Inside-Out Thinking

Love and evil

I met Reg Kray through Barbara Windsor.

Then I received instructions to drive down to an address in suburban town in Sussex where I was to meet a friend of Reg's, who would take me to see him in Lewes prison.

This young man with dyed blond hair, who'd shared a cell with Reg, said 'A lot of people say Reg and me was queer together. There nothing in it, that's right out – and anyway I had no choice in the matter.'

Prison visitors, mostly wives and girlfriends, sit at tables in a canteen and after about fifteen minutes the prisoners arrive and quickly get down to various different types of sexual activity, more or less openly.

No sign of Reg. I concentrate on keeping my eyes on the table. Then there's a sound of footsteps from along way off, a big metal doorway like the door of a bank vault swung open and there is the great man.

He is smaller than expected, partly because that famous photo of him and Ron, by David Bailey, taken when they were the toast of 60s London, has them looming down on the camera. Reg is dapper and – for the moment – quietly spoken, so much so that I have to lean in close. I notice he's got eczema in his his ear and am acutely conscious of his boast that at the age of 60 he can still break a man's jaw with one punch.

I ask him how he and Ron managed to keep discipline in the gang, a bunch of pretty tough characters. 'It was all down trust,faith and reasoning on the part of Ron and me – and if it came to it me and Ron were much better at violence than anyone else.'

It was said that the Kray twins ran a more successful business from within prison than they ever had on the outside. I went to visit Reg several times in Lewes and then Maidstone when he was transferred there, and usually there'd be several minor villains also visiting, usually looking nervous as if expecting an unfavourable Performance Review.

From time to time Reg would ring me at work and shout down the line for me to come to visit. I don't think he was angry with me, he just didn't understand the principle of the telephone – or maybe telephones had been rubbish in the 60s and he didn't realize they'd improved.

The security was tighter at Maidstone. I had to leave an imprint of my hand on an electronic screen as I went in. I think this is because once, when Ron had been in Broadmoor, Reg had gone to visit him, then they'd changed clothes and Ron had walked out of the gates in his identical twin's civilian clothes. I was leaving an electronic imprint of my hand so that when I left I was wasn't really Reg in my clothes - though he could've severed my hand and held it sticking out of the sleeve of my jacket.

There was some thrill of danger in all of this – like Clarice Starling visiting Hannibal Lecter (sp? And sp?) - and at the time I thought it was amusing, but I wouldn't do it now.

I published his auto Born Fighter and he was always trying to get me to publish Reg Kray's Book of Thoughts (pronounced 'Forts'), but I thought this was step too far. I remember one of them:

Flowers are God's way of smiling at you. ('Flaaahers').

Did Reg have a sensitive side? I've no doubt he was a psychopath, and know of terrible things, including more murders, that he and Ron organized both inside and outside prison that have not yet been revealed. Towards the end he took to phoning me to ask if I knew the whereabouts of a teenage boy who used to run errands for him. Reg spoke more quietly, plaintively even. It suddenly dawned on me he was lovelorn.

So perhaps all of us, all of us, even psychopaths are at risk of this, and that I think is the trouble with promiscuity. I was discussing it a couple of days with Frank Skinner, who is appallingly honest about what happens to a man when he reaches 50 in his new book. He has, of course, had quite a rackety sex life.

So let's put it down clearly. I've never seen it written down before. This is the reason why promiscuity is risky – I'm not saying wrong – risky: We each have a need for to love someone, someone who will love us in return. It's a love as strong as a mother's love for her infant, as strong as an infant's love for its mother – and it partakes of both of these and is tied up with them. It is as much part of us as our nervous system and represents our capacity to respond sensitively to life, our deepest and highest feelings. It is also the the most vulnerable part of ourselves, because in order to realize the highest and deepest we have to be able to put ourselves at risk. When I have sex with someone, even if it's only once, I risk that part coming alive, both in the other person or in myself.

The Campaign for Real People in Publishing

Lunch with Caroline Dawnay, the head of the new literary agency, United Artists. Caroline has extraordinary eyes, and I was swept along by her enthusiasm, her goodness and niceness and the romanticism of the enterprise. All the agents there had turned down very well paid jobs - with taxis to take them to work and home in the evenings - for the sake of their independence and a dream of continuing to work together. It's going to be hard, she knows.

We talked about PFD, the agency they all walked away from and about the group led by former Sunday Times editor Andrew Neil that had bought it. Like everyone else in the business we were trying to make sense of it. If almost all the agents have walked away, what is left but a bit of backlist?

Here's one perspective.

There are may pressures on UK publishing that are going to push it into strange new shapes.

The death of the high street. Even the biggest chains - like Woolworths, M and S - are finding it hard to afford property there. How are the UK book chains going to prosper and adapt?

The great driver of bestsellers in publishing in recent years has been the supermarkets, but what if a recession causes them to focus on the core business - food?

Supermarkets sell  books as part of an entertainment section that's mainly CDs and DVDs. In a year those won't exist as physical objects. Will supermarkets keep the section going just for books?

In the new year Amazon, Sony and others will begin a huge marketing push on e-book readers. Books will also be down-loadable onto phones and there will be a scroll onto which you can download thousands of books for those who want to continue to read on paper. Britain has a uniquely nerdy-techy culture - has done since Newton! - and i predict that Brits will take to these machines like nowhere else .(Combine this with nerdyness with the fact that books you want will become harder and harder to find on the high street.)

As Frank Skinner pointed out to me, buying physical books from Amazon to be sent through the post, the fastest trend in book-selling, is a strange mix of new and medieval technology. Much more natural to buy downloads on the net.

A huge part of the UK publishing industry depends on selling physical copies of American books by big, international authors - mostly thriller writers, to which UK publishers own the British and Commonwealth rights. When significant sales are downloads, these territorial boundaries will be impossible to maintain. As a customer in the UK why wouldn't you download the US edition? These US authors will realize that there is little value to them in giving a US agent, US publisher, UK agent and UK publisher a cut of their earnings.

Perhaps the biggest headache will be collecting revenues. I was recently proposing we take on a series on teenage books, and it seemed to me there would naturally be a big market for them downloaded as audio onto MP3s. I was told they'd just be shared for free like music. Why won't the same happen to downloads of written texts?

Advertising in books, a possible alternative stream of revenue, is something that many publishers and authors will find hard to contemplate.

As I predicted in the Independent on Sunday, changes in consciousness will bring them new art forms - more collaborative, multi-media, constantly mutating - that will eventually replace the novel.

So what is the prospect for UK publishers?  I think that profits are there to be fought for, that greater and greater focus will have to put on creativity. The danger is that the revenue streams that currently support vast superstructures and many layers of management will slip out of their grasp.

The way of the future seems to me to be 'schools of thought', associations of like-minded authors, agent/editors and Internet gurus free to exploit what they create world-wide.

So if you were Andrew Neil, why would you want to spend a lot of money on an agency at the moment developing no significant front list but with a back list?

I think that if you were an international media mogul, a visionary for whom cash flow was no problem - let's take Rupert Murdoch, Neil's former employer as a random example - you might think that in ten years, when the problem of collecting from these shifting, currently elusive revenue streams has been sorted, the people who own copyright will be kings of the world. 

Never Lie to a Freemason

I've recently met two senior Freemasons who have told me they can tell – and I'm sure they mean in an uncanny way – that they can tell whether people are lying or not. It must be a part of their esoteric training.

In my book I write that I believe that we all have the power to read other (perhaps better 'hear') minds but regularly screen this out, as it would overwhelm us.

One of the types of occasion this is brought home to me is when silences down the other end of the phone have markedly different qualities – the same for everyone, I'm sure. I think esoteric training reawakens qualities we all naturally have.

(Incidentally, it is impossible not to look guilty when someone tells you they know when people are lying.)

Music and the Longing for Old Forms of Consciousness

I've had some more messages of support from musicians. Donovan said he thought my book 'wonder-filled'. Gareth Sager of The Pop Group said it expresses in words what he's tried to express in his music.

When we listen to music and are 'carried away' by it, when we feel music's patterns working through us, playing us as if our bodies were other instruments in the orchestra, we feel re-connected with the cosmos and feel again that sense of being at home in a cosmos that cares for us, is 'anthropic' and carrying us along to our ultimate destiny.

So part of what attracts us to music is that it reactivates us in a form of consciousness that not long ago everyone enjoyed. Not long ago everyone felt that they were guided along every step of life's path, that the cosmos was nurturing them, that they were being prompted to play the parts they were meant to play in patterns set in motion by God and marked by the movements of the stars and planets.

So we may regain some of these joys, usually lost to the modern, alienated form of consciousness, when we listen to music, and if we revive the old form of consciousness but do so with the heightened awareness and conscious exercising of intelligence that esoteric philosophy brings, then we are right at the growing tip of human consciousness right at this minute.

An old initiate once told me that Mozart went through several brief incarnations before his incarnation as Mozart so that he would be able to remember, while encased in flesh, something the rest of us only retain as a very faint echo - the music of the spheres.

Destiny and Dematerialization

Met Fatima Bhutto, a beautiful, fascinating woman with an exceptionally strong, fine nose. When I said something about her family and particularly her aunt being regarded by the West as a bulwark against fundamentalism, she rather told me off, saying Benazir Bhutto had compromised with them.

She wants to influence things from below, by writing, but I wonder how long she can her evade her destiny as a political leader?

I think maybe we all have propensity to do this – as well to run away from real love when we find it. I first began to think about this when I read Rilke's retelling of the Prodigal Son in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. In his version the son leaves because he can't take the responsibility of being loved.

Of course there is an esoteric - or at least idealist – interpretation of this story too. The son leaves to descend into the material world, gets the fatted calf when he returns because he had acquired qualities his brother hasn't.

Existential Despair and a Glass of Champagne

Don't get the wrong idea. I hate publishing parties and hardly ever go to them. Typically they are hot and sweaty and the wine is warm, and most people who work in publishing are not very attractive. I have difficulty hearing what people say and my own voice seems to recede down my throat so I can't make myself heard either. I lose all confidence in what I'm saying and see people want to edge away. We look into each others' and know we have mo interest in talking to each other. The names of even my oldest and dearest friends disappear from my mind completely and beyond all recall the moment I'm required to introduce them.

The only time I wanted to go to publishing parties all the time was when I was a bookseller and impoverished enough to jump at the chance of a free drink, and I was also on the pull, which gave parties a point – though I don't think it over worked.

But I really enjoyed the party we held for Carol Seymour-Jones to celebrate publication of A Dangerous Liaison – her joint biography of Sartre and de Beauvoir.

Carol has deserves the wonderful reviews she's had in all the nationals. She had the lead review in the Sunday Times and the review in the Observer was everything you'd want. She has really captured, she really promotes the glamour of the intellectual life – you want to be in the Deux Magots when Sartre waddled fatly in. All this is exhilarating partly because it's quite alien to English culture. (Lytton Strachey first delineated English anti-intellectualism in his biographical sketch of General Gordon, and nothing's changed.)

I met Philip Johnston, deputy editor of the Telegraph, genial and pugnacious in the way of journalists who still remember Fleet Street as a lost and very drunken Eden. It seems that David Brent management types are taking over newspapers too. We said ain't it awful, and PJ said he'd threatened to throw one of them out of a window, and I thought 'hats off'.

Hannah, a colleague, made a speech with a good joke in it in which she seemed to be talking about Jordan and Peter Andre but turned out to be talking about de Beauvoir and Sartre. We toasted Carol. There was a portly gentleman who was very taken with Hannah and another colleague, Rina, and kept bearing down on them with gleaming eyes and asking me if all women in publishing are this beautiful? He said, more than once, that he was allowed to say these things because he was gay. I wasn't sure I believed him.

His partner – or at least the woman he arrived and left with – was a film producer and we wondered whether Carol's book would make a film, and if so, who would play the leads? I suggested Emma Thompson and Roy Kinnear.

How shifty was Sartre? He seems to have found in Simone someone with whom he could be completely honest about his sexual inclinations. (A few years ago I commissioned Angela Lambert's biography of Eva Braun, fascinated by the idea of someone seeing Hitler through the idea of love – what would that look like? I was also fascinated by Angela's friendship with Dennis Potter, and, talking about this she once told me that men have all sorts of sexual inclinations they are ashamed of and felt they had to keep secret, but that women would understand. Oh yeah? Simone de Beauvoir, Angela and who else?)

Being and Nothingness was one of my favourite books as a student. I still have my copy, well thumbed and with all the good bits underlined (!) Years later I invested - very heavily, there being no cheap, student edition - in a copy of Heidegger's Being and Time, and I think that I came to the conclusion that large parts of Being and Nothingness were little more than parts of Being and Time translated into French. (There was guesswork involved, because I was reading both in English, but you know what I mean.)

But for my money Sartre's plays and novels, especially La Nausee have stood the test of time. I love the French tradition – going back to Voltaire - of using narrative, in a very overt way, as a vehicle for exploring and dramatizing philosophical ideas - something I was aiming to replicate in my own book.

I think La Nausee is extremely important, because it is the most honest account, down to a visceral level, of what it feels to live life believing that it has no meaning, apart from what we choose to give it. I reckon that most people who hold life to be meaningless on an intellectual level don't allow the implications to work into their lived experience in a way which is honest or – as Sartre would say - authentic. If you do so, as I did for a short while as a student, life is extremely painful, and this is what La Nausee portrays.

Sartre couldn't keep it up for very long, and I suspect it's difficult to do so without risking mental illness.

Reminds me that have been times in my own life when I would've thought my book drivel from beginning to end.

That was before the great waves of dimethyltrtamine began to roll on down.

Hallelujah.

Letting Go of Power

I had a very interesting conversation with a businessman of Chinese origins last night - a Daoist. He talked about his dealings with local government in Britain and talked about the way that power inevitably corrupts. Even someone like Churchill, whose aims are undeniably good, has to allow evil to be done in his name if he is to wield power on a global scale, he said.

I asked him about the Dalai Lama and suggested he is perhaps a counter-example? The Daoist said that if the Dalai Lama were willing to give up his power,if he sat on the China/Tibet borders and went on hunger strike, Tibet would gain its independence. The millions of Chinese buddhists would demand it.

The Daoist also talked about Rupert Murdoch's plans to expand in China, the US and UK. He said that his links with Chinese women were primarily dynastic, and talked about Murdoch's plans to expand his publishing interests in the US and the UK. (I've heard this before from an Israeli source.) He said that the UK was a useful platfrom for Murdoch because the UK's relations with China have been relatively good recently.

The Truth is Not Out There

In the Guardian today there's photo of Virginia Woolf's study in Monk's House. It was in this room that she wrote many of her books, including her best, Mrs Dalloway - a masterpiece, not least because of its account of how differing forms of consciousness may regularly fail to connect. Woolf was radical for her time in appreciating how different other people's forms of consciousness can be.

It was in this house that she went mad for the final time, and from it she took the short walk to her suicide.

There have been many volumes written trying to explain her painful decline, but i heard an alternative explanation a few years ago, when following a pair of old women round on a tour of the house. In contrast to Charleston Farmhouse down the road, which all the major Bloomsbury painters helped to decorate, painting every available surface, every table, every pot, Monk House is for the most part plainly, even monotonously decorated. One of the women said 'All this green - it would drive you mad!'

Misleading Information

On Sunday I found a new path on Ashdown Forest. Climbing around twisted trees, roots sometimes forming steps, tree trunks and boulders with moss like a bear's fur, I following the path along the ferrous-coloured stream. I was reminded the Little Grey Men books by BB that my Father, who had a great love of nature, introduced me to and which I read to my daughter Tabitha in turn.

Then the path came to a stop and I saw, dancing above an orange pool in a sphere of sunlight, two luminously blue insects - one of the most beautiful sights I've ever seen.

I remembered that Conan Doyle, who believed in the Cottingley fairies, lived just round the road and also the way I used to delight in giving my daughter misleading information when she was very young. (Some of the spirit of this crept into my book.)

So I told her, for example, that at the poo farm - the sewage plant - there was a little patch with a wooden sign, marking out Tabitha's poo. On holiday in Cornwall there was a huge boulder with a metal hook embedded in it, which I told her was a giant's button - many of the plants in the garden were outsize because of the tropical climate, which maybe made it seem more believable. Once we made a little piskie out of plasticine and allowed her a very brief glimpse of it on the window ledge behind a shutter, and then one day, when we were driving down a narrow Cornish lanes, she saw one flying around the car.

Was Einstein an Initiate?

This is something I've been wondering about since David Ovason's The Secret Zodiacs of Washington DC, where it's revealed what a prominent place a statue of Einstein occupies in the plan for that city - built according to the principles of Freemasonic astrology.

I asked a friend who is a Freemason, who told me there is no record of Einstein having belonged to any of the lodges in the places you might expect.

Then just the other day I came across this account of a dinner conversation in Berlin with a Lady Drummond-Hay, published in 1930:

'How do I work? I grope.' Expressively he spread his hands as if to seize the invisible. 'I have built my theories out of nothing, for there is nothing to guide me, no precedent. I experimented with every idea, no matter how ridiculous. I adventured passionately for years in trackless realms of imagination and possibility.. I asked Professor Einstein what role inspiration and spiritual revelation play in his scientific discoveries: 'Inspiration comes like a lightning flash at the end of the search. Years of work, experiment, disappointment, groping in the darkness, are suddenly illumined by one second of dazzling revelation. Success is a baptism of light.'

He explained to me that his famous theory is in three parts. 'Like three degrees of initiation, like the ancients,' he commented.

As I point in my book, if we discard commonly accepted, materialistic notions and are instead attentive to the realities of our mental processes, we will admit that we are not inventors of 'our own ideas'. They come to us. Sometimes they are very faint at first, difficult to discern and it's like trying to catch a butterfly or a shadow. At other times they come powering through our mental space and it's all we can do to ride them.