One story became clear. A girl from a primitive, quiet, middle-class home – Katherine – would enter the bohemian, vulgar world of the Goldmans. He was going to fall in love, or some version of it. Later, when the novel was published, critics compared it to Nancy Mitford’s novel “The Pursuit of Love” for its stark depiction of a boisterous family. But whereas Mitford used the figure of the outsider to write about his own environment, here Trapido himself was the interloper, writing about a society that was alien to him. Everyone assumed he was British. “I guess you can’t tell I’m a stranger?” he said. “I just do anthropology.”
Because Trapido wrote out loud, the book took on a magical quality. “I kept rapping while riding my bike and pushing the swings,” he said. “I would find myself at the train station when I should have been at the pharmacy.” By the time he sent the manuscript to Jonathan Cape, a publishing house in London, Trapido was able to read the entire book. He called it “More Famous Jack’s Brother”, a joke made in Jacob Goldman’s novel about WB Yeats’ younger brother, a painter. “The title was pretty random, really,” he said.
Cape immediately rejected the novel. Six months later one of Trapido’s friends suggested he try the less fashionable but more heterodox publisher Victor Gollancz, who accepted “Jack” and did not change a word of it. Trapido was asked to send a letter describing himself, which was shamefully published on the back cover of the book: “I wrote my novel at the kitchen table many nights, when I was forty, without ever having had this impertinence before.”
“Famous Jack’s Brother” has been in print since 1982 and will be reprinted this week by NYRB Classics. Like other excellent but not very famous novels, it was mostly passed down from people who admired it to people who had never heard of it. Trapido did not show the manuscript to his family until it went to the printer. Her mother believed that no one would publish it because the language was so gruesome. His father said he found four typos.
“That’s all he said. So I don’t really know what he thinks about it,” Trapido told me in one of two long conversations we had in Oxford this summer. After Stanley died in 2008, he moved out of his home on Southmoor Road to a smaller place nearby overlooking the canal. Trapido was sitting on a sofa in his front room overlooking a large brick fireplace. The walls were filled with paintings of his son and grandson; Classical music was playing on the radio. He’s eighty-four years old and slyly funny. When I asked questions, he gave extremely long and indirect answers, full of absolutely concrete memories: the house he passed on his way to school in Durban; dressing like Alice in Wonderland; buying oranges from a racist greengrocer in London in the seventies; people’s teeth and the clothes they wore – and these always turned out unexpectedly and at the last moment into precisely thought-out reactions. While talking, Trapido often closed his eyes, raised his knees slightly, and brought his hands to the side of his head, as if to better explain the anecdote. Her son’s terrier, Beanie, was snoring quietly nearby. Trapido understands why everyone keeps asking him about “Jack,” even though he claims some of his other six novels are better. “I still like it,” he said fondly.
When people read “The More Famous Jack’s Brother” they remember where they were. Mick Herron, author of the “Slough House” spy novels, was an undergraduate student at Oxford when the book was published. He saw the mostly enthusiastic reviews in the newspapers (the book won the Whitbread Prize for fiction) and read “Jack” in his top-floor bedroom, a few blocks from where Trapido lived. “The enthusiasm was there from the beginning,” Herron told me. (He wrote the introduction to the NYRB edition.) “But that’s also the point. It’s a kind of bohemian lifestyle that he toys with as a possibility, the idea of running away and joining the circus.”