A Sort of Life (22 page)

One ominous day I took a ticket for London to discuss the future with Charles Evans and the representative of Doubleday, my American publisher. This was Mary Pritchett, who was later to be my agent in America and one of my greatest friends. But that day she seemed a dragon indeed. Nor was I very attached to her firm. Nelson Doubleday, a tall husky man, who had once served in Roosevelt’s Rough Riders and who knew more about horses than about books, would descend on London once a year and summon his authors by telegram to see him at set hours at the Heinemann office. I had received a telegram the year before. I could ill afford the ticket, but I was his pensioner and I had to go. ‘Siddown,’ he said, and looked at me with gloomy resentment as though I were some underbred brute which a smart horse-dealer had swindled him into buying. He took out a handkerchief almost as huge as himself and blew his nose a number of times. ‘Caught a cold coming over,’ he said, and they were the only words he spoke to me. I took the next train back to Chipping Campden.

The interview with Evans and Mary Pritchett proceeded on its dreary course: accounts showing the disastrous sales of the last two books were before them: the typescript of
Stamboul Train
lay on the desk beside the accounts – the third book in the three-year contract which had now come to an end. No further advances would be due to me until another novel was completed. I waited hopelessly while an argument went on between Evans and Mary Pritchett, and then the meeting was quickly brought to a close. Heinemann, Evans said, would continue to pay me my three hundred pounds for one more year, but Doubleday would promise nothing beyond two further monthly payments, and in the meanwhile they would study the new manuscript. There were several conditions attached even to these payments – another contract for two books with all losses to be recovered by the publishers before any further royalties were paid. Only in the train back to Campden did I realize that I might have to write two novels more with no payment at all after the next year was over.

During the following two months, while I was still receiving payment from Doubleday, I had to find a job at all costs anywhere. Our country peace was over, and the nights held little sleep. I tried to engineer a return to
The Times
but received only Barrington-Ward’s frozen response: I tried for half-time jobs on Sunday papers with no success. The
Catholic Herald
had advertised for a subeditor and again I spent the money for a ticket to London. The editor, a grey withered man who had made a name for himself as the strategical correspondent to the
Spectator
, received me with humiliating condescension. He asked for a little time to decide and I returned to the country full of hope. After two weeks he wrote asking me to come and see him again. This was certainly success, I thought, but, when I entered his room, he at once began to tell me how, with three novels to my name and my excellent experience on
The Times
behind me, he had come to the conclusion that I was too good for the job, I would never settle down. He was more condescending than ever and hardly disguised his pleasure in the interview – perhaps he hadn’t liked my name appearing in the same number of the
Spectator
as his own. I had too much pride and too little spirit left to ask him to return my railway fare, and since then I have taken a biased view of Catholic journalism and Catholic humanity.

‘I have been here before.’ I noted in my diary the same symptoms which at sixteen used to drive me to London with my brother Raymond. They were the symptoms of a life with too little hope – then there had been frustrated love, now there was failure. ‘My nerves horribly on edge; that feeling of lurking madness, of something swelling in the brain and wanting to burst; every sound, however small, made by anyone else, the clink of a plate or a fork, piercing the brain like a knife.’ If there are recurrent themes in my novels it is perhaps only because there have been recurrent themes in my life. Failure seemed then to be one of them.

Events took an ironic turn and convinced me of the temporary nature of any possible success.
Stamboul Train
was chosen by the Book Society (which meant in those days a sale of 10,000 copies) and Doubleday’s consented to renew payments for another year. My immediate anxieties seemed over when: ‘My God! I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. A telegram from Charles Evans at eleven to ring him immediately. I do so from a call-box in the square. J. B. Priestley threatens to bring a libel action if
Stamboul Train
is published.’ (I heard later that he had read a review copy sent to the
Evening Standard
.) ‘The character of Mr Savory he takes for his own.’ Savory, a character in
Stamboul Train
, was described as a popular novelist. He was interviewed on the Orient Express by a sadistic woman journalist who tried to make a fool of him. J. H. Thomas, the politician, was in my mind when I gave him a touch of cockney, Baldwin when I gave him a pipe – after all a popular novelist is a bit of a politician. I had never met Mr Priestley and had been unable to read
The Good Companions
which had brought him immense popularity three years before.

My suggestion that we should fight the libel action was brushed aside. Evans made it clear to me that if Heinemann were going to lose an author, they would much prefer to lose me. Thirteen thousand copies of the book had already been printed and bound. Pages would have to be substituted, and I must share the cost. Alterations had to be made at once, on the spot, without reflection.

‘Charles Evans then suggests alterations on the phone, deletion of “the modern Dickens” and of all references to Dickens as he says this will appease Priestley. I am to ring up again at three-thirty and hear the result. I would laugh if all my hopes did not rest on this book.

‘Rang up at 3.30. References to Dickens, to a pipe and to “blunt fingers” all to come out. Objection to the line “sold a hundred thousand copies. Two hundred characters”. I had to insert a new one, on the spot, in the telephone booth. The piece of dialogue: “You believe in Dickens, Chaucer, Charles Reade, that sort of thing?” to be altered. Shakespeare must go in, instead of Dickens. And the line “Dickens will live” has to be altered to “they will live”.’ It was almost as though Mr Priestley were defending Dickens rather than himself.

A child was on the way, and I had only twenty pounds in the bank. My mind shifted again towards the East, as it had done when I left Oxford, and I wrote to an old Oxford friend to see whether he could fit me into his department of English at Chulankarana University near Bangkok. His favourable reply came just too late to save me from this career of writing. I had been turned back into the pen like a driven sheep by the temporary popular success of
Stamboul Train
. (How temporary it was may be judged by the fact I have already mentioned that the first printing of my first novel in 1929 was 2,500 copies and of my tenth,
The Power and the Glory
, in 1940 was 3,500.)

Twenty years later I visited my friend in Siam, as it was called then. He was still teaching in the department of English, and we smoked some opium pipes together in a little room which he had fitted up as a
fumerie
with a statue of Buddha and a couple of mattresses and a lacquer tray. At Oxford he had written poetry of great promise, but for long now he had given up any attempt to write. Unlike myself he had accepted the idea of failure and he had discovered in lack of ambition a kind of bleared happiness and an ironic amusement when he looked at his contemporaries who had found what people call success.

For a writer, I argued, success is always temporary, success is only a delayed failure. And it is incomplete. A writer’s ambition is not satisfied like the business man’s by a comfortable income, though he sometimes boasts of it like a
nouveau riche
. ‘The reception of my
New Magdalen
was prodigious. I was forced to appear half way through the piece, as well as at the end. The acting took everyone by surprise, and the second night’s enthusiasm quite equalled the first. We have really hit the mark. Ferrari translates it for Italy, Regnier has two theatres ready for me in Paris, and Lambe of Vienna has accepted it for his theatre.’ Where is
The New Magdalen
now, and how many remember the name of its author?

The writer has the braggart’s excuse. Knowing the unreality of his success he shouts to keep his courage up. There are faults in his work which he alone detects; even his unfavourable critics miss them, dwelling on obvious points which can be repaired, but like a skilled intuitive builder he can sniff out the dry rot in the beams. How seldom has he the courage to dismantle the whole house and start again.

¹
It is seldom realized how short was Stevenson’s career: he began his first attempt at a novel (and abandoned it) when he was twenty-five, and he died at forty-four.

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