Inside-Out Thinking

The Nibbies

I was very glad to see that Quercus – described as 'unstoppable' in the Guardian Review – won Small Publisher of the Year this year. Anthony Cheetham, the boss, complained that Quercus isn't small any more.

I'm not sure if it's appropriate to describe publishers as brilliant, but, if it is, I've worked alongside three. When Tom Maschler started out his best friend was Arnold Wesker, whose autobiography As Much as I Dare I later published. They were young Jewish lads on the make – not as frightening as Scots perhaps, but formidable.

Arnold

told me that early on Tom wrote a very cynical book called The S Man, containing all the rules and ruses needed to become successful. Whether not he put these into effect, he had a wonderful career – apart perhaps from the Barbara Pym gaffe. Writers like Martin Amis, Julian Barnes and Ian McEwan, the stars of that generation, came to the fore under his aegis. For many years Gail Rebuck was my immediate boss, and I've never known anyone else in the business who is so intuitive. I think she really knows what is going to sell. Anthony Cheetham is by contrast much more cerebral. He works out all these rules and laws defining what will sell, which sound completely mad – but the extraordinary thing is that they work.

You might say the same thing about the philosophy of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky!

Pickles

'Mr Pickles is in reception'.

There are some people, a handful in a lifetime maybe, with whom one feels great karmic connection. You sense that in your present dealings you are working out relations from earlier incarnations.

These relations are not always friendly. A few years ago I published an exhilaratingly weird book called The Jew of Linz, by Kimberly Cornish, which, taking it's starting point from the fact that Hitler and Wittgenstein were at school together, suggested that these 2 very powerful beings pursued each other from incarnation to incarnation like metamorphosing creatures in Ovid or Taliesin.

As well as these great connections there are also people who keep cropping up from time to time. I think no novels I've read show better the way this happens than the Dance to the Music of Time sequence of Anthony Powell. (Powell had some interest in esoteric matters, and one of the characters in the book is part based on Crowley.)

Anyway, Stephen Pickles keeps on cropping up in my life. When I arrived in Oxford he was already a star. Out of all the scores of dandified young men milling around the Radcliffe Camera and the King's Arms, trying to draw attention to themselves and to promote themselves as the new Brian Howard - model for Anthony Blanche, the flamboyant one in Brideshead Revisited - Pickles was IT. Very handsome in an Italian sort of way with a great leonine mane, he was decidedly glamorous and very famous - known always as just 'Pickles'. His waspish witticisms were widely repeated and it was rumored that he's already designed the sets for an opera in London. I hardly dared speak to him.

Years later we'd see each other in Soho. We shared a fascination for Soho and Fitzrovia bohemianism - Francis Bacon, Lucien Freud, Derek Jarman, Julian Mclaren-Ross - the model for Xavier Trapnel in Dance to the Music of Time - Dan Farson and Jeffrey and Bruce Bernard. Pickles was right at the centre of this - he had a flat above a delicatessen in Old Compton St and a regular seat at the right end of the bar in the Coach and Horses while I was the  boy from the provinces with his nose up against the window. - though I did get some kind of foothold when I became Farson's publisher.

Pickles then published a book, a book of conversations overheard in pubs, called Queens. It showed an ear for dialogue like, say, Michael Frayn, Julian Mclaren-Ross or Alan Bennett. It's a kind of masterpiece. (That's a phrase Colin Wilson used of my own book. I don't know if he meant to damn with faint praise, but that's not what I mean - merely that Queens is unclassifiable. It's not clear what kind of book it is at all.)

Later - I think it was later, but maybe i've got my chronology confused - we both got into publishing in a sideways kind of way. He was in charge of Quartet for a while, when it built up a list of fiction in translation as good as anyone's. I once went to see Naim Attalah, the owner of Quartet, with my friend Roderick Brown. We were hoping to persuade the great man to fund a new list. Naim called Pickles in, and i remember he gave me an odd handshake. ( I must ask him about that someday.) It came to nothing.

I heard rumours that Pickles fell on hard times then just recently our paths crossed again, when I had the idea of publishing a sort of greatest hits volume of the old children's magazine Look and Learn, and the proprietor employed Pickles to put it together. When we met up to discuss he told he I was survivor in publishing and that was because I was nice and good. I took this to mean good-hearted. So not so waspish then. I don't think any of us are. I once regarded myself as a master of the arts of vituperation - to borrow Bron Waugh's phrase - and i remember Kevin Jackson, now a professor of Eng lit at London Uni, who did me the very big favour of reading my script and saving me from many terrible errors - used to leave Cambridge if he knew i was coming for the w/e, for fear of my sharp tongue. Kevin is someone who keeps coming round in a Dance to the Music of Time way too.

I think something that Pickles and i have in common is a history of shared reading, of great overlap anyway, esp in fiction. In our late teens the great books that told us what life is like were Powell, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Green, Angus Wilson, Muriel Spark, Iris Murdoch. DH Lawrence was on the syllabus in those days.The fashionable undergrowth of literature was William Beckford, Ronald Firbank, Baron Corvo, Cyril Connolly,  Maclaren-Ross, Patrick Hamilton. Now i guess Waugh and Green keep a certain readership, but I know Powell sells so little it's hard to keep him in print and i don't think Angus Wilson is in print at all.

Why do people stop reading very good, even great writers? Perhaps it's another mark of how quickly consciousness changes?

I salute the Guardian Review's love of reading - even if its review of my book was evidently by someone who hadn't read it through! The Guardian Review on a Saturday always wants to you make you read books! Last Saturday it invited people to name authors they thought ought to be in print and Angus Wilson was mentioned more than anyone. There was also a quote from Flannery O' Connor. The first book i edited/published was a volume of short stories with religious themes, brought together to try to show how a sense of numinous can charge and also shape fiction - the one that fascinated me most being by O'Connor. I suppose that was the beginning of the trail of thought that led to the Deeper Laws.

The quote: 'Fiction is concerned with mystery that is lived; the ultimate mystery as we find it embodied in the concrete world of sense experience.' What an inspiring, but also very, very stern thought for anyone with ambitions to write, especially if they are interested in the esoteric.

'Scientifically Correct'

Someone who is scientifically correct is scornful of the "New Age' and any form of spirituality not consonant with militant secularism. Much of the British media is scientifically correct.

The sad and absurd thing is that, as I am learning from reading about John Wheeler and directly from Robert Lomas, this correctness is based on a shallow understanding of modern physics. Many modern scientists, including many of the greatest, accept that it is perfectly plausible that the world is moved by intentionality on the macro as well as the micro level.

The view of science that the scientifically correct are trying to use as a razor to cut spirituality out of the cosmos is old fashioned - like a Meccano set.

St Francis

The rabbits are out! From the train you can see them in the field enjoying the evening sunlight.

The other day I was walking in the fields when suddenly I looked up to see four of them, including two young ones, running TOWARDS me! I had a very brief inkling of what it was like to be St Francis... before a fox popped its head out from the bracken ahead, far side of the rabbits.

A wise woman has been in touch with me recently, telling me to look out for St Francis in my life. I'm trying to be alert and conscious. I know another wise woman who, though I haven't seen this myself, suffers the stigmata.

Iron in the Soul

I was walking from the station to the car earlier in the week when I fell into step and starting talking to a man who was perhaps, as my mother used to say of me, 'not quite with it'. He was small, had an odd marching walk and talked in a jumbled way and with a strong local accent. He wore Brylcream in the style of my father's generation. I gathered he usually took a short cut back to his house through the allotments, but was worried about doing it now as it was getting dark, so i offered him a lift.

He told me he'd lost his father a few years ago, that they'd been scrap metal merchants. I guessed he'd lived with his father like Steptoe and Son, and the loss of his father had been a massive blow in his life. He said they'd had a yard where the multi-story carpark next to the police station now is.

How different Tunbridge Wells must have been then - what, 30 years ago. Nowadays it's so tidy, so manicured, so glossy. A stretch to imagine a scrap metal yard in the middle of it.

Those kinds of places fascinate me. They're sites of different forms of consciousness  - men who are happy to walk around all day black-skinned from oil and grease - places of numen. I went to one recently to get a spare part for my car, and an unexpected feature of the landscape was that cars of the same make are piled one on top of the other, so you find yourself walking among ottering, unsafe looking towers of  Renault 5s, Jaguars and so on. Perhaps that experience influenced me to write the bit in my book about Abraham wandering our the skyscrapers of Uruk.

Over the last 2 weeks 2 junk/antique shops have closed down in Tonbridge. I went to Lewes the other day to try to find an esoteric device for my paperback cover, and the biggest antique/junk place had closed down. Other traders looked understocked. All down to the Internet, they said.

Sad. Browsing on the net just isn't the same. There's less scope for serendipity.

Of course that word was coined by Horace Walpole. I had a load of material on Walpole, William Beckford, Alexander Pope and other occult minded people of that Gothick and fanciful era who used to fascinate me, but didn't use it for fear of too anglo-centric. Someone once told me that Brighton Pavilion was constructed with a system of pipes in an occult configuration intended to help fairies materialize. If any one had any research on that, I'd be intrigued?

Last weekend I went to Ashdown Forest to find the site of an old iron works I'd stumbled on a few years ago. There's no signpost, but there is a plaque up now, and apparently it was the first blast furnace in Britain, built by Henry VII. Last week-end the blue bells were not quite in full bloom, but the place was covered by them and the air was quite heady. I sensed tellurian forces, and was reminded that blacksmiths were once thought to wield occult power. 

Spiritual Warfare

One of the bits of adolescent rage I've never lost is rage at life's unfairness. I can't seem to get used to it.

To be born into a middle class suburban family in small town England in the late twentieth century must be one of the softest billets in history, but as i look around I see individuals who have almost none of the good things in life - beyond the basics of food, drink and shelter - and no prospect of getting them.

I used to have a colleague who was physically unattractive and also a bit dull, lacking in wit, who talked too much for most people's taste and gave off a slight air of desperation. This person never had a sexual partner or a kindred spirit, as far as i know, and everyone avoided seeing this person out of work if they could avoid it without obvious cruelty. I don't believe this person ever had the experience of approaching someone and seeing that someone look up, glad to see them. This person's life must've been very different - everyone quickly looking away as they approached.

And I made it worse! I created a cruel nickname, which everyone in the building soon adopted, and told exaggerated, funny stories about this person, which spread round the building too. I trussed this person up with a sort of 'hexing'.

This is one of the things I expect to be most harshly judged on. I failed as a human being - as I've written about my failures elsewhere on this site - and in this case it was worse because it was not just fleetingly.

If you did the same thing in a consciously occult way - if you knew how - the cost to yourself in this life and thereafter would be colossal.

I think maybe you become more aware of these things in late middle age. Which is why we become more placatory and choose our battles much more carefully.

The Work

Lorna Byrne has been advising me on my spiritual practice. She tells me how, if we persist, parts of ourselves are enlivened by it and continue to pray after we've - consciously - stopped.

This sounds similar to Rudolf Steiner's advice on working on the etheric. Conscious work over 21 days, he said, creates permanent change in the etheric body.

This work is also, of course, part of the Work of the Freemasons. Building a temple, building a hut or a house, is a metaphor for shaping the non-material part of ourselves in an occult way.

Eye for Detail

Went with my son, Barnaby, to see Adolfo Barabino play at Hever Castle on a lovely sunny Sunday evening - thanks to Robert and Olivia Temple. The Moonlight Sonata, which he started with, slightly lacked Beethoven vigour, the pieces by Lipati were interesting - I didn't know he composed - but his interpretations of Chopin were the most sublime I've heard. After Adolfo withdrew his hands from the keys, the air was still full of Chopin, gently mutating, like a disembodied intelligence.

I showed Olivia the topiary chess board, and then later we went to the pub. I'd told Barnaby about some of Robert's accomplishments - his ability to divide 7 figure numbers by 7 figure numbers in his head, the fact that he practically invented the alternative history genre with The Sirius Mystery, his translations of Aesop and The Epic of Gilgamesh, and that his history of Chinese science is the standard text book in Chinese schools.

Barnaby sometimes has a slightly oblique way of looking at things. I found out later that he thought i meant that Robert could ONLY divide 7 figure numbers by 7 figure numbers.

Robert told me that Inner Traditions have great plans for his forthcoming book on the Sphinx. That publisher had published Schwaller de Lubicz's masterpiece The Temple of Man with Robert's introduction, and now are going to publish his own book in the same lavishly - not say slavishly ha ha - illustrated format. I'm sure that certain types of books are much better published by small independent publishers.

I told Robert about Lorna Byrne and he told us about some of his own work with disembodied intelligences. From the way he described them I think this remarkable man has communicated consciously not only with an archangel but two cherubim!

Robert and Olivia also talked about their meetings with remarkable comedians, including Charlie Chaplin and Frankie Howerd.

I'd made Barnaby watch some old episodes of Up Pompeii. He likes slick American sit-coms, well-rehearsed with high production values, and I think he was a bit puzzled by Up Pompeii. Are they making it up as they go along? he asked.

One of Frankie Howerd's qualities was that he made you worry for him. You wanted him to be brilliantly funny, but he felt vulnerable, as if he might fall down a hole.

I had some of the same feelings when I took Frank Skinner to perform in front of and meet the key buyers in the book chains. Would some of them be sniffy? In the event i needn't have worried. His love of language won them round. His words lie back on his thoughts with little between them - no literary or other artifice, no dishonesty and never any cliche. There is something of Dr Johnson about Frank Skinner - Dr J having been the subject of his MA thesis.

We recently had an e-mail exchange on whether knob - as in knob joke - should have a k on the beginning. It turns out that knob meaning penis comes from the idea of a protruberance like a door knob. The k is therefore canonical.

I'm glad we got that sorted out.