‘Memory is the thing you forget with.’ Alexander Chase
It was my first literary party, in a London garden. I was in my late twenties, a hand-to-mouth reviewer with no day job. I took a girl I wasn’t quite going out with. We ran into a friend of mine. “This is Chris Reid,’ I said. ‘What do you do?’ she asked. ‘I’m a poet,’ he replied. She laughed with such forceful scorn that she recoiled back into a flower-bed and spilled half her wine. When Chris had wandered off, I asked why she’d reacted like that. ‘You can’t say you’re a poet if you just write poems,’ she answered. I felt glad I had never described myself – to anyone, let alone her – as a novelist, even though my desk contained the full draft of a novel.
The party moved on. Someone introduced me to Elizabeth Jane Howard, and then scarpered. She seemed to me formidable: tall, poised, coiffed and gowned, waiting to be diverted out of some grand boredom. As it happened, I had recently reviewed a collection of her short stories, Mr Wrong, for the Oxford Mail; better still, I had been enthusiastic about them. I mentioned this as unobsequiously as I could; she was neither diverted nor, as far as I could tell, remotely interested. Fair enough. ‘I gave you a decent review in a four-book fiction round-up in a provincial newspaper,’ or words to that effect, was probably not the conversational key to literary London.
How to engage her? Something more recherché, perhaps. I remembered, in a book-nerdish way, that whereas collections of stories normally list on the reverse of the title page the original places of serial publication, there were no such attributions in Mr Wrong. I decided that such silence must have been a deliberate authorial decision. I wondered what her reasons might have been. I asked her about it.
‘I didn’t know that was the case.’
‘Ah.’
‘No.’
‘So it wasn’t deliberate?’
‘No.’
The conversation was definitely lacking brio. I doubted she would be interested in my own modest literary breakthrough. A few months previously I had entered a Ghost Story competition organized by The Times, had been chosen as one of the dozen winners, and was soon to be rewarded with publication in a hardback anthology by Jonathan Cape! Who were Elizabeth Jane Howard’s own publishers!! No, she definitely wouldn’t be interested in that.
I gazed rather desperately across the party and saw a tall, windblown figure who could well be Tom Maschler. What a coincidence – the editorial boss of Jonathan Cape.
‘Is that by any chance … Tom Maschler?’
‘Yes, would you like to meet him?’ she replied instantly, then marched me across and left me there.
My nerves were by now pretty shot. Still, I wanted to try and impress.
‘Hello,’ I said, ‘I’m one-twelfth of one of your authors.’
He didn’t look even faintly amused. I explained ploddingly about The Times Anthology of Ghost Stories and its dozen contributors. He asked me my name again. I told him again. He shook his head.
‘Sorry, I don’t remember names. What was the title of your story?’
I looked at him. He looked back expectantly. I paused. My mind was filled with a terrible blank. What the fuck was the title of my story? I knew it, I was sure I knew it. Come on, come on, you’ve just read the proofs. You’ve just written your own contributor’s note. This is your publisher. You must know. It’s impossible for you not to know.
‘I can’t remember,’ I replied.
So there we were: a publisher who didn’t recognize one of his writers’ names, and a writer who couldn’t remember the title of his own – his only – work. Welcome to the literary life.
And the girl I wasn’t quite going out with? Oh, she dumped me soon afterwards.