I, Ripper

That is, Charles Harrison Hilliard, editor of Contemporary Review, a lively and often bawdy arts journal that I contributed to quite regularly for some years before falling into the Star’s orbit, therefore aligning myself with Big Boring Press and cutting loose from Small Impudent Press. Charlie came from department store people in some far provincial town, but he, having none of it, was quite content to spend their hard-earned money on a quarterly of sublime physical beauty that was notably full of irreverence, immaturity passing as wit, radical politics, the need to shock for its own sake, and the occasional truly well-conceived essay by someone whose name was not yet big enough to get him published in the Atheneum. That was me. The Atheneum crowd, very Oxbridgy and, for all their liberal airs, quite nose-up when it came to rube Irish geniuses in brown suits with the look of a pig farmer’s right-hand man, had yet to notice me and perhaps never would. Very well, I snorted to myself many a time, I shall live quite happily without the Atheneum, and I paid them back the insult of not noticing me by not noticing them, which they never noticed.

So here was Charlie, after a few years’ absence from my life.

It’s been too long. We had so many good laughs but now you’ve disappeared, even from O’Connor’s horrid Star. You were the best critic in London, which meant you had to be punished for your temerity in so regularly humiliating the bigger fishes. Hope you’re writing a novel or a play or something. Can’t wait to hear.

In any event, do please come to a soiree I am holding tomorrow night at eight, full of interesting chaps, all of whom hate Atheneum, having not been noticed yet by them, either. Rather a chatty lot, you’ll fit right in. Gals, too, artist and poet types, perhaps shady in certain aspects if you wish that game upon yourself. Teetote if you want, but the punch will be spiked with rum and the fizzy in the bottle will knock a jack-tar on his arse!

Best,

Charlie

It arrived at the perfect time. I’d worked myself to exhaustion on the murders, much to O’Connor’s satisfaction, but even he could see I was running ragged. He instructed me to take some days off, which I spent mostly sleeping, to avoid my mother. Now, just as I was feeling revived, Charlie’s invite arrived and it seemed a perfect anodyne to dead whores in alleys and yards.

I had a bang-up time. I didn’t dominate, no, but neither did I withdraw into recessiveness, and I came up with as many clever lines and swift retorts as any of them. It was a fast crowd, they drank and smoked too much, they fancied themselves “outlaws” (but of the safest sort), and the alcohol liberated them to pretend to be who they wished to be. As for me, I pretended to be a more widely published writer, or a writer rather than a subspecies called “journalist” or “critic.” I wore the brown wool suit, having no choice in the matter, with a blue cotton shirt, and looked like a cross between a barroom poet and an IRA gunman, as I had wanted. Some may have thought me dangerous, which I rather liked, not knowing that lump in my pocket was an extra handkerchief instead of a Webley, and I enjoyed the mystery I seemed to carry about, the sense of knowing more than I did. As a veteran observer of life and death, I thought myself superior to all of them, for their bohemianism, social nonchalance, and contempt for convention was mostly affectation. I’d seen gutted lasses and knew in fact, not merely in theory, how short, nasty, and brutish life could be.

I’m not sure when I noticed him. It was subtle. He was just there. No, I am not about to confess some homosexualist secret, like the one that doomed poor Wilde to Reading Gaol a few years later, and I have no pressing desire to touch the flesh of a being of the same sex. But I am wooable by wit, dynamism, worldliness, good taste, and as I pretended to myself, the certain knowingness that bespeaks a fellow who has seen and tasted much.