Where Have You Been? by Michael Hofmann Page A

hundred and eighty-five phantasmagorical-existential sketches. “He led with his typewriter. He made it fly.”

 
    IAN HAMILTON
    Though Ian Hamilton died in 2001 of cancer, I still see him sometimes in party rooms, at literary gatherings, burly, almost square, with the low center of gravity of a Scottish ex-middleweight or -wing-half, encased in his black Crombie overcoat (indoors, radiating simultaneously cold and impermeability), invariably smoking—oh, how we used to smoke—and making what the Trinidadian novelist, Sam Selvon, calls “oldtalk.” There was something of Lino Ventura about him; Ian McEwan described him as having “the face of a capo di capi, and a useful, understated cool.” A conspiratorial element of backroom, exile, spit, and sawdust clung to him. He put one in mind of a boxing manager or a soccer coach. His father’s middle name was Tough. The habitual set of his face was a sort of tender scowl. He had the secret sorrow one might look for in a Spurs fan and serial founder and editor of little magazines. The cowboyishly skewed mouth—the word “hard-bitten” might have been invented for it—passing sotto voce ten-ton judgments was much more familiar to me from Craig Raine’s gifted and unexpectedly devoted imitations of him than from the real thing. In fact, parties aside, I saw him very few times, though these, oddly, seem as though they could furnish a biography. An ill-advised lunch at my instigation in the early ’80s, just after his life of Robert Lowell appeared, at which Ian drank more than he spoke, and I hadn’t yet learned to drink (“those played-with-but-uneaten lunches for which he was famous” in the words of his friend, the novelist Dan Jacobson; “You never ate / Just pushed things round and round your plate / Till you could decently light up again” in those of Alan Jenkins’s poem “Rotisserie [The Wait]”—but how was I to know that?). Then there was the time he popped up in a playground in Queens Park, which was the wrong suburb, with a daughter I had no idea he had—he was supposed to be away in Wimbledon, and with sons—growling something about Catherine (innocently pulling at a bottle of water) having inherited her father’s thirst. I saw him another time going into the publisher’s to fetch some boxes of things, wearing a camouflage jacket, and with a station wagon idling outside, in the throes of moving house and changing lives. Later, there was a group reading in Manchester, even as an unbuttoned United having won the European Cup were paraded through the city on an open-topped municipal bus; we made our way through thousands of onlookers to read to a disappointed bookstore manager and a dozen nutcases—sorry, poetry lovers. I saw Ian the next morning, already ensconced in the London train, and felt far too shy to join him, but when I opened my newspaper, his name leaped out to greet me. It was his contribution to a series—this speaks volumes about a certain positively idealistic streak in English cultural philistinism—on “overrated books.” Ian’s chosen target was The Waste Land .
    He was possessed of more authority—more literary authority, I suppose I should specify—than anyone I’ve ever met, and it was, in the terms of the social anthropologist Mary Douglas, personal not positional authority. In other words, it didn’t matter that he no longer sat at the head of the table; no longer fronted book programs on the BBC; no longer had commissions to dole out, approval to bestow or deny in the columns of The Observer or the TLS ; that his magazines The Review and The New Review edited (partly to avoid creditors) from a pub across the road called the Pillars of Hercules had long since been wound up—you still wouldn’t want to cross him, or even disagree with him. Not because he was a—literary—gangster but,