Bedlam Burning

by Geoff Nicholson

  I was usually quite good at thinking on my feet and coming back with a snappy answer, but I couldn’t think of anything worth saying, so rather awkwardly I sat down again, had another drink, and I was still gently glowering when Bentley said, ‘So, Michael, have you solved your own liberal dilemma in this area?’

  ‘You mean, have I found a book I want to burn?’

  He pursed his mouth to show that he thought I was being a little vulgar and needlessly explicit.

  ‘As a matter of fact, I have,’ I said.

  I stood up and opened my own envelope, and I took out a small volume of literary criticism. It was called Palpable Obscure and it was written by Dr John Bentley.

  ‘My reasons for wanting to burn this book are fairly straightforward,’ I said. ‘Because he’s the kind of author who approves of book-burning parties.’

  The hush around the room was gratifyingly brittle. The guests reacted as though I’d committed the most terrible social gaffe. It was all very well to toy with fascism, but it was something quite else to insult your host. Dr Bentley looked at me sadly, as though he was trying hard to suppress the condescension he felt towards me, but wasn’t quite succeeding.

  ‘Someone does this every year,’ he said. ‘Not very original, but it does ensure at least the occasional small royalty.’

  He raised his glass to me and of course I had to raise my own in return. I don’t suppose I’d really imagined that my simple little insult would reduce him to quivering shame, but equally I couldn’t show my disappointment at how successfully and urbanely he’d dealt with it.

  It might have made for a rather sour end to the proceedings, which I suppose had been my intention, but we’d reckoned without Gregory Collins. It was now his turn. Grandly he took his place at a side table and placed his metal box on it, roughly shoving bottles and glasses out of the way. With unnecessary and comical ceremony he opened up the box. What he took out was not a book at all, but a typed manuscript some three or four inches thick. The pages were loose and unbound, and as he gripped them they slid around in his fingers.

  ‘This is my contribution to the proceedings,’ he said. ‘I’ve grafted away for the last two years trying to write the great bloody Cambridge novel, and here it is.’

  I knew nothing at all about Gregory Collins, but it still came as a surprise to find that he’d written a novel. He didn’t look the type, although my idea of what the type looked like was utterly uninformed.

  ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘the bugger’s finished, and it’s absolute tripe, and I can’t think of anything better to do with it than chuck the bloody thing in the fire.’

  The manuscript was too big and cumbersome to be thrown easily or accurately and so he walked across the room and carefully placed it in the grate. By now there was already a great deal of ash and burned paper in there and the sheer bulk of the manuscript threatened to extinguish the fire altogether, but after a while the pages started to curl and smoulder, then blacken and separate, never bursting into a grand, satisfying conflagration, but nevertheless being very effectively consumed and destroyed.

  There was some muttering around the room that this was a brave, rash and foolish thing to do, although simultaneously a couple of people sneered that it was probably only a first draft or a Xerox, and there could easily be another copy safely stashed away somewhere. But I didn’t think that. I could believe that Gregory Collins was a poseur, but I didn’t think he was a fake. Dr Bentley was finding the whole thing delicious, and was giggling like a schoolboy. It had been a great finale.

  And that was the end of the burning, though not quite the end of the party. A couple of people came up to me and said it had been pretty smart of me to burn Bentley’s book, but there was no doubt that I’d been upstaged by Gregory Collins. He briefly became the centre of attention, although he had very little to say for himself. When somebody asked him what the novel had been about he refused to give details. ‘I’ve burned the bastard,’ he said. ‘You don’t expect me to turn it into a bloody oral tradition, do you?’

  Then Bentley put on a record of Siegfried, clear signal that it was time for the majority of us to leave. A group of us were going back to someone’s room to smoke dope and listen to a Captain Beefheart bootleg, and we invited Gregory Collins along, but he turned us down, saying it sounded a bit too rich for his blood. I think we were all relieved. But before we went our separate ways he shook me very formally by the hand and said, ‘We made a great double act, eh, Michael?’

  Far less formally, Dr Bentley saw us to the door, and as I made my way out he looked at me with a tenderness that made me very uncomfortable. ‘So pretty,’ he said, ‘and so empty.’ I felt less threatened by his words than I did by his look, and perhaps recognising that he added, ‘But not quite pretty enough or quite empty enough to be truly appealing.’

  2

  It’s tempting to think that all this happened a very long time ago, in a completely different age and time, yet I’m sure that the feelings we had about ourselves then were surprisingly similar to the ones we have now. We felt ourselves to be very modern, very complex, very in control. But I also remember we felt bombarded, overloaded, surfeited. We felt ourselves to be awash in a superfluity of goods and services, products and messages. The shops seemed full of crap. Our roads seemed too full of cars. The world seemed polluted. We felt we were besieged by advertising, media images, information. Even from the academic quietness of Cambridge the world seemed too noisy and busy and demanding. Our perceptions weren’t inaccurate but, of course, we’d seen nothing yet. If anyone thought the future would be so drenched in the stuff of computers and electronic entertainment they were keeping rather quiet about it, although admittedly some people seemed to see the future more clearly than others, certainly more clearly than I did.

  As our lives as students came to an end, there was a great settling out, a clarification of who we were, of who we had been all along. Those who had appeared subversive and anti-materialistic now expressed an interest in the law or accountancy. Those who’d enjoyed a dandyish, decadent reputation as students now thought they might become television researchers. Those who’d been involved with concrete poetry and avant-garde film thought they should get a job working for the Daily Telegraph. And in most cases they got what they wanted.

  I had absolutely no idea what the future held for me, not even what I wanted it to hold. I would have been happy enough to stay on at the university, to spend a few more years in lecture theatres, libraries and seminar rooms, to be a continuing if not exactly an eternal student. But I knew all along that my degree wouldn’t be good enough to allow me to become a Ph.D. student. I’d even talked to Dr Bentley about my prospects. If he retained any resentment about my burning his book, he refused to show it, and he said he was prepared to put in a good word for me, but on balance he thought I shouldn’t set my sights too firmly on a career as an academic.

  I had a lot of ambivalence towards what I only half-jokingly referred to as the ‘real world’. Certainly the world of the university appeared at times both inauthentic and stifling, but the world out there, the world of jobs and careers, of grown-up relationships and ambitions and money, seemed an infinitely tough and frightening place, and nothing in my education had prepared me to deal with it.

  So, since I knew I couldn’t be part of academe I did what seemed like the next best thing, or at least an extremely obvious thing. I got a job working in London for a firm of rare book dealers. They were called Somervilles, a good old name in a small and highly specialised field. They bought and sold English and American literary first editions, Joyce at the very top end, down through Greene and Waugh, all the way to Kingsley Amis and Ian Fleming. They also sold authors’ manuscripts, everything from single postcards and letters to complete archives. It sounded like something I might enjoy, that I might be quite good at.

  At the interview I had been told this was a job with a future, that it might involve bidding at auctions, negotiating with literary estates, perha
ps eventually going to America to visit university libraries who were amassing literary materials. Both my potential employers and I could see that my charm might be very useful in this area, and I was keen to do well at the job, willing to put a lot of energy into this world of fine bindings and limited editions, but what I did day to day was a lot more humble.

  I was supposedly learning how to catalogue books and manuscripts, so they might be accurately described for our mail-order customers, who were many and rich and sometimes quite famous. Tom Stoppard and George Steiner were on the mailing list, as were any number of Cambridge dons, including Dr Bentley, though I checked the records and saw it was years since he’d bought anything.

  The job of cataloguing was a precise, formal and pretty dull business. I had to be able to discern the difference between a fine copy, a nice copy, a good copy, and a good reading copy. I learned pithy descriptive phrases – ‘some wear on the spine’, ‘with the author’s autograph inscription on the fly leaf’, ‘front edge somewhat faded’, ‘wrappers frayed’. I learned what foxing was.

  A couple of months after leaving university I found myself sitting at my desk when my boss, Julian Somerville, placed two books in front of me. Although he shared the family name, he was a sufficiently distant relative that they didn’t feel the need to share anything else with him, such as the family fortune. He managed the shop part of the business, not that they called it a shop, preferring the term ‘showroom’, since that sounded classier and snootier and more likely to keep out passing trade, but let’s face it, a shop is what a shop does. As far as I was concerned, Julian was the shop manager and much of the time I was his shop assistant.

  Julian Somerville was a long, thin breadstick of a man, with perfect manners, who dressed in multiple layers of brown: corduroy suits, khaki waistcoats, beige shirts, knitted tweed ties. The two books he placed in front of me were both copies of Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, both English first editions, both in fine condition, but one had a dust jacket and one didn’t.

  ‘Lessons in book dealing, number one thousand and one,’ said Julian brightly, and he indicated the book without the jacket. ‘This copy is quite desirable, quite collectable, and would set you back about a hundred pounds.’

  I nodded, doing my best to appear the keen student.

  ‘This copy,’ he said, indicating the other, ‘with the jacket, is worth about five hundred. The moral of the lesson: in this trade if in no other, you can judge a book by its cover.’

  ‘Far out,’ I said. It was the kind of thing I liked to say. I was surrounded by literary tradition, by solidity, by locked glass-fronted bookcases, by leather-topped desks. I felt the need to inject the occasional bit of ‘modern’ terminology. Julian frowned at me indulgently.

  His lesson filled me with a certain ambivalence. If a jacketed Great Gatsby was worth so much more than an unjacketed one, the jacket in effect became far more valuable than the book itself. I well understood how this might offend literary purists. They would say that being fixated on the materiality of the book, the edition, the binding, the jacket, was clearly missing the point of what books were about, that texts were somehow invisible, incorporeal, that they floated free of the solid matter of the printed object.

  Yet I wasn’t quite such a purist. I liked books. I liked their form as well as their content. I thought they were nice things to have around, to touch, to look at. A few of them furnished the small horrible room in Shepherd’s Bush where I lived. They seemed like a reasonable thing to spend money on, not that I had any money to spend on books or on anything else. The rare-book world was not a place where an entry-level graduate could make his fortune. I had known this all along and I didn’t feel particularly aggrieved. The fact that some books cost as much as I earned in a year was just a fact of life, and one I could by and large live with. Nevertheless, when some rich customer, usually American, usually too fat and too well-dressed, breezed into the showroom and casually spent a four-figure sum with rather less premeditation than I’d give to buying a Mars bar, I admit I could feel resentful.

  However, this resentment was somewhat free-floating. Partly I resented the American for being so rich. Certainly I resented my employer for paying me so little, and as a corollary to that I resented the world for being so expensive. But I was also fed up with myself for not having any valuable skills that I could sell in the market place. Or maybe it wasn’t about skills, anyway. I sensed there were plenty of young men out there who were successfully making their way in the world, and who weren’t any more skilled than I was. So what was it they had that I didn’t? What secrets did they have access to? I disliked myself for being so feeble, so ignorant of how to plug into the world of achievement, success and money.

  And money was probably the least important of the three. I told myself I’d have been happy to work for little or no money if I was doing something I really liked, that really mattered, but in the event I seemed to be working for little or no money, doing a job that didn’t matter in the least. I couldn’t have said that I hated the job at Somervilles exactly, and I was well aware that there were millions of jobs I’d have liked far less, but I had a profound sense that I was wasting my time.

  If, in that old existential sense, we are what we do, then I thought I was nothing because I’d done nothing, experienced nothing, at least nothing that seemed to matter either to me or to anyone else. I’m always amazed and irritated when I see people interviewed on the TV news or in documentaries, and there’s the interviewee’s name and a one-line, or even one-word, definition of who and what they are: Michael Smith ‘Student’, Mike Smith ‘Friend’, Mick Smith ‘Disgruntled employee’. Of course, most people who appear on TV or in documentaries have rather more dramatic captions than these. To be newsworthy they need things like ‘Orgiast’, ‘Father of Siamese Twins’, ‘Unrepentant Nazi’. I’m depressed by this too. It seems so limiting. Like anyone else, I had always wanted to be more than the labels attached to me, but at least I’d have liked the labels to be somewhat impressive: Michael Smith ‘Wit’, Mickey Smith ‘Lover of Women’ Mike Smith ‘A Man to Watch’. What I didn’t want, and what I suspected would have been the most appropriate was Mike Smith ‘Pathetic Bastard’.

  And I was confused too. I’d had this supposedly privileged English education; privileged enough that millions of my fellow Englishman would be quite prepared to hate me for it, to consider me a snob and an élitist. It was supposed to open all doors, to plug me into some pernicious old boys’ network. So why was I no more than a not much glorified shop assistant? And why was I living in squalor, in a horrible room in Shepherd’s Bush, instead of the Chelsea penthouse that I inhabited in my dreams?

  The other extant myth about Cambridge that I was finding to be completely without foundation, was that it supposedly provided you with friends for life. Since leaving university I’d seen hardly anyone. In a few cases there were good reasons, my friends had got married, gone to work abroad and so on, but even the ones who lived and worked in London stayed out of contact. Oh sure, I got a few party invitations, was sometimes called upon to be the ‘spare man’, went out for the occasional beer or pizza with somebody, but it wasn’t quite the gilded social life I’d been hoping for. Perhaps the truth was I didn’t have any friends any more, and that made me think perhaps I’d never really had any in the first place.

  But at least I had a girlfriend of sorts. She was called Nicola Campbell and I’d known her a little at university. I’d seen her at lectures and in the coffee bar, and had regarded her as a good acquaintance rather than a friend. Nicola had a clean, scrubbed, healthy quality that a lot of people found very attractive, very sexy. I could see, in a theoretical way, that this was true, but some sort of chemistry was lacking in my case. At university I’d never quite fancied her, never thought of pursuing her, but in London it was different. I ran into her going into a cinema on a Sunday afternoon. We were both alone, and maybe there is something especially depressing about going to the cinema alone
on Sunday afternoons, and maybe we both thought the other one was more lonely and desperate than either of us really was. We sat together in the cinema, and then went out for a drink, and later we went out a few more times to see other films, then we had sex once, and then we had sex a couple more times, and somehow, before we knew it, it appeared we were going out with each other, albeit in an uncommitted, half-hearted sort of way.

  Nicola was a good person. She was attractive, intelligent, charming, witty; just like me. We made a good, or at least a good-looking couple. We liked each other, but I think we both knew we didn’t like each other quite enough. Nothing was wrong and yet we had a sense of how things might be better. We thought our relationship would do for now, but we keenly hoped that something more passionate and interesting and substantial was not too far around the corner.

  The main thing I remember about Nicola from those days, is how little odour she had about her. Sometimes she smelled of soap, and occasionally of expensive, understated perfume, but she never smelled of herself. She never smelled of sweat or sex or garlic or anything robust like that. Her breath, her hair, her body, were all quite odourless.

  We fell into a pattern. We saw each other twice a week at most, and went to the cinema or for a cheap meal. We always went Dutch. She too had moved to London straight from university and was doing a job that seemed to have certain parallels with my own, although hers sounded much better since she was ‘working in publishing’. It seems absurd to me now but that phrase had a magic to it then, and not only to me. Publishing was spoken of as a glamour profession, something a graduate might aspire to and only be accepted into if you were one of the brightest and the best. It was a hundred times better than working in rare books.