The Pretender (7 page)

‘Here, what do you think of this?’

He handed me a poem by a poet from the provinces whose name I recognised. I read it twice, unsure what to say. I didn’t ‘get’ most modern poems. They were always too difficult or — if I understood them — too simple. But this poet was young and hot. I ought to say I liked it, but could find nothing to admire. ‘It’s like a well written postcard,’ I said, cagily.

‘Exactly. He was overrated to begin with and he’s already begun to parody himself,’ Tony said. ‘I can see that you and I are going to get on famously.’

An hour later, I left with a large stack of the last two issues of the
LR
and a book by Graham Greene to review.

‘Our greatest living writer,’ Tony said, handing me the book. ‘I used to see him a lot in the fifties. Published a couple of his stories. He typed them up for me on that desk there while he was waiting for Pepe to be free.’

‘Pepe?’

‘A tart he was keen on, had a flat two doors down. At first, he used to lie about why he was here. He’d say he had a bit of time to kill. But then, one day, Pepe came looking for him. He’d got wrapped up in something he was writing and she was impatient. Her time was money. Had a biographer round once. Tried to sound me out on whether Graham and I were... you know.’

I didn’t, at first, but I nodded sympathetically.

‘Just after some dirt. Tarts were Graham’s secret penchant, not boys. I didn’t let on, though. You aren’t that way inclined, are you? Boys.’

‘No,’ I replied, with an emphatic shake of the head. ‘Thought not. Pity.’

Tony was an inveterate gossip, happy to reveal the secrets of famous writers, but he became far more circumspect when it came to his own life. I soon discovered that he had been both a respected poet and a promiscuous gay man in the days before homosexuality was legalised. I liked him a lot, and attributed his weaknesses to circumstance rather than hypocrisy. I wanted to know everything about the prestigious magazine he edited.

On my second day, I asked him about the
Little Review
’s early history, before he was the editor.

‘Nothing before me, old boy. I am the progenitor, the one and only.’

‘But surely you weren’t around in Paris in the Twenties...’

Tony laughed heartily. ‘You thought.. well, why not? Different magazine, I’m afraid.There have been several
Little Reviews
. It’s a popular title.’

‘You copied it?’

‘I prefer the word
stole
. Bad writers copy. Good writers steal.’

I recognised his paraphrase of Picasso and remembered how Shakespeare and Co. had stolen the name of the earlier store in Paris. He was right, I decided.

‘How did you start?’

‘I wasn’t much older than you are now. Fresh out of university. A little money from the family. No inclination to get a proper job, so I started the magazine as a way of meeting the people whose work I admired. The first issue was mimeographed. Twelve barely readable pages. A hundred copies. Half of them I gave away. The rest I sold, on street corners, going door to door. Writers can be generous to magazines that are starting out. A few gave me good work. A few subscribed. By the third issue, we were folded over, with two staples down the middle, a proper magazine. By the twentieth, the magazine was too fat for staples. We had to have it sewn.’

I liked the way he used the royal ‘we’ to describe the magazine, even though it had always been a one man band. Now and then, I saw in the old copies I filed, he took on an assistant editor to deal with fiction, art or reviews (he always kept poetry to himself), but the incomers never lasted more than a year or two. Some only lasted an issue. The magazine’s sales had peaked in the sixties, but its influence remained strong in the seventies. Since then, subscriptions had dwindled. It was kept going by institutional subscriptions (universities, he explained, paid higher rates and were slow to spot that the zeitgeist had moved on) and paying contributors a pittance. Employing students to sell the magazine, as Tony had in its early days, was a desperate measure. Tony had pinned the notice up himself, in several university buildings. I was the only person who’d responded.

Unloading the magazines was a slog. I didn’t possess the natural charm essential for selling door to door. My worthy
would-you-like-to-buy-a-literary-magazine
spiel rarely worked. Often, there was nobody in. I learnt to go round halls of residence just before dinnertime, but was still lucky if I made more in an hour than I would have done working behind a bar. I’d hoped to meet women, but most wouldn’t answer the door to a bloke they didn’t know and I was never interested in the ones who did. I had an adolescent vision of an instant connection. I was looking for somebody as bright and beautiful as Helen, who liked me as much as Francine did. Yet even if, by some fluke, I’d met such a person, I wouldn’t have known what to say to her.

Despite my failure to sell many copies, I began to go to the
Little Review
office once or twice a week. I would help out by filing, answering the phone or taking papers to the post. I liked talking to Tony, pumping him for stories of old Soho. He told me about Francis Bacon, Colin MacInnes, Dan Farson and John Deakin. He took me to drink at the Colony Club and The Caves. These were claustrophobic places full of dodgy types, aging bohemians, aspiring artists and the occasional minor rock star. A few of these people showed a fervent interest in me, at least until Tony warded them off. I thought at the time that I was gathering material for a book (my whole life, I told myself, was merely material I was collecting for a novel). Yet, now that I come to write about that time, I can’t recall a single conversation, only snippets, vague images and the occasional cringe-making moment. Tony constantly moaned that Soho was well past its prime.

‘The fifties was the time. The blacks were just arriving. Everything was new. Sex. Reefer. Coffee bars.The sixties were a sod, by comparison. The phoneys moved in and the hoi polloi joined up. Things settled down a bit in the seventies. Creeping decrepitude ever since.’

I listened without comment. The fifties and sixties meant little to me, only what I’d gleaned from novels. The seventies were my first decade on earth, though I didn’t like to remind Tony of this.

I quickly became Tony’s confidante, but I wasn’t his only ‘helper’. He referred to most of his other acolytes as ‘hangers on’. They were twenty- or thirty-somethings of indistinct class, generally shabby dressers, who would offer to take the post or volunteer to review books but rarely did anything useful like hoover or make the tea. Tony warned me that there was one individual who I should never allow to post rejected manuscripts. He suspected him of stealing the stamps off the envelopes and throwing the manuscripts away: ‘caused me no end of trouble — half the writers assumed I’d hung onto their stuff in order to use it’.

I learnt to arrive before midday, at which time Tony would often disappear to the Colony Club or one of the other haunts of Soho’s daytime drinkers. He let me read manuscripts for him — any that might be of use would join the tottering pile on his desk. Otherwise I would scribble one of Tony’s stock phrases at the bottom, then seal up the reject in its stamped, self-addressed envelope. The phrases ran from
sorry, not for us
(complete crap) to
nearly, but not quite there yet
(shows a bit of promise) to
very good, but we’ve taken too much on at the moment
(a writer who was perfectly competent, or better, but who Tony didn’t like). He would sometimes write agonised notes to writers who were evidently his friends. These said something like
tempted to use this, but would be at least two years
. This last was true, he told me, one afternoon, pointing at the tea chest to the left of his desk, which was full to overflowing.

‘That’s the stuff I’ve accepted, but haven’t got round to using yet.’

When I handed him my Graham Greene review, he affected shock.

‘My dear boy, people take review copies to sell. If I really want a book reviewed I give the number of words and a deadline. You should have taken it to one of the places on Charing Cross Road: Henry Pordes or Any Amount of Books.’

Despite this caveat,Tony read my review, marking cuts, correcting the grammar and pointing out places where my point could be clearer, or more succinct. I could see what made him a good editor. The five minutes of attention he gave to my review were more valuable than all the feedback I’d had from the tutor who’d set and marked my undergraduate essays over the previous two terms.

‘Here,’ he said, handing the review back, ‘get it down to five hundred words and I’ll try and fit it into the issue after next. If you’re interested in Greene, by the way...’ He wandered over to the dusty shelves that covered one wall of the room, each one overflowing with books of every hue, in no discernible order. He knew exactly what he was looking for, and where to find it. ‘Here. You might want to read this. There could be an interesting article in it.’

He handed me a cheap paperback, published in the 50s, called
To Beg, I Am Ashamed
by Sheila Cousins. Its subtitle was
The Autobiography of a Prostitute
.

‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Is there a Greene connection?’

‘Read it first. See what you think. Then I’ll tell you.’

The
LR
was a welcome haven, for the house share in Tottenham was becoming unbearable. We were all on the verge of being thrown out. One afternoon in Soho I told Tony that I was badly behind with my rent.

‘I suppose you could live above the shop here,’ he said. ‘I hardly use the place any more.There’s only a sink, but you can get a whore’s bath in it, and I expect they still have showers at the university.Want a look?’

He took me to the second floor of the building, up the narrow stairs I’d see him climb on days he needed a place to sleep off the drink.There were two rooms. The biggish one had a double bed, a sink, and, behind a shabby curtain, a toilet. The small one was full of tea chests and box files.

‘The
Little Review
’s archive,’ Tony explained. ‘You can clear it up if you want more space. Well, what do you think?’

‘It’s fantastic,’ I, who had always dreamed of living in Soho, said. ‘How much rent would you want?’

‘No rent,’ Tony said. ‘You can be night watchman. Sort out the box room while you’re here and help keep me organised, the way you have been doing. Oh,’ he added, and paused, with a twinkle in his eye, ‘and, if I get lucky during the day, the bed still belongs to me. OK?’

Tony never did ‘get lucky’ any more, though some of his old friends, on finding that I’d moved in, assumed he had. Maybe he did have a kind of crush on me — sex enters most motives, as I had already discovered — but I came to think of Tony as a friend, and even, at times, as a surrogate father.

In Soho, I lived out a fantasy. Many nights I walked the streets, which were most real in the early hours, when there were no tourists. I soon found myself on first name turns with strippers and prostitutes, though conversation was as far as it went: I couldn’t lose my virginity to a woman who wanted money in return. As I walked around, I kept making notes, dreaming of the great Soho novel I would one day write. It would be a coming-of-age-in-the-city novel — not a confessional memoir like this, but a sprawling epic, loaded with history, mystery and insight.

The university was within walking distance. My little flat had no stove, so I subsisted on sandwiches, fruit and pot noodles. I’d never been very interested in food, but if I ran out, or was desperate for something hot and filling, there were plenty of cheap Chinese restaurants around. Pollo, a few streets away, served good pasta so cheaply that even I could occasionally afford to eat there.

I read voraciously from Tony’s shelves as well as the university library. Few of the novels I read were connected with my course.A degree was merely my excuse for being in London. One of the few non-fiction books I read was
To Beg, I Am Ashamed
, the prostitute memoir that Tony lent me. It took me a while to get through, as I kept putting it down, distracted by the more enticing prospect of reading all of Graham Greene’s novels, in the order that he wrote them. It was in the fifties, I thought, that he was in his prime. Every novel was even better than the previous one, peaking with
The Quiet American
and
Our Man In Havana
. The prostitute memoir was also published in the fifties. Despite its risqué title, I found the story dull, and easy to put aside. I took to reading it only late at night, when I had finished one book and it was too late to start another.

The book’s cover was a silhouetted woman who reminded me more of an underwear advert than the women who worked modern day Soho.The prose was often pedestrian and the story was surprisingly short on salacious detail. Yet I read on, intrigued by the clue that Tony had given me. It was a tale of decline, featuring a weak mother, a missing father, chances not taken and bad luck at every turn. The narrative was populated with seedy men, some of whom could have come from a novel by Greene or Jean Rhys, a thirties writer who my mother liked a lot.

One aspect struck me almost at once.The book claimed to be by ‘Sheila Cousins’ (at one point, the narrator marries a man called Cousins, who she follows to the far east, one of Greene’s favourite locations). Nevertheless, I had read enough books by women to know, almost certainly, that this was written by a man. It was nothing I could put my finger on, just the tone, the choice of detail. It was more than the absence of self pity, the matter of fact attitude to sex. The narrator had none of Jean Rhys’s fragility. I realised that for a man to write as a woman was one of the hardest things to pull off. For me to convincingly imitate a female novelist, as I had imitated Hemingway, would be impossible.

A few details in
To Beg, I Am Ashamed
made me think Greene might be responsible for it. Greene’s
England Made Me
, written in 1934, had references to selling tea. One of the characters in the novel sent postcards much like the ones sent by “Sheila’s” husband, Cousins, when he was in the far east, where he dealt in tea. Sheila drifted in and out of prostitution after her failure to sell vacuum cleaners, a career that Greene used for characters in both
England Made Me
and
Our Man In Havana
, which was written in the fifties. But it was only at the end of the story that she found she had no choice but to remain a prostitute. Then one got the details of the street life, from the three pound punters in Piccadilly (where Sheila worked) to the shilling scrubbers of King’s Cross. Greene’s regular visits to prostitutes could have been the source of this material.