Jacob's Room is Full of Books

by Susan Hill

  HAY LIT FEST TIME. Hay-on-Wye, charming little town on a hill right on the Welsh borders. Good shops. A thousand bookshops. Llangoed Hall, the excellent hotel in the country a few miles away that used to belong to Laura Ashley’s husband, Bernard Ashley. He arrived by helicopter onto the front lawn from his home across the valley in Wales.

  I did gigs at Hay several times and great fun they were. The Hay Festival used to be sponsored by the Guardian, but it has run through quite a few supporters in its time. It vies with Cheltenham for attracting the Big Names, but Hay takes it one further in that they are not always Literary Names, they are bigger than that. Bill Clinton lectured there and called it ‘The Woodstock of the Mind’. That pleased them.

  Talk of Hay leads back to Haymakers I have met, leads back to Christopher Hitchens and Susan Sontag and Martin Amis. Not sure where to start.

  Martin, I think. Yes. Because he only has a walk-on role in this and he is blameless. I have known him since he was, I think, sixteen. I admire his early novels greatly. London Fields, Money … He wrote like an angel then, and he still does, but the subject matter and characters of some of his later novels has not equalled the greatness of the prose. Well, that has happened to plenty of other writers and I will never give up on him. I am also very fond of him, though we rarely meet now because he lives in New York. We have a closer tie, too, and not only because I knew both his father Kingsley and his stepmother Elizabeth Jane Howard. Martin’s cousin Lucy was murdered by Fred West. Lucy’s mother was a friend – I knew her first when Lucy was still a ‘missing person’. I did not know much about it, other than the snippets of information hurriedly imparted by mutual friends before I met her. And then the terrible truth emerged. It was unimaginably dreadful, the worst possible conclusion to twenty-odd years of not knowing. How does one look someone in the eye when they have experienced all of that? It is very, very hard. And there are absolutely no words. None at all.

  But Martin managed words, as only he could. He wrote about Lucy in his memoir Experience, with such love, such joyful recollection of their childhood days, and such grief and pure, white-hot anger about her death. Reading it takes one through all of those emotions. It is cathartic but one of the few pieces of such writing which does not heal, because how can it? Words cannot heal or help such evil and suffering. I truly believe there is a limit to what even words can do and here one reaches it. My admiration for Martin the writer was always great, but after he wrote Experience it is respect that I feel most strongly, and that will never weaken.

  At Hay, in May 2000, I was coming out of my room on the upper floor of the Llangoed at the same moment that Martin was emerging from his, opposite. We had an intense conversation on the landing, a catch-up, a sharing of distress about Lucy – we didn’t talk about books apart from Experience. Our intermittent friendship has always come from a different place. We went down the rather grand staircase. He was meeting some friends for tea, and then they were all going over to do a gig at the festival.

  The friends, who arrived as Martin and I parted, turned out to be Christopher Hitchens and Susan Sontag, sweeping into the large hotel lounge, he taking his coat off while keeping a cigarette in his mouth, she – well, just sweeping.

  I was busy for the rest of that day and evening, but the next morning, waiting in the entrance for the taxi taking me to my own event in Hay, I was joined by Susan Sontag. She was a handsome woman – she had been extremely beautiful when younger – but also absolutely formidable, terrifyingly serious and very clever. The archetypal bluestocking. Self-aware. Self-important? Well, she was certainly conscious of her own status. I had read a lot of her essays and journalism and admired such of it as I fully understood – the references are often pretty obscure, especially those to art films and foreign literature, and the arguments are not always easy to follow. Wit is there, shafting through the uber-intelligent prose, but humour never. You get no jokes with Sontag and standing in the spring sunshine with her that morning, waiting for our respective cars, I was aware that small talk and chit-chat would be quite inappropriate. But I muttered something about the beauty of the late May morning and, for a moment or two, in response, she opened out like a flower. She had been driven through the lanes to the hotel the previous afternoon and they had been thick with blossom, the trees that fresh, first yellow-green before the deadness of high summer thickens and dulls them. And, she said, ‘I just felt I was being given such a privilege. Such a privilege to be in the midst of it all.’

  It was such an unlikely sentiment for this serious intellectual woman to express and, for a moment, we agreed and smiled and then just stood, basking in such a day and what, I realised, was indeed a privilege.

  And then, out of the doors behind us burst Hitchens, and Martin. Mart mentioned something about my having known Kingsley, and Hitchens said something sarcastic. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Contrary to the impression he liked to give, Kingsley was very proud of Martin.’ Susan Sontag said this put a new complexion on that particular father–son relationship, but she seemed doubtful. Hitchens continued to sneer as he strode off, cigarette, as ever, in the corner of his mouth. Their cars came, Mart gave me a quick hug, the others did not bother to say goodbye and they rolled off. My own cab appeared and we didn’t meet again, because our events were in separate corners of the festival tent-city.

  Both Sontag and Hitchens died within the next few years, both from horrible forms of cancer. Hitchens, whom I admired but could not like, met it head on with great and public bravery. Susan Sontag had already had two rounds in the ring with cancer and come out fighting. This time, she went down fighting, desperate and defeated and perhaps feeling the loss of dignity and powerful intellect as much as the pain.

  I have been reading a book called The Violet Hour by Katie Roiphe, in which she gives accounts of some great writers during their last weeks and days, facing death. The chapter on Sontag is tough, because her sickness and her absolute desperation to go through anything, anything, to buy herself more life are terrible to read about. Long after most people would have given up, she was trying the cruellest of treatments which had scant chance of success. Doctors ought to be ashamed of themselves for giving out the infinitesimal morsel of hope along with these barbaric procedures. Stem cell replacement was the worst of all. It was clear to everyone around her that the treatment was not working and she was dying, hideously, painfully, but they none of them dared to suggest to her that she give up. She was not a woman you argued with. She had survived against the odds before. She believed she always would. Roiphe is tough on Sontag: ‘From girlhood [her] private mythology was predicated on a contempt for the ordinary and a distance from it.’

  Her son, David, ‘was amazed by his mother’s continuing faith in medicine and by her ability to beat the odds. At the worst moments, he thought to himself, She really does not know what is happening to her; she still believes that she is going to survive. It was part of his role, as he saw it, to mirror this belief back to her as best he could.’

  It is beyond sad. To be unable to face death, to be defiant, to go through the worst of physical and mental pain, because of an inability even to contemplate the idea that there might be a spiritual dimension to life – and to death and after-death – because of an intellectual arrogance. How terrible must that be? Christopher Hitchens was the same, of course. The intellect, the mighty brain, the pride, the stubbornness – how they stand in the way of any gentleness or humility, let alone any kindness to the self. An open mind is surely best in the face of death, because intellectual pride and arrogance, and how your fellows, who hold the same position, think of you, gets you nowhere. Belief, admitting the possibility of another dimension, of a spiritual side to humanity, is no more of a sure thing than negativity, but at the very least it is a comfort – and what is wrong with that?

  I have had too much personal evidence of the presence of the dead, too many clear hints of a glorious after-life, to ignore. I would not make these up to comfort myself but they are an inexp
ressible consolation in the face of death. Would I deny them in the face of the sneers and jeers of others? If I did, I would be untrue to myself and my own experiences. I respect the unbelief of others. They should respect my faith. None of us can prove anything either way, to the satisfaction of the others, this side of the grave and to dent that is another sort of arrogance.

  I felt both sad and moved, reading about Susan Sontag’s end. No human being should have to die like that. She never came to terms with her own mortality, which reveals her as fearful and fearfully human.

  It is in this context that I will always remember those moments on the steps of the hotel, in the May sunshine, when she said that seeing the spring countryside had been ‘such a privilege’.

  Friday 3

  Frost, ice, sun and clouds, clear.

  Saturday 4

  Dark & sharp.

  Monday 6

  Snow, sleet, cold, rain.

  Wednesday 8

  Frost, ice, sun and clouds, louring.

  Thursday 9

  Grey & mild. Dark & mild.

  Friday 10

  Sunny & hot, heavy clouds, bright & chill.

  (The tortoise weighs 6lb 11 ounces

  he weighed Spring 1781 6 lbs 8 ounces

  May 1780 6lbs 4 ounces)

  So notes Gilbert White. It is always a joy to read his Natural History of Selborne, at random, or ‘on this date’ 250 years ago … He seems so close to us, with his weather and nature and gardening reports. So many things remain. He waits for the first hirundines, records when the swifts are very late, weighs the tortoise and seems to grow enough cucumbers to feed the county. He feels friendly to me as I read, cheerful, methodical, modest, inquisitive, a man as in tune with the natural world around him as if it were part of him, and allied to the blood running through his own veins, his breathing and the movements of his limbs. He is lovable, as Kilvert is lovable. There is so much to love in these old country parsons. White is useful, too, for correcting one’s feeling that never was a July as hot as this, swallow so early, oak so late in leaf, winter so mild, tortoise so regular in its habits. The sun rises and sets and the moon waxes and wanes and the tides are high and then low and the Earth turns on its axis, for us as for Gilbert White. That is comforting.

  JUNE

  THE MERRY-GO-ROUND of literary prizes starts here. First it was the Orange. Then the something or other and then the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction and now the Women’s Prize for Fiction – not as many new names as that big non-fiction award which has gone through so many changes of clothing. The Samuel Johnson Prize suited it very well but now it’s the Baillie Gifford.

  It ill behoves me to complain that there are too many book prizes, having won some in my early career. They came at just the right time, they were lifesavers in terms of the money, but more – they gave me confidence that I was right all along. They were recognition. And they are there. No one can take them away. Forty-five years later, they still count.

  So I can’t complain. But every year the prizes proliferate and every year, a few of them at least come to mean less – particularly the lucrative prizes for the best short story of the year. £20K or £30K for one story? These almost always go to unknowns who may have written a single stunning story and then vanish without trace. The point about book prizes is partly to give the recipient’s career a boost, to provide time and financial support for them to climb the next rung of the ladder.

  One writer who won a major prize a few years ago and whose book went on to be a bestseller said that she didn’t think she would bother to write another. Up to her, of course, but it seemed churlish, like being given a gold medal for your first attempt at the long jump and saying you can’t be bothered to continue in the sport.

  People will always disagree about the winner of any of the big prizes. The howls of dismay and protest that sometimes greet the Best Show Garden at Chelsea are often loud. But that is not the same as seeing conspiracy theories, deriding the judges, or insisting that they had ‘a hidden agenda’. Having been a judge for most of the major fiction prizes and twice for the Man Booker, I can say with a completely clear conscience that our panels had no hidden agendas – our only thought was the responsibility of choosing the best book. Not the best author. Not because it was ‘Buggins’ turn’. Not because we thought it should go to a woman. Or someone gay. Or black. Or transgender. Not because anything. During the last Man Booker Prize I judged, we had heated arguments, and the late Ion Trewin, most loved of bookmen, had almost to wade in and separate one or two of us. But when we had decided on the shortlist, we then asked him to tell us how many novels by women we had selected and to give us the break-down on which publishers had books on the shortlist. We genuinely had no idea about either because neither had been relevant.

  There is a huge amount of money lavished on these things – not so much in terms of the winner’s booty, but on judges’ fees and publicity and PR companies and on the prize-giving dinner. Whether this is all worth it for the prize backers I have no idea. I cannot think that it is, but it’s their money.

  And if a first-timer wins a Big Prize – especially one that garners masses of publicity – a heavy, heavy burden is laid on them for the whole of their future career. ‘Follow that!’ It’s the same with silly-money advances for beginners. A man wrote one promising, though not flawless, first novel a couple of years ago. The publisher threw a lot of money at its launch and promotion. It did OK – better than many a first novel. But not much more than OK. Now it is announced that they have given him a contract for his next book worth £400K. Now, we all know that £400K is not what it seems. Advances always unravel the next morning. They are divided into segments – so much on signature, on delivery and acceptance of the manuscript, on hardback publication, on paperback publication … less the author’s agent’s 15 per cent, less income tax, blah blah. But £400K is still way too much for a second novel. The weight of expectation on that writer’s back is too heavy. Sure, he may live up to it. But he may not. And if ‘not’ is the case, his career is probably over. There is no such thing as a free lunch, not even in the book world.

  A couple of years ago, eligibility for the Man Booker Prize was opened up to novelists from the USA, having previously been for those from the UK and Commonwealth only. It was a bad idea. The major sponsor wanted global exposure to their brand, which probably makes sense from their point of view but does not make any from that of writers and publishers here in the UK. In 2016 an American won the prize. Statistically, this is likely to keep happening and British and Commonwealth novelists will be pushed out. There is no American prize for which we are eligible. Julian Barnes has made this same point. I hate crying ‘Unfair’, but this is a case of ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’ Though not for the piper who calls the tune.

  LIT FESTS. Victoria Wood could have done a great sketch about them – the people who are in the paying audience, the authors, the organisers, the …

  I have done my share and I rarely agree to speak at them now – though the one I did in Whitstable recently was a pleasure. What makes lit fests work well are attentive, interested audiences of people who actually buy books afterwards, highly efficient organisation, friendly helpers, everything to do with the tent or hall or room in which one speaks working properly and, if there is an interviewer, one who has done his/her homework and is adept at opening the discussion up, prompting the right comments, steering the speaker back to the topic in hand, not putting self forwards … It is an expert job. The first time I did it I learned a lot within the hour – mainly that, although the speaker relies on the interviewer, in their turn they rely on the speaker. It can be smooth sailing and it can be like wading through mud at low tide. Beryl Bainbridge was a breeze, and great fun to talk to. So was Debo Devonshire. A nameless novelist far too big for their boots and unwilling to engage with either me or the audience made me vow never to do this thing again.

  At Whitstable, I found myself wondering how the smaller festi
vals survive. Large lit fests get large sponsorship, from newspapers or TV companies or local magnates with deep pockets and cultural aspirations. Small ones survive on volunteers and goodwill. Often they cannot pay authors, in which case the authors have to decide whether the gig is worth their while.

  But the joy of the lit fest is meeting with people who come to say they have always loved your books, or that this one has meant much to them, or that one kicked off their teenager’s love of reading, or was their late mother’s favourite … not to mention the old school and university friends and former neighbours who pitch up. I asked the organiser of one small book festival why they didn’t apply for Arts Council or area arts funding. They had. They were turned down because lit fests are, apparently, too middle class.

  A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO I was asked to contribute a short story to an anthology, edited by Tracy Chevalier, commemorating Charlotte Brontë’s anniversary, with the title, and theme of, Reader, I Married Him. I usually have no hope of writing a short story to a particular brief, or indeed, to commission at all. They don’t come to order. But I had been reading every book I could find about Edward VIII – the Duke of Windsor, as he became – and Wallis Simpson, of which there are many. They and their story have continued to exert a fascination with the British public, even so many years after the events, and I realised that I could write a story loosely about not so much ‘them’ as ‘her’ on the theme.

  Having read so much, and then written it, my mind of course went back to 5 June 1972 and the Duke’s funeral.

  Three months earlier, after David had died, I was in a bad way and I needed my friends, especially those who had been close to him, too. Stephen Verney, who was such a good support and friend to me when we were both connected with Coventry cathedral, and who was one of David’s friends, as well as colleagues, had moved on to become a Canon Residentiary at St George’s Chapel, Windsor. He and his wife Scilla asked me to go and stay with them there, at 4 The Cloisters, when I liked, for as long as I liked. The visit was life-saving for me.