He was ingenious, however, in fighting the block. Sometimes he would spend hours sitting in the bath, and he could take five or six hot baths a day. Once he decided it was white paper that appalled him, and bought a quire of green, with some limited success. Once he decided he could not work at home, so he rented a room around the corner to work in during the day. Giving up writing, what is more, meant he could score a point. ‘Now I am in multi-media digital publishing’ he told me triumphantly, and when I looked baffled he added: ‘You don’t know what that means, do you?’
That was my last chance to see Douglas Adams. By then he was a doting father looking after his little girl, and soon afterwards he moved to California to be near Hollywood. I never heard what happened to his big house in London, or his holiday home in the south of France, or his apartment in Manhattan, but I miss his talk and his laughter. Like all student humourists in the Monty Python tradition he went on thinking that student humour is all there is – wild fantasy mixed with plentiful name-dropping – and a tradition that belonged to John Cleese and Woody Allen was all he knew, though he valued their one-liners more than their realised works. Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy might have been his favourite book, though I never heard him mention it. His talk jostled ideas that might some day blossom into a programme or even a series. Could spiders have pornography? Or could there be a river with its own sense of time?
Turning the science fiction of H.G. Wells and his disciples into farce was his big idea, but though I never felt I taught him anything there are some surprising echoes of his student days in what he wrote. Dirk Gently mentions Coleridge, and I was once startled out of my wits by watching a stage performance of Hitchhiker’s Guide where a class in poetic analysis I had once given in college, along with the technical terms of figures of speech, was parodied on a spaceship. He looked duly embarrassed when I told him. I only once remember him at a lecture, though he adored intellectual gimmicks almost as much as gadgets and would suddenly flash a scholastic polysyllable in conversation like a trump card.
His mind was a lumber room, wholly disorganised and richly stocked. Anyone who has passed through a university knows there are people who believe there is an answer to the riddle of the universe if only they could find it. (Occasionally, and disastrously, they think they have found it.) Douglas never thought that, and ideologies and religions meant absolutely nothing to him. ‘The answer to everything,’ announces the sage of the universe in one of his books, ‘is – forty-two.’ To look for everything is to find nothing at all.
But he still had a point to make. In the nineteenth century, he would say, people used to read big novels to understand the world around them. Now we read or watch science fiction instead, and the new horizon of mankind stretches to the furthest stars. It is an intuition Kingsley Amis had already reached in New Maps of Hell (1960), when Douglas was a boy, hailing science fiction as no mere vulgar fribble but the classic literary form of the new intelligentsia – penetrating the human condition, comic in detail and fundamentally tragic in its vision of life. Life for Amis was a bawdy farce, but he knew the cosmos is a serious matter. Douglas doubted even that. Can there be heresy where there is no belief? He died with a millennium that had known fanaticism, then certainty, then doubt and finally the comedy of despair. Of course there is no answer to the question. How could there be? There is no question. We live in the universe – life, the universe and everything, as he once put it – because it is all there is.
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