A Week in December Page 25

  All day long, phrases from his review of A Winter Crossing two years earlier kept coming back into Tranter’s mind. ‘Moribund and ham-fisted’. Could he really have said that? ‘Watching Alexander Sedley fumble with the English language is like watching a drunk in boxing gloves trying to pick up his front-door key’. It had seemed rather good on the afternoon he wrote it. Every time Tranter convinced himself that Sedley would have taken his review ‘like a man’ and would bear no grudge against him, another terrible phrase came stabbing into his mind. ‘A prose tone-deaf to its own self-importance’. God. There was really no way back from that.

  There was only one thing to do. A week after Sedley’s appointment was announced, Tranter, with Septimus Harding on his lap, sat down to compose what he could only describe to himself as ‘the hardest letter I have ever had to write’. ‘Dear Alexander ...’ No, that sounded too friendly, too obsequious; it might also send out some sort of gay message to a private-school type like Sedley. ‘Dear Mr Sedley ...’ Too hostile, too gas board. ‘Dear Sedley’ was of course what a posh tit like Sedley himself would probably have started. He settled in the end for the bland, tautologous ‘Dear Alexander Sedley’. It would do. ‘You may remember we met briefly at that weird do at the Natural History Museum, then again – also briefly – at your excellent reading in Hampstead (sorry I had to dash off in such a hurry that night, incidentally, as there was much I wanted to ask you about A Winter Crossing – but duty called!) Anyway, I just wanted to say that I’ve recently had the opportunity of rereading it ...’

  Was ‘opportunity’ a bit strong? After all, anyone could pick up a paperback. But if he said ‘the pleasure’ it gave away too soon the volte-face he wanted to prepare more carefully.

  ‘Anyway, I just wanted to say that I’ve recently had the opportunity of rereading it. I must say that it was a thoroughly pleasurable experience. One’s first reading of such a book is necessarily influenced by the cultural baggage one brings to it; and prose as many-layered as your own really requires a second, closer reading. I relished your lightly worn learning and the playful references to other first novels, ranging from Camus to Salinger and, if I am not mistaken, Dostoevsky, no less! All this done with an enviable lightness of touch ...’

  Bloody hell. This was laying it on a bit. The trickiest part of course was whether to refer to his own review. It was conceivable that Sedley might not have seen it and the letter would then have the catastrophic effect of making him look it up. On the other hand, it was pretty unlikely that someone so far up himself would not have read the papers. Perhaps then he should go for a sort of generic retraction on behalf of all the bad reviews. Yes.

  ‘I don’t really recall its reception at the time, but I suppose not all the reviews were able to rise to the occasion straightaway. History tells us – Katherine Mansfield on Howards End, Henry James on Our Mutual Friend, almost everyone on Ulysses – that it’s not the first journalistic reaction that matters, but the second and third and, in the case of a novel such as yours, the subsequent responses over many years that really count. I have now had the pleasure of reading it three times and I have no hesitation in saying that it’s not only an extraordinary debut, but in its own way is an important novel.

  ‘I look forward eagerly to whatever you care to give us next.

  ‘Yours in haste—’

  The hardest thing was to get the dashed-off feeling of one great, distracted mind in a generous hurry to commune with another; but after three hours he was pretty sure he’d nailed it. In the life-shaping straits that Tranter found himself, anything was worth a shot.

  Ralph Tranter had been a novelist himself, once. It was a natural aspiration for someone who enjoyed books and had read English at Oxford, though it wasn’t one he felt confident to talk about. His first job had been with a large insurance company in High Holborn, on their graduate trainee scheme, and he had been dismissive of the various ‘creative’ types he’d known at college who seemed to think the literary or artistic world was agog for their arrival. Three years down the line, he was the only one with a job.

  Living at that time in two rooms in a former Peabody building near the BBC, Tranter would get back from work at 6.30, put a large potato in the oven to bake and sit down at his typewriter. He had the modesty to know that he must pay the rent first and buy himself time to write; he had the self-discipline not to go out or watch television; he had read so many books that he also had a prose style that was plausible for most purposes. Most of the prerequisites were in place; all that he lacked was something to say.

  But how important – really – was that lack, he wondered? When he looked at the novels he’d read and studied, not much seemed to happen in them. The main characters moved from position a) to position b). Plot – at least in the sense of any real action – was the province of the genre writer: the sadly misnamed ‘thriller’, the clockwork detective puzzle or a ‘disaster’ epic of mutant crocodiles in the sewer system. Meanwhile, middlebrow newspaper interviews and highbrow literary biographies focussed almost exclusively on the extent to which the contents of a serious novelist’s books were drawn from his own experience and the characters ‘based on’ people known to him. After two years of torn-up pages, false starts and sober late nights, Tranter convinced himself that – compared to finding a reputable publisher, choosing a catchy title and looking interesting in the author picture – the actual content of his novel was not that important.

  So it was that he began yet again, with a main character not unlike himself on a life path that bore a fraternal relationship to his own. This thing about ‘inventing’ characters that some novelists banged on about; really, when you came down to it, why bother? Very few people knew him, or any of the acquaintances he planned to include, so what was the point of conjuring and moulding new people from the void? At least he and his friends came with builtin credibility; they were, by definition, ‘realistic’ ...

  Tranter’s hero, John Sturdy, came from a modest Midlands family and his dilemma was much to do with regional issues: whether he should work in the pottery business or go to London with a girl from art school, who resembled Sarah Powell from the street next to Tranter’s parents’, though with added sexual charisma – a pretty hefty addition in all honesty. Tranter allowed the voices of the English regionalist school to harmonise with his own; there were intertextual references to the novels of Stan Barstow and Walter Allen, for instance. After three chapters, he found his book gaining traction. Every time he felt the need for a new incident, he would throw in an episode from his own life, but with a small twist. In this way, he had eventually spun the book out to 200 typewritten pages. The death of Sturdy’s grandfather could occupy another ten, and then he was only forty short of 250 – the critical mass, he’d been told, that could be leaded-out by the publisher to cover 200 printed pages.

  At the same time, Tranter wrote to small magazines, enclosing copies of articles he’d written at Oxford and unpublished reviews he had written ‘on spec’ of new books. Eventually, Outpost printed one; a month later Actium followed suit, and Tranter was quick to reinforce success by sending them more. He didn’t require to be paid, but when he’d built up a scrapbook of half a dozen cuttings, he began to hawk them round the bigger magazines and even newspapers. Many papers had almost given up reviewing books, but then, following an outbreak of new supplements in the late 1980s, suddenly found their space quintuple overnight. Instead of half a page shared with ads for furniture warehouses, book review editors were suddenly expected to fill three entire pages on a Saturday. They searched frantically through the papers on their desk for R. Tranter’s phone number.

  At this point Tranter played with the idea of inventing a second initial – calling himself RG, perhaps. The precedent was auspicious. There were the poets Auden, Yeats, Eliot, cummings and Hilda Doolittle, who was known only by her initials, HD; in the critical field where Tranter proposed to earn his daily bread, there were the fathers of Cambridge criticism F. R. Leavis and I.
A. Richards; more recently there were the prolific A. N. Wilson and D. J. Taylor, the last two, he believed, not much older than himself. How many more copies might A. V. Woolf have sold if so called? In the end, however, he decided it was more original as well as more honest to stick with one.

  Then, at the Outpost Christmas drinks party, Tranter met a literary agent and persuaded him to look at the novel, now finished and entitled The Potter’s Tale. A publisher, not one he would personally have chosen, accepted the book and paid him £2,000 for it. It received some friendly reviews but sold only 221 copies in hardback, including fifty-eight to libraries and twelve to the author’s mother; no paperback offer was forthcoming. There was a rumour that it was going to be on a long-listing for the Handivac, but this turned out to be false.

  Tranter experienced the disappointment at first as an intermittent wave or spasm, but over the following months it changed into crystalline, insoluble bitterness. This was the life event that was exactly the right, or the wrong, shape to fit into a recess in his character. As a child, he had been cheerful and reasonably benevolent in the playground and classroom. He lacked the confidence to be outgoing, but he had friends enough, he was good at schoolwork, he liked pop music and football; if he wasn’t in with the cool set, he wasn’t quite out of it either. It was no surprise to his teachers or family when he won a place at Oxford; he was good at lessons and had a particularly sympathetic feeling, even at the age of eighteen, for the Victorians.

  He found that university, although he liked it, made him develop a defensive layer. He thought he was as clever as the other students, but many of them had a social ease that baffled him. He bought a tweed jacket and a tie from a shop in Turl Street, but they didn’t do the trick and he went back to jeans and a safe donkey jacket. He joined societies, went to meetings, spoke up in tutorials; he hung out in the King’s Arms. It was not a disaster, but he never seemed to be asked to anything enjoyable or glamorous. He knew these people and they weren’t unkind to him; they remembered his name, in either pronunciation; they allowed him to attach himself to the fringe of their pub or college bar sessions, they smiled when he made a joke and they let him buy them beer; but they never condescended actually to invite him to anything. He changed from drinking lager to gin and tonic; he took up smoking, and chose the brand most popular with his friends. He gave up supporting West Bromwich and switched to Arsenal or Liverpool, depending on who he was with; he even considered dropping English and taking up philosophy. But over three years he found that whatever he did, he remained peripheral. This disappointment generated a low but resilient anger in him. One day, without actually putting it into words, he swore that however long it took, he would have his place in the light. Until then, in the short term, so far as university was concerned, he discovered one consolation: he could use what he’d learned from the people who shunned him to discomfit in turn those – and there were many of them – more ill at ease than he was.

  Tranter’s final session with Farooq al-Rashid was a revision course of all that they had done thus far. A minicab, paid for by Knocker, picked him up from the station and dropped him off at eleven o’clock. Lucy, the Brazilian girl, opened the door and showed him down the passageway to Knocker’s study.

  The genial old fool rose up from behind his gigantic computer screen and held out his hand in greeting. Tranter felt glad that this was their last encounter. Mr al-Rashid may well have been a billionaire for all he knew, but he had very little feeling for books.

  ‘How did you get on with The Secret Agent?’ said Tranter.

  Knocker frowned. ‘It wasn’t as exciting as I’d expected. I found it rather difficult to get through.’

  ‘That’s Conrad for you. You can take the Pole out of the Ukraine, but you can’t expect him to write English.’

  ‘Do you think Her Majesty will have read Conrad?’

  ‘Probably not. Let’s not stress about it. What about A Maid’s Revenge?’

  ‘Ah yes. Your friend Alfred Huntley Edgerton again. I preferred Shropshire Towers.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose that’s his Sergeant Pepper. And what did you make of “Fra Lippo Lippi”?’

  ‘I liked it,’ said Knocker. ‘Was that right?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right. Some people think Browning’s what you put in gravy, but I think he’s the authentic voice of Victorian England.’

  Lucy came in with some tea, apple juice and a box of dates. Tranter suspected that Knocker had looked at no more than a couple of pages of most of the books he’d recommended. He was far from certain that Knocker could actually read.

  ‘All right,’ said Tranter. ‘Let’s do a role play, shall we? I’ll be the Queen.’

  ‘Shall I go down on one knee?’

  ‘You’re not being knighted, are you?’

  ‘No, I ... But I don’t know how it’ll be.’

  ‘Have you read any good books lately, Mr al-Rashid?’

  ‘Oh yes, Your Majesty. Very many. The winner of this year’s Café Bravo prize was especially good, I thought.’

  ‘Oh really? I thought it was typical subcontinental, sub-Rushdie, look-at-me-aren’t-I-refreshing and tragically not copy-edited bollocks.’

  ‘She probably won’t say—’

  ‘Not bollocks, probably. But what do you say to the rest?’

  Knocker coughed. ‘The vitality of the modern British novel owes a good deal to the way that it has been energised by writers from the former colonies who have brought a fresh eye and a multicultural sensibility to—’

  ‘It sounds as though you’re reciting it,’ said Tranter.

  ‘I thought you told me to learn it by heart.’

  ‘I did. But you could make it sound a bit more, you know, spontaneous.’

  ‘Shall I try it again?’

  ‘No. Let’s do some quick-fire opinions.’

  They had been practising this exchange for some weeks; it involved Tranter royally saying ‘D’you like x?’ and Knocker coming back with a swift and polished reply.

  ‘D’you like Hardy?’

  ‘I find him over-determ ... determinas—’

  ‘Deterministic.’

  ‘Over-deterministic,’ said Knocker, ‘but one must admire his true feeling for his native Wessex countryside.’

  They went through the classics, some foreigners and then came up to date with recent authors. It gave Tranter pleasure to see Knocker repeat his own dismissals.

  He asked about a much-liked modern.

  ‘Should learn the difference between “may” and “might” if she wants to be taken seriously,’ said Knocker with confidence.

  ‘Good.’ Tranter next offered a venerated American.

  ‘Prose so muscle-bound you need a forklift truck to turn the page. Is that right?’

  ‘Spot on,’ said Tranter, and dangled an African laureate.

  ‘Hmm,’ said Knocker confidently. ‘Do you think he took a pledge at school never to use an adjective?’

  The final part of the lesson was a recitation. Tranter had guessed that the Queen’s favourite poet might be John Betjeman, and he had made Knocker learn a couple of his poems.

  Knocker found it easier to remember the lines if he stood up and walked about.

  “‘From the geyser ventilators/Autumn winds are blowing down”,’ he began.

  As he stood in the window, the light came through from the hills beyond, going up towards Epping Forest, illuminating the pale brown of his face and the dark pools of his concentrating eyes.

  “‘On a thousand business women/Having baths in Camden Town.”’

  As he watched Knocker’s thick black eyebrows spliced with thin grey wires and saw the Adam’s apple drag up in his throat, Tranter, for no reason, found himself suddenly thinking of where this man and his ancestors had come from – an agricultural valley in Pakistan, he presumed. He had an involuntary picture of bloody British partition; of religion and greed and the violence, over centuries; and of millions of the rural poor like the al-Rashids – bullied by
Arab Muslims pushing east and by raiding Mongols forging south and west, then exploited by their own people.

  “‘Waste pipes chuckle into runnels,/Steam’s escaping here and there,”’ Knocker’s voice went on, proud and even. “‘Morning trains through Camden cutting/Shake the Crescent and the Square.”’

  Betjeman’s words, and their thoughts for the businesswomen in their baths, had a strange effect on Tranter, as they issued through Farooq al-Rashid’s mouth. The vision he had was no longer of the Mirpur Valley but of the city of London – of himself and this Pakistani illiterate as cells in a giant body, celebrated by the verse of a second-generation Dutch immigrant. What a pair of old frauds we are, he thought.

  Tranter looked out at the long view and pictured Havering, then Epping to the north-west, then round to Edmonton, where a local stablemaster, Thomas Keats, had fathered a rumbustious boy called John; and south to Camden Town where in Dombey and Son Dickens had described the terrifying steam trains as they emerged snorting from the burrows of the old city while the cuttings were blasted out through Chalk Farm ...

  “‘Early nip of changeful autumn,”’ Knocker went on, as though in a trance, “‘Dahlias glimpsed through garden doors,/At the back precarious bathrooms/ Jutting out from upper floors” ...’

  ... And the stone tenement steps that led to Orwell’s flat in Canonbury where he was smoking himself to an early grave, the dreadful common at Clapham over which Greene had driven his narrow, loveless characters; and, more than this, the grimy streets of Lewisham and Catford that, so far as Tranter knew, still waited for a voice.

  As Knocker’s baritone with its Yorkshire vowels and Kashmiri consonants (‘vaste pipes’) came to an end, Tranter’s vulpine features began to soften in the short December light.