But the full flush of the Modish London Literary World lay somewhere in the future, like any semblance of equilibrium for the self-generated dogfight that I did not yet dare to call my career. Having consistently lost money with the Review, which came out only occasionally, Ian Hamilton thought of a way to lose a lot more money by launching the New Review, a quarto-format glossy that would come out every month. Swept up in this project, I initially committed myself to writing long articles. Tactically, if I had been capable of thinking tactically, this would have been a useful way of proving publicly (the TLS was still anonymous) that my name was good for something more substantial than the fizz and crackle of the TV column. Though I had foreseen that the TV column might prove more accommodating to reasoned argument than it first appeared, it did not offer the opportunity to write seriously at length, and be known to be doing so. The facts say, however, that I wrote my New Review pieces because Ian told me to, with the usual baleful implication that to turn him down would be tantamount to a betrayal of him, myself, and Western civilization. But it was my own idea to write even more stuff for the New Review under the name of Rudolph Regulus, thus to help fill the magazine’s demand for copy, which proved insatiable from the jump. Most of this pseudonymous material was meant to be funny, and I hope some of it was, but there was nothing amusing about the way I had searched out yet another opportunity to overwork. When I turned up in Cambridge, I was a second baby to look after, with the difference that I could sit up in a proper chair and smoke. I smoked so much that I needed the hubcap of a Bedford van as an ashtray. I had found the hubcap lying in the gutter in Trumpington Street, and thought: ‘That will make an ideal ashtray.’ A man who thinks like that has to be a real smoker. From then on, with the help of the hubcap, I proved I was. At the end of the day – a phrase I usually like to avoid, unless I am actually talking, as here, about the end of the day – the hubcap would be full of cigarette butts. There was another baby on the way by then, which would make three. Playing the good provider, I had some excuse to be a burden, but it occasionally occurred to me that I must have been no source of joy. When it occurred to me, I worked harder, vaguely formulating plans for making a big enough score to hire a nanny. Still enjoying the blissful dawn of the two-career-family concept, like most toiling husbands I cherished the illusion that a toiling wife could be taken off the hook by a nanny, instead of saddled with the extra obligation to look after the nanny as well. Taken off the hook? Saddled? The mixed metaphor illustrates the mental confusion.
Pete went into studio with our first album at about that time and I would follow him in, so that I could sit around watching. I was convinced that the music business would provide the really big score that would set us all free of the alarm clock forever. In the popular-music business there were only two kinds of money you could make: not enough to keep a flea alive, and more than you could imagine. At the risk of sabotaging the narrative tension I feel bound to say now that we only ever made the first kind, but in the early days I would sit in the production booth of the recording studio and nurse the expectation that the sounds being mixed on the desk would not only satisfy the demands of uncompromising artistic integrity but also generate cash flow, as if a successful oil well could be sunk in the vegetable garden of a monastery. Yet there seemed some warrant for the expectation. Our music publisher, David Platz at Essex Music, had told us outright that if we couldn’t get a hit single then our plan to make highbrow LPs would result in a long agony. Kenny Everett, however, thought we had written a hit already. At the height of his radio glory, before he rose to an apotheosis as the most original mind on television, Everett was still running a BBC show that all the bright young people listened to. If he spun your record, it could get you an audience. He took to one of the songs on Pete’s first LP for Philips, Beware of the Beautiful Stranger. The song that Everett liked was called ‘The Master of the Revels’. Perhaps seeing himself in the title role, Everett spun the disc on every show he did for weeks on end. He raved about it. Just as we were poised to take off, he got fired for making a libellous joke which allowed the interpretation that the Minister of Transport’s wife might have had an easy time passing her driving test.
We found it hard to believe our bad luck, because the one thing we knew about getting a hit was that airplay was everything. Hence the life-or-death importance of the BBC playlist. If your record was on the playlist, it wouldn’t necessarily get a bullet beside it, but if it was banned from the playlist you would get a bullet through the head. We had high hopes for a song called ‘Have You Got a Biro I Can Borrow?’. The BBC said that ‘Biro’ was still a registered brand name in Hungary and that they therefore couldn’t broadcast the word, because that would breach their house rules about advertising. Otherwise they would be glad to put the track on the playlist. Could I change the word? How about ‘Have You Got a Ball-point I Can Borrow?’ I had an attack of artistic integrity and said, ‘Over my dead body.’ Well, the BBC could arrange that. As far as that song was concerned, my body was duly dead. Unfortunately Pete’s was too. What I should have done, of course, was cave in immediately. Even the Rolling Stones would change a word to get on the air. But I still had a bad tendency to look down on the fundamentals before I had submitted to them. It made me outspoken at the wrong times. The plain speaking that I directed pointlessly at the featureless face of the BBC monolith I should have employed in the recording studio for Pete’s album, where I thought that a mistake was being made in mixing the vocal so far forward, so that the words reached the listener before the music did. Not out of modesty (definitely not), but out of a real conviction that a song should hit you in the knees first and climb to the brain later, I wanted the words to filter through, not leap out. I should have said so. It might have helped. But everybody else present, with Pete himself to the fore, was either a musician or a sound technician. I respected their expertise at the exact moment when an ordinary punter’s view, the only thing I was good for, might have altered the balance. Still, it was undeniably an ego boost to hear my lyrics coming out of the loudspeakers, and there were people saner than Everett who seemed to admire some of the results.
Nick Tomalin was prominent among them. I inflicted the discs on him and he found time to listen. (In retrospect I wonder how that last part happened: at this end of my career, young people flatteringly weigh me down with more of their first records, novels, and books of poetry than I could possibly listen to even if I did nothing else.) Nick, whose opinions I respected about the fertile ground between popular and serious culture – respected them, I suppose, because they coincided with my wishes – would recite one of my own lyrics back to me and say that he thought there would be a market for our kind of stuff if we could only get it on the air. The lyric he quoted was called ‘Carnations on the Roof’. It was the story of a dead metal worker whose hands, when he is cremated, burst into coloured flames because of the grains of metal embedded in the skin. It was my version of the Dyer’s Hand. Nick liked the idea that I had once worked in a factory and had actually seen a man like that. It satisfied Nick’s idea of journalistic authenticity, which, he believed, could only arise from the weighing and judging of observed reality. This was a pretty deep idea to follow on from hearing a pop lyric, and I thought that to arouse such a response would be a worthwhile reason to pursue our course to the limit, win or lose. The day was there to be seized. The most telling phrase that Horace attached to carpe diem was spem non pone secutas. Put no faith in the future. That idea came into sharp focus when Nick got killed.
He went to cover the Yom Kippur War. Somewhere on the Golan heights, he got out of the jeep and was no doubt glancing obliquely at an expanse of hot geography when the rocket-propelled grenade arrived. I must have been in the middle of typing up my latest TV column when the thing happened, because just as I was making my last corrections I looked up and saw Terry’s assistant literary editor, Miriam Gross, standing up and holding the telephone as if it had just stung her. Still, today, one of the most beau
tiful women in London, Miriam in those days was the object of all male eyes and it was not unusual to look at her on any excuse at all. But this was different. In my childhood I got early practice at watching a woman receiving the news of death, so I guessed immediately what was up, although I would never have guessed who was involved until she said his name. She said his whole name. ‘Nick Tomalin’s been killed.’ Silence raced through the open-plan office, and then the whole building, as the shock wave spread.
Scratch one more father figure. As usual I got the mental barriers up immediately. But there was no shutting out the sense of squandered promise. Later on it happened again when the gifted poet and political writer Francis Hope was lost on the DC-10 that went down outside Paris after some poor dunce at Charles de Gaulle airport jammed a cargo door shut instead of locking it properly. A ten-dollar RPG round, a door that should have been designed to open in instead of out: the discrepancy between cause and effect is part of the pattern, and a chilling reminder, for those who need it, that chance has no respect for what has been achieved. But Nick had already proved himself. What could I be said to have achieved if I were taken now? Time to look after one’s health. Time for a long, life-enhancing drag on a cigarette. But above all, time to get serious.
10. PASTING IT TOGETHER
One way to get serious would have been to do something about Louis MacNeice. Alas, my few pages of notes reminded me all too vividly of my PhD thesis about Shelley, an opus that had never advanced far beyond an outline. A good general tip for would-be writers in any field is to beware of outlines. If you keep going back to elaborate the outline, instead of getting to work on the first of its listed topics, then the outline has become a substitute for the project, which will never get done. It works like a cargo cult: the natives lay out bits and pieces of junk in the rough shape of an aircraft, and wait for it to fly. They start fighting over who gets the window seat. But the thing never stirs, and eventually the jungle closes over its forlorn outline. Even on that level, my MacNeice outline looked skimpy. Lacking the nerve to tell Charles Monteith that I had got nowhere, I told Ian Hamilton instead. As he did so often, the world’s least practical man came through with the right practical advice. He could do that for everyone except himself. On this occasion, while we both stood in the Pillars drinking beer for starters and Scotch for chasers, he cut my tale of woe short with his trademark amused sneer and said the thing that had never occurred to me. ‘Give them another book.’ This, he said, would help cure my chief problem. I had a blurred image. I was arousing resentment on all sides by playing with every toy in the kindergarten. The literati, in particular, were pissed off because I was writing articles out of what seemed no particular qualification except an urge to take their space. ‘Everybody knows who you are, but nobody knows what you do.’ I can remember these sentences of his because they stung. His advice was that I should collect all my literary pieces into a book, give it a title that made it sound as if it meant business, and thus promote the impression that my whole miscellaneous activity was part of a plan. ‘Everything changes when you get a book out,’ he snarled. ‘Suddenly you’re an author.’ The Edmund Wilson piece, he suggested, would be a good lead-off for the book. Here, I made my own contribution to the scheme. ‘I could call the book The Metropolitan Critic.’ He nodded. ‘Perfect. Sounds confident. Sounds arrogant as hell, in fact. Let the bastards argue with that.’
For the first time in my life, I sat down with a large pair of scissors to cut out my recent articles from their respective magazines and newspapers. There were quite a few that didn’t make the cut, as it were. Already forming the resolution not to write anything that I couldn’t at least consider for future publication in book form, I consigned them to the scrap heap. Those which I thought passed muster I further cut into column-width strips and pasted them onto sheets of foolscap. Haunted by distant memories of unsuccessful school projects, I nervously contemplated the crinkled and blotched strip running down the middle of each page, leaving room on each side for corrections, for rewriting, and for toning down. Plenty of that last thing proved necessary. Phrases which had only last year struck me as beaten gold now looked gimcrack. Actually too many of them stayed in, but I failed to spot them for the same reason that I had written them: lack of tone control. On a charitable view, faults of tone are the inevitable consequence of early exuberance: only a dullard is infallibly decorous from his first day. On a less charitable view, faults of tone are the deadly product of a tin ear working in combination with a loose mouth. But as I cut, pasted, and cursed far into the night, I could congratulate myself that a further stage was being reached. Somewhere inside the bumpy pages that piled up like popadoms, a picture was forming. This was the literary commentary of someone who had no academic job, no prospect of official preferment, and indeed no obvious credentials except as a common reader. Clumsy or not, it was all done for love. The finished manuscript just fitted into a box-file that bulged when I buttoned it shut. I tried to suppress the sceptical inner voice that said the box-file would become an actual book only if Faber agreed. Otherwise, like so many other unpublished authors, I would be merely toting a manuscript, like that mad don I used to see around Cambridge, endlessly carrying his stack of old newspapers on their random journey to nowhere. And my manuscript didn’t even look like a manuscript. When I unbuttoned the box, the top pages came burgeoning upwards as if the paste were yeast. The Andromeda Strain! It’s growing!
But Faber went for it. Charles Monteith, who must have guessed long before that the MacNeice project had the same chance of becoming operational as Blue Steel or Skybolt, even looked pleasantly surprised to be getting something out of nothing. He muttered dark obscurities about the difficulties of transferring the contract, but I was able to mutter back that my agent would be taking care of that. Yes, I had finally acquired an agent, or rather an agent had acquired me. Young, pretty, and still assembling her first roster of likely prospects, Christine Pevitt of Farquhar’s had been following my work and roped me in at just the right moment. I often get asked by young writers about how one goes about getting an agent, and the answer is that I have no idea. Look busy enough and an agent will get you. She herself will probably be only at the start of her career, and on the lookout for clients. Later on, her client list will be full. Never mind: when you, the hungry young writer, succeed in getting a few big pieces published in magazines, or in placing a manuscript of any kind with a publisher, some hungry young agent will probably turn up. But agents themselves don’t place manuscripts with publishers, or at least they didn’t in those days. Publishers didn’t take recommendations from agents, from other writers, or from anybody. Publishers were in the business of looking for publishable manuscripts, and they had paid readers of their own to aid them in the search. Similarly, the editors of magazines and newspapers commissioned articles directly from the writers of their choice. The agent’s job was to look after the contracts, from whatever source, making sure that writer’s take was negotiated upwards to the limit of what the market would bear, and that the resulting cash was collected in due time, instead of being conveniently left in the publisher’s bank to earn interest for him instead of the writer. All this was quite a big enough job without the agent becoming a star too. Nowadays some of the agents are stars, occasionally rather bigger ones than most of their clients, and we are told that they handle a lot more than these mundane details, even to the extent of creating new talents out of nowhere. It seems more likely that they poach from each other names already established, and that all those routine requirements I just mentioned still apply. But the work is so painstaking that you can’t blame the occasional agent for welcoming an attribution of glamour, which the culture-page journalists are increasingly eager to grant, even when the agent is not, as so often, a personable woman. In fact the unpersonable men have become the biggest charisma-merchants of the lot, sometimes even carrying code names, like terrorist masterminds in the kind of movie that Bruce Willis turns down so they get Jean-Claud
e Van Damme instead. (Imagine some dweeb adjusting his tie while he looks into the mirror and mutters, ‘They call me the Vulture.’) Though some of today’s big-name writers have undoubtedly benefited from the kind of agent who is shown to the best table while demanding top dollar, whether the agent’s job has really changed all that much is a matter for doubt. But in those days there was no doubt: the job was quite big enough, and no agent, however cunning, could turn a duffer into a desirable publishing proposition, just as no makeover, even if it includes plastic surgery, can turn an ordinary but glamour-struck young woman into Natalie Portman. This is only a brief disquisition about an extensive subject, but I put it in writing here because so many new writers, when they encounter their first disappointments, are driven to conclude that the reaction of the publishing world to their sincere and self-sacrificing efforts must be some kind of conspiracy, which could be circumvented if they had the right representation. There is no such conspiracy. There is only a market, which you can get into only by having something to sell – and something to sell means something that people want to buy.