by Nick Webb
I enclose a copy of my new book which I hope will cheer you up. Happy Christmas. Yours truly
In revenge he was inspired to write Bureaucracy, in which the player finds himself unable to get his own money after moving to Paris, whence, via a series of bureaucratic mishaps, he ends up somewhere very much stranger. Having designed the architecture of the game, Douglas became fascinated with learning how to program, when what was needed was simply for him to write all the ramifying text variations. Despite an excellent understanding of computer languages, he lacked the patience for programming; the project started to run late. Infocom staff are credited with helping him finish it (primarily, according to the website, the mysterious hacker W.E.B. “Fred” Morgan), and so is Michael Bywater who was quietly drafted in to help too.
The result of all these commitments was that when Douglas got down to work on Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, it was screamingly late. He’d been thinking about the book on and off for three years, and by the time Sue Freestone started working with him it was already six months past the “this time we really mean it, absolutely no messing about, this-is-it” deadline. Douglas had written one single sentence. However, Sue reports, it was a brilliant one.
Critical opinion varies about the Dirk Gently novels. I like them a lot, especially the first. Alfred Hickling in the Guardian thought that the third, The Salmon of Doubt, was shaping up to be the best of the lot when Douglas died. It’s certainly complex, very enjoyable and more relaxed than the first two titles. Kate Schechter, first seen in The Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul, reappears as a fully rounded female character—unlike Douglas’s earlier women characters who tend to be foils for the men to express some impossible romantic and sexual yearning.
Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency is Douglas’s authentic voice—darkly funny, full of fresh invention (even though it owed something to his Dr. Who plot), overly complex, and suffused with anxiety. There isn’t the same joke quotient per line as in the Hitchhiker’s novels, but overall the effect is just as satisfying.
The Electric Monk is a delicious idea; we have labour-saving devices to spare us effort—why not an electric monk who can believe really stupid things for us?* 174 The plot is unsynopsizable. It combines jokes about Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lamarck, quantum mechanics, chaos theory, academia, Schrödinger’s Cat, literary magazines, jealousy, death—a whole chocolate box of intellectual goodies—with inadvertently saving the world. Douglas had just read Gleick’s book Chaos for Heinemann and given it a rare pre-publication quote.* 175 Usually he resisted blandishments from publishers to give quotes because he felt it devalued the currency and he was prickly about his acceptability by the literati. But in the case of Chaos, he said, “it was like turning on a light in a dark room.” The ideas of chaos theory underlie much of Dirk Gently.* 176
It is no accident that Samuel Taylor Coleridge is one of the central figures in the story. Like Douglas, Coleridge, one of the greatest narrative poets of all time, took the reader and his Ancient Mariner into the unknown. Coleridge’s narrator in that poem is a decent man who makes one mistake. For this, all his fellow mariners die, and he is subjected to an extremity of nightmarish suffering before eventually finding redemption, of a kind. Arthur Dent is in a similar predicament: caught up alone in a bewildering universe—one which sneakily had appeared so safe and familiar—with a whole planetful of people blown to atoms behind him.
Famously Coleridge was also thwarted in the middle of a masterpiece when the Person from Porlock interrupted the composition of “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan . . .” Douglas, however, was his own man from Porlock. Jane Belson recalls that if he couldn’t find a man from Porlock, he’d pull one in from the street.
It was the desire to get it right. I think his block was more to do with fear than perfectionism. He was frightened he couldn’t do it. What he found hard was having these completely off-the-wall ideas which had to be combined with the perfection of the writing. Douglas wasn’t confident he could do it, and he did worry dreadfully. I think he went and looked for distractions in order to avoid facing the possibility of failure.
Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency contains within it a brilliant essay about music and mathematics (“Music and Fractal Landscapes” by Richard MacDuff). It’s typical of Douglas that he contextualized it within the narrative in a way that gently parodies scholarship, thereby disarming any accusation of pretension before it’s been uttered. Nevertheless, that essay is the most beautiful account of the connections not just between music and mathematics, but between mathematics and the universe.
Among mathematicians and physicists the subject of “MacDuff’s” essay is a hot topic. Even for a layman, you’d need a soul like a safety deposit box not to find it fascinating. Is mathematics an organizing principle of the cosmos, or merely a language that helps creatures of our peculiar configuration to isolate aspects of it? A snail does not need to “know” about the Golden Mean when making its shell any more than a sunflower understands the Fibonacci sequence. The snail and the flower self-organize into those exquisite patterns because of the way atoms interact at the quantum level. But why do atoms behave that way? This is why quantum physics is the science from which all others flow. Is it just coincidence, then, that such phenomena—extending upwards to great spiral galaxies—lend themselves to such elegant mathematical description? Does mathematics define the universe any more than grammar? Maybe both just help us talk about it; much brainpower has been expended and many books written on this subject. It is wonderful to find it so entertainingly touched upon in a popular bestseller. Douglas believed passionately that such apparently arcane ideas were at least as appropriate to so-called commercial fiction as sex and shopping—and a lot more interesting.
This essay within the novel is a reminder of how good Douglas’s non-fiction could be. His journalism is beautifully structured, often very funny and always illuminating. Jane remembers that he could do the same in conversation:
Douglas had this extraordinary capacity to convey information in a most subtle way. He was a natural teacher. His analogies were wonderful. You would get what he was about to tell you about a millisecond before he told you, which made you feel really clever. I’ve talked to other people who said that was exactly how they felt too. So you felt good talking to him because it made you feel really smart.
Douglas was regularly at Three on the Beaton Scale when writing Dirk Gently. It was very uphill, and the complexity of the narrative reflects the discontinuously dripping tap of his inspiration. Sue Freestone spent a lot of time in Upper Street (at this point he had not yet moved into Duncan Terrace) providing sandwiches, encouragement and warmly appreciative feedback. After a particularly pleasing page, he would run downstairs from his office like a child who had done something praiseworthy and give it to Sue, inspecting her with neurotic care to see if she laughed in the right places.
The schedule for the book was so tight that it was almost a conveyor belt with Douglas at one end and the reading public at the other. By writing on his Apple Macintosh Plus and printing the text on a laser printer as camera-ready copy, Douglas cut out several intermediate processes and shaved a couple of weeks off the production time.
Dirk Gently was his first book entirely free of the structural inheritance that comes from converting one medium into another. It even looks different on the page, and resists slipping comfortably into the category straitjacket. Douglas’s own quote on the back of the first edition (and still there today) describes his first Dirk Gently thus: “A THUMPING GOOD DETECTIVE-GHOST-HORROR-WHODUNNIT-TIME TRAVEL-ROMANTIC-MUSICAL-COMEDY-EPIC.”
There is a trajectory to Douglas’s books whereby they seemed to get darker and more cynical with every one. Nevertheless, on publication Dirk Gently went straight into the charts. He was particularly pleased by the success of the book, a non Hitchhiker’s, because it seemed like confirmation that he was a real writer and not just a man with a single brand.
The next Gently
novel was to follow with what was for Douglas remarkable despatch. The Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul was published by Heinemann in the autumn of 1988 and written from the late summer onwards of 1987. It was his first sane publishing schedule for years, though as always the book was delivered under time pressure because of Douglas’s longstanding and much postponed promise to go to Australia on a promotion tour.
Meanwhile the improbable hero, Dirk Gently, reappears: plump, bespectacled, addicted to cigs, delinquent about money, randy yet unfulfilled, given to gnomic utterances, exploitative, guilty, not entirely wholesome, irritatingly right and possessed of high-powered but unusually non-linear thought processes. Douglas’s friend Michael Bywater shares some of these characteristics and says he is not sure whether to be disgusted or flattered to be thought the model for Gently. Douglas did borrow some of Michael’s attributes, but Douglas’s creative processes were too horribly complicated for portraiture straight from life; besides, a detective who tries to fathom how the hell the world works was so very useful as a vehicle for his interests. The genesis of the character owes a lot to Chandler and to quantum physics.
Characteristically Douglas challenges the stable world view with jokes. For instance, there’s Mr. Rational, in the form of a smug, unkind consultant psychologist called Standish (here I standish and can no other . . . ?), one of whose patients in his hospital in the Cotswolds has been performing automatic writing. She appears to be taking dictation from the ghosts of Einstein, Planck and Heisenberg. Obviously, such a thing is crazy—except that what she takes down is physics of the highest order, throwing light on the greatest goal of them all, Unified Field Theory, sometimes called a Theory of Everything (or T.O.E.).* 177 Such a theory would be the ultimate triumph of the human spirit. What fun Douglas has in imagining the horror of the scientific mind faced with the paradox of getting such insights from an obviously impossible source.
The Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul is an enjoyable book, though not Douglas’s best. It is nicely observed and imbued with such a precise sense of place that one day it might be possible that literary fans will follow Gently’s path from Islington to St. Pancras Station in the same way that James Joyce buffs walk round Dublin on Bloomsday. In the novel Douglas takes a figure of speech—“For God’s Sake!”—and rotates it through ninety degrees. What would we do for the sake of the gods? What would they do for themselves? Wouldn’t immortality be the most sadistic burden? No wonder Odin (an echo of the master of the universe in Hitchhiker’s) is so damn tired. For him a nursing home, an infinite supply of clean linen and no responsibilities seem like an appealing arrangement. On the other hand, the alternative to immortality is not such a bundle of laughs, and Dirk discovers it can be disgustingly messy. Gently himself plays a rather passive role in the book, not so much an actor in the drama as a non-participant observer. The novel is full of wit and verbal pyrotechnics, but, stripped of such camouflage, it’s bleak.
By this time Douglas and Jane had finally moved into Duncan Terrace. Douglas insisted on the unbelievable stereo and a grand piano, and the rest of the administrative burden of the move fell to Jane. The mechanics of writing were much the same as before. Sue was on hand for sympathy and feedback. Lisa Glass, the copy editor, also rushed round from time to time to help them chill out. Douglas had a high regard for Lisa, whose intelligence saved him from various inconsistencies and solecisms. (He was impressed when she checked, and corrected, some of Dirk’s playful sums with his I Ching calculator.) Sometimes Michael Bywater turned up to offer entertainment, stimulation and dazzling conversation.
Once, Sue Freestone recalls, Janet appeared:
Douglas had been angsting at me for days about the increasing length of the grass in his back garden in Islington. At this point I was debating whether to buy a lawn mower on Heinemann expenses and cut it myself to shut him up. His mother, Janet, arrived unannounced bearing a hover mower. A small, determined woman, a quarter-sized spitting image of Douglas, she marched past us without a word out into the garden, unwound the cord, plugged in the mower, marched purposefully up and down until the grass was all cut, unplugged the mower, wrapped the cord round the handle, tucked the whole thing under her arm and marched out again, still without a word. Douglas and I sat looking at one another in stunned silence. He had not said anything to her about his grass worries but somehow she just knew.* 178
What’s more, Janet took the grass clippings all the way back to Dorset.
••••••
As soon as Douglas had finished The Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul, he’d promised he would go to Australia for a paperback promotion. So that he felt under unnegotiable obligation, for he had cancelled in the past, Pan had taken the precaution of booking tickets and working out his itinerary in some detail. He had to go, but he was still writing as the car arrived to take him to the airport. He edited while the limo glided across London and he was still fine-tuning the text as he was driven down the M4 to Heathrow.
When he arrived in Perth, Western Australia, twenty hours later, Douglas was still writing. Debbie McInnes, a likeable, energetic woman and one of the best publicists in Australia, remembers picking him up for the first appointment and finding him in his PJs, still making changes. Final corrections had to be faxed to England from the hotel. Debbie is 5’3". Douglas was 6’5". It is a pity there is no picture of them on the streets together.
Douglas had been out there before, in 1983, on promo duty for the Pan edition of Life, the Universe and Everything. It had been an enormous success. Brian Davies was the managing director of Pan Australia and Maggie Crystal was in charge of marketing. The company had recently declared independence from Collins and it was determined to do a spectacular job. Maggie remembers Douglas with affection from that first trip:
Our campaign was mainly author-led with plenty of telly. Douglas was a pleasure to promote. He was very clever and rather childlike. He was funny and had absolutely no side to him; the Aussies liked that. His views about British literary snobbery went down very well. He wasn’t A-list in literary terms, but he was culty. A cult is when you are enthusiastic about something, but don’t realize that millions of others feel the same—and that was certainly true of Douglas’s fans. We did TV in all the major cities: Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane. Douglas worked very hard. He was easy and could be quite funky and fresh even late at night. We sold a lot of copies. [Brian Davies estimates over 75,000 during that trip.]
For his part, Douglas adored Australia—the climate, the swimming, the space. Everything. He had discovered scuba diving on his first trip to Malibu, but it wasn’t until he got to Australia that he realized it could be so indecently pleasurable. Jane says that although he was not one of nature’s sportsmen, he was a very good swimmer. He loved diving. Once he’d overcome his natural buoyancy, those large hydrodynamic control surfaces would come into their own. The feeling of weightlessness underwater, and of liberation, the sheer sensual joy of it, are a delight. The colours of the fish, especially on the Great Barrier Reef, are indescribable. The flash of iridescent light as an entire shoal turns as one (how do they do that?) is breathtaking. Douglas found release down there, and spent as long underwater as his schedule and his (always urgent) obligations would allow.
Douglas also liked the Australians themselves a great deal. By and large they were a refreshingly straightforward lot compared to the brittle and competitive ambience shared by many of his Cambridge contemporaries. He was to return to Australia whenever he could. On one occasion—the madness of which must have appealed to his sense of style—he even went to Australia for a day. He’d promised to give a talk at the Adelaide Literary Festival, but he was once again under the gun for late delivery. He flew in and out again in twenty-four hours.
The 1987 trip to Australia coincided with Douglas’s need to recoup the truckload of fifties he’d tipped down the Duncan Terrace building site, to say nothing of the money he’d lost to his erring accountant and the taxman. In any event he was plannin
g to do a lot of travelling for his next book. Douglas’s relationship with Jane was going through a highly unsettled phase featuring long periods of separation. For all these reasons, but also for tax purposes, Douglas decided to take a year out of the UK.
Starting this period with a promo trip to Australia was ideal. Debbie McInnes looked after him well. She is amusingly no-nonsense about authors, some of whom have been known to throw a “tanty” (a tantrum) if all is not precisely to their satisfaction. But Douglas, she says, was no problem. It was a massive tour, partly because he had put it off so often. He was popular and in great demand. He seemed genuinely interested in listening to what people were saying and he performed as graciously in tiny radio stations as he did in big telly studios. Debbie recalls:
He could take the piss out of himself very disarmingly. We did sixty-five interviews in five major cities in ten days. The radio stations had to fight over him. Douglas scarcely had a minute to breathe. The schedule was his punishment for being late. He couldn’t go to the shops, though he did buy two silver bangles in Perth airport, and he managed to get to a Mac World computer convention. He was passionate about that. He was desperate to go swimming with the dolphins off Palm Beach, but there was no time. He had a huge wetsuit that I ended up storing for him until the next time.
