Mainly about Lindsay Anderson: A Memoir
Gavin Lambert
Faber, £16.99, 302pp
Buy it at BOL

"Anderson, if you go on like this you are going to be persona non grata with a great many people." Thus Lindsay Anderson's form master berrated him at the age of 13. "And I said to him 'You're probably right, Sir, but I think it's too late to do anything.' "

To anyone who worked with Lindsay - director of such classic films as If..., This Sporting Life, and O Lucky Man - he was both mentor-idealist and bullshit-detector extraordinaire. In my life his influence was profound. More than 30 years ago, rehearsing David Storey's In Celebration at the Royal Court, Lindsay shouted at me: "Don't just do something! Stand there!" What he meant was: "Receive and be true!" For Lindsay, being true to himself was a great source of pain and suffering. In one of the earliest entries from his diary for January 14, 1942, he describes himself thus: "In a way, I'm a split personality - the wrong mind in the wrong body."

It is through the "dark" mirror of these diaries that Gavin Lambert movingly reflects on the connection of these two boyhood friends, who remained close from their public schooldays in Cheltenham to Lindsay's death in France in 1994.

Both men are and were homosexual. Lambert's ease with his sexuality, his grateful acceptance of his first sexual liaison with his history master at prep school, contrasts with Lindsay's distress and torment. Throughout his life he would fall hopelessly in love, usually with heterosexual, married actors: they included Richard Harris, Albert Finney, Malcolm McDowell and lastly Frank Grimes.

"At the age of 21," Lambert notes, "Lindsay arrived at another definitive conclusion about himself. 'I will never be loved as I wish to be, for myself.' Then he told himself, 'Love is what you haven't got. I wonder if your homosexuality is what cuts you off like this.' "

Later, in his forties, living in Los Angeles and after a couple of broken love affairs, Lambert himself decides to keep a journal: "Hoping (but failing) to enlighten myself about myself, I start to keep a diary: 'I feel lazy, remote. I am deeply sick of cruising... Most of my life I have lived with someone. Now for the first time in my life I feel extreme loneliness."

As if on cue, Lambert is introduced to the teachings of Krishnamurti by Christopher Isherwood and his lover Don Bachardy. Krishnamurti's advice: "You only free yourself from anxiety when you stop resisting it, and the mind is quiet. The quiet mind is a free mind." In turn Gavin tried to introduce Lindsay to these ideas, but he would have none of it. He wrote of Krishnamurti: "I saw him in Washington, frail and elegant, communicating with great clarity ideas that personally I couldn't make head or tail of. I seemed to be the only person there who couldn't."

This was a typical example of Lindsay's stubborn resistance to any sort of interference with his own psyche. He dismissed as "impractical" the suggestion that perhaps conflicts in the external world resulted from conflicts within ourselves, and couldn't be settled until we settled our own personal accounts. His own unique unquiet was the source of his creativity, and so perhaps he dared not meddle with it.

Mainly About Lindsay Anderson is also a tale of exile and isolation. Lindsay exiled himself at home, where he described the past as a snug refuge from the present. Gavin Lambert exiled himself to Los Angeles, where the past was only half forgotten and still very young. The potency of Lambert's dual portrait lies in the connections he makes between the two protagonists and their various circles: from that other infamous exile from the Royal Court, Tony Richardson, to Nicholas Ray, the demon-driven director of Rebel Without a Cause, with whom Lambert had a covert affair that spirited him to Los Angeles to begin a career as a scriptwriter. (At a distance, Ray played Dostoevsky's Roghozin to Lindsay's Prince Myshkin from The Idiot - his overt anguish was a mirror image of Lindsay's introverted pain.)

Lambert takes us from his own dismay at the exploitation of Ray's death by Wim Wenders in his drama-doc Lightning Over Water, to Lindsay's final film, Is this All There Is? - another documentary - in which he cast the ashes of actresses Jill Bennett and Rachel Roberts, both friends and both of whom committed suicide, into a chrysanthemum-strewn Thames.

Lambert modestly observes at one point: "The past is only relatively more secure than the present, the biographer who believes in 'objective truth' is deceiving himself." Mainly About Lindsay Anderson is indeed written from a particularly subjective viewpoint. But it is a view that rings the bell of truth. Lindsay would have been very pleased - and perhaps a little surprised.