At the till here’s Bevan, the manager, and from the workroom behind him the smell of coffee and the faint sound of classical muzak. He doesn’t look up, just nudges another book at me along the counter with his elbow. Flutter By, it’s called, with a sash that says Riveting First Novel: its cover blazes with bright bird-colours.
‘Read that,’ he tells me. ‘She does it with another bird. The main character. And here’s me thinking all they ever do is bite each other’s beaks.’
Since the incident the Raymond Lawrence School of Creative Writing has been temporarily quartered in the English department buildings. I look into its larger tutorial room: two instructors, team-teaching. In the smaller room next door I find Cosmo Dye, the School’s director, looking up at me from a class of two dozen: he nods and beckons as he talks. Twenty-four would-be Raymond Lawrences: can there really be so many of them here in front of me? I tiptoe in, and find a seat against the rear wall as Cosmo tells the class that if they aren’t happy with their first draft, they shouldn’t be afraid to write a second.
I look about myself, and wonder what I always wonder in classrooms like this: which is the One?
Opposite me, over the students’ heads and behind Cosmo, a whiteboard carries one bold statement: FIND YOURSELF/ WRITE YOURSELF/ FIND YOURSELF AGAIN. Above and beside this, posters: Salman Rushdie, with the slogan 1989: LEST WE FORGET. Beside that, a simple, optimistic statement sans image, WRITERS RULE THE WORLD, and near it another, this time an image sans statement, of Edgar Allan Poe: always furtive, always unreliable. There’s a poster of Mavis Carpenter peering earnestly at the camera whilst one of her fists supports all of her jowls, and another of Roy Sharp receiving the Commonwealth Poetry Prize.
And make sure you serve up a really good sentence every page or two, Cosmo tells the class. Keep the reader’s interest up!
The largest poster by far is of the Master himself, a famously candid shot in greys and blues taken during his later middle years when he was slightly drunk, and showing much that was most attractive about him, as, surprised and momentarily disarmed, he turns to the lens. It was before he began regularly to wear glasses, and his eyes seem bared, and warmed and softened by the alcohol, his features loosened, particularly about his mouth: his entire expression is open, vulnerable, trusting: the man himself, and a Raymond I like to think I alone really knew. The slogan on this poster is the same as the slogan on the front of his T-shirt: END POVERTY. Combined with his demeanour in the photo it has an effect curiously if imprecisely optimistic, and in its time the image was everywhere. I’m delighted, of course, to see it again and being used in the School, although of course there are various framed photographs of him about the place, albeit in slightly less eloquent poses. END POVERTY: perhaps I alone remember the rest of the statement, on the back of the same T-shirt: KILL THE POOR AND EAT THE BASTARDS.
What does this new generation of children make of him, though, these golden lads and lasses gathered around me now? What, come to that, do they make of me? At one level, I know, Raymond’s public shenanigans in later life, and particularly his disastrous performance at his final public outing, became part of his myth. These stunts gave him a certain cachet amongst the young in particular: Raymond was cool. There’ve long been urban legends involving things he never did at events he never attended, as well as things he certainly did do which have been embroidered into wild fantasy, all of this a nonsense that rivals some of his own tall tales about his earlier years. And the more we hid him away, in those days, the more the stories grew, as if breeding out of the fact that he was no longer there—as if his absence from public life had become a blank wall for the graffiti of rumour.
The garden gnomes were one thing, but it was another phenomenon that really disturbed me, something that began just after he’d left us and was quite different from the many cheap attempts there’ve been to slander him or cash in on his fame. It took me completely by surprise when I first saw it: a little mannequin left behind in the Residence after a tour party had gone through, a tiny, homemade, thumb-sized Raymond, just a few judicious twists and knots of string and—there he was, somehow, with miniature specs and boots and one end of the string making a little white beard—plus (this is what was extraordinary) tiny wings, made from a couple of white feathers stuck in his back.
At first we suspected Raymond Thomas Lawrence II, since the development had the hallmarks of his down-at-heels obsessiveness. But apparently he was still locked away somewhere making ugly things for the poor: and, besides, after a while these angelic midget Raymonds started appearing all over the place: thumb-sized feathered replicas you’d see pinned to people’s clothing like a brooch or stuck to noticeboards and walls. They seemed to have acquired a particular meaning out there in the culture that didn’t have anything to do with what he’d written or who he was. Just the idea of him, no more, passed to another generation and its unreachable lurch away from us, into that frightening void in which they are dancing on our graves and we lie in them, eyeless, inexistent, forgotten.
Raymond as an angel: as I’m sure you’ll understand, that was a thought that never occurred to me while he was alive. But at one level it made sense, since there are angels in Bisque and there are angels in Kerr and there are angels elsewhere in his writing. Want to look like a great artist? he asked, as he was coming to the end of writing one or other of these—Kerr, I think it was, the raft-journey novel, his greatest novel, the one that was so memorably filmed with Bob Hoskins. Put a fucking angel in, Raymond said. Everyone’ll think you’ve read Rilke so it must be great Art—they haven’t read the mad fucker but they know about the angels!
Of course, he knew there was much more to it than that. As I’ve said, his writing began to mature in this early middle period, as some of the critics have called it, and Bisque was his first obviously substantial work—a firm second step, you might say, on the road to the Prize. Its title refers not to the seafood dish but to unglazed pottery, though you’ll probably recall that you can read the book from one end to the other and not find the latter mentioned: instead, the word is a figure for the unfinished state of the young woman depicted in it (Julia, her name) as she enters the excitement of Ibiza in the Mediterranean. Bisque, in that sense.
In Bisque, you’ll remember, this Julia is a would-be writer, and you’ll also recall that after a run-in with an American conman she falls in with an older fellow who is a doctor and, it transpires, a Nazi sympathiser and Franquista as well: and you will remember, too, that, late in the novel, he takes her for a picnic on what turns out to be the site of an abandoned concentration camp. Anything but an angel, then, this doctor: no, instead, the angels are the young pilluelo Julia keeps running into around and about the island: street urchins. There’s that extraordinary moment when she comes to believe, late in the novel, that these are the spirits of the children who have died in the deathcamps of Europe, and that they may not in fact exist in the normal sense at all.
Angels and death camps! Raymond said after the book was shortlisted for what was then the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Can’t miss with that combo, must be an important writer if I’m writing about angels and fucking death camps as well!
But I knew not to believe what he said, not least because I’d caught him in tears the day he finished writing the book. Blue, he said, brokenly, and shoved the final pages at me as he wrestled a hankie against his snout. Turns out the whole fucking thing is about that after all! It just came up out of the writing, he told me—the colour he was to become more and more obsessed with, and which occurs in everything he wrote from that time on: the colour in which we see the intangible becoming tangible, he told me years later, infinity becoming finite. Not any old blue, he said. Sky blue. The colour of liquefaction. Of the Blue Flower.
All these thoughts, provoked by the sight of the string Raymond-brooches on two of the creative writing children sitting in the class. Nowadays, I get a jolt in the chest whenever I see these odd little gewgaws appear. Somehow—don’t ask m
e to explain—they seem to touch on everything I’ve felt ever since Raymond left us, seven years ago now. On that, and on something more that I just don’t understand.
Now, suddenly, I’m back in the teaching room: all eyes are on me. Cosmo, it seems, has just introduced me—who better to talk to us about this wonderful writer than his nephew and literary executor?—and there is a silence that is mine alone. Time to perform once more! Peter will be opening the refurbished writing school building next month, Cosmo adds eagerly, as I reach the lectern.
A flutter of applause: not much to it, no real enthusiasm. Things are not as once they were, I’m aware of that, I’m well aware. I try to reach for common ground. The words come easily enough, since they’ve been said so many times before: When I was seven or eight years younger than the youngest of you now, I first met Raymond Thomas Lawrence, and I’ve never left him since, and he has never left me. Sometimes I’ve hated him, really hated him, sometimes he treated me badly, really badly, and sometimes he was the most wonderful uncle a nephew could ever dream of having—
And so on. Over the years, the Raymond I fashion for people on occasions like this has changed. At first I used to speak in open adulation, giving them the artist as Childe Harold, a self-doubting hero pushing against the boundaries of the tiny culture he’d been born into and breaking every one of its rules: each of his books was a clear step on a predetermined path to greatness. I always concluded with the opening scene from Kerr, where the protagonist’s long, mad, meandering journey on his home-made raft has brought him to Ibiza, which heaves-to over the horizon and then seems to lift out of the dazzle and glitter of the morning, out of the sea itself, slowly turning and turning in the glittering distance before and above and beyond Kerr’s raft: at which point it becomes something else, something mysterious, something out of this world: something even from the heavens—
An extraordinary piece of writing, set in a flash-forward at the start of the novel and one of the many sublime moments in the Master’s later work: the magnificence of it makes my voice break with emotion whenever I read that opening page aloud, even after so many years.
In the early days Semple—cruelly—accused me of speaking, when I addressed public meetings on occasions like this, in the first person hysterical. But my emotion was always genuine and often surprised me in the way it seemed to well up and engulf me as I read aloud. Where did it come from, was it real, was this even me who was reading—were the words in fact reading me? Was that it? At these times, the power of the written word shocked me, the way the text could take me over as I began to speak it. My audiences were moved by how moved I was, by what they saw as the purity of my soul but was actually the purity of Raymond’s or whomsoever’s spirit it was—one of his earthbound angels, perhaps—that took us over on these occasions, writer, reader, audience, all. Some of them wept as I read.
And then they didn’t. I don’t mean they stopped just like that, in the midst of a particular outpouring, but that after a while, over a year or two, I became aware that audiences’ responses were changing. I felt it as a change in myself, a tendency (I found) to listen more and more to my own voice as I read. Did I really believe the things that voice was saying, did I really feel the emotion I could hear? At the same time, the status of the public Raymond changed. He left us, in the way with which we’re all too familiar—terribly, yes, but—inevitably—in a way that revived much interest in him, albeit interest of this new and unexpected kind. Its grace note was the appearance of the little string dolls I’ve mentioned, which just seemed to pop up out of nowhere around that time. Out of the culture itself, I suppose, as it tried in its collective way to make sense of what it was that had just happened.
At last someone spat it out: He died for us—sprayed anonymously on a wall beneath a shorthand Raymond one sometimes began to find in public places, particularly near the University and the site of the writing school: just a few strokes rendering spectacles and beard above a pair of boots. Then, after a while, a sophistication: a scribble drawn at either side of these, suggesting arms outspread. Now he really was dying for us: and now, in my public appearances, I put on an imaginary black armband, so to speak, and introduced a new, plangent leitmotif to what I said: I made their transformation of him my own.
As I spoke, he began to change from the questing, larger-than-life figure I knew so well—Don Quixote, Childe Harold, Napoleon himself—to a victim cut down in his moment of triumph. He’d spent his career making enemies, treading on toes, pushing people away—who better to know that than I?—and, as I’ve made plain, there’d been at least as many negative responses to his elevation as there’d been positive, as well as those who openly revelled in the news of his illness when it came. Suddenly, from the nature of his death, all this vanished. Raymond belonged to the ages. How much I made of that!
Today, though—and this is the first time I’ve felt this—today it feels as if he doesn’t quite belong anywhere at all. There’s a mood change in the room, something which is new again in turn and which I am slowly picking up as I talk. I’m sure I’m not wrong. The wry self-deprecations get no response at all, the practised little jokes fall flat, the emotion as I read—from Kerr again, with as much fullness of feeling as ever—reaches out to dead air and fails. Near the back, a youth even seems to have his eyes closed, with anything but a rapt look about the rest of him. Another, unforgivably, is at work on his wretched phone, pressing away at it throughout, his brows a knot.
Eventually, I come to my peroration. It proceeds. It ends, magnificently as always. I wait.
Nothing happens. Not anger, not outright rejection, but worse—nothing very much at all. In fact it seems that they can’t be arsed—
Now Cosmo stands up.
‘Questions!’ he says brightly, grinding his palms, the one against the other. ‘Questions?’
Again, nothing.
We wait. Then, at last, a lass near the front:
‘How d’you get stuff published?’
This interests them: there’s a stir. The texting youth stops and looks up. Publication!
‘Well!’ I smile at them. ‘First you have to write something!’ Not a dog stirs. Did I sound condescending?—unreadable, this group. No, unwritten, that’s it. Unwritten. I scramble to recover. ‘I’m sure Cosmo and the team have discussed this—’
And it’s at this point that the door simply flings open: Robert Semple—he’s standing there in his fedora, looking in, looking at us! The class turns as one and gazes, lost to me in a second.
He gazes, confidently quartering the room. Now he steps in and presses the door shut behind him.
Someone has just asked me a question. ‘King Carl Gustaf,’ I reply, as I watch Semple stepping awkwardly between legs and feet. ‘The King of Sweden. Although the actual Prize was presented by the chairman of the panel.’ And: ‘Yes?’ to another questioner.
Now Semple has paused to bend over a young student: I can hear his robust, sibilant whisper: yes-yes? She nods back up at him: yes, yes. I try to ignore them. Another child-woman is putting a question to me, flatly and without eye contact.
‘Why should we read him today? Lawrence?’
Semple has found a seat now, near the back, between two young women who also seem to know him well.
The questioner is one of the little-string-Raymond-wearers. I point at the tiny thing on her blouse. ‘Well, let’s start by me asking you a question. Why do you wear that? What does it mean to you?’
She stares down herself as if she’s forgotten the thing is on her, almost as if she’s astonished to see she has a body. She looks up and past me.
‘Nothing,’ she says. ‘I just wear it.’
‘You just wear it?’
‘I found mine.’ This is the student next to her. She looks down and gives her mini-Raymond a little flick. ‘I didn’t realise it was him, then someone told me.’
‘Does it mean anything to you?’
‘It’s sort of like what you were saying.’ Th
is is the first young woman again. ‘Just now—you know, you were talking about, you know?’
‘I found it on the ground, and I’m like, y’know, what the fuck—?’
‘You can get them crucified.’ This from the back. ‘You know, on a cross, an actual cross—’
‘Yeah, but have you, like, seen one?’ This from about midway in the class. ‘Like, you know, actually seen one?’
Cosmo intervenes. ‘What’s your favourite Lawrence novel?’ he says to the class, encouragingly.
A pause.
‘They’re fucking long.’ The first woman again. ‘I tried a couple but I was like, you know, fuck it—’
‘I haven’t even started him!’ This blasphemy from a cheery youth to the left brings a dreary titter. ‘I got one for Christmas, but—y’know?’
Semple stirs and straightens: his brown hat seems to elevate at least six inches as he sits up. ‘I haven’t read them all and I’m on the fucking Trust!’ he says. A great belch of laughter from the class. ‘Not sure I’ve read any of them right through!’ Another great belch, and the hat settles contentedly back down. There are several seconds before the laughter dies away: I could wring his neck.
‘Thank you, Robert!’ Cosmo. ‘In your usual form! Right! Let’s have a show of hands. Who’s read one Raymond Lawrence?’
A few hands go up.
‘Two to four?’
Fewer.
‘More? No’—here he points at me—‘You don’t qualify, Peter, you’ve got an unfair start—’
Lifeless, soundtrack laughter. I realise that, among the creative writing students at least, no one in the room has read all of Raymond—and, astonishingly, some cheerfully admit to having read none of him whatsoever, none at all!
‘Oh, dear,’ says Cosmo. ‘Some work to do here. He is demanding, I have to admit, Raymond Lawrence does take it out of you. A great figure in our pantheon, for sure, but—well!’ He claps his hands together meaninglessly, cocks his wrist for his watch, claps some more. ‘Thank you, Peter, for your fascinating account!’
The Back of His Head Page 9