There’s no doubt I’ve always felt an attraction to those who feel part, whether by an accident of birth or by some later process, of official culture – of that world of books, of music, of painting, and of travel, being able to compare this European capital with that – even if, at the same time, I always felt it was I who belonged to the new world, the new flattening out, that great work of destroying what has been.
Wasn’t I one of the cultural levellers? I loved the old world – old Europe – but didn’t I hate it too: didn’t I enjoy the great destruction and falling away even as I affected to despise it? Perhaps this was simply an imaginary revenge.
For the years I lived with the monks, all revenge was imaginary: wasn’t I always polite and pleasant, even when it was as though they had lain in wait for me when I came downstairs in the morning and they pressed me to tell them what it was I thought I was doing? What was I writing? what was my project? and did I really think it was philosophy? Did I – really – think – it – was – philosophy, the words dragged out like that in incredulity?
For my part, I tried to say very little, and I knew never to leave a book downstairs for the monks in their jolly joshing to tear apart. And never to leave a chapter draft or a paper draft – never to leave anything behind, doubly difficult when the only working printer in the house was the one downstairs.
The landlord of the house, himself not a monk, had said, quoting Dr Johnson, only a fool writes for anything but money, and so he set to writing vast fantasy novels linked in a multi-volume saga. I was made to read the first one – nine hundred pages – and told him what I thought: it was bad, the imaginary world existed only in the head of its author, but for the reader, thin gruel.
Its author was impressed enough that I became his editor, and he made great readjustments, writing quickly – as always, one draft was enough – he wrote his well known book on a well known philosopher in 5 days; he wrote academic papers, when he was still asked to write them, in a single morning; when he broadcasted on the radio, he needed no notes, but only a single take, his voice on Thought For The Day being much higher than it was in ordinary life.
One draft – I saw him write another 900 page book in three weeks, this one a lot better, and it was decided that as well as an editor I should also be an agent, and we sent a section of the manuscript hopefully to publishers. A series of radio plays had been more succesful, however – nothing of my landlord’s was published, but the plays – a whole series of them, the manuscripts of which disappeared with his death – were heard and loved.
Hadn’t he received fanmail? Hate mail, too, and sometimes on a daily basis, until he invited the one who hated him out to lunch, and off they went and came back friends. That was his generosity and his bravery. I’d said: he’ll stab you, and he, then let him, but they came back friends after a long lunch, and there was no more hate mail.
He was a big man, my landlord, but bigger still was the millionaire priest from whom, it was said, every two years a whole side was carved away like a kebab. He drove a people carrier before that was common, and brought with him one of his girlfriends: a frail sixteen year old he’d picked up when he taught at a rough school, a match to the other frail sixteen year old he kept in his great house, which his wealth had allowed him to fill with exquisite antiques: but wasn’t he too large to sit at any of the splindly chairs?
In his backyard, he kept a pack of dobermans, for he lived in a rough area. One day a girlfriend told the police about the gun he also kept for fear of attack and he was jailed; later, he said he settled happily in prison, this vast man, who wheezed when he had to mount a single step, speaking calmly and with great simplicity with those around him, for that was his charm, his grace.
Like my landlord, he had arched feet and could move quietly and swiftly, and like him, again, he was a man of presence and charisma: a certain man, who stood foursquare on the earth, knowing his entitlement. Once my landlord took his friend out for a lunch of dim sum, and he had ordered, the millionnaire, everything on the menu, and drank a great deal and then pissed in our front garden because he couldn’t hold it in. And he did this with grace, with certainty, though that seems impossible in memory.
He was, it is true, only a half-cultured man; the seventeenth century was alive for him, and the eighteenth, but not those that are closer to us. But then he lived in a house where no piece of furniture, no fitting, was older than 1800: that was how he spent the immense wealth he had.
For our part, there was a Jacobean chest in the hall of our house, and around the walls in the room with the oak parquet there were valuable plates mixed in with unvaluable ones: a ruse to stop thieves and coveters of whom there were many in our house, which took in alcoholics and drug addicts who had given up their vice.
In the garden, the sculpture of a saint, but without a head, and the stables, where another tenant and I would go out to sit and look back across at the house asking how we’d ended up living there and how long it was to go on. I would watch him smoke and we would talk about his business, which he ran from the basement of the house, when he was sober and even when he was not, taking apart and reassembling computers – it was always mess – though he always set aside a computer so that I could come down and play games there and keep him entertained.
He liked to chatter and so did I, and he credited me, in his years struggling to be sober, with allowing him to talk about himself in third person and thus see himself from another perspective and not be so serious. The former eco-warrior, star of a Dutch documentary that showed him saving turtles from German tourists in Greece, who would lie their towels on top of the nests from which the turtle young would hatch, had become a lover of meat and fine clothes.
We were Chorlton dandies and known in the cafes for always going round together, chattering in that way we had which kept them amused for it was testament to closeness of being months and years together. In the evening, he would surf for porn and pin pictures on his purple walls, and I would find old country songs on Napster for us to sing along to – a whole New Year’s Eve passed that way, with the monks downstairs baffled by our loud, sober singing.
For their part, the monks were great gossips and planners and bon vivants: one rule was that if a guest had travelled, then the rules of the fast were broken, and all could eat whatever they liked. Only the Copts refused to be indulged thus – we’d shelled prawns for a big lunch, and it fell to me, in the end, to eat what the Copts would not: a whole mound of shellfish, squid and crab and prawns.
I used to offer to wait on the guests, so I could observe them without participating: wasn’t it fun to be on the fringes of this, more ancient world, where, as I suppose with the masons, one with a lowly in the job in the world could still hold high office in the church and command deference from all?
There was even a supposed princess, a primary school teacher who’d inherited the title from her late husband, who went round with a crusader’s sword in the back of her car, sometimes going out to Spain where it was still believed she the legitimate heir to one of the kingdoms of the Byzantine empire. Why Spain? – I’ve no idea, but there was an order she had knighted with her heavy crusaders’ sword and whenever she was in the house, we all called her princess and addressed her with solemnity.
In the top flat, there stayed for a while the prince of another such kingdom, who gave me some title so I could be part of his virtual court. For a long time, he drove a taxi, and had great plans for an import/export business, but then he came into a compound in Zambia where his uncle had a business. His cousin, who was also remembered in his will, tried to murder my co-tenant, cutting his brake cables. And then the great fraud was revealed: it was not a legitimate business that had been inherited, but something much more shady.
The former tenant returned to find a wife to take out there for the long attempt to run an honest business. He is out there still, I think, but without a wife, lost in his compound with his Zulu servants. One of us even went out to see him once and came back shaking his head. ‘What a terrible place …’ Money was being smuggled back in tubes of toothpaste, I knew that. Horrible stories of murder out there – the life of a black Zambian being worth of course infinite less than a white one. And the settlers with their dodgy, exploitative businesses stranded in their compounds and afraid of revolution.
Colourful times, life full of incident, guests and tenants coming and going: I met all kinds of people there, and heard all kinds of stories, which I knew no one would believe if I told them. The house belonged to another century; the Byzantine kingdom hadn’t ended; no philosopher was liked after Thomas Aquinas, except for a scattering of twentieth century analytics – one monk was taught by Grice. These were scholar-monks, men of knowledge and modesty, sight translating from old Greek, Syriac readers, self-taught Sanskrit scholars, lovers of Old English – it was they who seemed to lie in wait for me those mornings.
Who was I that had appeared among them? I would make excuses to got and fetch them sandwiches and pies from the bakery, chosing for myself videos to return for a pound by six o’clock to keep in my room writing. How many films did I see? Two or three a day, and for years, and sometimes running into the apocalypticist in the video aisles who would tell me of the New World Order that was to begin in the year 2000 and of his failed acting career and his unjust expulsion from one of the universities.
Films – to keep me in my room, working, for that was to be the horizon of my life. To work – and night, and day, it was all of what I could afford to think. Keep your eyes down, I told myself. Focus. And drank too many coffees that sent my mood up very high and then plunging down – a mad life I lived in the hope it would be temporary, for weren’t there among the frequent visitors the terrifying ghosts of the academic world, the man who burned his Ph.D. in a fit of madness and was now in a drawn out legal dispute with the university, the formidable scholar whom no one would trust to teach so wayward was she, but who lived in poverty, and from whose husband my landlord would buy paintings in the knowledge it would keep that poor couple afloat – and others, many others, who had crashing and burning in various ways, but whose life still turned around the chance of a job or at least some part time teaching or a settled courtcase?
Many years passed, and I outlasted all the other tenants. Year after year, I was like Hans Castorp in the sanatorium, at the centre of all incidents. I remember that house so well; I wander it now, in memory and it seems realer than the flat in which I live, just as that life, so frustrating then seems richer than mine now.
Castorp left the magic mountain, I think, to die as a soldier in the war where we see him last, and I left to continue my wrecker’s work on old Europe, loving and despising that to which I can’t belong.
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