The loneliness of a long- distance hater
Francis King
THE MASTER ECCENTRIC: THE JOURNALS OF RAYNER HEPPENSTALL 1969-1981 edited by Jonathan Goodman
Allison & Busby, £14.95
THE PIER by Rayner Heppenstall
Allison & Busby, £9.95
In a verdict itself of masterly eccentric- ity, C. P. Snow called Rayner Heppenstall `the master eccentric of English letters'. Certainly, Heppenstall wrote one masterly novel, his first entitled Blaze of Noon, which, as he himself put it with his lifetime addiction to all things French, enjoyed both a succes de scandale and a succes d'estime on its first appearance in 1939, thus saving its publishers Secker & War- burg from bankruptcy, and was subse- quently the reason for Heppenstall being awarded an Arts Council prize in 1966. But although his later studies of crime, his memoirs of people whom he had known and usually loathed, and his largely auto- biographical works of fiction, all show an equal distinction of mind and of style, if he was indeed a master, then he was very much (again as he might have put it) a petit maitre.
His literary eccentricity, in introducing the presque nouveau roman to the English public, was no greater than that of any of those chefs who helped to introduce the Presque nouvelle cuisine to the scampi belt. His personal eccentricity, as illustrated by many entries in his journal, extended merely to twin obsessions with measure- ment (he was constantly counting the number of stairs that he climbed, the number of paces that he took) and with crime (he would scrupulously record the anniversaries of notorious murders).
Except in his novels, in which he flag- rantly embroidered on the events of his own life and the lives of the people with whom he came into fastidious contact, Heppenstall was always determined to dish out the truth, however unpalatable to others. Although this truthfulness is the outstanding merit of his journals, it is likely to repel as many people as it attracts. Of the West Indian novelist, Wilson Harris, married to a Scotswoman, he writes: 'I find miscegenation displeasing, but by his col- our Harris must be three parts whites, and three parts are better than one.' Another entry runs: 'There are a whole race, the Arabs, and a mongrel people, the Irish, upon whom, if it were possible merely by pressing a button, I would happily commit total genocide.' Again, after a comment about 'a kind of lesbian effect brought about by a woman writing about women', he goes on: Not that I am at all opposed to lesbianism, any more than to male homosexuality. I only wish that both would become more rife among the `working'- class and coloured immigrants. Then they `would not breed so.' What oft was thought but ne'er so nakedly expressed' is the best way to describe such entries.
Heppenstall, as these journals repeated- ly show, was a man always quick to believe the worst of others. I myself suffered an amusing instance of this, when he reviewed my translation of Philippe Jullian's life of Robert de Montesquiou. My quality as a translator, he declared, was best indicated by my translation of raisonnable as 'reason- able'. The word 'reasonable' had certainly appeared in my version, but it had been a rendering of rationnel, not raisonnable. Clearly Heppenstall, only too glad to jump to an adverse conclusion, had never con- sulted Jullian's original.
Throughout the journals one is aware of an extraordinarily bright, if pencil-thin, sensibility focused like a laser-beam on this or that facet of a world that usually either disgusts or infuriates him. The bilious wit is as uncomfortably corrosive as an attack of heartburn. Simone de Beauvoir is de- scribed as la grande Sartreuse. The most marked characteristic of the BBC producer A. J. Burroughs was 'persistent mendacity on a clinical scale'. There are a number of no less scathing remarks about Sonia Orwell, whose Gallomania exceeded even his own. Clearly for Heppenstall the phrase 'good neighbours' was a contradic- tion in terms. After the Sillitoes, having moved into a flat in his block, caused him some inconvenience over the erection of a television aerial, he thenceforward re- garded Alan Sillitoe with so much loathing and contempt that it is impossible to recognise a sensitive, decent and modest man in the Steadman-like caricature that repeatedly bristles out of the journals. Having moved to Deal, Heppenstall was soon on equally dire terms with his neigh- bours there, deliberately lighting bonfires in order to annoy them. (Fire always obsessed him, so that — as Jonathan Goodman notes in his introduction — 'he was more interested in the fact that Bar- bara Hepworth and James Laver had died in fires than in the fact that they had died.') If, in the bumpy course of reading Heppenstall's last novel The Pier, one repeatedly comes on not merely sentences but whole paragraphs already familiar from the journals, this is because the feud with the Deal neighbours, repeatedly gal- vanising a man otherwise all too clearly and all too sadly in a state of physical and mental decline, provides it with its theme. An elderly writer, chain-smoking on his slow, inexorable journey to extinction, conceives a ferocious loathing for the people in the next-door house, without even bothering to get to know them. When the children's balls bounce into his garden, he rarely throws them back, preferring to consign them to his dustbin. When one of the neighbours comes to remonstrate ab- out yet another bonfire soiling the washing, he tells him to 'piss off. The only difference between reality and fiction is that whereas the real-life writer merely brooded on mass murder, in the last pages the fictional writer actually commits it.
The book contains a number of vivid evocations of Deal and its inhabitants. But too often, on these occasions when Hep- penstall is merely transcribing pages from his journals, a character (for example Simon Raven, left unnamed in the novel) puts in a featureless appearance, without any explanation of who he or she is, to vanish forever; and too often the obsession with measurement leads to some such wearisome passage as 'That year I was to spend 158 nights in the same bedroom. As one year was a leap year, it would have an extra night. By September 3rd, I had this year spent 241 of the year's first 252 nights here. Altogether, therefore, I had then slept 1,495 nights in the same room . .
Both books certainly testify to a writer of unusual erudition and intelligence, hardly worthy of the contempt with which Evelyn Waugh, pretending to believe that he was a German Jewish refugee, dismissed him under the derisive name of `Kurkweiler'. They also testify to what seems to have been a life of increasing narrowness and sadness — so that when the writer B. S. Johnson dies of his own hand, Heppenstall speculates in the journals that perhaps he has lost his only friend.
Previous page
