Shawn gradually absorbed the evidence that his offer was being turned down. It probably hadn’t happened to him since WWII, but he was a polite man, and ready to whisper of other things. Remembering all the advice I had received as to the desirability of an early exit, I made noises about leaving, but Shawn made noises – very quiet ones, as of a mouse on the rack – about how it would pain him if I deprived him of my company so soon. Thus it went on until the air out there in 44th Street grew dark. For years ahead I went on being astonished by how much time Shawn had lavished on me, but it could have been that Lillian Ross, his great secret love, was out of town for the day and had left him with an afternoon to fill. Or he might have just been hungry for a conversation that didn’t matter. He was a powerful man, but perhaps he had been lonely. Almost everybody you have ever heard of spends a lot of time being that. Finally he left to meet J. D. Salinger or Mary McCarthy or John Updike, or whoever was first on his evening roster. I sat there alone, faced with the long task of finding reasons for what I had done by instinct. Even today the best reason I can think of is that I didn’t want to exchange my life for an illusion that so exactly fitted my desires. Reality was meant to feel like the conquest of the self, not of the world.
So there was my subject: an ordinary life. I was quite aware that I could do things only a few people can do. But I was equally aware that in most aspects of character I scarcely attained the average of the common run: I was a very ordinary person. That was the principle I stuck to while I was writing the first volume of my autobiography, and I have stuck to it ever since, as the project stretches into this fourth volume and now looks like heading towards a fifth. The self-deprecation is still sincerely meant. Back at the beginning, it seemed like the least I could do, so as to start paying back the luck that had given me the means to earn a living when I had no other qualifications. By then, my first agent, Christine, had left the literary business to go into television, a move that I myself still regarded as drastic. My new agent was the equally glamorous Pat Kavanagh, who was quite accustomed to being admired by her male clients. Blessed with a direct manner, she made it clear that she didn’t necessarily salute the idea of my writing an autobiography. ‘You haven’t done anything.’ That, I tried to explain, was the point. The very idea was ridiculous, and therefore automatically comic: as long as I could make my memories of an Australian childhood and adolescence amusing in themselves, the book would stand a chance through being the opposite of serious. She looked dubious but thought that Tom Maschler of Cape might go for it. To Charles Monteith of Faber, he who had gone to sleep during Peregrine Prykke’s Pilgrimage, it would probably sound like the boy from the bush pulling another fast one. As things happened, Monteith wasn’t asked for his opinion. The project got no further than Maschler, who called me in and did a routine by which he proved, with statistics, that publishing such a book would be, for him, the same as throwing money on the fire, but he would do so because occasionally a man has to risk all in the defence of his integrity. The print run would be small, he warned me, and the advance would be small to match. I said with some confidence that Pat Kavanagh would be interested to hear all this. Nothing daunted, Maschler went on to say that I would be risking my future but he would be risking everything. His spiel practically had soundtrack music by Elmer Bernstein. It was him and me against the world. He would clear the path ahead, placate the board of directors, drug the sales representatives. But this unique idea of an autobiography by someone who had done nothing must go through. All I had to do was write the thing. He even offered me a free cup of coffee – a spendthrift gesture he usually made only for John Fowles. But it was his enthusiasm that clinched the deal. Between author and publisher, the relationship works awfully like sex: there is no substitute for being keen on each other. There was also a biscuit.
After a build-up like that I expected that the actual writing process would be agonizing, but it came easily when I could find the time. Some of the time found itself. My television appearances, dotted irregularly through the decade, had attracted the attention of one of the smartest executives at LWT, Barry Cox. If he had been less smart he might have ended up running a TV channel, but like Will Wyatt he was doomed by his sanity and competence to making sense of the chaos created by managerial zanies. I owe him a lot. In fact – it just occurred to me – I owe him a thousand quid. The year before last I bumped into him on Waterloo Bridge and he made the mistake of asking me what I had been up to since my retirement. I told him that my new idea for a multimedia personal web site was going to revolutionize television. No doubt sick of hearing about new concepts that would revolutionize television, he handed over a grand to help www.clivejames.com stay on the air for a few more days so that it could burn his money along with mine. He’s that kind of man, although, since hardly any men are that kind of man, you might not recognize him when I say so. At the time, I had met very few people like him. The show he was cooking up for LWT at its new citadel on the South Bank was called Saturday Night People. It would feature Russell Harty, Janet Street-Porter, and one other in yet another survey of the week, but this time based on solid journalism. Harty, whose life was to be cut sadly short, was a very sophisticated man with a knack for looking shocked on air. Since Janet Street-Porter specialized in the outrageous, they worked naturally as a double act, although off screen Janet privately, but sometimes very audibly, denounced Harty as a patronizing git. There was something to it: gay men, still fighting their own battles, weren’t yet very attuned to feminism.
But once the cameras were on those two, they were the ideal couple. Harty looked and sounded like an aesthete who knew Alan Bennett quite well, and Janet looked and sounded like a cockney female assassin who had been trained to kill with her voice, which was not only raucous but seemed permanently surprised, like a macaw taking off repeatedly from a steam catapult. They were the two sides of the class war, temporarily seated behind dodgem-shaped desks. The question was about who would occupy the third desk. How would the Third Person fit in? Barry’s rationale for picking me was that I didn’t fit in at all. The more that I played the visiting Aussie with the unexpectedly confident perspective on disintegrating Britain, the better he liked it. All three front-persons were fed with proper news stories. These had been put together by a team of journalists commanded by Peter Hillmore, an able young editor whose career was to be cut short by illness. But he was still going full blast when we started off, so we weren’t short of material. The question was how to comment on it. Each in his or her own way, all three of us worked it out. There was plenty of time because the show was only local in its first season. At first I was the slowest to get going. I took the stories handed to me by Hillmore’s research team, switched the words just enough so that I could read them out, and saved my comment for the end. Things were a bit dull. Then I learned to interlace my commentary all the way through, and things brightened up. Finally, with Barry’s encouragement, I learned to get outdoors, find a suitably grotesque showbiz story, and bring it back for dissection.
By an accident that helped to change the course of my career, I found myself sitting through the first screening of a movie called The Swarm, starring Michael Caine as a scientist saving the world from the killer bees. In the dark of the Leicester Square Odeon, as the killer bees swarmed all over Richard Chamberlain and reduced Olivia de Havilland to a hive, I wrote down Michael Caine’s dialogue in my notebook. ‘Everyone inside! The killer bees are coming!’ (Tip for writing in the dark: write big. The worst you can do is waste paper, whereas if you can’t read what you wrote you will have wasted the whole assignment.) In the next edition of the show I gave an account of the movie’s plot, with a recital of Michael Caine’s best lines. Since everybody can do Michael Caine’s voice – the only question is whether he can – my deficient powers of mimicry were no handicap. As I evoked the splendours of the screenplay – while being careful not to underrate the threat to civilization posed by killer bees – I could feel my story going over with the studi
o audience. There was a lady in a knitted hat who could take no more. Better than that, there was evidence next day that it had gone over with the audience at home. People came up to me in the street and talked about killer bees. Some of them imitated killer bees. On the other side of the street, people would wave their arms rapidly and do a buzzing thing with their mouths. It was my first experience of starting a craze on TV and I could feel it working exactly the same way as the first drink I ever had. I tried to remember the effect of my last drink, and how the first drink had led to it by an inexorable process. But there seemed just as great a danger of getting addicted to Puritanism. Here, surely, was a harmless pleasure. The following week I spoke again of The Swarm, and found that the audience couldn’t hear enough about it. For the last show of the season, the studio crew, in cahoots with the art department, rigged up a huge killer bee so that it could be lowered to attack me at the appropriate moment. Usually surprises don’t work in studio, but I managed to keep my head as I struggled, summoning my Michael Caine voice to cry: ‘Everyone outside! The killer bees are attacking the franchise!’ Janet hit the bee with a rolled-up script. Or something like that. There is no tape to say any different.
Saturday Night People was off to the races, but it never raced on the network. Lew Grade would not have Russell Harty on the air in the ATV area, which was too large a chunk of the network for the other stations to ignore. If Lew Grade’s prejudice against Harty was based, as seemed likely, on Harty’s homosexuality, then we were out of business until such time as the victim could prove he had gone straight, perhaps by marrying Janet. Otherwise there was nothing we could do about it. Luckily for me, there was nothing LWT could do about it either. The show was too expensive to keep running without a network slot. On the other hand, we had contracts that had to be honoured. So we all got paid top whack for a whole season of not making a television programme for LWT. Since the contract said that we couldn’t make television programmes for anyone else either, there was time to burn.
16. BEYOND THE ATTACK OF THE KILLER BEES
I burned it writing my autobiography. In Cambridge I would sit in the Copper Kettle, writing down my memories of being a failure at high-school mathematics while Stephen Hawking hummed past outside with equations for the birth of the universe spinning in his head. In the Barbican I would sit in the sill-free window and conjure the kookaburras of childhood while ducks came in to land on the lake for the next round of their world crapping championship. It would have been slower work if I had delved deeper into my psychological condition, but a cautionary instinct, which might well have been part of the condition, kept me safely on the surface. Nevertheless I could spot the occasional stain of grief soaking through. Quickly I would cover it with the moon-dust of tall stories, some of which I had been telling for years. Veterans of the Footlights club room or the Kebab House literary lunch would have been able to recite some of them along with me. It was not the first outing for my routines about Australia’s deadly snakes and spiders. But it was the first time they had been put to paper, and it was soon clear to me that the structure of the narrative had benefited from long rehearsal. There was an episode about billycarts which had once actually been written down, when I was doing my year as a junior literary editor on the Sydney Morning Herald in the late 1950s. On that first flight, the episode had been called ‘They Fell Among Flowers’. This time it was incorporated seamlessly into a larger narrative, but there could be no doubt that the hurtling, booming, disastrously crashing billycarts had set the tone for the book long before the book occurred.
The book was an animated cartoon. Although I liked to think that the story being told was roughly in line with the emotional facts – all the confessions about awkwardness and inadequacy were untrue only in the sense of being understated – it couldn’t be denied that some of the details sounded a bit exaggerated. As when I spoke, these embellishments, when I was writing, tended to arrive out of the blue. Suddenly they were there, and too good to leave out. The secret (as always, it was a matter of tone control) was to trim and time the extravagance of an embellishment so that it would be congruent to its setting, lest the readers withdraw their consent to being had. But being had they unquestionably were. It seemed best to come clean that I knew this was happening. So I called the book Unreliable Memoirs. Since this initiative was tantamount to calling my own sworn testimony a pack of lies, there was no automatic professional acceptance for the finished manuscript. Pat Kavanagh, still wary about the idea of someone who had done nothing writing a book about how he had prepared himself for not doing it, now had another reason for suggesting that I shelve the manuscript for ten years. Tom Maschler ominously assured me that the small print run he had envisaged could be made smaller yet: five thousand copies should be plenty. But I noticed that they had both laughed, even against their better judgement. There is no more precious laughter than that, and even today I am still out to write the kind of book I most like to read: the book I despise myself for being unable to stop reading.
So I wasn’t completely devastated, only almost, when Penelope Mortimer jumped the gun by about a month and posted an early review denouncing Unreliable Memoirs as a crime against humanity. She didn’t precisely dance on my grave, but she did march up and down on it while declaring herself insulted by my self-proclaimed satisfaction at excusing conscious falsehood with would-be drollery. The insult, apparently, was not to her alone, but to all serious writers. It was an insult to literature itself. Whether literature itself was an activity that Penelope Mortimer could plausibly be thought of as representing was open to question. (As an admirer of her novel The Pumpkin Eater I rather thought she could.) But the month that followed would have felt like a year if the unofficial buzz had not been building up. The publicity lovelies at Cape told me that the pre-production copies had all been stolen instantly. Apparently this was a good sign. Then the broadsheet reviews started to come out, and most of the reviewers quoted so much of my stuff that there was scarcely room for theirs: an even better sign. John Carey, who had once buried The Metropolitan Critic, hailed Unreliable Memoirs as the written equivalent of sliced bread. Instantly I revised my opinion of his critical prowess upwards. To my delight – for once I managed to enjoy the moment – the book went straight into the bestseller list and took only three weeks to reach the top spot. But what kept it there for months on end was undoubtedly a guest appearance on Parkinson.
Parky, at whose expense I had made far too many unreasonable remarks in my TV column when I was starting off, would have had ample reason, after I sat down opposite him on the set, to pull the lever that dropped me through the trapdoor to the waiting crocodiles. But he took Chinese revenge. He told me, and the watching millions, that my book had made him laugh. He said he particularly liked the episode about the dunnyman. Visited by my guardian angel, I suddenly acquired the sense not just to agree that it was a nifty stretch of writing but also to quote a few bits from memory, climaxing the act with the bit about the dunnyman tripping over my bicycle and engulfing himself with the contents of the full pan. In the studio audience, the ladies in the knitted hats had the choice between dying of shock or howling in approbation. They did the latter, and out there, in millions of living rooms I couldn’t see, other people were doing the same. I could hear them. They made my feet vibrate. On television, a successful gag doesn’t just click, it thumps. From that moment, I was made. In future years, the irony did not escape me that the delicate little boat of my literary fortunes had been launched on a wave of liquid shit.
The commercial success of Unreliable Memoirs ensured that those future years could never become financially desperate, although it was never true that I could have lived on the royalties of that book alone, or of all my books put together. You have to sell on the scale of Jeffrey Archer or J. K. Rowling to get rich as a writer. I try not to tell journalists what Unreliable Memoirs sold because they would be unimpressed by the figure. People assume that any book they have heard of sells a million. In cold fact, it
is a lucky book that sells a thousand, and I know of one literary memoir – in my review of it I called it a classic, and still think I was right – that sold fifteen copies. Unreliable Memoirs did eventually sell a million copies, but it took about twenty years to do so. The nice thing is that it is still going, as if it doesn’t know how to switch itself off: it’s like a broken washing machine that goes on with its spin cycle until the house falls down. Why it should have attained such longevity is a nice question. My own guess is that the British readers simply like to hear stories about a warm country, but the book is a steady seller in Australia too, where evocations of sunlight are like coal to Newcastle. Perhaps I succeeded in one of the things I consciously tried to do: evoke what it was like to be young in the free countries after World War II, when all the adults could still remember their lesson in the value of liberty. It was a story of simplicity, and as time goes by there is nostalgia for that simplicity, so the hankering for a clear account of it doesn’t fade. Counting the initial hardbacks along with the later paperbacks, there have been about a hundred printings so far, but that word ‘printing’ is the tip-off. All those books were never anywhere all at once, not even at the warehouse. Supplies get renewed according to demand, and over time the figure alters upward to denote a quantity that nobody has ever actually seen. You can just count yourself lucky that the number advances. It would have advanced more quickly if Sonny Mehta, who was chief editor at Pan Macmillan’s highbrow label Picador when the Cape hardback took off, had not persuaded me that the paperback should be in the Picador ‘B’ format rather than the Pan pocket-book size. A pocket-book would go on the rack and sell faster. A Picador would go in the spinner and sell more slowly; but it would, he assured me, sell forever. So far he has been right. The number continues to advance. Sometimes I visualize it going in the other direction as people start to hand their books back. They can, if they wish, but I can’t return the money. It all got spent. Only in television did I make enough to keep something. I suppose I could have gone on with regular journalism and kept raising my price, but there might have been a limit to what the market would stand, and would certainly have been a limit to my satisfaction. Much as I respected journalism as a form, I was starting to fancy myself as an Author. Not even I, however, was conceited enough to believe that I could always expect a hit. After all, I hadn’t expected this one.