Bury My Heart At W. H. Smith’s

Nothing was to be seen but the wastes of the plain and the sky above it. A tree, a thatched hut, stood here or there, as pallid as the earth itself. In that dry season, there was no sign of the river; it had dwindled like a shrivelled limb.

Peasants worked on the plain, sometimes near the tracks, sometimes distantly. Unlike the peasants of China, these were isolated one from another. The sun had burned them hollow. They toiled almost naked. Some stood upright, working with hoes, while others were bent double. They appeared motionless, like figures on a frieze.

And they laboured on the plain every day of their lives.

Monotony was their lot. How did a man’s thoughts run, out there on the baked mud? What would he have to tell at sunset?

‘I was up before dawn and took a handful of rice. Then I worked, as you know. It was hot. Nothing grows. Now I shall rest. It’s dark. I will sleep …’

That terrible monotony, as stern a ruler as the sun. Ever since infancy I had feared reincarnation when, at the age of three, I was convinced I had been a wizard burned at the stake in a previous incarnation; the agony of the fire often woke me, crying. What was there to prevent me from awakening next time as a peasant, bound to the Ganges?

To survive as an Indian peasant requires endurance born of centuries of fatalistic courage, passive acceptance, qualities scarce in the unsleeping West.

Those days on the train were ones in which my determination to be a writer developed. I wished to tell everyone about that alien way of life. I had my subject matter. What I did not realise was that I also had the stubborn temperament a writer requires.

A glance at the list of titles I have written since those Indian days shows a preoccupation with time. From Space, Time and Nathaniel, to Non-Stop, through Moment of Eclipse and Eighty-Minute Hour, to Seasons in Flight and Forgotten Life, the idea of passing time glides like a serpent through the words.

Of course it was never planned that way. It just happened, as much in life happens. Perhaps I have a problem with my time sense.

Whatever creativity is, it is in part a solution to a problem.

LENINGRAD. I was one of six writers on an Arts Council tour of the Soviet Union. We had been to Moscow and flown over the Caucasus to Tbilisi. Now we were being taken to the Kirov ballet.

The home of the Kirov is a grandly restored eighteenth-century building. The company itself is magnificent.

That night, they were dancing Hamlet to a modern score.

The ballet stayed very close to Shakespeare’s original story. But even a faithful Hamlet becomes, without words, the story of two rather pleasant middle-aged people who marry and, on their honeymoon in Elsinore, are pestered by a young fellow in black. This adolescent, contrary to the usual rule of adolescence, loves his father, who has died, and spends all evening dancing in and out, mucking up the honeymoon.

Hamlet is not Hamlet without Shakespeare’s words. The best part of a writer exists on the printed page. Without his or her words, a writer spends his time dancing in and out, imprisoned in Elsinore.

BORNEO. If there are still white patches on the globe, then unsurveyed parts of the interior of Borneo must qualify as terra incognita. There, hiding from the depredations of the timber industry, lives a wandering tribe which regards itself as part of the jungle which encloses it.

This tribe has a religion which would interest Carl Jung. It believes that all men possess two souls, an ordinary everyday soul which deals with ordinary everyday life, and a second soul the tribe calls the Dream Wanderer. This Dream Wanderer is a free being, not under the command of the person it inhabits. Although it cannot manage everyday things, it is native in the lands beyond the prosaic.

Directly I heard of this tribe, I knew I was an honorary member. I also am inhabited by a Dream Wanderer. The Wanderer roams where it will; sometimes it leans over my shoulder when I am typing and communicates in its own fashion. If I am lucky.

Writers must fortify themselves with pride and egotism as best they can. The process is analogous to using sandbags and loose timbers to protect a house against flood. Writers are vulnerable creatures like anyone else. For what do they have in reality? Not sandbags, not timbers. Just a flimsy reputation and a name …

She was very attractive and we were getting on famously. By mutual consent we crept away from the party and found ourselves in a little warm courtyard. There we fell into intense talk, touching, and looking deep into each other’s eyes. The point came when I had to tell her I was a writer of novels.

‘Do you write under your own name?’ she asked.

1

My First Editor

Arundel Street is a short steep street leading down from the Strand to the Victoria Embankment and the Thames. If you drove down it in a car with bad brakes, you might end up in the river.

On this occasion, I was going down it on foot, slowly and cautiously. I was about to meet my first editor.

Just recently, I went down Arundel Street again, thirty years later. Much had changed. Dull concrete frontages loom where once there was fanciful brick and terracotta. Colour has gone. There are large corporations, who like concrete frontages, where once small companies clustered behind flettons.

In the fifties, there were basement windows through which a passer-by glimpsed various activities. I peered through protective railings on this momentous occasion to glimpse a tall figure in shirtsleeves who was talking and laughing.

I ascended four shallow steps, where a brass plate announced ‘Maclaren Books, Nova Publications’. I entered, and made my way down into the basement.

A long room had been made complex by an arrangement of desks, cupboards, boxes, piles of books and magazines, pinups on walls as if it were still wartime, and several men, sitting or bustling about.

I was a callow youth, yet not entirely callow and not entirely youthful. Over the previous Christmas, the Christmas of 1955, I had won the short story competition in the Observer, then the leading Sunday paper. The story was set in the year 2500 AD and entitled ‘Not For an Age’.

Now I met my first editor. His name was Ted Carnell, the great EJ, whose obituary I would write, many years later, for The Times.

Ted always dressed neatly and was courteous and pleasant. He lived in a neat little house in Plumstead and spoke with a genial Cockney accent.

He had already accepted two stories from me, ‘Criminal Record’ and ‘Outside’. He was about to take me out to lunch and solicit more stories from me.

Think of all those literary anecdotes about poets meeting Cyril Connolly or Robert Ross for the first time. I was meeting Ted Carnell.

Before we left for the restaurant, he put on his jacket and showed me a watercolour painting by the Irish artist Gerald Quinn. It depicted some enigmatic metal shapes lying on a beach under an orange sky. It was very accomplished. I liked it immediately.

‘Do you think it would be better with a human figure?’ Ted asked.

‘Worse.’

‘It’s marvellous. I was thinking of running a competition for the best story explaining what the pic is all about.’

Although the competition never materialised, Quinn’s painting appeared on the cover of New Worlds. It still looks good.

The restaurant turned out to be an ABC in High Holborn. We went downstairs, where Ted had a regular table and was on good terms with the waitress.

‘How are the bunions, Mary, dear?’ Ted asked.

‘Not so bad today, thanks, Ted, how’s yourself? I’m saving two bits of the plum pie for you. It’s very nice and going fast.’

I was disappointed. Did Sartre have similar exchanges with the waitresses on the Left Bank?

Over lunch, Ted expressed an admiration for my stories and confidence in my future career. He wanted more stories for both his magazines. Perhaps one day, he added, I would like to meet John Wyndham?

John Murray to Currer Bell: ‘Perhaps one day you’d care to meet Charles Dickens?’

How many times have I been up to London since then? Living only an hour’s train ride from London, I have never seriously contemplated moving to the capital. As a result, a little excitement remains whenever I get aboard a Paddington-bound train.

Of course I was sorry that Ted was not grander, more aspiring, and that his waitress had bunions. But there had been the sight of the Gerald Quinn.

This is what I was doing with myself at that time when I did not dare to call myself a writer.

I wrote in the evenings, when possible. For all of the day, I worked in an Oxford bookshop.