Читать книгу Bury My Heart At W. H. Smith’s - Brian Aldiss - Страница 10

Here is how my first book came into being. A publisher stepped forward and asked me to write it. I never papered my room in King Edward Street with rejection slips. I don’t know what a rejection slip looks like. No wonder I have been so difficult ever since.

Always have a change of scene with a new chapter. So here is another bookshop: Parker’s of Oxford. Sanders has fallen away underfoot. Parker’s paid fair wages and let its staff go at five thirty. I gained ten extra hours of liberty per week. Parker’s closed down in 1988, to make way for Blackwell’s art shop.

I called a halt to poetry writing, and launched into short stories. Using the extra free time as an investment, I began to write a novel entitled ‘Shouting Down a Cliff’.

‘Shouting Down a Cliff’ took up two summers and all the time in between. It was written in two large hard-covered notebooks, in longhand, with one of those fountain pens containing a little rubber tube to hold the ink, predecessor of today’s cartridge pen. What rendered those pens obsolete was the dawn of cheap air travel in the sixties. At 30,000 feet, the old rubber-interior pens, under change in air pressure, would discharge their contents into one’s pocket.

If ‘Shouting Down a Cliff’ is not a title which springs to mind as readily as, say, David Copperfield or Lord of the Flies, this is because it has never been published. I never even typed it out from the notebooks. It was never offered to a publisher. I was convinced before it was finished that it was scarcely up to scratch. A critical faculty is not the least of a writer’s gifts.

Where ‘Shouting Down a Cliff’ differs from the novels of many other unpublished novelists working at that time in Oxford – everyone seemed to be at it – is that I finished it. It was complete. Eighty thousand words. Finito. I had seen it through.

If I had written a novel I could do anything.

‘Shouting’ was about ordinary life, which held profound mysteries for me, and still does. I was reading Proust’s novel, with its astonishing aperçus, and, at the same time, devouring the science fiction magazines which abounded in the fifties, before the paperback revolution. After years of being exclusively faithful to Astounding, I was turning to Galaxy, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and If. Other magazines surfaced occasionally, Thrilling Wonder and Dynamic being my favourites. At this period I knew nobody else who read science fiction. For that matter, I knew nobody else who was reading Proust.

In 1955, a considerable Proust exhibition was mounted in the Wildenstein Gallery in London. Of course I had the common ambition to imitate Proust, except that my terrific long novel would have scenes on Mars and the moons of Jupiter. It would be splendid and unprecedented. I went to the exhibition.

The chief exhibit, displayed in long glass cases, was les cahiers, the final manuscript of A la recherche du temps perdu, all written in many exercise books. In the Master’s spidery hand.

Never again did I write in longhand. This century certainly has its advantages, among which must be numbered the electronic typewriter, on which I am writing the first draft of this book, and the word-processor. Think not only of Marcel Proust but of poor Countess Tolstoi, who copied out War and Peace five times in longhand for her husband. In Cyrillic, too. No wonder their marriage was so awful. Take advantage of what technology has to offer.

I bought a typewriter and became more professional. These days I also have a fax machine.

Parker’s in my time was L-shaped. I worked in the Turl end with Don Chaundy. Whenever the door opened about lunch-time, we could smell the curry from the Taj Mahal restaurant opposite.

The weekly journal of the book trade is, and was then, The Bookseller. Every week it filtered down the long vertical of the L and round the foot of the L to Chaundy and me. It got to us fairly speedily, because few of the staff bothered to read it.

(God, I yawn to think of those days. Why aren’t I in New York, where the elevators sail upwards so fast and upwards is so much higher than elsewhere? Good old Manhattan, so different from Oxford …)

Anyhow, The Bookseller ran a series of articles which supposedly covered every aspect of bookshop life, although there was nothing about actually working in a shop. I wrote to the editor, Edmond Segrave, explaining that the pale face of the assistant was the backbone of literary life, and so on.

He wrote back inviting me to do an article for him. I did so in February 1954. It was so long that Segrave spread it over two issues. What a sensation! A bloody assistant having the cheek to string a few sentences together! Dark looks were cast at me in the trade.

At this point, I grasped one of the essential points of fiction, that Pretence is needed as a bodyguard for poor ailing Truth. I wrote again to Mr Segrave, saying that the only way to present the reality of the bookselling experience was to dress it as fiction. I was prepared to write him an imaginary diary – to be entitled ‘The Brightfount Diaries’ – in six episodes, to be run in six successive issues, in order to put across what I meant.

Much is owed to Mr Segrave. He summoned me to his offices in Bedford Square. He and his assistant, Miss Philothea Thompson, later to become editor, took me out to lunch. They agreed to run the ‘Diaries’, although The Bookseller in its long history had never before published fiction.

Soon everyone in the book trade was reading and chuckling over ‘The Brightfount Diaries’.

You see, reader, that that chapter on Sanders was not there just for padding or nostalgia, as you suspected. It was research material. Sanders was the model for Brightfount’s. I just made it funnier and changed the names of the guilty parties.

‘Brightfount’ became so popular that Mr Segrave kept me at it. He paid me, too. I met him once more, after his retirement, in a cheerful pub called The Little Mayfair, behind the London Hilton, and we had a drink together.

While ‘Brightfount’ was in full spate, Mr Segrave forwarded fan letters to me, from booksellers and so on, at home and overseas. The Beck Book Company wrote from Adelaide, offering me a job. I had always wanted to visit Australia. At that time, prospects sounded good out there, while the UK economy was dying on its feet as usual. Letters were exchanged. I was preparing to go when a further letter revealed what Mr Beck had until then had the cunning to keep from me, that they wanted me to run the theology department. I stayed in Oxford.

Many years later, my eyes beheld the solid brick-built glory of the Beck Book Company in situ. I reflected then, in a science-fictional way, on the parting of time-streams, and of the other Aldiss who nearly fled to Oz and took holy orders. That poor little pom never became a famous writer. But he was great on a surfboard.

The next letter forwarded from The Bookseller changed my life. It came from the firm then considered the most elegant in London, Faber & Faber, publishers of T. S. Eliot. It said that Sir Geoffrey Faber and his staff were great fans of ‘Brightfount’, and were wondering if I had considered turning the Diaries into a book. If so, Faber would take great pleasure in publishing it.

I still have the letter. It is on loan, with my other manuscripts, to the Bodleian Library in Oxford.

The first question readers ask writers is, What sort of routine do you have?

The second is, How did you begin to write?

To these questions – and others, such as, How do you discipline yourself? – there are various answers, depending on the writer and the time of day. Mostly readers hope to be astonished: You mean to say you write only in leap years? Routine is a hateful word. I’m a failed Bohemian, and write when and if I can. Which is most days.

I cannot remember when I was not making books. At my mother’s knee I was encouraged to collect pictures from magazines, to give them captions and bind them up with pieces of wallpaper for covers.

This aided my pictorial sense. Also helpful was the family’s Hobbies fretwork machine. On this machine, Mother made jigsaws from pictures stuck on to three-ply, simple jigsaws at first, then of increasing difficulty as my sister and I grew up.

My mother read to me before I could read. One of the first stories I ever read myself was in the old Daily Mail. A girl who lost her shadow had to travel round the world to find it. The theme touched me so closely that I coloured the illustration. Mother preserved the picture, and somehow it has survived the years.

At the tender age of seven, I was sent away to boarding school. In the junior dormitory, with its hurly-burly, I found a way of preserving my identity. I told stories.

All new boys had to tell stories. They were made to stand up on their beds and spout. If the story did not please, or the storyteller faltered, shoes were thrown at him. I never had a shoe lifted against me.

Soon I became champion storyteller. There was just one snag: talking was forbidden after Lights Out. The housemaster, Bonzo, had a spyhole by the door. He would rush in, cane in hand, switching on all the lights at once.

‘Who’s talking?’

Reluctantly, I would raise my hand.

The punishment was six strokes on the bum, laid on with vigour across the pyjamas. I have never met with quite that kind of criticism since, though in the comments of many critics one hears a nasty little housemaster longing to get loose.

That dormitory ritual of narrative. It was impossible to stamp out, so valuable was it. It warded off homesickness and night fears. Something very primitive was evoked when telling stories to a silent dorm.

My stories were of a lurid variety. Many of them were SF. I derived them from Murray Roberts’s stories of Captain Justice, which ran in a thirties magazine, Modern Boy. And I did all the voices. Justice, Midge, O’Reilly and Professor Flaznagel.

Later, at a better school, West Buckland in North Devon, I graduated, or perhaps declined, from verbal to written stories. They became more ambitious, less derivative. Our form was mad about Sellers & Yeatman – not just 1066 and All That, but the less popular titles such as Horse Nonsense and Garden Rubbish. I wrote my own version, ‘Invalids and Illnesses’, which was popular. But my great success was with a series of pornographic stories told in Americanese. Each title came with a one-sentence blurb, in the manner of American pulp magazine stories of the forties. The titles of those stories have gone from my head; only two of the blurbs remain: ‘They went to New York for a change of obscenery’, and ‘The editor’s incision was final’ (he died ‘on the job’, as it was then called).

These stories brought me into even greater danger than the oral tales. Had they been discovered in one of the periodical raids carried out on our desks, I should have been beaten and expelled. But the writing madness was in my veins. I also wrote comic stories and SF stories, which I collected into books. These earned me the exemption from school essays I have described.

This experience, valuable as it was in confirming that people might listen, was interrupted by war service. For four years I was out of England, four formative years from eighteen till almost twenty-two, a not uncommon experience for my generation. Out of England and out of the class system and the stream of English thought. I left the country a mere boy and returned as an adult. In those years, 1944–48, England also had changed. Pre-war England had gone for ever.

Nowadays, the trauma of being involved in war, or in any kind of catastrophe – a rail accident, say – is better understood than it was. We understand how necessary it may be to talk through a trying experience, just as young lovers whisper to their partners all the shortcomings of their parents. Confession is the way to mental stability.

In Burma, stuck in the jungle with Japanese forces only a few miles away, the older men spoke fiercely of how they would ‘grip’ their audiences when they returned home, relating their sufferings. Like the Ancient Mariner, they intended to tell all: in the hope of release from trauma, which was also the Ancient Mariner’s ambition. Just as the wedding guest tried to evade the long and tiresome story, I’m sure all of us in the ‘Forgotten Army’ in Burma found our friends at home, when we returned, just as reluctant to listen. We may also have discovered that some experiences could hardly attain speech.

For some years, when I was reinstated in that baffling place, England, I had nightmares in which the Japanese were advancing on me with bayonets fixed. Writing was a form of exorcism.

During demobilisation leave, I sat down to write my first novel. It was to be called ‘Hunter Leaves the Herd’ and would tell England what the Far East was like. It was about a deserter from the army. It never got written. I had not the equipment at the time to write a whole novel.

I took my typewriter and went up to Oxford to get a job. When interviewing me, Mr Sanders said, ‘Which contemporary novelist is your favourite?’

I do not know why I did not say Aldous Huxley or Evelyn Waugh (who had not then gone off the gold standard with Brideshead Revisited). I said ‘Eric Linklater’, as being more down to earth.

Later, Sanders said to me, ‘You know, I’d never heard of Linklater.’

But Linklater, with his bawdy sense of humour and jaunty narrative, was for many years a great favourite. I collected all his novels, plays and stories; they left my shelves only when my old home broke up.

After ‘The Hunter Leaves the Herd’ died on the vine, I wrote nothing but poetry, most of it inspired by the girls I met in Oxford. Then came ‘Shouting Down a Cliff’.

While on holiday in the Isle of Wight, I bought from a newsagent an SF magazine called Nebula, published in Glasgow, and read it on the beach. The stories were so amateur I knew I could do better, though I admired one by Bob Shaw. I had an acceptance from Peter Hamilton, the editor. It took him over three years to publish the story: called simply ‘T’ – it remains my shortest title – it was finished on 30 January 1953. I received Hamilton’s cheque in January 1955, and the story was published in November 1956. (One keeps such details of early stories; later stories are less slavishly documented.) By the end of November 1956 my career was launched. My first book had been published by Faber & Faber and a second one was in the works.

I needed to see inferior writing in order to encourage myself that I could do better. I knew no one, took no advice. To work in a bookshop is to know a world already full of books.

The title of my second book was Space, Time and Nathaniel. It was a collection of SF short stories. The title was distinctive, announcing the fact that I did not intend to follow a trail worn by other British SF writers. None of them wrote well enough, to my mind, except J. G. Ballard, another ‘discovery’ of Carnell’s.

A firmly entrenched belief in the book trade is that collections of short stories do not sell. On average, they sell less well than novels, and novels on average sell poorly enough. Publishing is a hard trade. But Space, Time and Nathaniel is still in print, thirty years on, having lived through four different English imprints. American publishers could not stand the silly title, and eventually issued an emasculated version under a generic – and therefore flavourless – title, No Time Like Tomorrow. Exactly the sort of thing that makes one hate being an SF writer. Spanish, German and French editions also appeared, the French Denoël edition being translated by Michel Deutsch, my first and possibly happiest French translator.

What was there in that volume which moved Kenneth Young, reviewing the collection in The Daily Telegraph, to claim that the stories conveyed ‘a true sense of wonder such as we find in Blake or Wordsworth’? The answer must be that their author was delighted with the majesty of the world, the possibilities in science fiction and the freedom of imagination which writing brought him.