A Conversation with Richard Lister.
Visiting Mr.Lister.
I enjoy my initiation into The British Library. I sign in at the registration desk. No coats allowed, no bags except clear plastic, no sharp objects...no pens! I have to go and buy myself a pencil from the shop! Then I have my photo taken (I look smug and beardy and pleased with myself) and they give me my Reader’s card. “Researching The World’s Knowledge” it says on the plastic card.
The most remarkable book I have ordered turns out to be “Me and the Holy Spirit” 1999, Pauline Dorricott Books. It is A4 in format and looks like a self-published book to me, which explains why I can find little trace of P.D. as a publisher.
The book is a humorous meditation on the Trinity, and why R.P. prefers the Holy Ghost to the other two. He likes the way all it seems to do is to, sometimes, fill people, or, sometimes ,not. Yet he feels it as “some pervasive influence in the universe.”
But what the book also talks to me about is how Mr.Lister is, or how he felt in 1999. He asks himself at one point: “What is left to me?” He answers:
“Reasonably good health at an enormous age; dozens of loving friends; a love of music in an age when it is on tap in the home at all hours; a taste for writing and painting and the ability to make a small but sufficient living if necessary; a small and unexpected legacy making it unnecessary to make a living at either, so that I can do both simply for fun; an agreeable, if rather small flat in W11 fifteen minutes walk from the park.
Few princes can have had so much to enjoy and so little to fear or resent.”
He talks about how, as a writer, although he made a living up to the 1980’s he was “never part of a Circle”, and feels that it has been this “lack of Circularity” that has seen his reputation sink away.
As I read I think of his description of his character Pellinew, from “The Questing Beast”: “Talking to Pellinew, you sometimes forgot that the world was real, and that its needs, in the way of rent or food, had to be attended to.”
I can imagine the friends of R.P. feeling the same way. I felt the same way surrounded by the purposeful hush of the great library. I look up for the first time and find a dark-haired girl scribbling at the next table. When I ask to borrow her pencil-sharpener she looks up briefly and whispers “Yes.” Sharpened, I continue to pencil more of R.P.’s words.
Now he seems to be talking directly to me:”about the age 55, when times were really rather hard, I decided that the only way of coping with life was to accept (as gladly as I could manage) what was sent and make the best of it. And this principle has served me so well that I am in no mind to abandon it.” I realise that I will be 55 in November this year a day before R.P. turns 96...I think he would be laughing at me now...
Our “conversation” continued for most of the afternoon. I learned more about his life. A failed first marriage, but then from the age of 70 t0 74 “four very happy years” with Ione. Then Ione died of cancer leaving R.P. without a partner again. He laments that he has spent a greater part of his life without this close companionship and love.
He writes movingly in “The Questing Beast”: “When you are possessed by a longing for someone in this way, the whole of life relates itself to that one, important thing. Then, in the course of time, the feeling dies away, and you can no longer recapture the greatness and reality of it.”
I enjoyed my afternoon in The British Library, deep in conversation with R.P. At the end of “Holy Spirit” he says that if there is a heaven he will not be “one of the saints” who go marching in. I feel sure that he would be among the princes, and that his princess, Ione, would be waiting impatiently for him.
Yet I hope he has many more years and is still able to “potter” round St.James’s Park chuckling to himself as he puts together another line of his sparkling verse.
Oh, and at the end he told me the meaning of life. What is it?
“It has none. Not of itself. You put your own meaning into it; and that is its meaning. Or if you say it is meaningless, so it is.”
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Hybrid Mode
