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| Ronald Searle Partly to escape his celebrity, Searle moved to the south of France, where he was pictured here at home in 2006. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe/Guardian |
Reality without imagination is only half of reality, argued Buñuel. And it is this argument between reality and imagination that runs through every sentence Gordon Burn ever wrote, equally in his non-fiction and in his fiction. A reporter and a poet, Gordon saw and Gordon felt. And he empathised. And animated and illuminated people as elusive and familiar, as real and imagined as Steve Davis and Peter Sutcliffe, Damien Hirst and Duncan Edwards, George Best and Rosemary West, Alma Cogan and Madeline McCann, Gilbert and George and Tony and Gordon. All our obsessions are here: sport and crime, art and politics, celebrity and fame, sex and violence, death and silence, the surfaces and the depths. And like BS Johnson or WG Sebald, Derek Raymond or Eoin McNamee, Gordon is a writer other writers read. And learn from and are inspired by. Particularly the first and the last novels, Alma Cogan and Born Yesterday, which show the opportunity and potential for a truly modern novel. And there is no greater testimony to Gordon's continued influence and relevance than the inaugural shortlist for the prize founded in his memory: How I Killed Margaret Thatcher by Anthony Cartwright, The Footballer Who Could Fly by Duncan Hamilton, People Who Eat Darkness by Richard Lloyd Parry, Pig Iron by Benjamin Myers and Myra, Beyond Saddleworth by Jean Rafferty. Fictions and non-fictions. In all their glories and in all their deceits. Everything real, everything imagined. In the cross-hairs, asking for truth. And so I hope Gordon would have approved. Because it is an honour to be one of the judges for this prize and it was a privilege to have been his friend.
Wilkie Collins's No Name is perhaps the most accessible of his "sensation" novels. It tells of two sisters who find themselves dispossessed when their parents die. Cue for one, Magdalen Vanstone, to try every ruse imaginable to regain her birthright and "name". With her nod to the Biblical fallen woman, Magdalen is a typical Collins heroine – sexy, self-willed, eager to fight manmade laws and establish her position in society. She is not one of Dickens's limp child-women.
Collins espoused female causes because he hated oppression. Having battled to escape his domineering father, he targeted hypocrisy wherever he saw it – from marriage laws to animal rights. Cosmopolitan in outlook, he had no time for pomposity, preferring to indulge his appetites for food, drink and sex, enjoy the company of friends, and become a supremely professional writer. This unprepossessing-looking fellow maintained two separate families, wasn't married to either woman, and kept the details quiet. But that's what makes his story so intriguing.
His mistresses and children did not enjoy properly fulfilled lives in that unliberated age. But Collins was clear he opposed marriage, which he considered institutionalised prostitution, and injurious to both sexes.
No Name has a magnificent scene where Magdalen, married to a man she despises, attempts to swap places with her maid, who works to support her illegitimate child. Magdalen understands not only that they are both victims of matrimony, but that their social positions are interchangeable – a truly Collins epiphany.
Guardian crossword compiler Araucaria's birthday celebration in 2001, with editor Alan Rusbridger. Photograph: Martin Argles for the Guardian
Like many fans who came to Araucaria's door, I found a warm welcome. I had gone to ask for a crossword; what I got was friendship and laughter and a decade of playing bridge together. And like so many others, I fell in love with his mischievous erudition, his humility and his courage.
As the world knows, John announced his cancer in a crossword puzzle that appeared in 1 Across, the magazine he founded, in December 2012 and was reprinted in the Guardian in January of this year. I saw him several times in his last few weeks. He had lost none of the twinkle that so infused the puzzles that made him famous. Once he asked whether I would speak at the memorial event that he knew would follow his death.
"Of course," I said.
"Make sure you say something sensible. The others will overdo the praise."
"I'll give it a whirl. I'll tell them you were ordinary. And a bit dull."
"Thanks."
"They won't believe me."
"No, well, we can but try."
On 25 November I made the journey to see him again. By then he could no longer speak, but he liked us to read to him. I had a couple of books with me: the collected writing of CLR James on cricket and a dog-eared copy of Poems on the Underground. John's breathing was laboured and he may or may not have heard me. I read essays on D'Oliveira, on Weekes, Walcott and Worrell and James's particular favourite, Learie Constantine. Men who, like John, were the cream of their generation and whose genius found expression on a very public stage.
My monotone was punctured by his breathing. Regular, but loud and harsh. Every now and then his breaths would skip a beat and my heart would do the same. And then it would start again and I would return to James.
But even I tire of cricket, and so after a couple of hours of this, I moved on to Poems on the Underground ... snippets of this and that, all too familiar to bear repeating, except perhaps Adrian Mitchell's paean to Charlie Parker: "He breathed in air / He breathed out light / Charlie Parker was my delight."
And John was ours. He died that night.
F
She was a feminist before the word existed. She wrote one of the first novels in English about American slavery – The Life and Adventures of Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw (1836). In Domestic Manners of the Americans, she railed against the injustice meted out to Native Americans, too: "You will see them one hour lecturing their mob on the indefeasible rights of man, and the next driving from their homes the children of the soil, whom they have bound themselves to protect by the most solemn treaties." Trollope was one of those foreigners not taken in by the American dream: she came, she saw, and she returned to Europe (although for a time she was stuck in Cincinnati).
Trollope loved a spectacle, and was willing to make one of herself, too. For this, she was denounced as unfeminine and lacking in decorum. "Oh! ... that ladies would make puddings and mend stockings!" Thackeray moaned after reading one of her books. The novelist Elizabeth Lynn Linton was more indulgent, describing Trollope as "a vulgar, brisk and good-natured kind of well-bred hen wife, fond of a joke and not troubled by squeamishness."
The woman was undeniably brave, but what I like most about her is her curiosity. She talked to everybody and visited everything: mountains, cottages, waterfalls, schools, prisons, Viennese catacombs stuffed with corpses, and Congress, employing every means of travel then available (donkey, steamboat, raft, carriage). She also had an eye and ear for the telling detail. Americans, she observed, were always spitting and never thanked anybody, and alligators actually ate people.
Her take on autobiographical fiction? "I draw from life – but I always pulp my acquaintance before serving them up. You would never recognise a pig in a sausage."
