An intimate stranger

One of the problems with being locked down for months is that you run out of books to read. It can take ages now for books ordered online to arrive — not days, as before, but weeks. So, in my desperation for reading matter, I got out the stepladder and climbed up in order to forage around my highest bookshelves, where long-hidden volumes languish behind the visible rows of books. And I struck gold.

I pulled out an old favourite, last read, I think, sometime in the Nineties. It is Letters to an Intimate Stranger, a collection of autobiographical pieces by Jack Trevor Story which first appeared in his column in the Guardian in the early Seventies. You might not have heard of this most original of writers, who died three decades ago. He wasn’t a big name, not wealthy or famous. But he did acquire something of a cult following.

His writing style was freewheeling and highly individualistic. And his columns from long ago remind us that the Guardian once had room for such quirky free-thinkers. It wasn’t always just a soapbox for stifling identity politics and obsessive woke sanctimony.

Jack’s pieces are bittersweet, full of self-irony, wry humour and raw candour. If you sometimes have to read passages more than once to follow his stream-of-consciousness narrative it’s because, as he himself explains, he eschews those standard words and phrases, the clichés that lubricate prose to make it flow more easily. If he finds anything resembling a cliché in his work he “picks it out and crushes it like a flea between his fingernails”, or words to that effect. You learn to just let his writing wash over you, until all those apparent non-sequiturs eventually fall into place like jigsaw pieces.

You have to admire a writer who wrote a short story every week for thirteen years — thirteen years! Every one of them was rejected, and he still didn’t throw in the towel. From a poor working-class background, he attended night school in order to become an electronics engineer, and got a job at Marconi’s. He married, had kids. At last, in 1944 at the age of 27, he had his first story accepted and was on his way.

His breakthrough came a few years later with his comic novel The Trouble With Harry (the trouble with Harry was that he was dead), which was filmed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1955. He was grossly underpaid by Hitchcock for the film rights. He was constantly being ripped off and ending up in debt (he went bankrupt twice) but it all made for great copy. He recounted what happened with Hitchcock after their argument over money: Jack intercepted him at Victoria Station in order to give him his latest book, which the director had grudgingly agreed to buy. As Jack struggled to get the rolled-up typescript untangled from the lining of his coat pocket, an alarmed Hitchcock flattened himself a wall, thinking Jack was pulling out a gun.

He put this incident down partly to his rough-looking, lived-in face. “With this face I have been picked up for trying to get my sixpence out of a milk machine, for walking with a typewriter at three in the morning, for falling asleep in a lay-by.” A magazine which described him as “rather fat and grey, his ragged moustache around his long, yellow teeth evoking movie Orientals dead and gone,” prompted his deadpan remark: “The secret is you have to use long, yellow toothpaste.”

He was in his fifties while writing his Letters to an Intimate Stranger, impecunious, living in a Hampstead bedsit with his pretty girlfriend Maggie, who was half his age. By then he had been married three times and fathered eight children. He’d always fancied younger women and made no secret of his infidelities — not surprising for someone who had kicked against convention his entire life.

He was prolific, producing numerous novels, scripts for film and TV, journalism, etc, but always somehow penniless. Another of his books (also filmed) was called Live Now, Pay Later, and that could have been his personal motto. Now, once again, the tax man was clamouring for unpaid taxes amounting to £17,000, which was rather a lot back in 1971. He had no chance of paying but wasn’t unduly worried. A chronic insomniac whose habit was to write through the night, he believed that if your real happiness came from a typewriter, “it’s running out of cigarettes or tea halfway through the night that’s the real threat”.

Jack died, alone, in 1991, somewhat incongruously in Milton Keynes. He had moved there in the late-Seventies to be the Arts Council writer-in-residence for a year, but never left. He had run out of places to go.

I have found him to be the perfect company in my lockdown solitude. Funny, inspired, flawed, at times achingly sad, he is the quintessence of what it is to be a human being. And I am ever so glad to be one of his “intimate strangers”.