Wish You Were Here

by Nick Webb

  On 22 June 1994, Jane gave birth to Polly Jane Rocket Adams. (Rocket for Jane’s pregnant food cravings rather than the spectacular but crude device for getting into space.) They adored her from the first moment; Douglas was besotted and would whip out his baby pictures on any pretext despite the fact that all babies look much the same (except one’s own). Polly was pretty cute, with her mother’s brown eyes, and already at the top of the range for height. Douglas had so many photographs that if he held them by a corner and flipped the edges, there would have been the illusion of movement.

  Brian Davies, who as a director of Pan in the UK and Australia, knew Douglas well, once spotted him with Polly in Harrods. It was Christmas 1995, so Polly was still not much more than a babe in arms. She was looking lovely but bewildered. “What ho, Douglas. Happy Christmas,” said Brian. “And to you,” replied Douglas, looking slightly sheepish. “Um, I thought it was about time that Polly met Father Christmas . . .”

  Indeed, the happiest I ever saw Douglas was when he was flopping on one of their big, squashy sofas with little Polly resting on his substantial tum. She was half asleep, looking up at her dad from a position that gave her a view up his mountain range of a nose. He was peering down at her with a look of utter bliss on his face.

  A year after Polly’s birth, Douglas and Jane held a party in her honour. Douglas, as a committed atheist, would not hear of her being dunked by some soggy-minded cleric into an unhygienic stone bath full of cold water. Yet he felt that new life in general, and Polly in particular, needed to be celebrated.

  Douglas and Jane devised a sort of secular christening and called upon their formidable collection of mates with histrionic talent to provide some inspiring performances. It could have been funny—all those London fashionables tiptoeing around the forbidden God word—but actually it was touching.

  After we’d all got thoroughly mellow in Duncan Terrace on the generous lashings of champagne, about a dozen pieces were read. Sue Lloyd-Roberts, one of Jane’s oldest friends, found something funny. There was a double hander too, and some music. Little Polly was either in her parents’ arms or crawling about beneath the piano looking amazed. Jonny Brock, also an un-godparent, contributed a deed. The layout, the legalisms, the dearth of punctuation—all show his training in drafting, though the undertakings themselves were less formal, a mix of the deeply felt and the deeply frivolous. The contract went like this:

  THIS DEED is made the 24th day of June 1995

  BETWEEN DOUGLAS NOEL ADAMS and JANE HYACINTH BELSON (“the Parents”) of the first part and SUE LETITIA LLOYD-ROBERTS MARY MABEL ALLEN MICHAEL CALIGULA BYWATER and JONATHAN SIMON BROCK of the second part

  WHEREBY the parties intend to contract for the benefit succour wellbeing and support of POLLY JANE ROCKET (sic) ADAMS (“the Child”)

  IT IS HEREBY AGREED AS FOLLOWS

  1. The parties of the second part are intended by the parents each to assume the role of non-denominational guardian or vicarious supreme being substitute but will hereafter for the sake of convenience only be referred to as “the Godparents”

  2. This deed is non-gender-discriminatory and where the context so admits the feminine shall include the masculine and vice versa

  3. The Parents hereby covenant with the Child and with the Godparents as follows:

  (1) To bring up the Child in a supreme being fearing and sober manner

  (2) To lavish her with love and affection

  (3) Not to be too horrid to her boyfriends howsoever spotty and malodorous they may be from time to time

  4. The Godparents hereby each and severally covenant with the Child and with the Parents as follows:

  (1) To be a jolly good chap[ette] at all material times

  (2) To commiserate with the Child as to the irascibility and downright curmudgeonliness of the Parents

  (3) [Female Godparents] To take the Child on bracing walking holidays in Iceland

  (4) [Male Godparents] To do bugger all until the Child is 16 and thereafter to take her on long weekends to Venice whereat the waiters will ogle the Child and cast admiring and envious glances at the Godparent

  (5) [Lloyd-Roberts] To foster in the Child the spirit of independent enterprise and downright rank foolhardiness

  (6) [Allen] To teach the Child how to be a very important person indeed

  (7) [Bywater] To tutor the Child in the ways of boozing whoring falling down drunk shooting up down and every which way and playing the piano like unto an angel

  (8) [Brock] To rant

  WHEREAT the parties have this day hereunto signed and affixed their seals

  WITNESSED BY

  Douglas himself made a short speech about how profoundly his world view had changed for the better since the birth of little Polly. His sense of wonder had been renewed. Though not a man who often resorted to other people’s words, the poem which encapsulated his feelings the best was Keats’s “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.” It’s beautiful, so here it is:

  Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,

  And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;

  Round many western islands have I been

  Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

  Oft of one wide expanse had I been told

  That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne;

  Yet did I never breathe its pure serene

  Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:

  Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

  When a new planet swims into his ken;

  Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes

  He stared at the Pacific—and all his men

  Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—

  Silent, upon a peak on Darien.

  Douglas read this well, with tears in his eyes. He loved Polly totally and unconditionally. It was the least complicated relationship of his entire life.

  ELEVEN

  More Books, Money and a Sense of Place

  “The planet has, or had, a problem—which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.”

  THE NARRATOR, FIT THE SECOND,

  The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

  Douglas was never a man to settle down like an old cat in an airing cupboard, but the 1980s were relatively stable. His fame was considerable, and so was his income. Unfortunately, he was pretty hopeless about managing his money. If there were a shoppers’ spectrum of caution, with somebody at one end of the scale who takes six months of reconnaissance before buying a hanky and a tonto out-of-control impulse purchaser at the other, Douglas would have been firmly down the frivolous end. But the fortunes spent in restaurants and computer shops were small potatoes compared to what he spent on places to live. It was paradoxical; he loved travelling, yet he needed to put down roots.

  Ed Victor had negotiated an advance of over £600,000 for Life, the Universe and Everything from Heinemann bidding with Pan. It was an ideal combination for Douglas: for he stayed with his paperback house that had done so well by him, but he had the kudos of a hardback edition from an established hardcover publisher. He had always been irritated by the distinction in English letters between literary writing and commercial fiction—or perhaps “successful” or “accessible” would be better words than commercial. It’s a divide which has more to do with snobbery than editorial virtue. Isn’t there, as Wilde observed in another context, just good writing and bad writing? Nick Clee, the urbane editor of the Bookseller (the publishing industry’s trade journal) recalls having dinner with Douglas and Jacqui Graham at the Edinburgh Book Festival in 1983. “Douglas was charming and funny, but a bit chippy about reviewers. He said that if the opening sequence of A History of the World in 101⁄2 Chapters [Julian Barnes] had been submitted to the BBC comed
y department, it would have been promptly rejected.” Douglas knew just how excruciatingly hard it was to create his kind of book and could not understand why it merited less attention than the novel of another writer who happened not to employ the conventions and shortcuts of SF.* 167 His deal with a grand old hardcover publisher seemed like critical validation.

  Money from foreign rights was also finding its way down the contractual links in satisfactory volume. Douglas was doing well all over the planet. Eastern Europe could not get enough of him, and the Japanese had taken to his Zen humour in a big way. He was particularly successful in Germany, then as now a major market that in those pre-Euro days paid in DMs, a currency solid enough to induce a religious experience in any recipient.* 168 Infocom, the leading Massachusetts-based game company, had acquired the computer game rights (in 1983) to Hitchhiker’s in a multi-game deal for a sum believed to be one million dollars.

  In 1983, Faber and Faber published The Meaning of Liff by Douglas and John Lloyd (Faber was John’s publisher). It was a cute, breastpocket sized edition quite stuffed with definitions that really ought to exist. Creatively it is a tour de force. William Burroughs once defined language as the ultimate control system legislating thought, feeling and what he rather alarmingly called apparent sensory perception. It’s instant migraine trying to think of a concept for which there is no word in the lexicon. We think linguistically, after all. Actually, there is a whole load of other stuff going on in the brain that could be called thought but which is not linguistic; nonetheless, formal discourse—ratiocination about concepts—does presuppose language. You try thinking of something for which no word exists. Tricky, isn’t it? Of course, John and Douglas started with words in a gazetteer, but then they still had to invent hitherto non-existent meanings to apply to them. What’s more, those meanings had to be apt and droll. It’s a remarkable display of virtuosity, and John and Douglas were exceedingly miffed when an unscrupulous advertising agency pinched the idea in the form of The Oxtail English Dictionary to sell chocolates.

  The Meaning of Liff is abidingly funny. Most people recognized it as very special, and it sold fairly well, though less so in the USA. There was some minor sniping when it was pointed out that Paul Jennings (in Ware, Wye and Watford) had done something similar many years before, though his approach had been suggested by homophones rather than finding labels for unemployed concepts. Douglas was mortified, and wrote to Jennings explaining that no disrespect was intended. The idea may have lurked in his brain from a game devised many years before by Frank Halford, Douglas’s English teacher at school, but John Lloyd and Douglas had given it their own remarkable stamp over many a drink in Malibu. Execution is all. Liff is a little gem, an opuscule of genius, and one of the few books of Douglas’s that he said he could reread without wincing.

  The Meaning of Liff also coincided fairly closely with Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, and some have suggested that there was some attempt to feed off the marketing profile of the movie. A closer look at the chronology does not support this ungenerous view. The similarity was a complete coincidence though John and Douglas did decide not to change the name of their book when it was pointed out. The authors did not make a fortune from Liff—which is a shame because it, and its sequel, should be in every home.

  However, in November 1985, in a hotel room in New York, Douglas sat goggle-eyed, oscillating between fear and joy, while Ed Victor conducted the American auction for Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency and its sequel (the UK rights having gone to Heinemann and Pan again). Douglas had been yearning to escape from Hitchhiker’s, and Dirk Gently, a hero so cool that his mind owed more to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle than traditional deduction, was the means whereby he planned to tunnel out past the perimeter guards and barbed-wire entanglements of his previous work. But first, the auction.

  You may have an image of Ed Victor, elegantly suited, clutching a gavel, standing behind a dais in a roomful of Gotham City’s finest publishers: “Roll up, roll up,” he would say. “Mix memory and desire [this was a literary auction after all], give me your chequebooks yearning to be free. What am I bid for this great novel and its sequel? Two lovely little copyrights from an author with an awesome record. Once in a lifetime opportunity—do I hear a million? One million two from the gentleman in the corner . . .”

  A rights auction is not like that. Ed knew the major players, and he would have established who was interested and able to come to the party with sufficient funds. (Bruce Harris had participated until the price became just too high for a small house like Crown.) The publishers would be given time—typically a couple of weeks—to read the book, do their sums, check the existing sales, take soundings from the bookselling chains, confer with the hard-eyed guardians of the corporate wallet, have lunch, and stare contemplatively into space: in other words, the full rigour of the acquisition process.

  Then, on the appointed day, Ed would take bids by phone, and those calls would have to be made by a particular time if the publisher wanted to be in the game. The bawdy hand of time, as Shakespeare put it, would be standing on the very prick of noon, for midday is often the deadline for the first round of bidding. Telephone bids are binding—not because publishers are intrinsically more honest than people in other industries, but because the business is so small, and it operates in such a debauch of self-referential gossip, that villains would become known instantly and then find it impossible to function. There is an etiquette to auctions that Ed would have observed. This dictates that the first to bid is usually the first to be called during the next round, so, in exchange for starting off the whole business before taking the temperature, as it were, from the rivals, the first in enjoys a slight tactical advantage. That’s because in later rounds he or she will know that—the other gannets having offered or passed—the sum reached at that stage represents (if only temporarily) the highest offer. There are variations to the conventions; sometimes the auctioneer will go back to the interested parties in the reverse order of the size of the bid so that the best bidder in each round has the advantage of being last out in the following round. Usually the rules are made explicit at the beginning, and all the players are familiar with such nuances.

  Of course the proprietor reserves the right not always to accept the largest numerical bid as other components of the deal such as marketing guarantees, royalty rates and schedule of payment may make a lower bid more attractive. But by and large the auction is an effective mechanism for getting the most money out of a market. The bidding will go on through successive rounds, with publishers dropping out when their limit has been reached, and the increments of each bid sending signals about the bullishness of the remaining players. Of course, the psychology of the auction, and the intense desire of publishers within their up-itself parish to win the game, can mean that they persuade themselves to go above the limit that the costings originally suggested was the sensible one. The rationale invoked is that if you’ve already convinced yourself to offer a million, a risk to bring tears to the eyes of your Finance Director, then the danger of a mere extra five grand seems too paltry a sum for which to lose the book. Not only do publishers, a vain lot, get emotional investment in winning the game, but the market too encourages these big punts, for there is now little middle ground between the bestseller and the modest performer. Nobody gets any prizes for being runner-up.

  Ed Victor can conduct an auction with the finesse of Horowitz playing Mozart. (Apparently Horowitz could tell if it was going to rain because the hammers of his Steinway would absorb that little bit more moisture.) Round by round the bidding went up until it eventually stopped when Simon & Schuster acquired the two titles for a smidgen over $2.2 million. Then a division of Paramount, S&S was a powerful force in the marketplace and had never been leery of levering open its giant chequebook for what it wanted. Its only vice as a publisher is that it suffers from a management culture which confuses brutality with efficiency. Despite his stonking advance, Douglas was always satirical abou
t S&S. “It’s one of those companies,” he told me, “where you know that everybody’s lipgloss will be perfect, but you’re not sure if they’ve ever read a book.”

  One of the things Douglas did with the money was buy property. By this time he and Jane had become friends with their neighbours, Rick Paxton and Heidi Lochler, who lived a little further down St. Alban’s Place.* 169 They are now established architects whose energy-neutral offices in a mews off Regent’s Park Road are stunning both in looks and function. Then they were starting up their architectural practice. It was a happy coincidence that Douglas and Jane were looking for somewhere else to live, a place they could create together. Eventually they found a magnificent Georgian house on Duncan Terrace, a few minutes’ walk from St. Alban’s Place, and they commissioned Rick and Heidi to design and build a new interior for it.

  Thanks to the UK’s planning regulations, the handsome exterior of Duncan Terrace was, of course, sacrosanct. The building was not much more than a shell when Douglas acquired it, and, as is axiomatic with any construction work, progress was interrupted by horrid discoveries, and sharp intakes of breath denoting the kind of problem that requires serious funds to fix. On such occasions builders repair the fabric with a specially efficacious form of mortar made of water and scrunched-up, high-denomination bank notes. Duncan Terrace must have consumed at least a UK book’s worth of money. One of the many vexations was finding dry rot in the top storey. Rick smiles when he recalls that Douglas wanted “about two hundred” electrical sockets in his work room on the top floor for all his computers, synthesizers, electric guitars and toys. There would indeed be a heady whiff of ozone in his study, and enough processing power to run an airline.