Читать книгу Grub Street Irregular: Scenes from Literary Life - Jeremy Lewis - Страница 10

One of the minor irritations of being a writer is the widespread assumption that writing is an easy business, to be undertaken if and when the prospective author has nothing better to do. All writers must be familiar with the bluff, red-faced man at a party who says, ‘So you write books, do you? I’ve often thought of writing one myself, and may give it a whirl one of these days …’ No one would say to a composer, ‘So you write string quartets, do you? I’ve often thought of writing one myself, and may give it a whirl one of these days,’ but we all know that being able to play an oboe or a violin requires a modicum of training and talent, while the mere sight of a musician’s score is guaranteed to induce a reverential hush. Painters and sculptors are more vulnerable, but writers are the easiest game of all: writing is, in theory, the most democratic of the arts, since even the most boring and monosyllabic among us use words and sentences, the common currency of writers and non-writers alike. And the internet has made writers of us all: in the age of the blog we are all equal, or so they would have us believe.

But the printed page, and the book in particular, still retains its magic and its réclame, and every now and then one is bullied or browbeaten into reading something written by the red-faced man at a party – egged on by his friends, who assume, quite wrongly, that jocular, articulate and entertaining anecdotalists must, by definition, be equally effective in print, and fail to realise that good writers are often tongue-tied and unforthcoming in company, only coming to life when seated at a keyboard. These good-hearted friends would never dream of asking solicitors, accountants or dentists for free advice, but writers, most of whom earn well below the minimum wage, are expected to devote long hours to reading and reporting on such works free of charge. They are thought to be unworldly, generous-minded characters, holy fools far removed from sordid financial considerations, while the publicity attracted by that tiny minority who receive huge advances misleads people into thinking that authorship is a lucrative profession.

‘He’s such a character, and has led such an interesting life,’ the good-hearted friends assure one, and the heart sinks as they speak. Those of us who have spent long hours trawling through publishers’ slush piles, carefully removing the stray hairs or tiny strips of Sellotape planted to ambush the professional reader (‘You can’t have read to the end, since the hair is exactly where I left it’), will recognise at once the telltale phrases which betray the man who might well be the life and soul of the party, but is hopelessly adrift once he tries to put it all down in print. ‘I’ll never forget old So-and-so. What an amazing character he was,’ we read, but when – if forced to discuss the work with its author – we ask how and why old So-and-so was such an amazing character, a bruised and baffled silence falls. ‘The times we had … how we all roared … I’ll always remember …’: the rhetoric is there, but missing are the details, the minutiae, the observations that bring abstractions to life. Writers notice and remember trivia which may seem unimportant to the world at large, but are touching and revealing when put to good effect. If I stop to ask directions, I am far more likely to remember my informant’s bottle nose or the colour of his tie than how to get from x to y, which is why – unlike the red-faced raconteurs – authors sometimes seem half-dazed, and are widely believed to live in worlds of their own.

‘There’s a book in all of us’ is one of those benign, well-meaning phrases which offer hope to the many while keeping the few firmly in their place. I have never believed it, but just occasionally the old cliché comes true – sometimes with unhappy and unintended consequences. I must be the least public-spirited of men, never involving myself in good works or the local community, and the only way in which I redeem myself – apart from being kind to cats and my daughters – is by encouraging potential writers, both professionally and in my private life. On one occasion I wish I hadn’t: not because the book was no good, but because of the effect it had on the author and his family.

Early on in my time at Chatto, we were sent a dog-eared, battered-looking typescript which looked so unpromising that, if I hadn’t been less busy than usual, I might well have turned it down after sampling a couple of pages at most. I started reading, and, to my amazement, found myself hooked. It described how, back in the 1930s, the author had been a pupil on board HMS Mercury, a training ship for boys moored in Southampton Water and run on despotic lines by Beattie, the sadistic wife of C.B. Fry, the cricketer and athlete who had once been offered the throne of Albania. The book was mercifully short – it needed heavy editing, and rewriting in places – but the story was so fascinating, and the interlacing of the author’s own experiences with the bizarre Fry ménage so tantalising, that I urged my colleagues to take it on. I had, I soon remembered, read it some years before, while I was at OUP, but had been easily outvoted when I suggested that we should take it on; later I learned from the author that it had been turned down by at least twenty publishers before it found its way to Chatto’s offices in William IV Street. Carmen Callil, by now in charge at Chatto, was happy to go ahead, but told me – not unreasonably – to make a very modest offer. We were unlikely to sell American or even paperback rights, so the book would have to pay its way through hardback sales alone. I don’t remember the terms we offered, but the advance was in the hundreds rather than the thousands, and it may well be that, as the author later claimed, we paid a starting royalty of 7½ per cent rather than the standard 10 per cent. But it had found its way into print at last, and I was determined to do everything I could to help it along.

Soon after the contract had been signed, the author called in at Chatto for the first of several lunches in an Italian restaurant in St Martin’s Lane. He was a bustling, stocky schoolmaster in his late fifties, with a mane of gleaming white hair, a Wellingtonian beak and a gait so upright that I expected him to topple over backwards at any moment: I liked him well enough, but he had the pomposity and the assumption of omniscience that goes with a lifetime spent ordering small children around. He had never published anything before, and had no knowledge of publishing or the literary life: he referred every suggestion I made to the local librarian of his home town in Nottinghamshire, and since she knew as little about publishing as he did, I fought to master my irritation when, at our next meeting, he quoted her views back to me in reverential tones.

Editing his book was the kind of work I enjoyed, and was good at. Sentences were reordered, entire paragraphs rewritten, and – this was long before the days of desktop computers – whole chunks were scissored out and pasted down elsewhere, with notes in the margin that read ‘Take in (A)’ or ‘Move to p.75 (B)’. But my tinkerings were only skin-deep: he had written a good and interesting book, and I was happy to do what I could to make it even better. I wrote a flamboyant and entertaining blurb, though he blenched momentarily when I referred to Beattie’s habit of inspecting the boys’ pyjama bottoms every morning for evidence of beastliness. We agreed to eight pages of black-and-white photographs; for reasons of cost, we could only afford a two-colour jacket, but the overall effect looked pretty good, and since there were no full-colour pictures of the Mercury in the late 1930s, our jacket had the virtue of verisimilitude. When the proofs came in, I sent copies to well-disposed authors like Richard Cobb and Alan Ross, both of whom wrote admiring letters. The reviews could not have been better, and William Boyd’s rhapsodic account was the lead review in the TLS. As expected, American publishers thought it far too English for their market, and the paperback publishers wouldn’t bite; but we sold out our modest hardback printing and made an equally modest profit, and both book and author received the acclaim they deserved.

All this was well and good – until I discovered that the reviews had gone to my author’s head. Over lunch one day, he told me that he had decided to give up his job as a schoolmaster in order to write full time. This was most alarming news, and I urged him to reconsider. Very few authors, I told him, could live off writing books alone, and it would be madness to take this step at his stage of life. Although I didn’t say so, I sensed that he was a ‘one-book author’, the living embodiment of the notion that ‘there’s a book in everyone’, but the fact that his book had been so well received had stirred up expectations that could never be satisfied. I begged him, in vain, to think again: pension time was only round the corner, he could perfectly well combine another book with teaching, and the literary life was a notoriously perilous business. In due course he produced an outline and a sample chapter of the next book he wanted to write. It was, as I had dreaded, utterly unpublishable. We turned it down and, as discarded authors will, he vanished from view.

Some fifteen years later I wrote a piece in the Author about the hazards of the literary life, at the bottom of which a potted biography mentioned that I had switched from publishing to writing, and had written two volumes of autobiography and a life of Cyril Connolly. Not long after it appeared, the Society of Authors forwarded to me a letter from my old author. He sounded very cross indeed. Well, he said, you seem to have done very well for yourself, as one might expect from someone who was part of the London literary scene, prone as it was to back-scratching and mutual self-regard. His own life had been a good deal less happy since the publication of his book, and it was entirely my fault. I had made no effort to sell or publicise his book; his wife’s health had suffered as a result of his decision to go freelance, and penury was looming; no one had published the book we’d turned down; the local librarian had been outraged by my reference in the blurb to Beattie’s inspecting the boys’ pyjama bottoms, and was convinced that by doing so I had alienated innumerable readers and ruined the book’s hopes of bestsellerdom; I had disgraced the name of publisher by paying him a royalty which, or so he had learned, was below the going rate.

Most of us drift through life on the vague if misguided assumption that most people like us well enough for most of the time. To be suddenly confronted with such raw hatred, and to be blamed for ruining someone else’s life, was a disconcerting business, and for a couple of days I felt shaken and depressed by this blast from the past. And then, quite suddenly, contrition gave way to anger, and I wrote him a furious letter in return. He had written, I told him, a very good book, but I now felt I had done him a great disservice by rescuing it from the slush pile, for although the reading public would have been the poorer without it, the price had been too high. I reminded him of how I had begged him not to give up his job, and told him that, sorry as I was to hear about his wife, he had only himself to blame. I recalled the time and attention I had happily devoted to editing his book, and told him how, without my enthusiasm, William Boyd and the others might never have reviewed it. I couldn’t remember the contractual terms, but was ready to plead guilty, bearing in mind that, with the costings as tight as they were, we may well have had no alternative. And if he and the Nottinghamshire librarian felt so strongly about the pyjama bottoms, then maybe he should have removed them from the text itself.

A few days later I received a placatory, apologetic letter from my old author. I wrote a friendly letter in return, wished him the best of luck, and have never heard from him since. His book, for all its faults, had been one of those rare oddities that brighten the publisher’s life, making a welcome change from the slick, often rather conventional offerings of sophisticated London literary types, and it seemed terrible that its publication, so exciting at the time, and so well-meant, should have brought such misery in its wake. A writer’s books are like his children, to be loved and worried over like their flesh-and-blood equivalents, and my author’s anxiety and irritiation were understandable if, to my mind, misplaced: but one of the perks of a writer’s life is the ability to talk to family, friends and complete strangers in absentia and from beyond the grave, and he can draw comfort from the fact that his book will still be available, in the copyright libraries at least, long after his tribulations have been entirely forgotten.