Walter Macken
Page 20
Lionel Hale is a good critic, but with only an inch and a quarter to sum up the value of so long a novel, he obviously hadn’t the room to spare to be constructive in his criticism. I think you probably won’t resent what he says about the end of the book; other reviewers will no doubt say the same thing. The important matter is the impression you will make with this first work; the impression of the power to create a scene and characters. Hale seizes on this in comparing your work to L.A.G. Strong’s.
But there will be plenty more reviews to come yet, both from here and from America. It is a good idea not to look at them until you have a fair batch to go through, when you can set off the good ones against the bad ones and get the true measure of what they think. And what they think is seldom as important as what your readers will think. They will like the book, and that is all you need to worry about.
Yours sincerely,
Lovat Dickson
P.S. RKO have written to say that they have now sent a long synopsis of the story to the coast, they will contact us if anything develops. This, I am afraid means nothing at the present stage. However, their interest has been looked after [Macmillan had provided RKO with everything they needed to submit the novel for adaptation to a film].
Next came another letter from Lovat Dickson:
21st April 1948
Dear Macken,
Thank you for your letter of April 19th. I am so glad to hear that ‘Mungo’ is enjoying a successful revival at the Abbey Theatre [my father played the part of Mungo in this new production]. It came, as they say at the right time.
I am glad you have not allowed the press cuttings to depress you unduly. The Americans have more paper, and the reviews enjoy greater length, though they do not always contain good criticism in the same proportion.
However, you are lucky to have got started over there with your first novel, and I hope that both there and here you will go on to greater success with the next book. By the way the press cuttings from the ‘Irish Press’ were most interesting. Mr Mark reminded me of what Oscar Wilde has said on the subject of life holding the mirror up to art.
Yours sincerely,
Lovat Dickson
This was followed by a letter came from Viking Press:
Viking Press.
April 29th 1948
Dear Mr Macken,
Here are a few more reviews, the latest of them being by Thomas Sugrue, which is to appear in the ‘Herald Tribune’ of May 2nd. Sugrue, by the way, is an interesting personality, a writer of talent and insight who has made a name for himself in the face of hopeless crippling.
I have your note of 19th. We, too, have no choice but to be philo-sophical about the fact of your book. The bottom seems to have dropped out of the market and we can only hope that ‘Quench the Moon’ and other titles on our spring list will survive until the public again begins to buy. If there should be any good news I will send it to you.
Sincerely yours,
B. Huebsch
Sad news came from Lovat Dickson in July 1948:
Macmillan & Co. Ltd.
12th July 1948
Dear Macken,
I have heard at last from Mr William Herndon, the Los Angeles literary agent whose letter you sent on to me at the beginning of May. You will remember that I said to him that we would be interested in the proposal that he might obtain a writing assignment for you. He now writes that he had not replied to the letter before as he has been out of town, and asking for a copy of ‘Quench the Moon’. I am asking the Viking Press to forward him one. As I guessed in my letter to you of May 6th, he is simply an agent fishing for his 10%.
We have just received a notice from the Censorship of Publications Board in Dublin saying that ‘Quench the Moon’ has been prohibited entry into Éire under an order dated 30th June as being ‘indecent or obscene’. As you know this happens to a great number of novels that are published, but I thought I should tell you in case you did not see it on display in Dublin bookshops.
Yours sincerely,
Lovat Dickson
His American publisher also wrote to him about the banning:
c/o Barclay’s Bank, London.
28th July 1948
Dear Mr Macken,
I leave London for Sweden tomorrow and write merely to thank you for your note which I found upon my arrival here. We will meet sometime but not this year. With the limited period at my disposal a trip to Dublin would be an impossible luxury. I would have been much disappointed if ‘Quench the Moon’ had not been banned in your fair country. Don’t they do that to the best books? I am told that it is something of a racket and that the censors give the booksellers a chance to stock up before they clamp down on the offensive volume; thus everybody is satisfied, the censors have protected virtue without interfering with sales.
Some time or other you will be telling me about another novel, won’t you?
Yours sincerely,
B. Huebsch
Books in the 1940s and 1950s were banned whenever there was any mention of sex outside of marriage, so this was presumably the basis on which Quench the Moon was banned, as Stephen and Maeve have a child out of wedlock.
My father had completed yet another novel, I Am Alone, by the end of July 1948. In this novel, the principal character, Pat Moore emigrates to London from Galway. He stays with his brother-in-law and begins work as a labourer on a building site where his brother-in-law is the foreman. He meets up with a range of characters on the building site and after a period working there, he leaves and gets a job as an insurance salesman. Meanwhile he has met and fallen in love with a local girl, but he also has an encounter with a local beauty who he lusts after. The story sets out to give a portrait of what it was like to be Irish in London in the 1930s and in the course of the story there are encounters with IRA men, but primarily it is the story of an ordinary young man who has come to England to live and work. Of course, my father drew on his own experiences of living and working in London between 1937 and 1939. Ealing, where my parents had lived, was the backdrop for the novel and he used his own experiences from selling life insurance door-to-door.
He wrote to Macmillan telling them he had completed his new novel.
Macmillan & Co. Ltd.
3rd August 1948
Dear Macken,
Thank you for your letter. I am delighted to know that you have completed a new novel. ‘I Am Alone’ seems an excellent title, although I haven’t checked to see whether it has been used, but the title is of the least importance at this stage: we will examine the book carefully and will write to you as soon as we can about it. I am just going off on a holiday myself, so one of my fellow Directors will be writing to you.
I am glad you take the philosophic view about the banning of ‘Quench the Moon’. That is the view that everyone in England takes of it.
With all good wishes,
Yours sincerely,
Lovat Dickson
Up to now, both Macmillan and Viking Press had been writing to him courtesy of the Abbey Theatre. Now at last through my mother’s thorough search they had found their house at 31 Ardpatrick Road, Cabra, and this then is the first reference to the house from which I Am Alone and Rain on the Wind were to come. This letter came from Macmillan:
5th August 1948
Dear Macken,
Thank you for your letter of August 3rd. I am so glad that you have found a new house. Even though the rent seems exorbitant, the privacy will be worth it. The BBC have paid for the television [rights].
There are a number of other sums due to you, and we can safely advance you £100 on account of your general earnings. I enclose a cheque for that amount herewith. ‘I Am Alone’ has safely arrived this morning, and we will be dealing with it as quickly as possible. All good wishes to you in your new home.
Yours sincerely,
Lovat Dickson
It must have been a difficult few weeks at Ardpatrick Road waiting for the verdict, as his other work had been so recently rejected outright by
Macmillan. It must have been a great relief to my parents when the following letter arrived:
30th September 1948
Dear Macken,
You have waited patiently for a decision on ‘I Am Alone’, but the MS arrived, as I warned you, during a period when several of us were away, and we have only now had a chance to read it and to give it all the consideration the work deserves. I am glad to tell you that we are ready to publish it, but I think you must yourself know that it is not as good a book as ‘Quench the Moon’. The subject has not the same interest, and the Galway background was more attractive than the rather drab Ealing mise en scene in the new book.
I tell you these things quite frankly, for the choice of theme and background is important to a novelist, who means to secure a wide and permanent public. There is one other feature of this new book which was not apparent in ‘Quench the Moon’. There you wrote with an intensity which gave attraction to your style, and you identified yourself with your characters in a way that held the reader’s interest. In ‘I Am Alone’, you seem to write more superficially.
You are outside of all your characters; you record everything they do and think as might a friendly observer, but you are not inside them as you were in ‘Quench the Moon’, and although the new story runs along easily enough, it does not run as deeply or seems to come from the heart as did the other.
It is perhaps unfair to draw the comparison too closely, but I think it is important at this stage of your progress as a writer to examine what you have done and ask yourself whether you are developing characteristics of style which are not the ones you really want to possess.
Thousands of books appear every year which have the form of novels and sell their few thousand copies, but everyone knows that the world would be just as well without them. But there are books and ‘Quench the Moon’ was one, which show an unusual promise and talent in the writer, which the reader remembers with pleasure afterwards, and which have a special place on many bookshelves. One can tell at once they were written with intense sincerity and with enormous pain. We know that you are capable of writing books like that, but we do not feel that ‘I Am Alone’ comes into that category.
Nevertheless, ‘I Am Alone’ is a decided improvement on ‘And Then No More’. It will probably be treated quite well by the reviewers and will have a sufficient sale to justify the risk in publishing it, but I doubt if it will really help your reputation, and I hope you will think very carefully about the theme of your next book, and make sure that your whole heart is in it before you tackle it.
Am I right in thinking that you didn’t exactly approach this book in that spirit: that you simply thought it would make a good story and therefore turned it out with that energy which one can’t help always admiring in you?
If we had known it was to be about an Irishman starting as a labourer in Ealing, going on to become an insurance agent, finding himself on the edge of IRA activities, marrying a nice girl and in the end keeping clear of disaster, we might have said then, what I have briefly said in this letter, that the subject did not promise a book of very wide appeal. But you have done it, and since we have your future at heart and want to give you every encouragement, we will offer to publish it, and if we join in the offer a little sermon on your future, you will know that we only do so because we have a firm faith in your capabilities. The terms we suggest are the same as for ‘Quench the Moon’, namely 10% to 2,000, 15% up to 5,000 and 20% after, 10% on overseas sales and an advance of £50.
Don’t think from what I have written that we will publish the book with any lack of enthusiasm. We have every expectation of making a modest success of it, but your future as a writer is of more concern to us at the moment, and that has brought forth this letter. I hope you will realise that it is written in an attempt to help you ultimately to the success you have it in your power to attain.
With kind regards, as always,
Yours sincerely,
Lovat Dickson
My father wrote a wonderful letter defending his novel. It gives an idea of how frustrated he had been with all the rejections he had received up to this point:
31 Ardpatrick Road,
Cabra, Dublin.
October 2nd 1948
Dear Dickson,
Thanks a lot for your letter of the 30th, received yesterday with the information that you will publish ‘I Am Alone’, and the terms which I find acceptable.
It wouldn’t have been you or Macmillans if you hadn’t been frank. That is what I value most in our association, and if the day ever dawns that you cast me off completely as being barren fruit, I will always be honest and know that from the beginning any criticism of my work has always come from you for my own good and believe me when I say that I have never resented it. I have tried all my life to face up to facts as much as limited human intelligence and failings will allow, and I think I have taught myself to be very suspicious and critical of the things that come from my brain.
And that is why now I would like to justify the writing of ‘I Am Alone’. If I agree with you that it lacks the heart that was in ‘Quench the Moon’, will you agree that if there isn’t a lot of heart in it there are large lumps of brain and mind? That it is tight and controlled good writing, that it is disciplined after the wavering canvas of ‘And Then No More’.
Before I decided to sit down and write it, I was wavering between two themes. One, a Galway one which I have been thinking of for years which I will call ‘Rain on the Wind’, and this. To write the Galway one it would have been essential for me to have gone back there again (which I will have to do) to get into the files of the local newspapers and go into the pubs down by the docks and learn to drink pints with the Claddagh fishermen.
‘Quench the Moon’ came as a germ [of an idea] from a three-act play I had written at the age of seventeen, and over which I had been dreaming for many years. In the same way this ‘Rain on the Wind’, will be coming from a three-act play I wrote in Irish called ‘Oighreacht na Mhara’, or ‘Inherit the Sea’, but it is essential that I should also soak myself in the atmosphere so that the heart would be beating in it like ‘Quench the Moon’. When I do come to write, ‘Rain on the Wind’, the heart will be throbbing in it so loudly, that it will be heard in China.
So here I was now, I couldn’t go back to Galway having to earn a living here. I was in despair after the failure of my last two MSS, I was beginning to think that I was only a tinkerer, that there was nothing in store for me except to be an accomplished actor, living a life of stupidity which only actors can lead, so I had to turn and prove to myself that I could still write. The emigrating from Galway to Dublin has reminded me forcibly of the last time eleven years ago when we emigrated too, the same heart burnings and strangeness and deep loneliness, and I had been thinking of the theme of ‘I Am Alone’ for a long time.
So I set out to write it under difficult conditions. I spent four hours per day at it, in a small tiddly suburban flat, with scarce enough room to breathe, smuts from factory chimneys floating in the window, and the echoes of obscene language as well from the young Dublin chisellers, bathing naked on the banks of the canal, just outside the window. So honestly I felt the theme of ‘I Am Alone’ very much from Pat Moore’s side and also from the side of Jo Jo. I set out to present two years in the life of a very ordinary young man, and the ordinary everyday things that happen to him away from home when he is on his own and somehow I believe that it will have an appeal to any man who has left his own country and gone to another, in that he can associate himself with the thoughts of Pat Moore. It is a theme that has never been touched upon properly by Irish writers with the exception of Peadar O’Donnell, who some years ago wrote a novel about the life of potato-pickers from Donegal. Funnily enough I had been thinking about it very hard and was at a dinner in Bray, near Dublin, where I was talking to the Earl of Wicklow, who told me how much he enjoyed Mungo at the Abbey, and about a few chaps from England he had brought to see it, and he was asking me why someone
didn’t write a book about the ordinary young people who go to England and about whom nothing is ever heard again. I said, coincidentally, I have been thinking about that for some time, for eleven years in fact, ever since I was working in London myself. That’s only by the way. I also felt this business about the IRA chaps. I knew quite a few of them. Friends of my own from Galway who were interned for seven years in the Curragh Camp here, during the war, and some of the chaps who have been released from English prisons where they have been since 1937.
They were young men then. They are not young any longer, and I think it is sad to see them come to realise that what they did was foolish, and worse, in vain because they fought foolishly for an ideal, their leaders have become legitimate [politicians and businessmen]. So no martyrs crown for them. No honour in their own land. They were eejits who should have stayed at home and gone to College and done their exams and gone into the Civil Service, instead of thinking that they could alter history by doing ten years in jail for burning letters in pillar boxes.
Do you understand that, what I’m after? To place the very ordinary against a background of implacable and hopeless idealism. Now I disapproved intensely of what they were doing then. (If they had to bomb why the hell didn’t they go and bomb up in the Six Counties which was the seat of all the trouble. What did the poor Englishman do to them, the chap who couldn’t tell you the name of a principal city in Ireland.)