The character of Monk Adderley was based on a character in the original William Hickey Diaries. Details of the duel between Adderley and Ross came largely from the life of John Wilkes.
The run on Pascoe’s Bank in Truro, the pressure by the other banks, the anonymous letters deliberately circulated to create a panic. All factual, except not exactly as to date.
Dwight Enys saving the injured miner by giving him what is now called ‘the kiss of life’. From a case related in John Knyveton’s Surgeon’s Mate.
So in the case of the Penzance lifeboat.
So in the case of the stagecoach. The original excerpt from the Morning Post for Monday, 23rd of November 1812, is printed in The Miller’s Dance in its entirety. As far as I know, the mystery of the robbery was never solved. I went up to Gloucestershire to examine an eighteenth-century stagecoach in detail and worked out, at least to my own satisfaction, how it could have been done.
As for Bella Poldark, I do not think I would have ventured to tell her extraordinary life story, were it not for the history of Charlotte Cushman, who was born in Boston in 1816.
There is, naturally enough, the converse risk of becoming too preoccupied by history. One can so easily detect the midnight oil, the desire to instruct. But novels are about life. If a reader wishes to pursue a particular subject, textbooks by the thousand exist. An author tends to be reluctant, once he has discovered something, at great trouble to himself, not to make the best of it. But the temptation must be resisted. It is a recurring discipline which should be exercised by every novelist who does research, whether the research is into the Peninsular War or into modern techniques of assassination. What is not relevant is irrelevant.
In my view, the historical novel at its best is not a spurious form of art because the past of itself is not a shard that one can dig up and measure and piece together. No one can do this, however conscientious, because history is not an objective science. Historical truth is not mathematical truth. The past has really no existence other than that which our minds can give it. Even the pure historian is at the mercy of hissources, and his sources usually are other fallible, or prejudiced, or forgetful human beings.
In my one book of short stories there is a story about the death and the burial of William the Conqueror. All the material facts for that came from a contemporary account by Ordericus Vitalis, which is as near as even the most conscientious historian can get to the truth of that matter. If I had written this as an essay and punctuated it with numbers and asterisks and then notes at the bottom saying Ord. Vit., page 231, and following with ib., ib., ib., people would no doubt have been more impressed. But in fact Ordericus Vitalis was thirteen when William died. In other words he probably depended on an eyewitness, or possibly even hearsay, and who knows how good his information was?
I am not trying to equate the good historian with the good historical novelist. Each has different aims. The latter, in pursuit of these aims, is more likely to err than the former. But each, in a subjective profession, is fallible.
And the pure historian – like the good novelist, though in a lesser degree – moulds the past, whether he intends to or not; he colours it with his own personality. All good historians set their personal impression on the past: Thucydides, Gibbon, Macaulay, Froude, Rowse – go through them all, and they all do that, for it can’t be otherwise.
Probably the only way of judging a work of art is to try to measure or judge the integrity of intention. If it has that, it may be a masterpiece. Or it may be a very poor and flawed work. But with such integrity it can’t be all bad, and it can’t be all lost.
Chapter Nine
When I wrote the first Poldark it was suggested to me – though not by my publishers – that I might have it put out under another name. I rejected this, preferring to take all the blame – or all the praise – without the shelter of a pseudonym. Also, for such a purpose, I have never written quickly enough. I have a very long list of publications, but this is because I started young and have been writing for a very long time. At the height of my production I came to write a novel about every eighteen months. Now it is about two years. Three novels have each taken three years to write. (I have been fortunate in that, once I began to earn a living from writing, I always earned enough to be able to take my time. In my earlier years I would have eagerly accepted some other literary activity to help augment my pitiful income, but it was not offered. When it was offered I was able to turn it down, so I have virtually never done any peripheral literary work in my life.)
From the earliest years I have always felt that it was up to the public to buy me by name rather than style or subject. This arrogant view has only partly been vindicated. Had I kept to one style I know I should have become a richer man. But so what?
Distributors, booksellers, and, alas, the public (who are the final arbiters) all like to be sure of what they are buying. Why should a shop that has developed a substantial clientele with a taste for Wilkins’ marmalade be expected to try to sell them the same firm’s strawberry jam instead? The remark made by Wilfred Lock, about my fifth novel being ten years ahead of the others but that commercially he could shake me, has been confirmed and reconfirmed through the years.
Collins were delighted when I returned to Poldark after a lapse of twenty years. The Black Moon was launched with great acclaim. I remember meeting their chief London rep a few days after publication and, along with his continuing – if a little forced – enthusiasm, his dropping into the conversation the fact that the book was piling up unsold at Hatchard’s and Harrod’s.
There has been a lot of stimulus and relaxation in moving from one style to the other. Ideally, perhaps, one should have used the styles alternately – and this happened for a time in the early Fifties – but one can’t discipline one’s impulses – or I don’t. The sparse, fairly taut story-telling of a suspense novel, with its stronger frame of events and its sharp conclusive ending, is just as much fun to write as the longer, more leisurely, more exploratory style of the historical novel. Why should I have given up either? Or why crouch in one’s study endlessly writing too many books when there is so much else to be found in life?
The ‘so much else’ has been largely hedonistic. Until well past forty I played tennis to distraction. With no natural talent for the game whatever, and no coaching, I became fairly good out of sheer application. I never played for Cornwall, though twice invited to do so – the deterrent being to drive to somewhere like Criccieth in North Wales, to spend each day playing competitive tennis for one’s county and each evening dancing until the small hours: a normal young man’s dream of delight, but not mine; I never had the stamina.
But I came to play with a number of county players from other counties which were much stronger than Cornwall, and not a few of the near-top English players, people who got usually to the second or third round at Wimbledon though never beyond. Of course I could not have lived with them at singles, not even the women. At doubles I was good enough not to spoil their game.
Perranporth at that time attracted a wonderful collection of good tennis players – the knowledge that some were coming would attract others – over a period of about eight weeks a year, beginning mid- July. Three hard sets of men’s doubles on a sunny summer morning, with kindred souls, is one of the rare pleasures that I would ask for again if I ever get to heaven.
In the earlier Who’s Whos to which I contributed I used to list one of my hobbies as ‘ beachcombing’. My love of the sea, especially the Cornish sea, has already been made plain. It seems to run in the family. My brother had no greater ambition than to sit in the sun on some Cornish strand. My son once said that if windsurfing had been invented when he was a boy he might have chosen not to be an academic but to be a ‘beachcomber’ instead. I don’t know how serious he was.
On the north coast swimming is rarely possible; surfing is all. Before the Malibu, body surfing was the universal occupation. In Poldark’s Cornwall I have described some of the peculiar joys of
surfing. I will only repeat briefly some few moments of the wonderful summer before my son went to Charterhouse in the September.
All through that splendid decade, if a summer’s day broke bright I would begin to write immediately after breakfast and go on until Jean let me know, about noon, that the picnic was ready. Then we would bundle the things – including the children if they were home – into the car and dash off to West Pentire or Treyarnon and spend the day sitting in the sun and surfing when the time and tide were right, returning home about seven, for me to do a little desultory work before a late supper.
That was quite a reasonable arrangement in most summers – I could seize the good days and work in the bad – but in that summer there was no let up. The fine weather set in on the 9th of July and went on until the end of September. Not merely did I neglect my work, but Jean got utterly sick of cutting sandwiches and packing picnics. But as summer did not relax, neither did we. The difficulty about our English summer, and more particularly about a Cornish summer, is that one can never, never take the next day for granted. So often one has been deceived by a halcyon two days and stayed in the second day, knowing exactly how to enjoy the third, and the third dawns with grey skies, a strong wind, and a 20-degree drop in temperature. We didn’t trust it that year, and the summer went on and on. So for virtually ten weeks we picnicked and sunbathed and surfed every day, gradually turning more and more boot-polish brown.
My son was due to be delivered to his new school on the 18th of September. The 17th was largely taken up with preparations and packing, but in the early evening he and I escaped onto Perranporth beach on an incoming tide. An almost breathless evening but the sea was monstrous. It was one of those seas when a surfer catches one wave, is borne along a dizzying way, then dropped upon another, and so upon another, and even sometimes on a fourth.
As we staggered together out of the sea joyfully exhausted after our fifteenth run, Andrew said to me: ‘Daddy, people who haven’t done this haven’t lived.’ He was about right. It is my second request from Paradise.
I have driven cars ever since I was eighteen. The number has not been great because I prefer to live with a car and get to know it. First was a Morris Minor, a small four-seater with a folding roof and an engine given much to piston wear (one always seemed to be discussing ‘rings’). It was the only car I know that, being delivered to us new, was used for six months before I noticed that the number plate on the front differed from the number plate on the back. It was also delivered with the footbrake only just working; the handbrake itself, operated only on the transmission shaft, being the only means of bringing the car to a stop. I decided to take my mother to the cinema in Newquay. On the way a herd of cows was crossing the road in leisurely fashion. I applied the brake and nothing happened, except that we drifted into a cow. Everyone was very courteous; the cow was not hurt, the car not damaged, the farmer was apologetic, and I more justifiably so. We continued on our way, saw the film and got in to drive home. By then it was night, and we found our headlamps to be squinting skywards at the stars.
The following day I slithered up and down the hills to Falmouth to get the brakes seen to. It was not a good beginning for a new driver. In those days, of course, there was no driving test to pass. ‘If in trouble put both feet down,’ directed presumably, and hopefully, to the brake and clutch. I had had an unlucky career as a cyclist, and my brother and sister-in-law came to the conclusion, which they gladly imparted to my mother, that Winston ‘ would be no good with a car’.
The second was a Wolseley Hornet, that triumph of British engineering which had a very small six-cylinder engine noted for its excessive cylinder wear and no compensating increase in quietness. It also had a ‘twin top’ gear specially suitable, they said, for overtaking. Unfortunately the two top gear ratios were so close that, going up Cornish hills, one was often forced to drop into second and grind up at a funeral pace.
Third was a Standard Flying Twenty, a handsome car for those days: probably it would be rated as a three-litre now. I bought it secondhand from Ronnie Neame, who directed my first film and who had had it from a naval lieutenant who had kept it unused during the war, so that the engine and all moving parts were in very good condition. But the bodywork was poor, so I arranged to have it overhauled and resprayed. I remember picking it up in London: it was transformed, beautiful and black and shiny. But the engine was missing badly. I drove it to Piccadilly, where I had arranged to meet my film agent and Anthony Kimmins, the film director, who had a project to put to me. I parked outside – one could in those days – but my attention to his proposition was a little absent-minded, as I wondered how I was going to be able to drive this shiny black beast back to Cornwall on the morrow if the engine was going to run as if fifteen out of the twenty horses had glanders.
I should, no doubt, have had a better sense of proportion, for nothing came of the meeting, and when I returned to the car it refused to start at all. I got the bonnet up and discovered that during the respray three out of the six plugs had had their operative ends playfully – or accidentally – hammered down so that there was no gap left for the plug to spark. I was eventually able to buy a new set and, when installed, drove the car back to my club where I took a late dinner and bed. The car had been parked at a busy part of the north side of Piccadilly for five hours.
The Standard served us well and it was years before I sold it and bought a three-litre drophead Alvis. This was also a four-seater, but two-door and not so roomy.
The Alvis became the pride of our lives. Its suspension was very hard, but its roadholding and acceleration were superb. Without any attempt at all to go faster, I knocked an hour and a half off trips between London and Cornwall. It was in this car that I took my family on an annual holiday from Cornwall.
It was seven years before I could bring myself to change the Alvis, which I eventually did for a 3.4 Jaguar Saloon.
It was extraordinary to find a return of my travelling time between places to something like that of the old Standard. The new Jaguar, however good-looking it was and however silent and reliable the engine, however comfortable to ride in at modest speeds, was to me like a coffin on wheels. Coming from a car that glued itself to the road, I had a number of narrow escapes, not of hitting another car but of going off the road at a corner. The suspension was woefully soggy, the roadholding, in a fast car, really dangerous. But provided you didn’t actually drive it into a ditch, it was very trouble-free, and we kept the car for quite a while, along with a secondary car of assorted kinds: various Minis, a Riley (new style, alas), an Austin Healey Sprite.
When I sold the Jaguar I bought an Aston Martin DB6. This was the fastest thing I have ever driven. Its road-holding was still not as good as the Alvis but it was infinitely faster. At over 90 m.p.h. the Alvis began to smell of engine oil. The fastest I ever drove was in the first Aston: 140 mph on the Turin autostrada.
The engine was beautiful – none of that nonsense spread by envious rivals that after one crossing of London it needed a retune. You could drive it very fast indeed on the Continental motorways, yet the next day would be in the choked traffic of Monte Carlo, and it would crawl along the Riviera without a vestige of snatch. But the clutch was a brute.
After eighteen months I took the car back and ordered an automatic. In the jargon of the fashionable motor world, this new car would, they said, be built specially for me, my name on it, so to speak, from the beginning. But the automatic Aston was not a great car. It was as powerful as its predecessor, and at speed seemed to settle its back down securely on the road, but it was too low geared. At 120 m.p.h., which it would reach quickly and effortlessly, the rev-counter would be showing 6,000, in the red zone. It was also too low slung and grated on awkward dips (such as crossing King Harry Ferry). And it burnt out exhaust systems at a great rate. The new Avon tyres with which it was fitted lasted 9,000 miles, then I had seven punctures in five weeks. (The Pirelli tyres with which I replaced them not only improved the roadholding, they
lasted almost for ever.)
About this time I started buying Alfa Romeos as a second car. I went to look for a Lancia in a showroom on the Bayswater Road, and saw a drophead Alfa Spyder in the window. I never got any further. The salesman, seeing my interest, said: ‘ It’s a fun car, sir.’ I thought this a piece of conventional salesmanship, but in fact it proved to be the truth. Insofar as driving a car is ever anything more than a means of getting from place to place nowadays, the Alfa provided it. Though, of course, a much smaller and lighter car, it had almost all the qualities of the Alvis, with a more comfortable ride and fewer foibles. It is the car by which I now judge all others for suspension and roadholding. In the course of the years I had three of them: white, pagoda yellow, and dove grey.
When I sold the second Aston I fell for the new Jaguar XJS twelvecylinder model, and kept it for nine years before buying a second. The early XJSs had a very bad reputation for unreliability, but apart from one recurring fault, which took a time to sort out, it did me extremely well, and the second was even better. It is wonderfully quiet, with none of that throttle roar of the Aston (which some people love), very powerful, very easy to drive, and very fast. I have done 125 in the last one, and there still seemed a little more in it. It still does not corner as well as the Alvis and the Alfa, but I have no other complaint.
In addition to my own car I have rented many in different parts of the world, the United States, North and South Africa, Australia and most countries of Western Europe. On my first visit to Hollywood I hired a car to drive down the coast as far as La Jolla and San Diego, requesting a ‘ compact’ car, as they call them. The car was late arriving and they apologized for this and for the fact that they didn’t have a compact. They awarded me a Chevrolet Bel Air, which measured 17 feet 9 inches. It was the first automatic car I had ever driven. They didn’t even bother to turn the engine off: I signed the papers, they bundled our luggage into the enormous boot and edged me into the driving seat. Then they leaned in at the open window and said: ‘ That’s OK, Mr Graham, just don’t use your left foot.’
Memoirs of a Private Man Page 24
