The Pretender

by David Belbin

  ‘Can you put it on the market anyway?’

  I didn’t want to be encumbered with possessions I would have to deal with later. In the next couple of weeks, as the house went on the market, I sold most of the furniture but for a few basics, then gave Mum’s clothes and other stuff I couldn’t sell to charity.The things I wanted to keep — a lot of books, two paintings, a few letters and all of the photos — went into boxes in the attic. I would have them sent on to me when the house was sold.

  My first term at university did not start well. Despite having more money than the average student, I could find nowhere to stay. After a week in the YMCA, a room came up at a house in Tottenham. I was to share with five second year students, none of whom were doing English or French.

  The house was off Philip Lane, with its old-fashioned shops that reminded me of Leam. I was a stone’s throw from Broadwater Farm estate, famous for riots a few years before. Unemployment was bad in Leam, but here, at the end of the Thatcher years, seven out of ten adults were unemployed.

  At first, I kept my distance from my housemates. I was sure, now I was finally in London that I was bound to meet the literary like minds — male or female — who had been denied me when I was living in Leam. Yet making friends wasn’t any easier in London than it had been in Leam. There was a Freshers’ week with endless clubs on offer, but none appealed to me. I looked in vain for a society that went to plays or a writing group. University College had no literary magazine. There was a student newspaper, and I offered my services as a reviewer, but the students on the stand said nobody read book reviews and asked if I’d be willing to report rugby games instead.

  Other people seemed to get to know each other. They paired off. I went to a Freshers’ disco, but it was a meat market. You couldn’t hear yourself speak, never mind the person you were trying to talk to, and I was useless at dancing. Spots erupted across my face. I did write to Francine, at her friend’s address. I lied, telling her that everything was fine, London was wonderful, much better than Paris, full of fascinating people. And there were interesting people around. I glimpsed them all the time, people who’d read books, people who I’d have liked to get to know, but I had no idea how to get in with them. For the first time in my life, I was meeting contemporaries who seemed cleverer than me. If I ventured an opinion at odds with theirs, they’d put me right, citing chapter and verse if they were being polite, taking the piss if they weren’t.

  The ones who impressed me most were an exaggerated, more educated version of the clique members who excluded me at school. They had all been to public schools, some of which had famous names. I sensed that there was a pecking order even amongst them. There were unwritten tests I’d have had to pass before they considered admitting me to the lowest rung of their ladder. I was far too thin-skinned and lacking in confidence to apply for admittance.

  While I was cripplingly self conscious, I have to acknowledge some snobbishness too. Looking back, there were offers of friendship that I spurned, though I was barely conscious of doing so at the time. I was quick to pigeonhole some students as boring, not worth cultivating, making the same judgments against them as others used to exclude me. There were opportunities I missed because I lacked the confidence, the common touch, that my contemporaries seemed to take for granted.

  Inevitably I started spending my spare time with the people in my house. There were five blokes and one girl, Zoe, who had already paired off with Steve, a Psychology student.The house had no communal rooms, but, since Steve slept in Zoe’s bedroom every night, his room became a kind of living room, especially as he had a telly, video and hi-fi. At first we went to the pub a lot, or the cinema, but these cost money, so, by November, we usually ended up in Steve’s room.

  We all chipped in for beer. As term went on, I chipped in more, because I was the only one with much cash. Steve and Zoe supplied the dope. In Leam, I’d avoided the druggies. Now I became an enthusiastic convert. Smoking hash, I learnt, was a good way of avoiding conversation. None of us had much to say to each other. Steve and Zoe hardly communicated at all. I had least to say, because I had nothing in common with the people I was living with.

  I got out of my tree most nights. I made up for the eighteen years I’d spent avoiding television by watching everything, from game shows to soap operas, programmes of which the most that could be said was ‘they passed the time’. That was all my time was for, in those days, passing. At the weekend, I liked to drink, only happy when the booze and dope got me to the stage of intoxication where the room began to whirl. If I closed my eyes, I seemed to be in a vortex, dragging me backwards at a hundred miles an hour. I was lost.

  Thirteen

  My money was going fast. As Mr Darkland had predicted, nobody was interested in buying the house in Leam. Worse, I’d expected to love my course, but hated it. This wasn’t because I found it difficult. Old English bored me. Malory’s Morte D’Arthur left me cold. By the end of the year we’d only be on to Milton. I’d done the first two books of Paradise Lost for A level and found it heavy going. I wanted to study twentieth century literature, but there was precious little of it on the syllabus. We wouldn’t get to Dickens until the second term of the final year. There were no Americans, unless you counted Eliot, so Hemingway didn’t feature.

  I was soon behind in my work. I’d made only passing acquaintanceships with other people doing Eng Lit. Few of them seemed interested in reading or writing. Studying stories and poems was an excuse to be in London, not a subject for casual discussion. In the search for allies, I went to the Uni Film club, where I once or twice tried to strike up conversations. I enjoyed going to movies, but didn’t know how to talk about them. I knew the titles and plots, not the names of directors or how a particular film fitted in with the rest of their work. Reading novels, I’d learnt to distance myself, to recognise the author’s techniques and tricks while, with another part of myself, if the book was good, believing in the story utterly. Films, however, were full of real people. I believed unconditionally in the characters they were playing and tried to identify with them, no matter how unconvincing or inconsistent their behaviour.

  I was equally taken in by most people I met. They all seemed so confident, so at home in the world. I assumed they had a fully formed take on life, and I, who hadn’t, was the freak. In the Tottenham house, I was the only one who had been to a grammar school.The others went to comps. They teased me if I used erudite words. They mocked culture. Yet I was sure they knew more about life than I did.

  In February, I wrote to Mr Darkland, asking him to rent the house if he couldn’t sell it. He wrote back saying that this might prove even more difficult in the current climate, but he’d try. I spent less time with the other people in the house. I was short of money for booze and preferred getting stoned on my own, sunk into a book rather than TV.

  I read constantly. Rather than be bored silly by the books on the syllabus — who ever learnt anything by reading a book they didn’t want to read? — I immersed myself in writing from the sixties, particularly my mother’s favourite, James Sherwin.

  In March, I got a warning letter from my tutor about missing coursework. He wanted me to go in and discuss it with him. Rather than face this embarrassment, I cut out dope and did the work. As with most things, once I got started, it wasn’t as difficult as I’d feared. But my marks were mediocre, barely 2:1 level. I’d always been a high flyer. Now I was one of the crowd. There was a new problem. Once my money ran low, I became less popular in the house. I had been subsidising the others to some extent. When I stopped rolling endless joints, they had even less reason to be around me. They were home less anyhow. By the middle of the Spring term, all had some kind of job — bar me. I needed one too, but I didn’t want to work in a pub or pizza place. There must be jobs that were more interesting, jobs that might lead on to something when I graduated. It might be years before I could earn my living as a writer.

  I looked on the Students’ Union notice board, toying with medical experi
ments or becoming a sperm donor. On my third visit, I saw a new ad, neatly typed on the headed paper of the Little Review, Soho. ‘Sales Rep Wanted’.

  I’d heard of the Little Review. It was a literary magazine in English that originated in Paris. Hemingway and the poet, Ezra Pound, had their early work published in it. I was surprised to find that it was still going. I waited until the corridor was empty, then took down the ad, so nobody else would see it. Two minutes later, while my nerve held, I phoned the number at the bottom for an interview.

  To my surprise, I got through to the editor himself. Anthony Bracken’s voice was plummy and slightly camp. He pronounced himself ‘delighted’ that I wanted to sell the LR on campus.

  ‘Come in and see me, old boy,’ he said. ‘You know where to find us.’

  I had never been called ‘old boy’ before and already suspected there was no ‘us’. Otherwise, why would Bracken pick up the phone himself? But I went along to Soho the next day at the arranged time, hopeful of finding the Literary London I had been dreaming of since secondary school.

  Fourteen

  The Little Review’s offices were on a Soho side street that connected the Charing Cross Road with Chinatown. The magazine shared its address with a porn shop. You didn’t have to go through the one to get into the other but I wasn’t aware of this on my first visit, so ventured shyly inside the Exotic Emporium. I passed stand after stand of glossy magazines in heavy plastic bags. I was the only customer. The bloke who came out of the back had a dyed moustache and a greedy grin.

  ‘You are over twenty-one, aren’t you, son?’

  ‘No,’ I said, and he looked confused. ‘I’m looking for the Little Review,’ I went on, and his expression cleared.

  ‘Out of the shop, turn right. There’s an alley two doors down. Come back on yourself and you’ll see a door with an entry phone. If there’s anybody there, they’ll buzz you in. If there isn’t, don’t come to me.’

  I found the door easily enough, in a dank, urinous recess. I pressed the entry buzzer and there was a long wait. I was about to press the buzzer again when the speaker spluttered into life. A crackly but familiar voice said ‘all right, all right, in you come’. The door rattled open and I climbed an unlit, narrow stairwell leading to a shabby door.

  ‘It’s open.’

  Anthony Bracken was in his sixties, halfway to being bald, and wore a tweed sports jacket that reeked of tobacco — Old Holborn rolling tobacco, I soon discovered.

  ‘Excuse the mess,’ were the first words he said to me in person.

  I stared at each corner of the large room, which was the size of the shop below, but much fuller. There were pile upon pile of copies of the Little Review. The oldest copies were A5 pamphlets with swirling green and grey designs on the cover. Others had arty photographs or cartoons and were of varying sizes, stacked in no discernible order. There was a big old desk, which must once have been quite grand. Its fancy top was a foot deep in papers, except for the cleared space that held a whisky glass and a bottle of Famous Grouse. On each side of the long desk was a tea chest.

  ‘Would you like the full tour?’ Bracken said, with a trace of sarcasm.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t sure what to expect.’

  ‘This was a smart office once. I had two secretaries in the sixties,’ Bracken told me, ‘Magazine sales paid for one of them, and the other was independently rich, so I didn’t need to pay her at all. But times are tight, young man. I can’t afford to pay you anything.’

  I was taken aback. ‘I thought you wanted someone to sell the magazine door to door in halls of residence.’

  ‘That’s right. You keep half the cover price. Interested?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good. You can take a pile away with you. Now, help me sort out this lot.’

  And so began my irregular employment at the Little Review.

  On that first day I helped to tidy the office while the editor went through the tea chest containing what he called ‘the slush pile’. The LR, he boasted as he skimmed the contents of the brown paper envelopes, was renowned for the speed with which it turned around manuscripts — generally within a week, always within a month. Many other magazines, Anthony told me (somewhere during this conversation he became Anthony, and, by the time I was leaving, Tony) took six months to a year. Because he made a quick decision, people often sent him their best stuff first.

  ‘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 tha
n 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.