Bedlam Burning (2 page)

And so, thinking I might be able to do something with these accidental good looks, I had gone into student amateur dramatics. The majority of the other people involved didn't seem to think of themselves as either students or amateurs. They preferred to think of themselves as serious young thespians, artists who were on the springboard to great things in the professional theatre, and I might
have been willing to go along with the self-deception, but my few appearances on stage had convinced me I was absolutely, irredeemably amateur.

I tried to be good. I wanted to be charismatic and magnetic, the kind of performer audiences couldn't take their eyes off. But they could, and they did. Such charisma and magnetism as I genuinely seemed to have in my real life evaporated completely the moment I walked on stage. No doubt the whole audience thought, What a twat, but none of them had expressed it quite so directly as Gregory Collins.

At that point the sullen boy came round asking if we wanted our glasses refilled and Gregory Collins said, ‘That'd be champion.' I thought he was trying to be funny, but no, ‘champion' seemed to be a regular part of his vocabulary.

I discovered he'd seen me in a minor role in an experimental production of Huysmans'
Against Nature
, a project that would have been quite bad and ludicrous enough even without my own contribution. He said, ‘I should think that's a book you wouldn't mind seeing burned.' I smiled thinly. The fact that he was almost right didn't make him any less annoying. I got away from him.

Our choice of book had to be kept secret, so we had arrived at the party with our volumes in sealed envelopes as though it were the Oscars or the Miss World Contest. But I did notice that Gregory Collins brought his offering in a locked metal case. This surely was taking things too far.

I spent the rest of the evening trying to keep my distance from him. He seemed like a bore. The party went on for a long time and nothing much happened. We all got slowly but not extravagantly drunk, and it was nearly midnight before the book burning started. I managed to get one of the few seats in the room from where I could see the proceedings clearly yet appear detached from them.

Bentley stood unsteadily on a footstool, called for order, and the burning began. He chose the sequence in which guests had to make their denunciations, but there seemed no particular pattern to it. I was hoping he'd choose me early so I could get it over with, but perhaps he sensed that and deliberately kept me waiting.

Envelopes were opened, books were produced, displayed, jejunely denounced and tossed into the fireplace. A couple of people played along with Bentley's prejudices. Someone burned Kate Millett's
Sexual Politics
. Someone went for
Mythologies
. But naturally there were also more liberal, combative elements present, and someone burned Henry Miller's
Tropic of Cancer
for reasons Kate Millett would have agreed with.

A slight, red-haired Scot with a squint and asymmetrical, triangular sideburns had brought along a copy of Ray Bradbury's
Fahrenheit 451
, not because he thought it deserved burning for anything it contained, he explained, but simply because of the title.

‘When you consider it,' Bentley said thoughtfully, ‘I don't suppose four hundred and fifty-one degrees Fahrenheit can really be the temperature at which all paper burns, can it? Paper comes in different varieties, made from all sorts of materials, and it's treated with any number of different chemicals and acids and so forth, depending on the quality and the purpose. So different kinds of paper must have widely differing flash points. Still, it's a catchy enough title.'

The fire burned erratically in the hearth, swallowing up books, occasionally choking with paper and ash, and requiring Bentley to attend it with a poker and tongs. He did it cheerfully and fastidiously, and he muttered ironic phrases about the dignity of labour.

Then a big fleshy bruiser took the floor. He was called Franklin, a medical student, treasurer of the JCR committee, captain of the college rowing team, who made pin-money by selling cheap pocket calculators to science students, assuring buyers that these little plastic suckers were going to change the world. Most of us were not convinced.

‘I'd certainly like to rid the world of this novelettish little volume,' he said.

He opened his envelope and displayed a copy of
The Diary of Anne Frank
, and in one movement he whipped it across the room like a frisbee, so that it thwacked into the fire back, creating a messy little eruption of ash and soot.

‘Oh, come on,' I said loudly, ‘that's not funny.'

‘Wasn't trying to be funny.'

I started to get up from my chair. I don't know precisely what I had in mind, whether I was going to flounce out of the party or whether I was going to offer to horse-whip the anti-Semitic bounder; but inevitably I did neither and Bentley did his amused best to placate me.

‘You shouldn't take this too seriously, you know,' he said. ‘We
aren't actually trying to rid the world of these books. That would be as wearisome as it would be futile. We're simply engaging in a little active, symbolic literary criticism.'

I was usually quite good at thinking on my feet and coming back with a snappy answer, but I couldn't think of anything worth saying, so rather awkwardly I sat down again, had another drink, and I was still gently glowering when Bentley said, ‘So, Michael, have you solved your own liberal dilemma in this area?'

‘You mean, have I found a book I want to burn?'

He pursed his mouth to show that he thought I was being a little vulgar and needlessly explicit.

‘As a matter of fact, I have,' I said.

I stood up and opened my own envelope, and I took out a small volume of literary criticism. It was called
Palpable Obscure
and it was written by Dr John Bentley.

‘My reasons for wanting to burn this book are fairly straightforward,' I said. ‘Because he's the kind of author who approves of book-burning parties.'

The hush around the room was gratifyingly brittle. The guests reacted as though I'd committed the most terrible social gaffe. It was all very well to toy with fascism, but it was something quite else to insult your host. Dr Bentley looked at me sadly, as though he was trying hard to suppress the condescension he felt towards me, but wasn't quite succeeding.

‘Someone does this every year,' he said. ‘Not very original, but it does ensure at least the occasional small royalty.'

He raised his glass to me and of course I had to raise my own in return. I don't suppose I'd really imagined that my simple little insult would reduce him to quivering shame, but equally I couldn't show my disappointment at how successfully and urbanely he'd dealt with it.

It might have made for a rather sour end to the proceedings, which I suppose had been my intention, but we'd reckoned without Gregory Collins. It was now his turn. Grandly he took his place at a side table and placed his metal box on it, roughly shoving bottles and glasses out of the way. With unnecessary and comical ceremony he opened up the box. What he took out was not a book at all, but a typed manuscript some three or four inches thick. The pages were
loose and unbound, and as he gripped them they slid around in his fingers.

‘This is my contribution to the proceedings,' he said. ‘I've grafted away for the last two years trying to write the great bloody Cambridge novel, and here it is.'

I knew nothing at all about Gregory Collins, but it still came as a surprise to find that he'd written a novel. He didn't look the type, although my idea of what the type looked like was utterly uninformed.

‘Anyway,' he said, ‘the bugger's finished, and it's absolute tripe, and I can't think of anything better to do with it than chuck the bloody thing in the fire.'

The manuscript was too big and cumbersome to be thrown easily or accurately and so he walked across the room and carefully placed it in the grate. By now there was already a great deal of ash and burned paper in there and the sheer bulk of the manuscript threatened to extinguish the fire altogether, but after a while the pages started to curl and smoulder, then blacken and separate, never bursting into a grand, satisfying conflagration, but nevertheless being very effectively consumed and destroyed.

There was some muttering around the room that this was a brave, rash and foolish thing to do, although simultaneously a couple of people sneered that it was probably only a first draft or a Xerox, and there could easily be another copy safely stashed away somewhere. But I didn't think that. I could believe that Gregory Collins was a poseur, but I didn't think he was a fake. Dr Bentley was finding the whole thing delicious, and was giggling like a schoolboy. It had been a great finale.

And that was the end of the burning, though not quite the end of the party. A couple of people came up to me and said it had been pretty smart of me to burn Bentley's book, but there was no doubt that I'd been upstaged by Gregory Collins. He briefly became the centre of attention, although he had very little to say for himself. When somebody asked him what the novel had been about he refused to give details. ‘I've burned the bastard,' he said. ‘You don't expect me to turn it into a bloody oral tradition, do you?'

Then Bentley put on a record of
Siegfried
, clear signal that it was time for the majority of us to leave. A group of us were going back to someone's room to smoke dope and listen to a Captain Beefheart
bootleg, and we invited Gregory Collins along, but he turned us down, saying it sounded a bit too rich for his blood. I think we were all relieved. But before we went our separate ways he shook me very formally by the hand and said, ‘We made a great double act, eh, Michael?'

Far less formally, Dr Bentley saw us to the door, and as I made my way out he looked at me with a tenderness that made me very uncomfortable. ‘So pretty,' he said, ‘and so empty.' I felt less threatened by his words than I did by his look, and perhaps recognising that he added, ‘But not quite pretty enough or quite empty enough to be truly appealing.'

It's tempting to think that all this happened a very long time ago, in a completely different age and time, yet I'm sure that the feelings we had about ourselves then were surprisingly similar to the ones we have now. We felt ourselves to be very modern, very complex, very in control. But I also remember we felt bombarded, overloaded, surfeited. We felt ourselves to be awash in a superfluity of goods and services, products and messages. The shops seemed full of crap. Our roads seemed too full of cars. The world seemed polluted. We felt we were besieged by advertising, media images, information. Even from the academic quietness of Cambridge the world seemed too noisy and busy and demanding. Our perceptions weren't inaccurate but, of course, we'd seen nothing yet. If anyone thought the future would be so drenched in the stuff of computers and electronic entertainment they were keeping rather quiet about it, although admittedly some people seemed to see the future more clearly than others, certainly more clearly than I did.

As our lives as students came to an end, there was a great settling out, a clarification of who we were, of who we had been all along. Those who had appeared subversive and anti-materialistic now expressed an interest in the law or accountancy. Those who'd enjoyed a dandyish, decadent reputation as students now thought they might become television researchers. Those who'd been involved with concrete poetry and avant-garde film thought they should get a job working for the
Daily Telegraph
. And in most cases they got what they wanted.

I had absolutely no idea what the future held for me, not even what I wanted it to hold. I would have been happy enough to stay on at the university, to spend a few more years in lecture theatres, libraries and seminar rooms, to be a continuing if not exactly an eternal student.
But I knew all along that my degree wouldn't be good enough to allow me to become a Ph.D. student. I'd even talked to Dr Bentley about my prospects. If he retained any resentment about my burning his book, he refused to show it, and he said he was prepared to put in a good word for me, but on balance he thought I shouldn't set my sights too firmly on a career as an academic.

I had a lot of ambivalence towards what I only half-jokingly referred to as the ‘real world'. Certainly the world of the university appeared at times both inauthentic and stifling, but the world out there, the world of jobs and careers, of grown-up relationships and ambitions and money, seemed an infinitely tough and frightening place, and nothing in my education had prepared me to deal with it.

So, since I knew I couldn't be part of academe I did what seemed like the next best thing, or at least an extremely obvious thing. I got a job working in London for a firm of rare book dealers. They were called Somervilles, a good old name in a small and highly specialised field. They bought and sold English and American literary first editions, Joyce at the very top end, down through Greene and Waugh, all the way to Kingsley Amis and Ian Fleming. They also sold authors' manuscripts, everything from single postcards and letters to complete archives. It sounded like something I might enjoy, that I might be quite good at.

At the interview I had been told this was a job with a future, that it might involve bidding at auctions, negotiating with literary estates, perhaps eventually going to America to visit university libraries who were amassing literary materials. Both my potential employers and I could see that my charm might be very useful in this area, and I was keen to do well at the job, willing to put a lot of energy into this world of fine bindings and limited editions, but what I did day to day was a lot more humble.

I was supposedly learning how to catalogue books and manuscripts, so they might be accurately described for our mail-order customers, who were many and rich and sometimes quite famous. Tom Stoppard and George Steiner were on the mailing list, as were any number of Cambridge dons, including Dr Bentley, though I checked the records and saw it was years since he'd bought anything.