At the end of the 1914–18 war, of course, it had all been quite different. English writing had taken that fascinating step into the 1920s, and it was obvious that a new era had arrived. The major figures of the previous generation –Shaw, Wells, Bennett, Galsworthy, and the rest–were still around and continuing to write. But the really exciting figures were D H Lawrence, T S Eliot, James Joyce, Aldous Huxley, Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf, who all had the effect of making their predecessors seem out of date.

When I went to London, most of that generation were dead or dying. Of their successors, Auden and Isherwood had moved to America, Graham Greene lived in France, and Stephen Spender, Louis MacNiece and Dylan Thomas no longer seemed to be producing important work. Two years later, Thomas was also dead. The ‘younger generation’ had failed to arrive, and the silence seemed ominous.

I left my home town, Leicester, because I suspected I would never become a writer in that environment, which was about as exciting as Clacton-on-Sea. Besides, I had married my girlfriend, a nurse named Betty, because she was pregnant, and wanted to find us a home nearer to the British Museum Reading Room, where Carlyle, Shaw and Wells had worked in their early days, and where I hoped to finish my first novel.

I had already made my first attempt to escape into a more interesting world when I hitchhiked to Paris at the age of nineteen, but failure to find work had driven me back to England within months.

London still had its share of bomb sites, many turned into car parks, and the area I chose, Camden Town, (because I liked the sound of it) looked oddly rundown, just like Paris when I had drifted there two years earlier. But even in working-class north London, I soon noticed that the rooms advertised on cards in shop windows carried the warning: No children or pets.

I found myself a labouring job on a building site, spent my evenings in telephone booths calling prospective landlords, and taking buses to remote places like Willesden or Tottenham in search of rooms – whose landladies flinched when I admitted my wife was pregnant.

We ended in a room in East Finchley, whose landlady stipulated that we should move before the baby arrived. There I often went to early mass – I was flirting with the idea of becoming a Catholic – and spent hours in the East Finchley Public Library. It was here I found Camus’s The Plague, which had been recommended on some radio programme as one of the best novels published since the war. Its opening pages, with the rats dying of plague in Oran, gripped me, but I soon felt that it degenerated into talk. At all events, I learned that Camus was part of the new generation of French writers who called themselves existentialists. That was better than in London where, a year after my arrival, the literary scene was as blank as ever.

In a few months our landlady became nervous in case the baby arrived early, and gave us notice. Fortunately, the foreman at work – I had found a job in a plastics factory – offered us a room, and we were there when the baby arrived. It was a boy, and we called him Roderick.

It was also in this room that I listened to the complete Ring cycle on our small Bakelite radio, identifying the leitmotifs with a library copy of Newman’s Wagner Nights. I also happened to switch on a programme with Dylan Thomas as some sort of guest commentator, and was surprised by his rich, booming English voice, and his amazing vocabulary as he answered one question by reeling off a list of synonyms.

On Saturdays I cycled to the British Museum, where I had obtained a Reading Room ticket, claiming I needed to access the library because I wanted to study the Egyptian Book of the Dead. This was not entirely untrue. For the past two years I had been writing the novel that became Ritual in the Dark, for which I was using the Egyptian myths of death and rebirth as a basic structure, as Joyce used the Odyssey in Ulysses. But it had finally dawned on me that Ulysses was a bad model, since even I had to admit that it moves too slowly, and decided instead to devise a plot based on the crimes of Jack the Ripper, which has interested me since childhood. After studying accounts of the murders in The Times for 1888 in the North Library, I would cycle over to Whitechapel and make sketches of the murder sites. I felt that the best way to give a novel authenticity is to base it, as Joyce did, on real places and events.

Soon we had to move again, since the crying of the baby kept our landlord and landlady awake in the next bedroom. And during the course of the next year, 1952, we moved twice more, until at the beginning of 1953, the marriage split apart. It was not yet over, but we were both sick of the instability, and it never came back together again.

In July 1952 I had learned from a full-page review in the Times Literary Supplement of the arrival of a novelist named Angus Wilson. His book was called Hemlock and After, and the anonymous reviewer described it as ‘a novel of remarkable power and literary skill which deserves to be judged by the highest standards’, adding that it was one of the wittiest novels since Oscar Wilde. I could almost sense the relief of the critic that a new writer had at last arrived on the scene.

I lost no time ordering it from the local library – 12s. 6d. was well beyond my resources – and began to read it on the way home. It was a disappointment, nothing like The Picture of Dorian Gray, and even less like Vile Bodies, to which another reviewer compared it. It was about a celebrated writer who, in middle age, discovers he is not only homosexual, but also has sadistic tendencies, and since he is a kindly, decent liberal, this wrecks his health and finally destroys him. The plot was absorbing, but there was something stiff and almost amateurish about the writing. In a sense, my disappointment was a relief. I had no wish to be left behind by the arrival of the new generation, particularly by a writer with my own surname.

But then, Wilson was apparently in his mid-forties, so belonged to the same generation as Spender, Auden and Isherwood. So I could relax for the time being.

Separated from Betty after January 1953, I took a job as a hospital porter at the Western Fever Hospital in Fulham. It was not taxing work, and that was its drawback. Our job was to sit in the porter’s room and wait for admissions, then take the patients on trolleys down to the wards. Meanwhile, there was little to do but make tea and read. The radio played all the time, although in those days before the advent of rock ‘n roll, it was mostly sport, sentimental songs and tunes from musicals like Guys and Dolls. When the feeling of stagnation became too overpowering, I sneaked off to one of the empty wards, full of old beds and damp mattresses, and sat there cross legged doing meditation exercises I had taught myself by reading Hindu scriptures.

Betty and I had every intention of continuing the marriage, although every time I went to see her we seemed to end up quarrelling. The final break came after I had found a flat in east London, and she came down to see it. Her mother had agreed to lend the money they wanted for ‘furniture and fittings’ (an excuse for collecting a premium forbidden by law). But after she returned to Leicester, Betty suddenly became suspicious of the landlady, and sent me a telegram asking me to cancel the whole deal. I was so disgusted that I decided to give in my notice at the hospital and go back to Paris. So, technically speaking, it was I who left my wife.

But before that happened, I spent much of that hot summer of 1953 in London coffee houses, and in one of them near Trafalgar Square, I met a teenager named Laura Del Rivo, who told me she wanted to be a writer. She was three years my junior (I was 22), came from a middle-class family in Cheam, and had a sweet childish voice. I found her charming, and was attracted by the thought of playing Henry Higgins to her Eliza. But Laura, it seemed, was already infatuated with someone else – a poet whose name she declined to tell me, and who apparently did not return her affection. I finally discovered that this was Bill Hopkins, and that he was the youngest child of a theatrical family from Cardiff.

Curious to discover why she preferred him to me, I sought him out in his favourite taxi-driver’s café in St Giles, and found him impressive, with a natural dominance and Welsh fluency of speech. He worked as a sub-editor on the London edition of the New York Times, and had published some remarkable poems in small literary magazines, notably The Watchman edited by the poetess Iris Orton. He had decided to launch his own magazine, to be called The Saturday Critic, which would concentrate on castigating the inadequacies of the current literary establishment (like Stephen Spender, editor of Encounter, and John Lehmann, editor of The London Magazine). I lent him the first chapters of my ongoing novel, and one day when I went to the café, I found my typescript waiting for me with a note that read: ‘You are a man of genius! Welcome to our ranks!’

I was pleased but, to tell the truth, not especially flattered, for I had taken it for granted that I was a man of genius since I was about thirteen.

And here I must establish a point that is of central importance to this book.

The sons of upper- and middle-class families are inclined to take a modest view of themselves because they mix with boys who are dominant and intelligent from the time they go to school. But in working-class schools, natural dominance and intelligence are less obvious. If their fathers work in factories, the sons are inclined to accept that they will do the same, and probably live in much the same kind of houses, and send their own children to the same kind of schools. There is no natural expectation of going into the Foreign Office or managerial training. Their horizons are limited because their expectations are low.

Now a few centuries ago, that would have been the end of it; the ‘lower classes’ expected to remain in the same station in life until they died. But the advent of universal education changed all that, and to learn to read was also to learn to dream.

This applied to women even more than men, for novels and women’s magazines made them dream of handsome and dominant males and, for sensitive working-class women – for example, D H Lawrence’s mother – the aspiration was often passed on to their children. I have long suspected that imaginative working-class women are the evolutionary spearhead of society, since the narrowness of their lives imparts an intensity to their daydreams that middle- and upper-class women, lacking the desperation, find it harder to achieve.

My father was a boot and shoe worker, and long before I left school (at sixteen) I felt stifled in the working-class environment of southeast Leicester. Daydreaming was as important as breathing oxygen. And since I knew that only my intelligence could save me from ending in a factory, a kind of desperate self-belief was a tool of survival. Besides, I had bought the new one-volume Shakespeare that had been published immediately after the war, and was delighted by the self-confidence about his own genius that he expresses in the sonnets.

So Bill’s ‘welcome to our ranks’ only demonstrated that he and I had reacted in the same way. But Bill had arrived at the conclusion by a slightly different route. His parents had been on the stage, and were famous all over Wales as a double act. Bill was very young when his father died, and remembers seeing newspaper billboards announcing: ‘Ted Hopkins dead’. He had concluded that all men receive the same treatment when they die, and this created a sense of his own uniqueness. When he finally discovered that most men’s death goes unnoticed, it made him all the more determined to achieve something that would make his own death a notable event.

Soon he and I had established a relationship built upon a friendly rivalry about who could become famous first.

So in the autumn of 1953 I hitchhiked to Paris again, stayed in a room lent me by a friend I had made last time I was there, and looked around for work. Chance directed me to the office of a new magazine called The Paris Review, edited by a wealthy young American named George Plimpton. He took me to dinner and agreed to give me a job selling subscriptions to Americans living in Paris; I was allowed to keep a generous percentage of the money. I set out the next morning with a list of the Americans living in Paris and a street guide, but it proved to be hard and discouraging work that failed to bring the flood of customers George had forecast.

That evening, in a café called the Tournon in the rue Tournon, I met a group of expatriate writers connected with a small magazine called Merlin. This was edited by an American, Richard Seaver, who talked to me enthusiastically about a new writer called Samuel Beckett, whose play En Attendant Godot had been the hit of last winter’s season. Beckett, he said, was pathologically shy and anti-social, and his work was all about loneliness and frustration. Seaver had inquired about publishing some of Beckett’s work in Merlin, but had failed to make contact with him. Then one day there had been a knock on the door of his room, and he had opened it to find a tall, gaunt man peering at him through thick lenses. Without saying a word, the man had handed him a bundle wrapped in sacking and then turned and vanished down the stairs. It proved to be the manuscript of an unpublished Beckett novel called Watt, and Seaver lost no time in printing a chapter in Merlin. Now he was proposing to publish the whole novel.

Others present in the Tournon were a pretty American girl called Alice Jane Lougee, who financed Merlin, an American writer called Austryn Wainhouse, who was translating the works of the Marquis de Sade for the pornographic publisher Maurice Girodias, and an English poet named Christopher Logue. The latter had a strange, harsh voice and irregular teeth, and told me he proposed launching a magazine called The Pillory, that would reveal the corruption and nepotism of the literary establishment; every issue would show the face of a different victim in the pillory. (Herbert Read, I seemed to recall, was to be the first.)

This was the first time I had actually been among real writers, engaged in the production of literature. In London, and even in Leicester, I had met plenty of ‘wannabees’ who talked about books they intended to write and even produced manuscripts. But the Merlin crowd not only had ideas, but were reaching an audience with them. As I sat there on that first evening, I made a decision to stay on in Paris and try to establish myself as a writer of ideas.

It did not take much persuasion to get Seaver to agree to let me try to sell subscriptions to Merlin, and I was told to call at the nearby office and collect some copies to show as samples. But even with two magazines to offer, sales were slow. I managed to make enough to eat and pay my bus fares only by selling copies of Merlin or The Paris Review to people who were unwilling to purchase a year’s subscription but glad enough to appease their conscience by buying a single copy.

At this point, Bill Hopkins turned up unexpectedly at my room near the Étoile. He had come to France to find out whether French printers would be cheaper than those in England, and I took him down to the Tournon to consult Dick Seaver. We found only Christopher Logue there, who explained that Dick’s fellow editor, Alex Trocchi, was now in Spain on precisely the same errand – because French printers were proving too expensive. It looked as if Bill’s trip to Paris had been a waste of money. Nevertheless, we spent a pleasant evening talking and drinking, and Bill and Chris Logue, both poets, seemed to enjoy one another’s company. That night, Bill slept on a mattress on my floor.

I was delighted see him in Paris. I am basically introverted, and found the strangeness of a foreign city a drain on the energies. Bill is an extravert who is always full of optimism; he was convinced that a little fast sales talk was all that was needed to provide us with an income. So the next morning we set out with an armful of both magazines, and called at the address of every American expatriate living in the Champs-Élysées. Sales were less buoyant than expected, and we sold only a few subscriptions, but at least we had the pleasure of talking about literature and ideas as we plodded between addresses.

One thing was obvious: the literary scene in France was far livelier than in England. Sartre and Camus, whose view of human destiny is basically gloomy, nevertheless believed that man has freedom of choice, and can exercise it even in the face of death. Whereas the British saw the war as an exhausting struggle that had drained their energies and finally lost them an empire, the French still felt the sheer relief of being rid of the Nazis. Sartre had remarked that he had never felt so free as when he was in the Resistance, and might be arrested and shot at any moment. This excited me, for ever since I had started reading Dostoevsky at the age of sixteen, I had been obsessed by that story of how he had been condemned to death by firing squad, and had been reprieved at the last minute. It had taught him that, compared to the prospect of death, most of our human anxieties are trivial. And although the war had been over for eight years, there was still a flavour of freedom in the air.

Bill and I could sense this as we drank a glass of wine outside a café, or walked along the empty boulevards at night, talking about our lives and the techniques of the novel.

We were both looking forward to meeting Alex Trocchi, who was obviously the intellectual driving force behind Merlin. I was fascinated by the stories of the social and sexual rebel who wanted to create a new morality and politics, while Bill wanted to talk about the mechanics of launching a magazine. In fact, Trocchi and Bill obviously had much in common: both wanted to make a clean sweep of current standards. The title of Trocchi’s essay ‘Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds’, in his book of the same title, encapsulates his basic vision, as Bill’s would be summarised in the title of an essay he wrote for Declaration: ‘Ways Without a Precedent’.

But I have to admit that both of us were soon feeling doubts about the whole Merlin project. Most of them were making a living writing pornography for Maurice Girodias, whose father had been the original publisher of Henry Miller. Chris Logue had written a novel called Lust, and Alex Trocchi had written a ‘fifth volume’ of Frank Harris’s My Life and Loves, and an interesting autobiographical novel called Young Adam, which he had adapted for Girodias’s Olympia Press by simply inserting slabs of sex. He was also translating Apollinaire’s sadistic fantasy Eleven Thousand Virgins, which ends with the hero violating and strangling a little girl. Austryn Wainhouse and Dick Seaver had embarked upon a complete translation of the Marquis de Sade, whom I had never read, although a glance at it convinced me that it could be absol...