by D. J. Taylor
The shelves had been up a fortnight now. The topmost one was slightly askew. I put it down to a craftsman’s disdain of perfection, a humility before the absolutes of wood and metal. But something still irritated me about Thetford Jim: a talent not recognised, an ingenuousness not rewarded. A producer I knew on Radio Norfolk was non-committal, but he agreed to investigate. There was another talent night a week later at the pub in Brandon. As the teenaged impressionist gave way to a staggeringly inept magician, I saw the producer’s eye list desperately in boredom. But he cheered up at ‘The Squire’s Walk’ and a song I’d not heard before, a plaintive and sentimental number about a village cemetery. ‘It’s authentic,’ he said. When I looked inquisitive, he went on: ‘You wouldn’t believe the kind of thing that passes for Norfolk these days. Had a character in my office last week called Sid the Ratcatcher. You know how they get themselves up – smock, shepherd’s crook – Christ knows what that’s got to do with ratcatching. Sang a song about sheep dips. It turns out he’s an accountant, lives near Lynn. Does the Rotary Club and the after-dinner circuit. But this one reminds me of the Singing Postman – you remember, the little chap with the glasses who used to sing about ha’ you got a light boy? Do you suppose he’s ever played to more than twenty people?’
Two days later I met Jim in Northwold high street with a large black labrador loping resignedly at his heel. ‘This here dog is my cousin’s dog,’ he explained. ‘I’m seeing to him on account of she’s away.’ I explained about the producer. ‘Uh ho. The radio and that. They wouldn’t want me to dress up funny or nothing?’ he asked tolerantly. ‘I shouldn’t think so.’ ‘OK,’ he said, and he articulated it ooh-kay, with a satirical glint of the eye. ‘I reckon I’ll sit myself down and do some practising.’ I watched him amble away down the street, the dog dragging at his ankles, fearful of the gulf that separated us. My mother would have known how to deal with Thetford Jim; she would have drawn him out, conquered his reserve. I was simply a fantastic alien who wrote about him in newspapers and wanted to put him on the radio.
There was a Sunday afternoon show on Radio Norfolk, squeezed up between Memories of my Golden Years and the religious slot, called Bandstand. It was supposed to be live, although in fact the majority of the show went out on tape and only the announcer’s feed-ins and the ‘star guest’ admitted a margin of error. They had him booked in for the Sunday before Christmas – ‘Thetford Jim: the sound of Norfolk’ – and a photographer came over from Diss to take his picture for the Eastern Daily Press: myopic, mild-eyed, gazing out from under a peaked cap he sometimes wore. I was in London, as it happened, seeing an editor or chasing a profile, but the story kept warm. On the Friday before the show someone peppered the downstairs windows of the cottage with buckshot. Puttering down the lane the next morning, Jim ran into a trip wire stretched at shoulder-height between two dead elms and broke his collar bone. Of various local informants only Mrs Nokes offered an explanation. ‘All on account of that Tracy Sutton. Just after his mother died.’ The name meant nothing. ‘Only fourteen, she was. One of those ones that look seventeen. And act like it, too. Who do you blame? In they end they only gave him a suspended sentence, but Tracy’s dad always swore he’d get even.’
They discharged him from hospital two days later, and I called round. The door was locked and stayed unanswered, though light burned from the upstairs shuttering. Then in the New Year, out on the bike again coming back from a job at Northwold, he careered across the road and into a file of schoolchildren. No one was badly hurt, but they kept him at Brandon police station overnight ‘for his own protection’ as the desk sergeant I spoke to put it. After that he disappeared: off to the far side of the county, people said, working at Channings jam factory near King’s Lynn. Mrs Nokes, who had access to this kind of information, reported that he was living in a Salvation Army hostel. The look in her eye hinted that I shouldn’t visit. An elm smashed against the side of the cottage in the March gales and knocked half a wall away: no one came to repair it. And then, idling in a newsagent’s queue with Mrs Nokes, I saw a vast, sandbag-shaped girl with gappy teeth and witless eyes chewing her underlip at the counter. ‘Tracy Sutton,’ Mrs Nokes whispered pityingly, and I turned away, finally aware of having taken a step too far, like some startled explorer descending into that lost world beyond the mountain who glimpses a pterodactyl taking wing into the gloomy sky.
The Survivor
Dear Edith, I have a lot to thank her for. It was she, you see, who came the closest anyone ever got to unmasking this lifetime of deceit, she who wandered most nearly into the eternity of dissimulation that has been my career. Of course, there had been near misses before – a worrying moment with Fielding back in the 1740s, born of over-confidence; a slight contretemps in 1873. (‘Sir!’ ‘Sir?’ ‘Sir. Your knowledge of Mr Dickens’ antecedents seems positively indecent. Perhaps you could explain how you came by it?’) – there was a lot of stuff about the early days that didn’t make it into Forster’s Life, but nothing like this nothing, with such potential for damage. Looking back, with that uncanny, supernal memory I have for scene and incident, I can remember it all: Edith’s tiny sitting-room in Pembridge Mansions, the usual watery tea in chipped china mugs, the customary sprinkling of young, literary sprigs – Brian Howard, my dears, up from Eton for the day. I was recounting one or two of my choicer anecdotes about Oscar to a corps of deferential listeners when our hostess gave me a shrewd look and remarked: ‘Mr Saffery. Your account of Mr Wilde’s indiscretions is extraordinarily vivid. It is almost as if you yourself were there. There was some laughter at this, which picked up when Ronald uncoiled himself langorously from the sofa and said in that shy, stammering way of his: ‘We all know that Mr S-s-saffery is p-p-positively protean. A real eminence grise my dears.’ It passed as a joke, of course – such was Firbank’s paroxysm of nervous laughter that he shattered a teacup – but for once I had the ghostly feeling, like knocking heard a long way off, that exposure with all its unhappy consequences wasn’t far away.
Dear Edie (I think I may call her that), Dear Ronald. They were only two stars amid a galaxy of serried acquaintance. Household names my dear, as Brian would say. Arnold and Max and Morgan. At the time – this was the early twenties – I was an aspiring man of letters going by the name of Henry Saffery (a little devilling in the London Mercury, a poem or two in the Bystander – small blooms, patiently nurtured, in any case I was winding down) and what with my war service – DSO and gammy leg – and my private income – White’s, MCC, you name it I was a member – I think I can say that I didn’t want for invitations. They were great days: sniffing the early morning roses at Garsington, those afternoon teas at Max Gate – one tried to draw Tom out but it never worked. Motoring down to Eton to see Aldous. I still have the correspondence: Mr Eliot’s compliments, Mrs Woolf’s regrets, and that bizarre epistle, signed ‘D.H.L.’, entreating me to ‘look into your heart of innermost hearts, Henry, burn briefly for a moment and confess that you have always loved me’. A hundred years old maybe, and the ink is beginning to fade, yet on my timescale as recent as yesterday.
I don’t know when it all started – let’s be honest, the really early stuff leaves me cold these days, it doesn’t have the immediacy it used to, doesn’t have the glamour. There were those first inscriptions, hasty scrawls you understand, filled in next to the chalked parodies of bison and tiger. In any case, nobody at the time knew what I was doing. Hour upon hour I’d watch as some benighted fellow-troglodyte ran his paw along the line of hieroglyphics, trying vainly to decipher them, but there was never any true meeting of minds. ‘This is literature dummy,’ I’d shout at him. ‘This is the future’ – but no, never a flicker of interest. They were so stupid, those cavemen, so numbingly dumb: intellectual discovery had no allure. What with the bison hunts and the shindies with rival tribes it was just one long party. But I kept my head down through those grim, pre-literate years, as Stone Age gave way to Iron Age, as Iron Age gave way to Bronze – I learned all the lat
est tricks when the opportunity presented itself. I was a dab hand at Runic and I have slight claims – together with a druid whose name I now forget – to having invented Ogham Script. And though it was good to be in at the dawn of civilisation, these, it had to be acknowledged, were limited skills: they didn’t impress anyone. Bent over your piece of granite, out over the windy heath, file in hand, you were unhappily conscious that the real action was going on elsewhere, that Ogham Script was nothing compared with the wheel or the latest hi-tech battle axe. Later on, sitting round the camp-fire as the boys toasted their victories or sang those Iron Age drinking songs, you could be pretty certain that someone would murmer ‘You writer fairies’ in the direction of our corner. We weren’t popular, even then.
Things were better a few millennia later when I hit ancient Greece. For one thing, literacy was actually a point in your favour – being introduced to someone at a party as a scribe no longer provoked skirls of philistine laughter. Why, there were even jobs going in it. Plus, the materials had improved: no more hammering away on the walls, they had goatskin parchment by then. Better still, for the first time in history literature had a social scene, a salon. Poetry readings, drama clubs – we partied with the best of them. Naturally I hung around with everybody who was anybody: Homer, Aristophanes, Aesop, Homer … I don’t want to damage any illusions, but in fact there were three Homers – you don’t seriously imagine anyone could have written all that stuff on their own?– and they weren’t called Homer when I knew them. Plus, the blindness thing was a gimmick – what Homer I, who was up on this sort of trick, called a sales promotion aid – and far from original. I don’t want to make any apologies. It was something everybody did at the time: there was Aristophanes with his limp, Menander’s string of race horses. You had to give those boys credit, they could manage their careers, even to the extent of impeding other people’s. Modesty forbids me to dilate, but that scene in the Odyssey, the big scene where Nausicca and her handmaidens discover Odysseus washed up on the beach … It broke my heart when Homer II put it in without telling me, without so much a credit or a by-your-leave. ‘Business pal’, he shrugged – all the Athenian literary editors were familiar with that shrug – when I reproached him with this oversight, ‘just business’.
I was writing myself, you see. The habit goes back a long way. Even at this early stage I cultivated a varied output: a few verse fragments, epigrams, a play or two. But they were an unprincipled crowd in those days, people got wind of what you were working on and bang went your intellectual property rights. And not just the Homers. I can remember one evening about two and a half thousand years ago, putting the finishing touches to a slick little comedy, a proto-feminist farce in which the housewives of Athens tell their old men: no more sex until the war stops, when some drinking buddy arrived to drag me out to an Aristophanes first night. You guessed it, Lysistrata. I still have the letter I wrote him somewhere. It didn’t do any good. These things never do.
Temporarily disillusioned, momentarily undone, I lay low for a while after that. I needed a change of scene, I needed diversion after a thousand years or so of resolute hackwork. Even then, you see, the writer found himself up against those eternal social pressures – parties, women, networking. So I took time out. I spent the best part of a century in Macedonia collecting material for a travel book – that sort of thing was very much in vogue just then, what with the Odyssey, what with all the talk about new horizons and the quest motive. I cultivated the critics – time spent with the critics is never wasted, let me tell you. I went on a fifty-year drinking jag with a succession of Greek poets, and then spent a couple of decades drying out in a shepherd’s hut on Knossos. Idleness you reckon, that typical writerly inertia, that demure, doe-eyed inability to get things done? You’d be wrong. I’d prefer to call it an awareness of possibilities. Naturally, I was aware that the great masterpieces of early civilisation weren’t getting written but it wasn’t a problem, I could wait. After all, I had all the time in the world.
For all that, it was a bad time for writers. Has there ever been a good time for writers? This one was specially bad. Too many wars, too much dislocation, distraction, call it what you will. Too much heavy shit. It hit the writing community – we were calling ourselves that even then – particularly hard. All those Greek city states, all those benign dictatorships we’d thought would be good for aeons were going down like ninepins. Plus, we couldn’t look to their successors. Everyone knew the Romans didn’t appreciate the finer things in life. Still, I hung in there. What with the invasions and the politics there was a run on war poets, military correspondents, that sort of thing. I did my best. I covered one of the Punic wars (in which nothing ever happened, just marches and rain, nothing you could write home about); wrote an eye-witness account of the fall of Troy in heroic stanzas: no use asking, they didn’t survive. Such reverses had a predictable affect on a sensitive temperament. Back from the Peloponnesian wars – Thucydides had got there first in any case – I had a writer’s block lasting two hundred and fifty years.
Obviously it was time for a rethink, it was time for a re-evaluation of strategy. Fundamentally, this meant asking myself just exactly what I wanted to achieve as a writer. What were my goals, my aims, ambitions? After all, these things vary. I got super-reflective around this time, while Carthage blazed and Hannibal forged westward over the Alps (I could have covered them both – I had offers), I even thought about writing philosophy at one point. But the circumstances weren’t favourable. It was all military history in those days – Livy, Tacitus, Plutarch – you know the names: serious stuff and not a smile among them. I scraped a living for a while as a publisher’s reader, but it was obvious that my suggestions, my proud experience, went unheeded. I can remember arguing for hours with Caesar about that first sentence, which seemed to me to lack impact, to impart an irretrievable dryness, but it was no good, he wouldn’t listen, and Omnia Gallia in tres partes divisi sunt it was. Of course I made mistakes: telling Pliny that those nature notes wouldn’t sell was one, and telling Catullus that his poems wouldn’t get past the censor was another, but I made them in good faith. Meantime, I gave myself a good three hundred years to finish my next – OK my first – major project, a verse drama on the Roman conquest of Britain. I wrote closing lines early in 410, as the wind fanned the flames on Capitol Hill and Alaric’s boys used the contents of the Municipal Library as firelighters. Once again I was a victim of circumstances, once again I was that fatal literary casualty, a man out of time.
Looking back, viewing it all with the hindsight of eternity, you can’t imagine the effect that the sack of Rome had on literature. For a start, it destroyed some promising careers: Scrotus, Alba, Plauditus – I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of them (let’s face it, nobody has ever heard of them) but they were very big in their day. At the same time, in the case of the major reputations it gave posterity an entirely lop-sided view. You might remember Martial for those steely epigrams, but what really sold were the smutty limericks and the poems about his ex-wife. All gone. All gone the same way as Q. Horatius Flaccus’s Tales of the Sensual Life and Marcus Aurelius’s harem memoirs.
Seldom has a profession come so near to extinction. Seldom has a profession stared so transfixedly at the brink and then shakily retreated. For a thousand years or so writers had been going around producing searing analyses of social problems, hymning martial accomplishments and taking money off indulgent patrons, and suddenly all of it – the social problems, the martial accomplishments and especially the indulgent patrons – had ceased to exist. We did what we could. We took off for Egypt, Gaul, Asia Minor, Morocco-anywhere in the Empire where the social order hadn’t broken down and there was still a spare desk. I spent twenty years in a field in what has since become Norfolk with a gang of terrified Anglo-Roman bourgeoisie, waiting for the Saxons to arrive. When they did turn up, when the great clinker boats came nosing into the deep-water creeks, the sense of déjà vu was almost tangible: that primitive, penumbral
murk, those drinking songs around the camp-fire, and mass illiteracy. For one who had been around at the dawn of civilisation, it was all very much like old times. I suppose you’d say, with that usual indulgent nod in the direction of the creative intelligence, that it was a Godsent opportunity, that it was history being made, and to be sure I couldn’t resist keeping a diary of those meagre, intense years, but it was less about Celt and Saxon, rack and ruin, the birds making their nests in the tumbledown churches, and more about lice, scurvy and not having enough to eat. All this was compounded, naturally enough, by a shortage of materials. The ink ran out around 450 – I tried making my own out of dye, but you really need a professional – and the books started disappearing. No one quite knew where – I suspected the locals of eating them – but by the end of the century my travelling library, all those first editions of Seneca and Sallust, was down to a handful. By the dawn of the sixth century I was reading the same bedside book – a copy of Plutarch’s Lives it was then – for ten years at a stretch.
What do I remember of those fugitive, eerie Dark Age days? Not much, except that an Anglo-Saxon cow byre is not the most congenial of literary milieux. (I know Faulkner wrote his first novel lying on a coke heap but then he didn’t have to share it with Snorri the goat-herd, whose idea of a pleasant evening in was to get paralytic on turnip wine and talk about his mother back in Frisia.) For a time I considered alternatives – at one point I nearly lit out for Merovingia where something like a literary scene was supposed to be happening, and there was a time when I seriously thought about becoming a monk in Ireland – but gradually as time passed these drawbacks mattered less. They mattered less because by now I had made an important decision about my career. Naturally, in a trajectory that had already lasted several thousand years. I had made important decisions about my career before. There was the decision to get involved in this whole business in the first place (that was back in the days of Cuneiform, which everybody thought was a dangerous innovation that wouldn’t last); there was the decision, made about the end of the first millenium B.C. that tragedy was pretty much played out as an art-form, and there had been various other minor shifts and adjustments in perspective. But this was something different. It involved – let us be frank about this – re-evaluating my whole status, eyeing up the entire rag-bag of writerly aspirations. It happens to us all, no doubt: you look back at what you’ve written in the past, you sift through the unpublished stuff, argue with yourself over its merits. I spent a year or two doing that, out on the Norfolk flats with the wind sweeping in from Jutland, and it was the most depressing period of my life to date. At its close I took the contents of the goatskin bag which had accompanied me thus far on my travels – everything, the poems, the plays, the letters from Horace and Propertius, and threw them in the river. Then I went back to the byre, found Snorri and got stupendously drunk.