I Don't Want to Know Anyone Too Well

by Norman Levine

  And before Miss Waters there were others. The press officer at the Norwegian embassy—he ran a Norwegian little magazine, in English, from London. And another one, from India, also in English. My early stories appeared in both. And when I got a copy of the Indian magazine I saw that my Canadian characters had been turned into Indians. And there was another editor who would ask to borrow your box of matches. Then, when you got back to your flat, you found he had stuffed a pound note inside the box.

  They are all gone—like their magazines.

  And something has gone with them.

  Those carefree days when you wrote when you felt like it. And slept in when you wanted to. And would be sure of seeing others like yourself at noon in certain places.

  Now in the morning, after breakfast, I wait for the mail to come. Then I go upstairs and close the door behind me. And I make myself get on with the novel, the new story, or the article which has been commissioned by a well-paying magazine. I take a break for lunch, then come back up here until four. Once in a while I might take a day off and go on a bus to see what the country is like. I forget that there is so much colour about. Or, for a change, take a train for the day to Plymouth. But otherwise, it is up the stairs to this room. All my energy now goes into work. I light up a small Dutch cigar, and sometimes I talk to myself. I feel reasonably certain now that what I have written will be published. Writing has become my living.

  Of course there are still the occasional days when things are going right and the excitement comes back from the work. Not like in those early days when writing and the life we were leading seemed so much to belong together. I had complete faith then in those little magazines. What I didn’t know was that what they bred was infectious. They infected a lot of young people with the notion that to be involved with literature was somehow to be involved with the good life. And by the time you learned differently, it was usually too late.

  On Friday I had to be up early. In the morning I was to be interviewed, in a rowing-boat on the Serpentine, for a Canadian television program on the “brain drain.” And later I was to meet my publisher for lunch.

  It was very pleasant on the water early in the morning. The sun made patterns. People going to work stopped to watch, while I rowed the interviewer, the cameraman, the sound-recordist, and their equipment—and was asked why wasn’t I living in Canada, and why did I write?

  I met my publisher in his club. He is an American, from Boston, bald and short. We had a martini. Then another. Then we went into the dining room. Smoked salmon followed by duck with wine, then dessert. And ending with brandy and a large Havana cigar.

  He asked me what type would I like for the book, could I send him the blurb for the dust jacket? He told me the number of copies they would print, that one of the Sunday papers wanted to run a couple of extracts before publication. He told me some gossip about other writers, publishers, and agents. And what was I writing now? And which publishing season would he have it for?

  I left him after four and caught a taxi back to the house.

  “How did it go?” my wife asked.

  “OK,” I said. “How was the zoo?”

  She began to tell me, when we heard a noise. It sounded as if it was coming from the front door. We went to look and surprised a man with a key trying to open the door. He was in his late fifties, short and stocky and wearing a shabby raincoat.

  “Is the doc in?” he said timidly.

  “No,” I said. “He’s on holiday.”

  “Oh,” he said. “I’ve come up from Sussex. I always have a bed here when I come up.”

  He spoke with an educated accent.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “But we have the place for three weeks.”

  “I always have a bed here when I come up.”

  “There isn’t room,” I said.

  “My name is George Smith,” he said. “ABC publish me. I’m a poet.”

  “How do you do,” I said. “We’ll be gone in ten days. Come in and have a drink.”

  While I poured him a brandy, I asked what was the name of his last book.

  He said he had enough work for a book and had sent the manuscript to—and here he named a well-known publisher.

  “But I haven’t heard,” he said.

  “That’s a good sign,” I said.

  “Perhaps they have lost it,” he said. “Or they are, like Doc, on holiday.”

  He brought out a small tin and took some loose tobacco and began to roll his own cigarette and one for me.

  “How long,” I asked, “have they had it?”

  “Nearly five months,” he said.

  He finished his brandy. I poured him some more.

  “I would ring them up and find out,” I said. “Or drop them a line.”

  “Do you think I should?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  I went to the door to see him out, and instead walked him to the bus stop.

  The street was full of mountain ash, and red berries were lying on the lawns, the sidewalk, and on the road.

  “I had a letter from T. S. Eliot,” he said. “I kept it all these years. But I sold it last month to Texas for fifty dollars,” he said proudly. “My daughter was getting married. And I had to get her a present.”

  I asked him where he would stay the night.

  “I have one or two other places,” he said. “I come up about once every six weeks. London is my commercial centre.”

  I went and bought him a package of cigarettes.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  The red bus came and I watched him get on.

  When I got back my wife said, “Well, do you feel better?”

  “No,” I said.

  It went on like this—right through the time we were there. An assortment of people turned up at the door. There was a young blond girl—she wanted to lick stamps for literature. There were visiting lecturers and professors from American and Canadian and English universities. There were housewives; one said, over the phone, “I’ll do anything to get into print.” There were long-distance telephone calls. One rang after midnight and woke us up. “Nothing important,” the voice said. “I just wanted to have a talk. We usually do now and then. I’ve had stories in ABC.”

  There was, it seemed, a whole world that depended on the little magazine.

  I tried to be out of the house as much as possible. I went to see my agent. He had a cheque for four hundred dollars, less his commission, waiting for me, for the sale of a story. He took me out for a meal, and we talked about the size of advances, the sort of money paperback publishers were paying these days, the way non-fiction was selling better than fiction. I met other writers in expensive clubs and restaurants. We gossiped about what middle-aged writer was leaving his middle-aged wife to live with a young girl. And what publisher was leaving his firm to form his own house. I was told what magazines were starting—who paid the best.

  Then I would come back to the phone ringing, the piles of mail, and people turning up at the door eager to talk about the aesthetics of writing. I didn’t mind the young, but it was the men and women who were around my age or older who made me uncomfortable. I didn’t like the feeling of superiority I had when I was with them. Or was it guilt? I didn’t know.

  Meanwhile my wife and kids enjoyed themselves. They went to the Victoria and Albert Museum, the National Gallery, the Tate, and came back with postcard reproductions that they sent to friends. They went to a couple of Proms, to a play, had a day in Richmond Park, Hampton Court, and a boat ride on the Thames.

  When the time came to go back, they didn’t want to.

  But I did.

  I had passed through my ABC days, and I wanted to get away. Was it because it was a reminder of one’s youth? Or of a time which promised more than it turned out to be? I told myself that there was an unreality about it all—that our lives then had no
economic base—that it was a time of limbo. But despite knowing these things, I carry it with me. It represents a sort of innocence that has gone.

  On the Saturday morning waiting for the taxi to come to take us to Paddington Station, the phone rang, and a young girl’s voice wanted to know about her short story.

  I said the doctor was away. He would be back later. She ought to ring this evening.

  “What time?”

  “After nine,” I said.

  “Have you read the story?” she asked. “What do you think of it?”

  “We just rented the house,” I said. “We were here for a holiday.”

  “Oh,” she said. “You’re not one of us?”

  “No,” I said.

  Then the taxi came. And the driver began to load the cases into the back of the car.

  I DON’T WANT

  TO KNOW ANYONE

  TOO WELL

  I first heard of Al Grocer as a legible signature at the end of this typewritten letter.

  Dear Mr. Bonnar,

  I should like to ask you quite well in advance if you would be agreeable to act as my guide while I’m in Cornwall for a week at the beginning of September. I operate an original service for independent radio stations throughout Australia. We offer them tape recordings of various aspects of European life. For the 1967 season our project is a series of journeys. And after reading your excellent article on Cornwall we have decided to include A Journey into Cornwall on our list.

  I hope you can come with me, and together we can shape a thirty-minute travel-interpretation of this (your) region. I would be prepared to pay for your services, and I think it would be fun to do. And I hope you can find time to do it with me. By the way, to lug the equipment (and ourselves) around, I’ll rent a car because I think of this in terms of my own pleasure and comfort, plus the great benefit of being mobile in our work. At any rate, may I have your initial reaction at this time.

  Cordially,

  Al Grocer

  I wrote back saying I’d be delighted. It seemed a fine way of seeing the country and having a holiday as well. For though I’ve lived in Cornwall for five years, I haven’t been around much. I don’t drive.

  On Friday I got Sam England to take his taxi and we drove over to St. Erth to meet the train. It was a fine, blustering kind of morning with whitecaps in the bay. And I could see the shadows of the low clouds moving over the far shore fields, leaving patches of light green, dark green, and brown. Al Grocer had sent me a brochure of his company. It included a photograph. From the photograph he looked to be an undistinguished crewcut, in his thirties. But the man I finally approached— the only one left standing on the platform—was clearly in his fifties. Medium height, stocky, bald. He was neatly dressed in a navy blue blazer, grey flannels, a white shirt open at the neck. And on a pale face he had very large black sunglasses.

  “Mister Grocer?” I said. “Good to see you.”

  “Ditto,” he said, dragging the word out. And his accent had a trace of central Europe in it.

  He smiled. And his mouth showed, contrary to what I expected, one of the finest sets of teeth I have ever seen. We shook hands firmly. Then he put his arm around my shoulder and left it there, something I do not entirely take with strangers. It was, I discovered, one of his mannerisms. A few days later I introduced him to my bank manager to cash a personal cheque of his, as he was running short. In less than five minutes after meeting the manager he was putting his arm around the bank manager’s shoulder.

  “Call me Al,” he said, and changed his glasses for another pair that he brought out of his blazer pocket. I caught a glimpse of bulging eyes. “I better make sure the porters don’t throw the equipment around, it’s sensitive.”

  There were no porters. The portable recording machinery was dumped on the platform, and the train moved off to Penzance. I helped him carry the equipment up the steps and across the covered, brown, wooden bridge above the tracks. He was breathing hard and I could smell scent, a kind of bay rum.

  “How was the trip?”

  “Not bad,” he puffed. “I really go for these toy English trains.”

  “Your first time in England?”

  “No. Twenty-five or thirty years ago I lived in Southampton—for three months. Someone got a disease on the boat taking us to Australia. They took us all off the boat and put us in quarantine. Until we all got the disease. Guess who got it last . . . ?”

  On the way back we had to share the taxi with an elderly couple who were staying at the Tregenna Castle. We drove up the long drive of trees to the plateau, and the taxi stopped. Mister Grocer opened the taxi door and got out, surveying the grounds, the country house of a hotel, the fine view of St. Ives with the harbour, bay, and the Atlantic below.

  “I’m going to like this place,” he said, taking off his glasses and inhaling the air.

  “This isn’t where you’re staying,” I said. “This is the most expensive hotel here. You asked for bed and breakfast. I’ve got you a place for fifteen shillings a day—it’s clean.”

  He put his dark glasses back on and returned into the taxi visibly disappointed. I had a feeling this kind of thing had happened to him before. And for some inexplicable reason I wished there and then that Mister Grocer could have stayed at the Tregenna Castle.

  My wife took an instant dislike to him. She had gone to some trouble and expense to get a duck and spent most of the day getting it ready.

  “What’s this?” he said. “Rabbit?”

  “No,” my wife said, “it’s crow.”

  He looked so startled that I found myself saying. “It’s duck. It’s been done in wine.” And for my wife’s benefit, “It’s delicious.” But the damage had been done.

  Next morning he came around after breakfast. He had changed and was wearing a fawn gabardine jacket over a dark blue sport shirt, light blue sport trousers, and the black sunglasses. Apart from his bulging eyes, his other features were fine, though age and fat had started to undermine them. “How do you like the bed and breakfast place?”

  “Just fine.”

  I fixed him up with a place run by a couple of artists. They had a terraced house and took in people, since they couldn’t make a living from painting. But I was a bit worried if Mister Grocer would take to their bohemian ways.

  “Would you like a walk?” I said.

  “You’re now about to get one of Bonnar’s conducted tours,” my wife said sarcastically from the kitchen. I had never known her to take such an instant dislike to anyone.

  We were walking towards Carbis Bay—it’s a pleasant walk: on the side of a slope, overlooking the bay, alongside flowering gorse, blackberry bushes, and wild garlic—when he said, “William, you having trouble in your marriage?”

  “No.”

  “It’s no good, William, I can tell. I’m sensitive to people’s voices. I can walk into a room and spot immediately by the way a person talks whether he likes me or not. And I could tell from the way your wife spoke that you’ve just had a row . . .”

  “But we haven’t.”

  We walked on, through a stile, in silence.

  “You married?”

  He shook his head. “I had a girl once, in Poland. When the war came an uncle in Adelaide said he would bring her out for me. I would come later. He did bring her over. Three years later he helped to bring me. When I came, I found my girl married to his son.” He stopped, plucked a wild garlic—“I made films in Poland,”—and put the green stem in his mouth. “Before the war, historical pictures—I used to be quite well known.”

  After about a mile the path leads to the door of the Carbis Bay Hotel. It was a very hot day, the tennis courts were deserted, there wasn’t anyone on the close-cropped lawns. We went inside the hotel. No one there either. I suggested that he wait while I try to find out if we could have some tea or coffee or a beer out on t
he lawn or the balcony. I finally found a student in the kitchen who said he was working here for the summer. He said they didn’t provide refreshments for non-residents during the season. I told this to Mister Grocer. But it was obvious that he had his mind on something else.

  “Is there anyone about?”

  “No.”

  He walked behind the reception desk and calmly helped himself to a considerable number of hotel envelopes and hotel writing paper. Then he sat down by a table in the empty lounge, made himself comfortable, and began to write a letter.

  “I like good hotel stationery,” he said.

  When we returned to St. Ives, he fumbled in his fawn jacket pocket.

  “I’ve lost my Biro.”

  So I took him to Woolworth’s. He tried out several plastic pens at a shilling each, but didn’t like them. “They are much too cheap.”

  We came out and walked along the front.

  “I think we can get a Biro,” I said, “in Literature and Art.”

  “But I’ve got one.” And he brought out from his fawn jacket pocket one of the plastic pens that were on sale in Woolworth’s. “What’s the matter,” he said good-humouredly. “Haven’t you ever taken something without paying for it?”

  We rented a car from the North Star Garage. We planned to start next morning. For the first day we would go outward to Land’s End along the north coast, and come back by the south. We decided it would be best to start early and return to St. Ives, from wherever we were, to sleep.

  We met in the car park by the cemetery. He was there, looking closely through a copy of the Times. And he encircled with his pen possible stories that he might record. The oldest water wheel in England was in the West Country—that would make an item, he said. The man who breeds worms for a living. Then he transferred these into a notebook that was marked “Ideas.” On its front page in his large clear writing was: