A Sort of Life (20 page)

‘I’ve read your novel,’ he said. ‘We’d like to publish it. Would it be possible for you to look in here at eleven?’ My flu was gone in that moment and never returned.

Nothing in a novelist’s life later can equal that moment – the acceptance of his first book. Triumph is unalloyed by any doubt of the future. Mounting the wide staircase in the elegant eighteenth-century house in Great Russell Street I could have no foreboding of the failures and frustrations of the next ten years.

Charles Evans was a remarkable publisher. With his bald head and skinny form he looked like a family solicitor lean with anxieties, but a solicitor who had taken an overdose of some invigorating vitamin. His hands and legs were never still. He did everything, from shaking hands to ringing a bell, in quick jerks. Perhaps because the flu had not entirely departed, I expected at any moment the legendary figures of Heinemann authors to enter the room behind me, Mr Galsworthy, Mr John Masefield, Mr Maugham, Mr George Moore, Mr Joseph Hergesheimer. I sat on the edge of the chair ready to leap up. The bearded ghost of Conrad rumbled on the rooftops with the rain.

I was quite prepared to hear what I had always understood to be the invariable formula – ‘of course a first novel is a great risk, we shall have to begin with a small royalty’ – but that was not Evans’s way with a young author. Just as he had substituted the direct telephone call for the guarded letter, so now he brushed aside any ancient rite of initiation.

‘No publisher,’ he said, ‘can ever guarantee success, but all the same we have hopes …’ The royalty would begin at 12½ per cent, with a fifty-pound advance, he recommended me to take an agent, for in the future there might be subsidiary rights to deal with … I went out dazed into Great Russell Street. My day-dream had never continued further than a promise of publication and now my publisher (proud phrase, ‘my publisher’) was suggesting even the possibility of success.

He was as good as his word, selling more than 8,000 copies of the novel, so that I was all the more unprepared for the failures which succeeded it. In the flush of that success I would have refused to believe that success is slow and not sudden and that ten years later, with my tenth novel,
The Power and the Glory
, the publisher could risk printing only 3,500 copies, one thousand copies more than he had printed of my first novel.

The Man Within
is very young and very sentimental. It has no meaning for me today and I can see no reason for its success. It is like the book of a complete stranger, of a kind for which I have never much cared – and this makes another judgement on the book yet more mysterious to me. My uncle Eppy – the rich worldly business uncle of the Brazilian Warrant Agency – wrote to me: ‘It could only have been written by a Greene.’ I thought of my parents, I thought of all those aunts and uncles and cousins who had gathered together at Christmas, and of the two unknown Greene grandfathers, the guilt-ridden clergyman and the melancholic sugar-planter dead of yellow fever in St Kitts, and then I thought of the novel, the story of a hunted man, of smuggling and treachery, of murder and suicide, and I wondered what on earth he was driving at. I wonder still.

Leaving
The Times
was even more difficult than joining it and took almost as long. A few months after the publication of
The Man Within
, while I struggled with another novel,
The Name of Action
(the only good thing about the book was its title and that was suggested to me by Clemence Dane), I wrote to Charles Evans a blackmailing letter: I told him I must choose between
The Times
and novel-writing – I couldn’t continue to do both. He replied offering me, if I chose to resign, six hundred pounds a year for three years (half to be supplied by my American publisher) in return for three novels. I did so choose, but how was I to set about it? I had been happy on
The Times
, I couldn’t just write a letter to the manager and walk out. I consulted George Anderson, and we held long dialogues together, while he reasoned with me. I had a great future, he assured me – one day, if I were only patient for a few more years, I might hope to be the correspondence editor. Already, when the correspondence editor was on holiday, I tasted the glory of deputizing for him and this brought me into direct contact with the editor, Geoffrey Dawson himself. Closeted with the editor every afternoon at four o’clock I argued the merits of the letters and we decided which was to lead the page. I was exalted by the contact, especially when, as sometimes happened, I won the argument and even perhaps secured the promotion of one of Walter Sickert’s frequent letters which offended Dawson’s tidy mind by being almost illegibly written over large sheets of lined paper in thick black ink, apparently with a matchstick and usually with an impenetrable smudge over an operative word, a calligraphy which suited his savage
non sequiturs
on subjects far removed from painting.

At last Anderson realized how strong was my determination to leave, but he agreed that first I must have a word with the editor, and the editor was hopelessly elusive. There were even moments when I wondered whether Anderson had warned him of my intention. If I tried to make an appointment he was heavily engaged, if I went to his room it was empty or he was busy with a distinguished visitor. It was weeks before I caught him – I had the uncomfortable sense of doing something beyond the bounds of polite manners like wearing a bright coloured tie with a dinner jacket. Indeed I began to believe that no subeditor had ever before resigned from
The Times
, just as no one had ever been sacked from the paper since the ungentlemanly days of Lord Northcliffe. Dawson, when I cornered him at last, took the conversation urbanely into his own hands. He said he understood that I had written a novel, and he congratulated me on its success – his wife had demanded a copy from her circulating library.
The Times
, he assured me, would have no objection if I continued to write novels in my spare time. The art critic, Mr Charles Marriott, had done so for many years, and even the dramatic critic, Mr Charles Morgan, had published one or two. Indeed the time might have almost come to try me out with an occasional third leader. However, if my mind were really made up, he could only say it was a rash and unfortunate decision.

I had a further interview before leaving on 31 December 1929, with the assistant editor, Murray Brumwell, who resembled an elderly schoolmaster and perhaps for that reason always transformed me into a tongue-tied pupil. It was too late to argue with me now, he said, but he would implore me to take care of my health and not to overwork. I smiled a little, thinking how I had been doing two jobs and working eleven hours a day. It was only later I realized that overwork is not a matter of hours and that he had good reason.

So I left the coal-grate and the faces under the green eye-shields, faces which remain as vivid to me now when the names of their owners are forgotten as those of close friends and women I have loved. In the years to come I was bitterly to regret my decision. I left
The Times
the author of a successful first novel. I thought I was a writer already and that the world was at my feet, but life wasn’t like that. It was only a false start.

¹
I am grateful to Mr Arthur Crook, the editor of
The Times Literary Supplement
, for this characteristic example. ‘E. Colston Shepherd, the former aeronautical correspondent of
The Times
, once told me that he was infuriated by a very truncated version of a story he had written with great care. He complained bitterly to Anderson, saying that his story had been very badly cut. “Heavily, my dear Shep, heavily. Not badly. I cut it myself.”’

T
HE
conditions of writing change absolutely between the first novel and the second: the first is an adventure, the second is a duty. The first is like a sprint which leaves you exhausted and triumphant beside the track. With the second the writer has been transformed into a long-distance runner – the finishing tape is out of sight, at the end of life. He must guard his energies and plan ahead. A long endurance is more exhausting than a sprint, and less heroic. One may sometimes envy Radiguet and Alain-Fournier whom death forestalled before they embarked on the long cross-country run.

The Man Within
was, it is true, the third novel I had completed, but the first two had been clumsy exercises. I had been in training only, and there still remained other possibilities – British-American Tobacco or the Lancashire General Insurance Company. With all its faults of sentimentality and over-writing
The Man Within
was professional. I found myself committed to the long-distance race.

I sometimes find myself wishing that, before starting the second novel,
The Name of Action
, I had found an experienced mentor. If Robert Louis Stevenson had been alive
¹
he would have been only ten years older than I am now, and perhaps I would have found the courage to consult him in distant Samoa and have sent him my first book. He had always seemed to me ‘one of the family’. I had lived as a boy on the fringes of his world: his relative and biographer, Graham Balfour, had come to our house, my beautiful aunt would often arrive from a stay with his friend Sidney Colvin and his wife, the former Mrs Sitwell, whom as a young man Stevenson had loved and whom he had met in the house of my great-aunt Maud of Number 11. Names which appeared in his Collected Letters were photographs in our family album. In the nursery we played on the bagatelle board which had belonged to him. Surely from my relative in Samoa I might have received better and more astringent counsel than from my publisher, Charles Evans, who was determined to shut his eyes to the disastrous failings of his young discovery. I even received an enthusiastic telegram from Evans welcoming the typescript of the second novel – how could I tell how bad it really was? Evans must have known, but he was determined to keep it dark for the time. He had a reputation for discovering young writers, and he couldn’t admit a mistake too quickly.

I don’t think I ever really believed in the book in spite of the telegram. I know I despaired of it often, as I plodded with my unlikely hero through the streets of Trier, on my last holiday before I left
The Times
. In most of my novels I can remember passages, even chapters, which gave me at the time I wrote them a sense of satisfaction – ‘this at least has come off’. So I felt, however mistakenly, with the trial scene in
The Man Within
, and later with Querry’s voyage in
A Burnt-Out Case
, with the three-cornered love scene in
The Quiet American
, the chess game in
Our Man in Havana
, the prison dialogue in
The Power and the Glory
, the intrusion of Miss Paterson into the Boulogne chapters of
Travels with my Aunt
– I don’t think a single book of mine has failed to give me at least once a momentary illusion of success except
The Name of Action
. When I think of the novel now I remember only my facile use of the geography of Trier, which I had first visited on my German expedition with Claud Cockburn, the echoes of my unpublished Carlist novel
The Episode
(a young man caught up idealistically in a disappointing revolution), and my discovery that a simple scene of action, a police pursuit through the night streets of Trier, was quite beyond my power to render exciting. I was failing dismally at what seemed to have come so naturally to Buchan, Haggard, Stanley Weyman. My long studies in Percy Lubbock’s
The Craft of Fiction
had taught me the importance of ‘the point of view’ but not how to convey physical excitement.

Now I can see quite clearly where I went wrong. Excitement is simple: excitement is a situation, a single event. It mustn’t be wrapped up in thoughts, similes, metaphors. A simile is a form of reflection, but excitement is of the moment when there is no time to reflect. Action can only be expressed by a subject, a verb and an object, perhaps a rhythm – little else. Even an adjective slows the pace or tranquillizes the nerve. I should have turned to Stevenson to learn my lesson: ‘It came all of a sudden when it did, with a rush of feet and a roar, and then a shout from Alan, and the sound of blows and someone crying as if hurt. I looked back over my shoulder, and saw Mr Shuan in the doorway crossing blades with Alan.’ No similes or metaphors there, not even an adjective. But I was too concerned with ‘the point of view’ to be aware of simpler problems, to know that the sort of novel I was trying to write, unlike a poem, was not made with words but with movement, action, character. Discrimination in one’s words is certainly required, but not love of one’s words – that is a form of self-love, a fatal love which leads a young writer to the excesses of Charles Morgan and Lawrence Durrell, and, looking back to this period of my life, I can see that I was in danger of taking
their
road. I was only saved by failure.

The Man Within
had sold 8,000 copies;
The Name of Action
barely passed a quarter of that figure. The reviewing of novels at the beginning of the thirties was at a far lower critical level than it has ever been since. Gerald Gould, a bad poet, and Ralph Strauss, a bad novelist, divided the Sunday forum between them. One was not elated by their praise nor cast down by their criticism, and the third novel which I had now begun was as false and even more derivative than
The Name of Action
.

I had left
The Times
with enough money to live on for three years, and so, to make that money go further and to give me a room in which to work, we moved into the country. We had found a thatched cottage (that pastoral Georgian dream of the industrial twenties), with a small garden and orchard, up a muddy lane on the edge of Chipping Campden. It was to rent for a pound a week (the limit of what we could afford), and we moved our few belongings there, including a newly bought Pekinese with a great passion for dustbins. There was no electric light and the Aladdin lamps smoked if we left them for a few minutes alone. We were a scared couple that first night, with no sound of accustomed traffic, only a hooting owl. After darkness fell, on the evening of our arrival, I was summoned by a knock to the back door and saw an unknown countrywoman standing outside, holding a dead rat by the tail.