My reading for 1950 took in the remainder of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Turgenev. I read Flaubert, Gogol, some of Zola, more Balzac, and made a start on Dickens. During the winter I took a course of WEA classes on the modern English novel, reading Graham Greene and E. M. Forster (including his Aspects of the Novel). D. H. Lawrence was also discussed, and I went on to read most of his novels and stories, as well as poems, letters and two biographies. His work was a revelation in showing that great fiction could be written with a local setting, and one that I knew so well.
I pursued my way through Lord Derby’s translation of The Iliad, Pope’s Odyssey, the Dialogues of Plato, and the plays of Euripides, as well as Apuleius and the Histories of Herodotus. The Everyman Smaller Classical Dictionary was culled from end to end for the construction of genealogical diagrams connecting the gods, goddesses and heroes of antiquity, until I was able to recite from memory their crimes, proclivities and misadventures. It was a pageant-like amalgam of geography, history, dramatic folklore and poetry, and philosophical conundrums made plain by reading, an old strange world coming so alive that it wasn’t so much strange anymore as merely a separate recreation ground that the imagination could play in.
I read more Shakespeare, enjoyed Don Quixote, and continued with the Bible, a rate of reading that went on for the next few years, though indeed it has never stopped. When little of importance remained unread I turned back to certain books a second or third time, as well as picking up the few that had been missed. It was self-evident that you could not become a writer unless you had read everything, and learned what you could in the process.
I made some remarks in a letter to a schoolteacher friend about Raskolnikov’s Siberian dream in Crime and Punishment, suggesting that D. H. Lawrence had been influenced by it when he wrote St Mawr, in which there is a similar apocalyptic vision of the night. This letter led him to ask whether I had thought of going to university, because as an ex-serviceman it would not be difficult to get a grant. The notion seemed attractive, but the obligatory study of Latin for six months or so in order to pass the entrance examination decided me against it. I lacked the urge to go in that direction, another instinctive negative never to be regretted. Perhaps I declined out of laziness, though if I’d had Latin already I might have been willing to cut myself off from the world for three years.
My uncle suggested looking around a small and grubby secondhand bookshop as yet unknown to me. The proprietor, Paul Henderson, had in his younger days been a writer, and he told me with some pride that one short story had earned him what to me seemed the enormous sum of fifty pounds. On gloomy afternoons we sat in his back room talking about books and writers, drinking coffee, and warmed by a smelly paraffin stove.
Paul and his wife kept open house on Saturday night, and people came to talk about what they were reading (or writing), such authors as John dos Passos, Hemingway, Sartre and Camus. Or we listened to classical music, and were generously provided with coffee and sandwiches at a time when extra food was not easy to find.
During that hard winter fuel was also difficult to obtain, and I did my share at home by going to various depots for coal or coke. You were restricted to a quarter of a hundredweight at each place, and had to stand half frozen in a queue to get it. I also helped my uncle, for he hardly had the frame to carry much.
Taking my father’s local election poll card from the shelf one day, I went up the street to vote in his place. Nottingham, like everywhere else at that time, was a depressing town. Food was rationed, though the war had ended five years ago, and people were complaining that even a Labour government was unjustified in keeping such scarcities going. Perhaps it was this that caused me to place a cross next to the name of the Conservative candidate, though I don’t suppose he was elected. It may also have been done as a kind of joke against my father, but whatever the reason, my political views were, to say the least, in a state of uncertainty – if it could be said that I had any at all.
On a gloomy afternoon in late autumn I met Ruth Fainlight in the bookshop. After the introduction Paul closed up and drove us into town to have tea at a café. Ruth was a nineteen-year-old American poet, who I thought was Canadian, though I don’t know why, for she had no accent. She had come to Nottingham with her husband, but we fell in love, and began to see each other as often as possible.
Chapter Twenty-six
Sitting in an unheated bedroom in November meant no hardship, since the theme of my novel was of a temperature to keep even a Hottentot warm. I could hardly have gone out of the house for seventeen days, which time it took for the first pen and ink draft of 100,000 words to be written. On 16 January 1951, less than three months from start to finish, which included typing, retyping, and a certain amount of revision, the 400-odd pages were squeezed into two new spring-backed folders and sent as a parcel, with return postage, to a publishing firm which had announced a competition for new novels.
After a quick re-reading of the handwritten version forty years later I can only hope the final typescript was some improvement. Paul Henderson saw it, as did Ruth, but their comments were not positive, and I see why. The story opens with John Landor, modelled perhaps on me, in so far as I was able at that time to know myself, coming home after three years in the army. During that period his mother’s last letter had promised a further one that never arrived, which was to make dreadful revelations about his father, Ralph, who was some kind of businessman. On the first day home John visits Larry, a character who seemed to have been suggested by my friend John Moult, and they sit in a pub discussing the possible contents of the missing letter.
The next chapter described John’s visit to his Aunt Rhoda, who lives in the country (strong echoes of The White Peacock here) and who also intimates sinister behaviour on his father’s part in connection with his mother’s death. John’s old girlfriend Helen is now an art student, and on meeting in the local gallery their conversation is full of callow intellectual chit-chat. Helen takes painting lessons from an opinionated artist called Tom Ransom, based as much on my Uncle Frederick as Helen is on Sybil his girlfriend, and in his studio they talk endlessly in a very faux-Aldous Huxley fashion:
‘In a way, though,’ said John, ‘I like to believe in immortality, but mainly in that of the Greek religion. I like to think that when I die, someone will put a gold coin between my teeth, so that Charon can take my fare when he rows me across the Styx into Hades. I like the Greek religion altogether. As far as I’m concerned, Homer is my bible. The Iliad and Odyssey. The Greek religion is romantic, it is sheer poetry, not sombre like the Christian religion. When I think of God I like to imagine Zeus sitting laughing on Olympus, looking at the antics of the world with one eye, and keeping the other anxiously on Troy and Agamemnon.’
Then: ‘I believe too much in freedom to be sympathetic to communism, though maybe I could believe in it if I was the absolute boss.’ And: ‘In order to eliminate wars we have to get rid of the surplus population by some means of perfect birth control, educate people into having only two children per family.’ And, lastly: ‘People worship God out of pity for Him, not because they need love and guidance.’ And much more of the same kind.
One evening John sees his father in town with a strange woman, suspects him of having pursued an affair with her throughout his mother’s illness. On getting home – this part of the yarn turning very Dostoevsky – he finds his favourite kitten dead, and is convinced his father killed it in a fit of homicidal madness.
The plot begins to sicken, rather than thicken. An account of listening to Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony at a concert has overtones of E. M. Forster, though only in so far as to indicate that nothing has been learned from him. John also has an association with a girl called Ada who works in a hosiery factory. She shows understandable irritation at his self-indulgent talk, her character being the composite of my pre-service girlfriends.
The title By What Road, a phrase lifted from Sir Edwin Arnold’s version of the Bhagavad-Gita, indicates the uncerta
in direction of the story, but the upshot is that John’s father is given to having sexual intercourse with his wife’s corpse in the graveyard. Moira, his girlfriend, has long been trying to cure him of the habit, but in the end Ralph kills her, and hangs himself. Such a vainglorious mish-mash of terminal horror leads me to wonder whether I read about a case of necrophilia at the time, or if it had been discussed at the Hendersons’, and if so why was it used as the theme of my novel?
Such an avalanche of pages can only be put down to an unbridled Stakhanovite determination to concoct a novel at any price. The mechanism employed was, simply, to begin, and then let rip with whatever thoughts or people came to hand. One situation gave birth to another, with dire results, each character dragging in someone else in conditions of maximum anguish and forcing them also to participate in the progress of the juggernaut.
It must have been on a day off from the fabrication of By What Road that Ruth and I visited Alderman Willie Hopkin at Eastwood. Now nearly ninety, he had been a friend of the young D. H. Lawrence, and I was interested, even eager, to know anything about the great writer. Hopkin had responded kindly to our letter with an invitation to tea, and we sat on the top deck of a trolley bus through the twelve miles of a bleak November landscape of head-stocks and pit villages to get there.
For a couple of hours he answered our questions, and talked about ‘Bert’ as if he still lived around the corner. We had read most of Lawrence’s work, as well as some biographies, so kept the conversation going, while Hopkin added many details, and told anecdotes about the young writer and his friends. Some account of the meeting went into a notebook, which has since disappeared.
At the beginning of April 1951 I went to stay at my Aunt Amy’s cottage near Aylesham in Kent. Her coalminer husband, Richard Richardson, known for some reason in the family as ‘Mimic’, had been killed a few years before on his motorbike, she being injured in the same accident. Four of her eight children were still at home, though now grown up, and I was generously fed and looked after during my stay.
Neither gas nor electricity in the house, I wrote by the light of an oil lamp in one of the bedrooms, left as much to myself as I cared to be, though sometimes going for a walk or a drink with one of my cousins. They were helping to repair and paint old woodwork in the village church, which they still attended on Sunday, having been in the choir as children – a strange life to someone who had grown up even below the religion line.
I met the vicar on my way to the post office one day, a handsome angular-bodied man of about fifty who wore spectacles. During a recent sojourn in hospital his dog had died, and he had since written its life story in verse so as to remember their friendship. ‘I used one long and two shorts for the rhythm.’
I put on a suitably erudite expression, yet wondered if he was testing me. ‘Oh yes, dactylic hexameter, if there were six feet to one line.’
‘That was it,’ he smiled, ‘but whose metre was that?’
‘Homer’s?’ I suggested. He queried whether the village of Nonnington had inspired any poems, at which I supposed my cousins had said something about me. ‘Not so far, but it may one day,’ I said.
I saw the films Samson and Delilah and Pygmalion in Canterbury, and from the public library in Dover took out books by James Joyce, Stephen Spender and Karel Capek, as well as Walter Raleigh’s Style and A Treatise on the Novel by Robert Liddell. Poems went to Outposts, but with no luck. The countryside was in the full cool flush of spring, and I walked in fields and woods that were coloured with anemones and celandines, violets and primroses, wood sorrel and forget-me-nots.
One of my cousins worked at a farm, and I helped him – not very successfully – to milk the cows. The family’s brute of a bull terrier called Major had to be exercised, and I got into trouble when it grabbed someone’s pet mongrel and half killed it. Another day it charged salivating across a field after a cluster of sheep and nearly got shot by the justifiably irate farmer.
A group of poems, and ‘The General’s Dilemma’, came back from World Review. To console myself I ploughed stolidly through USA by John dos Passos, read David Gascoyne’s Short History of Surrealism, and C. Day Lewis’s work. I wrote more poems, and a couple of stories, sending poems to The Listener, and ‘The General’s Dilemma’ to Orpheus. The Song of Solomon seemed good to read while in our letters Ruth and I were planning to meet in Folkestone.
Macbeth, and extracts from Dostoevsky’s Diary of a Writer were read on the Third Programme, my aunt’s wireless powered by an accumulator. I despatched a story to Chambers’s Journal, and received ‘The General’s Dilemma’ back from John Lehmann, who turned out to be the editor of Orpheus, saying that he liked the story but unfortunately the magazine was closing for lack of money.
On 14th May I started The Deserters, a novel which had nothing of the macabre straight-from-the-head fantasy of By What Road, though there were similarities in that a slightly older man than John Landor, now called Brian Selby, comes back from the war and gets entangled in the local bohemian society, my artist-uncle and his girlfriend again being prominent. Other characters, however, were more believable, and there was less pseudo-philosophical verbiage.
In our letters Ruth and I discussed leaving England, south seeming the only direction. On 19th May By What Road was rejected, and I realize now that no editorial reader could have gone beyond the first page, there being so few promising features that anyone would have been justified in thinking that whoever had written such embarrassing rubbish would never succeed as a writer. Even if I had worked over a dozen more drafts in as many years the result could only have been an undistinguished first novel from someone who was unlikely to produce anything further. Knowing this at the time, I had the sense not to send it out again. In any case I had done 120 first-draft pages of The Deserters, and by the end of May the novel had grown to 55,000 words.
Ruth and I made our tryst in Folkestone, and stayed a few days at Mrs Tryon’s boarding house. It was a time of Whitsun heatwave, and we walked seven miles along the clifftops to Dover, reading Matthew Arnold on the celebrated beach. Afterwards we explored the Stalingrad-like ruins still left from the war, and in the afternoon enjoyed the film version of Rattigan’s Separate Tables.
Nottingham seemed dead when I returned at the beginning of June, existence pointless without Ruth, even the convivial evenings at the Hendersons’ a desolation in her absence. I sometimes called to see Paul, and we would talk with knowledgeable Noel Dilks, a dwarfish fifty-year-old with long grey hair who sold secondhand sheet music and musical instruments in a shop just up the road. He had been writing a play for years, perhaps decades, with only Anglo-Saxon-based words, a rigidity which bemused me, for it was like using only a small part of a wonderfully flexible tool. Excerpts read one night at the Hendersons’ sounded fluent and pure, but I couldn’t get much sense as to what it was about, only recalling that one of the characters went by the name of Philadamus. Noel lived alone in a council house on the edge of town, and when he died a few years later his theatrical masterpiece was thrown on to the rubbish dump – as were nearly all my Uncle Frederick’s paintings after his girlfriend died.
Ruth and I arranged to meet for the day in Hastings and, though both of us arrived at the set time, we failed to see each other, as if Fate had taken a hand against us. Circling the clock tower, calling again at bus and train station, endlessly reconnoitring the stony beach, and rechecking the letter to make sure of the time and place, we must have stalked each other’s shadow in the sun just too far behind – or in front – to make the longed-for contact.
Bewildered and cursing, I went back to Nottingham, for a week of solitary walks to burn my anger off. I sat on the bank of the sluggish Trent and wrote a poem called ‘Exfiltration’, about electrical powerlines criss-crossing the fields, that hadn’t existed when traipsed over with Peggy and our siblings a dozen years before.
On 25th August my rather contrived story ‘Two Ways of Thunder’ was published in the Nottinghamshire Weekly G
uardian. A few-hundred-words description of ‘Mountain Jungle’ was printed in the Scribe, the magazine of the Nottingham Writers’ Club. My first poem was taken by the Royal Air Force’s Association annual magazine (for which half a guinea was paid) concerning the somewhat mystical thoughts of a man in radio contact with an aeroplane going on a long journey over the sea, signed not in my name but as ‘wireless operator’.
In September my Aunt Edith’s sons, Ernie and Arthur, called on me wanting to borrow a map so that they could plan a route around the Eastwood area to go ‘tatting’ in their fifteen-hundredweight lorry. They asked me to come along, the idea being to walk the streets of various mining towns pushing leaflets through doors asking for scrap iron, and explaining that we would call later to see if any was forthcoming. We thought it hilarious when, after knocking on a door and asking a grizzle-haired shirtless collier – looking much like Morel in Sons and Lovers – if he had any old rubbish, he answered fiercely: ‘Ah! Tek me!’ – and slammed the door in our faces before we could take him at his word.
Ruth and I met now and again, otherwise exchanging letters, which often included stories and poems. I was reading Ibsen, Chaucer and Aristophanes, Ovid, Thucydides and Lucretius, and for lighter matter the novels of Richard Aldington. I wrote such stories as ‘The Fall of the Cliff’, ‘The Major’, and ‘Mr Sing’, which did not survive, but also ‘Blackcurrant’ and ‘A Bad ’Un’, later ploughed into Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. A poem was accepted by a magazine called Prospect, and then came the news that my pension would continue until late in 1953. I unsuccessfully applied for the job of editing a magazine put out by the Raleigh Bicycle Company, called The Raleighgram.