Bury My Heart At W. H. Smith’s. Brian Aldiss
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reluctant to listen. We may also have discovered that some experiences could hardly attain speech.
For some years, when I was reinstated in that baffling place, England, I had nightmares in which the Japanese were advancing on me with bayonets fixed. Writing was a form of exorcism.
During demobilisation leave, I sat down to write my first novel. It was to be called ‘Hunter Leaves the Herd’ and would tell England what the Far East was like. It was about a deserter from the army. It never got written. I had not the equipment at the time to write a whole novel.
I took my typewriter and went up to Oxford to get a job. When interviewing me, Mr Sanders said, ‘Which contemporary novelist is your favourite?’
I do not know why I did not say Aldous Huxley or Evelyn Waugh (who had not then gone off the gold standard with Brideshead Revisited). I said ‘Eric Linklater’, as being more down to earth.
Later, Sanders said to me, ‘You know, I’d never heard of Linklater.’
But Linklater, with his bawdy sense of humour and jaunty narrative, was for many years a great favourite. I collected all his novels, plays and stories; they left my shelves only when my old home broke up.
After ‘The Hunter Leaves the Herd’ died on the vine, I wrote nothing but poetry, most of it inspired by the girls I met in Oxford. Then came ‘Shouting Down a Cliff’.
While on holiday in the Isle of Wight, I bought from a newsagent an SF magazine called Nebula, published in Glasgow, and read it on the beach. The stories were so amateur I knew I could do better, though I admired one by Bob Shaw. I had an acceptance from Peter Hamilton, the editor. It took him over three years to publish the story: called simply ‘T’ – it remains my shortest title – it was finished on 30 January 1953. I received Hamilton’s cheque in January 1955, and the story was published in November 1956. (One keeps such details of early stories; later stories are less slavishly documented.) By the end of November 1956 my career was launched. My first book had been published by Faber & Faber and a second one was in the works.
I needed to see inferior writing in order to encourage myself that I could do better. I knew no one, took no advice. To work in a bookshop is to know a world already full of books.
The title of my second book was Space, Time and Nathaniel. It was a collection of SF short stories. The title was distinctive, announcing the fact that I did not intend to follow a trail worn by other British SF writers. None of them wrote well enough, to my mind, except J. G. Ballard, another ‘discovery’ of Carnell’s.
A firmly entrenched belief in the book trade is that collections of short stories do not sell. On average, they sell less well than novels, and novels on average sell poorly enough. Publishing is a hard trade. But Space, Time and Nathaniel is still in print, thirty years on, having lived through four different English imprints. American publishers could not stand the silly title, and eventually issued an emasculated version under a generic – and therefore flavourless – title, No Time Like Tomorrow. Exactly the sort of thing that makes one hate being an SF writer. Spanish, German and French editions also appeared, the French Denoël edition being translated by Michel Deutsch, my first and possibly happiest French translator.
What was there in that volume which moved Kenneth Young, reviewing the collection in The Daily Telegraph, to claim that the stories conveyed ‘a true sense of wonder such as we find in Blake or Wordsworth’? The answer must be that their author was delighted with the majesty of the world, the possibilities in science fiction and the freedom of imagination which writing brought him.
5
Elegy for Minor Poets
The choice of publisher looms as a large decision in every writer’s life. As with many other things, advice is not much use.
If you have friends in publishing, the choice is made for you. You go to them, hoping the friendship will hold up. For most people, however, it is more a matter of sauve qui peut. You go to whoever is mad enough to accept your manuscript.
Not all publishers are alike, though all bear family resemblances. Authors can join the Society of Authors, which lives at 84 Drayton Gardens, in London, and the Society will advise. I am a member of the Council of the Society of Authors and an active member of the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain.
Although publishers are necessary, it is as well to remember that what you write is more important than which publisher publishes it – and what you write is fully within your own powers of decision. It’s useless to be a writer unless you enjoy the freedom and responsibility to decide.
How long has it taken you to read this far? Let me tell you how long it has taken to write this far. It is now the twenty-seventh of September, 1985, at four thirty of a golden afternoon. The chair, the table, the typewriter, I – all outside my study on the lawn. I am thinking of breaking off for a mug of tea, a little conversation and a walk round the garden. Then an hour or two more work. I have to go to a play-reading this evening.
I have worked on this typescript all afternoon. This morning I answered letters. I am also working on two or three other books.
There’s a novel called ‘Whitehall’, which is tentative and may never get itself finished. Whitehall was the name of my grandfather’s house. There is the massive revision of my history of science fiction, Trillion Year Spree, which I am undertaking with the assistance of David Wingrove. And there is, or may be at any moment, depending on how the cards fall, ‘The Helliconia Encyclopaedia’, which has hovered over David and me, appearing and disappearing like the grin of the Cheshire cat, for two or three years.
This is a day of pure, still autumn, with butterflies exploring cactus dahlias and nasturtiums, creative weather. After a difficult year, when I have struggled to get near a typewriter, creative juices flow again. I began writing part of this narrative yesterday, at nine o’clock, moved by the beauty of the evening. I saw the whole book clear: something which might help aspiring writers and perhaps amuse all my comrades-in-arms, the great reviewed.
The family went to bed as I tapped away. I sat in a pool of electric light in my study while moonlight poured in through the window. Jackson, one of our dearest cats, arrived and scratched at the window to be let in. He has taught me a few simple gestures like that. When he was in, Jackson settled down on a chair. But I climbed out of the window and walked in the garden. All was silent. A full moon loomed over the pines in a stagy way, recalling Böcklin’s The Isle of the Dead. A quick rejoice and then back to the typewriter.
It is easy to become a writer. Easy, that is, compared with remaining a writer. To remain a writer you have to continue to write. If you take a year off, it is hard to get back in the flow. Better, and ultimately more enjoyable, to fall into the habit of writing every day. If you have to go on a train journey, talk to the others in the carriage; make notes of what you see, of what they say. If you feel like it.
Too early success in writing may quench a desire to write more. So may too early failure. So for that matter may a lot of other things. Many things can go wrong in the happiest of careers, and little charity is extended to those who fall by the wayside.
Louis MacNeice’s ‘Elegy for Minor Poets’ celebrates those for whom writing did not bring success:
Who were lost in many ways, through comfort, lack of knowledge,
Or between women’s breasts, who thought too little, too much,
Who were the world’s best talkers, in tone and rhythm
Superb, yet as writers lacked a sense of touch,
So either gave up or just went on and on –
Let us salute them now their chance is gone.
Long-sustained creativity over a number of years involves two overlapping parts of the personality, the intellect and the emotions.
The intellect seeks to make sense, or at least a pattern, out of the universe with