Arts and Culture

I am always weak enough that the style in the novel I’m reading seems to unfold itself in my own, or perhaps it is that I have no style, and am only the nobody who is always swept along by a gust that is not his own.

Ill in bed for the last few days, it’s Pack My Bag that I read, and my thoughts turn weakly to the times I passed through the social world which Henry Green remembers. ‘I passed’, but that suggests agency too great – wasn’t it rather that I was always being taken up by one group or another, and that, by a kind of elevation, because I was blank enough that others could project on me desires of their own and recognise me thus, I was caught into the whirl of a social set?

I remember being pinned down by my arms on a bed in a country house by a girl with a double barrelled first name and a double barrelled second name – only for a moment, and part of another drama – that of making her boyfriend jealous, whose family also owned a country house like the one in which I found myself.

The girl had felt slighted, so she had come upstairs to find me, and what was I doing there? She was too young to have asked herself that; I was simply there, and to be drawn into her drama. Of course her boyfriend – was he her boyfriend? – noticed nothing, and had long since retreated with his friend to play snooker.

The house was all full of terrible knick-knacks, and in the snooker room, books had been bought by the yard to fill the shelves. The girl (another one) who had invited me there – and I had no idea that her house was different to any other, and was amazed to be told, as the taxi driver took us up the hill, that what appeared a small village of old houses was in fact part of the one estate, hers, or her family’s, my host – did so from a sense that I would add something to the drama.

Did I disappoint her? I remember, the first night, entering one of the largest rooms I have ever been in, with thirty foot ceilings and great high glass doors and great curtains pulled across them, there to find some men – boys – in dinner jackets, cooking for us. I was taken up to my room, and was to change. I had only a jacket I bought at a jumble sale, with a rip in the back.

Down I came, and it was dinner. We all drank a great deal, our hostess became ill, and slowly the intrigues began to unfold. Three men and two women – girls, all of us younger than 20. So this really was a weekend in a country house! And these really were a ‘set’! But of course they were not; our hostess’ family were new money, and had bought the estate all at once, and filled it with knick-knacks and books bought by the yard.

The real aristocrat amongst us said nothing of this, it was rather one of the girls, very snobbish since she hardly belonged to this world, who laughed at the unkempt maze in the gardens and at the ragged lawns. She was unimpressed. But the aristocrat, for whom her remarks were intended, was involved with the other girl. It seemed a complicated affair. Of course they were both very young.

Sometimes, later on, he would visit me in my room in the halls at university, and I would play him CDs as he looked through my books. I always thought he should be given things, he who gave so much to everyone else – true, he could afford it, but I always felt he was ashamed of his forced generosity, and wished someone could reciprocate in turn, and in their own way.

But this never lasted long; one girl or another would always come to find him, and if he always invited me on trips in his old car, which he used to drive the length of England to visit one old friend or another, it was the girls who always charmed their way in, taking all he bought them and demanding more. He disappeared back into his own circles, in the end, leaving his girlfriend behind (but she was never really his girlfriend).

On another occasion, found one day photocopying, I was taken up by another girl, who thought to involve me in her group – jaded, urbane Londoners with boyfriends much older than themselves, and who already tired of what they felt life had to offer them. Every night, for a time, I would be visited and they would speak of those minute social manoeuvers – perceived slights and insults they had borne or dealt to others around us.

Social climbers again – but this time measuring themselves by the cool, by a kind of reserve. They’d seen everything! They’d travelled everywhere! And where had I been, compared to them? And what was my connection to this or that London set? In the end, happily enough, I was dropped; they stopped visiting me: I was going out with someone they thought beneath me; I was snubbed in nightclubs, and this made me laugh.

I had been caught in an intrigue; I had disappointed them – or was it that I had moved from a diffuse set of possibilities – who was I? who was I to go out with? – that they might allow to be realised in various ways, to a person attracted to that kind of girl (the wrong kind)?

But that romance soon ended, and I was on my own again, to be picked up by the Young Conservatives, with whom I watched the General Election in 1992, laughing on my own when Chris Patten lost his seat. I was told the Young Conservatives thought me someone worth getting to know.

To be worth knowing – why not? – I was bored and romanceless, so I let them come round and smoke cigars in my room. How passive I have always been! Still, it was interesting to find out later what became of them all – one retired by 30, the other working in an off license, and to be caught up in speculation as to why one person succeeded and another did not.

For my part, of course, I had no hope of succeeding; I was a disaster, and I so depressed my poor university friends that I told them I was going abroad to teach for a year, when really I returned to the country after less than a week, having failed to find work and even the desire to find anything at all. Back – and to unemployment – but at least free for a few years from my friends who, in those years of recession, were doing much better, I thought, than me.

But wasn’t I, always, for them, some kind of absence, an open space of possibilities, occupying a position into which they could imagine occupying themselves? I was usually treated as one of their kind, whatever kind they might be.

Much later, returning to study, there was another period of being taken up, another crowd who desired that I was one of them and that I desire as they did. Once, ill, they came round to tend me like nurses; I was grateful for that.

I was figured as an older brother, I think – they were undergraduates, and I a postgraduate, and deemed wiser and older for that reason. And didn’t I belong to the world of the Arts? of Culture? That was my passport to their world, after I was 20 and had read a little, and to all the sets. Art and Culture, which still had a value in their world.

But of course, I fell away from that last set, too, when for a few months I was ill with some vague, unspecified malady. Days in bed – weeks lolling in the summer sun – and gradually a return to the world no longer populated by them, the posh and the would-be posh, to whose world I would not have to return for another ten years.

Arts and Culture: I began to read, before turning 20, under the influence of another, bohemian set who, I think, gave me the push to read by seeming so well informed themselves. Didn’t one know Samuel Beckett (‘Sam’ as she called him; he died at this time)? Hadn’t another lived a few weeks in the backrooms of Shakespeare & Co.?

That was a time marvellous until I they told me how young they felt they were, how their tastes would change, and that our tastes now were not to be trusted. They were too young and I was too young, I think they decided, and though we were all to live together in a big house, I pulled out, thinking I wouldn’t care for that moment, of which I already saw signs, in which they would pull away from Arts and Culture into another life.

Wasn’t it then I met one of their brothers, and knew? Wasn’t it then I saw that Arts and Culture was around them as they were raised, that they breathed in the dust of old civilisation with such ease because they hadn’t pushed their way into them like explorers unhappy with this world, but as they’d been taken there by their parents, university dons and artists? Taken there as to the tropical houses at Kew Gardens to be acclimatised and to know their way around, but only as they’d been shown in advance, only as it was their birthright.

When one of them left a note on my door in the halls to which I’d moved instead of living with them, I ripped it down, no doubt resentfully, and I think I regret doing that still, and that we all fell out of contact. But I thought I had to find my own way into the hothouse. Hadn’t one of them, the most generous, the one I remember the most tenderly, said she would rather I read whatever I pleased, that I follow my own course? And so I did, stumblingly, and over many years.

I think it was my 20th birthday I passed with her in the park. She’d remembered it, and bought me a gift – I can’t remember what it was, though a few months earlier, she’d got me the Notebooks of Malte Lauridds Brigge in an edition I still have. I even wrote to her once, when I found her name online, one lonely night a few years ago. What happened to her? But what happened to me, by the same token, or to any of us, who are growing older as part of a generation for whom things seem less sure than previously, though no doubt this is what every generation thinks?

The Young Conservatives used to buy books from me, which I sold to buy more books. I lived on pancakes, which I supplemented with what I found in fridges in other parts of the hall. I put brown paper all over my walls and wrote formulae on them to help me in my exams. I threw my mattress out and slept on the hard surface beneath.

I read Ted Morgan’s biography of William Burroughs with the curtains drawn against the sun, and dreamt of escape. When I heard my name called outside and a knock at the door, I didn’t answer. The bureau was open, and I took notes from Musil and from Proust as I read. I bought a creamy-covered copy of Finnegan’s Wake, and read it alongside a book that promised to be its key.

I think it was then I found a translation of Ungaretti’s poems – and Quasimodo’s. And I’m sure it was then that Stirrings Still came out, soon after Beckett’s death. ‘What Is The Word?’: the last poem, printed in very large type in one Sunday supplement or another.

Arts and Culture: weren’t those my heydays, with the university library open before me? But all I remember are the brown-papered walls and the hard bed and a kind of mania as the examinations approached. And when we left university, I knew some of us would fall from those circles of which we were part; it was a recession; what chance was there?

Didn’t I meet other ghosts at jobfairs, queuing to find out about PGCEs? Ghosts – former students – the more ghostly for that they appeared, now, without context. Some of us were adrift, and wasn’t it unbearable to see one’s own drifting in another, as in a mirror?

Meanwhile, others were busy becoming doctors and lawyers and accountants; other had disappeared into the City, until there were only a few of us left, blown hither and yon by what training courses were available to us or were not, by job applications and failed interviews.

A different life, a fallen one, and now the privileged were very far above us, and moving further away like the stars that, astronomers say, are moving away from us at half the speed of light. To have fallen, and have found oneself at the bottom – now books became truer company, and I read them as I thought the rich could not.

That is, I reread instead of read, and went over again books in the Quartet Encounters series – Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet amongst them – and then over again the volumes in the handsome Princeton collected Kierkegaard – and then again over Rilke, and Ungaretti and Mandelstam and Tsvetayeva. No doubt fantastical, distorted readings.

Bernhard was being translated then, and Henry Green republished, in too expensive-to-buy Harvill editions. Arts and Culture – but now on the side of the poor, not the rich. And wasn’t I making my own path? Difficult, then, before the internet. Difficult, great lulls, then frantic activity, say, for example, buying up all of Mishima after seeing the film that I caught by chance on Channel 4.

But now again I was no one at all. Back in my parent’s house in the back bedroom that looked over the fence to the large houses opposite. Back and my dad retired very early and unemployment all around me, that great wave of recession that finally caught the middle classes, I was absent to my friends who thought I was away.

I had returned almost as soon as I’d gone, having met the Mediterranean sun for the first time and thought it too hot. Gone, and returned, secretly, even as my friends thought I had gone elsewhere to weather the recession.

Sometimes, later, we saw each other again. To whom did I lend Troyat’s Tolstoy? I remember; I suppose she has it still. How many years has it been? I know she works for Glaxo, and drives up and down the motorway. Perhaps she’s married now, and has found her way into the Chelsea set as she wanted. But I think she is unmarried and on the edges still as she was then.

Whatever happened to that big biography, and to the copy of The Thief’s Journal I made her buy, and was surprised – infinitely surprised – that she read it at once, and even liked the same passage as me, when he sees the little genet flowers as he crosses the border from one country to another? And didn’t she remember, too, the line, ‘I wandered through that region of myself I called Spain?’

I remember repeating that line to another friend, in whose house I convalesced as I crossed the border separating a life on the fringes of sets and groups, and another life, in which I think I still live now. How many people I’ve known! Through how many sets I’ve passed!: two exclamations as I wonder at how very long life is.

Of course there are no flowers with my name, but it does seem I cross a hill similar to the one Genet describes, only this time there is no end to the crossing, which passes across a plateau joined to the borders of every country. Where will end? When will I descend to the valleys, or is this life, up here on the plateau, where life always seems never to have begun?