Читать книгу Grub Street Irregular: Scenes from Literary Life - Jeremy Lewis - Страница 11

Ghostwriting is a lucrative business nowadays, as publishers compete to publish the maunderings of illiterate celebrities, self-important politicians and sportsmen with nothing to say for themselves. Very often the resulting books sell in derisory quantities, and the enormous advances have to be written off. But that is neither here nor there to the ghostwriters, who have already received a sizeable slice of the advance, and – provided they do their work well, and deliver on time and at the right length – can be fairly sure that more pop singers, celebrity chefs, footballers and television personalities are waiting eagerly in line to spill the non-existent beans. Yet until fairly recently ghostwriters were badly paid and poorly regarded, seedy and faintly disreputable denizens of the literary underworld who got drunk by day and toiled all night in a garret.

I’ve never been tempted to become a ghost, partly because I suspect it could very easily take over one’s life, and partly because – for good or for bad – I have too distinctive a tone of voice, which I would find it almost impossible to repress. Sometimes, as an editor, I rewrote and reworked a book to such an extent that I almost crossed the line between heavy editing and ghostwriting. I’ve written elsewhere how, thirty years ago, I helped Tam Dalyell write his prescient but disregarded diatribe against Scottish devolution, in which he spelt out the constitutional anomalies embodied in the West Lothian question, named after his own constituency, and forecast that devolution would introduce yet another layer of bureaucracy and would lead, in due course, to Scottish independence. Because time was so short – Cape, his publisher, wanted to get it out in time for that year’s Labour Party Conference – I ended up writing about half the book, pounding away on an old manual typewriter in an empty attic room in his ancestral home near Edinburgh while Tam strode up and down behind me, pontificating as he went and tearing articles out of newspapers and magazines. But I regarded myself as, essentially, his editor, and would never claim to have ghostwritten his book. Some years later Tam wrote to say that he had been brooding on the matter, and had decided that, like the nail in the horse’s shoe, I had single-handedly held the United Kingdom together, since without his book Jim Callaghan might well have pressed ahead with devolution. Alas, he had reckoned without Tony Blair, never the man to ponder the consequences of ill-thought-out actions.

I have ghostwritten one book, however, and that was towards the end of my time at Chatto. I first came across its author when my colleague Rupert Lancaster commissioned him to write an account of his celebrated cricketing career. Rupert was bug-ridden or out of the office when the typescript arrived, and it was agreed that someone else should take a first look at it, and come up with reactions and suggestions. The obvious man for the job was my colleague John Charlton, who had played cricket for Winchester and for his college at Cambridge, and had once bowled out Alan Ross with a slow lob which, much to Alan’s irritation, had somehow dive-bombed his wicket from a great height, rather like a kamikaze pilot. For some reason John was unable to take the job on, and it was passed to me instead – most unsuitably, since I know nothing about cricket and have no idea how a longstop differs from a silly mid-on. I read our author’s book, and although I was sure it would be of interest to his admirers, I felt it was too functional for its own good, and lacked the human touch. ‘I went in to bat,’ he would write of some important match. ‘I scored 200 runs. I was bowled out. I walked back to the pavilion,’ and so on and on.

‘This is very interesting stuff,’ I told him as we sat together in my tiny office in Bedford Square, ‘but I think it would be even better if you put more of yourself into the story. How did you feel, for example, when you were first chosen to play for your county, or when you scored your first century?’

‘Feel? What do you mean “feel”?’ he wondered, a puzzled frown wrinkling his handsome brow.

‘Well,’ I asked, ‘were you nervous, or elated, or immensely excited? What did it feel like when you went out to bat in a Test match for the first time?’

‘It felt all right,’ he replied, and that was the end of the matter. Luckily Rupert returned to the office a few days later, and I was able to pass the whole thing back to him.

But that was not the end of my involvement with the great man. Shortly afterwards he was commissioned to write a book about his native land. It was to be a large-format, heavily illustrated book, with colour photographs specially taken by a well-known practitioner, and our author providing a text of some 20,000 words, taking us on a journey from one end of the country to the other, and interlacing topography and history with snatches of autobiography. A handsome advance was agreed with his agent. A great deal of money would be tied up in production costs and monies paid to the author and the photographer, and because the book was expected to make a sizeable contribution to turnover in the season in which it was due to appear, much emphasis was laid on getting the typescript and the photographs delivered bang on time.

Once again, for some reason Rupert was out of the office at the critical moment. At one of our editorial meetings Carmen Callil pointed out that our man was due to deliver his book any moment – the photographs had long since been taken – and that since I was the only person other than Rupert who had had any dealings with the great cricketer, she told me to find out at once what was going on. I rang him at home, and we agreed that I should pay him a visit the following day.

Next morning, instead of heading for Bedford Square, I made my way to the top end of Sloane Avenue, and rang the bell of his flat. There was no answer. ‘He’s a lazy bugger, that one,’ said a man selling flowers on the pavement outside. ‘Never gets out of bed, if you ask me. Keep ringing, you’ll get him in the end.’ Eventually a buzzer let me in, and I made my way up to the first floor. Clad in flowing white garments, our author waved me towards a low sofa, covered with large, soft cushions. He was not a man for small talk, so within seconds of my arrival I had asked him when we could expect delivery, and reminded him that its timing was all-important. At this he handed me a leatherbound notebook or diary containing a few jottings and autobiographical snippets. It took me, at most, five minutes to read them; and that, it soon became apparent, was all we had to go on. I took the notebook with me, and reported back to the office.

‘Darling,’ Carmen said, ‘we’ve got far too much money tied up in this book, and we can’t afford to carry it over for another season. There’s only one solution: you must drop everything else, and write it.’ And that’s exactly what I did. I had never been to the author’s country in my life, and knew nothing about its peoples, its rivers or its mountain ranges. But that afternoon I went round to the London Library, took out a pile of books, and began my researches. I read histories and travel books and memoirs; I spent long hours in the London Library. I remember nothing about it now, but for a very short time I was a world expert on the subject. After three weeks or so I felt I had done enough, and Chatto’s production department was agitating in the wings. I wrote the entire book over a long weekend, interlacing the author’s modest contributions with great slabs of descriptive prose, and brought it to a conclusion reminiscent of the travel documentaries shown in the cinema when I was young. ‘And so our journey comes to a close, in a very different world from that in which we set out,’ I wrote, before ending on a note that was both uplifting and admonitory: ‘If my book helps to persuade my country’s government to do all it can to preserve so rich and unique a heritage, I shall feel I have not written it in vain.’

The photographs were rather more genuine than my prose, and the finished book looked very handsome indeed. With luck, it not only contributed to Chatto’s overheads – rent, rates, salaries, lighting, heating, warehousing and all those humdrum expenses which have to be deducted from the publisher’s share of the monies received from copies sold – but made a modest profit as well. The author’s agent very generously offered to pay me a share of the advance due on delivery, so I was more than happy; but – foolishly perhaps – I have never been tempted since to resume the ghostwriter’s mantle.