The Back of His Head (7 page)

Of course I used to remonstrate with him about this behaviour, but it was no use. These are the folk you write for, I'd tell him, these are the folk you write
about
. This is your
readership
, you'd be nothing without them. Cattle, he'd say back. Fuck'em.

Even when he was alive he was a fortress: that is what I'm trying to say. His concessions at the time of the Prize were reluctant concessions to say the least, nearly all of them coming to some kind of grief. Nothing I've done for his estate since he began his decline has been at odds with what I saw in him before it, but none of it has come anywhere near the rage that close encounters would bring about in him as he was dragged, reluctantly, into celebrity. If it's true that
possessiveness and control
are what motivate me in my management of the Trust—Semple's words—such things are no more than extensions of what I saw the old man driven by when it came to protecting his writing and his heritage—or even to the simple business of putting up with people, having folk come near him when he didn't want them there.
Fuck off!
he'd yell through the hedge at sightseers when they tried to peer through it to the Residence.
I'm not a performing fucking seal!

There'd been some interest in Raymond and his work before the Prize, naturally, albeit somewhat muted: no one seemed quite to know what to make of him at first, since the early novels were so
outré
and caused so much uproar when they appeared—
Miss Furie's Treasure Hunt
, I mean, and the two Algerian novels that followed it,
Frighten Me
and
Flatland
. Beautifully written, yes, yes, they are: but all the same these are the works I have most trouble with myself, to be candid, with their excesses and the misjudgements of a writer slowly beginning to come to terms with his own genius. They certainly have some extraordinary moments.

The initial response to them, most of it in reviews, is meticulously kept in Raymond's papers. I've winced my way through each of them long ago, and through the comments scrawled in the fading near-sepia of their margins—
Amazing! Can't read English! Stupid shit!
—along with his underlinings and splattered exclamation marks. Some of his comments, alas, are even less publishable than these, far less so. He had a mouth on him, as I'm sure you're beginning to gather.

The worse the review, though, the more delighted he seemed to be: and for the first three novels there was much to delight him, since the critics were nothing but negative, expressing shock, appalment, even outrage. The revulsion was almost unanimous. In those days, only his overseas publication by a heroic, masochistic boutique publisher in London kept him afloat. No recognition from anyone—not even a momentary acknowledgement—that for all his excesses he might have had a mission in those early works, a purpose in taking us with him into the abyss.
What can we possibly gain from this perversion of a great European story, what does a giant child-eating beetle contribute to our understanding of the life we live in these islands?
—novel number one.
Once again children are being eaten, but this time by humans and with the added outrage of
recipes
as an appendix to the book (one hesitates to call it more than that)
—novel number two.
The torture scene at the centre of this work is outrageous and unforgivable, tinged as it is with a lingering sadism and even more questionable sexual tastes, which, if practised, would see the practitioner answering grave charges in court
—novel number three. By now, we're well in Algeria during its war of liberation (hence the titles of
Frighten Me
and
Flatland
). Or, some would say, we are well in Raymond's strange, haunting, mythical, sado-masochistic version of that country.

Now and then—not often—I would find among these reviews a grudging acknowledgement that the young man could actually write (
he is wasting his frequently evident talents as a writer of English on mere adolescent sensationalism
), and I was always fascinated by the way his words could suborn a reader from the paths of righteousness. (
The writing is seductive in both the best and the worst ways, and it is sometimes shocking to come to one's own senses, so to speak, and realise that one has simply accepted without question what one has just read
.)

Inevitably, at some point in all this, it began to occur to me to check out the reality behind what he wrote. One afternoon, when I knew he was away in Phyllis Button's bed, I rummaged his passport out of his bedroom drawer. This was early on, at a time when I was refusing to believe a word of anything he told me, any word at all—in my rebellious years, such as they were, when I was sure he made up everything he said and did, and, the more he told his stories of North Africa, doubted the more that he'd ever stepped from his native soil in the first place. And, of course, he had: his passport, a British one at that stage, was almost falling apart from constant branding. I could hardly believe some of the countries whose names were stamped into it.
Peru
, for God's sake!—what
could
he've been doing in
Peru
?

Marocq
, the customs stamp stated for his most recent trip. That was his usual way into Algeria, through Tangier and then into
Alger
, as the next stamp read beneath the curl of the
abjad:
and then
Marocq
again on the way back out again to Tangier—Tangier, visited incredibly early in his travels, and then Algeria, revisited again and again until (as I remember it) a long spell in the late 1950s, when he was in his mid-twenties and had plenty of occasions to do all the things he claimed to have done, various and changing as they were.

Sometimes I'd ask people what they thought. Was he really caught up in the war of liberation back then? I'd ask them. In Algeria?
Yes, of course
, most of them replied, but when I pressed them the only evidence they had was the books themselves: they seemed plausible, so what was in them must surely be true? Only one or two pointed out the inconsistencies—the early stories written from the viewpoint of the
colons
, for example, where the indigenes are clearly, passionately the enemy, atrocities simply something that must be gone through and the
Paras
pouring into the country unambiguously heroes, and then the later writing from exactly the opposite point of view, set in this rebellious
wilayat
or that. His reminiscences switched sides like this and back again, too, any protest provoking a gaze that froze the heart.

Then, of course, it was rumoured he'd been posted to Sidi Bel Abbès after an unhappy love affair in Britain and had actually fought for the Foreign Legion!—something I tracked down to the man himself, who hauled out a book with a photo in it he insisted was of himself in the distinctive Legion uniform of the time, second from the left and three rows back with a date in 1954. I switched sides, he told me.
But that's nothing like you
, I told him back: though the more I turned the magnifying glass on the image in the following weeks and months the more I became convinced that in fact it might very well be him—and, in the end, that, indeed, it actually was. Wasn't it?

Others were less convinced. How much of the early fiction d'you think is real—how much d'you think is based on what he actually did? I asked Semple at one point. None of it, he replied. Bastard probably stayed pissing up in the hotel bar in Algiers writing down what he heard other people say about the fighting.

As you can see, he too had breakdowns in his belief in the Master—we all did from time to time. On this occasion, I think I remember, the old man had just chucked Robert's latest poems back in his face and then bought him a colouring book and crayons: that or something like it was what lay between them at that particular moment.
It's just stuffing, what you write
, the old man had told him.
Stuffing, stuffing, stuffing! Find something different! It's meant to be
behind
what you write, not in front of it!
That was when he'd thrown the poems.
You can fucking talk
, Robert had shot back at him, his face dark with anger.
You can fucking talk
.

Hence his scepticism, Semple's, I mean. A little later, though, I caught him out in a drunken boast to the effect that, in truth, he'd never read
Flatland
, or at least that he'd never read it quite to the end— something like that—and I shamed him (as much as he was capable of being shamed) into reading my copy of the novel.

No one else writes like that, he said, as he handed it back to me when he was done. No one, no one in the world.

You could see he was rattled. He meant no one could write as well as that, but also that no one could write an account like the one Raymond had written in that novel without having
lived it
, without having
been there and done that
, as he used to say. He did it all right, Robert told me. No doubt about that. The old bastard, he did it all right.

I realised that if he was as shocked as this he couldn't possibly have read
Frighten Me
either, the other early Algerian novel, and I bullied him into reading that as well: and he was equally shaken by what he saw there, too, once he had. No wonder people tried to ban them, he said. Jesus, I'd no idea. They're so
realistic
, they're so
shocking
, it all actually
happens
—

Oh, the relief, though, when I finally
caught up
with the Master back then—when I'd read everything he'd already written and could open something of his that was new, something made while I was in his life, in his house and beginning to become a part of him.

One of the most wonderful things about his later success, as far as I'm concerned, is that it pasted a new narrative over the excesses of this early writing, you might say, a narrative of which I thoroughly approve and in which I had no small part myself in the fixing: Raymond as the growing conscience of the nation and then, as he went on, of the world, of the civilised world: Raymond the humanitarian, speaking on behalf of the wretched of the earth, wrenching our mistakes, naked and quivering—Lord, how some here
hated
him for this—into the eyes of the teeming globe.

There is general agreement among the critics that in his middle phase—from
The Outer Circle Transport Service
, say—his work began to acquire that depth and resonance, that
maturity of vision
, which was so much remarked on when he won the Prize and which so fully explained his winning of it.
For his holding before our collective gaze the wretched of the earth
—part of what the Citation states about his achievement. Other-people, he had begun to call them, the wretched and the damned: eventually the title of one of his last novels and certainly his most disturbing.

Slowly, slowly, all this has become mine: the compassion, the humanity, the love of the victim and the fool, of the man who dares to be different—of the man who dares to
be
.

I've told you what he was like at the ceremony at Stockholm: the attention he received when he returned home interested him even less, and, except for those occasions when he was feeling unusually generous, he tried to avoid it. The illness got in the way, it has to be said, though of course there are always those naysayers who claimed it made no difference whatever and that he was unbearable and unpredictable long before the first tremor in his arm.

Admittedly, there was a disastrous civic reception at the town hall here quite soon after the award, in which he made what even I have to confess was a most inappropriate speech, a truly embarrassing speech. After this it was agreed that he should begin to pass things more and more to me—to the others who were to be in the Trust, yes, but, primarily (given that by that stage I was formally his secretary and personal assistant), to me. More and more it was Raymond's name that was advertised but mine that was offered in its place, in the introductions to the various public meetings I insisted he continue to agree to: or he who would precede me onto the stage, or before the cameras, but I who would follow him and, after the brief, distracted few words he could be bothered to give at the best of times, I upon whom he would rely increasingly to give substance to these occasions—to flesh him out, so to speak.

And thus, imperceptible to the public gaze, a gentle transition from uncle to nephew, as, increasingly, I began to steal the show with a growing public narration of Raymond's life in the years after the award. At first these public lectures were illustrated by a steady accumulation of slides in a carousel: then, as time went on and with Julian's help, by electronic means. Scenes from the ceremony at Stockholm—Raymond receiving the award in his reluctant tuxedo and tie, his hair awry like Beethoven's, Raymond and the four of us with him, all in our youth (wry self-deprecation always worked well at this point of my presentation), Raymond with King Carl Gustaf, Raymond delivering his acceptance speech at the banquet, Raymond receiving his applause.