Literary Remains
R. B. Russell
LITERARY REMAINS
When I look back on my life in Eastbourne in the late 1980s I find it amazing that I could have ever had enough time and energy to accomplish what I did. I had returned from University but decided, after three years of freedom, that I could not possibly move back in with my parents. My father thought me foolish, paying rent on the squalid little flat that I took in the centre of town when my bedroom was still available in the comfortable, large family home in The Meads. My little sister was still living there, and visits showed me that staying with them would have been just as suffocating as it had been before I left. There were times in my flat when it was cold, and the lack of space irked me, but, compared to living in my parents’ super-heated house just a mile away, it was everything that a single twenty-one year old woman could want.
To pay the bills I took a part-time position in a large, modern bookshop; part of a national chain. It was just a few hundred yards from my flat, and I enjoyed working there. I was good at my job, being one of the few members of staff interested in literature, and I could have got on and perhaps made a career for myself with the company, but I refused to go full-time, and that annoyed my boss. I had completed my music degree, largely at my parents’ expense, and had horrified them both by joining a local rock band. I played rhythm guitar, and we spent many nights each week travelling around the south-east of England in an old Bedford van. We played gigs wherever we could get them. It was fun, and surprisingly lucrative; when you cover other people’s well-known songs at weddings and other private parties you get paid handsomely, but there was never any possibility of moving into the big-time. We could each of us earn a couple of hundred pounds a week when we were busy, and invariably drink as much as we liked at all of the free bars.
I also had my own band, writing material with a couple of old school-friends who had never moved away, but we rarely played to more than a dozen people in the local pubs. I think that my mother had once had hopes of me playing the violin or cello (my instruments at university) with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, and she would refer to my music degree with great sadness. I did put my abilities to another use, however, giving guitar lessons to a couple of friends of the family. Somehow I managed to get by pretty well financially.
I also had a boyfriend at the time. His name was Pete and he was the lead singer in a rock band in Brighton. I seemed to spend far too much time trailing around after him, and splitting up, and getting back together. He was unable to resist any of the groupies that followed him around, and I was too prone to forgive his weakness for them. When I wasn’t playing gigs myself I was following his band, and I never seemed to spend an evening at home. Despite this busy schedule I somehow managed to get a great deal of reading done at that time. I was obsessed with Joseph Conrad, and had several shelves of his books, and books about him, and I even considered going back to University to try and take an English degree. I was aided in my quest for his books not by the bright, modern shop in which I worked, but by Tilly’s bookshop at the end of Grove Road.
Tilly’s has been in its present location for years and is a wonderful resource for book-lovers who have the patience, as I had then, to wade through piles and piles of assorted, and ill-sorted, second-hand books. Unlike Mr Brooks’ bookshop on Station Road in Brighton, which was even more of a mess, the owner of Tilly’s had no idea of what could be found in his stock, or where. When the shelves had become full, in some dim past time, more books had been piled in roughly the right place on the floor in front of them. These piles became deeper and higher until such time as it was almost impossible to navigate between them. Only the dedicated bibliophile could ever find what they wanted, and I was dedicated. I don’t think that I ever paid much more than a couple of pounds for a book, but after a year or so I had managed to unearth most of Conrad’s major works from the area roughly corresponding to where they ought to be found on the shelves. My acquisitions included a number of first editions (the less expensive ones), and a chance meeting with a first editions expert in the shop where I worked got me interested in the idea of collecting books for reasons other than simple reading pleasure.
Inevitably I visited Julian Tovey’s bookshop, near my family home in the Meads. With the passion for collecting growing within me it soon became a place of pilgrimage. Certain of Conrad’s books only seemed to be available as first editions at that time, and those that I hadn’t already acquired were rather expensive. It is a slippery slope, and collectors will have done far worse things than me to aid their collecting, but I have to admit that I became something of a book tart, prostituting myself, in a manner of speaking, to assuage my collecting habit. I rather led Julian Tovey into thinking that I fancied him, and he started to do favours for me. He must have been in his forties then, and seemed so much older, but he was good-looking, in a dusty, bibliophilic sort of way. His home-life was not happy, as he explained to me, many times, in detail. He was obviously flattered by the attentions of a much younger woman, and back then I had a great figure and long, naturally blond hair. I started to work in his shop, on a casual basis, in return for books, and he also gave them to me as presents. I persuaded him to give me outrageous discounts, and often I was bought dinner. It was in return not only for spending a few hours minding his shop when he was away, but also for letting him think that I might have gone to bed with him if we didn’t both have partners; I claimed that my relationship with my cheating boyfriend was more serious than it was.
It was one Saturday afternoon in Julian Tovey’s shop that I first met Ernest Robertson. When he walked in off the street Robertson was simply an old man who had come in to browse. It was immediately obvious that he didn’t really want to buy anything, but he looked over the small stock, and then, rather pointedly, asked if Mr Julian Tovey was available. When I told the old man that the proprietor was at a bookfair he said that he would come back another time, and was disinclined to leave any message with me. He seemed absolutely ancient; his back was bent and his teeth were quite obviously not his own. He had very uneven white stubble that suggested that he probably couldn’t see well enough to shave properly, and he exuded a peculiar old man’s odour. I didn’t think that I had been particularly friendly to the old chap, but apparently he had returned and told Julian that he had been rather taken with his ‘young assistant’. According to my boss he had sold him a number of very collectable books of ghost stories, and promised more, all because I was such a fine adornment to the shop! I remember thinking that all of this was a little creepy, but sure enough he had sold Julian several rare books by M.R. James, H.R. Wakefield and Arthur Machen. The only downside, Julian pointed out, was that they were all devalued by Robertson scrawling his own name on the fly-leaf of every book in biro pen. Of course, to an expert in the field that would now add value to the books, but back then nobody was interested in Ernest Robertson. He only became revered by collectors just after he had died.
I didn’t think to take any interest in the books, but a few months later I entered Tilly’s bookshop just as the same old man was leaving, and he lifted his hat to me with a gesture that couldn’t have been in fashion for at least fifty years. Mr Tilly was looking through a collection of paperbacks that Robertson had just sold him, and he passed me a copy of ‘The Heart of Darkness’, saying that Robertson had written over it so much that it was worthless. Well, it had no value to me either; I had a first edition of Youth by then, in which the story had first been published, but I decided to read what the old man had written on the book. I leant against Mr Tilly’s counter and tried to decipher the handwriting.
I had not paid much attention to any Conrad criticism, but I rather liked what the old man had to say about the story. He
was commenting on it from a psychological point of view, suggesting that the narrator and Kurtz were both different aspects of the author himself, and, in explaining this, Conrad himself came off rather badly.
Tilly told me that I could have the book, making it obvious that it was nothing to thank him for. He pointed out that the man didn’t seem to realise that his note-making would not appeal to most people who might try and read them after him. Robertson had sold Tilly a number of horror anthologies, and these were by far the most defaced.
Out of interest I paid for a copy of the book that appeared to be the most heavily written-in. Mr Tilly thought this rather perverse, which it was, especially as collections of ghost stories were not to my taste. I read the individual tales over the following couple of weeks; I wasn’t a slow reader, but I was still consuming Conrad, as well as working and travelling most evenings with my own bands, or following that of my erstwhile boyfriend.
Half of the stories in the anthology I had bought were enjoyable, but half of them were too dull or creaky to impress me. A couple were excellent, I thought. I read each without attempting to decipher Mr Robertson’s notes until afterwards, coming to my own conclusions before reading his, and we broadly agreed. He, though, had an admirably clear insight into why certain stories were successful, and others less so. I remember that the very first tale in the book was called ‘Thurnley Abbey’ (I forget the name of the author) and I didn’t think a great deal of it. Mr Robertson described it as ‘melodramatic tosh’, and went on to explain how the gothic horror story had evolved since the days of Mrs Radcliffe, and suggested which other writers had handled similar themes with much more style. The book also contained ‘The Wendigo’ by Blackwood, which he described as ‘almost perfect’, although I found it over-long. He wrote that the story described a fear of nature, but also a reverence for it, and listed numerous words and phrases used by the author that subtly pre-figured the denouement of the story. It struck me that Mr Robertson obviously had a first rate mind, and I should really revise my opinion of the old man.
I returned to Tilly’s and bought many of the other ghost story and horror paperbacks sold to him by Robertson. I was attracted by the criticism, but in the process became hooked on the stories themselves. I didn’t think to mention this interest to my sometimes employer, Julian Tovey, for perhaps several months, when he told me that old Mr Robertson was himself the author of ghost stories. He told me this rather dismissively, as though it was as low a classification of literature as science fiction (his bêtte noire). However, by this time I was unashamedly a fan.
According to the database we used at work, Robertson had written four collections of short stories, a novel, and had edited two anthologies of classic ghost stories. All of his books were out of print, but on a foray into Brighton I found three of his own collections in the cellar of the Trafalgar Bookshop, and both of his edited collections in the paperback exchange in The Lanes. The novel eluded me for a while, but I got that through a booksearch service. With a sense of timing that couldn’t possibly have been worse, it was while I was reading these new acquisitions that I heard that Ernest Robertson had died.
I read all three of the collections in the week before his funeral and was overwhelmed by them. His ability to suggest the psychologically chilling, without ever resorting to anything graphic, was masterful. And I had just about finished his novel, Cadogan Square, about an old tramp in a London square who is victimised by the nouveau residents who want to lock him out of the little communal garden because he lowers the tone of the place. The tramp is never once referred to as Pan, but it is implied that the modern world has reduced him to a derelict clinging to this one little piece of nature in the artificial city. How could the author of such a subtle and moving tale have been known to me, living so close, and yet I never once realised who he was?
The Guardian printed nearly a full-page obituary of Robertson. I found out later that he had once been a staff writer on that newspaper, and later a reviewer for them, which was why his death, and career, were given such prominence. Other newspapers did not mention his passing at all. Then, somewhat unbelievably, he was cited by a well-known actress as being one of her favourite authors, and suddenly Robertson had a posthumous profile that he could never have expected. There was an article on collecting his books in a trade magazine, and in both the new bookshop where I worked, and in Julian Tovey’s, we had several people enquiring after his work. Within six months his books had been reprinted by an enterprising small press, and one collector offered me fifty pounds apiece for the annotated anthologies I had bought from Tilly at fifty pence each.
I have to admit that I resented the turn of events. Even my boyfriend’s band wrote a song which they claimed was inspired by one of Robertson’s stories. I was rather miserable about the whole situation, asking those who talked about him whether or not they had attended his funeral, as I had, and pointing out that there were only six of us at the crematorium. It rankled that my personal literary discovery had been taken over by so many others, but there were still many other things in my hectic life to distract me. I broke up with my boyfriend, very messily and painfully, without leaving myself with much dignity, and my father had a car accident that was causing a great deal of upset because the fault was his and he was being prosecuted for careless driving.
I stopped going around to Julian Tovey’s shop at about this time. I was simply unable to give him more than the occasional hour every now and again, minding the place when he went to auctions or fairs.
It had also started to get a little awkward between us, especially when he knew that I was single again. It was at least a year later that he turned up unannounced at my flat one day, a thing he had never done before. He stood nervously on the doorstep, and asked me if I could help him out for a few hours. I was going to decline but he explained that he was going to clear the books from Ernest Robertson’s flat.
‘I somehow expected to find more books,’ said Julian. ‘He’d been selling me the gems from his collection for a few months before he died…’
‘Yes, and all the rubbish he was selling to Tilly’s.’
‘But a bookish chap like that… And by all accounts a recluse… I’ve bought libraries from collectors like him before, and their rooms have been piled from floor to ceiling with books…with books even kept in kitchen cupboards, and once, believe it or not, in the cooker.’
It was a summer morning, and already furiously hot. We had let ourselves into the dark, dusty, but immaculate flat with a key provided by the solicitor. It was very musty and peculiar-smelling, but tastefully furnished and four of the five main rooms had just one or two bookcases in them.
‘The old chap’s Will has been in dispute,’ Julian Tovey explained, as he went down on his haunches to inspect a bookcase in the living room. ‘Would you open the curtains for me, please? I can’t see what there is in here.’
I put down the neatly nested cardboard boxes I was carrying and pulled open the long, heavy, red curtains.
‘Yes,’ Julian went on, scanning the spines. ‘He owned this whole building, and it’s worth a lot of money; you know, enough to make it worthwhile for two different groups of distant relatives to argue over. But it looks like their solicitors will see the majority of it by the time they’ve stopped squabbling. And Robertson had a few sitting tenants in the other flats, which apparently complicates matters.’
He stood up and walked to the other bookcase:
‘Luckily they’ve agreed to sell the contents of the flat and put the proceeds into a fund. And happily they accepted my quote for the books some time ago.’ He pulled a small number of thin hardbacks from out of the bookcase and was riffling through them. ‘Normally I’d just put all these in boxes and sort them out back at the shop, but I’ve got no room in there at the moment, what with the builders … So my plan is to separate the books here; those I want for stock from those I want to sell at auction. And of those for auction, some can go up to London, and the rest, any ru
bbish that remains, I’ll just put in the local, general auction. I expect Tilly’s will buy them.’
I left Julian and walked through to the dining room where, again, I opened the long curtains to the big windows. I admired an elegant grandfather clock that had a spider living in the top left hand corner of the dial, and wondered why Julian wanted me to help when there were so few books? There were no more in this room than in the last, but there were a reasonable amount in the study; this time there were two very large bookcases on either side of the door. In the first one I saw the small row of books he had written himself, and taking a couple down smiled to see that he had written his own name in the front of them with the date of publication. I would have liked to have them myself, but by then even Julian knew their value, and he probably had some well-heeled collector lined-up to buy them for a few hundred pounds each.
There was only one bookcase in the old man’s bedroom. There was no room for any more because it also contained a wardrobe, a cupboard, a chest of drawers and a dressing table, along with a big brass bed. The guest bedroom, in contrast was more Spartan. There appeared to be no books in there at all, so that was the extent of the collection. I had inspected the whole place before returning to Julian, who had removed his jacket and already had volumes piled up around him on the floor.
‘Can I open the windows?’ I asked, feeling uncomfortably warm now that the summer sun was shining in through them.
‘By all means,’ he replied, taking a book off one pile and putting it on another. ‘Apart from the heat, it smells too much of the previous occupant.’
The windows, though, were locked. I asked:
‘Do you have keys for them?’
‘No, just for the front door of the building, and for this flat itself.’
‘Can I poke around and look in drawers and cupboards for them? They’ll only be small keys I expect.’
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