The Pretender

by David Belbin

  Twenty-eight

  The LR’s mail basket was overflowing. Many letters were postmarked the 27th, suggesting that the sender had used the holiday to prepare a submission for the Little Review. Amidst the pile of manuscripts submitted were two Christmas cards for me. One was from Francine, with an affectionate message. The other was postmarked New York, where I knew only two people. Hope to see you in the New Year, it said, with no mention of the money from the Hemingway manuscripts. The card was signed Helen and Paul Mercer.

  I was forging again, but in a purer way. I was writing for my own satisfaction, adopting the style of James Sherwin because, as yet, I had no style of my own. Few authors,Tony reckoned, found their own voice before thirty.The same went for their subject matter. I could find nothing of my own to write about, so borrowed Sherwin’s subject, as well as his style. I was simulating the Sherwin novel he’d never published, the one he was reading extracts from when my mother saw him read on a university tour in the early seventies. A Commune was the working title.

  James Sherwin was like JD Salinger, Harper Lee and Ralph Ellison, all of whom had had huge early success then lapsed into silence. Each writer’s first novel had continued to sell, so they had no need to keep publishing new books to make a living. Rather than dilute his or her reputation, the author stopped publishing. What I wanted to know was this: did Sherwin stop writing, too? Rumour had it that Salinger and Ellison still wrote every day. Salinger was supposed to keep his manuscripts in a safe the size of a room. Ellison was said to be working on his second novel, and — decades ago — had published chapters from the work-in-progress. When each died, this hidden writing was likely to be published quickly. Sherwin was younger than those two and had been less popular. But he was the most successful recluse. He lived cheaply on a remote Greek island with an irregular ferry service and a much younger American wife. He didn’t want to be disturbed and I wouldn’t disturb him, no matter how strong my obsession.

  As my Sherwin voice grew more convincing, there was a temptation to test it on somebody. But it was a temptation I resisted. James Sherwin’s 1960’s stories (including the two in the LR) had all been collected. There were so few of them, he was unlikely to have forgotten one.There was no way I could convincingly discover a short story that Sherwin was meant to have written thirty years before. Anyway, if the Dahl story came out, I couldn’t get away with the we found it in the archives line again. My Sherwin stuff was an exercise, much as I’d intended the Hemingway forgeries to be. It was destined for the bottom drawer.

  On January 4th, I collected the mail from the large wire basket at the bottom of the mail chute. Amidst the brown A5 envelopes was a postcard from Tunisia, announcing that Tony was having such a good time he had extended his holiday (no word of his return date), a review copy of a small press poetry book (it had to be small press because no proper publisher would be back at work for another week yet) and a blue, airmail envelope, postmarked Greece.

  I put the latter in Tony’s personal pile and worked my way through the day’s submissions. Rejecting the lot took the best part of an hour. I wondered how the would-be contributors would feel if they knew that their work had been tossed aside after a cursory glance from a nineteen year old university dropout. Then I picked up the blue envelope again. Who would be writing to Tony from Greece? It wasn’t a contribution. I could tell from the weight of the envelope that it held only one sheet of paper. There was no necessity to open it.

  James Sherwin lived in Greece. And Tony had told me to acknowledge any contributions we received for the five hundredth issue.This letter might be a contribution, I told myself, a short poem on a single sheet of paper. Before I could think of an objection to this argument, I opened the envelope. Inside was a word processed letter.

  Karenos, December 14th, 1990

  Dear Tony,

  Thanks for your letter and the book. Five hundred! You have my heartiest congratulations. Do send me a copy of the anniversary issue. It’s been a long while, hasn’t it? This is the worst time of year on the island, cold, windy, nearly deserted, almost makes me yearn for London. I think I wrote to tell you that I married. Sonia bought me this computer in the hope that it would get me writing again, but all I seem to write on it are replies to prissy American doctoral students telling them to fuck off. Most days though, I sit down at the damned machine, try.

  Which is my way of saying that I haven’t anything to offer you just now, but if something crops up, I’ll send it your way. I enjoyed the poems, particularly ‘His Trojan Ass’. Good to know that somebody’s as lusty as ever.

  warm regards,

  James

  The letter surprised me. For a start, I hadn’t known Sherwin and Tony were pally.That somebody of Sherwin’s stature liked Tony’s poems made me want to read them myself. I’d glanced at them, but hadn’t been to one of Tony’s (now very occasional) readings. From his letter, Sherwin — whom I thought of as an almost mythical, godlike figure — appeared very human, a man with a simple case of writer’s block that had lasted twenty years.

  I felt guilty about reading the letter. It was intended for Tony, not for me. But I also felt excited, not by the content, but by the medium. I could tell at a glance that James Sherwin owned exactly the same computer and printer as I did: an Amstrad 8256 with a bog standard dot matrix printer. Nobody could possibly distinguish one machine’s printout from the other. A forger’s delight. But the excitement soon passed, for the coincidence had no consequences. There was nothing I could do to profit from this discovery, nothing at all.

  As the days rolled by, more contributions came in for the five hundredth issue. The Arts Board had yet to inform us about the grant, but they could hardly withdraw it before the anniversary issue. And there was no word from Tony.

  Then, one day in the middle of the month, he was back. Hearing movement in the office below me, I hurried downstairs, shivering, wearing only my underpants. It was eight, very early for Tony. He hobbled up the stairs, tanned but tired. It was the first time I’d seen him use a walking stick. He thanked me for holding the fort.

  ‘That attack shook me badly. I didn’t know how much until I got away. But I’ve been gone far too long. You must tell me everything.’

  I told him as much as I thought he could take in, finishing with the letter from Sherwin, which he examined almost lovingly.

  ‘I haven’t heard from James in years.’

  ‘You used to be friends?’

  Tony nodded his head, not looking at me. Were they more than friends? But no, Sherwin couldn’t be gay. He had recently married.

  ‘I’ll take this pile to read at home,’ Tony told me. ‘I’m going to put together a contents list for the five hundredth issue to show to the Arts Board. That and the sales increase should guarantee our grant for the next couple of years.’

  ‘I hope so,’ I said, then added. ‘Oh, I put a story by Tim Cooper in the pile. I thought you might want at least one new writer in the anniversary issue.’

  ‘Good idea,’ Tony said, adding, after a while, ‘you haven’t written anything you want me to look at, have you?’

  ‘I’m not ready yet,’ I told him.

  ‘Not necessarily for publication,’ Tony said, in his mildest voice. ‘But it can help to have an audience, especially when you’re starting out. You can leapfrog some of the more obvious pitfalls, not get into bad habits, that kind of thing.’

  ‘I see,’ I said, noncommittally.

  ‘I really would like to help,’ Tony told me, kindly. ‘You’ve helped me so much.’

  ‘I am writing,’ I explained, awkwardly. ‘Only, most of it sounds like whatever writer I’ve just been reading.’

  ‘Everybody starts with imitation,’ Tony told me. ‘It’s inevitable. I started out trying to sound exactly like Auden. Early Auden. These days, I keep reminding myself of late Auden, though no-one else seems to notice. It’s OK. It’s not something to worry about, believe me.’

  If only he knew. ‘I’d like a copy of
one of your books,’ I told Tony. ‘the one with the poem that Sherwin mentions, maybe.’

  ‘Sure,’ Tony said. ‘I’ll bring one in tomorrow. And thanks again for all your help, Mark. You’ve been a brick.’

  I left to attend one of the lectures I’d skipped the previous year. The lecturer was even duller than I remembered. As I was leaving, a pretty student who was sitting on the same row as me said ‘I’ve not seen you before. Are you in our year?’ She was chatting me up, not challenging me. Still I didn’t know how to react. I mumbled something and hurried away, wondering why I was so useless with women. I didn’t go to any more lectures after that.

  Twenty-nine

  The five hundredth issue was coming together. The artist Francis Bacon, an old chum of Tony’s, had agreed to contribute an illustration for the cover. Tony returned from the Colony Club cock-a-hoop with this news. His magnanimity fuelled by champagne, he attributed his good fortune to me.

  ‘Since you’ve been on board, Mark, things have really turned around.’

  ‘When are you going to publish it?’ I asked, unmoved.The issue was already late. Tony had decided that it would be a double number, incorporating issue 501, allowing him to charge a full fiver for a copy.

  ‘As soon as the Arts Board cheque arrives and I can pay the printer’s bill. I have a meeting with them next week.’

  ‘And is the Dahl story going in?’ Since his return I’d been avoiding asking him about my forgery. I didn’t want to cast suspicion on the story or jinx it in any way.

  ‘Ah,’ he replied, instantly sobering up. ‘Now that’s a little complicated.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because Dahl’s dead. The thing is, had I accepted the story before his death, that would have been fine. But I rejected it and evidently held onto it for the best part of forty years. I have no right to publish. The question is, do I approach his estate and ask them whether I can use it? In which case, they have every right to say ‘no, hand it over’. Or do I publish and be damned, which could get me into trouble?’

  None of this had occurred to me. ‘Do you think anyone would suppress the story because of its content?’ I asked Tony.

  ‘Nah. The sex is at a remove, after all. But a lawyer might argue that Dahl disposed of the story because it wasn’t good enough.’

  I took a deep breath. ‘Do you think it’s good enough?’

  ‘I do,’ Tony said. ‘But it’s atypical. What did you think of it?’

  I hadn’t prepared an answer to that question. I was proud of my work, yet worried that Tony was testing me. He might suspect.

  ‘I’m not a big Dahl fan,’ I said. ‘But I liked it.’

  ‘Would you publish it in our five hundredth issue?’ Tony asked, with one eyebrow raised.

  I didn’t answer this directly. Instead, I furrowed my brow in thought, then came up with an answer to the question that was most on my mind: how to pass off my forgery convincingly.

  ‘What if you say that Dahl didn’t want the story publishing until after he was dead? You accepted it, but then he changed his mind.’

  ‘A little far fetched,’ Tony told me, then began to think about it. ‘Surely I’d have kept the correspondence?’

  ‘All sorts of things get lost,’ I told him. ‘And Dahl was a very minor writer then. You’d forgotten all about the story until you read about his death, and then you sent your assistant burrowing in the archives...’

  Tony laughed. ‘It might work. I never realised you were such an accomplished liar, Mark. I’ll think about it. Here.’ He held out a slim volume. ‘The book you asked for. I hope you enjoy it, but don’t tell me if you don’t.’

  It was Purposes of Regimentation, Tony’s latest Carcanet collection. Inside it he’d written For Mark, without whom I cannot do without, which I found a little ambiguous, though I know he meant it in an affectionate way. I smiled gratefully, then returned to my room, where I worked on the Sherwin story.

  Later, at night, I looked at the poems. Some I understood, some I didn’t. Whether this was a failure on my part or because they were deliberately obscure, I can’t say.Tony wasn’t an ‘out’ gay poet, like Thom Gunn, but, if you knew him it was hard not to read a majority of the poems as being about gay sex. They were, in turn, whimsical, erotic and vaguely disappointed. Leaving aside two affecting elegies for friends who had died of AIDS, the poems did little for me. I kept the book upstairs, but, as Tony had suggested, never mentioned it to him again.

  This was a lonely time. Tony spent no more than an hour or two in the office each day. Tim was in Leam. We wrote to each other, but he and Magneta hadn’t had the phone reconnected. I could make free phone calls from the office, but there was nobody to have a conversation with. I developed ways of filling the hours. Thanks to a letter of accreditation from Tony, I had a reader’s ticket for the British Library. At first I felt like an impostor amongst the academics and obsessives who inhabited the grand building. Yet, as I tracked down every published article about James Sherwin, my own minor obsession, I began to feel like one of them.

  I found the early poems and a letter he’d had published in The Times. There were two uncollected stories in long disappeared magazines from the early 60s. I got a clutch of interviews and countless articles about his work. There were even a number of whatever happened to? and the mystery of type pieces, though these appeared to have dried up since the mid 80s.

  I read and I wrote and I lived on porridge, pasta and sandwiches. I was poor. The dole was pathetic. I could have pulled some kind of scam with housing benefit, perhaps, given that I wasn’t paying rent, but I was getting a little rent (which I didn’t declare) from Tim and Magneta and that kept me afloat. A prostitute I was on nodding terms with offered me a job putting her cards in telephone boxes. I refused, then regretted my nervous reaction for days. The job would have been good for material.

  The nights were long. It was too noisy to get to sleep until late and too cold to walk the streets of Soho, ‘researching’ material for my novel about London life. I watched my mother’s old portable TV, though the reception was bad. I became addicted to American cop shows and Coronation Street. I let my hair grow long because I couldn’t afford a haircut. All of my clothes were beginning to look shabby. I hadn’t bought new ones since Mum’s death. I talked to myself a lot. I was, without realising it, rapidly sinking.

  As was the magazine. The next Arts Board meeting was cancelled, our grant further delayed. There then followed a long silence. The absent Tony kept getting phone calls from the small printers he’d been using since 1972.

  ‘He owes us nearly four thousand. That’s a month’s payroll.’

  The Little Review had been run on a shoe string for years. Nominally, it paid people, but most contributors waived payment. Tony, assuming that his annual grant would be renewed, had been juggling debtors to keep the cash flow going. Doubtless he’d done this a hundred times before. In the early days, he once told me proudly, ‘There were no grants, and I made a small profit, out of which I paid myself. In those days, you see, people had a real appetite for literature.’

  But those days were long gone. Without a grant, there wasn’t a single literary magazine that could survive, unless you counted the small offset jobs that looked like bad photocopies and were produced by angry, unemployed men in northern towns. And maybe they were the only ones that deserved to survive, though I was too tactful to say this to Tony. I’d been brought up to believe in being self sufficient, and hated drawing the dole. Wasn’t a grant a kind of dole for magazines? Wouldn’t it be better to use the money to pay budding authors forty quid a week on a job creation scheme? I did try that one on Tony.

  ‘Half the scroungers on the streets would claim to be writers,’ he objected.

  ‘Then make them produce a hundred pages every three months or they lose their money,’ I suggested. ‘That’d cure a writer’s block.’

  ‘The trouble is,’ Tony told me, changing tack, ‘what we need are fewer writers, not more. The ones
we have can’t make a living.’

  The printers threatened to take him to court. Tony had nearly gone bankrupt in the late seventies. He was getting too old to be put through that again. He began to pester Naomi Finch, the Arts Board officer responsible for the Little Review’s funding. After a week of daily phone calls, Finch invited Tony to a meeting. When he came back, he was lower than I’d seen him before.

  ‘They’re pulling the plug,’ he told me. ‘Magazine support budgets are being slashed and we’re the biggest to go. This is what she said to me: magazines have a time when they’re vital — a couple of years, five at the most — after which they become like an aging slag who’s slept with everybody but never had the sense to get married and settle down. She’s always trying to pull the new talent, not realising that, in satisfying her jaded appetites, she’s depriving somebody else of a good fuck.

  ‘Then she told me formally that the board felt it was time for the Little Review to make way for new magazines. What new magazines? I said to her. She couldn’t answer, of course. So I started my spiel about the five hundredth issue, all the people who were going to be in it and you know what she said? Why don’t you write to them all? See if they’ll stump up for the printing bill and go out with a bang? As if I could humiliate myself by...’

  He burst into tears and, awkwardly, I hugged him, feeling useless and sorry for my friend. Sorry for myself too, for soon I would be out of a job.

  Thirty

  Tony began to take the magazine very seriously indeed. He started coming in at ten, opening the mail and answering the phone himself. He wrote to a handful of people: rich benefactors who had come through in the past and authors who had made it big (fewer than you might think: most successful writers still earned less than school teachers). He needed ten thousand pounds to cover the overdue printing bill and the costs of the final issue. I suggested he go to Francis Bacon, who was, reputedly, a millionaire. His cover sketch alone was worth many times the amount needed. Tony wouldn’t hear of it. He wouldn’t sell art, and he wouldn’t put himself in an embarrassing position with a friend.