Bury My Heart At W. H. Smith’s

Recuperation: a Brief Chapter

The Brightfount Diaries was published by Faber & Faber on 2 November 1955.

Parker’s loyally ordered a half-dozen copies on sale or return. Their faith in their staff was rewarded. The copies sold out by lunchtime. I was safe round the other end of the shop, hiding behind piles of second-hand books; but I had had my hair cut for the occasion.

Along came the reporter from the Local Paper. He proved to be as embarrassed as I was. He took a few notes, brushing back a lock of hair from his forehead as he did so. It immediately fell back again. Later, I had a few drinks with him. He was a poet. His name was Adrian Mitchell. His first novel, If You See Me Comin’, was published while he was working on the Oxford Mail.

Parker’s, meanwhile, ordered two hundred and fifty copies of Brightfount. A poster was produced with a photograph of me in the shop. A whole window was filled with my pink-jacketed book. Over in Blackwell’s, they became pretty suspicious of me.

Then the reviews began to come in. Suppose the reviewers did not find the book amusing, I thought to myself. Well, if they don’t enjoy the thing, I never have to write another. It was a weasel thought. I would like to think I never thought it.

Fortunately, the reviewers took a lenient view.

Years like 1955 are few and far between. There were the Observer short story prize for ‘Not For an Age’, early short stories published, Brightfount a success, and my first child, Clive, born. A thrilling hope filled me. Perhaps I might redeem the wasted years and prove myself of some worth. It was never making money which interested me, but making good.

After Brightfount, Faber went on to publish my science fiction. I was fortunate to be with the one publisher in London at that time where people liked and understood science fiction. Sir Geoffrey Faber and his daughter Ann and fellow-director Charles Monteith all read it. Charles had just had his great success in discovering William Golding and Lord of the Flies, a novel he rescued from the slush pile. Both Charles and Golding were SF readers. Charles, who became my editor, was ever generous, hospitable and amusing. He had fought in Burma, and was wounded in the Arakan, generally reckoned to be the nastiest sector of the Burma theatre.

Faber parties were rather alarming. The company was then housed at 24 Russell Square, on a corner. With what awe one approached the building. The Faber list was a comprehensive one, beginning with literature and moving through Hugh Ross Williamson and David Stacton to science fiction, nursing and gardening. Those guests who wisely feared to join the incense-burners grouped round John Lehmann – such men as Cyril Connolly, W. H. Auden, Professor Trypannis, and other sweet singers – could easily find themselves entangled in discussions concerning mastectomy and hydrangeas. Daniel George, a celebrated littérateur of his day, was kind and amusing, treating the event like a day at the races, naming, with annotations, each celebrity as he or she entered. ‘There goes Colin Wilson. You can tell he slept on Hampstead Heath last night. And that’s Alfred Duggan, who never sleeps …’

One could be spoken to by T. S. Eliot at Faber parties. He had his office near Charles’s. I was taken to meet him in his room containing the famous pencil portraits by Wyndham Lewis of Eliot and Pound. Eliot had the look of a rather shabby eagle. He was polite and talked of the paperclip over-population problem. This was Eliot being the publisher; he was not in his poet persona.

It was pleasant to be treated as a writer, but there remained the nagging question, Was one actually a writer? Only when four or five books had accumulated on the shelf did it seem that something stood between me and mortality. Many more years had to pass before I woke one morning and realised that I was – inextricably, irremediably, incurably – a Writer. And no one could take that away from me; I had that greatest of securities, a life’s work, and could afford to play other than safe in various ways.

There is the brute necessity of earning a living. Some writers, highly praised, gain little financial reward. The great James Joyce industry came too late to aid the living Joyce – penury in Zurich and all that. Some writers, highly praised, enjoy massive financial reward: Anthony Burgess, I’m happy to see, is classed as a millionaire. Yet there are writers who receive no critical laurels – the sort who are never reviewed in the TLS or the literary weeklies – but are several times richer than Burgess. Some writers who gather no critical praise reap no financial reward either. And there are authors like Graham Greene who seem to have everything.

LESSON ONE: Financial reward is no criterion of an author’s merit.

LESSON TWO: Financial failure is no criterion of an author’s merit.

In the past, I have felt pressure on me to write a book a year. That is, a novel, a collection of short stories, or a nonfiction book. This year, 1989, I happen to be writing three books, though not all may pass the winning post of completion.

Behind me lies a year where I wrote nothing fruitful, unless a thousand letters are fruitful, which I doubt.

As to why I wrote nothing. Over the seven previous years, I wrote the three long Helliconia novels, a total of almost half a million words. Into those novels, I tried to pour all that I knew, of writing and of the world. My endeavour was to encompass all my experience. After that, the ground had to lie fallow.

7

In the Big Spaceship

W. H. Smith’s used to be one of my stamping grounds when I was first in Oxford. It was an excellent shop, the manager being a small, nervous man called Kessel. We got to know each other and he once offered me a job. Perhaps I should have taken it. I could have been a manager by now …

A difficulty was that I did not see myself as one of a large staff. In the army, I had been one of a large staff for four and a half years.

Smith’s in those days ran a lending library, and sold its rejects on a bench outside the shop. The library went long ago. Nowadays the books are all tucked away upstairs. Other booksellers like Tim Waterstone have come along, who hold more evangelical attitudes towards books, and now Waterstone has been bought by Smith’s.

But it was outside Smith’s of Cornmarket, Oxford, that I bought for one shilling an ex-libris copy of George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides. Its vision moved me towards a holistic and eco-logical approach to writing. It was necessary to shed the influence of P. G. Wodehouse.

Some time or other, we have to tack our colours to the mast. Otherwise, goodbye, mast!

I was in Faber’s offices after Brightfount was published, talking to Charles Monteith and Geoffrey Faber.

‘The book’s doing well,’ they said. ‘What are you going to write next?’

‘I also,’ I said, ‘write science fiction.’

To have a career in writing – well, I hardly see what the phrase means, unless it means to be not so much a writer as a careerist, with, as an ultimate objective, perhaps a hotel in the Bahamas, or an estate in Tuscany – retiring from writing, in other words, rather than actually becoming a writer.

Ian Fleming made writing his career, and was eminently successful in it. His strategy was a time-honoured one, still recommended to those who wish to make money. Fleming invented a hero with whom many could comfortably identify, and related his adventures in a series of easily readable novels (no easy task, as imitators have discovered). The adventures took on a formulaic, almost heraldic, pattern, from which Fleming did not depart. James Bond did not age. The closer Fleming kept to the established pattern, working minor variations within the pattern, the more he pleased his readers. Fleming roused and then fulfilled generic expectations, as Agatha Christie had done.

These matters are clearly understood. It is useless to be too clever. We cannot have Hercule Poirot throwing up his hands in Chapter Thirty-three, declaring that he is baffled, and retiring to Belgium. Dr No cannot actually remove James Bond’s threatened testicles. That’s a no-no. The cleverness of Ian Fleming was in not being too clever: he fulfilled generic expectations.

It is easy to understand the success of James Bond after the event. On the whole, the mass of people share Bond’s tastes. Expensive cars, pretty girls, adventure, drink. All the world loves a dry martini. But to deliver with Fleming’s style – that’s another matter.

In 1955, the Fleming craze was in its infancy; but the general principles of his later success were already accepted. Tarzan, Bulldog Drummond, The Saint and other formula heroes had been there before him. If at the outset of one’s writing life one decided to make a lot of money, one could follow that trail. Not only did it seem profitable, thrillers were also respectable. Dons read them, horsy people in country houses read them, clergy read them.

If at the outset of one’s writing life one decided to fail at literature, science fiction was a good bet. No one read it. Not knowingly.

The British have the best science fiction writers in the world. All the ignorance of critics cannot make it otherwise. Mary Shelley, H. G. Wells, Olaf Stapledon, E. M. Forster, G. K. Chesterton, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, J. R. R. Tolkien, Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, Adrian Mitchell, Angela Carter, Doris Lessing, Anthony Burgess have all written science fiction or something very like it. Yet the mode remains largely ignored by critics brought up only to appreciate the novel of character.

Commercial science fiction, branded as such, had, in 1955, only just escaped from a shuttle service of magazines, mainly American. Some regular hardcover American publishers had taken it on to their lists. In consequence, British publishers, making their annual raid on the fleshpots of New York, had returned with a token handful of this mysterious new literature which their US counterparts, barely concealing their mirth, had assured them would sell like crazy.