Ian McEwan **
I
don’t remember what led up to my moving to London in January 1974
from my cheap, comfortable flat in Norwich. I took an attic room among
the roofs and TV aerials of Stockwell, in a house belonging to an
antiquarian bookseller called Cyclops. He had left school in his mid
teens and gone to live in Paris, in the Beat Hotel during its one
brief moment. There he developed a romantic passion for literature
the like of which I haven’t come across in anyone else since. He had
an eye patch and tough guy good looks and was able to bring home a
series of impossibly beautiful women. One of them, a West Indian girl
from Brixton, moved in with us. She and I sometimes overlapped in
the tiny kitchen where I would be preparing my lunch while she thought
about her breakfast. All afternoon she would bathe, make up and dress,
in preparation for Cy’s return from his shop on the King’s Road. Then
the good time would begin, and the house would throb until dawn.
Part
ex-hippy, part country mouse, I moved warily about this household.
I thought I had left this kind of high life behind me in Kabul two
years before. I was serious, I was here to write. I had cut my hair
well clear of my shoulders and had grown a scholarly beard. Cape was
bringing out a collection of my stories, but not for another eighteen
months. Up in my attic I began work on more stories, but I soon began
to wilt in the discovery that every writer never stops making -- writing
is not enough. And it’s difficult to do in isolation. Where was the
city, the life, I had discarded Norwich for? My one literary contact
was Jonathan Raban who had given up his teaching job at the University
of East Anglia and gone freelance. He lived in Earls Court, in the
basement flat of a house belonging to Caroline Blackwood and Robert
Lowell. Here I learned about a new magazine rising out of the ashes
of The Review and was advised to call on the editor.
I’ve
never bought the myth of Ian Hamilton as literature’s flinty enforcer,
the man of ‘eyelids thin with scorn’ who slashed your copy to tatters
and waited there contemptuously while you fixed it. True, even back
then he had the face of a capo di capi, and a useful, understated
cool, but I came to think of him as a kindly sort. We sat in his office
at 11 Greek Street and I explained what I was up to. His manner was
pleasant, even avuncular. He took the story I had brought and suggested
we went downstairs for a drink. The Pillars of Hercules was The
New Review’s outer office and unofficial club room. It was midday
and there was no one else around. We stood at the bar drinking large
gin and tonics -- a novelty to me then -- and Ian asked me questions
about my family background. I suppose I could, or should, invent a
riotous story about our first meeting but the memory of it blurs into
the next dozen occasions. The bar behind us fills with writers, many
of them poets I had never heard of, and the long office party of the
mid-Seventies begins.
In
The Pillars I met ‘my generation’ of writers -- male, born in the
late forties -- and made friendships that will last me a lifetime
-- among them Amis, Barnes, Raine, Fenton, Reid. Most of us had yet
to publish our first books. We read each other with close, gossipy
attention. It was a given that there was nowhere as good to place
a story or poem as The New Review -- at least, until the
Amis-Barnes era began at The Statesman. If this was a literary
clique, it was remarkably open. I took various friends along who weren’t
really writers at all, but Ian treated them as though they were and
gave them books to review. Anyone, it seemed, could wander in and
get a drink. Junkies came in to shoot up in the lavatories upstairs.
If you wandered in too often, you were likely to be given an unpaid
job. Mine was at a desk in a corner of the packing room on the second
floor. Ian asked me to read the short story slush pile and tell him
if there was anything worth his consideration. It took me two weeks
to discover that there wasn’t. We tinkered with the idea of publishing
a selection of the covering letters whose emotional range had impressed
me. Later, I helped with distributing the magazine and learned where
all the bookshops in London were. There were surprisingly few in those
days.
Because
of the hospitality in The Pillars, The New Review attracted
unfriendly coverage in the press. The magazine was said to be too
expensive, too glossy, too obscene sometimes and generally too self-confident
for a publication humbly dependent on public funds. Above all, it
stood accused of being an excuse for a piss-up. There was a grain,
a dram, of truth in this, but the writing and editing got done, and
to the highest standards. Ian was the sort of editor writers wanted
to please. He didn’t hand out praise, or even condemnation; it was
silence, neither lofty nor benign, more a kind of butch restraint,
that worked the trick. I was never told that the story I had brought
along that first time had been accepted. The fact trickled out somehow
and I sensed that it was correct to hide one’s delight. I was made
aware that if I presented another story, there was a chance it might
get read. There was no method to this minimal touch -- it was simply
a consequence of Ian’s character. A few years later I worked with
Richard Eyre and found that he unconsciously worked a similar trick;
he stood back at rehearsals, open to whatever might come up, and the
actors worked intensely to appease the reticence that awed them.
Back
in my Stockwell attic room, I worked more happily as the months passed.
I had somewhere to take my fiction, I had contemporaries to talk to
and read. The trips to Greek Street gave me a short story ‘Pornography’.
Sometime in early 1975 I had a long conversation at the bar with Ian
about the difficulties writers face with their second books. Out of
this came a story,’Reflections of a Kept Ape.’ Excited by the new
poetry I was reading, I handed in a poem about a man who was turned
into a dog by a vengeful woman. Considerate as ever, Ian lost it.
He started an occasional series in which writers reminisced about
family life -- writers and their families have been a running concern
in his own work. I promised to contribute, but after a week I was
stuck. When I complained that I was finding it difficult to write
the truth about my family he said curtly, ‘Make it up’. This was how
I began my first novel, The Cement Garden.
The
story goes that none of the contributors to The New Review
was ever paid. This wasn’t quite true. I was paid for almost every
story Ian published. You had to show persistence, and you stood a
better chance with him if you didn’t have a regular job. I remember
going into The Pillars once with Seamus Heaney, whom I had just met.
We found Ian at the bar, bought him a drink and got him into a dark
corner -- we didn’t want the sight of his chequebook starting a general
stampede. I came away with thirty pounds and Seamus with ten. Over
lunch at the Chinese fish and chip shop in Berwick Street, elated
by my success, I offered the poet expansive advice on raising his
earnings. When I met him again, a year later in California, he kindly
pretended to have forgotten the incident.
The
younger writers who hung around The New Review came of age
in the Sixties. Ian, however, was a child of the Fifties. In the hot
summer of 1976 a dozen of us were eating supper at pavement tables
outside a Greek place on Charlotte Street. This was at the time of
a reckless fashion among certain writers for smoking cannabis in restaurants.
A smouldering parsnip-shaped concoction came Ian’s way and he stared
at it with contempt.
‘What’s this?’
‘You smoke it.’
He took three or four long drags, then
screwed the rest into his ashtray. ‘You’re meant to pass it on,’ someone
protested.
‘But you gave it to me.’
We watched him closely for signs of
transformation. He took a slug of his drink, picked up his cigarette
and went on talking. Not a flicker. Very cool. We were impressed.
This
was an exciting time for me, so it would be easy to sentimentalise
The New Review. I had no involvement with the running of
the magazine, but it was clear to everyone in the Pillars that Ian
was under pressure. There were debt collectors, problems with distribution
and circulation, a hostile press, the Arts Council threatening to
pull the plug -- which it finally did. There was also some heartache
in the private life, as well as domestic problems that sometimes required
Ian to go chasing across central London in the small hours for the
protection of someone close to him. He didn’t complain. In fact, he
didn’t talk about it much and you got the feeling he didn’t want to
be questioned. But it wasn’t always possible to conceal the strain
-- on one occasion his hair turned white overnight and started to
fall out. Within a week or two it was black again and starting to
grow.
Apart
from the occasional double issue and a sudden shrinking of format
for the final two issues, the back numbers of The New Review
retain nothing of this turmoil. In fact they’ve stood up well against
almost a quarter of a century. Turning the pages now, what’s apparent
is a rare combination of cultural openness and fierce literary standards.
Another triumph of The New Review was entirely transient,
and not one that history is likely to thank the editor for; however,
Ian’s achievement has some bearing on the question of how we support
writing in this country. What he managed, probably without meaning
to, was to create a milieu. Writers gathered around The New Review,
as they had around The Review, because they respected Ian’s
ideas of quality and they felt flattered to be included. I doubt if
there has been a period in English literary history when so many writers
have filed through one pub. Writers read each other, obviously; they
are bound to deny it, but they write for each other too, in a remote
and buried sense. This is particularly true for those at the beginning
of their careers. We might prefer to portray ourselves as lonely beacons
in a dark world, but when our first stories or poems are printed it
means a lot to know that a few contemporaries we admire are reading
them.
When
I am asked how -- or whether -- writing should be subsidised, I always
say this: what writers, particularly young writers, need is a classy
magazine with a charismatic editor; it should be culturally eclectic
and have exacting literary standards. It should be metropolitan, because
most writers and readers live in cities, and its editorial offices
should be near, or above, a pub. The contributors should be decently
paid. Ian probably looks at his complete set of back issues with mixed
feelings and memories -- those were turbulent days, not always happy,
but the writing got done. When I look at my old New Reviews,
however, I tend to think that this was one of the wisest pennies the
literature panel ever spent.
