Bury My Heart At W. H. Smith’s. Brian Aldiss
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I yawn to think of those days. Why aren’t I in New York, where the elevators sail upwards so fast and upwards is so much higher than elsewhere? Good old Manhattan, so different from Oxford …)
Anyhow, The Bookseller ran a series of articles which supposedly covered every aspect of bookshop life, although there was nothing about actually working in a shop. I wrote to the editor, Edmond Segrave, explaining that the pale face of the assistant was the backbone of literary life, and so on.
He wrote back inviting me to do an article for him. I did so in February 1954. It was so long that Segrave spread it over two issues. What a sensation! A bloody assistant having the cheek to string a few sentences together! Dark looks were cast at me in the trade.
At this point, I grasped one of the essential points of fiction, that Pretence is needed as a bodyguard for poor ailing Truth. I wrote again to Mr Segrave, saying that the only way to present the reality of the bookselling experience was to dress it as fiction. I was prepared to write him an imaginary diary – to be entitled ‘The Brightfount Diaries’ – in six episodes, to be run in six successive issues, in order to put across what I meant.
Much is owed to Mr Segrave. He summoned me to his offices in Bedford Square. He and his assistant, Miss Philothea Thompson, later to become editor, took me out to lunch. They agreed to run the ‘Diaries’, although The Bookseller in its long history had never before published fiction.
Soon everyone in the book trade was reading and chuckling over ‘The Brightfount Diaries’.
You see, reader, that that chapter on Sanders was not there just for padding or nostalgia, as you suspected. It was research material. Sanders was the model for Brightfount’s. I just made it funnier and changed the names of the guilty parties.
‘Brightfount’ became so popular that Mr Segrave kept me at it. He paid me, too. I met him once more, after his retirement, in a cheerful pub called The Little Mayfair, behind the London Hilton, and we had a drink together.
While ‘Brightfount’ was in full spate, Mr Segrave forwarded fan letters to me, from booksellers and so on, at home and overseas. The Beck Book Company wrote from Adelaide, offering me a job. I had always wanted to visit Australia. At that time, prospects sounded good out there, while the UK economy was dying on its feet as usual. Letters were exchanged. I was preparing to go when a further letter revealed what Mr Beck had until then had the cunning to keep from me, that they wanted me to run the theology department. I stayed in Oxford.
Many years later, my eyes beheld the solid brick-built glory of the Beck Book Company in situ. I reflected then, in a science-fictional way, on the parting of time-streams, and of the other Aldiss who nearly fled to Oz and took holy orders. That poor little pom never became a famous writer. But he was great on a surfboard.
The next letter forwarded from The Bookseller changed my life. It came from the firm then considered the most elegant in London, Faber & Faber, publishers of T. S. Eliot. It said that Sir Geoffrey Faber and his staff were great fans of ‘Brightfount’, and were wondering if I had considered turning the Diaries into a book. If so, Faber would take great pleasure in publishing it.
I still have the letter. It is on loan, with my other manuscripts, to the Bodleian Library in Oxford.
The first question readers ask writers is, What sort of routine do you have?
The second is, How did you begin to write?
To these questions – and others, such as, How do you discipline yourself? – there are various answers, depending on the writer and the time of day. Mostly readers hope to be astonished: You mean to say you write only in leap years? Routine is a hateful word. I’m a failed Bohemian, and write when and if I can. Which is most days.
I cannot remember when I was not making books. At my mother’s knee I was encouraged to collect pictures from magazines, to give them captions and bind them up with pieces of wallpaper for covers.
This aided my pictorial sense. Also helpful was the family’s Hobbies fretwork machine. On this machine, Mother made jigsaws from pictures stuck on to three-ply, simple jigsaws at first, then of increasing difficulty as my sister and I grew up.
My mother read to me before I could read. One of the first stories I ever read myself was in the old Daily Mail. A girl who lost her shadow had to travel round the world to find it. The theme touched me so closely that I coloured the illustration. Mother preserved the picture, and somehow it has survived the years.
At the tender age of seven, I was sent away to boarding school. In the junior dormitory, with its hurly-burly, I found a way of preserving my identity. I told stories.
All new boys had to tell stories. They were made to stand up on their beds and spout. If the story did not please, or the storyteller faltered, shoes were thrown at him. I never had a shoe lifted against me.
Soon I became champion storyteller. There was just one snag: talking was forbidden after Lights Out. The housemaster, Bonzo, had a spyhole by the door. He would rush in, cane in hand, switching on all the lights at once.
‘Who’s talking?’
Reluctantly, I would raise my hand.
The punishment was six strokes on the bum, laid on with vigour across the pyjamas. I have never met with quite that kind of criticism since, though in the comments of many critics one hears a nasty little housemaster longing to get loose.
That dormitory ritual of narrative. It was impossible to stamp out, so valuable was it. It warded off homesickness and night fears. Something very primitive was evoked when telling stories to a silent dorm.
My stories were of a lurid variety. Many of them were SF. I derived them from Murray Roberts’s stories of Captain Justice, which ran in a thirties magazine, Modern Boy. And I did all the voices. Justice, Midge, O’Reilly and Professor Flaznagel.
Later, at a better school, West Buckland in North Devon, I graduated, or perhaps declined, from verbal to written stories. They became more ambitious, less derivative. Our form was mad about Sellers & Yeatman – not just 1066 and All That, but the less popular titles such as Horse Nonsense and Garden Rubbish. I wrote my own version, ‘Invalids and Illnesses’, which was popular. But my great success was with a series of pornographic stories told in Americanese. Each title came with a one-sentence blurb, in the manner of American pulp magazine stories of the forties. The titles of those stories have gone from my head; only two of the blurbs remain: ‘They went to New York for a change of obscenery’, and ‘The editor’s incision was final’ (he died ‘on the job’, as it was then called).
These stories brought me into even greater danger than the oral tales. Had they been discovered in one of the periodical raids carried out on our desks, I should have been beaten and expelled. But the writing madness was in my veins. I also wrote comic stories and SF stories, which I collected into books. These earned me the exemption from school essays I have described.
This experience, valuable as it was in confirming that people might listen, was interrupted by war service. For four years I was out of England, four formative years from eighteen till almost twenty-two, a not uncommon experience for my generation. Out of England and out of the class system and the stream of English thought. I left the country a mere boy and returned as an adult. In those years, 1944–48, England also had changed. Pre-war England had gone for ever.
Nowadays, the trauma of being involved in war, or in any kind of catastrophe – a rail accident, say – is better understood than it was. We understand how necessary it may be to talk through a trying experience, just as young lovers whisper to their partners all the shortcomings of their parents. Confession is the way to mental stability.
In Burma, stuck in the jungle with Japanese forces only a few miles away, the older men spoke fiercely of how they would ‘grip’ their audiences when they returned home, relating their sufferings. Like the Ancient Mariner, they intended to tell all: in the hope of release from trauma, which was also the Ancient Mariner’s ambition. Just as the wedding guest tried to evade the long and tiresome story, I’m sure all