Letter to several possible recipients from the mid-1980s
To whom it may concern
Obviously I am writing to say sorry. I know this is meant to be a love letter but, as you will have guessed, I am one of those men for whom love – contrary to what the Ali McGraw/Ryan O’Neil film claimed – always means having to say you’re sorry. At some point love letters become letters of apology. The thing separating the two is also the thing that makes the one blur into the other: a relationship.
To start at the beginning, I saw you at that party in wherever it was and you were beautiful. Is it superfluous to say that? Is there a man in the world who does – or at the very least did – not think his woman beautiful? (I fear that this is a paraphrase of something Arsène Wenger said, and back in the 1980s, when this letter purports to have been written, no one had heard of Arsène Wenger. But the thing about this letter is that while it’s meant to be sort of written by me in my twenties it’s a version of me in my twenties who benefits from all the wisdom and insight I’ve amassed – not much actually – since then. So, for the sake of clarity: as well as being a letter not to one but several exes it is also a letter from several versions of my previous self, some of them also exes. As such it was written both then and now and at various points between. Its tense, if it has one, is the present retrospective.) All else followed from seeing you at that party and thinking you were beautiful and that, somehow, I had to connive a way of talking to you.
You know those software statements? ‘By opening this package you agree to abide etc …’ I think you effectively sign a contract like that when you have your first kiss, and it’s an agreement renewed and extended with every subsequent kiss: I agree that by participating in this kiss I am willing to have my heart smashed to pieces in return for this one moment of bliss. It’s a version of the Faustus thing – ‘O moment thou art fair, stay.’ (I’ll come back to this too.) I’m happy with the terms of that contract. It would be a dull life otherwise. The important thing is that we had some great times together, some great moments, most of which, if we’re being utterly frank, I can no longer remember. Life is all and only about those moments. (So when I say this is a letter of apology I mean the opposite; it’s a letter of non-apology.) ‘You say yes to a single joy and you say yes to all woes’ – that whole trip. As you know I was – in this context I am simply too embarrassed to use the word ‘am’ – somewhat of a Nietzschean. Sorry about that, about the way I was always quoting Nietzsche. In fact, while we’re at it, I’m sorry about the way I was always quoting, period. All that Rilke and Dylan too … Well, honey, what can I say? That’s what young guys do. They quote Nietzsche and Dylan and Rilke. Ditto the music, the relentless torrent of late Coltrane I inflicted on your ears. Sorry about that too. More specifically, I’m sorry that, after listening to First Meditations (for Quartet), at top volume you said ‘I guess I’m just too mellow for this.’ Yes, that’s right, I’m sorry you said that because that left me no choice but to say, ‘Right, that’s it.’ After which you said, ‘What do you mean?’ After which I said, ‘It’s over. We’re splitting up.’ That may seem like rather an extreme reaction to your reaction but, even now, looking back, I think: fair enough, good for you (me, I mean). Frankly, anyone who doesn’t swoon at the moment of transition between the first track, ‘Love’, and the second, ‘Compassion’, when the aftermath of the tenor is hanging over everything and there’s almost silence, just the faintest residue of a pulse, before Elvin and Trane bring the whole suite swelling back to life again – frankly, even though we’re dealing, literally, with the movement from ‘Love’ to ‘Compassion’, that person deserves to get booted out on their arse! After all, it’s not like we’d been listening to Ascension. Now that really is a racket. For what it’s worth I never listen to free jazz now. I’d rather put my head in a metal dustbin and have someone bang it very hard with a big hammer but when you’re that age you just have to fill your head with this stuff. It calms you down at some level.
Another thing I’m sorry about is the way that I always wanted to go to that pub, the Effra. God I loved that pub! I loved all pubs but I loved that one even more than all the others. Now that I hardly ever set foot in pubs it seems hard to believe that I could have loved them so much. They strike me as horrible, smoky, violent places and they were probably smokier, more violent and even more horrible back then. It just seemed so implausible to me that you didn’t like pubs. How could anyone not like pubs? Pubs weren’t just where one had a good time; pubs were what one did. Especially the Effra. On a more general, beer-related note, it is a source of deep regret that you had the ill fortune to meet me in the depths of my real ale phase so that all our holidays (I know what you’re going to say: we only had two) were organised around the CAMRA guide. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not going to throw the baby out with the bathwater and de- (or re-)nounce real ale. I still love the stuff. Flat beer served at room temperature is one of England’s great contributions to the sensual life of the world. But this I will concede: it seems a weird way to have spent one’s twenties, always chucking pints of Dog Bolter down your – my – neck and searching out a boozer where they served Old Peculiar. This became especially clear in my late thirties and early forties – the Ecstasy years – when I ended up leading a life that was in some ways more youthful than the pubby one I led in my mid-twenties but, as with Arsène Wenger, the alternative just wasn’t available back then.
I’m really sorry, as well, that you were such a headbanging feminist nutcase. Honestly. What a waste. There you were, twenty-five, slinky as a cat, and I never saw you in stockings or a G-string (I still remember the fury that the ‘Underneath they’re all lovable’ advert induced in you, in me, in us), never even saw you in a dress in fact, only in dungarees and (a concession to glamour) that Simone de Beauvoir headscarf. Poor you, poor me, poor us. Hey, the sex was great though, wasn’t it? In spite of all the political prohibitions about penetration and patriarchy and the dread figure of Andrea Dworkin hanging over us like a curse it turned out that, at some timeless level, naturally enough, we liked doing all the stuff that people have always liked doing. Those moments when you’d say, ‘Do anything to me.’ Well, call me an opportunist but I took that as meaning, in so many words, ‘Do it in my arse.’ Turns out that’s exactly what you did mean, of course, but to have actually said so would have been craving your own oppression, like choosing to read Norman Mailer (at least I never quoted that tosspot!) instead of Toni Cade Bambara. All of which, of course, was part of the thrill. Ah, good times. Or great moments anyway.
Anyway, what I’ve been leading up to saying, basically, is that I’m sorry I was such a jerk. I’m sorry I thought the way to seduce someone – yourself, I hardly need remind you, included – was to undermine their politics, that the way to demonstrate that I was an alpha male of the mind was to quote Nietzsche and generally let it be known that I had read more Adorno and Lukacs than whichever rival male was also trying to do exactly the same thing. So, to show how genuinely contrite I am, I’m going to make a confession – a double confession, actually, the first part of which, if we’re being entirely honest, is actually a boast: I did sleep with M that time, after that party in Bonnington Square when I said I’d ended up crashing at Pete Johnson’s place in Oval Mansions. Guilty as charged (I’m trying to wipe that smile off my face but it’s not really a smile, more of a smirk). That’s part one. And the second part, I realise now, is also a sort of boast: I never actually read History and Class Consciousness. It was just too complicated and boring. The days when I could even contemplate reading such a thing are long gone – the brain is not what it was – but back then I was, theoretically, capable of doing so. The funny thing is that of all the stuff that didn’t happen back then, that’s something I really don’t regret.
Love