Jacob's Room is Full of Books

by Susan Hill

  I trot out the old phrases. You need application. You need to read. You need to want it.

  You need luck. Talent. More luck.

  See if you can spend a year not writing and then ask yourself if you still want to do it.

  I don’t think I am ever much help. If you’re going to do it, you will.

  ‘If it’s meant to be.’ Is there any more to it than that?

  I say it all again anyway. Then I think, who am I? I actually only know what I have learned for myself and that probably only applies to me. I write in fragments, more often than not … I don’t sit for four or six hours, and I never get up and produce hundreds or thousands of consecutive sentences. I did once, but only because of limited time available in which to get anything down at all before homework or exam revision or the baby’s crying or the children’s supper called. I suspect my natural mode is the one I write in now, which is a bit here, a bit there. I notice that the daughter who writes does that, too – she can write a scene or two on a train, or while waiting for the pot to boil. A friend of hers recently lamented never being able to find three days without interruption in which to get going on her second novel. Maybe she never will. Maybe she will have to be more ruthless in carving out that time, or learn to use an hour to maximum advantage. Everyone is different, there are no rules, we all create our own way of doing it.

  I say all this, too.

  I am always tempted to ask, ‘Why do you want to be a writer?’ Though most often they have more or less told me that already. But why the ‘Why’? One never asks, ‘Why do you read?’ There is no shame in not really knowing about the writing, in saying just, ‘I just know I love writing.’ For myself, I say, ‘Because I can’ and ‘Because I am otherwise unemployable’. And ‘Because I have done it for the last seventy years and I can no more imagine myself not writing than I can not breathing. And the consequence of both might well be the same.’

  Do people want to paint in this way, or sculpt, or compose, or dance? Some do, but nowhere near as many, simply because of the technical challenges and requirements. Everyone can write, ergo everyone can write a book.

  The older I get the more divided I become. On the one hand, let everyone write a book who wants to, and have it published, the more the merrier. On the other, there are too many books in the world already, and too many new books published, making claims on people’s reading time and purses and on shelf space and …

  Maybe there is no answer. That is true of quite a few things, after all.

  ALAN JUDD. Most people know him as a spy story maestro, author of the Charles Thorogood series – A Breed of Heroes, Legacy, Uncommon Enemy, Inside Enemy. Good spy stories are hard to come by and probably harder to write. I have occasionally toyed with doing one but have always been deterred by the riches of those already available and the long shadow of John le Carré. Once you have read the George Smiley novels, what more do you need?

  But I had never heard of Alan Judd, and he had not written his spy stories, when my then French publisher asked me what I thought of a novel called The Devil’s Own Work by Alan Judd and proffered her opinion that it was a work of genius. Others from the French book world who sat around the table nodded in agreement. So I bought The Devil’s Own Work.

  She was right. It is a fine novella. It is quite short, impeccably written, immaculately structured, beautifully shaped. It is by turn enigmatic, touching, frightening, ambiguous, but never less than impressive. It more than nods to Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier – hardly surprising, given that Judd wrote a prize-winning biography of Ford. It is not like that masterpiece in subject matter or setting, but there is something in the tone, and in the way the narrator tells his story. There is nothing wrong with that. We all beg, borrow and steal from one another, much of the time quite unconsciously. We read and remember other people’s novels, dive down deep into that place from which our own books derive, and are transmuted, possibly over many years. We are not copying. But no book is an island, entire of itself.

  I have just re-read The Devil’s Own Work, wondering if I would still be impressed. Sometimes a book has its day and, although of course it does not change, the reader does, as a result of having read better things, or new tastes having come to the fore, or fashions in literature having moved on. Other novels seem to have improved, usually because we have matured as readers, our imaginations have expanded and we understand new literary approaches, sometimes because of life events which have opened us up to a new emotional awareness and understanding. It really does not matter. I can still enjoy and appreciate Alice in Wonder-land, whereas Fifth Form at Malory Towers can yield me nothing more.

  The Devil’s Own Work is on one level a horror story, about a Faustian pact, and there are some suitably dark, menacing moments, but it is also a shrewd comment on literary fiction and writers puffed up beyond their true value. Once you grasp both aspects, the book acquires further richness, but even at first reading it is a fine story – and one of the best written of novellas.

  It is still in print and I still recommend it.

  And that’s another thing – the perils of recommending books.

  HAS MAY EVER BEEN SO COLD? Eight degrees here today and the wind made it feel like minus 8. But there have been other Mays like this. The year I was married, our wedding day, 23 April (Shakespeare and St George), was very warm and sunny. The day we had our wedding party, a month later, it was no more than 10, windy and wild and wet. During the May Bank Holiday weekend of 1984, when I was in hospital, I lay looking at rain being dashed against the ward windows. Nurses, coming on and off duty, were soaked and frozen.

  So this weather is nothing new but it still feels unseasonal. The cuckoo has shut up, the swallows appeared and vanished again and the lilac is being bent and bashed about.

  Huddled indoors, looking as ever for something different to read, I ran my fingers along a shelf and stopped at How to Disappear. I seem to have three copies in three different versions with three different covers. Even as I took one down and went to the sofa with it, I had already gone back to a warm Cotswold summer ten years ago – warm but with intermittent monsoons – and the time that Duncan came to stay in the flat at one end of our barn.

  Duncan. Duncan Fallowell, author of How to Disappear and other brilliant, eccentric, quirky books by a man who Has Adventures. Duncan has adventures because he goes about looking for them – an admirable trait, though one which I have never shared. His adventures are sometimes self-sought – like those he met with in New Zealand. He wrote about them in Going as Far as I Can. Then there was his trip To Noto – Noto is a place in Sicily to which he drove from London. Duncan drives everywhere. His adventures are sometimes topographical, sometimes architectural, but mostly they are of the human sort. I have never known anyone who has bumped by chance into such an extraordinary array of people, simply because that is how he sets his compass. He walks into a bar and the only other man drinking a pint there turns out to be a former lover of Evelyn Waugh … that sort of thing.

  I have never known anyone else like Duncan. One doesn’t. In his youth he was one of the handsomest men ever, with louche, sexy, decadent good looks. Now, older, he still has more than a shadow of them, because he is slender, but also young in outlook, up for anything, inquisitive, excitable. But thank goodness, he is not ‘forever young’ in that irritating Peter Pan way.

  He shocks me and worries me and delights me by turn, and he is one of the most disciplined and meticulous writers I have ever known. He makes me feel slovenly. He takes infinite pains.

  He ought to be better known and more widely celebrated than he is, because he is incapable of writing a dull sentence. When you plunge into a DF book you set off on an adventure yourself. He is an urban man, a London man, in spite of needing some quiet time in remoter places, and you don’t go to him for descriptions of wildlife and the natural world. You go for two things, apart from the adventure – for towns and cities, the manmade landscape, and for people. At one time he wrote
a lot of profiles for colour supplements and magazines – pop stars, actors, writers, even aristocrats. There is a great one in To Noto of Mick Jagger. His piece about a visit to Sacheverell Sitwell towards the end of his life, at his home in Northamptonshire, is one of the best ever about that amazing, lovable man. Duncan conjures up both the man and his surroundings so that I felt I was sitting there with Sachie all over again.

  Duncan is a perspicacious and clear-eyed profiler because he gets to know his subject, in so far as that subject will allow him. When one does, the result is very rewarding. I wish he could have interviewed the late Diana, Princess of Wales, because he understood her, he knew what made her tick and he also hit the spot, in so far as anyone ever has, about exactly why she was so loved and why her death, funeral and the whole period surrounding them were like nothing else before or after. Almost. Because he himself does not really understand it. Who did? He kept haunting Kensington Palace, looking at the flowers as they piled higher and higher, and at the people bringing them, breathing in the atmosphere, being saddened and moved and trying to answer all the questions. Nothing else has brought that time twenty years ago back to me as Duncan does.

  Perhaps he would rather be known as a novelist. Maybe he thinks he is best at that. But he is best as a unique traveller, spotter of idiosyncrasies and eccentrics, at putting his finger on the pulse of a place. I have never wanted to go New Zealand, and after reading his book about it I want to go even less. I know why, too. But To Noto makes me want to go to Sicily, as well as afraid of ever doing so. It was Sachie Sitwell who gave him his send-off there – Sachie, another lover of strange places, oddities, curiosities in the great human museum of the weird. They had something in common. But Sachie was a lover of Venice, and Duncan is a Venice hater – which is quite ridiculous, principally because he has never been. He has set his face against it like a child who will never eat a banana just because he has been told it is delicious and he will absolutely love it, and so is determined he will loathe it.

  We had some good talks, the summer that he came to stay, sitting in the garden at dusk and after dark, over glasses of wine, the puppy at our feet, the cats somewhere about, silent shadows. And the owls in the long barn. The flat in which Duncan was staying was at one end of the barn and at the other was an open balcony, in which the barn owl had nested. Several young owls had fledged and at night they made a strange hissing noise, and the hissing ran right along the wooden beam into the bedroom where Duncan slept, head against the same beam, so that he woke, terrified of the ghostly sound and quite unable to discover what it was. He did not come over to the house in his terror then but early morning saw him ashen-faced, at our door. I explained about the baby owls, finding it quite funny. I don’t think he did.

  I have been re-reading my way through his books, moving from one to the next in no particular order. There is renewed surprise and fresh interest that jumps out from every other page.

  He takes your breath away with some of his images: ‘French electricity pylons are more like people than English ones. They have little thalidomide arms, large heads, erect terrier ears.’

  He is very perceptive about people as they really are, not as they present themselves. He read one of Dirk Bogarde’s volumes of autobiography and got the man exactly right. ‘Beneath the carefully casual exterior it was all terribly uptight. Bogarde says that his great quality is charm. It isn’t. It is sadness. An aura of extreme emotional vulnerability gives depth even to his trashiest roles.’ Spot on, as when he says that Bogarde was ‘the finest British screen actor alive’ (as he was then).

  Bogarde could never ever admit to his own homosexuality. He could never see that it was clear as crystal to the rest of the world. Of course, that was partly the times in which he lived. But in the course of the research for the book, Duncan also went to see Sir Angus Wilson and his partner Tony Garrett, who had just moved to France, after decades in rural Suffolk. They went because, as Angus said, ‘I do find all that hypocrisy about homosexuality and so on very hard to swallow. They were quite awful in Suffolk when Tony was forced out of his job as a very good probation officer, saying how much everyone liked him but really he couldn’t be allowed to continue in the circumstances – just because he didn’t hide our relationship.’

  Yet Angus was in many ways a traditional, even conventional Englishman, and one of his times, too. He and Bogarde were poles apart. Angus was camp. Dirk tried his damnedest never to appear so.

  Not long after their difficult and stressful move to France, disaster struck Angus and Tony, when they discovered that French law does not allow anyone not related by blood or marriage to inherit an estate. It has to go down in a particular order of relativity: spouse, parents, elder son and then other sons, then daughters, male cousins, female, and so on and so on until a fourteenth cousin three times removed may be reached. But a ‘partner’, hetero or homosexual, of however many years, gets nothing.

  In panic, because by now Angus was ill, they fled back to England. The strain of all this can have done nothing to help his physical, let alone mental and emotional state.

  But before any of this happened, Duncan Fallowell got an afternoon with them when they were still moving into their new place in St-Rémy-de-Provence, and he had tea and sugar-meringues ‘glued together with jam’, of which the Knight had a whole box, most of which he demolished with gusto, getting icing sugar all over himself without a care.

  It isn’t easy, at least for me, to have a ‘books read’ conversation with Duncan, though. I ask if he has read X or Y. ‘No – my tastes are avant-garde.’ He is the only person I know who would say that. I offer to send him the Patrick Melrose novels by Edward St Aubyn because I think he would ‘get’ them. But he refuses.

  THE CENTRAL HEATING is back on. Hirundines seem to have returned to Africa even before their nests are full.

  WHEN I AM WRITING CRIME NOVELS, I do not read any. It is all too easy to lift someone’s idea inadvertently. Not the big idea – there are only so many of those in crime fiction, as in any other. No, it’s the small things. And the setting. And what Jeeves called ‘the psychology of the individual’. Val McDermid’s DCI Carol Jordan and profiler Tony Hill, with their smooth professional relationship and roller coaster personal one, are a great fictional pairing and having a profiler who is not a cop, and so is not so tied by police rules, works particularly well. I have never watched the television adaptations but the books are absorbing and intriguing, though the graphic violence gets to me sometimes.

  I read three on the trot recently, after which I tried going back to P. D. James. The later Adam Dalgliesh novels still reverberate but her early books seem a bit simplistic now. She learned on the job, as we all should, though it’s surprising how many don’t.

  What a good, nice woman PDJ was. The Spectator gave me a lunch when I was seventy, to which I could invite whom I liked, and I asked Phyllis, though I hesitated beforehand, not expecting her to come, as she was ninety by then and, I assumed, frail. Not a bit of it. If she was less steady on her feet than the last time I had seen her, her mind was still razor sharp, and her conversation lively and challenging. She didn’t duck the difficult topics. It was a joy to have her there, especially as it was the last time I saw her. Always ask.

  She was very good at character, and at settings. I tired of her poet detective after a time, but her murderers were always complex individuals. The best of the novels are set in Suffolk, which she knew so well (and, after those, London and Oxford). She made such good use of the coast, of the river Thames, the churches and lanes and nooks and crannies of Oxford. One always walks there with her – and is always looking over one’s shoulder. She is far better at Oxford than anyone else I have read and I wish she had set more of her books there.

  Of the early novels, I think A Shroud for a Nightingale stands up best, but it is some years since I read it last. I must dig it out before I move on to another novelist. I have jags on one writer. I suppose many addicted readers do.


  ANOTHER READING JAG, Ian Fleming/James Bond, but, after reading five in a row, I find only two that really satisfy in anything other than a ‘slips down like ice cream’ sort of way. Casino Royale can be read any number of times, even simply for the great Texas Hold’em poker game organised by one of Fleming’s best villains, Le Chiffre. I learned Texas Hold’em, teaching myself via an app, and then played a lot online. Too much. I had to stop, not because I was losing – I was breaking even overall and anyway, I never played for high stakes – but because it is very addictive and time-wasting. No, not ‘wasting’. I enjoyed it, it was a mental challenge, and I was improving all the time. But time-consuming, certainly. I began to find myself playing every night until the early hours. Time to stop. But knowing the game has made re-reading Casino Royale much more exciting. Gambling at the tables lends itself to great set-piece scenes in fiction. At the beginning of Daniel Deronda, George Eliot created a magnificent one in the casino at the fictional German spa town of Leubronn, based on the one at Baden-Baden. That casino is still where it was in her day, and unchanged other than having been given a fresh coat of paint and new upholstery and drapery, though always in the same white, gold and red. In Anthony Trollope’s Palliser novel Can you Forgive Her?, the aristocratic wastrel Burgo Fitzgerald loses everything on the spin of the roulette wheel. Dostoevsky’s The Gambler is a whole novel about good and evil forces played out in the casino.

  Le Chiffre is a magnificent and entirely credible villian, which some of Fleming’s are not, and if a villain is not credible, he can’t frighten you, whereas Le Chiffre is terrifying.

  So is Sir Hugo Drax, in Moonraker, which I rate as by far and away the best Bond, and the one which can take its place with a lot of good literature – the novels of Graham Greene, for a start. It has a more sombre theme than the other Bonds, one which becomes worryingly more relevant more or less every decade. Every time North Korea raises its head I am reminded of Moonraker.