Then, almost 100 pages in, we learn something else about Harry that helps explain what makes him tick. Before the war, he lived in Paris with a girl there. He thought about marrying her but when war broke out he went home to London. Only later, much too late, did he receive a letter saying she was pregnant. He and she are Jewish — and we never learn her fate.
So, he stalks the streets of London haunted by the Holocaust. He takes each day, each bet, as it comes, and tries not to get involved in anything more complex. But the little boy in the room downstairs has taken a shine to him…
The foreword to this edition is by Iain Sinclair, who — with filmmaker Chris Petit — visited Baron at home in Golders Green in 1992:
“The elderly author, unpublished since 1979, when his Spanish novel, Franco is Dying, met with the indifference that seems to be the lot of any awkward cuss who refuses to step aside when his humber’s up” (p. vi).
Characters in the novel might well speak of protagonist Harryboy as an “awkward cuss”, but we’re privy to his rich inner life, his passions for gambling, books and women, his strong survival instinct paired with a self-sacrificing moral core. He’s a loner in many ways, and one reason is because he is bookish.
“Among the uneducated (which frankly is what you would call the general population where I live) the serious reader is a lonely person. He goes about among the crowds with his thoughts stuffed inside him. He probably dare not even mention them to his nearest pals for fear of being thought a schmo. There’s a hunger in his eyes for someone to talk to.” (pp. 63-64)
Harryboy reads a great range of books. “Chandler and Hammett are my favourites,” he tells us (p. 63), at a time he’s working through everything by Zola. He holds forth on Upton Sinclair, HG Wells and George Simenon, and later on Nat Gould, Edgar Wallace and Damon Runyon. On p. 148, he’s reading Theodore Dreiser, on p. 211 he cites a poem by John Masefield. There are women writers, too:
“We were both at that time searching out psychological thrillers at the library, the kind the Americans do well, Vera Caspary, Patrica Highsmith and so on.” (p. 134).
It’s a diverse list of names but I wonder if they’re united by a naturalistic style, a focus on — or unwillingness to avoid — the grit and dirt of life.
That’s the kind of view we get of post-war London, particularly in all the stuff about the short-term investment in renting squalid building, which the council will surely soon condemn, to the new waves of immigrants. Sinclair says in his introduction that “Baron foresees Peter Rachman”, who died in 1962 — the year before The Lowlife was published — but became notorious as a slumlord after his death as the Profumo scandal broke. That makes the book exactly of its moment.
But I’m not sure this is a social realist or kitchen sink novel. It’s more of a thriller, the stakes every building against Harryboy, caught against his will in different, conflicting loyalties. There’s a theft, a chase and a violent punch-up, We really think at one point he is going to lose an eye.
And yet for all its an adventure, it feels very real — and is full of shrewdly observed detail. Many Londoners, Harryboy included, take the changing demographics of London in their stride, but Baron is good on the prejudice, too. It’s most directly seen in snobby neighbour Evelyn Deaner. At one point, we catch her horrified by the hats on women in the Daily Mirror.
“Can you imagine me wearing one? I think they must design these hats for exhibitionists.”
Then, from nowhere, she is “fighting for breath” in fury that their landlord let a room to a black couple.
“‘You know’ — she turned to me — ‘there’s only one water-closet in this house.’” (p. 125)
Later, she’s sure, on no grounds at all, that this couple eat “tinned cats’ mean” (p. 147) and mean to serve it to her son.
When Evelyn’s husband Vic tries to quell what Baron calls these “spasms of hate”, Evelyn tells him he doesn’t know what he’s talking about because he’s out of work all day.
“Suppose that man cam home early. Eh? Have you thought of that?”
And then, almost immediately:
“Please don’t tell me now that I’m prejudiced. I know there are good and bad. … What do you think I am — one of those colour-bar people? [But] this man is a labourer.” (p. 126)
It’s all unfounded and in her head; she’s conscious of it being unfair; it’s about class as much as ethnicity. There’s a lot bubbling up here, and Harryboy then makes his own connection:
“Sure, I nearly added, and these haters of life, they can even murder babies. Because that moment brought back to me like a twitch of pain in the head my fear that a little son of mine might have been packed into a dark, suffocating, sealed trunk for five days and nights and sent to the furnaces.” (p. 133).
It’s the mechanics of prejudice observed and relayed by a Jewish veteran of the war. The connection haunts him, and it haunt us, too.
I'm now reading Baron's autobiography, more of which anon...