The Lowlife
The Lowlife
Alexander Baron
Black Spring Press
Published in 2010 by Black Spring Press Ltd
Curtain House
134-146 Curtain Road
London
EC2A 3AR
www.blackspringpress.co.uk
First published in Great Britain by William Collins & Co. Ltd, London 1963
Copyright © 1963 Alexander Baron
Introduction copyright © 2001, 2010 Iain Sinclair
The right of Alexander Baron to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
ISBN: 978-0-948238-45-1
A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
Cover design Ken Leeder
Also by Alexander Baron
From the City, From the Plough (1948)
There ’s No Home (1950)
Rosie Hogarth (1951)
With Hope, Farewell (1952)
The Human Kind (1953)
The Golden Princess (1954)
Queen of the East (1956)
Seeing Life (1958)
Strip Jack Naked (1966)
King Dido (1969)
The In-Between Time (1971)
Gentle Folk(1976)
Franco Is Dying (1977)
Introduction
IAIN SINCLAIR
We live at a time when the pre-forgotten seek out the reforgotten, the old ones, hoping to verify a mythical past. Alexander Baron, when I visited him (with the film-maker Chris Petit) in the tranquillity of his Golders Green retirement, knew very well that the game had changed: he no longer had the publishers’ phone numbers, but he kept on writing. That’s what he did. What he had always done, since he returned from the war; a D-Day corporal, a former Communist. ‘A firebrand’, he called himself, ‘an extremist’. Why on earth would we want to talk to him? His books had drifted out of print. Even copies of his first big successes, From the City, From the Plough (1948), a novel which ran through countless editions, had to be searched out on market stalls or in Isle of Thanet charity pits. Baron’s Golders Green, like the Mexican border town in Jim Thompson’s The Getaway, was a reservation of the living dead. Memory men, indulging a non-specific pain, traced the trajectory of sentiment as far as they could comfortably take it, to the edge of the abyss: Whitechapel.
We took Baron back to Cheshire Street, to Hare Marsh, the location for King Dido (1969), a fierce fable in which a working man rages against his inevitable fate, the taint in stone; the way that certain areas defy redemption. The elderly author, unpublished since 1979, when his Spanish novel, Franco Is Dying, met with the indifference that seems to be the lot of any awkward cuss who refuses to step aside when his number’s up, was bemused to find himself transported to an unconvincing but oddly familiar set. With his stocky build, silvered hair, fists bunched in the pockets of a white raincoat, he reminded Petit of the actor Lino Ventura in a underworld flick by Jean-Pierre Melville. Baron was physically strong but out of sync with present dereliction and neglect, the corrugated fence, the piles of smouldering rubbish, the feral dogs. To regress, to dredge up reminiscences of post-war Hackney, the family home, months of wandering the streets like a sleepwalker, was visibly stressful. He faced the cameras, square on, but his eyes moved away, tracking a palpable absence.
Something had gone badly wrong. The novels, when Baron discussed them with one of the new generation who found their way to his house—the novelist John Williams, or the researchers Jeb Nichols and Lorraine Morley (Other Words, December 1988)—were written by a doppelganger, a cocky pretender who shared the old man’s name. ‘You’ve stirred up memories there,’ he would say. This was a mensch, modest, soft-spoken, generous with his time. A man who had outlived his expectations. There were no comebacks on the horizon, but Baron’s books, so the youthful pilgrims insisted, lived on in the perpetual present of achieved and transformed experience. Reservoirs of darkness can never be dispersed. The Hare Marsh pub, outside which Dido Peach fights, emerged with the passage of time as the Carpenter’s Arms, a command post for the Kray twins; the backwater from which they set out on the night that Jack ‘The Hat’ McVitie was killed. Violence feeds on acoustic echoes, fictional templates.
Baron was a true Londoner, which is to say a second-generation immigrant, a professional stranger; the confrontations of urban life were always a major part of his project. His novels are enactments of placed (rather than displaced) autobiography. Favoured geographical zones represent stages in the evolution of the author’s sensibility. King Dido is Whitechapel, the bloody theatre of survival; the microclimate from which the disenfranchised newcomer has to escape. Aspirant Hackney tolerates the well-crafted fiction of Baron’s maturity. Golders Green is the serene garden, the final reservation from which all the mistakes, loves and dramas can be recalled, re-imagined, appeased.
Hackney was where Baron returned when he was demobbed. To his mother’s house. A period of wandering the streets, meditative traverses, gave him the time to notice the minute particulars of a ravished landscape, the scams and hustles, the culture shifts. Years later, in 1963, sifting those postwar memories, he would craft The Lowlife, his delirious Hackney novel. ‘A writer’s job,’ Baron told Jeb Nichols, ‘is to be the spectator who hopes he can see more of the game and try to make sense of it.’
The wonder of The Lowlife is that it does justice to a place of so many contradictions, disguises, deceptions, multiple identities. Hackney, I had thought, was defined by being indefinable. A fistful of mercury. Shape it and it spills. A logging of Kingsland Road, which I attempted in Lights Out for the Territory (a book of speculative London essays), was redundant before I reached Dalston Junction. Graffiti, as I copied them into a notebook, were overpainted; the heavy drench of jerk chicken giving way to the scented fug of Kurdish football clubs. Balkan refugees punting contraband cigarettes blocked my view of a voodoo boutique that was doomed before I could finish counting the shrunken skulls. An old-time manufacturer of bespoke dressing-gowns (think David Kossoff) lived on as a faded sign, partly obscured by a swiveling surveillance camera on a tall pole. Time is thinner (and faster) now. More text, less meaning. The Lowlife, with the lean and disciplined structure of old-time social realist television, captures the moment of transition. The known is still known—market gardens, brickworks, oily-fingered industry— but the new life, brought by the West Indians, Bangladeshis, is recognised early, and celebrated.
Harryboy Boas, a gambler and sometime Hofmann presser, lives in a boarding-house (timid/aggressive landlord skulking like a rat in the basement), on the hinge of Dalston and Stoke Newington; between the frenzy of Ridley Road Market and the hushed Hasidic enclave to the north. Harry has a privileged sense of history: as personal experience. He knows that Hackney isn’t, properly speaking, the East End. Nobody stays there. It’s a staging post on the journey to respectability. (EastEnders, the TV soap, accurately replicates the physical outline of squares and pubs that can be found in the borough, but its fabulous demographics—mouthy geezers with a graveyard pallor, nightclub speculators, blacks and Asians as token frame-fillers— belong much further out. In Essex. Romford, Hornchurch, Upminster.)
Harry is detached, an observer. He’s damaged; compensating for events in his own past which have left him with a nagging sense of loss. He lives in an amnesiac daze, a willed forgetting: existential burn-out in the shadow of the Holocaust. Nothing to be done and he’s doing it on a daily basis. He has his analgesic rituals: the heavy lunch, long afternoons reading and dozing on the bed, the prostitute, the good cigar. Gambling is risk, inevitable loss. Necessary punishment. It is his only connection to the life of the city, the mob. The rigorous scholarship with which Harryboy chases his fancies, three-legged dogs and hobbled nags, is religious. He is a righteous man studying the Torah of the Tote. Temporary wealth, the wad that spoils the hang of a good suit, must be rapidly dispersed, recycled; converted into secondhand literature. Conspicuous charity, hits of sensual pleasure, return Harryboy to the Zen calm of having nothing, no possessions, no attachments, no unfulfilled ambitions.
The Lowlife moves at a pace. The mundane domesticity of Harryboy’s boarding-house totters on the brink of a Gothic abyss, the half-remembered horrors of Whitechapel and the river. If he should falter, lose faith, hit a bad run at the track, he could be sucked into the swamp, the Jack London nightmare. He would join the animals, fighting for a crust. In one vivid episode, Harry takes an excursion to the lower depths: he’s toying with respectability, an investment in a slum property. He wins a house, a terrace of houses, on a cut of the cards; then loses everything to an Indian in a Cable Street dive: ‘a smell in the cafe which was like asthma cigarettes’. Alexander Baron forsees Peter Rachman: the treaty of convenience between prostitution, dope, bricks and mortar. The Hackney gambler is advised by Marcia, a tart he sometimes visits: ‘Slums. You buy them for the last five years before clearance and stuff them with niggers.. .You could clean up, Harry. You don’t need much capital, you can buy a house for two hundred.’ The spit-on-the-palm economics of the city are revealed. Harry’s unobtrusive, semi-detached life, weeks lying on a bed working his way through Zola, is tenable
because another place, the nightland of illicit pleasures, is a 73 bus ride away.
Many East London Jewish writers have left accounts of these transits, shuttling between home (the ghetto) and the lawless cellar (gambling, booze, miscegenation). Bernard Kops in The World is a Wedding (1963) links the claustrophobia of family life in Stepney Green with the liberties of Soho bohemia. Roland Camberton, in his Hackney novel Rain on the Pavements (1951), sends his young men (arguing about literature and politics—like Harold Pinter’s gang in The Dwarfs) to Italian cafes where they smoke, discuss Eliot and write bad poetry. Camberton was one of a number of working-class writers patronised by the publisher John Lehmann. The book jacket for Camberton’s novel featured a Neo-Romantic composition by John Minton, an independently wealthy cruiser who taught at the Royal College of Art. Minton’s Hackney could be anywhere, a generically dingy streetscape through which L.S. Lowry smudges drag their sodden banners. Lehmann’s promising young men were supposed to act as salaried spies, Mass-Observers sent out to document the bizarre habits of the proles.
Alexander Baron was never part of that crowd. He met Ashley Smith, author of the day-in-the-life reportage A City Stirs (1939), and he knew people who knew Whitechapel authors of an earlier generation, Simon Blumenfeld and Willy Goldman. But it wasn’t his business to satirise or complain. Novels dealing with group dynamics, the community, gave way, at the time of The Lowlife, to the psychopathology of one recalcitrant individual: a self-punishing moralist, a gambler. Harryboy Boas chases fate as a way of divorcing himself from tradition, religion, family expectations. He’s an elective lowlife. An unachieved elitist. An autodidact. And therefore a non-writing writer, an artist of the city, trained to appreciate subtle shifts in mood and weather. Harry, gazing out of his high window, is eager to welcome the next wave of immigrants, but wary of the first signs of the great American consumer push: retail conformity, the suits and cars and sounds that East End hoods customised in their bid for the violence franchise.
British movies, aping the hardboiled style, imported Hollywood heavies to play Jewish wide boys: Richard Widmark, in Jules Dassin’s version of Gerald Kersh’s Night and the City. But the gambling-fever novel traces its lineage to Dostoevsky. It’s a well-tested device: the outsider, the believer in arcane systems, divorces himself from righteous society, begs, cheats, lies, steals, subverts every taboo. Revengers set out on his trail. He runs. He tries to borrow. He confronts the mobsters, the professionals of hurt who are out to damage or destroy him. It’s a standard riff, a way of giving tension a structure. Think of Anthony Newley, the sleazy, sweating, chain-smoking clipjoint MC in Ken Hughes’s film The Small World of Sammy Lee (1962). He races from Soho to the family shop in Whitechapel; to his brother, Warren Mitchell. Soliciting straight money that can soon be bent, burnt, blown away. Think of James Caan in Karel Reisz’s film The Gambler (1975).
Back in the Sixties, it was Reisz’s translation of Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning that helped to marginalise the London lowlife novel. Suddenly the north was sexy. Nottingham, Rotherham, Liverpool, Blackpool: exotic, unknown and interchangeable. Cobbles, canals, industry. Horny-handed toilers with bicycles. Girls (RADA-trained) who couldn’t cope with contraception. Oxford graduates, frequently gay or bisexual—Lindsay Anderson, Tony Richardson, John Schlesinger—dusted down the Lehmann trope. London fiction moved away from the Jewish working class (Baron, Emanuel Litvinoff, Bernard Kops) to those who could talk up the changes, soft-sell the Swinging City. Photographers, pill poppers, property sharks.
The standard gambling novel or film depends on clocks. Phone calls. The cigarette lit from the dying butt. Frantic moves within an ever-tighter urban labyrinth: Gerald Kersh’s Night and the City (1939), Robert Westerby’s Wide Boys Never Work (1937). There’s a firm structure and a liquid topography. But that isn’t Baron’s technique. He is so solidly grounded in place, in workaday Hackney. He runs a double narrative, the madness of the track and the betting shop interwoven with the history of a dysfunctional family (suburban ambitions reduced to the declining no-man’s-land of Dalston). The child of this family becomes Harryboy’s own ‘lost’ son. Characteristically, Baron spurns the grand finale, the eye that is to be sacrificed to save the child’s sight. ‘My great gesture fell as flat as all my other great plans.’ The Russian novel of doomed souls is therefore reduced to an East London rag-trade copy. There was talk, according to Baron, who had good showbiz connections, about The Lowlife being optioned as a film; a vehicle for Harry H. Corbett, the young Steptoe. Comedic/sentimental script by Simpson and Galton? It never happened.
When I pitched out on a Camden Passage bookstall in the mid-Seventies, a speed-freak friend of Malcolm McLaren, who had grown up in the streets Baron describes so lovingly, told me that I should read this ‘amazing’ book, The Lowlife. He was, as usual, quite right. It was as if a direct descendant of Harryboy Boas, a runner, chaser of rumours, a hand-to-mouth man with a powerful appetite for literature and gossip, was recommending the autobiography he would never get around to writing. I picked up the Collins first edition (I don’t remember seeing any other) within a few days. The runner talked so fast, quarrelled, embraced, argued, he must have done his reading on the wing: as he jogged between appointments. His taste was excellent. He puffed Colin Machines (AbsoluteBeginners), Michael Moorcock, Gerald Kersh, James Curtis. And he led me, with The Lowlife, to one of the best fictions, the truest accounts of the borough in which I had lived for ten years. I’m delighted to borrow, now, the runner’s belted herringbone coat, to draw deep on his cigarette and to make his pitch. Here it is, the book, the place, the story. Enjoy.
Hackney, 2010
The Lowlife
CHAPTER ONE
One day, when I have got a few hundred pounds together, I will take a boat to the Canaries. I’ll look around, and settle in on one of the smaller islands; somewhere out of the way. On four pounds a week, they tell me, you can live like a lord. A thousand would keep me for over four years.
Four years. A lifetime nowadays. We should have such luck.
I will read and swim, loaf about. No one will interfere, no one will judge me. If they drop that big cookie I can always go down to the beach and swim out into the warm sea till I can’t swim any more.
Perfect.
All I need is a few hundred pounds.
My name is Harryboy Boas. (Bo-as, two syllables, please.) At the moment I have thirty pounds in the world. But I face the future with confidence. The dogs are running at White City tonight. In the third there is an animal, which, I heard this morning.. .Ah, I should have such luck. But a man can dream. I bother no one.
My story starts one night last year. It didn’t seem a night different from any other. We are carried to the grave on a stream of dead days and nights. We live them and forget them. Yet who knows on which dead day or night a terrible change can come into a life? A disease starts. The seeds of a crisis, a disaster, a great joy, are sown. At the time we are aware of nothing. I didn’t know that night. I went round to my sister Debbie. How could I know what was coming to me?
Debbie lives in Finchley, the smart part. Finchley, as few people know, is one of the millionaire quarters of London. There are roads in Finchley that make Kensington look poor. Houses at forty thousand, three-car garages (Rolls, Sonny’s Jag and Mummy’s shopping Dauphine), driveways, grounds front and rear, and butlers. Not that Debbie married so high. A fifteen-thousand-pound house and a Spanish couple to look after it is all she’s got, poor girl. All right, so she hasn’t done so bad. When she married Gus in the third year of the war, he was a boy without money, only a medical certificate to say the army didn’t want him, and an ambition to make a book. So a book he made, and in a modest way, he hasn’t done so badly. When did a bookie starve?
He is a good fellow, Gus. He didn’t marry Deb for her money. Money in our family? Nor for her good looks. Debbie was always a fat girl, with a face so helpless and gentle it breaks your heart. He was fond of her. He liked the girl. It happens sometimes. With a good heart he married the girl, and I’m glad to say he got a happy marriage as a reward. Happy, that means no trouble, a good home, a yes-wife who is also a good cook. Peace to come home to. And three daughters. Terrible girls. All thin, all snooty, all the sort that flute ‘Mummy’ and ‘Daddy’ in high-class accents; they kiss Mummy and Daddy and feel a little more ashamed of them every year. Of their old man’s bankroll they are not ashamed at all. For my nieces I feel no affection. God knows, I believe in family affection. I hunger for it. Shouldn’t we, Debbie and I, after what happened?