded the way familiar citizens do when they are inadvertently caught up in history. Readers, weary of standard-issue superheroes, enthusiastically pushed him onto the best-seller list.

But he was never comfortable with celebrity or with celebrities, and those he met on the up staircase are recalled with great irreverence. As a World War II artillery officer assigned to Winston Churchill's headquarters at Chequers, Captain Ambler attended a private screening of an American musical. In the dark, the Prime Minister mumbled a forthcoming speech to himself: "I could not distinguish words; what he was rehearsing was the way he would deliver the words; what I could hear were the rhythms and cadences of delivery being hummed in a nasal tonic sol-fa of his own. Dum-dum-di-dah, it went, and then dum-dum-di-doh followed by a challenging doh-doh-di-di? On and on it went. He was supplying the music to go with his words." Dinner with an ostentatiously bored Somerset Maugham was a frost: "He had had enough of me. Noel (Coward) was the one who knew how to please him. He came bounding in, made straight for Willie, bobbed a curtsey, went down on one knee and said, 'Maitre!' "

The shadow that falls in Here Lies has little to do with Ambler's private life or his two marriages--he might have been a lifelong bachelor for all the discussion of his domestic affairs. It concerns his screen credits. In the front of this truncated autobiography, 18 novels are listed, along with 16 screenplays. From The Mask of Dimitrios and Journey into Fear to Dirty Story and The Levanter, the books form a distinguished line. Most of the films are extremely forgettable, and so are the adaptations of his work. But Ambler remembers them: "The Mask of Dimitrios had been made cheaply in standing sets and on the Burbank lot with Warner contract players, and by that time had already been tipped as a 'sleeper' . . . I had not expected to enjoy myself --Background to Danger with George Raft had made me very queasy--but I had not expected a screen Dimitrios to give me stomach cramps. They were quite severe." At the close, he imagines an ideal novelist-turned-screenwriter. After he completes his assignment, says Ambler, he has a sense "of anti- climax, a feeling of irritation because his work must now be handed over to others." For him "there is hope. It will not be long before he is back working in a medium in which he can be fully creative." Ambler's account effectively ends after World War II: the next forty years are barely mentioned. From then on the author spent too many years in Hollywood handing his work over to others. Here Lies is a dark and witty title, but not perhaps the most apt. That was already taken by Malcolm Muggeridge for his autobiography. He called it Chronicles of Wasted Time.