Three Lost Books

I’m not a generous giver-away of books. Something about the physical presence and psychological resource of a book as a piece of technology brings out the miser in me, the indiscriminate collector. My first copy of Auden or Keats fills me with greedy nostalgia as well as being the readiest resource – I know where the poems are in a way I don’t with other volumes.

But I’m just as avaricious with these feelings by proxy – the coverless copy of Phantom Lobster I may have ‘borrowed’ from David Craig’s office in Lancaster is almost as exciting for me because I can sense or imagine his relation with the book, and, almost as good as that, the lonely edition of James Liu’s Art of Chinese Poetry that Bernhard Widder picked up in that marvellous second-hand shop in Novy Sad, which I somehow persuaded him to make a gift of to me, fascinates not just because it is a fine book, but because I can conjecture about the journey which brought it to that shelf in Voivodina at that time.

So when a volume is renounced, ‘lost’ in the terms of this blog, I’ve come to realise it is almost always a gesture of some significance – a significance I was usually only partially aware of at the time. There are, as ever, three such instances I can recall in any detail.

The first is a How To: the teach yourself classical guitar book which, as far as my reconstituting memory can distinguish fact from desire, took you through the major issues of harmony and composition as well as the minor ones of technique and -- I don’t know -- how to actually play. I received this when sixteen from a dear friend, Debbie, while I was going out with the first love of my life, Diane. I had barely begun to read it (hence the marvellous gauze drawn over its actual contents) when Diane and I found ourselves in yet another of our interminable squabbling rows.

I’ve since learned that all such rows – which recur through the few major love affairs of my life – are invariably my fault. They tend to originate in some emotional issue I can barely articulate, which the other party only discovers in the process that they have very strong opinions about. In other words, I stir up stuff best left alone, then don’t know how to back down. In the early days I hadn’t even gathered that I should back down: I could suddenly see, through gabbling on, both issue and argument in a magnificent clear light and couldn’t bear to go back to the darkness. But the darkness is where happiness lives.

Most of our arguments, because we were teenagers, lived in the cold. We were forever pacing the streets of Broughty Ferry, standing out of the grim wind off the Tay if possible, or sitting on red wooden benches in the full blast if not, or sitting, as on this occasion, in the park on the Monifieth Road, tearing goosebumpy strips off each other.

Diane, having had enough of my exasperating refusal to ever cede any point however minute on whatever matter however trivial, decided that she might as well give up and stomped off home. I, perhaps because the subject had related in some way to our undying devotion to each other and how there could be no others ever, decided to stage a counter-stomp and, as a gesture visible to seagulls and angels alone, left the book.

Presumably I meant something along the lines of: another woman gave me this. But she is a friend: you are my love. Yes, it is a valuable book, but I only have (admittedly bookish) eyes for you. But she had, I should reiterate, already gone.

I doubt she ever had the slightest awareness of the symbolism I was committing to the gaze of eternity, but it had a couple of far-reaching repercussions. One was I gradually understood the deeply reprehensible solipsism of my emotional world; the other was I never really got anywhere with playing the guitar. Although other books were bought, and half-hearted self-teaching recurred on and off over the years, it was never going to be the love of my life.

The second book also involved Debbie at a slightly earlier point. Through one of those mysteries of the commodity which can no longer be reproduced in the world of universal internet access, I happened to be standing in a bookshop prior to departing on (perhaps) a package holiday. I was (maybe) thirteen. I noticed a set of Spike Milligan books which seemed marvellously cheap and intriguing. These, The Little Pot-Boiler, etc, slotted exactly onto the end of my humour spoon, extending it from the parodies of the Moc Gonagall, of which more elsewhere, to just out of reach of the slightly-used realm of Python.

In those days it was obligatory to have one member of your teenage circle who could recite reams of Monty Python sketches verbatim doing all the voices. It was also obligatory for this person to be unable to stop mid-sketch, and to have no neck. I tired of his pauseless, neckless litany, and warmed to the gibberish and scribbles of cut-price Milligan. I therefore bought the full-strength Complete Goon Show Scripts from a school book club, a large squareish yellow-backed book that blew my tiny mind.

Soon I and best pals Neil and Ian were prattling in silly voices into a tape recorder at Neil’s house (where I would later complete my first mural – a reproduction of the cover of Disraeli Gears), and I was planning a 16th birthday celebration with Debbie and our pal Alison, whose parents were having some work done in the extensive basement of their large but modern house also just off the Monifieth Road, in which I would swing a sock filled with custard against a currently-unused wall. This, as with many other things around the age of 16, was more fun in the anticipation than the execution – but still pretty exciting in a manner than doesn’t bear Freudian analysis.

Naturally, I wrote to Mr Milligan to inform him about this, naturally expecting a gleeful endorsement by return post. Two years later, while in my first year at university, while trying to explain my deepest convictions to my new bestest friend, James, for some reason I gave him my copy of the scripts.

Now, when I look back on this donation, I realise that there were a number of intervening moments of significance. At school my interest in absurd nonsense had developed in parallel with a growing involvement in drama. No-one now remembers my Lear of Albion Crescent, though there may still exist somewhere a grainy video of Ernie’s Incredible Illucinations.

But somewhere at the bottom of an unhappy cardboard box there will be the scripts (the first by me, the rest in collaboration) of a one-act farce, a pantomime, and the sketch show An Evening with the Drastic Party, written within the first year of Thatcher’s accession and performed one year later in Edinburgh’s world-famous Bedlam Theatre. It was not during the Festival. Perhaps ten people came all week.

By that point there was a select company of us, including another James, the novelist known as Meek. But sometime in the midst of this I gave away my copy of the Scripts. Why?

The best stab at this I can make is that it was round about the same time that I started going to the Oxford Poetry Workshop, and it was certainly true that by then, though several of my friends were actors (though not James), I had decided not to audition for anything. In other words, as with the guitar, I was renouncing some part of the complex composite that makes up the early psyche. Dear Fry, I was saying (James was, I suppose, a lot posher than my friends from the Ferry), I won’t be playing Laurie.

The third book is in some ways the most intriguing. As part of that unconscious choice to fix on poetry, I attended first the OPW, then added to that the Old Fire Station Workshop (started by Anne Stevenson, and then under Tom Rawling’s acerbic but benign tutelage), then, mid-eighties, we (the unit of writers thus built up) inherited the University Poetry Society and started running a weekly sheet of news and poems the details of which, as with many of my activities by that point, evade me.

Somehow, I seemed to be President of OUPS (a most appropriate-sounding acronym), and we began inviting the most interesting writers we could think of. These were often linguistically-innovative figures from the previous decade or so – Eric Mottram, Tom Raworth, Robert Creeley. And it must have been around this time that I gave my old copy of Norman MacCaig’s selected poems, New Maps and Old, to Keith Jebb, my old pal of the preceding five years.

Now this was not, apparently, a radical gesture, as I had a good number of MacCaig’s individual collections, and simply meant to buy up the rest in due course, so filling in the gaps, as it were. I was, again, informing someone about myself and my background by indirect means. I’d been very lucky to be taught MacCaig’s work at school at the same time as I was renouncing classical guitar and banging custard-filled socks off walls, and MacCaig had a big influence on my first poems – I moved from a metrically-clogged style to what I thought of as stripped-down work.

But round about the mid-eighties, the triple influences of MacDiarmid, W.S.Graham and Frank O’Hara were working in me, and Keith and I embarked on a long series of collaborations, poems in dialogue with each other and others – Nietszche, Ted Berrigan, and the mad Victorian artist Richard Dadd pop to mind – in which MacCaig-like clarity seemed to be the last ingredient in the mix.

Gradually I built up a style in English that incorporated Language Poetry, misheard song lyrics, druggy states and a generally dislocated messthetics that I called Unglish. My Poems in Unglish remains a lost vol: ungathered, incomplete and unpublishable.

But watching the carefully elusive, witty subtlety of the man himself in ‘None A Stranger,’ the programme that celebrated his eightieth back in 1990, I could see that handing that copy of MacCaig over to Keith was equivalent to putting a side of myself away, hopefully for safekeeping.

Found Book Noted

One of the minor miracles of coincidence happened upon me today, though one that needs a bit of set-up to establish its (admittedly deeply subjective) level of astoundingness.

Among the many books, comics and writings of my own which have been archived in my personal Library of the Lost, there was one scifi novel I remember with great fondness from my early teens. Bought from SteppenWoolworths in Broughty Ferry for a derisory sum, it was a time travel adventure starring some special agent battling foes in far-back Mohenjo-Daro. It got swept away in one or another of my mother's clear-outs (following the dusty path to oblivion first trod by my infant companion, a panda, of which more later, and accompanied by many 'Commandos' and 'Astounding Stories'), and all I really remembered about its protecting-the-timelines shenanigans was that the lantern-jawed hero was accompanied by a symbiotic telepathic assistant made of jelly who disguised itself as his shoulderpads.

When the internet made it apparent that everything could be retrieved, reissued, or simply downloaded in a new format, I made a few desultory efforts to track it down, but, without title or author, it was never going to be easy. So an alternative scheme, roughly parallel to the theme of this blog, soon occurred to me: I would write it again. Or rather I would write a scifi novel of my own, based on what I could remember plus what I could fantasise about what I could remember.

Back in January, I was in Sofia after a series of translation sessions with Bulgarian friends and fellow poets, and myself and the poet VBV were strolling from his flat into town. We began chatting about the odd nature of the imaginative quest -- when some goal sets itself you instinctively feel is worth pursuing, and how different such quests are in the era of universal access. We realised we both employed a series of what I used to call (rather grandly) stochastic limitations -- basically self-imposed obstacles -- in order to allow the actual purpose of the quest, which is just contemplation of a theme associated with the goal or object of desire, to take place.

An example of this would be my search for the original seventies editions of the Gene Wolfe fantasy, Book of the New Sun, a book I've since bought in a current edition, but want with the Bruce Pennington covers, as I associate Pennington with Ashton Smith, Lovecraft, and that whole strain of Thirties US Wierd Horror I was so into in my quarantined-off-from-healthy-teenage-stock style youth. So far I have volumes 1 and 4, but I'm quite content to mooch around second-hand bookstalls in Tynemouth Station Market etc until the very thing crops up.

Vassil admitted to similar one-hand-behind-the-back contests with synchronicity, and talked about a project of his which was also to rewrite a novel he'd encountered years before about a fictional revolutionary figure. He knew he could probably pick up a copy through book traders (though at what expense?), but that wasn't really the point.

He mentioned a children's book he'd loved and how, when he'd got hold of it, he was amazed to see how little of what he remembered was actually written down. This, the teeming inner world of the young reader's engagement with even quite sparse text, as long as their imagination could inhabit, renovate and extend that text, was what I was after. (More on that walk elsewhere, later).

Then, only last weekend, I was in London for a couple of meetings, and caught up with old school pal, the novelist James Meek. Among many topics of conversation (bears, plus fours of Shoreditch, narcissism in Vietnamese restaurants, the name of Shakespeare's first theatre, marital contentment and dogs, narrative voice in nineteenth-century Russian fiction, slow reading), I thought I'd throw in the line that I'd finished the fantasy novel he'd told me to write.

In fact, a character in his last novel, We Are Now Beginning Our Descent, begins such a trilogy but abandons it in self-disgust, but it was nonetheless worth it to see his reaction. Yes, I continued, it's a tetralogy, the working title is My Mid-life Genre Crisis, and I'm half-way through the western. None of which is is exactly true (I still have a scene to write of the fantasy one, and I'm no more than a third at the most through the western). But I realised that I'd talked the project a step closer to actuality. It had begun to have textual presence.

I'm followed around by lots of books, plays and poems I'd like to write if I had the time. Some of them are just ludicrously Not Me, some of them are just ludicrous, some of them are perfectly reasonable, and some of them will never happen simply because there is No Time. But they all exert a magnetic pull on my imagination, they all demand to be treated as though they were real texts. And there is a sense in which the concept of text is related more to this idea of presence than to the physical artefact which most people think they're dealing with.

Think, for instance, of that current chattering point, the book you claim to, but have not read. You nonetheless have a degree of awareness of it, you know something of it in synopsis, or through adaptation, or intertextual allusion -- and you feel a degree of guilt about it. You imagine it, perhaps even inhabit it or hear it or have ideas you know can't be terribly accurate about it. You are a kind of reader of your own confabulated version of it, and you have imagined this as though it were text.

That's how it is with my unwritten books, and that is also how it was with this long-lost pulp scifi novel. Because, as you've known from the start, because this was a narrative necessity, I found the book. To be more precise, I took my daughter and dropped her off at a cafe I didn't know, but guessed was probably near this bookshop I'd visited once with the novelist Laura Fish while we were killing time before a school visit. It's called Black Flame Books, and I highly recommend it to you, especially if you have any lost cause searches.

We'd had a cup of coffee in a branch of Boarders earlier, and I'd said to my daughter just to drag me out if I started looking at the books, given the entire bookcase I could fill with my unread purchases. So when I'd parked my car by Black Flame, I'd first of all smiled at the notion of having a browse, then, after a slight swither (was something calling in a high-pitched voice only literate dogs could hear?), in I went.

Almost the first thing I saw was Hemingway's Across the River and Under the Trees, the title of which comes from the dying words of Stonewall Jackson. He (Jackson) was shot by 'friendly fire' returning to his own lines after the Battle of Chancellorsville, but died a few days later not of his wounds but from pneumonia. In his final delirium, after issuing several orders to absent troops, he'd said, 'Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees.'

The previous day I'd seen one of my PhDs, the very talented Tara Bergin, who'd shown me a poem on the death of Stonewall Jackson containing these lines, and, unrelated to this, we'd spoken as we have before about the role played by coincidence for writers, how it is often interpreted as reinforcing a creative decision, and how difficult it is for critics to acknowledge and indeed incorporate such an irrational methodology in their writing. As soon as I saw it I went to have a look at the scifi section, thinking my luck was perhaps in for another volume of the Gene Wolfe.

Soon I began coming across a familiar publisher, Star Books. Many of the Woollenworth vols had been from this publisher -- in fact I found one with their sticker for '9p' still on it, and I realised that there were a lot of books from the period of my missing vol. Still, I didn't quite believe I would, as I inevitably did, come upon not just it but another book in the same (presumably extensive) series. There it was, cover and title instantly familiar though I couldn't have described it seconds beforehand: The Emerald Elephant Gambit by Larry Maddock, 'starring' Agent of T.E.R.R.A. Hannibal Fortune (published by Ace Books in 1967).

The cover is the quickest sketch: a bald man in a sky-blue tunic, heavily armed with bow and quiver over one shoulder, curved sword and dagger dangling from his belt, is clutching the eponymous pachyderm. He is set against as though encased in a custard force field like a giant helmet against a background of vertical green streaks, which looks like it's raining snot. He advances up a gentle incline from left to right whilst looking back over his shoulder at a feathery boneless flying grey thing, limbs trailing, two saucer eyes staring out of the picture from its swirl of a head. Inside the book, it claims the cover is by 'Sergio Leone'. You can see at once why it might appeal to a fourteen year old boy.

I remember being tremendously excited by the setting: historically verifiable while fabulously distant. I was used to Robert Howard's pre-glacial Hyborian age, or Ashton's Smith's dying future Earth of Zothique. Somehow the idea that the author had done some research as well as invention was very appealing. The other volume, as it turns out, The Golden Goddess Gambit, simply ramped up the coincidometer to eleven by being set -- apparently, I haven't read it yet -- in Minoan Crete. Contemporary Crete, of course, is where I wrote my own equally trashy fantasy novel over the last two summers.

Lost beginnings 1, the beginnings

Every night, when I attempt to re-imagine the notebook, I project myself back into the summer, when it sat beneath my Greek pillow; I remove it and look at its cover (the spine repaired by a black masking tape with a slight thready pattern on it, moleskine's black elastic band holding it shut). I open it and pass over the empty space on the first page where the address should have gone, turning instead to the first entry, a note to me from my daughter.

Her handwriting is growing more oval as she enters her teens, but eighteen months ago it still had a childish roundness that's echoed in a few of the phrases. She still calls me 'Dada,' a nomenclature I encouraged past its usual sell-by date because of its echo of Dadaism, and she concludes with my affectionate title for her, 'Best Bug,' the origins of which even I can't quite remember. In between, however, the message has her characteristic insightful maturity.

Although I can't remember the words exactly, I know what their content was: 'this is for you to look at when you're away from home, so that you feel comforted by the thought that I, we [I can't remember whether she includes Debbie in this or not] are thinking of you and love you.' I was touched and reassured by it throughout the time I was able to look at it: it did fulfil a function of bringing my imagination back to my family when I was, sometimes, very far away.

And it still performs that function now, each time I (partially) recall it, before I turn to the last entry, the phrasing of which I can never quite recall, and have to rehearse; then turn to the crucial missing section in the middle, picturing the drawing of Twisty Jesus from Komsomolskaya, remembering how I went through the entries drawing a circle in pencil around each station, so that I'd be able to find them quickly when I finally got round to transcribing them. I was already thinking of each entry as little sketch poems, like the ones I made the first time I visited the Uffizi, later setting them out in lines.

That reminds me that there are other, more subtly misplaced pieces of writing that I still claim to possess:

That journal I kept when I went to Italy for the first time with James Lloyd, with whom I recently got back in touch after a gap of almost thirty years. I typed up its pseudo-Kerouackian passages and called it Travelovel, circulating it around a few friends, one of whom, James Meek, still assumes I keep diaries with that degree of detail. The 'poems' were immediate reactions to the paintings, something I did in approximately the same manner in Rome, though fortunately those were in my pocket sketch book.

That verse play improvised directly onto an old electric typewriter called, ludicrously, Pannini, based on the painter of Roman scenes that montaged Classical ruins and contemporary scenes for the eighteenth century connoisseur market. There were a couple of canvasses in the Ashmolean by him that fascinated me, and the play, such as it was (it was like The Draughtsman's Contract, but with less happening) arose initially from speeches by the statues and bas-reliefs, before adding monologues by Pannini and dialogues between him and his patrons.

The novella Virtual Sideboard, which I wrote on holiday in Lanzarote whilst drinking cheap Spanish market brands of whisky and staying up all night, which consisted of extremely convoluted sentences about the onset of responsibility anxiety in a new parent, and fantasias-within-fantasias, retreats into the world inside the old sideboard that sat for decades in my grandmother's living room and now languishes in the asbestos-roofed garage of my parents' house. Somehow, I never quite got round to typing this up.

These unfinished, unpublishable, never-quite-relinquished pieces of writing are supposedly among my endless heaps of paper. Pannini turned up, briefly, when I got a young writer in to help tidy things up, and I imagine Travelovel is recoverable, not least because the original journal it was taken from still exists. But I haven't seen Virtual Sideboard for years, rather like the synopsis of a verse novel I mislaid when we had to move out of the lighthouse so its floors could be rehung, and never located again, and therefore can never quite get on with writing.

(The atavism of my compositional process lies close to the heart of this project: how can I proceed if I don't have those very scraps of paper?)

There was an incident which still gives me the cold shivers, when I found my research assistant throwing out letters from the 80s because they wouldn't be of immediate interest -- there had been one day previous to that when I hadn't gone through the material being dispensed with, and I keep thinking 'What if?' in a most unjust and ungenerous panic.

So how do these effectively lost pieces compare with the actually gone notebook I try to reconstruct in my dozing mind's eye? How will the piece of work I'll have to produce without it compare to the pieces I could produce if I were to find and edit those missing items?