AFTERTHOUGHT
•
Here Lies, and Lies . •
ALAN BRIEN
Yesterday, the ashes of Alan Brien were scat- tered on the surface of the Welsh Harp, a North London reservoir. It was his last wish, according to his biographer Auberon Waugh, but whether the intention was simply to contaminate the water supply and rot the teeth of an entire metropolis, or to achieve a spurious immortality by continual circulation through the digestive systems of those who survived him, none of the handful of remarkably cheery mourners was pre- pared to reveal. Brien had remained forty years of age ever since his fortieth birthday on March 12, 1965, and was accustomed to attribute his sur- vival, for a further half-century beyond that date, to a chronic inability to decide on his famous last words. One view was that these were 'It's all right for some' (the title of his unwritten auto- biography) while another held that he ended on a quotation from Shakespeare, 'Pray you, undo this button.'
Brien was born in the north-eastern town of Sunderland—a place which was continually evoked in his writings, much to the mystification of its inhabitants, as a combination of Dodge City, the Gorbals and Port Said. He was educated first at Hylton Road Infants School—an institution he walked out of after one half-morning, during the play break, explaining to his mother, 'I've been to school, now what do I do?' This attitude to education was to remain with him for the rest of his life. The occasional nightmares he suffered in adulthood he attributed to being sent back again immediately. It was his firm 'conviction that all anyone needed to learn academically before the age of eleven could be taught in a week, before the age of seventeen in a term, and that a respect- able degree could be obtained after three hours work a day for nine months.
Procrastination was a vice with him all his days despite many warnings that continual indul- gence in this beastly habit would lead to him going blind and his extremities dropping off. He was committed to sloth and delay as an end in itself. There was nothing he would not put off doing in order to do nothing. The retentive capacity of his bladder was an amazement and a revelation to physiologists, the last-minute delivery of his copy a miracle and an agony to editors. He began read- ing at least half a dozen books every week of his existence and rarely finished one. He boasted several times of being in the middle of fifty volumes and his ceaseless crusade to deny copy- right to all printed works, including long novels, published without an index, was probably due to a desire to find a quick and simple means of find- ing his place without having to start at the begin- ning of each one all over again.
Brien had no head for figures and a constitu- tional inability to master any abstract ideas. There were few topics upon which he would not argue but his case was invariably weakened by his habit of inventing statistics and forging references. Con- versation, he often said, was an exchange of weak- nesses and he had an irritating habit of spoiling other people's anecdotes by hunting down all the inconsistences in their telling. His own mono- logues were 'apt to begin, 'I remember once, or perhaps I invented it, or was it your story, well
anyway . . .' He was always planning to begin a novel but, partly owing to his insistence on com- posing the reviews before he wrote the text, no sign of one has been found among his effects. He produced many ingenious rationalisations for this failure --the most popular being his claim that, as any fiction would necessarily be based on his own life, he was obliged to wait until his life was over to find how the narrative ended. He had no trust in any existence after death, being content to meet any evidence for survival with the ques- tion—'then why isn't Hannen Swaffer editing the Psychic News?' He preserved always an obsessive interest in theology which he regarded as fascinat- ing material for amateur psychoanalysis.
Brien had a high regard for moral courage being as he over-readily admitted, a physical coward. 'I don't mind taking any risks so long as there is no likelihood of anybody actually hitting me' was how he put it. Here too he justified his reluctance to endanger his neck by the philoso- phical assertion that man's first duty is to continue living. 'A race of heroes is a race of suicides he once said (or if he didn't, he should have). Nothing made him so uneasy and distrustful as to find him- self in the heart of a group who shared his beliefs and prejudices. He immediately began to doubt any assertion, especially one made by himself, if it met with general agreement. He prided him- self upon the clinical accuracy of his self-aware- ness but he cherished many profound misunder- standings about his own temperament and char- acter. It was always his conviction that in any gathering he rarely opened his mouth, that he was incurably sentimental and tender-hearted, and that he would rather appear a tongue-tied fool than a loud-voiced bully. This, to put it mildly, was not the impression left on most of his acquaintances though his friends claimed there was an odd, if elusive, trace of truth in the view.
Brien got on very well with children so tong as they did not compete with him. He enjoyed play- ing games with rules arranged so that nobody could lose and there were rewards for all. He had an engineer's instinct for machinery but only if it operated toys or gadgets. The advent of cheap plastic guns, cars, boats. robots. etc., gave him great pleasure when he discovered that he could operate on their innards with a hot poker over the stove. Nearly all of his children's toys developed strange melted wounds through which he observed their secret workings. He was also an adventurous and unpredictable cook who could never repeat a recipe because each one developed according to its own logic, progressing through a dozen differ- ent flavours, as he cancelled and transformed the dish's tastes with a new herb. He was fond 'of eating too, though he tended to alienate classic cooks by explaining to them that he had never en- joyed any food as much as that he cooked himself.
He said that he was never bored with his own company because his own thoughts always came as a surprise to him. His theatre reviews and his essays appear to have been composed almost en- tirely by his unconscious, and when he praised something he had written, he did so without embarrassment because he felt he had been opera- ting as medium for some controlling personality beyond his interference. This led him to be accused of inconsistency by those who discovered that his opinions had sometimes almost totally reversed themselves in the course of composition. During his long career as a compulsive scribbler, in short and frequent bursts of prose. Brien dis- played so many psychosomatic symptoms that he never had time to develop any real diseases. If his hero, William Hazlitt, had not booked the epitaph for himself, Brien would have liked to have ended with the words—Well, I've had a happy life.'
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