The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time dg-3

by Douglas Adams

  After he split up with Chapman, Adams’s career stalled badly. He continued to write sketches but was not making anything like a living. “It turned out I wasn’t terribly good at writing sketches. I could never write to order, and couldn’t really do topical stuff. But occasionally I’d come out with something terrific from left field.”

  Geoffrey Perkins, head of comedy at BBC television, was the producer of the radio version of Hitchhiker. He remembers first coming across Adams when he directed a Footlights show. “He was being heckled by a cast member, and then he fell into a chair. I next came across him when he was trying to write sketches for the radio show Weekending, then regarded as the big training ground for writers. Douglas was one of those writers who honourably failed to get anywhere with Weekending. It put a premium on people who could write things that lasted thirty seconds, and Douglas was incapable of writing a single sentence that lasted less than thirty seconds.”

  With his dreams of being a writer crumbling around him, Adams took a series of bizarre jobs, including working as a chicken-shed cleaner and as a bodyguard to the ruling family of Qatar. “I think the security firm must have been desperate. I got the job from an ad in the Evening Standard.” Griff Rhys Jones did the same job for a while on Adams’s recommendation. Adams recalls becoming increasingly depressed as he endured night shifts of sitting outside hotel bedrooms: “I kept thinking this wasn’t how it was supposed to have worked out.” At Christmas he went to visit his mother and stayed there for the next year.

  He recalls a lot of family worry about what he was going to do, and while he still sent in the occasional sketch to radio shows, he acknowledges that his confidence was extremely low. Despite his subsequent success and wealth, this propensity for a lack of confidence has continued. “I have terrible periods of lack of confidence,” he explains. “I just don’t believe I can do it and no evidence to the contrary will sway me from that view. I briefly did therapy, but after a while I realised it is just like a farmer complaining about the weather. You can’t fix the weather—you just have to get on with it.” So has that approach helped him? “Not necessarily,” he shrugs.

  Hitchhiker was the last throw of the dice, but in retrospect the timing was absolutely right. Star Wars had made science fiction voguish, and the aftermath of Monty Python meant that while a sketch show was out of the question, there was scope to appeal to the same comic sensibility.

  Python Terry Jones heard the tapes before transmission and remembers being struck by Adams’s “intellectual approach and strong conceptual ideas. You feel the stuff he is writing has come from a criticism of life, as Matthew Arnold might say. It has a moral basis and a critical basis that has a strong mind behind it. For instance, John Cleese has a powerful mind, but he is more logical and analytical. Douglas is more quirky and analytical.” Geoffrey Perkins agrees, but remembers there was little grand plan behind the project.

  “Douglas went into it with a whole load of ideas but very little notion of what the story would be. He was writing it in an almost Dickensian mode of episodic weekly installments without quite knowing how it would end.”

  By the time the series aired in 1978, Adams says, he had put about nine months’ solid work into it and had been paid one thousand pounds. “There seemed to be quite a long way to go before I broke even,” so he accepted a producer’s job at the BBC but quit six months later when he found himself simultaneously writing a second radio series, the novel, the television series, and episodes of Doctor Who. Despite this remarkable workload, he was already building a legendary reputation for not writing. “I love deadlines,” he has said. “I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”

  Success only added to his ability to prevaricate. His publishing editor, Sue Freestone, quickly realised that he treated writing as performance art, and so she set up her office in his dining room. “He needs an instant audience to bounce things off, but sometimes this can weirdly backfire.

  “There was a scene early in one book when he talked about some plates with, very definitely, one banana on each. This was obviously significant, so I asked him to explain. But he liked to tease his audience and he said he’d tell me later. We eventually got to the end of the book and I asked him again, ‘Okay, Douglas, what’s with the bananas?’ He looked at me completely blankly. He had forgotten all about the bananas. I still occasionally ask him if he has remembered yet, but apparently he hasn’t.”

  Writer and producer John Lloyd has been a friend and collaborator with Adams since before Hitchhiker. He remembers the “agonies of indecision and panic” Adams got into when writing. “We were on holiday in Corfu with three friends when he was finishing a book, and he ended up taking over the whole house. He had a room to write in, a room to sleep in, a room to go to when he couldn’t sleep, and so on. It didn’t occur to him that other people might want a good night’s sleep as well. He goes through life with a brain the size of a planet, and often seems to be living on a different one. He is absolutely not a malicious person, but when he is in the throes of panic and terror and unable to finish a book, everything else pales into insignificance.”

  However the work was dragged out, it was extremely popular. The books all became bestsellers, and Adams was given an advance of over $2 million by his American publishers. He wrote a hilarious spoof dictionary with John Lloyd, The Meaning of Liff, in which easily recognised concepts, such as the feeling you get at four in the afternoon when you haven’t got enough done, were given the names of towns—Farnham being the perfect choice for this low-grade depression. In the late eighties he completed two spoof detective novels featuring Dirk Gently.

  For all his facility with humour, Freestone says she has been touched by how profoundly Adams’s work has connected with some readers. “In Hitchhiker, all you have to do to be safe is have your towel with you,” she explains. “I heard about this woman who was dying in a hospice who felt she would be fine because she had her towel with her. She had taken Douglas’s universe and incorporated it into her own. It embarrassed the hell out of Douglas when he heard about it. But for her it was literally a symbol of safety when embarking on an unknown journey.”

  There are serious themes within his work. The second Dirk Gently novel can easily be read as being about people who are homeless, displaced, and alienated from society. “His imagination goes much deeper than just cleverness,” says Freestone. “The social criticism is usually buried by the comedy, but it’s there if you want to find it.”

  Having been through such a lean period, Adams worked constantly until the mid-nineties, when he very deliberately applied the brakes. “I had got absolutely stuck in the middle of a novel, and although it sounds ungrateful, having to do huge book signings would drive me to angry depressions.”

  He says that he still thought of himself as a scriptwriter and only inadvertently found himself as a novelist. “It sounds absurd, but a bit of me felt cheated and it also felt as if I had cheated. And then there is the money cycle. You’re paid a lot and you’re not happy, so the first thing you do is buy stuff that you don’t want or need—for which you need more money.”

  His financial affairs got into a mess in the 1980s, he says. He won’t discuss the details, but says that the knock-on effect was considerable, so that everyone assumed he was wealthier than he actually was. It is possible to track the movement of Adams’s life even between the first and second series of the radio show. In the first there were a lot of jokes about pubs and being without any money. The second had more jokes about expensive restaurants and accountants.

  “I felt like a mouse in a wheel,” he says. “There was no pleasure coming into the cycle at any point. When you write your first book aged twenty-five or so, you have twenty-five years of experience, albeit much of it juvenile experience. The second book comes after an extra year sitting in bookshops. Pretty soon you begin to run on empty.”

  His response to running out of fuel was to attempt some “creative crop rotation.” In particular, his intere
st in technology took off, as did a burgeoning passion for environmental issues. In 1990 he wrote Last Chance to See. “As is the way of these things, it was my least successful book, but is still the thing I am most proud of.”

  The book began when he was sent to Madagascar by a magazine to find a rare type of lemur. He thought this would be quite interesting, but it turned into a complete revelation. His fascination with ecology led to an interest in evolution. “I’d been given a thread to pull, and following that lead began to open up issues to me that became the object of the greatest fascination.” A link at the bottom of his e-mails now directs people to the Dian Fossey Trust, which works to protect gorillas, and Save the Rhino. Adams was also a signatory to the Great Ape Project, which argued for a change of moral status for great apes, recognising their rights to “life, liberty, and freedom from torture.”

  He was a founding member of the team that launched Comic Relief, but he has never been a hairshirt sort of activist. The parties he held at his Islington home would feature music by various legendary rock stars—Gary Brooker of Procol Harum once sang the whole of “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” including all the abandoned verses—and were peopled by media aristocracy and high-tech billionaires. Slightly less orthodoxly—for an enthusiastic, almost evangelical atheist—he would also host carol services every Christmas.

  “As a child I was an active Christian. I used to love the school choir and remember the carol service as always such an emotional thing.” He adds Bach to the Beatles and the Pythons in his pantheon of influences, but how does this square with his passionate atheism? “Life is full of things that move or affect you in one way or another,” he explains. “The fact that I think Bach was mistaken doesn’t alter the fact that I think the B-minor Mass is one of the great pinnacles of human achievement. It still absolutely moves me to tears to hear it. I find the whole business of religion profoundly interesting. But it does mystify me that otherwise intelligent people take it seriously.”

  This attachment to traditional structures, if not traditional beliefs, is carried over in the fact that his daughter, Polly, who was born in 1994, has four non-godparents. Mary Allen is one of them, and it was she who introduced Adams to his wife, the barrister Jane Belson. Allen says, “In the early eighties Douglas was going through some writing crisis and was ringing me every day. I eventually asked him whether he was lonely. It seemed that he was, so we decided he needed someone to share his huge flat. Jane moved in.” After several false starts, they married in 1991 and lived in Islington until last year, when the family moved to Santa Barbara.

  Adams says the initial move was harder than he expected. “I’ve only recently understood how opposed to the move my wife was.” He now says he would recommend it to anyone “in the depths of middle age just upping sticks and going somewhere else. You reinvent your life and start again. It is invigorating.”

  His role in his dot-com business fits into this sense of invigoration. His job title is chief fantasist. “I’ve never thought of myself in the role of a predictive science-fiction writer, I was never an Arthur C. Clarke wannabe. The Guide was a narrative device for absorbing all those ideas that spark off the flywheel, but it has turned out to be a very good idea. But it’s early days,” he warns. “We’re still in a swimming pool and there is an ocean out there.”

  Other new ventures are a novel—eight years late and counting—talk of a Dirk Gently film, the H2G2 Web site and an e-novel. “I’ve been talking about how electronic books will come, and how important they will be, and all of a sudden Stephen King publishes one. I feel a complete idiot, as it should have been me.”

  The film project has been “twenty years of constipation,” and he likens the Hollywood process to “trying to grill a steak by having a succession of people coming into the room and breathing on it.” He is surprisingly enthusiastic about this apparently antique art form.

  “With new, more-immature technologies there is a danger in getting excited about all the ways you can push them forward at the expense of what you want to say. It is therefore rewarding to work in a medium where you don’t have to solve those problems because it is a mature medium.”

  After such a long fallow period he wisely notes that many of these new projects and ideas will fall by the wayside. “But I’ve been out of the mainstream of novel writing for several years and I really needed to take that break. I’ve been thinking hard and thinking creatively about a whole load of stuff that is not novel writing. As opposed to running on empty, it now feels like the tank is full again.”

  LIFE AT A GLANCE: Douglas Noel Adams

  BORN: March 11, 1952, Cambridge.

  EDUCATION: Brentwood School, Essex; St. John’s College, Cambridge.

  MARRIED: 1991 Jane Belson (one daughter, Polly, born 1994).

  CAREER: 1974-78 radio and television writer; 1978 BBC radio producer.

  SOME SCRIPTS: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, 1978 and 1980 (radio), 1981 (television).

  GAMES: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, 1984; Bureaucracy, 1987; Starship Titanic, 1997.

  BOOKS: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, 1979; The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, 1980; Life, the Universe and Everything, 1982; The Meaning of Liff (with John Lloyd), 1983; So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, 1984; Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, 1987; The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, 1988; Last Chance to See, 1990; The Deeper Meaning of Liff (with John Lloyd), 1990; Mostly Harmless, 1992.

  Foreword

  This is a very Douglassy moment for me. Douglassy moments are most likely to involve:

  • Apple Macintosh Computers

  • Impossible deadlines

  • Ed Victor, Douglas’s agent

  • Endangered species

  • Excessively expensive five star-hotels

  I am tapping at a (Macintosh) computer as I fight a deadline imposed on me by Ed Victor. Would I please see if I might provide a foreword for The Salmon of Doubt by next Tuesday?

  I am in the most outrageously luxurious hotel in Peru, the Miraflores Park Hotel, Lima, enjoying the encellophaned bowls of fruit and Louis Roederer as I prepare to go upcountry in pursuit of spectacled bears, one of the least understood and most threatened mammals on the planet.

  Being an expensive hotel, high-bandwidth Internet connections are available in each room and I have just watched a two-hour film on my computer, showing Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO, making his keynote address to the Macintosh Expo in San Francisco. The Emperor of Computer Cool has just unveiled the new I-Mac and I haven’t been able to call up or email Douglas to talk about it. A new revolutionary piece of sexy and extraordinary Apple hardware and Douglas won’t get to see it. He won’t have played with an I-Pod or messed around in I-Photo. To anyone who knew Douglas, and I am including his millions of readers here, the misery and frustration of this will be appallingly evident. It is dreadful for him because he has missed New Stuff and it is dreadful for us because the New Stuff will never now be celebrated by the acknowledged Poet of New Stuff.

  You see, I want to know what to think. I want to know what the new machines look like: yes, I can use my own eyes and my own sensibility, but I have got used to the superior insights offered by Douglas. He would have offered the exact epithet, the perfect metaphor, the crowning simile. Not just on the subject of New Stuff, of course. He would have found a way of linking the amiably odd behaviour and character of spectacled bears both to familiar human experience and to abstract scientific thought. Much of the world that we move in has been seen through Douglas’s eyes and become clearer. Which is to say the very confusion and absurd lack of clarity of our world has become clearer. We never quite knew how conflicting and insane the universe was or how ludicrous and feeble-minded the human race could be until Douglas explained it in the uniquely affable, paradoxical and unforced style that marks him out for greatness. I’ve just visited the bathroom and noted that the soap on offer there (tightly sealed in that absurdly unopenable disc of indestructible plast
ic paper offered by hotels for the convenience of their guests) is not called soap at all: it is in fact an Almond Facial Bar. That would have been an email to Douglas straight away and the email back, which can now never, ever be had, would have made me giggle and dance about my hotel room for half an hour.

  Everyone heard, in the sad weeks following his shocking and unfair death, how good a comic writer Douglas was, how far-ranging his interests and how broad his appeal. This book shows what a teacher he was. Just as sunsets have never been the same colour or shape since Turner looked at them, so a lemur and a cup of tea will never be the same again because of Douglas’s acute and quizzical gaze.

  It is very unfair to be asked to write an introduction to a book which contains an absolutely brilliant introduction written on the very subject of introductions to books. It is even more unfair to be asked to write an introduction to the posthumous work of one the great comic writers of our age when the book one is introducing contains the definitive introduction to the posthumous work of the definitive comic writer of all ages: Douglas’s foreword to P. G. Wodehouse’s Sunset at Blandings, as Ed Victor pointed out at Douglas’s memorial service in London, serves as an astonishingly accurate description of Douglas’s own gifts. Not that this was for a second in Douglas’s mind when he wrote it.

  Douglas was not hideously Englishly modest, which is not to say that he was vain or boastful either. His passion to communicate his ideas and enthusiasms, however, could easily trap you on the telephone, over a dinner table or in a bathroom to the exclusion of all other company or considerations. In that sense, and I don’t think I’m being disrespectful here, a Douglas conversation could, mano a mano, tête à tête, be exhausting and confusing for those unable to keep up with the passionate pinging from thought to thought. But he could no more write confusingly than he could execute a perfect pirouette, and believe me there have been few human beings born less able to execute pirouettes without the destruction of furniture and all hope of safety to innocent bystanders than Douglas Noel Adams.