The first novel

The First Time is a crucial marker.  Whether it be a first lover, first job, or first child, these first events serve to map out our chronology.  They grip and bite into our past like pitons up the face of a mountain.  Recently I achieved another first; my First Novel.  Not of course the first that I have read, or even the first that I have written; but the first written by a friend touching on matters in which I figured.

The Devil's Looking Glass: how like Simon to choose an obscure quotation from an obscure poet - Butler - that somehow has all the quaint dated contemporaneity of a Dennis Wheatley thriller.  The book is actually a PhD manqué - the thesis Rees should have written on seventeenth century scientific prose.  It even boasts a splendid collection of recondite epigrams which serve as ersatz academic footnotes.  Throughout the novel, he works in God knows how many strange-but-true facts about Aztec gods, mineralogy, Restoration eccentrics, Italian liqueurs, parapsychology and much else.  If a criticism can be made of the book, and there are several, notably that it has no heart - presumably torn out with an obsidian dagger by moonlight - it is that it wears its manifest erudition too heavily. But then Rees, while always fascinating, was never the subtlest of chaps.

But beyond all this skilful skullduggery, the book is something rather more touching, an elegy to the Varsity life.  In this respect it has much in common with The Masters, Glittering Prizes, and a host of other novels, published and unpublished, which represent the bitter fruits of an unrequited love-affair with Oxbridge.  We have the echoing pillared courts, the obligatory donnish in-fighting, the sublimely ivory-towered isolation from the outside world.  But it is not even for these elements that I find the book so moving.

It is for the way that Simon's own voice, his richly modulated unstoppable story-telling, breaks through time and again, often with words, phrases, facts and sometimes conversations which sound so familiar.

I was present at the actual birth of one draft of one chapter - I have no idea which, even assuming that first Blitzkrieg composition survived through to the printed page.  What I remember most about it was the insouciance and fecundity of Rees.  With barely an "Oh, excuse me, must do my daily chapter," he sat at his long-suffering Olympia - this was before the days of his huge, improbable and ultimately handicapping word-processor - and knocked off the requisite words.

But it was not because of that the novel hit home.  It was the way many of Simon's daily preoccupations over several years had been melded into a novel.  From the fabric of Trinity, dons and their famous foibles, to his musical knowledge and activities, and of course his half-hearted research.  I noted too the aspersions cast on Ford Escorts: I do not think it is a coincidence that Rees was no lover of my car or my driving.  On one other point I am less sure, and my feelings are more ambivalent.  I am aware of several Rees short-stories based fairly directly on events from my life at that time.  But what should I make of the fact that one of the main characters in the novel is called by the rare and half-familiar name Gwyn?

(4.2.96)

Index

Talking to myself

After my Part III exams at Cambridge, I decided to teach myself German.  I did this in my room at the top of the Queen’s tower, opposite the chapel and clock tower.  From its windows you had one of the best views in Cambridge, looking out over the plush sward of Trinity’s Great Court, with the Great Hall on the left and the porters’ lodge in the top right-hand corner.  During the month that I had to learn the language, I would often sit in the alcove, watching the world go by, and talking to myself.

In fact I spent most of that period talking to myself in one way or another.  Much of the time it was in German, since I need the sound of a word to learn it.  Interspersed with my constant repetition of words and phrases, mostly out loud, I would commune with myself on nothing at all.  Since my friends had already gone down, I rarely spoke to anyone else.  I can honestly say that during that month I had some of the best conversations ever, and found my mind pullulating with ideas and thoughts.

Similarly, I have found other times of my life when I have been alone fruitful in this way.  Whether this was when I had just moved down to London, and was unemployed and so had nothing better to do, or when I was on holiday wandering the Greek islands, at such times I have found anything and everything was liable to send my thoughts racing after some mental butterfly, only to relinquish it at the sight of another, yet more brightly coloured or elusive.

I remember those times with fond affection, partly because like most memories, they are bathed in a warm glow of nostalgia which smooths out the rough edges of inconvenience, and partly because like youth, they represent a lost time to me.  Today, in the hustle and bustle of my very full yuppie life, I am rarely on my own and never idle.  It is therefore a long time since I have had a really good heart to heart with myself.

Though my present lifestyle has ample compensations, I do miss this talking.  I miss the immediate understanding I can offer, the absence of any need to fill in details or sketch their background. Instead, I can proceed with concocting thoughts at their most fresh and daring.  With myself, the feedback is so instant that the inspiration is rarely lost.  Bouncing an idea back and forth between my split yet unitary self is like an image in two parallel mirrors, shadowing itself to infinity.

I feel less fecund as a result. My thoughts and inspirations are few and far between, I must husband them.  Inevitably my work eats up many.  However, at least those that are left, poor as they may be, become all the richer for being rare and more occasional.  Perhaps that is why I produce these essays when I can, why they represent no drudgery, but an almost self-indulgent luxury.  Often they are sparked off by one of these little illuminations.  After chewing on it for a few minutes, savouring its particular insight, enjoying the afterglow of minor creativity, I will often try to fix it by committing it to a written form.  In the course of filling the page, new thoughts may, sometimes, emerge.  If these thoughts start to match up to the initial inspiration, I begin to feel again the old joys of the interior monologue.  And so do I.

(22.6.86)

Index