With the arrival of Amazon and the self-publishing boom the supermarkets are no longer seen as the leading threat to the way things were. The trade always has to have someone to fear, someone to accuse of destroying what has gone before. Publishers mocked both Oprah in the States and Richard & Judy in the UK when they started their book clubs, until they realised that viewers of these shows could make or break some of their best authors.
I remember the independent bookshops complaining when Tim Waterstone first created his chain of bookstores at the beginning of the eighties, accusing him of trying to put them out of business. Many of the accusations they levelled against him were much the same as the ones they levelled at the supermarkets and then at Amazon. Now the Waterstones chain that once looked like Goliath to the smaller shops has come to resemble David in comparison to the new giants.
Reading an interview with Tim Waterstone I discovered that as a boy his first experience of book-buying was in a small retail outlet in the Sussex town of Crowborough, where I was born.
I was being taken to the same shop as a boy (about 15 years after him), and I don’t think much can have changed in that time because my memories are almost identical to the ones he described to the journalist. Few provincial bookshops were good in those days, offering little choice and long waits if you ordered anything that wasn’t already in stock. Things are a great deal better today and much of the improvement is due to the business models created by Tim Waterstone, the supermarkets and Amazon.
Confessions from the British Library
‘You must have been here a hundred times,’ the young woman from the Society of Authors said as our guide ushered us up to the boardroom of the British Library for a privileged peek behind the scenes of one of the biggest municipal building projects ever undertaken in the world. Priceless literary treasures had been brought up and laid out for us to wonder at.
‘Never been here before,’ I said, surprised to see how shocked she was by this confession.
‘What, never?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘honestly. It’s never occurred to me.’
‘But what about research?’
‘I think I must just write very superficial books.’
She rejected this suggestion with all the politeness one would expect and when I later made the same confession to another member of the party, an extraordinarily distinguished biographer, he kindly pretended to be impressed that I had managed to write so many books without recourse to the many subterranean floors of material that lie beneath the building. There is close to 200 miles of shelving under the library’s piazza, and almost the same again somewhere in Yorkshire. Was it arrogance that had led me to think I didn’t need the help of these people in tracking down stories and following threads of truth? Was it idleness? Perhaps it was something else entirely.
Our guide took us out onto a balcony high above the floor of the reading room. The room had the proportions of a cathedral, the rows of desks filled with hundreds of readers and researchers poring silently over books and screens, lost in labyrinths of thought and information.
When persuading our son that he should go on to further education, even though he had no particular vocational path in mind, my wife and I had always glossed over the fact that neither of us had been to university, telling him that ‘not so many people did in those days’. My wife tells me she regrets that she went straight from school to the world of work, but I have never regretted it for a second and that puzzles me because I love reading and I love thinking and I love writing, all of which should be available in spades during a university education.
Seeing behind the scenes of possibly the greatest library in the world was fascinating, but it still did not make me want to join the hordes on the reading room floor. It actually made me want to escape back into my own world and to go in search of a restaurant where I could maybe read a book over lunch, but more likely just watch the world go by and daydream.
Daydreaming was the thing I got into the most trouble for in school classrooms. It was my greatest pleasure but also my downfall, and has continued to fulfil both those roles ever since.
I think daydreaming finally gained the upper hand over educational endeavour when I was about 14 and from then on I found being confined to a classroom, or the effort of being forced to read a book which did not catch my imagination, almost intolerable, like a sort of mental suffocation. I had agreed to stay at school until I had at least taken some A levels and so I kept myself distracted by spending hours in the art room and the drama department. Being able to draw and paint pictures, perform and create scenery absorbed me because they allowed my mind to wander most of the time.
I started tapping away at my first novel when I was 15 and I was writing sketches for school reviews as well as appearing in them. Most of the time during those years, however, I sat around for hours on end smoking cheap cigarettes, talking nonsense, listening to music on portable record players and staring into space. I was waiting impatiently for the moment when the whole ordeal would be over and I could take full control of my life and head for London and on from there into the rest of the world.
I was breathlessly reading Room at the Top, Of Human Bondage and Keep the Aspidistra Flying, listening to Johnny Cash singing about his ‘Folsom Prison Blues’ and watching If, Lindsay Anderson’s film about a rebellion in a public school remarkably like the one I was incarcerated in, as I tried to work out what the coming years were going to be like. The thought of going on to spend three more years in an institution where I might not be able to daydream as much as I wanted was not attractive.
The liberating effect of Lindsay Anderson’s film had been the direct opposite of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, which I misguidedly read before embarking on my senior school and which gave me every expectation of being ‘roasted’ over an open fire by sadistic prefects. Another Victorian novel, Vice Versa, did little to calm my fears of what fate lay in store for me, nor the later adventures of Billy Bunter at Greyfriars School.
The relatively liberal atmosphere which I actually found myself in when I arrived at Lancing at the age of 13, overseen by Sir William Gladstone, a wise and benevolent headmaster and great grandson of the Victorian Prime Minister, gave me hope that life might just improve as I moved closer to the end of the long, tedious years of childhood and formal education.
By the time the envelope containing my final pitiful exam results arrived at my parents’ house I was already renting a room in a shared flat in Earls Court, ruled over by a flamboyant resting actor, and was starting the long struggle to support myself from my writing. Never for a second was I tempted back into any classroom until people started inviting me to be the one on the podium doing the talking.
‘You may just have to get a job …’
‘So, young man, what do you plan to do with your life?’
It’s one of the most annoying questions that well-meaning people ask of the young as soon as they leave school or university, and at most points before and in between.
It may be annoying, but even the most innocent, or rebellious, of young people know that finding the answer is the key to everything. When you get to the other end of your working life and look back, these people are asking, what sort of path do you want to see stretching out behind you?
In some ways I was one of the fortunate ones. From the age of 16 I had an almost clear idea of what I wanted that path to look like, but when I described it out loud it sounded pretty naive, not to mention vain, so I tended to respond to interrogation by looking down and mumbling something non-committal like everyone else.
What I knew I wanted was to be free to follow anything that caught my interest. I wanted to attack life like an overexcited dog hurtling back and forth along a ripe hedgerow, chasing every tempting scent and every promising rustle of leaves. I wanted to have learned as much as possible about as wide a variety of subjects as possible. I wanted to be in a position to take advantage of any unexpected opportunities that might be offered to me. I want
ed to be able to make my own decisions as to how I planned my life and spent my days. I wanted to surrender my fate to serendipity while at the same time being able to make enough of a living to support myself and whatever family might come along (something else that would be in the hands of the God of Serendipity). I wanted to get to the end of the path with as many good and varied memories and stories as possible – and, of course, I wanted to meet girls, as many as possible.
The thing I was most frightened of, along with possible starvation, was boredom. If I couldn’t continually distract and stimulate myself with thoughts and adventures that interested me I knew I would be in danger of sliding into the shadows of despondency, and hurtling on down from there into the pit of despair.
There appeared to be a few options that fitted these criteria; the three front runners were writing, art and acting, all of which seemed to provide the necessary highs needed to stay ahead of the black cloud of depression, but at the same time they offered the constant threat of rejection. It required a fair degree of blind, and naive, optimism to commit to any of these paths. If I voiced my ambitions out loud I ran the risk of hearing other people’s opinions on just how likely it was that I would starve to death if I tried to make any of them my life, so on most occasions I would decide it was better to keep my own counsel.
My first year in London had not gone that brilliantly financially. As well as writing anything and everything I could think of, and selling none of it, I had also dipped my toe into the acting world, which basically meant being a background extra for the odd day’s filming (including an appearance as a footman in a powdered wig in a filmed history of prostitution, my task being to literally ‘serve up’ Cora Pearl, a famous nineteenth-century courtesan, on a platter to Edward VII while he was the Prince of Wales), and getting the occasional photographic modelling job.
These scraps of employment had paid the £7.50 a week rent on my room in the shared flat in Earls Court and not much else. It was fun but it was increasingly difficult to fool anyone that I was ever going to be able to support myself on this path.
‘You may just have to get a job.’
My father’s perfectly sensible words sent a chill of horror rippling through me. The words he didn’t say, but which seemed to hang in the air between us were, ‘like everyone else.’
We were meeting for supper in London, as we sometimes did when he thought I needed feeding, and were having a drink in the bar at the top of the Park Lane Hilton, which was then the highest building in the area, so that we could both gaze out over the city lights during any lulls that might fall in the conversation. He liked taking me to places like that and mostly I enjoyed these peeks into the life he led on his company expense account when he wasn’t at home with my mother. Even going with him for a drink at the Playboy Club was an interesting, if somewhat disquieting, experience. I knew several girls who worked as bunnies and was all too familiar with what their real views were of the club members they were trained to serve with such bright smiles.
Taking horrified offence at his suggestion that I should get a job like everyone else, but making a huge effort to hide it, I vowed to myself that I would demonstrate my disdain by getting the most obviously boring job going, the sort of thing that George Orwell, Somerset Maugham, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene and my other influences would have held up as an example of the sort of living death that any young creative soul should avoid at all costs. Then, I told myself, my father would see the error of his thinking and would be sorry he had crushed my great creative potential.
My father, probably assuming that he had just given me a sound piece of paternal advice, was by then studying the menu, apparently unaware of the turmoil his words had caused inside his son’s head.
The following day I resigned myself to the fact that I was now officially a failed actor/writer/artist and set about job-hunting with a heavy, angry heart. I bought an Evening Standard and secured some interviews. It seemed a good idea to exaggerate a little to these potential employers as to the A level results I had achieved. My former headmaster gave me a generous reference, accompanied by a kind letter assuring me that this change in direction might prove more rewarding than I was fearing. I was grateful for this attempt at consolation, but remained convinced he was mistaken.
I was offered three different jobs, but only one of my interviewers failed to ask to see any evidence of the exam results I was claiming. That was the job I, therefore, had to accept. Thus, within a frighteningly short time, I found myself a shipping clerk for the United Africa Company in an office in Blackfriars, spending my days filing bills of lading and my evenings in the company’s amateur dramatics club. I was 18 years old and it felt in the darkest hours of the night as if my life was at an end already. There seemed nothing to do but hope for some sort of miracle.
Within a few months I realised that no miracle was coming and no one was ever going to notice that this was a gesture of defiance and not simply a sensible career move. I had backed myself into a corner and was now lost in an office which held little potential for anyone wanting eventually to earn a living as a writer. Rather than realising that they had caused me to ruin my life, my parents actually seemed fairly relieved that I was now earning a steady salary. It dawned on me that if I didn’t want to spend my life filing bills of lading I was going to have to do something about it myself.
To quote the blurb on the back cover of my battered Penguin edition of Keep the Aspidistra Flying, the story of Gordon Comstock who saw the aspidistra as the symbol of the artist selling out to the comforts and security of dull, middle-class respectability: ‘in his mulish determination to embrace the full agony of poverty, he walked out of one “good” job after another, to the despair of his friends. For him the Embankment was nobler than the aspidistra, symbol of spiritual death.’ I think that was pretty much what was going on in my head, although I lacked even Comstock’s courage because I intended to do all I could to avoid ending up sleeping on the Embankment.
In my desperation to escape this self-triggered trap, I contacted everyone I had met in my first year in London, begging for any possible ways out and, to my amazement, gordon eden-wheen (he insisted on no capital letters, such were the pretensions of the time), an agent who had got me a couple of modelling jobs the previous year, asked if I would like to be his assistant since he had to be out of the office a lot producing fashion shows during ‘the season’.
Run a modelling agency? Did I have to think for even a second before accepting?
The money was about half whatever I was earning as a shipping clerk, but the decision still seemed like an absolute no-brainer since one of my most urgent priorities since leaving my single-sex school was to meet as many young women as possible in as short a time as possible. Had there ever been a place more tailor-made for providing such opportunities in abundance?
Soon after I took up the new job, based in a room off a photographer’s studio in Charlotte Street, eden-wheen was invited to merge his agency with a large modelling school in the middle of Bond Street, providing me with still more chances to meet young women and at the same time opening up any number of opportunities for finding material to write about.
Within a year I was back on course towards being a full-time freelance writer, mainly selling my services for public relations purposes, with the modelling school as one of my clients. Public relations was still a fledgling industry, which is the only explanation I can give as to how a 20-year-old with virtually no experience was able to make a living from it. I even used to lecture on the subject for the modelling school’s rivals, Lucie Clayton, a secretarial and finishing school that had become famous in the sixties for producing the most glamorous models of the day, although I can’t for a moment imagine that I had any wisdom worth listening to.
By this stage I had decided that being a writer really was the only way I could see that I could ensure a satisfactory level of personal freedom and variety, and hopefully earn a living. But what should I write about? There w
ere plenty of interesting stories and people to choose from but I couldn’t see how to turn them into a living wage.
I tried every possible road that a writer can take and there were many times when it seemed impossible that I would ever be able to earn a steady living from such a precarious profession. To public relations I added business writing and then travel writing, and in every spare moment I was trying to write books. I only ever took two full-time jobs after that, one in a public relations consultancy and the other on a media trade magazine. Neither job lasted more than a few months and I eventually had to admit that I was probably never going to be capable of holding down any permanent position. I was now set irrevocably on a course where self-employment was the only option. Had I realised quite how choppy the waters I was sailing into would turn out to be I don’t know if I would have had the courage to do it … Who am I kidding? I had no option.
The forgotten rules of grammar
As a result of my lamentable inability to concentrate in school classrooms, I do not have any grasp of the rules of grammar. I must have known some of them once because I got English, Latin and French O levels, I think, but they no longer reside in my memory. I rely entirely on whether something ‘sounds’ right (by which I also mean ‘reads’ right), like a musician who can’t read music and is forced to play by ear.
If it doesn’t sound right then I am able to put it right but I am not able to find any of the technical terms needed to describe most of the types of words or grammatical constructions that I have used. I can identify nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs, and I might be able to name a few tenses, but after that I have to resort to the dictionary every time someone mistakes me for an expert and asks me what a subjunctive or a subordinate clause might be. I can only identify a split infinitive because of Star Trek’s ‘to boldly go’ catchphrase.
Confessions of a Ghostwriter Page 12
