That sleep may come
Does anyone remember, let alone still observe, the rule which once ordained that novels should never be read before lunch? The idea behind this was presumably that such great productions as Anna Karenina, Great Expectations and Le Rouge et le Noir were, in whatever sense, unworthy of those hours when the brain must be deemed to function at its sharpest. A government blue book or a ministerial memorandum should always take precedence over George Eliot or Henry James, fit only to be consumed once the alimentary processes had suffi- ciently blunted intellectual alertness.
To those of us who write fiction the con- cept of it being unfit for what is nowadays called 'quality time' seems not merely quaint but positively insulting. An early morning journey on the Underground reveals how desperate in any case many people are to ingest a hasty, bite-size chunk or two of imaginative literature before set- tling down to Dame Travail's numbing banalities. Novels in this context take on the nutrient properties of health-store energy bars.
There is something, however, in the idea of certain books as belonging to specific times of day, never more so than when, during the small hours, racked by night- mares worse than the Lord Chancellor's in Iolanthe, 'you awake with a shudder despairing' and invoke the consolation of the printed page to stave off the blue devils. Those of a bookish turn, at moments like this, grow surprisingly partic- ular in their choice of the appropriate restraining hand, the benign volume which will prevent them from swallowing cyanide or dashing out their brains. In such circum- stances, novels are not exactly encouraging, whereas the impacted actuality of a histori- cal work or a decent biography may act rather like the pick-me-ups administered in spoonfuls over the counter by chemists around Piccadilly to Edwardian knuts and mashers feeling a more than usually morning-afterish seediness.
A week or so before Christmas, while staying with friends in the country, I found myself in just such a sleepless situation. The wine at dinner had played its custom- ary trick of knocking me flat for two hours before an abrupt three o'clock resurrection in tandem with a raging thirst. Outside the window a fox barked and owls hooted. I became gripped with the fatal sense of what Browning calls 'the petty done, the vast undone' which whisks one off on appalling rollercoaster rides of guilt and sorrow. None of the books on the bedside table, The Satanic Verses, Empire of the Sun, Flaubert's Parrot, seemed exactly serenity inducing, and I was beginning to feel like the hero of Eugene Labiche's delightful farce, Le Voyage de Monsieur Perrichon, who asks the man at the Gare de Lyon bookstall to 'give me a writer who has nothing to say about love, money, mar- riage, politics or death' when my gaze light- ed on a complete set of the Strand magazine piled unceremoniously in the corner of the room.
Everybody knows that Sherlock Holmes made his first appearance, and his last bow, between the covers of the Strand. The very name evokes, by the same token, p. world of button-backed armchairs, pipe smoke and soda syphons in which chaps on home leave from Bechuanaland or Sarawak strove to recapture those absolutes of decency and clean living emblematised by England. The magazine's moral and literary values were, or at least seemed to be, irremoveably middle-brow and ornery-blokeish. The famous boast of the magazine's publisher, George Newnes, founder of Tit-Bits, was that, 'I know what the average man wants, for I am that average man.'
Yet closer inspection (with all the insom- niac's clarity of focus) uncovered a rather more eclectic brew. What was a writer like Aldous Huxley, for example, hardly the most anti-intellectual storyteller, doing in its pages, and could it just have been the money which inspired H. G. Wells, whom many Strand readers would happily have horsewhipped for his political opinions, to become a frequent contributor? And what can have possessed D. H. Lawrence to con- tribute a heavily bowdlerised version of his acrid little masterpiece 'Tickets Please', in which a randy tram-driver is all but torn to pieces by a maenad-like gaggle of sex- crazed 'conductorettesi The sense that all was not quite as hunky-dory in the Strand as Newnes would have his readers believe is enhanced by the bizarrerie of stories by certain less celebrat- ed writers. Nobody these days reads Morley Roberts, ex-cowboy, dockhand, bosom pal of George Gissing and author of nearly 50 novels, but 'The Fog', published in 1908, whose protagonists are fleeing by balloon from an England where a creeping miasma brings mob rule and madness, cries out for television treatment, as does Ianthe Jerrold's 'The Orchestra of Death', an imbecilic but totally compelling melodrama involving a revolutionary secret society and skulduggery at the Coliseum.
Oddest of all is a story with the dimply uncompromising title 'A Horrible Fright', dating from 1894, by L. T. Meade. She had recently undertaken a career change to thriller writing from the production, in industrial quantities, of tear-jerking tales of school life (try 'A World of Girls', unputdownable, a real Kleenex-consumer). The eponymous fright overtakes the sym- bolically named heroine Virginia who finds herself sharing a train compartment (no corridors then) from Euston to Holyhead with 'a big man wrapped in a great big ulster' who, having threatened her with a razor and a pair of scissors, orders her to make use of them in cutting off his mous- tache, whiskers and beard and shaving all his hair. Having changed his clothes (while her back is turned), he transforms himself into 'an elderly clergyman in complete and most correct clerical costume'. Freud was as yet unknown to readers of the Strand, but certain implications even then must have been so obvious that you wonder how Meade got away with it. The Strand folded somewhere around 1950, with Macdonald Hastings, Max's father, as its last editor. Any equivalent magazine now could only exist at the whim of some millionaire whose culture ran as deep as his altruism. Sombrely reflecting on this and on the favourite mantra of pub- lishers, 'There's no market for short stories', I heard old Stranders with names like L. C. Cutcliffe-Hyne, J. B. Harris- Burland and H. Greenhough-Smith turn peevishly in their graves as I settled back to sleep.
Jonathan Keates
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