It is a long time since I have experienced a ‘touch’. When I was a young man, people were always borrowing from me. I was brought up very strictly. My father said, ‘Never have an overdraft. Never have a mortgage except on your first house, and pay that off as quickly as possible. Never borrow. Always pay bills by return of post.’ I have stuck to these rules, even at Oxford, when I had very little and the temptation to get into debt was great. One of Charles Lamb’s most striking essays is called ‘The Two Great Races of Men’. They are ‘those who borrow and those who lend’. I have always, like Lamb, been a lender. When you are known always to be solvent, people instinctively come to you to borrow. Or rather, they always did in the old days.
I don’t recall any borrowing in Chaucer, though his master, John of Gaunt, richest man in Europe, exercised power by jud-icious lending. Shakespeare’s age was a notorious time for the art of genteel mendicancy. Hence Polonius’s advice to his son Laertes:
Neither a borrower, nor a lender be,
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.
I suspect Shakespeare knew what he was talking about and, being prudent by nature, and kind, was a ‘touch’, though never a soft one. His Falstaff, who had a nasty side to him (‘Hook on! Hook on!’), was the first celebrated borrower in literature, battening on his landlady to the point of almost ruining her business, and cadging a thousand pounds out of old Shallow, which he had no intention of repaying. A thousand pounds was a vast sum in those days, enough to buy a fully rigged ocean-going ship and fit it out, and crew it, for an Atlantic voyage.
But the golden age of ‘touches’ was, by my reckoning, 1775-1875, with Sheridan leading the pack by a mile, touching his aristocratic Whig friends for large sums, but drawing anyone gullible into his net. Being an MP made him immune to arrest for debt, at least while Parliament was sitting, but on his death creditors attempted to arrest his corpse. Even Dr Johnson was once arrested for debt and had to effect a touch to regain his liberty, but in general he belonged to the race of the lenders. Lamb’s essay, being the classic statement of the problem, is based on his one-time employer, John Fenwick, owner-editor of the Albion, which he purchased with borrowed money. He is presented in the essay as ‘Ralph Bigod Esq.’, a profuse spender of other people’s money, including the Duke of Northumberland’s, which was intended to promote the paper, a radical and subversive organ. Fenwick came to a bad end, as habitual borrowers always do, deserting his family and bunking to Canada, but not before he had touched a multitude, including William Godwin, an amazing achievement since Godwin was a master-toucher himself, his chief victim being his son-in-law Percy Bysshe Shelley.
Lamb does not feature Leigh Hunt as a toucher in his essay, though he might have done, since he occasionally lent Hunt modest sums from his exiguous resources. Hunt also touched Shelley, and at one time hoped to live off Byron, but the lord sent him packing; in due course Hunt took revenge with a hostile biography. How much of a cadger was Hunt? Macaulay once remarked, ‘He thinks he can borrow £10 from you any time he feels like it.’ On the other hand, it is on record that £50 he borrowed from Macaulay with a promise to repay it in three months was, in fact, returned, though only after three years.
Two recent biographies of Hunt take a more favourable view of his mendicancy than the traditional folklore does. But the image of Hunt handed down to us will always be Harold Skimpole in Bleak House. Dickens denied to Hunt that he was the original of the character, but he admitted to Forster that Skimpole was Hunt ‘to the life’. This was not true, for Skimpole emerges as a much more sinister character than Hunt could conceivably have been. It was a piece of cruelty unusual with Dickens, but his patience had been sorely tried by Hunt’s demands that ‘testimonials’ be organised on his behalf, and no doubt also by the slatternly Mrs Hunt, who did some touching off her own bat.
The great literary toucher of the 20th century was Julian Maclaren-Ross, who flourished and eventually decayed in the Soho of the 1940s and 1950s. It was said that he never touched a fellow writer, but that was not true. I once saw him, in the French Pub (actually called the York Minster) try to touch the redoubtable Maurice Richardson. They were just out of earshot, but by reading their lips and observing their expressions I could see that a fiver had been requested and refused. I was afraid that Ross would now slide up to me with his ivory-headed swordstick — a tap of it immediately preceded a touch — but fortunately his attention was diverted by the arrival of Francis Bacon, a more promising target.
Ross had the annoying habit, shared by Ralph Bigod Esq., of immediately spending the loan, in an ostentatious manner, in front of the reluctant lender. He would offer the man he had touched a drink, or even order a round (touches always took place in pubs), and then disappear in a taxi. In Anthony Powell’s Music of Time novels, Ross appears as X. Trapnell, his touching rituals accurately described. I regarded Ross with some aversion, but then I never knew him well enough to perceive his well-concealed charm. Mark Members, another Powell character, said of him, ‘You count as knowing a man reasonably well after he’s borrowed five pounds off you.’ A fiver was Ross’s touch-unit, though if it was readily and promptly produced, he was liable to say, ‘Do you think you could make it a tenner?’ A tenner in 1950, Ross’s prime, was what you were paid for a lead review in the New Statesman or Spectator. Not to be parted with lightly, if you could help it.
John Raymond, my mentor in all literary matters then, said, ‘Never give that man Ross a penny. You might as well throw it down the drain.’ He also advised against lending to John Davenport, who had the master-touch. The latter would sit at a table in the old Commercial, in the King’s Road, on a Saturday morning as soon as it opened, writing letters to grand friends, and spreading out the envelopes so you could see the names. That was his decor for a touch. Raymond claimed he could reject a touch from Davenport, a former boxer and wrestler, without causing offence. ‘I know how to handle John,’ he would say grandly. ‘Some foolish people don’t. My view is, everyone gets the Davenport he deserves.’ But the very next week he was clobbered by the old monster with the characteristic imprecation, ‘Take that, you short-arsed little twit, and learn how to speak to a gentleman.’ Raymond gave me advice on fending off touches from Henry Fairlie, a borrower of world class. But Fairlie is worth an essay in himself, and one day I will write it. As Peregrine Worsthorne and I were agreeing recently, the grand days of literary touching seem to be over. At least for us, that is. Are there still touchers out there? If so, what is their unit? A fifty-pound note?
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