There must have been something in the sea air that swirled around those towers and quadrangles, which encouraged daydreamers to try writing. Evelyn Waugh was there during the First World War (and published Decline and Fall, a deadly satire of the teaching world, when he was 25). Jan Morris was there at the end of the thirties (although known as James Morris then), and went on to become one of the world’s greatest travel writers. Tom Sharpe arrived there around 1940 and became famous for his comedic novels, particularly the university-based Porterhouse Blue. Sir Tim Rice, the lyricist, arrived in the mid-fifties, followed by the playwright David Hare around 1960, who has written about his time there in a play called South Downs. Fellow playwright and screenwriter, Christopher Hampton, would have been there at much the same time as Hare.
The first I knew that Dave Horlock had other plans than being a school teacher all his life was when he announced that he was leaving at the end of term in order to become a professional director at a well-known provincial theatre company. I was devastated to lose a friend who had made the long school evenings interesting, particularly as I had been looking forward to doing one more production with him before I too left. He admitted that his only regret about leaving so suddenly was that he wouldn’t be able to stage the play that he had been planning.
‘What were you planning?’ I asked.
‘Hamlet,’ he replied. ‘I was going to ask you to play the lead.’
‘You were going to ask me to play Hamlet?’
A tidal wave of disappointment swept away any possible pride or excitement at the thought that he had been going to offer me such an opportunity. A near miss, after all, is as good as a failure, and there are always going to be more near misses in life than there are going to be bullseyes. Over the following years I would experience that same feeling many times whenever an agent would fail to ring back when promised or an editor who had raved about a manuscript had to break the news that they couldn’t persuade anyone in their sales team to share their enthusiasm, or a book which I was certain the public would love sank without a trace within weeks of publication.
For most writers, just like actors and artists, it takes us many years before we can support ourselves from our chosen craft, and even once we are established we continue to be hit by disappointments and rejections more often than not. Most people find the odds too daunting and fall by the wayside as the years go by. Those who succeed are the ones who just keep going, refusing to give up, always trying new ideas, always creating new material, always believing that there is no other way to live.
There will always be shooting stars, people who hit lucky first time and soar much higher and faster than everyone else. They are the people who get written about in the media most often, but the reason they get into the media is because they are unusual. Those moments of good luck, or divine inspiration, will happen to nearly everyone eventually, if they just keep going. ‘Every dog,’ as the saying goes, ‘has its day.’ And if they never happen? Well, you will still have had an interesting time chasing them along the way.
Discovering Jay Gatsby
‘Have you read this?’ my tutor asked, lobbing a copy of The Great Gatsby into my lap.
I started it that night and didn’t bother to go to any lessons the next day because I wanted to finish it and then spend time thinking about the knot of excitement that it had left in my stomach.
This, I decided, was who I wanted to be – Jay Gatsby. There was the immense personal fortune, the mysterious past, the magnificent parties, the mansion, the wardrobe full of pink suits – who could ask for anything more?
It is not surprising I was so transfixed, because it was exactly the sort of effect F. Scott Fitzgerald had wanted to achieve. ‘So he invented,’ he wrote of Gatsby, ‘just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a 17-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end. ’
Although I was deeply attracted to the idea of getting inside the lives of people like Gatsby, I also wanted to be sure I could walk away before things turned nasty. After a while it dawned on me that it was the narrator, Nick Carraway, that I really wanted to be. He was a writer staying in a cottage in the grounds of the mansion. He became involved with the dissolute lives of the main characters, uncovered the very stuff of their souls and then went back to the solitary safety of his home to write his story once things got dangerous.
‘I was within and without,’ Carraway wrote, ‘simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.’
That, I decided, was what being a writer would be like.
‘The Principessa is throwing a party …’
‘What is happening on the beach?’ my mother enquired of the waiter as we watched troops of formally uniformed staff carrying chairs down from where we were sitting with pre-dinner drinks on the terrace.
‘The Principessa is throwing a party,’ the waiter replied, assuming that the activity required no more explanation than that.
He was right. Tom, my best friend, who had been invited to join us so that my parents didn’t have to bear the full weight of my company throughout the holiday, and I were well aware of the Principessa and her entourage since arriving at the Tunisian beach resort. We must have been about 12 years old; an age when we found it hard not to gawp at a beautiful Italian princess as she glided around the complex in Jackie Kennedy sunglasses, apparently oblivious of our fascination.
We ate dinner faster than usual as the sun set across the horizon, eager to get down to the beach and watch the revellers from a better vantage point, anxious that we might miss something.
Long tables had been set out beneath the undulating canopies and the uniformed hotel staff were moving back and forth between the semi-naked guests and the various meats which were turning over open fires. There was a babble of languages, none of which we understood, and music we had never heard before. Flaming torches took over from the sunset as we crouched on the sand outside the flickering light, drinking in every detail of the illuminated scene, inventing our own back stories for every guest there. It was my first modest glimpse of the international jet set (a new concept at the time) at play. It seemed richer and more glamorous than any film I had ever seen. We sat there for hours, intoxicated by the scent of smoke and jasmine and the possibilities of what adult life might hold in store.
A black BMW behind King’s Cross
‘Remind me again who you’re going to see today,’ my wife said, looking up from the family breakfast table as I prepared to leave for the station. These were the days before everyone automatically carried a phone around with them all day. Once I left the house we probably wouldn’t speak again until I got home that evening.
‘I’m not sure,’ I admitted.
‘What do you mean, you’re not sure?’
‘Some chap who wants to write a novel about the secret world of bodyguards and mercenaries. I think he works for one of the Middle Eastern royal families.’
‘Cool,’ my son said through a mouthful of Rice Krispies. ‘Will he have a gun?’
‘Where are you meeting him?’ My wife now looked alarmed.
‘Behind King’s Cross.’
‘Where behind King’s Cross?’
‘I’m not sure,’ I said, realising that I was sounding evasive. ‘He said he would meet me there, behind the station.’
‘But how will you know him?’
‘He’s going to be in a black BMW.’
‘Don’t get killed, will you, Daddy,’ one of the girls piped up cheerfully.
‘Just a minute …’ Her interrogatory glare was unnerving me. ‘Are you telling me that if you don’t come home tonight and I have to ring the police …’ I cast a quick glance at the children, all of whose eyes were now boring into me, ‘and they ask me where you were going today, I have to tell them that all I know is you were meeting a man in a black BMW behind King’s Cross?’
‘Well, when you put it like that …’ I tried an ironic little chuckle in the hope that it would
put things back into perspective and stop the youngest girl’s bottom lip quivering so ominously. ‘I can leave you the number that he called from if that would put your mind at rest.’
Needless to say the mystery man turned out to be perfectly amiable and had put together a pretty good plotline which needed to be turned into a full-scale manuscript, but I made a note to self that day that responsible husbands and fathers have to be a little more careful not to alarm their families through sheer carelessness.
Tales of courtesans and mistresses
‘You got a call while you were out,’ my wife said as I came in the door, studiously staring at the vegetables, which she was cutting up for supper with more vigour than strictly necessary.
There was a tension in the air and my usually ineffective male antenna was warning me to tread carefully.
I had informed her as I left that morning that I had a meeting in London with a woman who was at the time infamous for her exploits as a courtesan amongst the highest and mightiest in the land. The woman had been seamlessly professional at the meeting with the publisher and the old boy had fallen in love just as heavily as she had intended. After the meeting she and I had repaired to the bar at the Dorchester for a celebratory drink. The outfit she had chosen for maximum impact at the meeting was so tightly fitted to her figure, and so lacking in any excess material, that she had not had anywhere to store any cash. She protested her embarrassment at finding herself unable to pay for the drink she wanted to buy me, but I was quite happy to fork out since her eyelash-fluttering performance had definitely added another zero to the publisher’s offer. Now I was trying to divine why my wife might be avoiding eye contact so obviously.
‘Oh yes?’ I said. ‘Who was that?’
‘She said she didn’t need to leave a name because you would know who it was. She had a foreign accent; all very breathy.’ Still her eyes were fixed on the execution of the innocent vegetables giving up their lives to the blows from her knife. ‘She said to tell you “thank you”.’
‘That’s it?’
‘That’s it. Although actually it sounded more like “tank you”.’
Those who have had affairs with people of importance, either paid or not paid, often seem to feel the need to vent their frustrations in print when things go pear-shaped. Sometimes it is because they need the money; sometimes it is for the sheer mischief-making hell of it. Sometimes they have even been married to the person of importance and want to vent the spleen which their divorce has built up in them, usually aided by their legal teams. Mostly they don’t have stories that the publishers, or indeed the public, feel they want to pay money for, but now and then one will catch the public’s imagination. The soldier who wrote about his affair with Princess Diana was probably the most successful in this genre, but there have been others.
Those who make a living in this manner have various ways of introducing themselves when they first make contact with a ghost. Some like to come straight out with the announcement that they are ‘high class prostitutes’ (in reality the ‘low class’ ones often have the more interesting stories to tell, Truman Capote’s Holly Golightly and Emile Zola’s Nana notwithstanding). Sometimes they prefer to describe themselves as ‘escorts’. ‘Courtesan’ was a description I had suggested to my latest client as part of the proposed book title. I thought it sounded rather romantic and redolent with historical connotations. She liked the sound of it until she looked it up in the dictionary and decided that she would rather be described as a ‘mistress’.
Books can also provide interesting insights into the thinking that has led these authors to follow their chosen paths through life.
‘I told you she was an interesting woman,’ I said.
‘I really couldn’t say,’ my wife said, chucking the vegetables into a pan of boiling water with a dangerous splash. ‘She just said that and then hung up.’
Deathbed delivery
Until the relatively recent proliferation of self-publishing and print-on-demand services, getting a book published was a mind-numbingly slow process. If I started working with someone in January it might well be June before we had managed to get a publisher on board, even with the help of an agent. The publisher would probably then schedule publication the following summer, or maybe even the autumn. It would then take a while for the book to seep into the shops and into the consciousness of the sort of readers who might be likely to recommend it to other people. Eighteen months, therefore, could easily elapse between the first meeting between me (the ghost) and the author and the book actually starting to rise above the horizon.
As a result it is always rather unnerving when the would-be author is of a great age. People of a great age often have the best stories, but they are nearly always in a hurry, fearful that their health will give out before they have had a chance to see their stories in print and enjoy the excitement of being published authors.
Helen-Alice Dear was only 15 when she left London to visit Bulgaria on a family holiday in 1937. Just weeks after her arrival, she found herself unable to leave and struggling to survive in an increasingly hostile and terrifying environment, first under the Nazis and then the Russians. Her marriage to a Bulgarian man bore her four children but they were often homeless, cold and hungry. Despite these hardships, Helen refused to give up hope and bravely managed to protect and raise four happy children. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, she was finally able to fulfil her dream of returning to her homeland. She was a woman of indomitable spirit but as she approached 85 even her strength was beginning to fade.
With the help of one of her daughters I wrote a synopsis and found an agent and a publisher. Things were moving forward smoothly by publishing standards, but agonisingly slowly for Helen as her health continued to slip away.
The book – My Family is All I Have – was printed but still sitting in the publisher’s warehouse when Helen’s daughter rang to tell me that her mother was in hospital and the outlook was not good. There were hurried phone calls and a dash to the publisher’s office where I was able to snatch the first copies of the book from the editor’s desk before grabbing a cab to the hospital in time to line them up on the table stretching over Helen’s bed. Her own youthful face stared down at her from the front covers.
‘Do you think it looks all right?’ she asked, her smile suggesting she had already decided that it did.
The following day she passed away.
The mid-book blues
Writing books is one of the most enjoyable and rewarding ways to earn a living and I can’t imagine ever doing anything else. That does not mean, however, that every part of the operation is a joy. As with any large-scale endeavour, from creating a garden to running a marathon, from being a rock star to being a prince of the realm, there are times where the effort and the monotony of the job feel crushing.
The blues usually strike me about half way through the writing process. All too often, I believe, the books which the market has traditionally demanded are longer than their subject matter merits. If you write tightly and edit well as you go along you can often tell a story very effectively in 30,000 to 50,000 words (The Turn of the Screw, Animal Farm, Of Mice and Men, The Great Gatsby, Death in Venice, Heart of Darkness, The Picture of Dorian Gray … I could go on). Publishers and readers, however, have been accustomed for many years to books that are 80,000 to 150,000 words – and sometimes longer. Designed originally to work well as parcels in the American postal system at the end of the nineteenth century, they are simply the size and shape that people have grown used to and, therefore, expect.
Imagine that you have been commissioned to write a blockbuster thriller which will go out under the name of a famous author who always produces books that are at least 400 pages long (around 150,000 words). The plot that has been worked out is great, the characters are strong and you’ve managed to tell the whole thing very succinctly and elegantly in 50,000 words.
That is the morning when you wake up to the realisation that you now have to find anot
her hundred thousand words without ruining the tension, without losing the attention of the readers and without waffling.
Waffling is easy, of course, and by no means an unpleasant way to earn a living, but if you do that you will only have to go back and cut it all out again later, losing thousands of valuable words and dozens of valuable man-hours and severely endangering your will to live.
Like any marathon runner you have to put your head down and keep powering on, but you then become obsessed with word-counts: constantly checking how many words you have done that day (or in the last ten minutes), working out how many more days you need if you continue at that rate, forcing yourself to stay at the screen for just one more hour, then just one more, agonising every time you have to cut something out and the word-count drops by even a few dozen. The days seem to stretch out ahead for ever.
Like the marathon runner, however, and the patient gardener, perseverance and professionalism always pay off and you eventually come out of the darkness of winter into the sunshine once more. The finishing line comes in sight and you are able to sprint to the end, refreshed by the rush of adrenaline and the bloom of another spring, ready and enthusiastic to start on the next book, all memories of the blue days forgotten.
Maybe this is a good moment to confess to another sin: the sin of envy. I can’t help but imagine how glorious it must be to be one of those immortal songwriters who you hear talking about how they penned their most famous track in a matter of minutes, creating a perfect little masterpiece that will be paying them and their descendants royalties for years to come. Imagine for a moment being Ray Davies and dashing off masterpieces like ‘Waterloo Sunset’, ‘Lola’ and ‘Sunny Afternoon’. Not only do you then have the rest of the day to please yourself, you also get to sing your stories in front of hundreds of thousands of adoring fans. Contrast that with the long haul of the book writer who is then lucky if he can persuade half a dozen people to turn up to a reading in a bookshop. Envious? I’m positively mint green.
Confessions of a Ghostwriter Page 14
