The Cornish novels, twelve in all, not far off two million words, have occupied for better or worse a considerable part of my life. Over long periods they have been entirely quiescent, though never forgotten. After the first four, which covered in the writing only about eight years, there was the long gap of twenty years before I took them up again.
I was very doubtful then whether I could ever get back into the mood in which I had written Poldark, even if I wanted to. Life moves on. One becomes more cynical, more sophisticated – and one’s work mirrors it. All through two decades I had received letters from readers asking me to continue the story. Friends similarly – especially, of course, Cornish friends. And the memory of that ‘possession’ which had taken hold of me once or twice in the writing – especially in Demelza – still stirred. None of my modern novels had created this haunted sensation. But the modern novels gave me a lot of satisfaction in other ways, and were much more successful.
Since I returned to England I had had one success after another, and was still oppressed by the levels of taxation. I badly wanted to leave England again for this reason, but knew I could not – or would not. England, somewhere in England, I knew now, had to be my home. So after Angell, Pearl and Little God I found myself under a number of pressures. I had no need to make money for some years; my new publisher, Collins, were ardent admirers of the Poldark novels – readers’ letters still came; and over and above all this, far more important than all this, was a growing desire and a curiosity to know what all these people would do after Christmas 1793, where I had left them for so long.
So a new novel, The Black Moon, was dated to begin on the 14th of February 1794, seven weeks after the end of Warleggan. Only in reality was there a gap of twenty years.
It was hard going to begin. The style seemed to be lost. I was trying to return to the eighteenth century and a family saga, a different, slower tempo, a rebirth of characters long since left behind. And although I didn’t take too much account of this, I knew that by changing styles I should be disappointing as many readers as I pleased.
I have somewhere, writing before, described the return to Poldark as being as difficult as breaking the sound barrier. This is an exaggeration, but for some months I told no one except my wife what was going on, lest I should find the attempt beyond me and give it all up.
But after a few months the momentum came back; the characters had clearly only been latent, for they were active and lively from the start, almost as if they had never been neglected at all. They sprang up around me.
And the momentum increased, and the preoccupation took over. Halfway through I called to see my accountant one day and told him cheerfully that for a year or two I was ‘returning to my nonprofit-making activities’, meaning the Poldarks. I told Ian Chapman, and he was delighted, for he and his wife Marjory had long been admirers of the first four books. (Not so the reps, who, for all their enthusiasm, rightly foresaw the difficulty they would have reselling a new/old style Winston Graham to the booksellers and the public, whose memory is usually short. And so it proved.)
Towards the end the novel seemed to take over my life – even though it was being written in Sussex, not Cornwall – and the intense absorption, exciting but exhausting, reached a climax in the last two weeks, when I sometimes wrote 4,000 words – in longhand – in a day.
When it was over and done with and after a decent interval, I began the sixth Poldark, The Four Swans. Irrespective of what reception The Black Moon might receive, there was no question now but that I must complete another sequence of these novels – though this time it was to be three books, not four; and my feeling was to write these straight through, not intersperse them with modern novels as had been done with the first four. A whole set of new characters had flooded into The Black Moon, and they demanded time and space to work out their own destiny.
For some years in a desultory way there had been interest shown by the film industry in the first four Poldark novels. A firm called Hemway – part-owned by David Hemmings, who later starred in the film of my novel The Walking Stick – had considered taking out an option and had tried to get a production team together. Then Ian Chapman handed the books to Robert Clark, the millionaire chairman of Associated British Pictures, and he at once declared an interest, which he never abandoned all his life.
I should say in the years that had passed since the first four were published, Ward, Lock had continued to keep them in print, and they had been selling, though very slowly. In 1950 I met Max Reinhardt, then married to Margaret Leighton, but soon after we met his marriage broke up, and in 1956, being a temporary bachelor, he invited me to go as his guest to the Publishers’Annual Congress, this year to be held in Florence and Rome. I accepted, and we had a wonderful time – the Italians, regardless of cost, putting on all the possible panoply of their rich country for the world’s publishers, from a Palio staged specially for us at Siena and an opera in Florence at which Victoria de los Angeles sang, to an audience of the Pope in Rome.
I did not realize until too late that in fact the one species not represented at this teeming conference was an Author. I was the only one there, and I had no business there. I’m sure Max didn’t care. We laughed and joked our way through eight days of festivities. Of some slight embarrassment to me was the assumption of the authorities that, as I was Mr Reinhardt’s guest, I was probably Mrs Reinhardt. Publishers wore red labels, their wives received purple. I wore the purple. I had invitations to dress shows, beauty salons, hair stylists. I told Max I ought to be considered one of the Congress tarts.
With us on this adventure went Denys Kilham Roberts, Secretary General of the Society of Authors, and his wife Betty. Their marriage too was wobbling dangerously near the rocks, but at the time all went well.
A few weeks before leaving England I had sold the serial rights of my latest novel, The Sleeping Partner, to John Bull magazine. Just before I left, the editor wrote to tell me he liked the book so much he had decided to increase the payment by an extra 200 guineas. Talking to Max and Denys when we were in Florence I told them of this and added, ‘ It’s enough to destroy one’s lack of faith in human nature.’
The same day they were discussing the huge success Ralph Richardson and Peggy Ashcroft had recently had at Stratford in Titus Andronicus. I said, ‘ With a cast like that, it’s money for old rape.’
So, briefly, I earned a reputation for wit. Two days later Denys Kilham Roberts introduced me to Marghanita Laski and said: ‘You’ll know Winston as a novelist, of course. But he is also a very witty man.’
I was so embarrassed by this introduction that even my general tendency to see the funny side of things deserted me, and she and I talked soberly of Gothic and Renaissance churches and the Italian tendency to architectural flamboyance. Then she said magisterially: ‘Are you a member of PEN?’ I said, no, and she said, ‘Oh, you must be.’ So I meekly joined there and then. I have never regretted it, but I am sure no one can have guessed that my membership, stretching now over forty years, springs from a desire to appease Marghanita for turning out such a dull and unfunny man.
One day we were walking across the Piazza della Signoria and Max said to me: ‘You see that man ahead of us, that’s Stanley Unwin. He’s selling The Bodley Head. They say he wants £80,000 for it. Ridiculous!’
Three months later Max bought it.
Earlier he had said to me: ‘As you know, I own two publishing firms. They are agreeable occupations, and I have enough to live comfortably on and to treat them as a side issue. Or I could buy a large established publishing firm and take it as my full-time profession.’ His purchase of the Bodley Head told me he had made his choice.
Less than a year later he came to stay with us in Cornwall, and walking on the beach one day he said: ‘ The Bodley Head has a fine backlist but I would like to add to it. Do you have any of your earlier novels which have gone out of print and would like to see republished?’
It happened that Ward, Lock had become discouraged by
the falling sales of the four Poldark novels and had written to tell me they felt these books had reached the end of the road and they were allowing them to go out of print. The rights had therefore reverted. I hesitantly told Max of these books and invited him to have a look at them. He promised to do so. I told him that, as my other novels were doing so well, I would be quite happy to allow him to put them out on a little or no royalty basis if they suited him, because I was fond of the books and would like to see them in circulation again. When he returned to London and read the books he said he would be happy to publish. Of course he gave me a fair royalty.
This digression is to make the point that, had the first four Poldarks not been republished by Bodley Head in an attractive new format, they would have been out of print for years before Collins eventually decided to do them in Fontana, and much less likely to catch the eye of Robert Clark and other film-makers.
As I have said, the late George Hardinge, an editor at Collins, was a great admirer of the Poldark novels, and his prophecy that in paperback they would be ‘ a licence to print money’ was proved to be true.
In this climate, Robert Clark took an option on the books and set in motion a plan for a huge and expensive film covering all the first four books, intending to make of them a sort of Cornish Gone With The Wind. Kenneth Harper was to be the producer and Vincent Tilsley the scriptwriter.
Jean and I went down and met them in Cornwall, and we had an exciting five days looking for locations. The March weather was horrible, drizzle and mist every day, but I was able to show them many of the scenes that the film would expect to include.
I took them to Port Isaac and Roscarrock and Port Quin and to Trevellas Porth. At Trevellas the mist was thick and ghostly. We slithered our way down in two big cars almost to the edge of the sea. It was not a pretty road, having been used for more than twenty years for test trials on the London to Land’s End motor rally: hairpin bends and surfaces of loose stone and rock. The old mineshafts loomed in the mist, the sea muttered on the rocks, a solitary gull told us of its bereavement. Vincent said he would like to go off on his own for a bit. He was obviously inspired, and we waited for him there in the damp, clammy mist, not speaking ourselves, listening perhaps for the tramp of long-dead miners, for the hiss and suck of the long-silent engines; for the clang of the long-fallen changing bell. Nothing had altered here except time and weather, turning it all to rubble and to waste.
The following day we went to St Day, the very centre of the old copper-mining belt, to Redruth and Camborne, stopped at South Crofty, where a mine still worked and was in profit, and then to St Ives and Penzance. In the few days we saw much, and then we all returned to London.
Vincent Tilsley wrote a very good script, but inevitably the story had to be hideously slashed. And even more would have had to come out, for his script as written would have run for at least five hours.
However I need not have been concerned (if concerned is the word). Unknown to us, a financial battle was developing in London with EMI trying to take over Associated British Pictures. After months of conflict they won, and, it being the invariable custom of incoming moguls to axe any projects initiated by outgoing moguls, Poldark was axed.
At about this time I was approached by Donald Wilson, one of the BBC’s foremost producers, with a proposition of his own. He had been the moving force which had finally got The Forsyte Saga to the TV screen, and he was looking for some other project to follow it up. He did not want a historical subject, he wanted it to be about modern life, and thought its setting should be Bristol.
In 1497 Giovanni and his son Sebastian Cabot had sailed from that port under letters patent from Henry VII, and had discovered Nova Scotia. The family of Cabot had been in and around Bristol for most of their lives but had left no apparent heirs. Donald Wilson’s idea was to suppose that in the twentieth-century a family called Cabot was still living in Bristol. A good writer, he thought, could produce a long saga about this family bringing in whichever occupations and industries and cultures he fancied to use from the Bristol of today.
It was a clever idea, and I was not untempted. But it would be a very big project, and I had done nothing like it before. As usual lacking confidence, I tried to get out of it. I had never written a script, I said (which was only true of TV). It would involve the creation of an enormous range of characters, and I was not sure I could do this.
Donald said: ‘Why not go there and scout round for a few days, see if anything appeals to you? I can lay it on.’
So after humming and ha-ing a bit more I agreed to go.
It was February. Bristol in summer has a very pleasant climate. Sometimes in the winter it is like Alaska. For the first three days I was there it was like Alaska.
I arrived at Temple Meads to be greeted by Brandon Acton-Bond, the head of BBC Bristol. A first slight shock. Accustomed to the chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royces of the film industry, I blinked twice at the careworn Hillman Minx and at Brandon’s shabby overcoat.
He drove me to the hotel and we had dinner. He was a man of fifty-odd, dark, thin, pleasantly intellectual. We got on well. Before he left he told me of the sandsuckers which, like other shipping in those days, came directly into the centre of Bristol, and whose duty it was to keep the channel from silting up.
‘I’ll show you them tomorrow,’ he said, ‘and you can meet some of the captains and crews. But first we’ll go round the docks.’
Next morning it was grey with a bitter east wind. I shivered at the thought of the ordeal to come. My overcoat had felt like paper last night. Eventually I decided to keep my thick pyjamas on under everything else. I went downstairs feeling a little constricted but protected against the worst.
Brandon drew up in his Hillman. ‘You looked pretty cold last night,’ he said, ‘so I’ve brought you an extra overcoat.’
We went round the docks. Only my nose suffered in the east wind. We went aboard a sandsucker and I met the captain and crew. This part was really interesting. (A member of the Cabot family working as mate on a sandsucker?)
At lunch I was able to shed the two coats, but the restaurant still seemed oppressive. After lunch Brandon took me to the Theatre Royal to see the Old Vic Company. Leaving one coat in the car but lugging my own along, I took a cramped seat in the third row. By the end of the act I was melting away like a wax candle.
‘Excuse me,’ I said and went off hurriedly to the lavatory, where I all but had to strip, dragged off my pyjamas, tore back into the rest of my clothes and was just in my seat in time for curtain up with the pockets of my overcoat fairly bulging.
The rest of my stay was surprisingly stimulating. I went back to the sandsuckers twice more, saw another play, went round the Wills factory, saw where the Bristol car was made, etc., and all the time ideas were tugging at me.
The girls in the cigarette factory were great fun. I went back a second time. They were jolly, uninhibited, very frank, didn’t seem to mind my company at all. One of them told me that until last Christmas she had always believed that Jesus Christ was the first man and that Adam and Eve came after.
I went home, talked it over with Jean. I consulted the few notes I had made. After all, it would be fun to create another, modern saga, after writing Poldark. I rang Donald Wilson and said I would have a shot at it.
He said: ‘Good, good, I’m delighted. Could you let us have a synopsis of the story.’
I said: ‘Sorry, I’ve never written a synopsis in my life, and it’s too late to start now.’
Embarrassed pause. ‘Well, before I commission this I have to show something to my superiors.’
I said: ‘Things only grow as I write. But look: I’ll be happy to write you six chapters – that may be about 100 pages of type – happy to do that. Will that suit?’
He agreed at once.
I can’t recall how long this took me. The characters were formulating themselves quite quickly, so it may have been less than six weeks. I sent a copy of the chapters to Donald and a second cop
y to Brandon.
A couple of weeks elapsed and then Donald came on the telephone to me to say how delighted he was with the piece, and Brandon, he said, was equally excited.
Unfortunately between the time he first approached me and when I delivered there had been a turnaround in the higher echelons of the BBC. Donald Baverstock had taken over as head of drama and had decreed that serials were ‘ out’. The new fashion was for a ‘series’, in which the author creates a group of characters and writes each week a separate story for them. Of course there could be continuing interest from one instalment to the next, but each one should have a separate beginning, middle and end.
I said: ‘That’s a form of short story. All right for them as likes them. But I don’t write short stories.’
We argued, amicable to the end, but I refused to budge.
He said: ‘Please think it over for a week or two.’
‘I will,’ I promised, and I did.
The outcome was still, regretfully, ‘no’.
It is the only time in my life that I started something and then aborted it.
Inevitably it was not all lost. The character of Angell, based on a solicitor at the Savile Club and whom I had had in mind for some time before, moved over to a novel I wrote later using his name. The character of Deborah I used in the novel The Walking Stick.
Chapter Five
In the meantime things had been moving elsewhere. Robert Clark, deprived of his position at Associated British Pictures, had bought London Films, which had continued to exist since the death of Korda solely for the purpose of exploiting the many famous films the great Hungarian had made in his lifetime. Clark had other ideas, and he bought another option on the Poldarks and tried to set it up in the television world.