It is inevitable that the publisher should have a split personality, divided between his love of literature and his desire to make a living. Frustrated as a mother, he is determined to be a midwife, and his taste, patience and humanity generally make him a good one. But the tough commercialism of which he is unjustly accused is limited to snatching with perfectly sincere regret the odd half-crown from printer and author, and to the search for the rainbow gold of the best-seller. When threatened by imminent bankruptcy, he puts his prices up instead of down, ignoring the fact that no ordinary member of the public ever buys a book unless it is paper-covered. Publishers know this but they do not believe it. My father, for example, knew that policemen could be bribed, but he did not believe it.
Thanks to American sales, the failure of the English Arabesque was not disastrous, but it was a shock to find that I had to go back to the bottom of the literary snakes and ladders and start again. The result was that I strained for effect. I put an extra polish on style and made the next book carry all the assets I had—a setting both romantic and true, characters from Syria and Spain and half Europe, and what should have been a dark stream of excitement gathering in the mountain waters until it rushed headlong for the fall. But the fall was my own. I attained a blank failure. Since I was by no means flown with insolence—unless it were a Disraeli-like insolence of over-embroidering my waistcoat and insisting that I be heard—the fates were unkind.
I must be content with having aimed The High Place at the sun and lost the arrow without even knowing whether it cleared the nearest bush. The novel was set on the Syrian frontier, and concerned a colony of anarchists who had reached the logical conclusion that only a third world war could bring about the desired abolition of the State. Since I was writing in 1948 and alarmed by the steady growth of State dictatorship in England, I had only to exaggerate my own resentment in order to create a hero and narrator who should be deeply involved in the anarchists’ plot until he discovered that their intention was not merely to take advantage of war but to cause it. Yet I fear their trigger device, though scientifically correct, was unconvincing. Indeed, I was later told by an experienced diplomat that the provocative language used to each other at international conferences by Russians and Americans was already so bad that no drugged cigar could possibly make it any worse.
Still, that might have passed. So might my study of the Russian, the Spanish and the religious aspects of anarchism, all contributing with a reasonable economy of words to the final tragedy. Where, I think, I failed was in breaking my own rule. I did not make my meaning clear to the well-educated stockbroker.
I hid a story within the story. I was, and am attracted by the Manichean heresy. I suspect that the battle between Good and Evil is unending, and that the triumph of Good on this planet of earth is not certain. Whether it is certain in a more universal purpose we cannot know, since the terms good and evil are relative only to human conduct and meaningless in any other context. We have no ready reckoner to tell us whether any course of action will cause more human suffering or less; therefore we can only follow the dictates of conscience, and hope to heaven that it has a purpose. More we cannot claim for it, since conscience may lead us—as it did Elisa Cantemir in the novel—to what by any human standard is intolerable evil. Thus Evil must be the servant of the ultimate purpose no less than Good, and we are possessed by one or the other.
Into this myth of dualism I fitted my characters. The servant of Ahriman was Elisa Cantemir; the servant of Ahuramazda, Anton Tabas. Oliver Poss, an international spiv with a Greek passport standing apart from the conflict, was a wholly amoral Pan. Eric Amberson, the hero and narrator, represented the Mithras who must be sacrificed for humanity; but since, like a chief witch of the old religion, he was only too willing to give up his life, the harder sacrifice of love, happiness and self-respect was demanded from him.
Now, all this should not have been in the least apparent in the book, since Amberson himself was telling the story and unaware that he and the antagonists were playing their parts on two stages, one human and one divine. I used every conjuring trick of technique so that the religious dualism should pass clear over the heads of those for whom it meant nothing, and add a pleasure for any reader who picked up the symbolism. But the result was to leave in the air a vague and unsatisfactory sense of the supernatural, which was of course disastrous; and I never realised its presence until some contemptuous reviewer, intending to be unkind but blessedly revealing what was wrong, compared Elisa Cantemir to Rider Haggard’s She. As I had conceived her, Elisa was a passionate but unfeminine political maniac and the last person in all fiction likely to go up in smoke.
Even the rogues of Defoe cannot leave religion alone. This mounting uninvited into a too mysterious pulpit obliges me to satisfy curiosity and to answer the question of what I do believe. When I was in my twenties, dining in Bucharest with that liberal Byzantine, Canon Douglas, he told me that all my rag-bag of speculations could honestly be contained within the Church of England. It may be so, but I have to employ some far-fetched allegories before I can repeat the Creed. I am no more troubled by miracles than the centurion of Capernaum; and indeed I do not think that physicist and biochemist are now very far from explaining in their meaningless but useful words the source of power. I accept the Doctrine of the Trinity as a clear and magnificent definition of Godhead. Yet I cannot believe that any one of the great religions is less true than another.
They provide maps, and the individual soul is wise to choose that which is most familiar to him, whether a Roman road map which shows the day’s march as straight whatever the points of the compass, or the coloured inch-to-the-mile of the Hindu, or the child’s atlas which I myself prefer wherein detail is inadequate and unimportant, and the general picture clear. Since I am not yet weary of this life, I hate the thought of dying; but I am certain that when dead I am the earning of Life will be a harder and more intellectually adventurous task than the earning of a living, and that when the map is no longer two-dimensional I shall need all the self-discipline and knowledge which I have been able to acquire and the grace, which I have not deserved, of the Second Person of the Trinity, by whatever name He be called, if I am to find my way among the dreams.
The failure of The High Place reminded me that I had not yet reached the age of contemplation when it is permissible to promulgate heresies, and that my immediate duty was to support a family. A year’s work had brought in no income—proof, at any rate, that it was honest.
The obvious way of recovery was to write some fast-moving story of unlikely adventure. Speed, I knew, was one of my gifts—in spite of the laborious slowness with which the illusion is produced—and I was constantly being exhorted to write another Rogue Male. But I cannot analyse myself well enough to imitate myself. So I plunged for pure speed and imagination, and produced a commercial thriller called A Rough Shoot in the hope of selling it as a serial in America. In its genre I am not wholly ashamed of it, but the difference between this story and Rogue Male is the difference between cast iron and wrought.
A Rough Shoot was bought by the Saturday Evening Post as a serial, and also made into a film—a very bad one. Almost simultaneously the Post took the finest of all my long short stories, Three Kings, so that I had more money in the bank than I ever had before or since. The first sale merely proved that my calculation was right, the second that my craftsmanship was triumphant. In one I had pleased the market; in the other I had pleased myself, but needed the confirmation of the market that my taste was not purely personal. There is no artificiality in the distinction.
I have never been sure whether any story would sell or not, for my subjects are always unusual. If, in spite of the oddness, an experienced editor considers the story fit for mass reading, then there is every chance that I have hit my target. I may, of course, have fallen unconsciously into commercialism, but that is improbable unless I am playing with some entertaining fantasy without any undertones at
all.
Johnson declared that no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money. What I think he meant to express—though one should not study too closely all the mushroom cloud from a Johnsonian bomb—was his detestation of the amateur for whom it was enough to have written at all. It would be fair to present the problem thus: if you cannot live by your writing, the translation into words of your own manner of thinking cannot be effective, for your whole aim and object is to be so compellingly good that the maximum number of people, whether they approve or not, will have to pay money to read you. The market is the ultimate test for the craftsman. That it should also be the first and only test for the hack is unimportant.
I had no intention whatever of allowing A Rough Shoot to be published as a book, for I thought it too slight and ephemeral. The literary scholar of thirty-five years ago is still alive enough in me to be exasperatingly contemptuous of the mere story-teller. But weakly, and at last, I gave way to the insistence of my American and English publishers. A Rough Shoot was only forty thousand words, half the length of a novel, so I decided to write a sequel with the same hero and narrator and more true to life in that we would inspect the jolly school-boyish character when he was overcome by darkness, defeat and revenge. A Time to Kill was meant to appear in one volume with A Rough Shoot—a story of attack followed by one of defence.
But publishers dispose. Readers, they said—and they said it on both sides of the Atlantic—would not stand two stories in one volume. I do not know why. Personally I prefer to have eighty thousand words for my twelve and sixpence. Again I gave way—with the result that I was typed as a thriller writer, and not a very good one at that. My only sour satisfaction was that the public would have little to do with either book until offered as a paper-back, thereby proving that its business sense was as good as my own.
I set both stories in Dorset because I wished my characters to be free of foot, and I have no liking for description of the open north where the thermometer insists it is not cold though nothing but whisky will allay the discomfort of continual shivering. The western end of the chalk, not too closely populated, suits the mood of loneliness. Man on the short turf is apart from his fellows, and in a sense predatory upon them, since for his food and drink he must descend below the tree-tops. Meanwhile he may stand back from an England which, half-way to the horizon, recovers her youth and appears again a forest—ecstatic, as a man standing back from his beloved, that a beauty which was all of feeling is also a beauty to be seen. I delighted to draw the setting of A Rough Shoot from the four hundred acres of high farmland where I myself shared a shoot, though I could not allow to my narrator, who was a plain, provincial businessman, more poetry of description than would be in character.
A writer explaining how he deals with his subjects is almost bound to fall into excesses of conceit and humility. They are both so necessary to him. Lacking conceit, he would stop trying for the better; lacking humility, he would not know what the better was. More entertaining and just as relevant is to explain why he is drawn to his subjects at all, for that at once becomes the story of those thoughtless and happy hours when the raw material of writing is fed into the unconscious. If poetry be emotion recollected in tranquillity, much prose has as its origin tranquillity recollected with emotion.
To shoot for the pot has always refreshed me, combining my love of open country with the more urbane anticipation of a future meal. But, though a competent shot with rifle and pistol, I have never been more than a comedy figure with a gun. Anything which flies or runs—so long as it does—is reasonably safe from me. Occasional lessons have only driven my teachers to despair, for I am not even consistent in error. I may be under or over or peppering the next parish.
The beginning of my sporting activity was as fraudulent as the rest of it. When I was at Oxford I was employed one summer to be a good and healthy influence upon a thirteen-year-old boy. The job called out a temporary sense of responsibility, and a self which was then unknown to me did it well; possibly I remembered the dreaming happiness of my own boyhood before 1914, and was determined to preserve it in another. This charming boy was expected to learn to shoot, and I to encourage him in the art. Day after day the gamekeeper hurled chunks of pottery into the air for us. Invariably the boy hit them, and I missed them; on the other hand, I enjoyed it, and he did not. So we came to a gentlemen’s agreement under which I should shoot the rabbits while he entertained himself as he pleased. The rabbits on that Somerset estate looked as if they had been bred by a circus conjurer. Some were black, some red as a fox, and some, fathered by liberal-minded, rabbit-coloured rabbits, were tortoiseshell.
Returning to October Oxford I could now claim, in a casual manner, to be able to shoot; and Ivor Barry invited me from time to time to annoy his father’s pheasants. Thus I qualified for a future banker—not, of course, by reason of my prowess, but possibly because I knew all the correct gestures. They were almost in my blood, for when I was a very little boy I would make my father tell me bedtime stories of the shooting at Bilney in Norfolk and the gamekeeper and the local characters.
In Roumania one of the many saints of the Orthodox Church would sometimes close the bank long enough for a night and a day in the silent Danube marshes. I loved the morning flight for its unearthliness, its change, marked as that between waking and sleeping thoughts, from the city of men to the city of the birds. Closely following a peasant guide through darkness so black that there was no gleam of water, I arrived at nowhere and squatted in a waist-deep pit. Heralding the morning flight, teal bulleted overhead in twos and threes, their bodies just blacker than the night. Out of the grey came the grey geese, and after them, when the water was silver and the points of the rushes black against sunrise, the squadrons of the duck. Then the sun rose, and far away I could see the frontier of willows separating the sown from the desert of water in which no man lived but an occasional outlaw. One such, arriving with infinite precautions, I met at a peasant wedding. He was the local hero, and the bride’s father was greatly honoured that he should have taken such a risk. The man was all misery and wet hair, his sheepskin cloak rotting with mud, and his person a biblical comment upon the fruits of murder.
The feathered arrows of the half light were nearly always too fast for a slow arm encumbered by clothes; but warmed and after breakfast I was tireless in the pursuit of snipe, caring greatly for my dinner and less for the sporting dogma that he must be shot because he is the hardest bird to shoot. To my palate the snipe surpasses the woodcock, always provided that he is free from a faintly fishy tang and has never seen a shop counter.
The evening flights of September—since I do not mind leaches but I cannot stand cold—were much to my taste, and once in my life have I known what the first-class shot must feel. My companions were laid up with fever, due either to mosquitoes or a surfeit of water-melons, and I strolled out through the dusk along the top of a flood bank with no cover at all. The duck, confident that no one would ever attempt to shoot them from so improbable a position, committed suicide upon the end of my gun until it was too hot to hold. I could scarcely carry my bag, especially since I had to cover a quarter of a mile backwards facing the dogs of a gipsy encampment. They set great store by the useless beasts, and it would have been unwise to kill.
Once I shot in the Dobrudja, where the tumuli of the dead cover the steppe like ants’ nests—perhaps a Scythian cemetery with room for twenty cemeteries between one grave and another, perhaps the last record of Darius’ expedition while there was still leisure to bury the dead before the onset of starvation and empty wandering. Beyond this nomad’s paradise and close to what then was the Bulgarian frontier, high vegetation begins again. There we came to two great hedges, thicker than even an abandoned Dorset hedge, which enclosed nothing and seemed evidence of human intention rather than accomplishment. Over each hedge was a peregrine falcon. The tiercel and his mate had worked out a technique which proved that they were killing as much for sport as f
or hunger. The falcon would glide low along the foot of her hedge where partridges were cowering. Up would get the covey and fly across to the second hedge. Just before they arrived, the tiercel would strike, bagging one or missing. He then patrolled his own hedge until the partridges lost their nerve again and were driven back to the falcon. We four guns were in the middle of this fascinating game. We did occasionally drop a bird out of the covey, but for the most part the peregrines worked like a pair of ill-trained gun-dogs, a hundred yards ahead of us.
In the years which followed Roumania my mind, enterprising in all but relaxation, paced the cage which I had made for it, and I never touched a gun until my return at the beginning of the war. Again there were morning and evening flights on the Danube marshes, and sometimes long tramps over the open plain—ten or more guns, with a hundred paces between them, walking mile after mile across the sunburnt stubble and fallow. Game got up so far away that full choke in both barrels was recommendable, and I was completely outclassed by the Roumanians, who were a people of keen shots with a strict and admirable code of game laws.
In the Lebanon my ex-gamekeeper sergeant-major and I were bound together by a community of tastes which once exposed us to the delight and derision of two sections. We were about to start one of our pistol-shooting matches. The target was being nailed up when he and I simultaneously spotted a snipe. We fell upon our bellies and crawled in its direction. To have killed a snipe with a .45 revolver would be a memory for ever. Twenty-six pairs of eyes watched us with amazement, for nothing less than a German spy bogged from his parachute could account for this lunatic behaviour. We fired together at nothing visible. None of them connected our slow and skilful stalk with the little brown bird which rose and obligingly settled again. Once more we got within twenty yards and fired. This time one of us must have been very close, for the snipe disappeared towards High Lebanon, producing every jink and trick in its repertoire. We returned and explained ourselves. But the word ‘snipe’ carried little magic for those highly intelligent townsmen. We might as well have said it was a sparrow.
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