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Lies, Fiction, Truth: My Relationship with Alan Ross
(Published in The London Magazine, April/May 2004)
My first printed story, 'Simon Carver Looks at Life', a dark tale about a prep school boy and cricket, appeared in the October / November 1996 issue of The London Magazine. This should have been a happy start to my belated writing career except that I had lied to Alan Ross ahout myself. This was to prove a fertile lie, which forced me to reappraise myself radically, during a time of my life when I was going through a period of mental exhaustion.
Alan Ross, who throughout his life also suffered from crippling bouts of depression, had phoned me, sometime in August 1996, to find out some of my biographical details for the contributors' notes section. He was renowned for being curt on the phone, and I found him intimidating and slightly grand in his manner. Initially I was straightforward with him, although he asked a number of probing questions (part of his Naval Intelligence background perhaps). Then he asked me which school I had been to, and I tried to sidestep the question by saying that I had been to Haileybury prep school, and briefly to public school. Then I talked quickly about my time at a tutorial college in Windsor, the polytechnic of North London, Birkbeck College, Cambridge University.
'Yes, but which school did you go to? '
' Haileybury, ' I blurted out, ' but I was only there for a year or so. '
' Which house were you in? '
' Edmonstone. '
The interrogation over, he said my story would appear soon, and we both said a clipped goodbye.
In fact I had run away three times in my first term at Haileybury in 1968 and never went back after that. I returned instead to my alcoholic parents in Egham, Surrey, my mother vivacious but sometimes violent, my father benign but in the early stages of dementia.
After my first two weeks at Haileybury, I had no intention of staying. I don't believe it was anything to do with the school. The previous school holiday had determined my fate. My father began to deteriorate in mind and body, my mother was often drunk and also involved in a messy relationship with the man who drove my father to work. Her mood swings, from most loving mother to Lady Dracula, were terrifying. But I had this obsession that if I were at home I could help my mother and make everything better.
Perhaps my initial half-truth to Alan Ross was understandable, as I did not wish to dig up these things. I just hoped that he wouldn't use the Haileybury detail in the contributors' notes, but he did - perhaps because, ironically, he was himself an Old Haileyburian. After this I met him briefly on two occasions at his funny little hut of an office in Thurloe Place SW7, but I never mentioned my lie. Eventually in the spring of 1998, I wrote him a letter revealing the truth, although I am sure that by now he knew anyway.
But that lie signified to me the need I had to cling to some fictionalized idea of myself, and also how I still erased the painful, or what I interpreted as most shameful, parts of my life.
My father died in 1970. My mother went on a world cruise and I stayed in Egham. Mrs Dent came in to cook my meals and to keep the house clean. I had my first intense sexual relationship, with the gorgeous Virginia, which cheered me up no end.
From this point on my life was really a series of interesting vignettes, lacking an underlying purpose: dropping out in Wales; a philosophy degree at the Polytechnic of North London; squatting; involvement with performance-art events; chauffeuring an eccentric barrister in his Rolls-Royce; teaching in adult education in the East End.
In 1987, I found myself doing research at Cambridge University (I had gained a First in English from Birkbeck College after four years of part-time study). In the Lent term of Cambridge. I began supervising students for Peterhouse. Some years later, the Cambridge examiners 'referred' my PhD thesis - meaning that I had more work to do on it - and I eventually accepted a M.Litt degree.
I had already begun to teach American undergraduates in various colleges in London. In 1994 I was in America on a promotional tour with the American director of one of these colleges. We were driving from Chicago to Galesburg on a long, bleak Midwest road, when I had the overpowering, anguished realization that I could not go on. All the fears and horrors that had been bottled inside me for so long burst out. l had come to the end of my road. I took the train back to Chicago, then a plane to England and six months of free psychotherapy, courtesy of Tonic, the charity supported by Mike Oldfield.
After this I began to write seriously. As the autobiographical element in my narratives lessens, I am exploring more deeply through fiction ways to be truthful about life. I believe it was Robert McCrum who said recently in The Observer that writing a novel is perhaps the most probing form of psychoanalysis there is.
I am now far happier and living in Hackney with my delightful wife, Nicola, head teacher of an infant school, and our delicious two-year-old daughter, Myfanwy. I continue to teach English literature to American undergraduates at Birkbeck. I am writing another novel, and I hope that this one will find favour with a publisher. But at least my short stories, poems and reviews have been published widely.
In After Pusan (1995), the third book of Alan Ross's autobiography, he wrote with directness about his 'present self, emerging shakily from me wreckage of breakdown and depression, cut wrists and crisis'. My own sufferings have not been on this scale, but I think that all those who are prone to depression feel that the surface of life is never entirely stable, and that potential collapse is always waiting round the next corner.
My lie to Alan Ross was a key turning point in forcing me to face up to some entrenched illusions I still held about myself. Luckily, he never took umbrage and printed two more of my stories. Over the also sent me a number of witty postcards, about my stories, reviews or broader things. He was a man of great sensitivity, and dry humour.
William Boyd, whose first short story was published by Alan Ross, wrote many years later in the Evening Standard, that the London Magazine is 'A fantastic magazine whose place in the history of twentieth-century literary life grows ever more secure and significant' At the time of his death Alan Ross was again in a state of severe depression and I doubt if he was able to appreciate the extent of his achievement.
But I have no doubt that the new series of The London Magazine will keep the flame burning, and give oddballs and outsiders like me a chance to flourish.
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