Bury My Heart At W. H. Smith’s. Brian Aldiss
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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 and a carnation in his button-hole would come up the High from Magdalen College. He pushed a barrel-organ, stopping every so often to play an air. From Sanders’ window, you could hear him as far away as Halliday’s Antiques.
Despite my limited hours for personal pursuits, I was keeping company with the most beautiful girl in Oxford. Her name was Pam, and her hair was a staggering mixture of sunlight, ginger and Pre-Raphaelite red. She liked – we liked between us – the old Neapolitan tune, ‘Come Back to Sorrento’.
The barrel-organ man (I knew his name once) would trundle his barrel-organ up the High, stopping outside Sanders to play ‘Come Back to Sorrento’. Methinks that music hath a dying ping I would climb from the window and pay him lavishly. Sixpence. A sizeable fraction of the three pounds which was my weekly wage. What sentiment! What music! What generosity!
What happiness.
Try parking your barrel-organ, or your van, outside Sanders now.
In those days, children, there were no double yellow lines up the High. Indeed, there was scarcely any traffic. Old Oxford, breathing the last enchantments of the Middle Ages, expired in a death rattle of traffic wardens.
Oh, it sounds great. If you were content to work till seven every evening for three pounds a week. Of course, if you knew you were going to be famous (a secret kept from all but Pam and Mrs Y), that made everything OK.
So there stood Betjeman’s old van, full of trashy books. Sanders would turn them over and finally say, ‘A fiver, John?’
‘Well, I know it’s rubbish, Frank, but someone must read the stuff. I really have to buy a new set of tyres. Couldn’t you make it ten pounds?’
They soon came to an agreement.
The agreement was five pounds.
Bill and I then carried the books into the shop. Betjeman departed.
Sanders kept any books that were at all passable, merging them with our new stock. The rest of the books were crammed into two large suitcases. These suitcases I took up to Foyle’s bookshop in London, where the buyer in the basement would pay me perhaps twenty pounds.
The only novel I can remember salvaging from Betjeman’s collections was Guy Endore’s Methinks the Lady, which I read avidly while immersed at the same time in Pope’s poems and Lewis Mumford’s Condition of Man. I still read several books at once.
This rather shady dealing in review books stood me in good stead later, when I became literary editor of the Oxford Mail.
Christmases at Bill and Gertrude Oliver’s house were different from ordinary English ones. The food shortage was noticeable. We ate Smarties at intervals. The Christmas tree was decorated in the Austrian way. Its tip reached the ceiling, and it was loaded all the way up in white candles, nothing but white candles. It resembled a dancing girl in an inflammable white dress. The heat was terrific. We had to back away. Yet the house stands till this day.
Bill is dead. He died young, of cancer. When I went to see him in hospital, he would talk of nothing but bookselling. I tried to lure him to more personal subjects. He would not be moved. His talk was purely of books, new and old, and the problems of selling them. He was a most impersonal man; a door had been locked which even terminal illness did not open.
During