GBH (30 page)

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
.