An Aesthetic Underground Read online

  What a relief it was when an eminent professor at university said in a seminar group, “What would you say was the key to approaching Blake?”

  My God! I thought. Is there a key? Something vital I haven’t read?

  Into the thick silence, he said, “Well, the key thing about Blake was that he was a bit potty.”

  I’ve often thought of those two sixth-form years and wondered where the energy came from. I can only suppose it was repressed sexuality. There were heated rivalries amongst the boys and we were all devoted to our teacher and I think he too felt for us a kind of love. I’m not implying that this was homosexual but there was certainly some kind of sexual current. I think there always is in good teaching.

  But current or no current and current of whatever nature, I would have traded away all this intellectual passion, the pleasure of a perfectly landed right hook, the ooziness of thick paint on canvas, the astonished joy on first reading “though moles see fine tonight in the snouting velvet dingles,” I would have traded away all this and any imagined future for the possibility of touching the breasts of the girl who lived next door but one away. Her name was Mary.

  My real initiation into the world of books happened just before I went to university. My father had been transferred from Beckenham to Leicester, an unlovely city. Although it had been an important Roman administrative centre little of any antiquity had been spared. The factories were brutal, the streets and housing mean. Guidebooks describe the city as: “Noted for its bulk manufacture of boots and shoes.”

  I fell into the habit of walking every day to the museum. They had on display a small collection of oils and watercolours by Edward Ardizzone whose work as an illustrator I’d been drawn to some years earlier when I’d seen his cramped and spiky drawings in H. E. Bates’s two story collections, My Uncle Silas and Sugar for the Horse.

  Strolling back home one afternoon along New Walk, trees and shrubbery on one side, small houses on the other, I saw a sign in a window: Books. I opened the front door and found myself in a small hallway which was stacked with books on either side. Books almost blocked the staircase to the second floor. I edged along the hall until it opened onto what must once have been a sitting room. It was now a cave of books. Shelved floor to ceiling but most of the floor stacked perilously with thousands more books. Most of them were leather bound.

  Sitting at a desk in the middle of the room was a Dickensian figure in rumpled cardigan, muffler, pipe ash and dottle. Behind thick glasses his eyes were swimmy as raw oysters. He wore woollen gloves with the fingers cut off. There was a strong suggestion about him of a Peter Sellers character. I asked if I might look round. Although it was full summer the gas fire burbled and popped in the room’s silence. On the desk top were a packet of Chocolate Wholewheat Digestives and a large magnifying glass.

  Most of the books were eighteenth and early nineteenth century, bound in full calf, but here and there standing out because of their lighter colour were earlier books bound in vellum. I had not had the opportunity before to handle so many old books. On the bottom shelves massive leather-bound folios. I was mesmerized. I felt excited and in some way upset. I was unable to take it all in. Flustered is perhaps the word. Titles appeared out of the blur of leather and cloth. Dugdale’s Antiquities of Warwickshire, William Camden’s Britannia, Layard’s Nineveh and Its Remains, Surtees’s Jorrocks’s Jaunts and Jollities, Thomas Love Peacock’s Headlong Hall.

  It felt to me like uncovering a treasure trove, a Sutton Hoo of books, one glittering marvel after another. The room was very hot and the smell of leather heavy. I felt almost as if I were sinking into the books, swooning. I found a three-volume leather-bound edition of The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling and asked how much it was. He opened the first volume and peered through the magnifying glass at the title page.

  “Are you a local boy?”

  “No, we’ve just moved here.”

  “I don’t get many boys in here local or otherwise.”

  “The books are beautiful.”

  He looked up at me with swimmy eyes.

  “Beautiful,” he repeated. “Hmm. Well, well. You’re a rum one and no mistake.”

  “Why rum?”

  “And what will you do with our Mr. Jones?”

  “Well, I like the story,” I said and then, shy and blushing but somehow compelled, rushed on, “but I’d like to own a book that someone held and read in the eighteenth century.”

  He twisted his head round and up and opened his mouth and made a caricature of astonishment.

  “’Pon my soul!” he said. “Upon my soul! Ten bob.”

  I was soon going to see Bernard Halliday nearly every day. It was a fortunate conjunction for both of us as I was eager to learn and he was lonely and longing to teach. He instructed me to buy John Carter’s ABC for Book Collectors and his Taste and Technique in Book Collecting. Then I was to read Lowndes’s Bibliographer’s Manual of English Literature. Later he guided me through the gruelling terrain of Ronald McKerrow’s An Introduction to Bibliography for Literary Students. He taught me to read catalogues and gave me old catalogues from Maggs and Quaritch.

  “Always read catalogues,” he’d say. “Catalogues are where all the knowledge sifts down to.”

  If I made mistakes he would say sternly, “It behooves you to know what’s o’clock.” The tea I brewed for us he dismissed as “maiden’s water.” Modern first editions were anathema. “No different from gambling.” And then with shaking shoulders he forced out, “Some bloody pillocks collect . . . detective stories!”

  I soaked up Mr. Halliday’s outpouring of information. How to clean dust-soiled vellum bindings. Better than any gum or rubber eraser was white sliced bread. How to straighten bowed boards. Leather soap. Neat’s-foot oil. The uses of lighter fluid.

  I wallowed in bindings and leathers and fonts, in all the lovely jargon of the trade, half-titles, colophons, blind stamping, foxing, black letter, washed leaves, cancels . . . I came to believe that there were few things in the world more beautiful than the deep burning black of Baskerville type on crisp rag paper.

  The best part of this education, however, was simply handling the books in their hundreds, coming to an understanding of the meaning of condition. I would take volumes to him excavated from the filthy piles and he would say, “So that’s where that went. Well! Well! Interesting old book that. Russian. St. John Chrysostom. Know what that means? ‘Golden Mouth.’ Homilies, these are. Parchment and written in a nice hand. How much? Oh, I don’t know. I could let you have it for nine thousand . . .”

  He would then break down in rheumy mirth and mop at his eyes with his grubby handkerchief.

  He did give me what are called “reading” or “working” copies of various of the well-known eighteenth-century novels. Both terms mean “damaged” or “in non-collectible condition.” I remember taking to Canada Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling, Graves’s The Spiritual Quixote (much appreciated because it is a satire on Methodism), and Smollett’s Roderick Random. He also gave me “reading” copies of anonymous eighteenth-century novels typically written “By a Lady.”

  Anonymous novels are catalogued, incompletely, in a work by Halkett and Laing entitled A Dictionary of the Anonymous and Pseudonymous Literature of Great Britain. I’ve never read any kind of survey which talks about them as literature. During those visits to that filthy house with the musty smell of old leather and old paper in my nostrils, I imagined reading those novels in Halkett and Laing and writing about them as the matrix, as it were, from which rose the peaks of Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, Sterne . . .

  That germ of an idea never left me and many years later in Canada, after various false starts, and with some guidance from the Vancouver book dealer William Hoffer and with the almost fatherly advice and encouragement of the Ottawa dealer Richard Simmins, I did form a collection of over five thousand volumes which documented the short story i
n Canada in the twentieth century. I also built collections of Contact Press and the House of Anansi Press, both of which were bought by the National Library of Canada.

  ALMA MATER

  Dissolute would perhaps be the best word to describe my university years. I left home at eighteen to go to Bristol and never went home again. Set free for the first time in my life and entirely lacking any form of supervision I began to lead a life of excess. I was celebrating my escape from my mother and her cheerless and puritanical background which firmly equated sex with sin. I was also celebrating my escape from a suffocating and numbing middle-class existence.

  In the story “Single Gents Only” I wrote:

  But he found it easier to approach what he would become by defining what he was leaving behind. What he most definitely wasn’t—hideous images came to mind: sachets of dried lavender, Post Office Savings Books, hyacinth bulbs in bowls, the Radio Times in a padded leather cover embossed with the words Radio Times, Sunday-best silver tongs for removing sugar-cubes from sugar-bowls, plump armchairs.

  My years at Bristol seem to me now sunlit and lazy and always expanding and deepening in new pleasures. The intellectual aspect of the university did not weigh on me. It was all something of an anti-climax after the intensity of those sixth-form years. There were gaps to be plugged, of course, and I plugged them; I endured the tedium of Chaucer’s supposed translation of The Romaunt of the Rose, Malory’s Morte d’Arthur and Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy and suchlike—the sort of works that Philip Larkin would have dismissed as “ape’s bumfodder.”

  The main chore at Bristol was having to attend weekly seminars for three years in Anglo-Saxon. After having ground through the vocabulary and grammar I was able to translate such gripping fragments as remain: The Battle of Maldon, the poems of Cynewulf, the voyages of the intrepid Ohthere and Wulfstan, and The Battle of Brunanburh, a poem of 73 lines about a battle between an army of Norsemen and Scots and an army of West Saxons and Mercians. The location of Brunanburh is unknown but it was apparently near the sea.

  Oh, wens and thorns!

  It was not enough to keep the mind alive.

  The only other constraints on a carefree life were a Shakespeare seminar with L. C. Knights and occasional meetings with my Moral Tutor, the poet Charles Tomlinson. He was myopic and morose and kept the blinds and curtains in his office permanently closed so that meetings with him were like sitting in a gloomy tent. It surprised me that this frail little man rode a motorcycle. He kept it in the office beside his desk because he claimed his landlady’s dog had once bitten it. I was supposed to write essays for him but he hadn’t sufficient energy to invent titles and I really couldn’t spare the time. After a few visits I stopped going regularly and just popped in occasionally to see that he was all right.

  Insofar as I could, I let the university fall away from me. I was supposed to wear a gown at all times, not only in the university but in the streets. I did so for the first couple of weeks, then stopped as I looked and felt daft. On colder nights I wore it in bed.

  Pubs became my second home. Rough pubs sold Somerset “scrumpy,” a still cider, somewhat sour and of ferocious potency. Really rough pubs sold a truly disgusting Bristol speciality, a half-and-half mixture of draught bitter and draught port. I became so accepted in my local that I was asked to join the darts team, a great honour in a pub where students were barely tolerated. Many of the clientele were Bristol-born Jamaicans, street-fighting men who lived by breaking and entering and extortion and, in one case, because of the girth of his appendage, by starring in extremely rude movies.

  The landlord’s wife produced such typical pub fayre as cheddar cheese cobs, Scotch eggs, Cornish pasties, pork pies, and pickled eggs in a jar of cloudy liquid. Someone had printed on the jar’s label: No Farting. She it was, rather than her husband, who waded into altercations; even the Jamaicans were frightened of her. It was the sort of pub where on the evening opening hour of six, old men with the shakes would say, “Just pick that up and hold it to my lips, boy.” Others would wag a fatherly finger and say, “You take after me, lad. Never more than thirteen pints a night.”

  My other consuming interest was, of course, girls. I went from the famine of a single-sex school to feast. It seemed I was never without female companionship, none of it serious on either side in a long-term kind of way but always generous and affectionate and often torrid. The most extraordinary of these liaisons happened in Jersey where I was by accident working on a farm and sleeping in a barn with peasants brought in from Normandy as casual labour. Among them were identical twin sisters, largish girls, and I ended up in bed with both of them at the same time. There had been nothing Casanova-ish on my part. They just came and got me.

  I had deliberately delayed applying for a room in a Hall of Residence in the hope that by the time I did they’d all be taken. A Hall of Residence sounded institutional to me and unlikely to tolerate what I vaguely had in mind. I was more interested in what the university called Alternative Accommodation and alternative accommodation I certainly got. My story “Single Gents Only” has more than a tinge of autobiography in it. “The Lady Who Sold Furniture” also has a basis in fact. In the first weeks of that first term I moved four times. I stayed in a succession of peculiar places. One was actually a boarding house with long-term non-student residents who addressed each other as Mr. and Miss. They were variously weird—a walleye, a toupee, tics—and all behaved with a creaking formality. Dinners were eaten in mincing, lip-dabbing silence. The owners of this mausoleum exhibited a ghastly gentility, the husband, cavalry twill trousers, Viyella shirts, and lemon silk cravats, his having been a pooh-bah of some sort in Uttar Pradesh. I thought of him as “The Major.” Mrs. Major draped herself in ankle-length Paisley-pattern material. At night she left out in the dining room festive thermos flasks of cocoa and biscuits on doilies for the inmates.

  In the hall suspended from a mahogany frame hung a huge Benares brass gong chased and enamelled in red and green. On the frame’s mahogany ledge lay a padded striker, a long mahogany handle and a fleece-covered head the size of a baseball. Arrived back from the pub on my fifth night of residence and standing in the silent hall I could no longer resist the golden invitation. I gave the gong a two-handed BONG. The sound was astounding. The sound waves shimmered on for ever. In a panic I put the striker back on its ledge but it fell and as I stooped to pick it up my head hit the edge of the gong again. The inmates began to come down the staircase in their dressing gowns and leather slippers and stood whispering and sibilant. Mrs. Major appeared horribly without makeup and wearing a hairnet. I started up the stairs towards my room.

  Someone said, “One can’t just . . .”

  I could feel all their eyes on my back.

  I got the boot in the morning from The Major.

  I found a room in a house of students the next day through an advertisement in the Students’ Union building. Settled in, I fell into the habit of reading into the small hours and getting up at about 11:30 in the morning. Breakfast was usually scrumpy and Madras beef curry.

  At a party one night I met a first-year student called David Hirschmann. He was taking an honours degree in philosophy. Standing in the kitchen, David pouring wine for revellers, we started chatting in an idle sort of way. After a couple of hours the conversation had become deeply personal. We left the party and walked and talked, sat in a park on a bench and talked. Talked until dawn surprised us. By breakfast time we had agreed that we had to move in together as soon as this could be arranged. It was a relationship that lasted for many years. I was very shaken last year when other Bristol friends, Charles and Penny Denton, wrote to tell me that David had cancer of the brain. He had been given, they said, about three months. I was making preparations to go to see him when Penny Denton wrote again to tell me he had died.

  David was gentle, kind, quick-witted, but at the same time rather clumsy and goofy. One Sunday evening four of us
decided that we wanted to go to a restaurant in Clifton but we had no cash. David was the most respectable-looking of us, so we decided that he should put on his suit and see if the owner would accept a cheque. The restaurant had about eight tables and the owner cooked on an open grill at the far end of the room. David opened the door, did something Tati-like with his umbrella, and quite literally fell into the restaurant, landing heavily on his back. Guido, the owner, hurried between the tables and stood looking down. David, bright red in the face and still supine, said, “May we pay by cheque?”

  David’s father was a doctor in Hampstead. His mother had been a matron in a large London hospital. Perhaps because of this background he was fastidiously clean and when we were living together he would actually dust things and put books into piles and hold wineglasses up to the light to check them for cleanliness. He used to nag me.

  “Surely you don’t expect her to sleep in those sheets, do you?” We were in a way like the Odd Couple. David would listen to Pablo Casals playing the unaccompanied cello suites; I would then claim the record player to listen to the majestic misery of Ma Rainey singing “Deep Moanin’ Blues” and “Daddy, Goodbye” along with jugs booming and kazoos blatting.

  David’s girlfriends continued to be hopelessly neurotic. We suffered through a girl who appeared far too frequently in the middle of the night weeping and accusing David of base infidelities, a girl who swallowed pills and had to be pumped out, a kleptomaniac on probation, a girl who was quite enthusiastic about sexual intercourse but who refused to remove her bra, saying only that she “couldn’t,” and a girl who cut herself. I think he was attracted to the idea of helping them.