Ian Thomson

Though alcohol withdrawal is potentially fatal, booze has none of the media-confected glitz of heroin (imagine Will Self boasting of a Baileys Bristol Cream addiction). The 17th-century word for the sickness that follows excessive drinking — ‘crapula’ — effectively hints at the alcoholic’s sleazy kind of stupor. In his earlier years, Stephen King would drink himself daily into a wall-eyed hangover. His scariest novels — Carrie, The Stand, The Shining — were written in the 1970s when sobriety was a no-no for him. Jack Torrance, the author who goes off his rocker in The Shining, suffers the most horripilating of alcohol-tainted visions while holed up in the Overlook Hotel in the Colorado Rockies.

In 1998, the Jamaican singer Bounty Killer released a single, ‘Can’t Believe Mi Eyes’, which expressed incredulity that men should wear tight trousers, because tight trousers are an effeminate display of gayness. Fear and loathing of homosexuals has a long history in the West Indies. Jamaica’s anti-sodomy laws, deriving from the English Act of 1861, carry a ten-year jail sentence for ‘the abominable crime’. Similar laws exist elsewhere in the Anglophone Caribbean, yet Jamaica is outwardly the most homophobic of the West Indian islands. A white man seen on his own in Jamaica is often assumed to be in search of gay sex. Batty bwoys (‘bum boys’) are in danger of being stoned, cutlassed or shot.

For good or ill, black West Indian culture is synonymous with youth culture in Britain today. Even among white teenagers, a Jamaican inflection (‘buff’, ‘bruv’) is reckoned hip. The ‘Jamaicanisation’ of British cities quickened after Jamaica’s independence in 1962, when more West Indians migrated to Britain, and London was poised to become the most Jamaican city in Europe. Zadie Smith is well placed to chart the vagaries of life in mixed-up, mixed-race Britain. Born in 1975 to a Jamaican mother and a British father, she grew up in the ethnically multi-shaded London borough of Brent. Her marvellous new novel, NW, crackles with reflections on race, music and migration in Brent’s north-west suburb of Willesden.

Vasily Grossman, a Ukranian-born Jew, was a war correspondent for the Soviet army newspaper Red Star. His dispatches from the front between 1941 and 1945 combined emotional engagement with independent-minded commentary. A solitary, questioning spirit, Grossman set out always to document truthfully what he saw and heard. His report on the vile workings of the Treblinka death camp, ‘The Hell of Treblinka’, remains a masterpiece of controlled rage and unsparing lucidity. Unsurprisingly, Grossman was mortified when the man who had prevented Hitler’s annihilation of Jewry was suddenly set on their extinction. In early 1953, Stalin announced in the pages of Pravda that a plot to murder Kremlin members had been unmasked among Jewish doctors and intellectuals.

At the grubbier end of my street in north London is the Somali mosque that was burned down earlier this month in an arson attack. The other day I asked at the police cordon if any arrests had been made. ‘Not that we know of’, said the duty officer. A smell of charred wood hangs over this dreary, out-at-elbow part of Muswell Hill. People complain that Somalis are heavily ‘welfare-dependent’, and have no wish to integrate into British society. It is true that immigrants today, with the internet, cheap flights and satellite television, are more likely to see themselves as members of a foreign country, hosted by, but not emotionally attached to, Britain. Diversity is here to stay, however, and many of us like it that way.

Back in the 1960s, England was a bad disappointment to many West Indians. In the grey city streets with their scruffy, bay-fronted houses they looked for somewhere to live. Many were surprised to find themselves categorised as ‘coloured’. (ROOM TO LET: REGRET NO KOLORED.) In the Anglophone Caribbean, the term ‘coloured’ applied to people of mixed race; in England it was one of the basic words of boarding-house culture and of polite vocabulary in general. The Making of a Minister, written (apparently) in the late 1960s, is a period piece, which alludes to ‘coloured men’ and unfolds round London’s Caribbean quarter — its boundaries roughly at Marble Arch, Bayswater, Notting Hill and Ladbroke Grove.

B.S. Johnson railed intemperately at life, but in his fiction at least he found a lugubrious comedy in human failings. In 1973, aged 40, he killed himself by slashing his wrists in a bath while drunk. Today, in spite of his former high reputation as Britain’s ‘most subversive novelist’, Johnson is pretty well forgotten. On the evidence of the prose and plays collected in Well Done God!, however, it would be a mistake to consign him to the frivolous pastures of the literary bagatelle. Samuel Beckett, for one, enjoyed the irreverent boisterousness of his writing, and the admiration was mutual.

Julian Cope, the well-read jester of English pop, was the founder member of the 1980s art-rock combo The Teardrop Explodes. With his antic appearance (Rommel overcoat, wild tawny hair), he falls into the erratic genius category. Drugs have played their part. By his own account, Cope has undertaken some dangerous chemical expeditions to the mind’s antipodes by means of lysergic acid. Yet he is no tiresome advert for drug-induced excess (still less for English whimsy). He is a recognised authority on the neolithic culture of Britain, for one thing, and has written two winningly eccentric volumes of musicology, Krautrocksampler and Japrock-sampler.

Was a nation ever so beset by calamity as Poland? During the second world war, Polish cities were bombed, fought over hand-to-hand and crushingly shelled. Beyond their ideological differences, Hitler and Stalin were united in a determination to destroy the country. Without the Nazi-Soviet ‘friendship’ treaty of 1939, Hitler would not have been able to implement the mass killings of Jews in Poland, or Stalin been able to deport thousands of Poles as ‘enemies of the people’ to the frozen immensity of Siberia. Through their opportunist alliance, the dictators worked to undermine Polish statehood. At the war’s end, Poles found themselves dispersed in places as far-flung as India and Soviet Kazakhstan. History had blown them to a harsh lee shore.

The other evening my wife came home to find me watching re-runs of Steptoe and Son. The washing up had not been done, and everything was in a state of bedragglement (including Olga, the family dog). ‘How can you bear to watch that stuff? Steptoe’s got a face like a squeezed lemon. He’s perfectly horrible. I’ll go further: he’s perfectly revolting.’ How could my wife not like Steptoe? The series had been a hit from the moment it was launched in 1962 and drew audiences of over 20 million. Ray Galton and his co-writer Alan Simpson combined a seaside postcard sauciness with the cockney menace of Harold Pinter (only with shorter pauses). The series is, among other things, a meditation on human decrepitude and the frustrations of a father-son relationship.

Back in the Sixties, if you wanted a fruitful, freakout-free LSD experience, you might have called on Mrs Aldous Huxley in Los Angeles, where she lived as a beatifically attuned Buddhist adept until her death in 2007. Aldous Huxley, her husband, had emigrated to America 70 years earlier in search of spiritual solace and the ‘benediction’ offered by psychotropic drugs. Evelyn Waugh was not alone in thinking that the States had driven Huxley dotty. Jim Morrison, the psychedelic Frank Sinatra, named his California band The Doors after Huxley’s crackpot hymn to the mescaline experience, The Doors of Perception. Tim Lott’s sixth novel, Under the Same Stars, dilates entertainingly on British attitudes to America as a supermarket for far-out fads and Huxley-like cults.