Having learnt, by chance, that a book I remembered lending to Craig Brown some forty-odd years ago (when we were working on the The Dirty Bits) was now worth quite a bit of money, I dropped Craig a line c/o The Oldie. Though we had not met since, he answered by return and in friendly fashion, but where my signed copy of The Book of Grass is now, remains anyone’s guess . . .
I had met George through M who I had got to know when she and her parrot were in the room next to mine at St Hilda’s in Oxford, where we were both reading English. As adventurous in life as she was intellectually (among her publications: Sixteen Takes on a Self-Invented Woman and The Hidden Library of Tanith Lee), she became a lifelong friend, and it was through her that I met many characters on the edge of polite society, two of whom, were to become my lodgers. One of these was George Andrews whose Book of Grass: an anthology of Indian Hemp has become a classic.
I was not interested in marijuana but had no objection to it – except as a substitute for the rent. When I told George I didneed the two pounds but I didn’tneed the weed, as smoking just made me choke, he came up with some hash brownies as a gift. But these had no more effect on me than the LSD I had experimented with a few years before.
In spite of my shortcomings as a smoker, our relationship remained friendly if remote. He would appear briefly in the kitchen to spoon out some brown rice (all I ever saw him eat) or greet me with a beatific ‘Hi man’ as he floated past on his way to or from his room.
It did not alter even after the visit of his wife – a spectre in flowing robes with glitter on her eyelids – of whose existence I had not previously known. She came, went and was never mentioned again.
Most of the time I was aware of his presence only through the smell of pot, of which the house reeked throughout his stay: a stay which came to an end when I could no longer put up with the tsunami of phone calls. George was, of course, dealing and my house had become his headquarters.
He moved on without rancour – I had probably lasted longer than most of his landladies – and, not long after, I received a letter from an address in Wales, inviting me to stay.
Some twenty years later my jazz musician son found it hard to believe that at one time he had hated the smell of pot. As for what became of George: when I last googled him, I saw he was back in the States and his interest now was in flying saucers.
It seems people are capable of collecting anything. I just heard of someone who collects the labels on eating apples. It is hard to imagine the satisfaction in that; easier to understand collecting something which you have pleasure in handling or looking at. Or anything where you can have all of a kind: say, the first 100 Penguins, or every edition of a favourite book. This would presumably give the same satisfaction as finishing a jigsaw puzzle, where completion can be such a pressing need that a friend, having mislaid two pieces of a just completed 9,000 piece puzzle, got out a fretsaw and carefully reconstructed them; only to find the originals, a few days later, down the side of the sofa.
I have never consciously collected anything, but have made up for this by never throwing anything away and therefore, you could say, collecting everything. Which is how I come to have every note that Harry – the poet Harry Fainlight – ever wrote me, only to find that these are now saleable. There are people out there actually ready to buy them.
None of the notes is substantial, quite a few are malign. One envelope, addressed in his unmistakeable hand, contained nothing but a page torn out of a book: the sepia photograph of his grandmother’s tombstone.
As for the writer of these strange little missives . . . he had arrived in my life through a friend, a lot wilder than me. She knew lots of poets. Through her I met – or had at least been in a room with – quite a few of them: Michael Horowitz, of course, (who hasn’t?) but also Gregory Corso and the spectre-like William Burroughs.
Not long back from New York, where acid had begun to unhinge him, Harry needed somewhere to stay, and the little garden cell I was letting for thirty shillings a week was vacant. He moved in, and so began the little stream (I now wish it had been a flood) of notes, left around the house for me to find in the mornings or posted, variously, from a London prison, a psychiatric hospital in Scotland, his parents’ home in Sussex, the cottage in Wales where he died a few years later.
I didn’t keep Harry’s notes because I thought I could sell them. Nor the letters from Jean Rhys. Nor the one from Simon Raven asking me (I was then his publisher’s secretary) to open any mail addressed to him (it was mid-December) in case there was a Christmas cheque in it. I kept them because I keep everything and now, having found people collect not only stamps but apple labels, alarm clocks and belt buckles*, I am no longer surprised that there is a lively trade in autographs – so lively, that I have been warned not to let the originals out of my sight.
A letter from Jean Rhys
What a pity George – George Andrews – who succeeded Harry, hadn’t been given to communicating on paper. His signature (if only I had kept a rent book) might have made it worthwhile having the house reeking of pot. A benign presence, the author of The Book of Grass was a man of few words. All I can remember him ever saying, as he padded about, arm uplifted in greeting, was ‘Hi, man!’, and brown rice is all I can remember him cooking, except for the hash brownies which he hoped would bring me – a non-smoker – into the fold . . . .
Looking round me, as I try to bring some order into a house crammed with things, I sometimes think enviously of those people who throw away anything they no longer have a use for. Of course, this can go too far. My erstwhile friend, Andrea, discarded people with the same ease as others throw out an old tea cloth. It was some consolation, years after she had dropped me, to find a character in one of her novels say that friends are like pot plants: they have a short life.
I wonder if Andrea’s letters, too, need to be put aside in case (she died only recently) they are saleable. She, who had written me into her will and then written me out again, would not disapprove. Not born to money, she valued it, and I felt a strong stab of affection when I came across this page torn out of the Radio Times. The caption reads: ‘I would find it very pleasant if the critics were to hail me as a genius. But if it was a choice between critical approbation with low viewing figures and audiences of 20 million**, it’s no contest.’
I am thankful that almost all the thousand or more letters that have been keeping the present at bay are from friends whose names are known only to those who actually knew them, so I can keep them or throw them out, or return them to the writer, or to the writer’s children, without any thought of foregoing some useful cash.
As for Harry, even if I sell his letters, my memory of him will stay intact for as long as I have a copy of his book and can still see him sitting at the kitchen table, one Christmas Eve, transfixed by the Frog Prince who appeared among the green metal leaves of a slowly opening water-lily, each time he spun the top I was waiting to wrap for my three-year-old son.
For more of this kind of thing see Esther Menell’s memoir, Loose Connections, available at £13.95 (including UK postage) via the link on the CONTACT page.
