Enter WAITER with profiteroles, champagne; opens latter; pours glass. DINER ignores it!
DINER suddenly sits up, all attention, bright.
DINER:
There was the baby, sitting up, with that unbelievably stupid look of hope upon his stupid face! (pause) There was Mahler on at the time, Das Lied von der Erde if I remember rightly, I objected to that, too. And the baby with this look of expectancy, the baby expectorant, ha! (pause) And she said, she said as though she could not have meant it to mean more, (pause) sincerely, she said, I shall dry out without you. (pause) I shall dry out without you.
DINER slumps again; finally.
DINER s eyes close.
DINER lifts glass.
BELLY meanwhile has been reaching towards a climax of distress. At climax, DINER joins BELLY at pitch of shriek.
Both suddenly stop.
DINER’s hand pauses; spills glass.
BLACKOUT.
Short Prose
The Travails of Travelling People
Published in Smith’s Trade News, 20 April 1963
You must have an agent, they said.
So I have this agent. She has a fabulous Georgian house in this top postal district. She has carpets on the walls, and gives me Fuller’s walnut layer cake, China tea, and spiel. Like how she’s made ten thousand last year for this writer just like me.2 So after some thought I agree to let her do the same for me next year. When my novel Travelling People is finished I take it along to her. Take it, not trusting the post. Besides, it would cost too much: big, it is, to me, 110,000 words, all my own, I had to put it in a lever-arch file as they don’t make anything else that would take that thickness of paper. Very proud of that bulk alone.
Back it comes a few weeks later. It feels very heavy. All this agent will tell me about it is that it is pretentious and unsaleable. According to her Expert Reader. I ask her if I may see the Report, feeling like a schoolboy trying find out what They have said about him to his Mother. She will not tell me. Only that Travelling People is pretentious and unsaleable. What is the point, I even say to her, by letter, of course, of our relationship unless you tell me what I have done wrong so that I can try to put it right next time? That would be to betray a trust, she thinks, to show me the Report; so I am answered, at the third time of asking, pretentious and unsaleable, again. I assume the Report is appalling and obviously recommends instant expulsion. But however bad it is, not knowing is worse. I quietly disintegrate into fairly small pieces.
A sweet friend so very kindly picks up most of these pieces and tidies up generally. Then she gives me the phone numbers of two agents whom she has enquired about and found reputed to be sympathetic to first novels. I am sceptical about anyone being sympathetic to first novels which are also wildly unconventional. But what else is there to do?
So I ring number one on my little list. His phone is engaged. I ring number two, the last, and can speak only to his secretary. I tell this dolly my business, and end clearly but cynically by saying that much wasted time can be avoided if she indicates whether her boss is prepared to read the unusual, the unconventional, and to try to understand what I am trying to do in Travelling People. This dolly is very put out at this, incensed at my imputation that perhaps her boss does not read every word sent to him. To mollify her I apologise profusely and promise to send the novel.
I do not send the novel. I take it myself, that afternoon, with a letter explaining what I think I am trying to do. This agent has a Georgian house, too, with nice lead-flashed dormers and crummy cream paint. In the Enquiries office there’s this fair old dolly who asks me in what I allow to be a good imitation of the Queen Mum voice whether she can help me. Restraining a natural inclination to explain in hardly necessary detail how not half she could, I give her the letter and my lovely 2¼" thick typescript. She smiles and makes me wish I had bothered to wash and shave. I huddle in my Orson Welles overcoat and hope I look eccentric and mysterious.
Then I retire to the Angel3 and pretend I am anything but a writer. This sweet bird comes and sticks some more of the pieces together.
Within the fortnight a civil letter from this second agent. I am delighted that he has seen more or less exactly what I was trying to do in Travelling People, and that he likes it; he makes suggestions for one irrelevant character and one irrelevant chapter to be cut or rewritten; and makes it clear that if I am going to be inflexible about it then there is not much that he can do for me.
But I am not like that at all, and I am certainly pleased to know exactly where I stand. So I ring this dolly again and make an appointment to see her boss.4
She’s an even fairer old dolly than the one downstairs. And her boss has his carpets on the floor. Very right and proper, I think, wall to wall, too. And he sits me in this splendid green womb of an armchair, next to the oilfilled radiator, under one of the dormers. Mind you, he smokes a pipe, but I try not to hold this against him. I soon learn he knows his kit: not only did he read English under Leavis, but he has been both an author and a publisher himself. He knows Travelling People, too, and his objections to Chapter Two are reasonable and valid: I agree to cut it,5 though it is like cutting out my own liver. Still, a book can live without a liver. He’s read Tristram Shandy, as well, and thinks it marvellous: one of the more useful divisions of humanity is into those who do and those who don’t adore Tristram Shandy. By the end of our talk, I am wholly re-integrated.
The first four publishers find my novel full of promise but are unwilling to spend money to see that promise in print. One of them even invites me out for a drink and we spend a couple of pleasant hours discussing my fullness of promise and his unwillingness to spend money to see that promise in print.
Then T. S. Eliot, Herbert Read, Henry Moore, Bonamy Dobrée,6 and the other Gregory Trust judges make me the recipient of one of the Gregory Awards for the encouragement of young creative writers.
By what I believe to be a genuine coincidence, the next publisher to whom Travelling People is offered by my agent is very interested, and invites me to go to see him about it.
I have strange ideas about publishers. I imagine Dickens, for instance, going in to his publisher with a great idea for a book, and being told:
‘No, it won’t sell, Charlie. Kill her off in the last chapter, and we’ll call it The Death of Little Nell.’
But this publisher is very different from anything I had expected: a most charming gentleman, and he has no carpets on his walls either, just lots of lovely enviable books. Nevertheless I am very nervous and more or less demand to have a whiskey forced down my throat before I can talk at all. Then when we do talk it is more about The Novel than about Travelling People. But finally he wins me over when he says that he found my novel funny, which of all reactions is the one I find most pleasing. Then he starts talking about cuts: ‘flat patches’ he calls them, but really he’s after my novel’s kidneys.
So I take it away, and cut out the kidneys. To my astonishment, Travelling People is a better book for being without its kidneys as well as without its liver. And I’m sure you don’t find many authors saying that the surgery suggested by their agents and publishers results in a better book. It makes me wonder whether people, too, wouldn’t perhaps be better without some of their offal.
Then one day in August we sign a contract and I receive the first half of my advance. The next day I take off for the south of France. It seems the only thing to do. The only thing I can think of to do, anyway, hackneyed and unimaginative as it may sound.
When I come back it is to find that the printers consider certain passages in Travelling People to be obscene. I tell the publisher that my first reaction is to refuse to change a single word, he says ‘Good for you,’ and it is the printers who change their minds. The publisher also lets me have a big say in the typography and production of Travelling People, and I spend a day with a compositor going through the typescript with him page by page: the setting being complex, not to say eccentric. This compositor clearly th
inks I am right round the twist. I am also allowed to commission my own jacket from John Holden, a painter whose work I have admired for many years.
Next year he is going to publish my poems: and greater love hath no publisher than that he lays out his loot on an author’s poems.
I think the best agent in London found me the best publisher in London.
Bloody Blues
Published in the Observer, 18 April 19657
It was because my father used to swear there that interested me in the beginning. He never used to swear anywhere else when I was around. It became a bond between us, something we had together that my mother did not, unlike anything else, his swearing on alternate Saturday afternoons.
This was just after the war ended, and as soon as he was out of the Kate8 he started taking me and a Pratt’s two-gallon petrol tin to Stamford Bridge.
It was the team, of course, which made him (normally restrained to the point of near-inarticulateness) swear with a vigour and comprehensibility which surprised and delighted me: Chelsea.
It was not as though Chelsea had poor players at that time, either. ‘Those three cost a bleeding packet,’ I remember him saying, as, with Len Goulden and Tommy Walker on either side of him, Tommy Lawton stood waiting for the whistle, rubbing his hands together as if obsequiously, his great shoulders hunched against the cold, shifting his weight and flicking to loosen each ankle in turn.
All three were at the ends of their careers, all three had come from other perhaps more famous, certainly more successful, clubs, but all three were typical Chelsea players of that period. Their heads were small in relation to their bodies, their dark hair was cut short, parted in the middle and swept sharply back on either side, and they ran as though they had thought out and invented the mechanics of the action for themselves without reference to evolution, as though each thought himself the first human being to run.
The other characteristic of the archetypal Chelsea player then was extreme footballing skill accompanied by an equally extreme inability to produce it at crucial moments.
During the kickabout before the start of Tommy Walker’s benefit match against Hearts, for instance, I can still see the way Walker killed a thigh-high ball thundering at him with the calmest and most economical of six-inch movements. Yet when similar use of his brilliant control would have brought him an easy goal during the match, he missed a slower ball altogether.
It was at this sort of thing more than any other kind of shortcoming that my father swore. While, by the time I was old enough not to need the petrol tin to stand on, I used to be happy if Chelsea won, he would be happy only if they played well, win or lose. I still find this difficult to understand.
In those days of huge crowds we used to get to the Bridge anything up to an hour and a half before the kickoff. That was the worst part, waiting. I came to know the roofline from the top of the main banking by heart: flats, acres of chimneys, a green copper dome, the asbestos whaleback of the Earls Court Exhibition, and quaintly fretted decorations on the great grey and rusty gasometers over towards the river. In a gap at the back of the main stand steam occasionally fluffed as a train went along the single-track line, its pace oddly unrelated to that of the steam and smoke.
This roofline is not visible from the press box at the Bridge, which is set so high up under the main stand that only the bottom quarter of the great terrace opposite can be seen. It’s not the same, watching a match from the press box, as from that terrace. But, there, the team isn’t the same either: a largely home-produced side with no stars has replaced expensive buys from other clubs, but after their most successful season for ten years my father is still dissatisfied. Perhaps he’s right, too, they are basically the same old Chelsea: out of the Cup in the semi-finals, and faltering in their challenge for the League after leading most of the season. True, they won the League Cup, but, cruelly, hardly anyone noticed.
The first match I reported this season happened to be a major one at Stamford Bridge (Arlott was still doing cricket, Ferrier and Pawson were god knows where) and immediately after I’d phoned my early report through I met my father for a few moments. Chelsea had won well and easily, but he was still pessimistic and cast severe doubts on the parentage of two of the forwards.
I left him to go back and write another report for the later editions. From the unpopulated terraces came the strange undercurrent of scratchiness caused by plastic beakers blowing about. By the time the preoccupied evening dog racing crowds had begun to straggle in, I’d finished what was my longest and to me most important report so far.
When I saw my father a week later, he hadn’t even read it.
A Fishing Competition
Published in the Observer, 30 May 19659
Some came into the Cornamona pub on the night of the competition meeting with the familiarity of daily visitors, others with a deferent sureness that the occasion broke down barriers inherent in their positions as teachers or doctors, and yet others with that shyness which comes from day-long contact with stock and fields rather than with other men, their faces burnt by two days’ April sun; one in a tubular aeruginous suit, looking strangely like Beckett’s Murphy (‘Word went round among the members of the Blake League that the Master’s conception of Bildad the Shuhite had come to life and was stalking about. . . .in a green suit, seeking whom he might comfort.’)
Most drank as they canvassed for the exact number of boats and engines available. Then the competitors’ names went into a flat cap, and those of the boats into a wet (‘I’ve been fishing all day’) trilby. Two men to a boatman, laughter and consternation at some of the coupling brought up by chance in the draw, a little diplomatic rearrangement, fears about the weather (last year the competition was held in a storm, and two men were drowned), and the meeting went out into the Guinness-dark night.
Nowhere wider than half a mile, the Doorus peninsula runs four miles out into the northern end of Lough Corrib from Cornamona, in Joyce Country, Connemara. The boats were drawn up on the lakeshore at a point where it meets the road about halfway down the peninsula, and parked cars narrowed the road for half a mile on the Sunday morning of the competition. The lake was calm, but heavy, vertical rain fell, complicating the starting arrangements: some keen competitors were out promptly at half past eleven, others had to be fetched from the pub at two by impatient companions or boatmen. All seemed agreed that it was a poor day for fishing.
The Corrib trout is a brown trout: that is to say, he has a silver belly shading to bronze on the flank and deep olive-black on the back, and the whole length is spattered with inkstain-like splodges, mostly sepia but towards the tail blood-red, about the size of an Irish threepenny. The biggest ever caught weighed 21½ pounds, and the average fish is about a pound and a half; they generally fight very hard, particularly when they see the boat, and their flesh is a salmon-like delicate orange-pink. He can be taken in a variety of ways, but on this Sunday the rule was artificial flies (sooty olives, black pennels, and grand invictas being amongst the favourites) fished wet.
Trout and salmon fishing on Lough Corrib is free, and the Irish Inland Fisheries Board is trying to improve it by re-stocking with a quarter of a million trout a year and making it solely game waters by removing all the perch and pike. Traps rather similar to lobster-pots are used for the perch, and large sprays of twigs for them to spawn on are placed in the shallows and later removed. Pike are caught on fixed, buoyed lines baited with perch: one 45 pound monster caught in this way two years ago glares viciously from a glass case in the Cornamona pub, and ‘Let’s go and see the Pike’ is a pleasing euphemistic invitation to local conviviality.
At six the muffled crackling of outboard motors was heard out among the lake islands, and the boats began to return. The rain held off briefly as the tailboard of a red lorry was dropped, and the officials climbed up to enact the weigh-in before a crowd of a hundred or so. Competitors with sagging landing nets pushed their way through to pass up their catches, and watched edgily as the nee
dle of the kitchen scales deflected, bounced and settled: two fish weighing 1lb 12ozs, five weighing 3lbs 14ozs, a single half-pounder, half a dozen catches under the top so far, and then four fish just reaching four pounds. But with melodramatic suddenness someone on the edge of the crowd noticed a latecomer just climbing out of his boat with a landing net weightily distended by a single fish larger than anything seen yet, and everyone turned to watch his approach.
There were those who thought at first it was a salmon, others who thought it some weird throwback or cross and yet others who agreed with the man who correctly thought it was a sick fish and who later said ‘I asked him if he was going to eat it, and he said his wife liked fish, and I told him if he thought anything of his wife at all he’d persuade her not to like this one.’ But it was a trout, and it had been fairly caught during the competition at the mouth of the Cornamona river on a black pennel, and (despite the fact that it would have gone nearly double had it been in good condition) it did weigh 5lbs 12ozs: and it therefore won prizes for both highest total weight of fish caught and for the biggest fish.
Fifty competitors caught 32 trout that day weighing 46 lbs together. Some caught nothing and had not even a sunny day on Lough Corrib to compensate them: but all of them (and many others who had not fished) saw the Pike that evening.
Writing and Publishing: or, Wickedness Reveal’d
Published in Socialist Commentary, June 1965
Americans sometimes refer to English publishing as a ‘cottage industry’. This is not quite true, for publishing in this country has evolved to a somewhat later stage than that, is in fact in economic terms closely comparable with very early capitalism. That is to say, the basic producers of the wealth are not paid even a living wage and are exploited by secondary producers and non-productive entrepreneurs.
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