Envy, the mother of invention

Peter Nichols' rivalry with Tom Stoppard has fuelled the playwright's creative fires for decades. But how many other artists have been inspired by envy? Lots, says Paul Taylor

Picture this edifying scene. Time: last Saturday. Place: the doors of Broadcasting House. Fresh from promoting his reprehensibly enjoyable and breathtakingly honest volume of Diaries on Loose Ends, Peter Nichols is assailed by the usual anoraked bunch waving their autograph books. He performs his side of the bargain politely enough and as we walk on, this brilliant and famously "neglected" dramatist is clearly able to tell from my expression that I'm thinking: "Well, I must say, neglect is all very relative. Nobody was frothing at the mouth for my autograph." He was quick, therefore, to scotch any idea that these people were lavishing on him the recognition that it is now almost axiomatic he does not receive from his fellow countrymen and the English theatrical establishment.

Picture this edifying scene. Time: last Saturday. Place: the doors of Broadcasting House. Fresh from promoting his reprehensibly enjoyable and breathtakingly honest volume of Diaries on Loose Ends, Peter Nichols is assailed by the usual anoraked bunch waving their autograph books. He performs his side of the bargain politely enough and as we walk on, this brilliant and famously "neglected" dramatist is clearly able to tell from my expression that I'm thinking: "Well, I must say, neglect is all very relative. Nobody was frothing at the mouth for my autograph." He was quick, therefore, to scotch any idea that these people were lavishing on him the recognition that it is now almost axiomatic he does not receive from his fellow countrymen and the English theatrical establishment.

"They only want your signature so that they can do swaps - trade them up for a bigger name," he declares with lugubrious relish.

So I'm left wondering about Nichols's current exchange value on the rickety rialto of the autograph hound. How do these theatrical trainspotters go about their business? Does it involve dialogue like - "I'll swap you five Ronald Harwoods and a Lord Lloyd-Webber for a Patrick Marber." "Throw in a couple of Ray Cooneys, Sharon, and you've got a deal"?

That funny-sad scene outside the Beeb was, in fact, a very Peter Nichols moment. As the Diaries richly demonstrate, no one in the world is better at dramatising the rueful, self-obsessed comedy of literary envy or possesses such a matchless talent for looking a gift horse straight in the kisser.

Indeed, Tom Stoppard must be very grateful that this book lacks an index. If it did, anyone remotely in the know about Nichols would make a bee-line for all the references to his fellow-dramatist, a man whom the author - less successful in worldly terms but, in my opinion, quite a bit more talented - ends up referring to "Tahm Star-purred".

Here's a typical entry about the genesis of a show that eventually became the hit play and film, Privates on Parade. "Also thought of calling my Malayan play Transvestites, feeding off Tom's success and getting just in front of his in the alphabetical catalogues". An ingeniously petty travesty of Travesties. Or take this elatingly crabbed musing: "Lay late in bed reading the raves for Tom's play Jumpers at the Old Vic. Whereas for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Hobson [then the influential critic of The Sunday Times] only compared him favourably with Beckett, Pirandello and Shakespeare, this time he puts him in the scales with God and finds the older man a bit light-weight." That gets the relentlessness.

You end up wishing that Nichols had written a play about his Star-purred Prahbluhm. Ah, but he did in the magnificently funny A Piece of My Mind, a 1988 comedy that flopped because of a miscast George Cole. It's a drama that the National Theatre, if it were run properly, would revive tomorrow with Simon Russell Beale in the plum and exceptionally testing central role of the Nichols surrogate. The Diaries record, in characteristically unguarded fashion, the moment when he hit on the idea for it. He was brooding one day over a bad review in a newspaper whose front page carried a story about 5,000 Pakistanis killed in an earthquake in the Indus. "I thought of the scene Val Wood had described when she had to remind Charles [her dramatist husband] of Vietnamese Napalm victims after the reviews of one of his stage failures. Is that a good starting-point for a mean, misanthropic comedy?" It was.

A mad vaudeville of invidiousness, A Piece of My Mind on one level carries meanness of spirit to such mock-epic lengths that it breathes a cathartic generosity. It imagines a hilarious worst-case scenario. The Nichols dramatist "dies" (he's actually imprisoned in an ottoman in the drawing room of his manor) and to pep up his wilting posthumous reputation, the Stoppard character (punningly named Miles Whittier) joins forces with his widow to write a fake play in the manner of the deceased (but better) which will give him a new lease of after-life.

As well as being an acute anatomy of literary envy, this comedy refers to some of the many other cases lodged in the bulging bile file of artists eaten up with creative resentments. These range from Rimsky-Korsakov (so envious of Tchaikovsky he was blocked until the composer did the decent thing and died) to our old friend Salieri. The wonderful thing about A Piece of My Mind is that it's as though Salieri had been able to write a brilliant, deprecatingly self-obsessed comic opera about his Mozart prahbluhm.

From Nabokov's Pale Fire (the editor as envious distorter of a dead author's intentions) to Nicolson Baker's U & I (a microscopic safari round Baker's Updike prahbluhm). From Martin Amis's The Information (all $500,000 worth of it) to Michael Frayn's superb The Trick of It (critic marries the novelist who is his special topic and drowns in her creative unfathomability). The cupboard on literary envy is far from bare. But A Piece of My Mind exposes the limitations of a lot of authors' treatments of this theme.

The trick when writing about it is to know when to be diabolically circumspect and when to concede your own fallible humanity. Nicolson Baker, for example, parades his haplessness like a super-intelligent version of a bad travel writer. He isn't alert, though, to the irony in which his work is enveloped: that all the talents and resources he praises in Updike's writing are those he himself possesses, whereas Updike has many gifts that are quite outside Baker's range. So the book is solipsism disguised as an Updike-obsession.

Or take Martin Amis's The Information - one of the most hyped but also one of the most facile comedies of literary envy ever written. The irony there is that while struggling to show how he identifies with both the rivalrous authors in the book, Amis at some fundamental level can't identify with either. Indeed, you could say that his ongoing immaturity as a writer consists precisely in this: that he wants to wrap himself in a prose-style that is invulnerably superior to envy - missing the joke that one of the really interesting things about the condition is that it afflicts people who theoretically should be above it, but like the rest of us can't be.

The cream of the jest in The Information has not been anticipated by its author. The eyes of his prose are either trained on the minutiae of Schadenfreude or gazing up at the galaxies like a peeved telescope. It's not, we gather, other writers, but the universe itself that mortality-fearing Martin is prepared to admit he envies. I mean, it gets advances that are huge to the point of infinity, no alimony bills and billions of sets of teeth to fall back on in a dental emergency.

Peter Nichols is bracing company. We met to talk about envy but strayed on to all sorts of other things - which rather puts paid to the idea that he is tunnel-visioned on the topic. Of course, one sat there already dreading the day when one might read the diary entry: "Had lunch with Paul Taylor who is a mid-life crisis on very short legs. Fear that he has taken me up as his good cause of the week. He did all the drinking and most of the talking. Felt more than ever the advantages of the switch on my deaf-aid."

One of the things this underrated author knows is that there's releasing comedy in the fact that there is no Last Judgement day for authors, no time when all the frenetic rushing about on the floor of literature's bourse is over and done with. But if there is a literary heaven, Nichols will be there sitting at the right hand of God - and in all probability, biting the right hand of God, too, in a mild fit of celestial envy.