by Maggie Gee
The end came after a rejection from the last big publisher on our list. I wrote the agent a short, polite letter asking him to send the manuscript to two small independent publishers, Serpent’s Tail and Richard Cohen Books. But the tall man did not deal with small independents. They were too short, they were under his radar. He didn’t say this, but I would hypothesise two reasons. One, they pay less. He was a businessman. Of course agents deal with small independents, but in our case there was no real warmth or liking to make up for the missing money. Second, and perhaps more important: if I was going to be turned down by publishers he thought of as so lowly … he would be turned down by them too. This was simply unacceptable.
He ended the relationship between us by fax, which arrived at the end of an afternoon. It came scrolling smudgily into my house where Nick and Rosa had to live too, where either of them might have read it first. I suppose he was afraid to speak to me. I wish I could remember what he said, but it was just something coolly neutral: ‘I don’t deal with those particular publishers … better if we no longer represent you.’
I know there was no malice behind it. I know that for him it was just business, and I was no longer a business proposition. I had fooled myself into thinking it was more—some agents are doggedly loyal to their authors—but no, I had deceived myself. Beware, young writers. Agents need to make money.
That was the nadir. That was the worst. You may wonder, reader, where this chapter is going as I drag you with me down this long mudslide, but take heart, for this was the turning point. It was Nick who told me this, for when I came through clutching the cheap, cowardly paper I had ripped from the mouth of the grey machine, his antic self, his adorable self that cannot be repressed or changed, shouted, ‘HURRAY! Hurray, hurray! Thank God, at last you are rid of that ——.Now everything will get better, Magsie.’ At the time I thought he was utterly mad, though I loved him for it more than I can say, but it was true, my fate was back in our hands.
I sent off the manuscripts to the two publishers I had chosen. Richard Cohen Books was an interesting one; Richard had been a famous editor at Hodder, credited (falsely) with rewriting Jeffrey Archer; but he really had edited countless high-profile literary authors and books, Fay Weldon’s scintillating Puffball among them. He had left Hodder to found his own firm. It was small, but his reputation gave it status.
A preliminary letter came back at once, from Richard himself, acknowledging receipt, but also, in a humorous way that fell on my bruised ego like irony, saying something like ‘but why would such a famous author be sending to a little outfit like ours?’ Naturally I did not send a ten-page answer.
Even that slight contact made me hope, though I had hoped too much, and had too many knock-backs. Yet a small voice inside me said, ‘This has to work, because if not, this time I can’t bear it.’
Then I remembered what you had to do when life was too much for you to bear. It was the week after I had sent the books off. Nick had gone to work, and Rosa to school. I was alone; the house was sunny. Hope swirled up into that glory of sunlight and with it, the terror of absolute despair. Before I knew what I was doing, I was down on my knees, on the comfortless jute flooring, praying, my forehead cupped in my hands, the knuckles pressed into the ridges of jute. The sunlight blazed above my head. ‘Please God please God, may I get a phone call. I just can’t bear this any more.’ Red basket-weave marks on my hands, my knees.
And the phone rang. It was Richard Cohen. I could hear the smile in his voice. He had read my book, liked it, admired it. Yes, they were very keen to publish. They weren’t rich though. Would £5,000 be enough?
Like all the best film scripts, it wasn’t quite over at the moment when the hero arrived to save me. But Richard did have a heroic mien: he was tall and craggy, an Olympic fencer still, in his fifties, with a baritone voice and a head of curls. He introduced me to Christine Casley, the wonderful editor who would go on to edit my next three books (my next three books. That casual phrase that for two years I’d been unable to take for granted.) I liked everyone in that small firm with their offices off Soho Square. It felt like old-fashioned publishing. They got on with each other, they believed in all the books. It was a happiness to go in and see them, to use, again, with infinitely more pleasure, the innocent phrase ‘my publisher’, to descend from the square to that bright, bookish basement.
But financially, the wolves were slinking round the door, clattering the lids of the dustbins outside. Richard had sunk his inheritance into the firm, but he was an editor, not an accountant. I had grown more steely through those three hard years, and I remember one day how I went down the steps to see this tall man who had done so much for me, determined to get the second half of my advance, payable on delivery, now I had given him the edited text. He had great charm, and we liked each other. He did not refuse, but said something like, ‘We don’t have to do it now, do we? I could put it in the post.’ All the conventions of politeness said, ‘Oh, put it in the post, Richard.’ But the steel in me said, ‘Now would be great.’ I left the office, his cheque hot in my hand, and paid it in to the bank with indecent haste.
Publication was scheduled for some time in autumn. The cover proof shimmered, a cave of blue ice. Christine Casley’s editing had cured me for ever of my overuse of ellipses and italics. We had a summer holiday in Cornwall with Rosa and her friend Aline, camping near a surfing beach. It was a brilliant holiday, a treat for the body, walking on rolling cliffs and long sands, lying on our backs to watch shooting stars. I was very happy that things had got better, infinitely grateful for ordinariness. The girls were twelve and fourteen: a lovely age. They stayed in bed in their tent in the morning while Nick and I had time on our own. I was supposed to ring Richard from a callbox—this was before the days of mobiles—to check the last few corrections to the text and get a definite publication date. I remember I left the girls and Nick on the beach at St Ives, below the new Tate. I had to walk through some cavernous, hellish entertainment place to find the callbox. Going back into the underworld.
Richard was sounding slightly evasive. Various things were going on, he said. He had a few ‘troubles’. He was wondering … perhaps it would be better to publish in the spring? Then he could really make a good job of it. There would be more money, he’d be on a firmer footing. I was caught off guard, and did not disagree.
I went back to the beach. The girls were playing, the sand was white, it was the same as before, but a terrible dread began to crystallise as I relayed this apparently anodyne message.
Nick’s reaction was instinctive and immediate. He went through his pockets to find more coins. ‘You go back and tell him he’s got to publish. It has to be now, Mags, you’ve got to get it out. And if he’s short of money, we’ll find it somehow. I’ll find it. I will. Go and tell him that.’ I trusted Nick’s instincts. I was impressed. I went back through hell to talk to Richard.
He did find the money. They made a lovely book, with expensive paper and a cover of austere cobalt beauty, an ice-cave leading away into light, something silver, mysterious, just around the corner. Twelve copies arrived: I held the first in my hands, electric with joy. I was alive again. I have never loved a book so much as The Ice People, that cool blue drink after three years of drought. Now at last I realised how precious books were, how hard and risky it was to write them, how chancy the business of jumping through the hoops.
But I had made it in the nick of time. On the day the book was published, the publisher went bust. The launch party for my book was a wake. Half the literary world had turned up, not just for me but out of sympathy for Richard. We must have sold sixty or seventy books that evening, because I caught a muttered conversation between two of the staff as they totted up the takings: ‘Over £600. That’ll pay X’s wages.’ The reviews of this book that the tall, superior agent had said ‘did not demand to be published’ were almost uniformly ecstatic. Jeremy Paxman invited me on ‘Start the Week’ and was intelligent and enthusiastic, saying I was ‘up ther
e with Orwell and Huxley’; Eric Korn praised me highly in the TLS; George Melly raved in the Telegraph; Fay Weldon applauded in the Literary Review: as in a happy dream, everybody loved it. The Times, Time Out, all fell into line.
The best of Richard’s list was bought up by another small publisher, Metro, run by the impressive Suzanne McDadd who, after my time there, had been a director of Faber and Faber. She stayed up half the night reading The Ice People, loved it, and paid me for the paperback rights. Soon they were preparing a mass market paperback, its jacket lavishly decked with quotes. The Mail on Sunday book club made it their book of the week: Rose Tremain wrote a praising feature to accompany the Mail offer. Richard Cohen told me Metro sold 30,000 copies. And now the story almost dips into farce, for Metro Books, in turn, went bankrupt, and I never did get my royalties.
But the book itself has continued to be successful. It is now in its third edition, the most recent described by the Observer as ‘masterly … one of the first great novels of the globally warmed world’. Last year my new agent sold the television rights.
I picked up the threads of my career. I started on what was once unthinkable: rereading, and revising, The Keeper of the Gate, which for years I’d been unable to bear to look at. And I saw Nick had a point. There was something there. In fact, perhaps … could he even be right? Was it possible that actually it was my best book?
And now I come to the nub of this chapter, the point I want to make with this long story of the worst five years of my professional life, a story I don’t enjoy retelling because I have to re-experience the terror of failing. Many novelists stall at a certain point. Their profession deserts them. They are no longer wanted. And I was so nearly one of them.
What I learned was, there’s little logic in this world. No team of angels combing the wind to see that no one good slips through. No internal aesthetic, no guarantee. Literary history is not foolproof, no more than art history is. I realised this long ago, when I first started travelling and visiting the local galleries wherever I went, in Dusseldorf, Salzburg, Berne, Bournemouth: that art history is an approximation. I always found at least one or two painters I had never heard of, but thought remarkable. Perhaps they didn’t paint enough; perhaps they lived in the wrong place, or were ahead of their time, or knew the wrong people, or didn’t live long enough, or weren’t pushy enough. Somehow they slipped off the historical map where the path of the famous is crudely marked out. (I see the same phenomenon on courses I teach. It’s not always the most talented ones who go on to be successful; it’s the luckiest and most determined.) I started to put my observations of the literary world together with my reading on evolutionary biology; life was struggle, and all human activities related to our jostling for advantage. Were the other things just illusory, then, the watchwords I’d lived by, truth, beauty?
I saw that literature had never been the self-sufficient world the modernists tried to make for themselves. They did it, in fact, by self-publishing, by patronage. They also built cliques who believed (or believed they believed) that only beauty mattered; in fact they were cohorts who pushed each other through. Virginia and Leonard Woolf showed sound common sense by founding their own publishing firm. The Hogarth Press liberated them from being dependent on commercial whim, which Virginia was too fragile to survive, but they ran it as professionals, and made money.
What was writing, at bottom, biologically? A human activity, like painting and sculpting, a skill we use to make a reputation in our group. These skills aren’t magic; they come from a connection between senses, dreaming brain, and hand (in earlier times, when narratives were oral, between brain, voice and performing body). Storytellers always had value to the tribe, because humans like novelty, and laughter, the pleasure of adventure, of happy endings, of listening to ancestral memories or sometimes experiencing sorrow safely.
Once we could measure our value at the fireside. The link between story and body was close, and storytellers were close to their audience. But twenty-first-century stories are encoded in books, which are products. The audience aimed for must be ever larger, because the middlemen, publishers, want to make money. Not that they really know what will sell; they are gamblers, the gurus of sales and marketing to whom commissioning editors defer, but all the same, it’s hard to get past them. There is no direct interface where ordinary readers can gauge our skill at storytelling, where we can find and meet our audience—just the vast faceless spaces of the net, where all of us are equally lost.
I saw how late capitalism was transforming the book trade. As the giant firms sucked up the independents, they aimed to sell more copies of fewer books. Easier for them to expend effort on a small range of easy-to-sell products. The logic of copying, of repetition. The technologies of advertising and mass reproduction have grown lethally effective since Walter Benjamin. The more a name is heard or copied, the more, sub-liminally, people think it’s the best. The logic of it all was leading big publishers away from writers and towards celebrities. It cost no money to promote the already-famous; they advertise themselves, by falling out of clubs. Thence the tyranny of the big book chains and their charts, overrun by celebrity novels and autobiographies. Perfectly respected and serious publishers talked proudly about ‘the death of the mid-list’, to show they too were out there, swimming with sharks; but really they were just making sad boasts about the loss of variety and interest.
(I was simplifying, but the chill I felt could not be dispersed by my own morning swim.)
But couldn’t we fall back on our critical gatekeepers, the literary editors, the reviewers? Would quality be saved by the books pages?
I knew there were good critics and valiant editors. I had often been kindly treated by both. Yet what I saw—what I still see now—is in fact a world of progressive illusions, where adjectives build upon one another. A writer is praised, and wins a big prize: a quantum leap in his career has happened. The praise will now increase, and there will be more prizes. Soon he will be ‘a great writer’ (when I look at my own generation, the ‘great’ are mostly men, and I say this as a woman who reads and admires both genders). Partly it’s the psychological effect I have mentioned, where people judge in the light of their prior expectations. The ‘frame’ is all-important to what we think we see. Yet if you try to lay aside the frame, and look hard at the work, book by book, there may have been no improvement at all. If anything, there has been a falling off. But we have to believe, because others do. Conformism is a safe stratagem. That (truly great) genius Hans Andersen said it all in his story, ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’, where no one had the courage to break the illusion that the emperor had a splendid new set of garments (in fact he was naked, had been conned by flash tailors who told him they were using a magical new cloth, but it took a small child to believe his own eyes and tell the truth, that the emperor had no clothes—all the adults in the crowd were in thrall to consensus).
Critics like their towers, their increments, their sense that they are watching a success story, that their own praise can add to it. It becomes taken for granted that certain names are landmarks, and the more they are repeated, the more it seems true, for they start to come easily to everybody’s lips. Once again, the power of repetition; the relief of simplifying a landscape. But it doesn’t prove they’re good. They are merely successful.
I saw it as a jungle, from that time on, where there were few disinterested observers. That’s what we need, since there are no literary angels; we want teams of skilled taxonomists, Nabokovian naturalists, protected like jurors from prevailing opinions, ideal readers who sift slowly and carefully and add to knowledge with what they tell us. That’s not what we get. We get reviewers, rushing too fast to earn their pittance, trying to be funny or shocking or rude or do anything that will get them noticed. They write for themselves, not to describe the books. Often they are writing about themselves. They don’t see what they do as a service to literature; it’s journalism; the books are fodder. It was a sinister, irrevocable step when the n
ames of reviewers first became larger than the names of the authors they were writing about. (But reviewers also have to make their names. They are struggling too. Why should I expect them to be different? We are all out for our evolutionary advantage.) And the critics’ own position is no longer secure, for the arts pages in the newspapers are shrinking, the literary editors are being sacked, the newspapers themselves are fleeing to the net because the young no longer buy the physical papers.
So what are writers, in this jungle? I wondered. (I meant, when we were not at home writing, that private, low-key act, the core of it all, which I was forgetting in my cynical inventory. The writing, which can’t be faked, or stage-managed, unless you’re a celeb and pay someone else to do it. The work, the work, I had to cling on to that, for the world I was seeing was very bleak.)
In the jungle, writers are opportunists. We are showoffs, trying to display our coats. We need to be the most beautiful and youthful, we need to have novelty, we need to have mates: a pack or a cohort to shoulder us through, to rush us on upwards through the trees. If we fall, we must be sure to get up quickly, for if we lie there, bleeding, we will die down there. And we, too, are here for our own advantage, struggling for the light of fame or money, for we, too, have to pay the bills, we, too, have young to bring up, and set on their own path to evolutionary advantage.
