by Nick Webb
The three of us got on tremendously well, and I remember thinking, as I made my slightly unsteady way home that evening, that if the offer were not too mean, we would be successful in acquiring the book.
Sonny Mehta recalls what happened:
You came in [that’s me] in your usual shambling way, saying there was this radio series you’d been listening to that you thought was really something, and that you figured we ask the writer of the scripts if he could turn it into a novel. That’s roughly what happened. You gave me some of the tapes—I remember listening to them. It was a small contract, but when we published, it just went through printing after printing.
Editors are not sovereign in most publishing houses; they have to get the blessing of the right forum in order to spend the company’s money. They do this at the editorial meeting, an institution that authors have learned to dread. Suppose, they fret, not entirely without reason, the committee gets around to my book, in which I’ve invested years of toil and anguish, after a long, fractious meeting, and it’s time for lunch.
At the editorial meeting (nomenclature may vary), the editor makes a pitch about a book to his or her colleagues, usually with the sales director or some professional hard-nose also present. Publishing is a business to some extent concerned with managing failure (axiomatically most of what’s published does not become a bestseller), so the people around the table are pretty cynical. They’ve heard it all before, and regard its repetition as an unnatural act. You might think this is a tough test for the work of a delicate author to endure, but it’s not unreasonable. The editor can get the benefit of the pooled experience of those present, and if he or she cannot sell the book in-house, is it fair to expect the sales team to sell it to the trade?* 105 After all, if you think the editorial meeting team sounds blasé, let me tell you its members are sweetness itself compared to the professional buyers in the big bookselling chains like W.H. Smith. These world-weary, etiolated people are so gorged on publishers’ hype that they could scarcely raise a flicker of interest if a mile-high silver starship landed on their Swindon warehouse; they rank as amongst the most jaded on Earth, possibly in the entire history of the species.
But at the Pan editorial meeting, in an airless room in the middle of the building, Sonny Mehta and the rest of my colleagues smiled at my enthusiasm. After some haggling with Jill Foster over royalties and sub-right splits,* 106 Pan acquired the world rights for an advance against all earnings of £3,000, half payable on signature of the agreement and half on publication. Douglas and John Lloyd were the original parties to the contract, but John Lloyd’s name was later deleted—and thereby hangs a tale.
Although not a huge risk for Pan, in 1978 £3,000 was a decent sum. John Lloyd says that at the time he was badly in debt, with an overdraft.
It seemed like a fortune. Writing together was perfectly natural. We’d written lots of things together—a pilot for the BBC, a film treatment, a cartoon series for that Dutch company. We’d tried lots of things and we were very close friends, we’d shared a flat together. We got on very well as writers because we weren’t the same sort of writer, so there was very little competition; it was just a sort of cooperative thing. We laughed a lot; we had great fun.
Douglas, living in squalor with Jon Canter off the Holloway Road, was also thrilled to get an advance. He embraced the possibilities of having some spare change with childlike glee. Jon recalls Douglas nipping out to the local off-licence to buy some Coke, and coming back with an almost unmanageable crate of the stuff—because he could. He’d woken up to the realization that he could afford to buy in quantity if he wanted. Douglas, literally and figuratively, was never a single bottle purchaser again.
But when Douglas sat down to write the novel, he felt—as with his script and sketch writing—that he should do it on his own, without John Lloyd. He wrote to John suggesting that he alone write the book, and that he was sure that John would see the sense of doing things that way.
For all the complexities, John and Douglas were friends, and for many months they had been the thickness of a brick away at home and at work, so the fact that Douglas put all this in a letter was particularly hurtful to John. Why not talk, for goodness sake? It may suggest that Douglas found it a difficult subject to broach, but it is just as likely that he did it in all innocence, not anticipating that it would be a problem, but only knowing that one had to be formal about such understandings. It was, as he explained in an interview with Neil Gaiman, his project. Although he had felt it might be fun to collaborate, when he realized he could do it himself, he changed his mind. He was within his rights, but as he admits:
I should have handled it better. John Lloyd and I are incredibly good friends, but on the other hand we are incredibly good at rubbing each other up the wrong way. We have these ridiculous fights when I’m determined to have a go at him and he’s determined to have a go at me.* 107
Douglas was taken by surprise by the vehemence of their row. But John was furious. Being fired off the book was a burning coal in his heart. He was humiliated. Years later, when both men were reconciled, it was still a subject that had to be stepped around as delicately as a sapper probing for a mine. Douglas, by then fully aware that he had been a clodhopper, rationalized that it had been good for John, for it had pushed him into telly where he became hugely successful. John, suffused with the benignity that follows the passage of decades and the extinction of a friend, says that Douglas’s need to write the book on his own was vindicated by results. Nobody else could have captured his voice or done it so well. Of course, John explains, he sulked for a while, but now he understands that Douglas did the right thing.
However, at the time it hurt deeply. We tend to lie to ourselves about our friendships because such fibs reflect well on our own resources of emotional generosity. What’s more, facing up to the possibility that friendships can sometimes be a matter of convenience requires us to be unflinchingly clear-sighted about the fallibility of human relations and the horror of loneliness. John and Douglas’s relationship was a planet in a highly elliptical orbit. Sometimes it would be close to its star and basking in the warmth. Other times it would be remote and frozen—and at all times it would have a ferocious precession as it wobbled around an axis of envy and competition.
John was driven to find an agent to represent his interests. As a staffer, his creative work at the BBC was the property of the organization, but ventures out of house belonged to him. Besides, agents are enormously useful to serve as a toughie (“my partner, Mr. Gradgrind”) when you would find it embarrassing to fight a particular battle yourself. Mark Berlin, of London Management, had admired John since seeing him in revue at Cambridge, and was happy to take him on. Mark is tidy-minded, courteous, and steely when required. He has a filing system of an efficiency unparalleled in the history of the industry and can even find notes of telephone conversations that occurred a quarter of a century ago. John, Mark recalls, was hurt by Douglas’s decision and said “that he was not prepared to be Douglas’s emotional football any longer.”
Mark and Jill Foster haggled as only agents can. It was all very civilized. Mark’s advice to John was to ask for 15% of the income from the book in perpetuity, a better long-term bet in Mark’s view than a more substantial share of the advance. The calculation of 15% was based on John’s help with two episodes out of twelve, i.e. one sixth, rounded down to a more convenient number. John says that he would not hear of such an arrangement and chose instead the enhanced share of the advance. Perhaps he just wanted to draw a line under a painful wrangle by settling for a payment that would close the subject forever. Of course, he may have figured that a cheque in the hand is worth several in the future if you’re broke, but he was also concerned with doing the decent thing. In the many complications of their relationship John and Douglas were adept at inducing subtle guilts in each other. In the end, after some toing and froing, John Lloyd’s interest in the contract was bought out for half the advance, but with no continuing participat
ion in any subsequent royalty income.
This is an interesting wrangle from the point of view of what m’learned friends have taught us to call “intellectual property.” If John’s contribution in the two episodes he co-wrote (out of twelve) had been to help devise the essential furniture of the narrative, then he would have been entitled to a small but proportional share of all the subsequent incarnations of the work. Even if he had wholly written two episodes, but without creating the infrastructure of the narrative, he would be entitled to share pro rata in any direct use of his material. But Douglas was careful not to use anything from episodes five and six in the book. This would have rendered the argument for continuing participation untenable. On the other hand, if you were prepared to be really bloody about it (which, to his credit, John wasn’t), it may have been possible to negotiate some more money in order for the proprietor not to be troubled by any further encumbrance. Given that The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy went on to sell a million copies in record time, this must have been a bit galling for John, but he wasn’t the victim of unfairness. Money was not the whole issue in any case. In the febrile world of dauntingly bright Cambridge smarties, it was fame, and especially the recognition of creative excellence, that were the spur.* 108
John was deeply cheesed off for years. Douglas may have needled him in a peculiarly sensitive spot. As a producer John has been inspirational, but it must be frustrating to be the nurturer of talent, forever out of shot when the public makes stars of those in front of the camera. As he said:
The thing is, Douglas was the first in our circle to make it. He was a rich person long before anyone else. Then Mel Smith got rich and put £3,000 on a horse, and that seemed mad. Now lots of people one knows in the comedy snakepit own strings of racehorses so nobody thinks twice about bringing a bottle of champagne or ordering one. [Douglas had ordered a bottle of champagne in a Chinese restaurant to the bewilderment of the waiter and amazement of his friends.] But Douglas was always a step ahead, and it’s more evidence that he went through life with a bag over his head; he didn’t realize that people would be hurt. And yet, he used to say the same about me. Years later he said, “I remember going to dinner once at your house, Johnny, and you said to me: ‘Pass the salt, you failure.’” And he’d carried that inside him for fifteen years of multi-millionaire success—this canker inside him saying, he hates me, he thinks I’m a failure. I think anyone who knows me will understand that I am just not capable of that kind of blatant cruelty. It was probably said as a joke or something . . .
Once, after Not the Nine O’Clock News [the huge TV hit produced by John], Sean Hardie, the producer, and I went for a rather miserable week to the South of France to invent a new project. We didn’t really come up with anything—we’d been working too much together and too closely and had run out of things to say. But we did come up with this idea for a sitcom. It was called Rich Bastard. It was about this writer who’s very rich and rather clodhopping in the way that Douglas was. It was slightly about him. [In the sitcom] he had this friend, who was a radio producer who he was always terribly, improbably jealous of—which was slightly the relationship we had. Whatever Douglas did, he always seemed to feel I’d bested him, including the business of having children first. He used to go around saying that bastard Lloyd’s beaten me again.
The plan had been for Douglas and Lloydie to fly to Corfu (again). There they would write the book, and at the end of a righteous day at the word-face they would totter down through the cool of the evening and the scented, balmy air and reward themselves, while the stars came out, with a jolly meal and a bottle of retsina in the local taverna. With any luck they might be able to offer an option on their bodies to any passing female Scandinavian tourists . . .
Instead, Douglas repaired to the flat off the Holloway Road, a long way from the Greek islands in every sense. There he set about writing with what was (for him) grim method. This is what he took to his room: lots of Coke (the drink), a typewriter, several reams of A-4, a gramophone, and “Wuthering Heights” by Kate Bush (for trance induction). He played it until he wore the needle out. Jon Canter, heroically good-natured, was worn out as well.
Alistair Beaton, the author and playwright, identifies four stages in the collapse of an author’s self-esteem. They go roughly like this:
1) This is bloody difficult. I may be blocked.
2) Oh no, oh no. I can’t manage this bit at all.
3) Gloom, gloom. Bloody hell. If I’m honest with myself I can’t write any of it.
4) The truth is, I just can’t write at all. I’m a fraud, and finally I have been found out.
Douglas did not get very far down the Beaton Scale for this first book, but he was a man who needed company. In solitude he could easily fall into a kind of gloomy vacancy. Writing, as well as all its technical challenges and its brain-bruising calls on invention and talent, is lonely, and the writer’s world tends to shrink to just a room and the keyboard. John Lloyd says:
Douglas was determined to prove himself because he’d been a cooperative writer with Adams, Smith, Adams, Graham Chapman, Ringo Starr and me. He’d never done anything, except for the famous sketch about the Kamikaze pilot, on his own. And so he was determined, when he got the contract to do Hitchhiker’s, that he would do the damned thing himself and prove he was a proper writer.
Characteristically, Douglas delivered late. In his introduction to the compendium volume of the Hitchhiker’s novels, he describes his delinquency like this:
After a lot of procrastination and hiding and inventing excuses and having baths, I managed to get two thirds of it done. At this point they said, very pleasantly and politely, that I had already passed ten deadlines, so would I please finish the page I was on and let them have the damn thing.
Meanwhile I was busy trying to write the second series and was also writing and script-editing Dr. Who, because while it was very pleasant to have your own radio series, especially one that somebody had written in to say they heard, it didn’t exactly buy you lunch.
Certainly the first novel judders to a halt with every narrative strand in suspension. At the time I imagined—naïve git that I was—that his abrupt finish was a deliberate literary device, a kind of playful suborning of the convention whereby fiction is so much tidier than life. Also the final page, in which the characters set off to the restaurant at the end of the universe, looked like a shameless means of whetting the market’s appetite for a sequel. But no. Pan’s fiction editor Caroline Upcher and Sonny Mehta had just got annoyed by being strung along by Douglas, who was not guilty of deliberate lies about delivery so much as optimistic and sincere self-deception. In Don’t Panic, Neil Gaiman reports that Pan executives spoke with Douglas along these lines: “How much have you done?” then, “Oh dear, well, it will have to do—we’ll send somebody to collect it.” Caroline does not remember such a conversation, and it would go against any publisher’s grain to publish something incomplete. It’s more likely that Douglas estimated that he would have rounded the story off more satisfactorily by the time the motorcycle messenger arrived—but he hadn’t.
Pan’s paperback had been catalogued, presented to the chains and a witty one-page flyer had been distributed all over the environment. The cover had been designed (Hipgnosis artwork with Pan’s Ian Wright doing the layout) and printed, and was waiting on the binding line at Clays, the big book-printer in Bungay, Suffolk. The reps had subscribed the book to the trade, and the turnover anticipated in the annual budget. Just about everything that could be done had been done short of having the actual text. The point had been reached when they just had to have the book.
John Lloyd reported that to him at first the novel read rather too much like the work of the great Kurt Vonnegut.* 109 The reviewers also picked up on this, though it has to be said that the more Douglas wrote and rewrote, the more the voice became his own. He and Vonnegut do have much in common. Vonnegut is less explicitly comic, more darkly sardonic and more artful about narrative constructio
n. Both writers have a sense of the absurd—though Douglas’s is more cosmic—and they have mastered an immediate and conversational style that is easy to read, but hell to write. Vonnegut is a humanist; as he puts it so well in God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian, he has tried to behave decently without any expectation of reward or punishment after he’s dead. He always seems melancholy about the human condition and the horrific things we can do to each other. After all, he witnessed the firebombing of Dresden, something so unspeakable that it took him over two decades to find a way of writing about it (Slaughterhouse Five). You can imagine Vonnegut banging his head on his desk and sighing with a blend of sarcasm and sadness at mankind’s antics. Douglas, on the other hand, is less satirical; with the exception of Last Chance to See, he finds humanity not so much tragically graceless as comically odd.
Bizarrely, Vonnegut, despite pre-dating Douglas by a generation, was once reviewed by someone who said he had written a very Adamsy book, viz his superb novel, Galapagos.* 110 That novel does indeed share Douglas’s preoccupation with evolution. Vonnegut points out that in the long term big brains are not all that desirable from the evolutionary point of view. In a fragile world the possessors of them can use their intelligence to ruin the planet in ways unimaginable by a less intellectually endowed species (and, he asks, is intelligence an adaptation that makes for happiness?). Vonnegut’s character who uses high explosives “as a branch of show business” is a trope that Douglas would have been proud to devise. But in the literary antecedents game beloved by critics, it’s clear that this had always been Vonnegut’s voice—and he started writing when Douglas was scarcely taller than a dachshund.