Bury My Heart At W. H. Smith’s. Brian Aldiss

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СКАЧАТЬ scene. Hugh Macdonald, editor of Marvell’s poems and other works, always grumpy, but fun to imitate behind his back. Geoffrey Grigson, poet, producer of books, never satisfied with our service. Many celebrated dons, the most engaging of whom was probably J. I. M. Stewart. Stewart was busy installing himself in Christ Church when I arrived in my shabby suit to conquer Oxford. He was writing a series of Shakespearian or mock-Shakespearian plays for the BBC Third Programme, then at its cultural zenith. Years later, Stewart must have felt a little rueful when he found Tom Stoppard tilling the same ground more profitably in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. But by then he was well embarked on his second or third career as detective writer Michael Innes.

      On a Saturday afternoon, when Oxford fell into a comfortable doze, and those who wished to curl up with a good book were already doing so, A. V. Bond entered Sanders.

      He descended from somewhere called ‘The Cotswolds’. I put the term in quotation marks because I knew no more of the Cotswolds than the name; I had never been there. Mr Bond called himself ‘The Poet of the Cotswolds’.

      He was roughly dressed, garbed generally in a long black coat wrapped tight round his wiry frame, as if he were about to be shipped to Patagonia, where warmth counts for more than style. To me, he was the Ancient of Days, or at least of an Afternoon, his sparse white hair tormented by the memory of Cotswold typhoons – or whatever they had up there – a straggly white beard, and piercing blue eyes.

      Mr Bond was dramatic. He entered the shop like a thinned-down Wolfit, one arm raised in salute, and immediately began to talk. His chief target was Mrs Y, who eagerly devoured his every word. She would sit with legs crossed, elbows propped on desk, and hands clasped under her chin, looking up at him as if to convey visually the message that Earth, and the Cotswolds in particular, had not anything to show more fair than Mr Bond.

      I too was fascinated. It was my first poet. He would declaim in the shop, and Mrs Y would clap prettily, and say afterwards, ‘Of course he’s such an amusing man and so gifted.’

      His poems were printed by Mr Vincent, a local printer with a shop in King Edward Street, and sold at a penny a time. I remember none of his poems, unless he was guilty of a sonnet beginning ‘The heart in wonder like a lonely wren …’ I have retained none of his little sheets, unfortunately.

      Mr Sanders once told Mr Bond a dirty joke, which profoundly shocked him. He left the shop, returned to the Cotswolds, and did not reappear for a month.

      His open-air aspect convinced me that he must inhabit a mountainside, and a gorse bush he had made comfortable. I was disappointed later both by the extreme couthness of the Cotswolds – which resemble burial mounds more than mountains – and the discovery that the poet lived in Stow-on-the-Wold. I’m sure he was designed for the Pennines at least or, failing that, the Quantocks.

      The visitor I liked least was Evelyn Waugh.

      Waugh I observed with a particular interest. At school, we had been taught English by a fine product of Trinity College Dublin, H. C. Fay. Fay, known as Crasher after the sound of his hobnailed boots which he wore at all times, modelled himself on George Bernard Shaw, and had something of Shaw’s wit. His wit was sharp. It was truthful. It often transfixed us. But there was no malice behind it. We liked it. And we admired Fay – less because of his learning than because he had once, in class, told us that his cat was too fat to climb through her door hole into the house because she was pregnant again.

      Sensation! The word ‘pregnant’ had never been spoken by an adult in our presence before. Fay was treating us like human beings. We were grateful. From then on, we were on Fay’s side, and content to be transfixed regularly by his wit.

      His virtues consisted in more than the possession of a pregnant cat. He was sympathetic to my wish to become a writer. In his class, I was granted a privilege. Instead of a weekly essay, Crasher Fay allowed me to write a weekly story. While the rest of them were turning out their constipated page and a half on ‘My Visit to the Dentist’, or ‘Why I Love Rugger’, or ‘How to Treat a Hotwater Bottle’, I could plunge into the real thing. Imagination.

      Fay was indulgent about the stories he received, though they were more fantastic and would-be humorous than he liked. One Monday morning in class, his patience stretched to breaking point. He seized up the story I had submitted and waved it furiously in the air.

      ‘Aldiss,’ he said, ‘if you do not mend your ways, you are going to end up as a second Evelyn Waugh.’

      I blushed the colour of ambition.

      Waugh’s early novels were pure delight. Meeting Waugh in the flesh was a different matter, at least if one was victim material, a bookseller’s assistant. As I remember him, Waugh was always in a bad mood. Perhaps it was because he was writing Brideshead Revisited, which is where he went off the gold standard. Later, Waugh redeemed himself a hundredfold with The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, a brave, funny and perceptive book. Largely autobiographical, I understand.

      He entered Sanders like some minor devil, small, bounderish, rosy on the wrong bits of cheek, with a smell not of brimstone but an equally noxious mixture of cigars and lavender water. He wished to see Mr Sanders – so imperiously wished to see Mr Sanders that anyone less than Mr Sanders was hardly worth a glance. A flick of the cigar was all we could hope for.

      Sanders would appear in his usual genial way and sweep Waugh upstairs. They would emerge later, Waugh clutching some luxuriously bound volume of landscape engravings, both laughing. I believe he once had a very nice Boydell’s Thames from Sanders. They would part at the door, glowing false bonhomie on both sides. Waugh was a bad payer. And inaccurate with his cigar ash.

      John Betjeman was much more pleasant. He would arrive giggling and steaming in an old coat with a fur collar which might once have done duty for Bud Flanagan. His hair was curly and somewhat enveloped in an old felt hat. He filled the shop with formidable goodwill, made himself pleasant to all, and signed a copy of his poems for me.

      ‘Such an interesting man,’ cooed Mrs Y, after one of his appearances. ‘And so fond of Oxford. He’s like me, he loves beauty.’

      Betjeman came not to buy but to sell. He was then living near Wantage. He reviewed for the now defunct Daily Herald, where he was bombarded with the very sweepings of publishers’ lists. Why they sent him such rubbish I do not know, unless Bloomsbury had an exceptionally poor view of the Daily Herald. The gaudier the cover, the more likely it was to be despatched to Wantage and a labouring Betjeman.

      But Frank Sanders would be all smiles, and would go out into the High Street with Betjeman, to look in his van.

      Reader, this is not mere anecdotage, please. You are being treated to social history. (Besides, what if Summoned by Bells should, in another century, rank with Moore’s Lalla Rookh? In his day, some good judges placed Betjeman among our best English poets, with his touching mixture of dread, humour and inspired pedestrianism). Stop and consider the implications behind that last paragraph.

      Betjeman drove up the High in his old van and stopped outside Sanders. He then came into the shop for a half-hour’s chat, after which he strolled out again with Sanders. We are talking about 1950.

      A little amplification of the point. I was a success at Sanders. After less than a year there, Sanders allowed me to dress the window every Monday. We mixed antiquarian, second-hand and new books, perhaps on a theme. Natural History, say. Bill Oliver wrote the tickets in his neat hand.

      Dressing the window was enjoyable; from there we could watch the academic world go by. Every Monday morning, a tubby old man with white hair СКАЧАТЬ