A few months ago I bought a book called The Idler's Companion at a remainder bookshop near Victoria station. Most of the time I choose to be as idle as possible, so the book appealed to me. I got on a bus, and for the first time in my life read a few passages of Montaigne. I was thrilled and moved.
The following afternoon, again with nothing to do, I went into the huge Borders bookshop in Charing Cross Road. I spent a pleasant hour in the cafe, then decided to look for more Montaigne. I approached the girl at the information desk, spelling out his name carefully and explaining that his writing was one of the great literary classics. But he did not appear on her computer.
I tired of her, and accosted a likely-looking lad hurrying across the floor. He too had not heard of Montaigne. I said that he was the 16th-century founder of the essay, and might be under classics or literature. "There was a time," I said pompously, "when every assistant in a bookshop would have heard of him."
"Yeah, well, he's no longer in the canon."
"No. You're just ignorant."
"I've got a degree in literature."
"Well, don't bother with university. Go back to school. You might find O-levels suitable."
"Oh, go over to Foyle's!"
In the following days, I thought a lot about whether I had been right to be rude to him. Of course, it provided a release for me in the melancholy state I was in. I try to ingratiate myself with everyone, yet my life is punctuated by these fierce and distressing scenes where I insult some total stranger. How do I appear to them? As an angry overweight middle-aged loner, probably drinking too much, clinging to the remnants of his Oxbridge education, a person defeated by life?
Did the incident do the young man himself any good? Would it have made him want to read Montaigne?
Certainly it is surprising how imperfectly many great writers are now known. I suppose there might be various explanations for it. The canon is less narrowly defined; there is a general dissociation from the past; perhaps a decline in education; literature itself is downgraded within the culture; there is an immense weight of authors and titles. Whatever the reason, the mention of any hallowed name often now produces blank looks, particularly in bookshop assistants.
There is no common literary culture any more, probably no common culture at all. This level of alienation bothers me; perhaps it has something to do with my outbursts. And I am not the only one. Every day in the streets I see people suffer sudden, lacerating bursts of rage. Sometimes I partake, sometimes smilingly stand aside. But these incidents happen because our sympathies and assumptions are not the same and a society that could call itself a nation has ceased to exist.
I do not wish the English nation to return. Actually, I rather fear it. I remember once seeing a photograph of a group of cyclists, both male and female, on tour in Holyhead in 1931. I have never seen faces so formidable. Well might this people rule the earth. Better in a way that their fangs are drawn, and that they have been diluted by a million varieties of foreigners and half-foreigners such as myself.
No, I would rather be in the huge new bookshops, sitting in the juice bars, tormenting the assistants with my erudition. Although, truthfully, I haven't read much at all, particularly not recently. My culture is patchy, and my manners are even more unreliable.
And if the young man was cut off from the culture of the past, how much more profoundly am I cut off from that of the present. I have read no British novelists who began to publish since 1980, except for Alan Hollinghurst and Jason Cowley. I feel physically ill when I pick up the shiny new titles with their huge type, chick-lit, lad-lit, hip-lit, whatever it may be. And my connections with the literary world mean that I know far too much about the editorial, marketing and design process that has gone into these books.
I was born in 1955, named after Prince Charles, the only child of warring parents. I grew up locked up with them in our silent house. I lived for reading, and my general culture soon far outstripped my social skills. As a teenager, I grew to loathe rock music, which made me a stranger within my own generation. Now, in my middle age, I have grown fashionable, sophisticated, acceptable. But it is too late.
Perhaps one day I will leave this country of my birth. Almost everything about it now makes me uneasy. In a way, I long to go. It would be the end of my talent as a writer, that is the trouble.
And, sometimes, when I ride through the suburbs of south London on the trains that I have loved from my youth, over the dreamy commons and past the Victorian water towers, I know that my love of England is as profound as my hatred for it, and that I could not leave without draining the blood from my personality. It's not Bondi beach for me, being comforted by some magnificent young surfer. Would that it were.
