by Bob Biderman
It wasn’t to a solicitor’s office, however, that Z was headed. It was another sort of building on a back street of the city amongst the charnel houses – a place lit from dusk to dawn with flickering oil lamps and coal fires that left an indelible stain of soot on all the windows. And inside men – no, shadows of men – ghostly, grey, crammed before desks five by five and six by six from front to rear. Some young, some aged, all squinty-eyed, they were the copyists – lowest of the low in the legal chain which led from this sad and sorry lot to dandified attorneys drenched in champagne and truffles. They were the legal equivalent of galley slaves, either rejects from solicitors’ firms cast aside after endless years of service, or newbies – those without enough schooling or connections to start off as an articled clerk working their way upwards with the alacrity of ants caught in a pit of rancid butter. Unfortunate enough to be literate and have a passable hand, they copied endless pages of script picked up from firms around the city at closing time and brought here, to the free-lance copy office to be ready at daybreak. By the midnight hour, shaky hands would reach beneath their desks for liquid stamina. Nearing dawn, red eyes would be rubbed in a vain attempt to stop the jittery movement of the script they sought to copy. After a few hours more, fearful of error – a blotch or smudge which meant the painstaking process must start all over from scratch again – it was time for one last drink from the bottle which was always at the ready. But then, alas, the jittery lines would take on a life of their own and start jumping from the page – letters of the alphabet flying all around like Russian Tartars and these poor, tired men whose stiffness could only be alleviated by another drink of dirt-cheap, rot-gut whisky, trying hopelessly to swat them down.
All this for one penny a folio of seventy-two words, thought Z. And he ran it through his mind again – one penny for seventy-two words. That meant 864 words needed copying before a shilling could be earned. And that without error or one needed to start over again. But then he wondered how many words had he, himself, written for naught? A thousand? A million? A writer’s life was not a happy one – if happiness was found in pounds and pence. Yet there were no end of ‘wallers’ hanging around, his friend, Jerome had told him – men who lingered outside the copy offices leaning forever against the façade of buildings opposite in the hope that the master would look out the dirty window of the work room and see them. For, in truth, no matter how difficult and demeaning, a top-rate copyist working flat out could earn in a good week between four and five pounds. And then he could quit and have a decent binge until he was broke and had to queue up for that miserable work again. It was a way of getting through the winter. Come summer they might move off to Kent and pick hops instead. It suited some people, said Jerome, though it didn’t suit him. For him it was just a way of quickly picking up a few extra bob till he sold another story to a magazine or newspaper.
Fortunately, Jerome was an eternal optimist – if he waited around another few decades till a certain children’s book was written, he might even have been called a Pollyanna. Ideas shot from his fevered brow like the puffed rice breakfast cereal that was all the rage in the energised packaged food industry. Jerome had lots of ideas, he was a young man on the move. But right at that moment he was a copyist.
On more than one occasion he, Jerome, had said that it wasn’t flamboyance they were after but a moderately good time, with articulate friends, decent whisky and aromatic tobacco. He had written an entire book (several, in fact) on this subject, praising the virtue of what he called ‘idleness’ – not laziness, mind you, but those enduring moments of space and time which nurture dreams and creativity. Central to this theme were the notions of respect and tolerance. Jerome had built his career on this simple idea, which led some people to think he was a sluggard. But nothing could have been further from the truth. As far as Z was concerned, Jerome worked harder than anyone he knew – with the possible exception of Z, himself.
Z trusted Jerome because, like Z, he had no one to fall back on but himself. And knowing that made a great deal of difference to Z because he felt that if Jerome said something, he said it with honour and if he said he would do something, he would do it with pleasure. In short, Jerome was someone Z could believe – not least because Jerome had once also lived in the East End and had been looked upon as an ‘other’. Not an ‘other’ because of race, but an ‘other’ because he was different in his head. And that, Z felt, was the biggest ‘otherness’ of all.
Like Z, Jerome was a dreamer. You could see it in his eyes which sometimes would drift off into another land far away from the person sitting next to him. Those who knew him well (and few people did) would comment on how grounded he seemed, how self-possessed. And yet he himself didn’t feel ‘grounded’ at all. Like many people with a strong inner life, he had a curious sense that there were things he was bound to achieve, that somehow, in a vague and ill-defined way, he had a unique purpose and that there were even vaguer spirits to guide him. And, yes, there were times he felt he was playing out a pre-determined role in the theatre of life – something reinforced during his years as a vagabond actor with a touring company.
But probably the same things could have been said of the other young writers in their circle – people like Doyle and Barrie, sometimes Shaw, and the blind poet, Marsden. They all were dreamers who had come up ‘the hard way.’ Nothing was given to them. What they had they had earned through sweat and toil and having had the courage to follow their dreams and listen to their own inner voices.
Perhaps, in a strange way, they were fortunate to be living at that particular time which the Jubilee represented. Though, for them (most of them, anyway – Kipling aside), it was just a lot of misplaced pomp and circumstance. A recently lettered public was emerging from the ill-lit offices with worm-eaten desks and the factories of some Dickensian Coketown into the dawn of a new and more open age where a multitude of penny magazines stuffed the shelves of railway newsagents providing unlimited fodder for the recently contrived class of commuters who consumed them voraciously as a means of all too briefly escaping their rapidly encroaching drudgery some twenty minutes down the track.
Yes, change was in the air. You could smell it along with all the dung churned up by the soon-to-be outmoded omnibus, but more especially by the new odours and sounds and sensations blaring at you from the walls, the stalls and the pages of papers like the Pall Mall Gazette. Suddenly (well, perhaps not so suddenly as all that) the stereotypical image of the Victorian lady and gentleman, prim and properly covering their piano legs with modesty socks, was being ripped apart with the vengeance one feels about a lie that’s been allowed to fester just too long. The screen was being torn down to reveal a mirage that was never really there. But whatever was there – and that, of course, was open to interpretation – everyone knew it wasn’t going to be there long.
It was an idea that was approaching with an unstoppable force that bordered on certainty. And like most ideas that brought with it the seeds of the new along with the annihilation of the old, the first thing to go was the language which propped up the ancient and outmoded – for there is nothing more sterile and stultifying than a language that has outlived its moment.
Was either Jerome or Z, himself, conscious of their role in this revolutionary reconstruction? Probably not. Marx’s son-in-law used to chum around with them on occasion. And they all knew Eleanor, his wife. Who didn’t? They were quite aware that the axis of the world was shifting – how fast, again, depended on whom you asked – but they weren’t out to bang their drums (well, maybe Shaw but he did it with so much panache that nobody minded). And, Z, as we noted before, waited to bang his drum till later. Jerome never banged a drum at all, though after the War to End All Wars he wondered whether he should have.
The critics were not kind to them. Of course, critics are hardly ever kind – it’s not their job, they would argue. But critics always have an axe to grind and a family to maintain – they either uphold the old regi
me or usher in the new. In either case their job is similar to the Praetorian Guards or The Young Turks who will soon become Praetorian Guards if their heads haven’t been lopped off.
They, the critics, were especially unkind to Jerome (or would be, soon). They called him ‘vulgar’ and ‘coarse’ which was really quite curious for a fellow whose stories were so incredibly gentle. What they meant by that, however, was that he dared to write in what they called ‘the vernacular’ – throwing ‘literary style’ to the winds – or snobbish pretence, depending on which way you looked at it. But they did him and, by implication, the rest of his friends a great favour by giving them a collective sobriquet of ‘New Humorists’. They hadn’t meant it as a compliment but the rubric stuck, lifting them out of the great anonymity of amorphous faces and transforming them into a Movement – the dream of every half-baked writing group.
But back then, in the summer of 1887, they were still young pups chasing after bones. The bones, it is true, had become meatier and more frequently tossed so that, by then, both Z and Jerome were able to hear more clearly the Sirens’ call. And, in fact, though they both would have many decades left in their writing career, it is of interest that the books each of them would be remembered for would be written in the following year.
It was Jerome that Z had come to see. Jerome knew who was who amongst the pack of braying lawyers (most of whom he discovered hadn’t a thought in their head except what to eat for dinner) and, in fact, had studied for the law himself before he gave it up to write. It had been a difficult choice – law was boring, tedious, tendentious and much more interested in itself than justice, but it had a certain status and security that writing didn’t. Besides, for a bright young man who was as personable and energetic as Jerome, the chances of success were high (or at least higher than writing novels). But Jerome was a dreamer who had a way with words. And a dreamer with a touch of magic was possibly what the world wanted then, he imagined. So he chose the route of least resistance, the one that felt right to him. It was risky, but so was everything in life. And Jerome, who had been orphaned before he was old enough to grow a moustache and had been responsible for himself ever since, was bound and determined to make his way in life. But he would do it in his manner – with a smile and a wink. After all, 1887 wasn’t a bad time to be alive. Not if you were a young man like him.
They had a drink at the corner pub where Z told him about his interest in the Whitechapel murder case. Had Jerome heard anything over the grape vine? Did he know who was chosen to lead the defence? Jerome told him he didn’t know for certain, but rumour had it that man was Geoghegan – a brilliant lawyer who wasn’t afraid to take on the most difficult litigation. Maybe Z had heard of his defence of the Dynamitards? It was a brave and celebrated moment and, for a time, all of London knew him – or at least claimed they did. There was only one slight problem, though. Geoghegan was fond of drink, like most men of his ilk – overly fond, some said. He was honest, forthright and sincere, but he had been known to succumb on occasion – and then there might be problems, mightn’t there? So it was a risky choice but, according to Jerome, there was none better.
CHAPTER 9
Z HAD A brother named Louis who was also a writer. Unlike Z, Louis was hardly known and wrote in self-imposed obscurity. Not that he particularly cared, for he was more of a bohemian and felt the idea of career was a 19th century bourgeois notion which had nothing much to do with art; he often said – to anyone who would listen – that an artist who made money from his work had probably succumbed to the call of mammon rather than the whispers of the muse. And so he wrote because he wanted to write and that was that. Anything else, he said, came from a false sense of pride. Of course these might have been sentiments that came from having a successful brother – one who people expected great and glorious things from. All the same, Louis wasn’t really bothered. He travelled in his own world of like-minded artists. And together they would go off on jaunts across the Channel, for days of peripatetic philosophising and hazy, turquoise-coloured nights of rum and absinthe, even though they had hardly more than the price of the steamer crossing and a bare room in the garret of some cheap hotel on the Rive Gauche.
It was Z’s brother who told him of Greenberg, a Jewish philanthropist of Eastern European origins who had worked his way up from poverty to become rich and well respected, if not extraordinarily wealthy, and had helped Louis out on several occasions. Greenberg was one of a small group of self-made businessmen who were nurtured by the ghetto and wanted to give something back to those they had left behind in the dank and dingy rooms of the East End. These were men like Herman Landau, himself a Polish Jew made good, who were willing to stand up and speak out against the xenophobic ranting that echoed not only on the streets but in the boardrooms and was being closely observed by opportunistic politicians who would tone down the language but not the intent in order to gain an active following they could exploit sometime in the very near future. They were few, but together they became a collective thorn in the side of the Guardians, who insisted on a ‘softly, softly’ approach to all things Jewish which came into conflict with anything Christian.
As it happened, Louis had gone to visit Greenberg just that very day and had found him deep in discussion with someone named Myers – a rather intense man, probably in his mid-thirties, who had the habit of mopping his sweaty brow with his handkerchief and then using it to wipe his glasses. Myers, it turned out, worked as the managing clerk for a law firm and was discussing a case that it seemed Greenberg, at Myers’ urging, had placed with them. The case was a gruesome murder. The accused was named Lipski. And the law firm Myers represented was that of John Hayward, solicitor.
Louis wasn’t able to stay very long as he had just dropped by on his way to the British Library, but, from what he could make out, Greenberg had already gone some way towards establishing a defence committee for Lipski, being convinced, for some reason, of the young man’s innocence – as was Myers, himself. (Whether it was Greenberg who had convinced Myers or vice versa was something Louis hadn’t found out.)
In a way, Z was surprised to hear that his brother had stumbled onto this conjunction of people and events at the same time Z, himself, was searching for it. But in another way he wasn’t. Louis had a wide network of friends and acquaintances – most of whom were either artists or writers or those who liked being around artists and writers; that is to say his friends and acquaintances were all people wrapped up in words and images (people who some years down the road would be collectively termed ‘the chattering classes’). Z was well aware that the ‘Whitechapel Murder Case’ – as it had come to be called – was the main topic of discussion among those who had anything at all to do with the East End, especially after the inquest when it had gone beyond the streets and into the more sedate living rooms of the Jewish intelligentsia. And as enough time had passed since the brutal facts of the murder had caused that initial frisson of vulgar excitement, people had started to consider the events themselves and the personalities involved and why an ostensibly ‘nice young man’ should have done such a terrible act – if, indeed, he had done it at all.
It was that first seed of doubt, that stirring of suspicion by those who looked just a few inches underneath the surface and thought that something didn’t seem quite right – as if it were all too straightforward. And there was all that weight, all that enormous weight of circumstance, the viability of which had been camouflaged by the hounds braying for blood. Something smacked of the relentless march to the gallows that happened when the poor and powerless were trapped inside a bureaucratic nightmare of crime and punishment; a feeling most people who had gone through the refugee experience intuitively comprehended as that horrific process which severed them from the nurturing breast of humanity, degrading them into the lower ranks of the animal order to be herded, corralled and possibly slaughtered all in the name of stability. Yes, they understood that feeling quite well.
So
was it at all surprising that someone like Greenberg, someone who had risen above the tumultuous fray but knew in his heart where that terror was coming from – was it at all surprising that he would have become interested in such a case? Z thought not. But, then again, Z was always a great admirer of the power of coincidence. Coincidence was all over the place and you could make of it what you wanted.
Louis was quite happy to introduce Z and Greenberg before going off on another of his travels – this time to Holland – and Greenberg was quite happy to meet him. He, of course, knew of Z and his work and realised that someone like Z could be quite useful. And it was through Greenberg that Z came to meet Myers, the managing clerk for Hayward’s law firm.
So what did Z find out though his brief but fruitful meeting? He discovered, firstly, that there was a rump defence committee that had been set up. Secondly, that this committee was contacting Jews of some means who might be sympathetic to their cause (which, at this point, was simply raising enough money to provide Lipski with the possibility of having good legal representation). Thirdly, that this quest was not easy as most of the well-off Jews had been squeezed dry from never-ending appeals for aid and assistance to their unfortunate brethren. Fourthly, that most Jews of position were frightened of being identified with this case. Fifthly, though there was a general feeling that Lipski was guilty, there were a number of people of limited means who wanted him to have a fair hearing and therefore were willing to contribute a few hard earned shillings. And, lastly, though, as of yet, the defence hadn’t any evidence that would contradict the prosecution’s case, Greenberg and Myers themselves were convinced of his innocence because they both had been struck by the young man’s character and appearance. Myers especially was quite resolute in saying Lipski was simply another unfortunate victim of East End brutality coupled with incompetent policing and a rush to judgement. He was certain that a proper investigation would eventually exonerate him. However, as there wasn’t enough time or money to launch a proper investigation of their own, they would have to construct a defence based on refuting the prosecution’s circumstantial evidence as extraordinary pressure was being applied to have the case over and done with as quickly as possible. So, if they had any chance of saving this ill-fated young man, they would have to work fast.