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.

Comments

[Nick]

Am I right in saying you are a Cancer? As in the star sign