William Cooper's Last Interview 

Poet and BBC Producer Graham Tayar in conversation with Harry Hoff 

In the nineteen forties and early fifties, Birmingham’s New Street Kardomah Café was – together with a pub around the corner, the Troc – the city’s focal meeting point for ambitious students and young aspirant writers, actors, musicians, painters, would-be intellectuals and the occasional criminal, budding or manqué. They were sure – most of them – that their time was yet to come and if Ken Tynan could do it, why couldn’t they? One afternoon, writer Bert Barton, unemployed and broke as most of us were, rushed into the basement café waving a library book (to buy hardbacks was beyond our reach). “Kid,” he said to me, “It’s us!” The book was William Cooper’s “Scenes From Provincial Life”. It’s actually set in Leicester, the author assures me, although he was secretive about it at the time, for reasons which will become clear. Anyway, the parallels with Birmingham and presumably many other non-Metropolitan towns were exact: in such matters as love, Art and friendship, Cooper spoke for all of us. Published almost fifty years ago and later to be a Penguin best seller, it was the first of five “Scenes From…” scattered among the writer’s twenty or so books, mostly novels. The latest and last, “Scenes From Death and Life”, is about to appear. Does it look like being his final novel? 

“It does. I’ve no intention of writing any more. When it came to this particular point I concluded that I’d said all that I’d got to say. Stop writing!”

 Cooper’s real name is Harry Hoff and his first four books were published as H.S. Hoff, three of them before the war. Together with Anthony Powell, Harry is Britain’s only surviving pre-War novelist still producing work – and being published. He adopted the pseudonym because of a legal threat from one of his friends who might have thought that a homosexual character in “Provincial Life” was based on him.

 A later work, “Scenes From Metropolitan Life”, was delayed for years because a young woman said she’d sue for libel if it came out. So it didn’t come out! But finally she died rather early. Her husband rang me up to tell me and then I knew the book could appear. It’s quite a good book though that wouldn’t have affected the lady in question. She didn’t want to be identified; she said it made her seem as though she drank too much and slept around too much, which it didn’t do!

 She was after all only the alleged model for one of the dramatis personae. But Harry’s novels run fairly close to reality, far more than most writers. Alas, too close.

 This one nearly landed me in a libel suit; it never actually happened but I always felt it might. But I never wanted to do research; I always wrote out of the top of my head.

 Friends, neighbours, colleagues and relations should now be grateful. This amiable, talented and utterly delightful man has only just stopped being dangerous to all in range. After “Provincial”, “Married”, “Metropolitan”, and “Later”, “Scenes from Death and Life” completes a sequence which provides a fictionalized version of the life of H.S. Hoff. 

I have to admit it’s possible .(Even now, he’s very cagey. Do writs still lurk around the corner?) But there’s a great deal more to my life than appears in these books

. Harry was born in Crewe in 1910 and grew up there (– a horrible place. I never want to go back). His parents were teachers and the story of his childhood is vividly told in “From Early Life”.

It’s not a “Scenes From…” although my publishers wanted me to call it that. It’s not a novel but a memoir of what I can remember from my early days. 

He went up to Christ’s College, Cambridge, to read Natural Sciences, the first from his school (student or teacher) to go to an older University. C.P. Snow, already a novelist, was Harry’s supervisor. 

After the supervision part of the deal was over, we indulged in conversation about novels. I don’t know that he encouraged me to write, but there’s an element of emulation about the beginning of my career. If he wrote, why shouldn’t I?

I hear echoes of my own Birmingham youth. Many of us were looking for role models until we, unwittingly, were to discover whether or not we had any talents – and at what. Harry began as a teacher in Leicester (at Snow’s old school) but went on to follow a very distinguished career in various parts of the Civil Service. Would he rather have been a full-time novelist? 

No, I wouldn’t. I say that when I see what’s happened to the other people who’ve become full-time writers. I think one ought to hang on to real life so to speak. And it does acquaint one with what’s going on in the world, what people are like, things that interest me. 

Not all Harry’s novels are based directly on his own life. “Love on the Coast” was about flower children in San Fransisco trying to run a little theatre. Harry wasn’t exactly part of that scene, but he observed it a close range. And although the “I” in the book is a character in fiction, the voice and attitudes considerably resemble his own. 

“The Ever Interesting Topic” refers to Sex, especially gay sex. Why so? It was probably at King’s College, Cambridge, where there were quite a lot of homosexuals around. Somebody once said at High Table, “What did you talk about”, and the reply came, “Oh, the ever interesting topic.” Sex? Homosex in particular, that’s what they were interested in at King’s. 

Once again, Harry is a listener and watcher, but he blends these skills with imagination, humour and gentle irony, as a master storyteller should. However, Scenes from Death and Life” is in essence the final part of Harry’s fictionalised autobiography. He ended the first novel in this sequence, Scenes From Provincial Life, with these prescient words:

“I think of the string of delights and disasters that have come my way since 1939. And then I think of all the novels I can make out of them – ah, novels, novels, art, art, pounds sterling! “My own life history. The past years suddenly spring up, delightful and disastrous, warm, painful and farcical. I reach for a clean note-book. I pick up my pen.” 

And until very recently, Harry was still at it, as he told me, writing, and at times recycling. 

It (the new novel) includes something I wrote elsewhere, for a symposium on death in “Granta”. I wrote this piece and a lot of people who knew me thought it was rather good; so I incorporated it in this book. It’s “Scenes From Death and Life” in that it begins with the death of my wife, and goes on to “Life”. When a grandchild is born to one of my daughters, in fact. So it goes full circle. 

(Just to keep his public guessing a little more, it should be said that the birth is one of the completely invented scenes in the book.) Harry Hoff was a key figure in the development of the post-war English novel. He preceded all the new novelists, Kingsley Amis, John Wain, John Braine and the other so-called Angry Young Men of the arts. But he wasn’t one; nor indeed were they. 

To see myself claimed as an Angry Young Man at the age of forty, as I was when William Cooper first emerged, is really quite futile. It was just a journalist’s trick, a useful label to short-circuit thought! 

Harry always was and still is a reasonably contented man. He wrote in “From Early Life”:“My parents, intelligent and decent minded school teachers both…unfailingly did their best for me. I had a happy childhood, I think. I clearly remember days when my schoolfellows called me ‘Happy Hoff’.”

How then would he sum up his temperament? 

Part of it’s in my nature which is relatively sunny, shall we say. And also there’s the self-discipline of not feeling sorry for myself. It’s difficult to admit that I’ve been either happy or successful in anything, but nevertheless it could be true. I think that’s probably a pretty good thing to be able to say that about one’s life, that you’ve said all that’s got to be said, and it’s been published. That’s not bad – it completes it. 

And almost half a century after William Cooper’s first book grabbed my attention so memorably, Harry Hoff – frailer than he was when I first met him ten years ago but still cheerful and articulate and on the edge of his nineties – poured me out another glass of wine. 



Based on a conversation on 12th May 1999. © Graham Tayar 1999
This was in fact Harry's last interview : he gave no more before his sad death in 2002.