The Skull Beneath the Skin
Meanwhile, on the western slopes of the Northern Heights, Hampstead, that home of the 131P, is celebrating the fact that so many writers breathe its healthy air. Thirty-nine local authors have contributed to an exhibition of photographs and personal trivia. Those who expect such an
exhibition to provide thirty-nine steps towards the further understanding of the literary person- ality will be disappointed. The exhibition is no more revealing than a similar effort on seventeen librarians from Slough would be. All we learn is that writers are sober, law-abiding folk who write their tomes in illegible script in Woolworth exer- cise books and hoard photostats of their birth announcements in the Times. For all that, there is something special about the Hampstead writer. Hampstead authors are either born, like Marghanita Laski, Ivor Brown, or Hesketh Pearson, the biographer who keeps the smut out of history; or else they are made—like the Marxist art-critic John Berger, Frank Norman (for whom fings will never be the same again), or David Storey, who himself writes of Hampstead : `I feel uncertain and insecure in Hampstead, as though, beneath the flowers and Georgian bric-a- brae, there's unmistakably all the signs of a cemetery.'
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