One of his clients was John Lehmann. Lehmann had multifarious interests, lots of pies in the oven. His income must have been quite large. He never made a real success of publishing. He persuaded Periton to take on Henry Cohen. They absolutely hit it off. Henry was exactly the type Periton wanted: a man who didn’t have any interest in making money. Henry always needed to write. He wasn’t having a great deal of success at the time – then Scamp came along. Periton enabled him to get very good publicity. He asked Henry what he would do next. The Hackney book was the big mistake, careers have been destroyed by writing about Hackney. Kiss of death. Henry said something about trying short stories. Periton probably got him the job at MGM, to keep him going. Nobody knows if Henry ever wrote anything else of substance. I don’t know if there was anything under another name. My view is, at the times I ran into him, he was a declining person. He had huge genetic problems with his Jewish orthodox family. He had problems with his inamorata. He was terribly fond of Elizabeth.
He told me to get out of documentaries, to go in for a novel. He said, ‘Go and see Periton, old boy. See Leslie.’ I had money at that time, nothing to do with the world of literature, trust estates – which Periton was incredibly good at. He became my accountant. And from him I would hear quite a lot about Henry’s life as a sort of scholar gypsy. We would have lunch, Periton and I, once a year. He said Henry had this woman to support him. She was finding it difficult, Henry wouldn’t take anything from her – but, at the same time, he wouldn’t do anything. They seemed to be at an impasse.
Every year I’d say to Periton, ‘How’s Henry?’
Then one day, it was probably mid 1960s, Leslie said, ‘Henry’s not so good. In fact, he’s dead.’ But before we come to that I must tell you about another weirdo who entered the picture. My most intimate friend from the Winchester and Oxford years. He was rather like that fellow in Brideshead, the Charles Ryder thing. Granville Byrd was a phenomenon, an obsessive figure in my life.
It started at prep school and it carried on right through public school and university, Granville was always the best of the rest, the head of the list who didn’t get the scholarship. In Oxford, he began to develop severe problems. He had a very unhappy war in South Africa. He added drugs to alcohol. He got a job in Ealing Studios, when I was still in films. He was good at it. In the film industry there are lots of adventuresses about, very attractive women. One of the problems with Wykehamists is that they are inept with ladies. They are desirous, lustful as a raft of monkeys, but have no idea how to gratify that desire. This can lead to misunderstandings.
When Granville, who was getting into very sticky water, inherited, never having been given a sou by his mother, he started a publishing house. If they were strapped for cash, they would advertise for a new director – who needed no knowledge of publishing, but who should have five or ten thousand pounds to invest.
I began my novel. It was based partly on my war background, partly on my country family. Granville had a lot of Welsh in him. His great‐grandmother came from America, the time of the War of Independence. The family sided with the British. They went over the Alleghenies and were captured by Red Indians. The whole lot were slaughtered, apart from her, the great‐grandmother. She joined the tribe, eventually she married the chief.
The whites sent a punitive expedition to liberate the girl. A young officer, Lieutenant Byrd, was put in charge. He killed all the Indians and liberated her. Which she was extremely displeased about. Byrd took a fancy to this girl and married her. She came back to Wales with him.
I said to Granville, ‘This is quite a story.’ He had a pair of moccasins from the old lady, which he kept in a box. He had pictures of his ancestors, leaning on long guns. They owned most of Chicago at the time.
I said, ‘This is a bloody good idea for a book.’ Granville said, ‘I need a research operator.’ On one of my trips to Periton, I said, ‘Do you know anything about Henry?’ He said, ‘He’s not doing much.’ I said, ‘Would he like to do a bit of research?’ Leslie said, ‘I’ll talk to him.’
Henry said, ‘Oh, you’re up to your old tricks. Can’t you understand? I don’t want to do anything.’ I said, ‘Can you afford that?’ And he said, ‘I can’t, but Elizabeth can.’ I said, ‘I’ve got a friend called Granville Byrd. He needs somebody to do research.’ Henry said, ‘Will I be paid?’ I said, ‘Of course you’ll be paid.’
So he did go round, he worked with Granville for about six months. He kept ringing up. ‘I can’t stand it with this friend of yours. He’s completely mad. He’s trying to sell some spurs to me, a family heirloom. What does any of this stuff matter? A ridiculous man.’
Henry wasn’t interested in families and family histories. That was what he was trying to get away from, Hackney orthodoxy. He said, ‘Your friend thinks we’ve got a good novel. He’s trying to get me to collaborate on it.’ I said, ‘Isn’t that a good idea?’ Henry said, ‘Not at all.’
The news I was getting of Henry was all through Leslie Periton. One day Periton said, ‘It’s all up.’ I said, ‘What’s happened to Henry?’ He said, ‘It’s a great tragedy.’ I can’t remember the details, aorta, aneurism. I should think around ’65. Henry would be about the age I was then, forty‐five.
Granville Byrd died in ’77. In extraordinary circumstances. He’d become obsessed by conspiracy theories. It was the time of Watergate. Granville was fanatically on Nixon’s side. His contacts led him to Nixon’s doctor. Nixon was alleged to be ill at the time, he couldn’t answer the charges brought against him. He wasn’t fit to be impeached. Granville got hold of Nixon’s doctor and collected all the real stories on tape. His solicitor, when he died, wanted to pass them on to me.
Granville had what you might call a ‘superior daily’ who looked after him. She went round there at about half‐past nine in the morning. She rang me: ‘We’ve had a terrible disaster.’
I went straight round, down into the basement in Thurloe Square. Grey flagstones. Granville was completely naked. He had fallen on his face into the basement. All the services in his flat had been turned off, water, gas, electricity.
I rang the police. They said, ‘Are there any signs of foul play?’ I said, ‘That’s for you to determine.’ They said, ‘Well, actually, we’re working to rule at the moment. We’ve got a pay claim in. Unless you establish foul play, or attempted suicide, we won’t bother. Ring the hospital.’
Granville was unconscious for five weeks, then he died. He’d broken all his ribs.
I’ve no idea whether the Red Indian novel Henry was researching was ever finished. I do know that all Granville’s papers were taken over by his solicitor. Granville said, ‘The contents of my papers must never be divulged – but the papers must never be destroyed.’ The sort of instruction that solicitors absolutely hate.
We had a memorial service. The solicitor came sidling over to me: ‘Do you want the tapes? You know Granville was tapping phones, recording everything: Nixon’s doctor, Watergate, China, Vietnam. I don’t want these things in the office.’
There were a number of significant moments when our paths crossed, Henry and I. We were birds of a feather. We emerged from unusual backgrounds where assumptions were made about us, the kind of people we should aim to become, the paths we would pursue, the people we would marry. If we had followed those paths, we would have had no problems at all.
I had no particular reason to listen to gossip about what Henry was doing – but I have, as accumulated memories work their way to the surface, a pretty good notion that he and his lady did get married. They had a child. I think so. It could be a whole new chapter in Henry’s story.
Granville was rather the same. Granville Byrd, Henry Cohen and myself: there wasn’t any reason why any of us should have lived the kind of life we did. My father thought all this was rather amusing. He was particularly amused by my decision to go into the artillery instead of the Guards. I said to him, ‘What do you think about it?’ And he said, ‘All I can tell you is that your mothe
r’s relatives went into the Coldstream Guards. They are all now either dead or mutilated.’ I went into the artillery and I’m still here to tell the tale.
Douglas passed me his yellowed copy of Scamp, pointing out Henry Cohen’s inscription. The Minton dustwrapper was gone, removed, as was the fashion in those days: no bald man stalking cobbled streets, hand in pocket, bundle of papers crooked under his arm. The box of Lyne’s unsorted tapes took up most of the table. We replenished our mugs of tea.
I faced days of work transcribing the interview. I would need to cut much of it, while trying to preserve the essence of Lyne’s discursive style; the way one story always folded into another. If I had closed one quest, I’d opened plenty more. Could we find the Burroughs tape? The Hackney short stories? The Red Indian novel, which sounded like an anticipation of John Ford’s The Searchers?
Douglas led me upstairs, past dark family portraits, paintings by Hazel Guggenheim and others from the bohemian years. He had an attic room with a set of tables, along which a mappa mundi had been spread: a chart of Lyne’s life, his contacts, influences, experiences. It was a script, a history, a mystic instrument from which to conjure the dead. He showed me how Henry Cohen aligned with William Burroughs, how Father Ignatius ( Joseph Leycester Lyne) could be referenced with Graham Cutts and Alfred Hitchcock. Where possible, Douglas invited the figures in this enormous scroll to sign their entries and to make a short comment.
Now I was being added, in my role as author of an obscure novel of the Welsh borders, Landor’s Tower, to take up a red pen and join the company. Douglas looped a secondary path to William Burroughs, whom I visited in Lawrence, Kansas. As I left, I saw him recalibrating the lines, predicting future walks. And I remembered Burroughs’s left hand as it reached out for the first drink of the evening: the joint of his little finger was missing. He had taken it off, years before, with poultry shears.
‘Child Roland to the dark tower came.’ Shakespeare. Was it Lear? ‘His word was still, – Fie, foh, and fum.’ Edgar: Act III, Scene IV. Roland Camberton’s alter ego, the bright Jewish boy David Hirsch in Rain on the Pavements, would have known his Lear, mugged it up for the Balliol interview. He might have a passing acquaintance with Robert Browning and that questing poem in which Roland negotiates the landscape of nightmare to arrive at the point where a more traditional narrative would begin.
Returning from Douglas Lyne’s memento‐strewn tower, I thought the job was done. The sorcerer left me with enough of the story to put me off the scent. But two questions nagged. The first I could resolve with some degree of conviction. The name, Roland Camberton, where did it come from? Schoolboy scholarship provided the Roland part: Shakespeare, Browning or medieval French romance. And Camberton? The pseudonym was resolutely Aryan. Henry Cohen cast himself as a matinée idol rescued from a forgotten Hollywood programmer witnessed at the Clarence Cinema in Lower Clapton. Ronald Colman, Madeleine Carroll and Roland Camberton in The Prisoner of Zenda: such was the fantasy of a bookish adolescent.
It was the second question that really troubled me, the other kind of child, the one Lyne alluded to in such an off‐hand way. ‘They had a child. I think so. It could be a whole new chapter in Henry’s story.’ There was no way of forgetting this phantom. If there was a living child, wasn’t it my duty to find him or her?
From time to time, I tried to interest publishers in bringing Camberton back into print. I was an admirer of the series of London Books Classics being put out by John King and his partners. In considering Rain on the Pavements they made the usual attempts to find the person who held the copyright and they came up with a name: Claire Camberton. I was given Claire’s details, a meeting was arranged.
A woman with bright eyes, an animate but tentative presence, arrived on my doorstep, dragging a large red case on wheels. She was, so she told me, no stranger to Hackney. She brought reams of documentation, photocopies of letters, snapshots, books: the fruits of twenty years’ research. She was astonished to meet another Camberton enthusiast and we were instantly exchanging snippets of information, trying to fit the jigsaw together. Claire was indeed the daughter of Henry Cohen, but not the child of the late marriage. Her story was unexpected and poignant.
‘I was born in December 1954. My mother’s name was Lilian Joyce Brown. She was from Andover in Hampshire. She lived in London during the war, working as a silver‐service waitress at the Savoy. She was three years younger than my father. She died twenty years ago at the age of sixty‐four. She was a bit reclusive towards the end of her life and fairly secretive too.’
Lilian Brown met Henry Cohen when she attended one of the evening classes he gave, in short‐story writing, at the City Literary Institute in Covent Garden. Lilian, her daughter recalls, was a pretty woman frustrated by her lack of formal education. She had a sharp eye for antiques and secondhand books and she haunted street markets. Very soon an affair was under way: ‘Mum liked Jewish men, it was a bit rebellious at the time. My father pursued her and chatted her up. Mum told me, in her rather prim way, that he was very virile.’
They came to an arrangement: Lilian Brown would carry Henry Cohen’s child and, after giving birth, hand her over. Cohen’s mistress of the moment, a Jewish woman, couldn’t have children. Claire’s mother moved to London, Thornton Street on the Stockwell–Brixton border, and she received an allowance of £26 a month from Cohen’s solicitors. She changed her name by deed poll to Camberton. Life in those ground‐floor flats, as Claire remembers it, consisted of ‘plastic knives and forks and making do’. The pseudonym had a simple explanation. ‘My father made the name up by combining Camberwell and Brixton. He hated them both. He hated coming south of the river. He was very proud of the fact that he lived in Chelsea.’
Lilian decided to keep the baby. A terrible scene ensued, the last time the infant Claire saw her father. ‘It was all Hollywood then. Everything was a story, a romance. When mum decided to call herself Camberton, my father slid away. He ended the association.’ The estranged couple met on Clapham Common in 1956. ‘My father produced a huge stack of legal papers and presented them to my mother. Isn’t that dramatic? I was in the pram. That was their final parting, the end of the relationship. There was no further point of contact.’ It was like a replay of an image from Graham Greene’s Clapham Common novel of secrets and betrayal, The End of the Affair.
As Claire pointed out, the character Margaret in Scamp seems to be a guilty memory of her father’s relationship with Lilian Brown; even though Scamp was published before her parents met. ‘It’s a melodramatic plot line,’ Claire said. ‘She’s three months pregnant and she kills herself. The whole theme is right there: a woman who is not of his class, not in his league, and having a child. That’s probably why he didn’t want my mother to read it.’
Scamp presents an anti‐hero, Ivan Ginsberg, who courts failure, relishes obscurity, and has an eye for a waitress. ‘Ginsberg was very much aware of her desirable presence by his side; so delightful were her little moues and winks that he . . . felt like . . . whispering into her ear an invitation.’ And there was always another woman in reserve. ‘Until Lolita became his mistress, Ginsberg was delighted with the novelty of this courtship. But afterwards there was nothing to sustain their relations except recrudescent desire . . . Ginsberg was also still ashamed of Lolita’s background, which, though it might supply colour for an adventure, an anecdote, made a long‐term affair impossible. At the same time he was ashamed of being ashamed . . .’
Among Claire’s papers was a photocopy of ‘Truant Muse’, an article by June Rose published in The Jewish Chronicle in 1965, just before Camberton died. Rose wanted to discover why certain writers ‘whose names were once well known . . . sped into obscurity’. Henry Cohen, she decided, was ‘the kind of individual who finds it pleasant to vegetate’. He retreated to a bungalow beside the sea. ‘London history is his special subject and he writes with erudition and clarity in small reviews.’ The article is accompanied by a photograph of a balding, melancholy man:
like a cinema organist after the coming of sound. Here, without question, is the figure drawn by John Minton for the cover of Scamp. That image is taken from life. A stalking solitary. A crow in the rain.
And there is one more surprise: a ‘major work’, never published, Tango. The journal of a hitch‐hiking odyssey around Britain, an English On the Road. ‘The writing is at times Orwellian,’ Rose enthuses. Camberton laid out his plans in a letter to The Jewish Chronicle. ‘My intention is to make two journeys: one, partly on foot, through Europe . . . and the second to North America.’ Tango was rejected by his publisher and has not resurfaced.
‘Roland Camberton is essentially an isolated figure,’ Rose concludes. ‘A man in a mackintosh, dignified, anonymous, alone. He is isolated from other writers, from the Jewish community . . . and his essential anonymity implies almost an element of choice.’
A firm of Wimbledon solicitors informed Claire’s mother that Henry Cohen had changed his name a second time, shortly before his marriage. The new name was never to be revealed. The allowance would stop. The site of the grave would remain a secret.
I had been chasing the wrong story. Dying at the age of forty‐four, Roland Camberton left behind books that are worth searching out, as well as the manuscript of a journey on foot across Europe. I had missed vital clues in Rain on the Pavements, material about random and reckless expeditions around England; the begging of water in Surrey, hitched rides that deposited him in Bedford instead of Cambridge. ‘The bleak, unlit, and half‐made roads of an industrial estate.’ Slough. ‘Long, low factory sheds . . . private railway lines . . . an immense hangar‐like structure.’ I totally failed to grasp Hirsch’s drift out to the edge‐lands in search of a more inspiring poetic of entropy. At the age when Henry Cohen was buried, I had scarcely begun: a Jewish bookseller in Uppingham was considering taking a punt on my first eccentric novel. I had lived in Hackney for twenty years without becoming part of its dream or its meaning. And I never succeeded in getting away. Where did Cohen keep his seaside bungalow?
Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire Page 50