Making an Elephant

by Graham Swift

  One afternoon that summer, on the island of Siphnos, I went with a bucket on a length of rope to a well, the only available source of water nearby, and though I’d been repeatedly enjoined by the Greek friends I was with not to let go of the rope when I let go of the bucket, I let go of the rope. There was the bucket suddenly winking at me from the bottom of the well and there was I at the top. I remember standing there and just laughing out loud at my glorious, consummate stupidity, at the whole fabulous carefreeness of my way of life at that time. The cicadas rattling in the hot hills all around me seemed only to be joining in my laughter too.

  Some while after my return to England I got out the manuscript of my novel, began to read it and knew at once that it was awful. Irredeemably awful. Strangely, this lucid realization didn’t devastate me. I’ve abandoned work since with much greater agony. I didn’t feel that those days on the veranda had been wasted or that those weeks in the Aegean sun were a delusion. No, the judgement I could now coolly pass on myself would have poisoned those days. Those days were inviolate. Let life be lived.

  Nonetheless, what I’d written was crap.

  The future had caught up with me but I wouldn’t let it trap me. I found work as a part-time teacher—teaching, again, by the hour—in various South London colleges. I’ve never had any vocation or training as a teacher, but for the next ten years this was how I survived. The part-time status was as vital to my self-esteem—I would never be sucked into full-time employment—as it was in giving me time each day to write. And during those ten years, without the aid of a single vine leaf or veranda, I did indeed write, and publish, not only my first novel but two others.

  I remember standing one morning that autumn at a crowded suburban railway station on my way to one of my colleges. Barely a month before I’d been dallying in the Dodecanese and laughing my head off by that fool-making well. There can be few sights less exalting, more chilling to the soul than the sight of English commuters massing for the daily grind, and here was I—who’d once on another railway platform mocked a strutting Greek army officer—dutifully clutching my briefcase. But I had the oddly uplifting sensation of being at a turning-point.

  After that winter of oil crisis and three-day weeks there were two general elections. In America, Nixon resigned. The aura, the taste of a decade lingers over into the next and I can’t help feeling that the spirit of the Sixties, that surge of post-war optimism and liberalism in which I was lucky enough to have been young, really died in 1974. Perhaps for me it was artificially extended, its edges blurred, by my time in Greece. I’d entered my mid-twenties. When does youth end?

  But if the chill was entering my soul on that railway platform it was partly because I had no inkling that wonderful things were still in store for me in that benign year, and they were to happen not in Kos or Kalymnos or Khios, but in Clapham …

  As 1974 drew to its close I would understand that I was at a watershed. It was the year in which I more than once knew perfect happiness. It was the year in which I became aware, in more than one way, of historical forces. And it was the year in which, contrary to the immediate evidence, I knew for certain I would be a writer.

  Ano Volos and slopes of Mount Pelion.

  NEGRONIS WITH ALAN

  KENSINGTON, 1976

  Alan Ross was my first ever editor and publisher and, before either of these, encourager. I first met him in 1976 but I wrote this piece some twenty-five years later after his death in 2001 and haven’t published it till now.

  Negronis with Alan

  Writing and claustrophobia, or rather the need to overcome it, go together. I’m aware of this in more than one way when I think of Alan Ross. If you can’t stand your own company alone in a room for long hours, or, when it gets tough, the feeling of being in a locked cell, or, when it gets tougher still, the vague feeling of being buried alive—then don’t be a writer. When you’re a young writer, still struggling to get into print, the sense of confinement can be particularly acute. You have simply yet to appear. You exist—it’s only your choice—in a sort of box, under a lid. You can sometimes wonder if the lid hasn’t become sealed or turned to stone.

  Alan did two things. He opened a door of welcome to the literary life as no longer a solitary business, but he also lifted the lid. He let me in and he let me out. He gave me that first, unrepeatable, unforgettable gasp of about-to-be-published oxygen.

  I know that my experience—it’s only to pay tribute to him—was far from unique. Alan died on St Valentine’s Day, 2001. Speaking at a memorial service for him some months later, the novelist Will Boyd, first published, as I was, in Alan’s London Magazine, gave a curiously familiar account of his first meeting with Alan. They’d gone, he told the congregation, to a restaurant for lunch and Alan had said, ‘What will you have to drink? I’m having a Negroni. Would you like one too?’ Will had never had a Negroni before and hadn’t a clue what it was, but he’d also never before been taken to lunch by an editor and publisher and, desperate not to look out of place, he’d said as nonchalantly as possible, ‘Yes, please.’

  When the service was over I went up to Will and said, ‘That Negroni thing, it happened with me too. Just the same.’

  And Will and I can’t be the only ones. If the number of cognoscenti of the drink were to be measured only by the number of writers whose careers Alan effectively launched, this would still make, I suspect, a significant clan, a whole authorial brother-and-sisterhood of the Negroni. For me it will always be the drink of initiation and liberation. I only have to sip it to remind myself of all that’s enchanting—and it can be enchanting—about the writing life.

  Red vermouth, Campari, gin, a twist of orange. Soda to make it long. A little ruby-pink fire of a drink, sunset in a glass. Its name suggests some magisterial head barman of long ago, but, as far as I’m concerned, it ought to be called the ‘Alan Ross’. No one else I’ve known has become synonymous in my mind with a drink.

  My first Negroni with Alan (perhaps Will Boyd’s too) was in a now-vanished restaurant called Meridiana in the Fulham Road, opposite Sydney Place, a short walk from South Kensington Underground and the London Magazine office in Thurloe Place. As the Negroni will always be Alan’s drink, so the knot of streets round South Kensington Tube will always be Alan’s patch, and will always have, via him and the Negroni, a certain Latin, Mediterranean brio. Lunch with Alan was invariably in an Italian restaurant: Meridiana, San Frediano’s, the Piccola Venezia … Coming up from the Underground, past the flower and newspaper stands, I still feel, as nowhere else in London, that I might be emerging into some sunny Continental city—a concourse in Palermo or Rome. And the sensation goes right back to that first feeling of being let out from under a lid.

  I’m thinking back to 1976, when Alan published my first story, which happened to have the (misleadingly) airy title ‘The Recreation Ground’. By then I’d been a writer in theory and spirit for some dozen years; in practice—if not in print—for some five or six. But for the slender link I’d formed with Alan and London Magazine, I might have felt entirely on my own. I was nearly twenty-seven. Not so young. Other people at that age can be well settled into more conventional, more lucrative and, so they say, more sensible careers.

  I’d learnt by then that in order to write you have to persevere, but you also have to eat. I’d found scraps of part-time work at various South London colleges and I led a sort of shadowy, furtive existence—writing in the morning and emerging in the afternoons to teach day-release or evening-class students ‘proper’ English. For some of this time, out of the same economic pressure, I was still living at my parents’ home in South Croydon and so still within the envelope of everything that entailed.

  In straight miles South Croydon isn’t so far from South Kensington. In other respects they could be poles apart. I may have ached to spread my wings, but part of me was still lodged in a world where, not so long before, the china ducks had been flapping up the living-room wall. Alan—poet, writer, editor, publisher, collec
tor of paintings, mover in literary and artistic circles—was simply the first person with any of these attributes I’d ever met.

  Though, strangely, I felt I knew him even before I met him and when I did meet him he proved to be one of those people who retain about them the lasting aura of when you first encountered them. I was actually in his company only a few times, widely spaced, over a period of more than twenty years. I can’t pretend to have known him closely at all, yet he had a presence for me far exceeding the actual contact. When I met him he was fifty-four, more or less twice my age at the time, and he remains in my mind’s eye a distinctly youthful fifty-four—offering me that remarkable drink.

  The presence I’d known, or intuited, before that first meeting was gleaned mainly from rejection slips, which can, of course, be the most cruelly impersonal things around. Alan somehow had the art of making them converse. They would come with an individually inscribed ‘Sorry’ or ‘Almost’, a ‘Not quite’ or ‘Very nearly’. Thankfully, they never seemed to have the tacit message, ‘Go away’. I’m not sure how many stories I sent Alan before he finally took one, or if the gradient of encouragement was a steady upward slope (though I like to think so), but by the time the magic acceptance came I felt I had, or my work had, a friend.

  No other editor I sent stories to in those days ever gave me that feeling. Though, again, I know I wasn’t alone. Through London Magazine, which he kept going for over forty years, Alan was, quite simply, the best and most unsung supporter of young writers there was. Unsung, because trumpet-blowing was never part of his style, and he detested that appropriating aspect of publishing that likes to brag about ‘discovering’ talent. Yet style, in which modesty and reticence were mixed with eccentricity and even flamboyance, he had in plenty. You sensed a range of possible Alans, only some of whom you might see. There was a chameleon quality about him, even an alert, looming, chameleon largeness to his eyes. He was certainly capable of being many things at once, but you felt the essential being was never in doubt: he’d merely chosen for it a variegated and idiosyncratic wardrobe.

  When I first met him, in his office at 30 Thurloe Place, he seemed, almost literally, a man of two parts. To the waist down, he was jacket and tie, slightly patrician, slightly raffish—a wispiness to the sideburns. Below, it was rumpled jeans and sloppy shoes. Perhaps he’d concocted this combination to cover his mixed anticipations of me. The expression and demeanour were also complicated and versatile: a sheen of affable panache, but a definite, innate hesitancy—a quiet smile, a watchfulness, a slight stammer, the dark eyes seeming to bulge as if he was always about to be, or ready to be, surprised.

  I’m sure I disappointed him. I was nothing out of the ordinary. ‘Hungry?’ he soon asked, as if his first impression of me was banal: I was skinny.

  His office was at the top of the building then. It had no separate entrance and you had to make an apologetic dash through someone else’s office to get there. In subsequent years, during long battles with the landlords, it moved down to become a sort of cabin in the back garden, always adhering to the same address. But ‘office’ was never the word anyway. It was more a sort of miniature cosmos of Alan’s passions and tastes. There was a lot of colour. Pictures covered the walls, mingled with photographs. Some of the photographs were of people I recognized but regarded then as mythological beings. Some of the pictures were of women naked and frank enough to seem to give off a musk. There were rows and stacks of books, and heaps of jumbled correspondence—some of it held down by a glass paperweight shaped like a breast. You felt the presence of other writers, great names, in that tiny room. There was the dog, supposedly trained to devour unwanted manuscripts, and there was Alan himself, a man not just of two halves but, clearly, if that crowded space was anything to go by, many sides: poetry, painting, publishing, cricket (he was the Observer’s correspondent), Italy, India (where he was born), dogs, racehorses, women. And more women.

  We walked through Onslow Square: a bright spring day in 1976. I’d never been anywhere like Meridiana before. People came and greeted Alan, he greeted them. To the waiters he was ‘Signor Ross’. In one sense clearly in his element, he retained, reassuringly, that characteristic look of subdued but appreciative astonishment. We sat down. He asked me what I thought of the women sitting at other tables, at least one of whom had kissed him on the way in. He asked me what I’d like to drink …

  He was the same age as my father, and there were other parallels. They had the same name—my father taking the double ‘l’. They’d both been in the navy in the war, serving on Arctic convoys to Murmansk, which had left in Alan’s case (though I don’t think my father escaped lightly) some terrible memories and a chronic need for southern warmth. They both had a quiet, modest core. But there the resemblances stopped, lost in that gulf between South Kensington and South Croydon, now filling anyway with a ruby-pink haze.

  I wasn’t alone, but that doesn’t dilute the experience or stop the debt being immense. He published my first story and my first (and still only) collection of stories. If his book-publishing side arm, London Magazine Editions, hadn’t fallen at the wrong moment into one of its occasional cash-strapped abeyances, he would have published my first novel. He was certainly the first publisher to read it and accept it. Not long after that first meeting, he wrote with uncanny perception (since I hadn’t said a thing) to say he felt I must be working on something longer than stories. If I was, could he see it when it was ready? I was, he did see it and, within days, promised to publish it. It’s not supposed to happen so simply, and when in fact it proved too good to be true, he swore to find me another publisher. Though it took four years, The Sweet Shop Owner found its way into print largely through Alan’s efforts. The first story and the first novel were both thanks to him.

  There was an unhappy aspect to Alan’s chameleon nature, unseen and rarely alluded to—a dark suit hanging in the wardrobe. Sometimes he’d be compelled to put it on. He suffered from periodic bouts of severe clinical depression. I never knew, if he or anyone did, their origins, but the war was one possible source. He’d once been briefly sealed (though it can’t have seemed brief and he might never have got out) behind a locked bulkhead amid the remains of two gun crews, in a burning, flooding ship, under fire at the time from a German cruiser. The ship was the destroyer Onslow, and I suppose Alan must have received a subliminal reminder every time he walked from his office to Meridiana by way of Onslow Square.

  A pleasure-loving man, a lover of open, sunny places (cricket, racecourses, the Sussex coast, Italy), he suffered from intervals of mental torture and incarceration. Every so often he would ‘disappear’, and you knew he wasn’t at Thurloe Place or in the real or the Piccola Venezia but somewhere in a pit of misery and drugs. Then he’d resurface, looking fragile but very pleased to be back in the world, and generally playing down the whole thing. I remember lunching with him soon after one such nightmare. He still looked shaky and medication-dulled. A friend of his entered the restaurant, looking too, for whatever reason, a little frail. There was an exchange of token ‘how are you’s’ and ‘oh, all right’s’. Then Alan said, with a rush of cheeriness, ‘Hard work, isn’t it—being all right?’

  Writers should count themselves lucky: merely to have their self-induced immurements, their self-imposed immersions.

  Not long before he died Alan suffered a particularly dreadful onslaught of depression, triggered, it seems, by the news of the sinking of the Russian submarine the Kursk, not far from Murmansk. A trigger of a trigger, in Alan’s case. He seemed to have got through it and was back on form again. In the last note I had from him there was the usual casual reference: ‘Wouldn’t wish it on anyone …’ Then, two months later—there was no connection, it seemed—he died, of a heart attack, on St Valentine’s Day.

  Life offers us very few, if any, moments of real ‘arrival’, when we know that we’ve entered a domain that, however fragile our presentiments of it, however unfamiliar it may seem and however awkwardly we actually m
ake our entrance, is yet where we belong: moments of arrival that are also moments of release. After drinking that first Negroni with Alan, I may very well have thought: I could use another of these. But I was also thinking: I’d like more of this please, more, please, of all this.

  I knew something by then of the privations of the literary life. I’d never really known that it can also be, from time to time, intensely sweet. Alan introduced me to its sweetness. I was twenty-six and virtually penniless, but here I was, being published (how ridiculously puny it will seem to a non-writer: one story in a magazine) and offered a rose-tinted elixir. I was young enough and wise enough not to waste the opportunity for walking on air.

  And that wasn’t so hard to do. At this time, though I wouldn’t have dreamed of sharing the fact with a fifty-four-year-old man —even as he invited my confidential comments on those women at the other tables—I was very much in love. I’d met, not so long before, the woman with whom I wanted to share, and have shared, my life. I’d ‘arrived’ in that sense too. Life can be doubly sweet.

  St Valentine’s Day, 2001 … Soon after Alan’s death, on a cold, grey February afternoon, I was waiting in a London bar to meet a friend. There was only one possible drink I could order. My friend arrived. He said, ‘What’s that?’ ‘It’s a Negroni,’ I said. ‘Have one.’ I ordered another fiery-red glassful, then I told him the story that Will Boyd would tell too.

  GUILDHALL FARCE

  1983

  In 1983 my third novel, Waterland, was nominated for the Booker Prize. After it was all over, Time Out asked me to write this short, irreverent but not unheartfelt piece. The television coverage of the award dinner reached new, grotesque heights that year, and I’ve been told that the recording of the programme was subsequently used in television training as a locus classicus in how not to present such events. The ineffable Selina Scott committed gaffe after smiling gaffe, of which the most conspicuous was randomly to ask one of the dinner guests, after the winner had been announced, for an on-the-spot reaction, only to be told by Angela Carter (for it was she) that she was asking one of the judges. The most brilliant tactical stroke of the evening was that of the winner, J. M. Coetzee, who, to the consternation of the TV people, was serenely absent.