GBH Read online

  Another point that needs stressing here is that, if Lewis is not much better-known than he should be in his own country, it is because, in the days when he was writing (I hope, I think the situation has improved now) the better written, the blacker, and more direct a novel was, the more liable it was to upset the delicate sensibilities of squeamish publishers whose blind devotion to—and thus fear of alienating—middle-class taste (which, above all, dreads reality in literature and anything that cannot be mentioned in the drawing room) was true across far too wide a sample of British editors. The bowdlerizing attitude reduced the quality of most British fiction to the level of the simpering dare, and of course, also biased editorial views in their commercial judgment—a judgment which, by the way, was at times ridiculously, indeed, quite spectacularly wrong. To take a classic example, my own first publisher’s reaction to Len Deighton’s The Ipcress File: “Interesting, but of course sheer fantasy … could be of no interest to the general reader …”

  Moreover, the result of this attitude was that even if an enterprising junior editor in a big firm went out on a limb and accepted such novels as Lewis’s, the governors upstairs, by not lifting a finger to promote them, went subliminally out of their way to make sure they were sabotaged.

  Yet you have only to read him to see that Lewis was one of the first British writers in the sixties to take Chandler literally—“The crime story tips violence out of its vase on the shelf and pours it back down into the street where it belongs”—and Jack’s Return Home is a book that I and plenty of other people at the time considered to be a classic on these grounds, besides the sheer writing ability that it displays, and still do. But it, too, has doubtless become unavailable, out of print, pulped, thanks to the attitude—virtually amounting to disinformation—prevalent in that section of British publishers that I have just referred to, which seems unshakably convinced that as long as Agatha Christie and P.D. James are selling all right, then you’ve quite honestly covered the ground, as well as not spitting on the Union Jack.

  What this means, as I have said, is that they have covered a good deal of startling and original work with ground—i.e. buried it.

  And besides, how wrong can you be? The difference between what people want to read now, as opposed to what their parents read fifty years ago, has changed as utterly as the problems that confront society (social realities which literature ideally exists to reflect) and that is why more and more black work is being produced in the UK now which has no point of reference whatever with the two writers I have just named.

  What a pity Ted Lewis didn’t live to see it.

  Reading GBH I am mindful that its author was from the north of England; he was born in Manchester and studied for four years at Hull Art School—very probably at the same time as Peter Everett, who wrote Negatives, another very black novel, grossly underrated in Britain, which Cape published (rather nervously, if the incomprehensible jacket is anything to go by) in 1964, and which was subsequently filmed by Claude Chabrol. This book, just like Lewis’s work, put murder back in the street too, in the suffocating slum existence of Notting Hill; it, too, joined madness and sexual perversion to murder (none of the three ever travel apart, whatever the M’Naghten Rules may say) just as Lewis’s novels did.

  As for those decaying, economically dying and unprivileged northern towns—Newcastle, Liverpool, Hull and Manchester—I have known some of them; apart from London they are the most violent, the most despairing we have, and Lewis’s grasp of their atmosphere of hopelessness, the dialogue hissing with internecine distrust, boiling with hatred even among members of the same family, or apparently lifelong friends, makes me wonder just how closely the sinister stories he tells were, if not autobiographical, linked to people close to him in real life, perhaps family even; I find it hard to see how, where or why he made such a close study of them otherwise.

  I knew Ted Lewis—no, I didn’t, I only sat next to him. Nobody I knew ever knew Ted Lewis—it was impossible to get to know him, even superficially. I only met him because Jack’s Return Home appeared in the same Hutchinson’s list, New Authors (long since defunct), as my own first novel; Lewis therefore frequented the same pub downstairs from Hutchinson’s offices, the Horse and Groom in Great Portland Street, as the rest of us did (including my editor, Graham Nicol, and his). And for the same reason—not just for the beer, but to see if we couldn’t dig a few more quid out of their pocket against our advances (we none of us ever had a light, and I, anyway, had an expensive girlfriend!).

  But Lewis invariably sat on his own at the far end of the bar, and I never saw him with a girl. He usually sat bent over in an attitude vaguely resembling prayer with his head on his arms; and none of us ever got to know him, because he was always totally drunk. He was blond, good-looking, had a face I liked—and I wouldn’t at all have minded a long talk with him or even a short one, particularly after I had read Jack’s Return Home.

  I never managed it. You could say something to him, but he never talked back, and when you looked at him all you got in return was the mysterious kind of look you might expect from a stained-glass window. That would have been in 1962 or ’3 I suppose. Then I went back to Spain and Tangier, and I never saw him again.

  I don’t know if any of us in The Horse ever really knew him (I never saw him anywhere else). But then what person is more secretive than the speechless drunk?

  Don’t think that any of the foregoing is a criticism of Lewis; it isn’t. It is just the memory I retain of him—and that a 28-year-old one. Criticism? Far from criticism, Lewis makes me think rather of what I imagine David Goodis to have been like, and I could hardly be more complimentary than that.

  But to return to my beginning, reading GBH certainly gave me an insight into why its author drank. As I say, I reckon he knew a good deal of what he was writing about from very close to—perhaps dangerously so. That leaps out of his work immediately. Whatever the truth, he got their dialogue correct, right down to the last cadence.

  So all I can do now is pay my respects to his courage which enabled him to write the way he did for as long as he did, describing the horror around him in terms of his own interior horror, if necessary with the help of alcohol or any other weapon to keep him going. By preferring to look the street straight in the face instead of peeping at it from behind an upstairs curtain, he cleared a road straight through the black jungle; and that, for me, would have earned him a place in the top rank even if he had survived.

  He is an example of how dangerous writing can really be when it is done properly, and Ted Lewis’s writing proved that he never ran away from the page.

  No—because with Ted Lewis, the page was the battle.

  Derek Raymond, Le Peuch, August 5th, 1990.